Veritas Rex

Marriage Amendment Still Chained up in Committee

Unfortunately, Stuart's words about the Marriage Amendment being chained up in a House committee last session still ring true today.

Who Really Stands for Marriage in the IN House?

Talk is cheap.  Check out who the real supporters of protecting marriage in the Indiana House of Representatives are.

http://www.advanceamerica.com/blog/?p=246

H/T - Advance America

Curt Smith on the Abdul radio show tomorrow

 

 

    

 

IFI President Curt Smith will appear on the Abdul in the Morning radio show tomorrow at 7:50 a.m.  Please tune in and call in with your questions and comments.  You can listen online at www.wxnt.com or listen in the car at 1430 am.

 

 

Stampede at the Animal Farm

***editor’s note: the following is a parody, which, praise the Lord, at the time of printing, still falls within the constitutional framework of protected speech. ***

To Veritas Rex Readers: Mitch Stewart directs Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National Committee, in Washington, D.C., and last week he sent me a draft of an email that he later blasted out to Obama supporters Friday morning. Mitch and I are committed to reaching across the aisle to forge new bridges than span the past decades of distrust, and he occasionally asks for my input on his communiques. Sometimes he even uses my suggestions; the following represents last week's back-and-forth, and I thought it would be helpful to share; hopefully this may inspire others. --CM

Indy-based Republic Airways provides relief to Haiti's Orphans

By Christopher Mann

Kudos to Indianapolis-based Republic Airways Holdings, Inc., parent company to numerous airline subsidiaries, for donating a plane to deliver relief supplies to Haiti and ferry to the U.S. children orphaned from last week’s earthquake in Haiti. At a Sunday worship service in Fort Wayne, Rep. Mark Souder (IN-3) called for Hoosiers to consider adopting Haitian orphans. Souder will likely raise this issue again tonight in his webcasted Townhall Meeting Tuesday 1/19/10 at 7:00 p.m. 888-559-4668 for audio or click http://souder.house.gov for audio & video.

Republic Airways Donates Aircraft to Relief and Rescue Operation for Haiti Orphans,
INDIANAPOLIS, Jan 19, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Republic Airways Holdings (NASDAQ: RJET) today announced the completion of the successful operation to rescue 53 orphaned children imperiled by the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti. Republic Airways provided the Embraer 170 jet that was used to transport the children to Pittsburgh, where they are receiving medical attention from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). Flight 9401 arrived in Pittsburgh at 9:22 this morning. 

Read full press release here: http://tiny.cc/NMajR.  

Christopher Mann is a public relations consultant in Fort Wayne. Email Chris at chris@christophermann.com or Tweet him at @MannCub.

Marriage Amendment Passes Senate Committee

This morning the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the Marriage Amendment on to the full Senate by a vote of 6-4.  All 50 Senators will now get a change to vote on the Marriage Amendment.

Here is a record of the vote:

Voting in favor of marriage between one man and one woman:

Sen. Head (R)

Sen. Bray (R)

Sen. Zakas (R)

Sen. Holdman (R)

Sen. Schneider (R)

Sen. Steele (R)

Voting against marriage between one man and one woman:

Sen. Lanane (D)

Sen. Taylor (D)

Sen. Broden (D)

Sen. Randolph (D)

Not voting:

Sen. Alting (R)

This was a good day or marriage in Indiana.  All signs point to the Marriage Amendment passing through the Senate by a large majority.  30 other states have taken measures to protect marriage within their constitutions.  Our neighbors in Wisconsin and Kentucky have the exact same language as SJR 13 (Indiana's proposed Marriage Amendment) and have not experience the list of horrible terribles that opponents claim will happen if the people ultimately decide to add protection for marriage into Indiana's constitution. 

The big question remains...will Pat Bauer continue to thwart the will of the people and keep the Marriage Amendment locked in committee once it passes the House?  Last time a vote was allowed in the House a majority of his Democrat colleagues voted in favor of marriage protection.  However, currently, HJR 7 (the House version of the Marriage Amendment) is still chained in the House Rules Committee. 

Democrat State Representative Dave Cheatham has shown strong support for marriage despite the objections of Speaker Bauer and Rep. Ron Herrell (D) has just signed on as a co-author.  Perhaps a pro-family group of Democrats could stand strong in their caucus and demand a vote on the Marriage amendment??  I'm just sayin'... *smile*.  Speaking of the MA chained in a committee...Stuart Shepard says it best:

Christian Unity: A Man-Bites-Dog Story?

Were there less cause for this kind of press

By Christopher Mann

 

This morning’s Fort Wayne Journal Gazette features a story about an ecumenical weekend worship service focusing on relief for earthquake-stricken Haiti, and the story impressed me for a number of reasons:

1. It’s the silver lining we need in the wake of more stories of death, amputations and orphanage, which likely will not cease for quite some time.
2. It’s a reminder that our limited ability to heal and alleviate is dwarfed by God’s ability to do that and so much more.
3. It’s a reminder that, unfortunately, this story is newsy enough to deserve front page cover, above the fold; were Christian unity the norm, this would be just a dog-bites-man story. The fact that Christians are braving cold January temperatures to for a common cause is, unfortunately, newsworthy. Kudos to the Journal Gazette’s Devon Haynie for covering this story.

Highlights of article

1. Melissa Montana, president of STAR 88.3 FM, a Fort Wayne Christian Radio station, organized a worship service at Pathway Community Church, which was attended by about 250 people.
2. The radio station has partnered with Mission of Hope: Haiti, an organization that offers educational, nutritional and spiritual resources to the impoverished in. For information on donating, visit http://www.mohhaiti.org.
3. Congressman Mark Souder (R-3), spoke of the need for adopting orphaned Haitian children in the wake of last week’s earthquake.

Christopher Mann is a public relations consultant in Fort Wayne. Email Chris at chris@christophermann.com or Tweet him at @MannCub.

Health care, Afghanistan dominate Pence’s town hall meeting

By Christopher Mann

Last Thursday Congressman Mike Pence (IN-6) addressed a town hall meeting of about 100 constituents who braved a fresh six-inch blanket of snow in the northeastern town of Bluffton, about 30 minutes south of Fort Wayne. Though the winter storm delayed the meeting by almost a half-hour, that didn’t seem to dampen the Congressman’s reception, who enjoyed rousing applause on positions mostly related to health care reform and Afghanistan. The meeting was taped by CSPAN and will reportedly this next week.

The following are some highlights:

Health Care Reform: “The cure is worse than the disease.”

Not surprisingly, Pence’s first snowball-salvo was against the health care reform bill passed by the Senate last week and now cryptically being reconciled to the House version by House Democrats, Senate Democrats and the White House (pro-life democrats in the House have reportedly been uninvited to these negotiations.)

“[Health care reform] legislation is moving forward behind closed doors as we speak today. I believe we should scrap the current health care bill,” the four-term congressman told the mostly senior-citizen crowd.

“Congress must reform health care,” he said, but this bill will hurt health care, not help it, arguing that health care reform should include allowing consumers to purchase health care insurance across state lines, which would increase competition and lower costs. Pence, who chairs the House Republican Conference, said Congress must also reform runaway medical malpractice litigation. He repeatedly referred attendants to the GOP’s plan for health care reform, hosted at GOP.gov.

Rick: Loved his brother to debt

“Rick,” a Bluffton resident, charged Pence and the GOP of double speak when they favor big government programs while they’re in power but oppose them when the Democrats rule. He accused Pence and the GOP of playing politics with important legislation, and referenced his own painful story of incurring a six-figure debt when helping his incapacitated brother survive an illness.

Pence conceded that his party left their conservative moorings and approved government growth like the 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act (MMA). The bill was originally estimated around $400 billion over ten years, but later revised in 2005—after the election—to $1.2 trillion, comparable to the cost of the current health care reform legislation. Pence was among a minority of conservatives who voted against the legislation, and has noted that the GOP’s poor showing in the 2008 elections amounted to a sound rebuke to a party that has talked conservative fiscal management but walked something else in recent years.

Pence disagreed that objecting to a government takeover of health care is the equivalent of playing politics with important reform, saying that it is possible to lower health care insurance costs, but the key is to increase competition, not protect turf, as state borders do now.

Afghanistan: Why tell the enemy when you plan to give up?

“Monty” noted that following a recent trip to Afghanistan, Congressman Mark Souder recently announced his changed view, believing that President Obama’s 30,000 soldier surge—modeled after President Bush’s Iraqi surge of 2007—can work. Pence said that he also recently visited Afghanistan and after meeting with General Stanley McChrystal, Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai, and other U.S. commanders and Afghan political leaders, he left the fledgling democracy with a similar conclusion that the U.S. can win the war, but with one large reservation: “I don’t think it ever makes sense to tell the enemy when you’re going to stop fighting,” Pence told the Bluffton crowd to a rousing applause.

“[General McChrystal] told me that they have the resources and personnel and they can get the job done if they have the time to do it,” Pence said. He warned, however, that leaders on the ground told him, “Look, the Taliban has been using that July 2011 [withdrawal] deadline as a recruiting tool. They’re walking up to people and saying, ‘see, they (the Americans) are leaving. We are staying.’

The U.S. Forces want to come home, and Congress wants them to come home, but he says that he can’t figure out why the President insists on signaling to the Taliban via a published deadline how long they have to hold out.

He says that we must have a credible government in Afghanistan and he recently co-signed a letter containing a “deafening” message to President Karzai to that effect, noting that the upcoming parliamentary elections must be run with much more transparency and integrity than the presidential elections of 2009, largely dismissed as fraudulent by the global community.

Pence and his colleagues have called on President Karzai to delay the parliamentary elections, pass major election reform law, and then reschedule the elections to increase the world’s confidence of a representative government. Pence says that the President has not yet agreed to this, but that the U.S. Congress would continue to press for such reform.

 

Christopher Mann is a public relations consultant in Fort Wayne. Email Chris at chris@christophermann.com or Twitter: @MannCub.

The Manhattan Declaration

I just signed on to the Manhattan Declaration.  It is quite good.  Congratulations to Chuck Colson, Professor Robert George (Princeton), Professor Timothy George (Samford) and all the others who helped produce it. 

I found the marriage section to be as accurate an explanation of the Christian position in favor of traditional marriage as there is available.  Check it out:

"Marriage

The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man." For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. Genesis 2:23-24

This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. Ephesians 5:32-33

In Scripture, the creation of man and woman, and their one-flesh union as husband and wife, is the crowning achievement of God’s creation. In the transmission of life and the nurturing of children, men and women joined as spouses are given the great honor of being partners with God Himself.    Marriage then, is the first institution of human society—indeed it is the institution on which all other human institutions have their foundation. In the Christian tradition we refer to marriage as “holy matrimony” to signal the fact that it is an institution ordained by God, and blessed by Christ in his participation at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. In the Bible, God Himself blesses and holds marriage in the highest esteem.

Vast human experience confirms that marriage is the original and most important institution for sustaining the health, education, and welfare of all persons in a society. Where marriage is honored, and where there is a flourishing marriage culture, everyone benefits—the spouses themselves, their children, the communities and societies in which they live. Where the marriage culture begins to erode, social pathologies of every sort quickly manifest themselves. Unfortunately, we have witnessed over the course of the past several decades a serious erosion of the marriage culture in our own country.    Perhaps the most telling—and alarming—indicator is the out-of-wedlock birth rate. Less than fifty years ago, it was under 5 percent. Today it is over 40 percent. Our society—and particularly its poorest and most vulnerable sectors, where the out- of-wedlock birth rate is much higher even than the national average—is paying a huge price in delinquency, drug abuse, crime, incarceration, hopelessness, and despair. Other indicators are widespread non-marital sexual cohabitation and a devastatingly high rate of divorce.

We confess with sadness that Christians and our institutions have too often scandalously failed to uphold the institution of marriage and to model for the world the true meaning of marriage. Insofar as we have too easily embraced the culture of divorce and remained silent about social practices that undermine the dignity of marriage we repent, and call upon all Christians to do the same.

To strengthen families, we must stop glamorizing promiscuity and infidelity and restore among our people a sense of the profound beauty, mystery, and holiness of faithful marital love. We must reform ill-advised policies that contribute to the weakening of the institution of marriage, including the discredited idea of unilateral divorce. We must work in the legal, cultural, and religious domains to instill in young people a sound understanding of what marriage is, what it requires, and why it is worth the commitment and sacrifices that faithful spouses make.

The impulse to redefine marriage in order to recognize same-sex and multiple partner relationships is a symptom, rather than the cause, of the erosion of the marriage culture. It reflects a loss of understanding of the meaning of marriage as embodied in our civil and religious law and in the philosophical tradition that contributed to shaping the law. Yet it is critical that the impulse be resisted, for yielding to it would mean abandoning the possibility of restoring a sound understanding of marriage and, with it, the hope of rebuilding a healthy marriage culture. It would lock into place the false and destructive belief that marriage is all about romance and other adult satisfactions, and not, in any intrinsic way, about procreation and the unique character and value of acts and relationships whose meaning is shaped by their aptness for the generation, promotion and protection of life. In spousal communion and the rearing of children (who, as gifts of God, are the fruit of their parents’ marital love), we discover the profound reasons for and benefits of the marriage covenant.

We acknowledge that there are those who are disposed towards homosexual and polyamorous conduct and relationships, just as there are those who are disposed towards other forms of immoral conduct. We have compassion for those so disposed; we respect them as human beings possessing profound, inherent, and equal dignity; and we pay tribute to the men and women who strive, often with little assistance, to resist the temptation to yield to desires that they, no less than we, regard as wayward. We stand with them, even when they falter. We, no less than they, are sinners who have fallen short of God’s intention for our lives. We, no less than they, are in constant need of God’s patience, love and forgiveness. We call on the entire Christian community to resist sexual immorality, and at the same time refrain from disdainful condemnation of those who yield to it. Our rejection of sin, though resolute, must never become the rejection of sinners. For every sinner, regardless of the sin, is loved by God, who seeks not our destruction but rather the conversion of our hearts. Jesus calls all who wander from the path of virtue to “a more excellent way.” As his disciples we will reach out in love to assist all who hear the call and wish to answer it.

Butler's Brad Stevens at TPCC Book Event

College hoops fans and Butler University enthusiasts alike will want to attend The Butler Way book presentation on Sunday, Dec. 13th, at 12:30 p.m. at Traders Point Christian Church near Zionsville.

Indianapolis Star reporter David Woods' recently-published book answers this fascinating question: How did a small liberal arts school in Indianapolis become a national power in college basketball? Woods will be joined Butler's Head Basketball Coach, Brad Stevens, to explore this question and the current nationally-ranked team's place in its 100-plus-year history, famously known as The Butler Way. Copies of the book will be available for $18, which Woods will gladly sign and personalize, just in time for Christmas gift giving. Light refreshments served. The gathering will be in The Pointe, an upstairs meeting room at the church, where Woods and many other Butler supporters and fans attend.

The church is located just off Interstate 65 at the Zionsville exit (Mile Marker 130; southwest quadrant) on Indianapolis Road just outside Indianapolis' northwest side.