Sandy Hook

The right-wing press really can’t get enough of the comparisons of President Obama to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin over his new executive actions and proposed gun laws, including the reauthorization of the Assault Weapons Ban. While the first Assault Weapons Ban that lasted from 1994 to 2004 didn’t produce a fascistic dictatorship, WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah writes today that “Obama’s gun grab” is how “every mass-murdering tyranny in the history of the world started.” Farah claims that the left will bring about “the end of liberty” and that Americans will be in the same situation as the colonists confronting a “tyrannical government” during the American Revolution.

Left leads to the end of liberty. The right path buys us time to restore the principle of constitutionally limited government.

If the U.S. government renders its citizens as subjects by disarming them, it will be the end of the dream of liberty that drove our founders to arms to fight for self-government and independence.

In fact, that was what precipitated the War of Independence. When British occupying forces set out to seize New Englanders’ arms depots at Lexington and Concord, the colonists drew a line in the sand. They understood that without firearms, they would lose any leverage they might have with their masters. They understood that without firearms, they would be hapless subjects of tyrannical government forever.

A new generation of Americans find themselves in just that predicament again, as Barack Obama puts on a full-court press to ban entire classifications of firearms leading inevitably to a government monopoly on force.

He’s appealing to emotion, and, for many Americans, dumbed down by government education and cultural institutions that place no value on freedom and personal responsibility, it’s working.

Yes, children were slaughtered at Newtown, Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School. But not one of those children would have been saved by Obama’s gun grab. To many Americans, that doesn’t matter. They just feel that something must be done.

What they don’t understand is that they are helping to set up more carnage, more Sandy Hooks, more bloodshed and, ultimately, the end of government accountability to its citizenry.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a Ph.D. in history to know that every mass-murdering tyranny in the history of the world started like this. They began with a government monopoly on force. Once that is established, the citizenry is no longer served by government, government is served by its subjects.

Today, Rick Green and David Barton weighed-in on the tragedy at Sandy Hook by laying out not only the standard Religious Right solutions of putting prayer and the Bible back in schools, but also adding a unique suggestion to start arming everyone from early childhood.

Explaining that he began teaching his own kids how to use guns at the age of four, Barton said that people only want to get rid of guns because they are afraid of them, which can be attributed to the fact that they don't know how to use them.

As such, if everyone had a gun and was taught how to use it from childhood, there would never be any firearm incidents or accidents, just like during the founding era:

That's what these guys do not see and do not look at; they're just flat scared of guns.  And the solution to that is exactly what the Founding Fathers said and that is you start teaching kids to use guns when they're very young because gun accidents are caused by non-familiarity with guns; once you're familiar with them, you don't have accidents with them.

I have searched and in the founding era I think I've only ever found two gun accidents and everybody was hauling guns back then; you took your guns to church, you were required by state law in some states to take your guns to church.  We didn't have accidents because everyone was familiar with how to use them.  It's not being familiar that makes is dangerous.

Peter LaBarbera of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality spoke to Vic Eliason of VCY America about his twenty “Resolutions for Pro-Family Advocates Battling the Homosexual Agenda in 2013” on Crosstalk yesterday. When a caller told him that she does not “accept the behavior” of her gay son and forbids him and his partner from “staying in my house together,” LaBarbera said that accepting her son’s homosexuality is “a lie from the pit of Hell” and commended her for “praying for your son to be delivered out of that lifestyle.”

Caller: The reason I’m calling is I have a son that’s homosexual and my thing of it is, it’s what Peter said, even if he is my son I can love him unconditionally, I will not accept the behavior. If he comes to my house and brings a partner, there is no way they are staying in my house together. Jesus said: do you love me more than these? Even though there are children, we are to love him first. Jesus will bring our children out but we’ve got to be on our knees before the Lord and on our face. We bombard Heaven for their deliverance and at the same time we uphold these values before them.

LaBarbera: That’s wonderful. You love your son and that’s not in question. The lie of the other side is to love your son you have to love or embrace his homosexuality, and that’s really a lie from the pit of Hell. We don’t give an alcoholic, we don’t say, ‘I love you so much I’m going to give you a bottle of scotch every month.’ That’s not true love. True love is what you’re talking about, it’s defending godly values and praying for your son to be delivered out of that lifestyle.

Eliason also likened homosexuality to not only drunk driving but also the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, arguing that they are all manifestations of wicked behavior. LaBarbera lamented that the “homosexual movement” has successfully “redefined” and “marketed a sin,” changing the word “gay” to no longer “mean perversion.”

Eliason: Behavior is the problem. Let’s just think back a few weeks to a horrendous thing that happened in that little school where twenty-some little children were killed because of the behavior of an individual who was deranged and in my book, demonic, in what he did. But it was behavior. Let’s talk about a car wreck, when someone is driving drunk and the car goes crashing into someone and kills them, the result is horrendous but it’s because of behavior. And somehow this idea of behavior has escaped us, that everything should be status quo and that people are free to go out and imbibe and commit terrible crimes and violate nature because behavior is ignored.

LaBarbera: That’s a great point, Vic. The homosexual movement specifically is a movement that successfully marketed a sin. That’s what they did, they redefined a sin, marketed it as gay. Vic I had an old-time reader when I first started the Lambda Report, that was my original publication, and her name was Gay Guptill. Boy, was her life made a lot harder when they stole her name. You know the word used to mean merry, it didn’t mean perversion. They redefined that and it only went downhill from there.

Later, Eliason said that not reproaching someone’s homosexuality is much like failing to move “someone who is on a train track who is about to be hit with a speeding train” as homosexuality, according to LaBarbera, is “a ticket to Hell.”

LaBarbera went on to say that President Obama is “not really a Christian” since he supports marriage equality but admitted that he “underestimated” how Obama’s endorsement “would have an impact on the homosexual so-called marriage debate.”

Eliason: If you have someone who is on a train track who is about to be hit with a speeding train, you may have to speak loudly or firmly but the most loving thing you can do is get them off the track.

LaBarbera: Absolutely. Whether the left likes to hear it or not, embracing homosexuality as a lifestyle is a ticket to Hell and we want people not to spend eternity apart from God.

Eliason: We have Wanda standing by in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Wanda you are on the line with Peter LaBarbera.

Caller: I just wanted to say that I think it’s more important to be obedient to God rather than to have all this fairness in marriage. I have noticed in reading my Bible that when a country’s leadership was corrupt, the nation usually went along with the corruption and that’s where we’re going right now.

LaBarbera: I think you’re right on. I think that’s part of the reason we lost on the marriage issue. Obama’s corrupt Christianity, so-called, of course he’s not really a Christian with what he’s defending, homosexual marriage. I underestimated how that would have an impact on the homosexual so-called marriage debate.

Glenn Beck returned to the airways last night for the first time since before both the "fiscal cliff" deal and the Sandy Hook tragedy and hauled out the chalkboard to lay out his grand theory explaining it all.  He spent an hour rambling about the importance of the reason "why" people do things, going off on tangents about everything from Apple stores to faded t-shirts to fake rust painted on signs at Disney World, all in an effort to explain how both the fiscal cliff situation and the reporting on Sandy Hook were driven by "incompetence, power, and greed" because nobody wants to talk about the real issues, such as how all the Democrats and Republicans in Congress ought to be tried for treason and how video games are turning the nation's children into "zombie killers who are practically dead inside":

Shortly after the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, James Dobson weighed in to declare that the shooting was evidence that God has "allowed judgment to fall upon us" because the nation has turned its back on him by accepting things like abortion and gay marriage.

Those remarks, not surprisingly, generated some controversy and so, last Friday, Ryan Dobson sought to set the record straight on "Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk" radio broadcast where he asserted that his father's remarks were taken out of context and that he is the victim of an agenda-driven effort to smear him:

Some of our listeners may have seen some of the buzz on-line, especially on our Facebook page, surrounding comments made by my dad right here on the Family Talk broadcast following the Sandy Hook Elementary tragedy that took place on Friday, December 14th.  But believe it or not, people with their own personal agenda have splattered all over the internet and the blogosphere that my dad, Dr. James Dobson, said that God caused the murder of those children and those adults and let me tell you that is a lie, and I believe that is an intentional distortion of my dad's words and it's taken totally out of context.

There have been a lot of accusations aimed at my dad over the years; he is called hateful and a bigot, all kinds of vile things that I would never repeat on the air and I always ask people [to] just quote him. Show me where ... I mean, if he's that hateful, if he's that mean of a person, he's been on air for thirty-five years, he's written over eighty book, if that's who he is, you should have volumes of evidence to bring forth, but there's nothing there!

I just want to say to our friends and our listeners, if you see something distributed about my dad that is outlandish, please consider the source. A lot of these bloggers and online columnists have an agenda and they are just throwing bricks at a man who is making a stand for righteousness.

Of course, our entire original post was built on directly quoting James Dobson himself saying that Sandy Hook was God's judgment:

Our country really does seem in complete disarray. I'm not talking politically, I'm not talking about the result of the November sixth election;  I am saying that something has gone wrong in America and that we have turned our back on God.

I mean millions of people have decided that God doesn't exist, or he's irrelevant to me and we have killed fifty-four million babies and the institution of marriage is right on the verge of a complete redefinition.  Believe me, that is going to have consequences too. 

And a lot of these things are happening around us, and somebody is going to get mad at me for saying what I am about to say right now, but I am going to give you my honest opinion: I think we have turned our back on the Scripture and on God Almighty and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us.  I think that's what's going on.

Pastor Bill Elliff of the Arkansas-based The Summit Church and the Religious Right group OneCry appeared on AFA Today with host Buster Wilson this week where he explained that the September 11 attacks and the elementary shooting in Newtown, Connecticut were “gracious” acts of divine punishment. He said that God allowed the two tragedies to occur because of “our humanistic pride” and secular government in order to “bring us to our senses and bring us back to him.”

Wilson was positively dumbfounded as to why people would be offended by such rhetoric and similar language by AFA spokesman Bryan Fischer, who said that God refused to stop the school shooting because he’s a “gentleman,” and Elliff worried the U.S. is going the way of the Roman and British empires.

Wilson: I have never seen the vitriol that has been unleashed against us, some of us here at this ministry, since we’ve been publicly saying: you know what one of the problems is for the last fifty years we’ve been saying to God we don’t want you, there’s a wall of separation between us, and the place you’ve seen that amplified most has been in the public schools. We have received just unbelievable vitriol for saying that, seeing it as too simplistic, one person wrote ‘this is 2013, are we still wrestling over Creationism?’ We are in a changing, almost post-Christian America is what it seems like at time, what’s gonna happen if we don’t turn back to the Lord and see great revival brought about?

Elliff: I think what’s going to happen is what’s happened to every society before us who has not turned back. I was thinking the other day probably in Rome they thought ‘this could never happen to us’ and England in its prime they said ‘this could never happen to us.’ There is something about our humanistic pride that causes us to think, we could never go down as a nation.

…

Elliff: I’ve often thought about 9/11 and what happened there. God doesn’t cause evil, he didn’t cause the shooting the other day. But when we say, ‘Lord we can live life without you,’ then he says, ‘okay, I’ll let you feel that.’

Wilson: Let you get a taste of it.

Elliff: I thought at 9/11 what happened was God’s protective hand was removed and we felt what pure evil is like. We felt that this last week. That was pure evil, it’s the devil who has come to steal, kill and destroy. He’d just as soon kill a baby or a child in the womb as anything else. God allows that moment, we’re pressing the issue by turning from him, but he allows that moment to bring us to our senses and say, ‘God we desperately need you.’ So really it’s gracious. The pain that comes, the judgment that has really come by our turning away from the Lord is a merciful thing that God does to bring us to our senses and bring us back to him.

Elliff explained that the shooting was a sign of God’s discipline as “judgment comes to a nation it is God saying, wake up, you have walked away from me and I have loved you and I have so much desire to protect you but when you walk away you forfeit that.”

Elliff: We look at what has happened recently here in the school shooting and the so many things that have happened in the past few years. If we put all of those in biblical context and surround it with the Scripture we would come to different conclusions about what was happening. I was thinking the other day that God has instituted pain in our body, you know when you get a rusty nail that goes up to the sole of your foot that’s a real good thing that you feel pain because it causes you to make an adjustment. God’s judgment is like that. It’s a loving God saying to us when judgment comes to a nation it is God saying, wake up, you have walked away from me and I have loved you and I have so much desire to protect you but when you walk away you forfeit that.

Andrea Lafferty of the Traditional Values Coalition used the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in order to bolster her campaign against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act over the bill’s protections for LGBT employees. While speaking to Janet Mefferd yesterday about the Orange County, Florida, school system’s new non-discrimination policy that is similar to ENDA, Laffery said that just as parents are upset about the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting and are concerned about keeping their children safe, they should also be worried about ENDA’s “devastating effects” as schools will have “people with some real issues playing out their personal problems in the classroom.”

ENDA, the bill itself as I have been talking about it won’t become law, but they’re going to piece meal it. They’re going to start by making federal contractors—if you want to be a plumber for the government or want to do this, that or the other with the government, you have to comply with this order. They make try and find other ways of doing it, implementing the whole ENDA but I’m not sure exactly how at this point. But what I think people should focus on is: what does this mean locally?

People are really upset because of this tragedy up in Connecticut and protecting our children and we’re going to see some devastating effects. What they did in Florida is they passed a measure which affects adults, teachers, staff and kids. Our concern is that transgender children in schools are a different issue than teachers and staff. What we’re going to see is people with some real issues playing out their personal problems in the classroom.

Like other Religious Right activists who have warned that ENDA will lead to sexual assault and death, Lafferty maintained that ENDA is part of the left’s “open season” on Christians on behalf of “fringe minorities and people that are truly sick.”

Lafferty warned that Chick-fil-A restaurants may soon be “forced” to hire “weirdos” seeking to undermine Christian businesses, warning that transgender people are committing “the ultimate act of self-hatred” and need “special medical treatment” rather than job protections.

Lafferty: I fully expect that depending on how the administration pushes this, we’re going to see people applying for jobs at Chick-fil-A and Christian businesses because families go there because A) the food is good and B) they want to support what Chick-fil-A stands for, and no better way of hurting a Chick-fil-A restaurant than to have a bunch of weirdos working there.

Mefferd: That is so weird you say that because I had an experience like that at Chick-fil-A just a couple of weeks ago, exact same experience. I thought: that’s very strange that this person is working at Chick-fil-A.

Lafferty: They may have chosen to hire this person but they’re going to be forced to.

…

Lafferty: I think minorities, those protected classes, are going to be shocked when they find out that a transgendered man or woman is going to be treated the same as an African American man or woman. That’s not right and the laws will be overridden if ENDA should pass. That’s why they are going jurisdiction by jurisdiction to try and force communities to accept this. This is the ultimate act of self-hatred and we are lifting this up? We should be giving them special medical treatment maybe.

Mefferd: Get them some help.

Lafferty: Not protected class [status].

Religious Right author Joel Rosenberg says that people like Jon Stewart of The Daily Show share in the blame for the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting because they have waged a “cultural war against Jesus and Christmas” and tried to “drive [God] out of our society.” Like American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer, Rosenberg claims that God did not stop the massacre because God is a “gentleman”: “If a nation tells Him to leave, He will leave.”

All this is so painful to see, so heart-wrenching. I look at my own children — including my little 8 year old — and then look at all the grieving parents on TV and mourn for them, trying to understand what they are suffering right now. I’m praying for the Lord to comfort and heal all those traumatized by what happened in Newtown. But as I do I can’t help but think about the trendlines and the dark trajectory our nation is on. It’s not just “the economy, stupid.” We are, in many respects, in a moral and spiritual freefall in our country, and we are paying a terrible price.

The demons of violence and lawlessness are the loose all across America — in Newtown, Connecticut….in Aurora, Colorado….in Oak Creek, Wisconsin….just as they were in Littleton, Colorado and at Virginia Tech in years gone by. But why? How is it possible that violent crime in the United States has surged by more than 460 percent since 1960?

The answer is as painful as it is simple: the further we turn away from God in our nation — the further we drive Him out of our society, our of our schools and courts, and out of our media and out of our homes, or the more we give mere lip service to religion, the more men are ”holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power” (2 Timothy 3:5) — the worse things are getting. Consider just the cultural war against Jesus and Christmas that has been waged just in the last few days:

• Fox News headline: “Holiday message: Atheists dub Jesus a ‘myth’ on Times Square billboard”

• CNN column, “Have yourself a merry atheist Christmas“

• AP article about the “War on Christmas”

• Fox News story about a rapper singing about a “Gangbanger Jesus”

• KTVA-TV (Alaska) story: “Atheists Wage War on Christmas in Anchorage: Anti-religion signs on People Mover buses”

• Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart wages war on Christmas and mocks those who thinks he’s wrong [caution: obscene language]

The Lord God Almighty is a gentleman. He won’t force us to accept His great love and many blessings. If a nation tells Him to leave, He will leave. But what are we reaping as a result of a society that increasingly ignores God and hates or dismisses Jesus Christ? We are witnessing a horrifying explosion of murder. We are witnessing a gruesome crime wave unprecedented in American history. And there appears to be no end in sight. In recent years, we’ve seen brutal mass murders in high schools, on college campuses, and in small towns all across America (a recent FBI report says the murder rate soared 18.3% in small towns in America last year alone).

…

There is a point of no return — a point at which God removes His hand of grace and mercy and turns to the judgment of America. If we don’t repent for our sins, we are going to face that judgment…perhaps sooner than we think. As I note in Implosion: Can America Recover From Its Economic & Spiritual Challenges In Time?, “Alarm bells are going off all around us. Lights on the dashboard are flashing, Warning! Warning! Yet America is sleeping through the alarms, blind to the warning lights. And tragically, for the most part, the Church — God’s chosen instrument to bless individuals, families, communities, and nations — is asleep as well. I shudder to imagine where we are heading if we don’t wake up soon, plead for the Lord’s forgiveness, and ask Him to use us to love our neighbors and revitalize our country.”

After attacking Bob Costas for criticizing America’s gun culture, Ted Nugent is blaming America’s purportedly “politically correct culture” for the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. In an op-ed for the far-right Washington Times, Nugent said that the shooting occurred because of the country’s “’anything goes’ value system” which “vilifies, condemns and mocks traditional societal values and customs at every opportunity.”

Some blabbermouths already are using the Connecticut school massacre to promote their anti-gun agenda even though more gun laws won’t prevent a psychotic from getting a gun and killing us.

…

Like an iceberg, we only periodically see the psychotic manifestation, the tip of our shattered culture, but what lies just beneath the surface is a gigantic cultural cancer that is rotting America from within.

The ugly and dangerous truth is that we live in an embarrassing, politically correct culture that exalts and rejoices in the bizarre; aggressively promotes an “anything goes” value system; and vilifies, condemns and mocks traditional societal values and customs at every opportunity.

We’ve embraced a culture of contempt that attacks the very institutions that make for a healthy and strong society, and then we’re shocked when it spirals out of control. The only thing I’m shocked about is that anybody is shocked.

More laws and more restrictions won’t fix our culture. The problem we face is much deeper and more insidious. What ails us is a spiritual bankruptcy of cultural values that actually matter. More laws and restrictions can’t cure that.

Until we admit what’s at the heart of the matter, we will continue to put a Band-Aid on gaping wounds and try to convince ourselves we’ve done something meaningful.

As with most things, the cure to this mess begins and ends with the family. Traditional family values have been under siege for decades by our culture of contempt. In the absence of a solid family, the whole thing slowly unravels and rots.