Autopsy Report

Anyone tempted to think that the autopsy of Terri Schiavo has settled the matter of the circumstances surrounding her condition should read Michelle Malkin's discussion of the coroner's report and the related links.

No Apologies, Please

LaShawn Barber offers her opinion of the Senate's debate on its failure to pass anti-lynching laws 60 to 100 years ago. In short, she thinks it's dumb:

In light of the serious problems we face in the world and our own country, I think this apology is one of the dumbest, emptiest, most politically correct pile of rubbish I've heard in a long time.

We've got fanatics trying to kill us all in the name of their god and hiding among us. We're being taxed to death taking care of deadbeats and criminals, while President Bush is sending even more of our money to brutal dictators in Africa. And the Senate apologizes for failing to pass anti-lynching laws 100 years ago?

A hundred years from now, I hope politicians will apologize for the lynchings that took place in Los Angeles after a jury acquitted the white cops who subdued lifelong criminal Rodney King. They should also apologize for the lynching that goes on right here in the streets of D.C., as black and Hispanic gangbangers kill each other and innocents for the most ignorant reasons. Apologize for failing to deport Hispanic thugs who jumped the border to spread their thuggery into America's heartland. And the Senate apologizes for failing to pass anti-lynching laws 100 years ago?

Perhaps Congress should apologize for decades of bloated socialist programs that caused the black family to disintegrate. Paying unmarried women to have babies is obscene, immoral, and the reason so many (too many) black children have no fathers to speak of. Treating blacks like dummies who require separate (LOWER) standards than every other race is offensive. I'm offended. Where is my apology?

Generations of blacks have been lulled into feeding from the government trough, and the damage it caused will reverberate for generations. And those numbskulls down the street are apologizing for failing to pass anti-lynching laws 100 years ago. Lord, give me strength.

I'm sick of politicians wasting time and money pandering to blacks, treating us like empty-headed children, spoon-feeding us putrid pabulum, and prostrating themselves for every perceived slight. Don't apologize to "Black People." Apologize to individual blacks who actually care about this mess.

Apologize for failing to protect Americans against foreign invaders. Apologize for taking our hard-earned money and giving it to people who don't want to earn it themselves. Apologize for constantly referring to me as "African American," implying that I'm a lesser American than everyone else. Apologize to all Americans for pushing racially divisive entitlements and preferences and insane "hate crime" laws. Thanks to your misguided paternalism, racial tension will always be front and center.

Freedom is more important than all the apologies, handouts, and excuses Congress could ever come up with. I'm living in the best country in the world, and I'd never be freer anywhere else. To blacks who grew up believing America was the most racist place on earth, if you no longer believe that and realize freedom, the right to be left alone, is the only apology you need, demand that from your senators.

Pretty eloquent stuff. Parenthetically, we should mention that many observers have noted that the reason such legislation failed in the past is because it was filibustered, mostly by southern Democrats. You would think that the party that employed the filibuster to block anti-lynching legislation would have been a bit ashamed to employ it to block a vote on a black nominee to the Federal bench. Such a thought, however, assumes a certain sensitivity to historical irony among Democrats that is apparently well-suppressed.

Clueless Bishop

African Anglicans are paying a steep price for adhering to principle:

Anglican bishops in Africa who are refusing millions of dollars from liberal AmericanEpiscopal sources to protest homosexual clergy say the price of their protest has been higher than they thought.

"To be honest, there is not enough money for the needs we have in Rwanda after the [1994] genocide," said Rwandan Bishop John Rucyahana of the Diocese of Shyira, "but if money is being used to disgrace the Gospel, then we don't need it."

The Rev. Alison Barfoot, assistant to the Anglican archbishop of Uganda, said the Anglican province has no working phones in its Kampala headquarters because it lacks the funds. Conservative American churches haven't pitched in enough -- "definitely not to the extent of what we've given up," she said.

Bill Atwood, general secretary of Ekklesia Society, an international Anglican network, just returned from a tour of Tanzania, Malawi, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda and called the lack of money for Africans "scandalous." "I just met with some archbishops a week ago," he said, "They were saying how painful it was, with people starving to death to make these choices."

What choices are these? The Bishops of Africa have decided that they will not accept money, as desperate as is the need, from those Episcopal bodies which support the ordination of gay priests and the marriage of gay couples. The amount of money declined totals in the millions of dollars.

Kenyan Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi said in an interview he was willing "to do without the money" if it's necessary to remind the Episcopal Church of its mission. "It was to preach the Great Commission," he added, "but what kind of Gospel are they preaching now, saying there should be union of people of the same sex?'"

In March, Bishop Jackson Nzerebende of Uganda's South Rwenzori Diocese cut ties with the Episcopal Diocese of Central Pennsylvania, which had donated more than $65,000 for school fees, transportation, college tuition and an AIDS program. Then, last month, the Ugandan province rejected a $27,000 donation from the New Hampshire Diocese to improve local schools.

Central Pennsylvania Bishop Michael F. Creighton called Bishop Nzerebende's decision "a Good Friday nail in the compassion of Christ." "Our consent to the election of a bishop in New Hampshire (Bishop V. Gene Robinson, who is divorced and living in a homosexual relationship) appears to be more important than the compassionate ministry we have shown with his own people," he said, "who are struggling with and dying of AIDS."

Leave it to an American Bishop to be clueless about what fidelity to a principle means to those who truly believe in it.

The "Christers" Are Coming!

Doug Ireland is beside himself with angst at the success of organizations of "Christers," as he calls them, in mobilizing their troops to boycott sponsors of entertainment which promotes sexual license.

He detects a whiff of fascism emanating from the offices of the gentle folks at the American Family Association and Focus on the Family, Ireland calls them "religious primitives," and grabs his readers by the lapels to scream in their face that theocracy is just around the corner, can't you see. Quick, hide the children.

It's all very comical. Here are a couple of examples:

Ireland quotes Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at the Annenberg School of Communication at USC, who calls the new "Christer" offensive a drive toward "theocratic oligopoly. The drumbeat of religious fascism has never been as troubling as it is now in this country."

Ireland and Kaplan fear that our government agencies are actually responsive to the people's wishes. This ugly recrudescence of dreaded democracy can only lead to trouble. Once the government starts listening to its citizens where does it stop? Auschwitz?

[E]vangelicals feel they have permission to push their way into public and cultural policy in every walk and expression of life.

Imagine the chutzpah of these "Christers" who think they have the same rights as every other American citizen. Where do they get such an impertinent idea? Haven't they learned that religious people, unless they're liberals, are supposed to keep their opinions to themselves, and let the Left alone to run things and impose its values on the rest of the country?

Nobody at the national level is tracking these Christer censorship and pressure campaigns in a systematic way, to quantify them or assess their impact, so that strategies to defeat them can be developed....Unless Hollywood, and the entertainment and broadcast industries, all want to live through an epoch of increasing content blackmail and blacklists, the wealthy folks who make a lot of money from those industries better wake up and start funding intensive and systematic research on the Christian right and its censorship crusades against sexual subversion and sin in the creative arts - or soon it will be too late, and the "theocratic oligopoly" of which Martin Kaplan speaks will be so firmly established it cannot be dislodged.

What this frantic statement lacks in honesty it makes up for in humor. It's dishonest because what Christian organizations are doing is not censorship and, even if it were, there's nothing illicit about censorship unless it's imposed by the government, and even then it's not necessarily unconstitutional. If corporations are persuaded not to subsidize the dissemination of certain ideas on television networks, that's not censorship. They're making a business decision based on the customer's wishes. If the government, through the FCC, chooses to regulate the content of what's going out over public airwaves, that's not necessarily bad either. It's similar to a public school administrator prohibiting the school library from placing pornographic magazines on its shelves.

Ireland's paragraph is humorous because the overwrought author, in his excitement, tacitly acknowledges what I'm sure he didn't intend to admit: that what Hollywood is engaged in is an attempt to sexually subvert the culture. Mr Ireland is obviously distraught that this noble cause is encountering resistance from people who don't want the culture subverted. Resistance to sexual subversion is an evil, in Mr. Ireland's mind, equivalent to being a fascist.

Or worse, a "Christer."

Thanks to No Left Turns for the tip.