Gun Owners are Not Out of the Woods Yet

Apparently, the Schumer, Manchin, Toomey (STM) Bill went down to defeat, but according to a blogger sundance at Conservative Treehouse, don't celebrate just yet. Sundance claims that the President's tantrum yesterday in front of the Sandy Hook victims was to signal Majority Leader Reid to change the rules of the game midstream to allow a gun registration bill to pass by a simple majority of 51%. Sundance:

Because he is setting up Harry Reid to historically change the Senate Rules, mid-term, and advance the progressive senate cause through a simple majority threshold. Pay attention to how they position themselves. What is about to take place will be historic in the manipulation of constitutional limits on power.

Remember that Reid's bill, S.649 is still out there, to be voted on. If I have it right, the STM bill, which was an amendment to S.649, technically passed the Senate 54-46, but failed to get 3/5 of the vote to pass, so it actually failed. Now, imagine the Reid bill comes up under new rules. If the same coalition passes it, it will pass the Senate and go to the House.  Frankly, I don't know if Boehner is committed to supporting gun owners, but I doubt it.  It could come up in the house,

Once again, I have to emphasize that nothing in the Reid bill would have prevented Sandy Hook, or for that matter any other mass killing that has taken place in the United States.  The Left instead is dancing in the blood of innocents, trying to put another keystone in place leading to our eventual disarmament.  It is a mistake that we only get to make once.  Keep vigilant.

Using Crying Mothers as Human Shields

The Left, with the cooperation of some on the right such as Senator Toomey, and Alan Gottlieb, Chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, is trying desperately to convince us that the current gun control bill will be good for gun owners. One of the latest ploys is the tried and time tested tactic of hauling crying mothers before the camera. Adam Shaw exposes this particular strategy of the Left in an American Thinker piece today entitled Hiding Behind Grieving Mothers. He points out that the Left uses grieving mothers as human shields to avoid having to argue their desired goal on its own merits. Shaw:

In any normal situation, the President's decision to push Francine Wheeler -- a sobbing, grieving mother of a six-year-old boy killed at Sandy Hook -- in front of the cameras to argue for the latest Senate gun control bill would be breathtaking for its exploitation and its cynicism. Yet now it is a regular part and parcel of a typical left-wing tactic -- to suppress rational discussion with a tidal wave of emotion.

Shaw goes on to point out that emotion and rational thought need not be divorced from each other. Rather, emotion compels us to act, but rational thought informs us how to act. In the case of Francine Wheeler, I grieve right along with her. I think about how it would devastate the lives of my daughter and her husband, the grandparents on his side of the family, and my wife and I if my own grand children were murdered in their school. But then I put on my thinking cap (remember those) and I note: 1) The United States has banned so called "assault weapons" before, and it had no effect on crime. 2) The United States has done background checks on those who obtain weapons through licensed dealers, but most criminals don't get their guns through licensed dealers. Most criminals also don't get their guns at gun shows. Oh, and people who buy over the Internet must get a background check before they can pick up their guns. Same deal at auctions and pawn stores.

I also note that the existing regulations have had a devastating effect on not only the 2nd Amendment, but the other Amendments as well. For example, under the background check system, you must prove your innocence of any of the situations listed to the satisfaction of the bureaucrats at the National Crime Information Center before you may exercise your fundamental human right to be armed. Yet our law says that you can not be deprived of these rights without due process. Therefore any background check seems to violate the very letter of the Constitution. Having more of it hardly seems to help matters, indeed sets yet more bad precedent. And if you are a Leftists who is claiming that the sacred right to vote should not be burdened even by requiring you to prove who you are before voting, how do you square that circle?

Finally, I note that while this is one weeping mother who supposedly stands for all, not all of them agree that the Senate's gun bill is the way to go. 

Even Newtown's school board has voted for armed security, voting unanimously to request an armed guard for each of the district’s four elementary schools. In Newtown, the argument isn't over whether it's a good idea to have armed guards, but rather if schools should have more than one armed guard. Board member Richard Gaines asked "Is that enough?"

Shaw again:

Mrs. Wheeler spends the majority of the video talking about her son, before immediately arguing that we should pass the Senate bill -- a bill that would not have prevented the shooting. What she implies (that this bill would have saved her son's life) is false, and if she was to explicitly say what she implies, she would be lying. Yet who wants to be the one to call a grieving mother out on that?

This is Obama's tactic -- he knows that Republicans do not want to be seen as uncaring, or as attacking a weeping mother. The Democrats are using the families of those killed as riot shields with which to back Republicans into a corner, instead of having the guts to stand up and argue rationally for what they believe in.

As Adam Shaw said, prove it. Show us the facts that prove your proposal will do anything to prevent another Newtown.  It has been noted that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the very definition of insanity. I would change that from insanity to inanity. In any case, there is no evidence that any of the gun control laws on the books have eliminated crimes, even the background checks being currently debated. So why expand them. Why not try something else instead?

Hot Air Tires to Reassure Gun Owners...and Fails Miserably

Over at Hot Air, Ed Morrisey attempt to divine the Senate votes on the Toomey Manchin bill and claims that Reid Coming Up Short on Gun Control Bill. On the other hand, anyone who could get that abomination, the ObamaCare bill through despite is unpopularity can not be under estimated.

I can not understand, for the life of me, why gun owners seem to think that any gun control, let alone increased background checks will have any effect on future Newtowns, or indeed on crime in general. I talk to folks who point out that they can pass a background check, so why should they fear? Unfortunately, these people either don't see, or turn a blind eye to the fact that we are dealing with people who are negotiating in bad faith. Once they get a universal background check bill in place, the demand will be to constantly expand the list of prohibited persons until virtually everyone is a prohibited person. That has already happened under the current regime of background checks, as veterans coming home have been put on the "no buy list," as have husbands who find themselves on the wrong side of a preemptive restraining order sought by a vengeful wife. a Justice Department study shows 40% get their guns from friends or family members, another 40% get their guns from the street and illegal sources, but less than 9% get their guns from retail outlets, while only 0.7% get them from gun shows. So, criminals will largely be untouched by any change in the law. They will still steal them from family, or get them on the black market.

The bill makes a showing of saying that the Attorney General may not make a registry of the 4473 forms held by currently licenced dealers.  But the Attorney General could make a registry of the 4473s of retired, or out of business FFLs.  And, don't forget that DHS could make a registry of current licensees data and share that with the Attorney General.  So, at some point in the future, a law like that in Connecticut is passed that bans, among others, your Ruger Ranch Rife.  You are required to turn them all in, including that expensive semiautomatic shot gun you use for pheasant hunting every year.  You refuse.  But DHS has your name on a list.  Would you like to have a DHS swat team, in an armoured personnel carrier show up at your door?  Wouldn't that be exciting?   You can read more about the devil in the details at The Volokh Conspiracy, where Dave Kopel lays them all out. Of course, in addition to these sneaky traps, there will be amendments. Each amendment that passes will also add a Senator or two to the list of those voting "aye." The gun grabbers, who lost the gun control debate over the last 50 years, have pretended that we never had this discussion, and have reignited the debate again. The fact that even the Senators who have put forward these bills, including Diane Feinstein, Little Chucky Schumer, Pat Toomey, and Joe Manchin understand that nothing they are proposing would have prevented Sandy Hook or any other mass shooting. At the same time, these people resist doing anything that might have helped, including putting armed people in the schools to protect the defenseless children sitting there like ducks at a shooting gallery. What does that tell you? It tells me that they really don't care that our children are being killed, what they want is a disarmed and compliant America. Mao was right about one thing, that power comes from the barrel of a gun, and they want a monopoly of power. If the Second Amendment falls, look for your other rights to be gone as well, for it is the Second Amendment that gives teeth to the others. Ed Morrisey:

Addendum: Does Manchin-Toomey have a prayer of passing the House if even a couple of Democrats oppose it in the Senate? I highly doubt it, which is another reason this won’t be a terrible outcome for gun owners.

Morrisey has more faith than I do that we will weather the current storm. I believe if it passes, Mr. Boehner can not be counted on the prevent it getting to the floor of the House. If it does, it could be anybody's guess.

A Mass Murderer Goes On Trial, and Nobody Notices

Daniel Doherty has Everything You Need to Know So Far about the Gosnell Trial over at Townhall.com today. If you haven't heard of the Gosnell trial, then you have been too dependent on the lamestream media, or as Rush Limbaugh likes to call them, the drive by media. Go read the linked site. I vomited a little in my mouth, so don't want to go back and rehash what has already been written. To its credit, the Washington Post has decided to send a reporter to cover the trial, after being shamed.  Had this murderer committed his crimes with a gun, we surely would have been hearing all about it.  But because he used a pair a medical scissors, we have not.  Perhaps it is also that the media feel shame precisely because calling out Gosnell would have been politically incorrect. 

Putting aside for now the filthy conditions and unsanitary medical malpractices the Gosnell clinic maintained, can we now discuss the horror, and the immorality of aborting our children?  Even from a purely legalistic point of view, the Constitution requires that a person can not be deprived of life or liberty without due process.  But these children are routinely killed by their own mothers without any sort of warrant being issued, or trial held.  And using semantics as the Left is so fond of doesn't really change the facts.  You can call him or her a "fetus" if you want, and there may be good medical reasons for designating a growing child still in the womb by a different name, but the fact is that the growing child in the womb will become a person if the pregnancy is not deliberately terminated.  The rights of the mother to terminate her pregnancy for convenience can not be greater than the right to life of the child.  For if the mother's convenience is greater than the child's right to life, then what prevents a mother from killing her child at any age up to 18, when the child reaches legal majority?  If it is simply outrage, we have seen how the public can be manipulated and desensitized to where no outrage is expressed.

"Medical ethicist" have argued that what they call "after birth abortions" should be legal because the child can not yet appreciate his or her life. But since when has one's appreciation of one's life been a determinate for personhood? And notice once again the use of semantics to mask the fact that if this procedure were sanctioned, people would be allowed to murder their own children. Is this really any different than the ancient practice of sacrificing the first born son? The Bible condemns that practice (witness Abraham being stopped from sacrificing Issac.) So should we. Also notice that the ethicist don't venture an age where the child becomes a person, leaving open the option at any point in the child's development where a parent can murder his or her children without a by your leave from society.   According to the National Catholic Register:

The second we allow ourselves to become the arbiters of who is human and who isn’t, this is the calamitous yet inevitable end. Once you say all human life is not sacred, the rest is just drawing random lines in the sand.

The Gosnell trial features gruesome partial birth abortions and afterbirth abortions in which the child was screaming.  Nobody knows how many such abortions were performed, but it could be 100 or more.  How the people who worked there could calmly go home at the end of a shift, only to return the next day speaks to the desensitisation these workers must have gone through.  It is not unlike the death camp murderers in Nazi Germany.  It was a horrifying death cult, and the  "medical ethicist" want to expand that death cult.  Such a death cult results from man substituting his own notion of morality for God's firm laws. Every civilization that has tried to do that came to ruin. But even you don't believe there is a God, surely you can see that no good thing can come from ignoring the experience of history.

Not One More Inch

Daren Jonescu has a piece over at the American Thinker today entitled Where's the Progress in Progressivism. To what Utopia are the modern day Progressives leading us knuckle dragging Neanderthals? In itself, it is an excellent explanation of the so-called philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of Socialism in all its forms, whether Communism, Fascism, Fabianism, or Progressivism. Jonescu:

The propensity for what we may call pseudo-theorizing has been at the heart of progressivism from the start. The nineteenth century spawned a mutant philosophical subset, intellectuals for tyranny, who produced ersatz scientific, moral, and even metaphysical arguments to persuade men that their desire for unlimited state power was in fact an unavoidable inference from an objective reasoning process, rather than the authoritarian impulse plain and simple. This philosophical mutation -- reason as handmaiden of authoritarianism, rather than as its natural rival and limit -- was made possible by the anti-rational turn in German thought during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most dramatically signaled by Immanuel Kant's condemnation of previous Western philosophy as a "dialectical illusion," in his Critique of Pure Reason.

snip...

This was the seed of modernity's deadly invasive plant, political historicism. In effect, this nineteenth century weed, authoritarianism in the guise of theory, was the latest and greatest revival of Socrates' old nemesis, sophistry -- the art of rhetorical persuasion in the service of political efficacy, grounded in the denial of any distinction between truth and power. The basic method of this newer, more devilish sophistry was to obliterate the truth/power distinction by flat-out denying the reason/politics distinction. In other words, the intellectuals for tyranny reduced the mind itself to the play of political forces, hence conflating logic, the abstract method of development in the search for knowledge, with power struggle, the practical mechanism of political development.

One of the things the Christianity introduced to the world was the notion that individuals count, not merely collective peoples. The Prophets preached to the whole collective of Israel, and promised pain if the collective Israel did not repent. But suddenly Jesus is saying that even if your neighbor doesn't repent, or your wife or brother for that matter, if YOU repent, and believe in God's saving grace, YOU will be saved. That was something new, and it carried down through Christian philosophers including St. Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther to John Locke, and ended up as practical politics in the Constitution of the United States, and its precursor document the Declaration of Independence.

Marxism, on the other hand, proclaimed that history, rather than being the collection of the choices of individual men, was in fact the driver of those choices.  Jonescu again:

 

For one thing, the individual human being becomes, if not an outright logical fallacy, then at least an insignificant term in the new morality which flows from the elevation of political history to the status of a logical argument, or dialectic. Ethical individualism is thus obliterated, in favor of a collectivism that is as much metaphysical as it is ethical. (I have repeatedly noted that progressivism literally denies the logical priority of the individual human being, and declares instead that the individual is derived from the collective. Some may have found this description hard to believe; nonetheless it is not only true, but absolutely unavoidable if one radically reverses our relationship to history, as progressivism does.)

Secondly, if reason is reduced to political history, and the brute force of collective action identified with the force of logic, then death and oppression, the practical means of progressive authoritarianism, are as objective and amoral as a syllogism. In this way, historicism becomes man's most ingenious moral sophistry: the rationalization of mass murder, and of carelessness about life itself. What, after all, is mere individual life against the glorious march of history? Furthermore, what is individual moral responsibility in the face of collective historical necessity? This is perhaps the ultimate explanation of every progressive atrocity, real and prospective, from the Communist Manifesto to Bill Ayers' projection of the need to kill twenty-five million Americans who resist re-education; from the millions slaughtered by Stalin, Hitler and Mao to Barack Obama knowingly ignoring the cries for help from the victims of Benghazi for over seven hours, or his support for death panels and post-birth "abortion."

Of course, Marxism has proven to be a lie. But the Marxists can not admit to that lie, and so have constantly changed their language to fool the public in the hopes that they can keep their true agenda alive, namely the Tyranny of the Elites. Despite the fact that history (properly understood) has shown that Marxism has failed wherever it has been tried, Marxists dare not admit this to themselves, for their egos could not take it. Thus they change names from Marxist, to Socialists, to Fascists, to Communists, to Liberals, to Progressives, each one meaning whatever one wants it to mean, like Social Justice. Just as Global Cooling became Global Warming, then Global Climate Change, but always it had the same solutions, so the Progressives have maintain the same solutions no matter what they called themselves.

One of their "solutions" has been to ban all guns in the United States.  They will tell you they don't want to ban all guns, just these dangerous guns (which have been conveniently demonized by a compliant media) and whose owners have been made to seem like crazy kooks out to terrorize innocent mothers and children.  In another age, it was "Saturday Night Specials," cheap handguns that black men supposedly carried to threaten and mug families out for a good time on a weekend night.  Clearly such overt racism is no longer acceptable, so they move on to demonizing southern white men.  The impulse is the same, however, and so are the people involved.

Lewis Dovland has a piece up at American Thinker entitled Guns: The Left's True Aim and How to Thwart It, that explains the Progressives strategy in banning all guns in the United States. It involves trickery, demonizing guns and people, of course, slight of hand, and possibly more outright fraud by the Senate Majority Leader. Doveland:

To understand progressive methodology, let's use another similar issue: the gay marriage agenda. Say the current definition of "marriage" as it has been for thousands of years is represented by "A" on a continuum of A to Z, with "Z" being the left's ultimate goal. Asking for "Z" now would be a major overreach (and "Z" is much farther than just gay marriage), so progressives ask for "N," which is just enough of a stretch to make people push back only a little.

So to protect a foundation of society, the people of California overwhelmingly vote a law that defines marriage -- an appropriate state's rights issue. The left goes to court and has California's decision overturned. The people next pass a state constitutional amendment, and again the left gets it overturned, and now it is in the Supreme Court. The left also applies public pressure through the media to brand anyone who doesn't agree as a homophobe or hater, all the while controlling the educational curriculum so only one side of the argument is taught to our children.

Eventually, progressives will get only "C" this time, which is really all they wanted for now. But note something powerful here. "C" becomes the new "A." So there is never a way to back it up to the original "A." Over time, they will win another "C" that becomes "A."

It has been a successful strategy so far on every front. The first Federal gun control, the National Firearms Act, was passed in 1934, during the crime wave of the 1930s. A few of the most notorious criminals had the new automatic firearms such as the Thompson Submachine gun. At close range, the Tommy gun was an awesome weapon, and the police claimed to be outgunned by gangsters wielding Tommy guns. I think this was a lie, because all of the people that were terrorizing the public at the time from Bonny and Clyde to Baby Faced Nelson were eventually put down by ordinary weapons and good police work. In any case, under the NFA, you could still own a Thompson, if you had the permission of your local officials, paid a $200 tax, and registered your ownership of that weapon with the ATF. In essence, the NFA made ownership of these weapons unattainable by the average guy in the street, while leaving them available to the rich and powerful-the Elites.

Of course, there were more gun laws to come, such as 1938, and the Gun Control Act of 1968, after the assassination of President Kennedy, his brother Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. Once again the public was panicked, and gun grabbers were able to use emotion to crack down a bit more on gun owners. Even President Reagan got in the act with the so-called Firearms Owners Protection Act, which did little to protect firearms owners, but further restricted ownership of NFA weapons, making them available only to the very very rich. Each time a new gun control bill was passed, that became the starting point for more "common sense" restrictions. We started out with no infringement, and now we find ourselves battling to keep semiauto rifles and push back a plan to register all our guns so they can be confiscated.

Enforcing the universal background check will require registration of all guns in a national database; otherwise, how and where do we prevent private sales without background checks? And the details of how to enforce the background checks will be handled by the legislation, neatly out of the direct view of the public. Once that occurs, the government will have a list of all legal guns and owners in the U.S., making confiscation extremely easy when the time comes.

We must make clear to our "representatives," who will be only too happy to cave to the Left in order to appear to be willing to compromise, "Not One More Inch." Remember the words of Jessie Helms:

“Compromise, hell! That’s what has happened to us all down the line — and that’s the very cause of our woes. If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?”

We believe in freedom, in liberty, and we believe those telling us how to live should mind their own business. We can compromise on certain things, for instance how long it will take us to return to a balanced budget. But we can not compromise these fundamental principles. Not one more inch (and oh, by the way, we are gunning for all those laws that infringe our rights.)

Army Now has Evangelicals and Catholics in its Crosshairs

Please take time to read this post by Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugged entitled U.S. Army Labeled Evangelicals, Catholics as Examples of Religious Extremism. Would that it were so, and I count myself as part of the problem. We are no where near extreme enough. Every time an abortion is performed, we should be wailing in the streets, for another child has been murdered. Indeed, whenever an injustice occurs, and these days the injustices are hard to ignore, we should be shouting at the top of our lungs, as the prophets did of old. But even if we did these things, the Army still should not consider that too extreme. After all, even at our most extreme, we are not killing people.

As to why this is happening, I can only guess that the regime is trying to strongarm the Church into going along with the ruling by HHS that the Church must hand out abortificients to its employees under ObamaCare.  The Church has vowed to resist, on principle, and has filed lawsuits against the regime.  You see, the Church, and the Jews before them, have considered that life begins at conception, and that to abort the child is to murder him or her.  Murder is a sin against God.  But like Communist and Fascist regimes around the world, this regime can not have anyone disagree with it.  Instead, they must smear the ones who disagree and resist, and make them out to be evil.  Eventually, if they don't change (and the Church is not going to change its mind) the regime starts imprisoning or killing them.  By making us out to be terrorists, and with the NDAA as "authority" the regime believes it can silence the Church.  Good luck with that.

You can insult us with things like "Piss Christ" and we will follow the Biblical injunction to turn the other cheek. But the Army would be well advised not to make us out to be the enemy. Remember that you took an oath not to the current Commander in Chief, but to uphold and defend the Constitution. Remember that Christians have a duty to defend themselves and their families. While no doubt you will bring enough force to bear to ensure your short term success, how many martyrs are you willing to create? How many peaceable citizens are you willing to kill?  The lesson of history is that the Church grows stronger with each martyr you create.  Rome is dusty history, but the Church still stands. 

Christians must fight, fight, fight...

On April 3, 2013, Fay Voshell published a piece in the American Thinker that I think all of us need to read and understand entitled Stomping on Jesus: The Iconoclasm of the Left. There are two definitions of iconoclasts. One is someone who seeks to overthrow, or to change popular ideas, or commonly held beliefs. When such commonly held ideas are wrong, as is the case with the gun grabbers, of global warming alarmists, such people are thought to be good. By thinking independently, and searching for the truth, such people enlighten us all. The other definition of an iconoclast is one who literally destroys religious icons for purposes of destroying, or weakening the faith tradition. It is iconoclasm of the second sort that Ms. Voshell refers to here. Ms. Voshell views the order by a Florida Atlantic University professor to students to stomp on Jesus's name written on a piece of paper as a recent, crude attempt at modern day iconoclasm. Mr. Voshell:

The attempts to exterminate Christians and the images of their faith have a long and bloody history, and certainly have not been confined to pre-modern Japan. While persecution has remained a constant of Christian history since the time of Jesus and the apostles, iconoclasm, the concerted attempt to rid a given civilization of Christian religious images, has been a recurrent issue, especially during the eighth and ninth centuries. During that time period, imperial legislation of Byzantium attempted to bar the use of figural images. Existing icons were destroyed by those who had a theory that sacred images were "graven images," and therefore idolatrous.

But some scholars believe the rise of Islam, which forbids religious images, coupled with the Byzantine emperors' desire to make the State rather than the Church the sole authority were at the heart of the iconoclastic movement. The movement aimed at destroying religious images gave the political rationale necessary to justify the persecution of Christians who would not bow to the almighty State. Stomping on or eradicating Jesus' image indicated subservience to the government and its imperial leaders.

In an age when many were illiterate, and books were rare and expensive because each one had to be copied by hand, icons were a way of teaching the people about the life of Jesus, and of explaining his saving grace to each of us who believe in him. As such, icons are not "graven images" forbidden in the Bible, but teaching aids. Take away the teaching aids, the aids to evangelizing and preaching, and you undermine the faith.

Ms. Voshell explains all of this as a prelude to her real message: The Christian community has been too meek in its reaction to the vicious attacks both here and abroad to the Christian faith. In Egypt, for instance, while the President hands over military hardware and millions of dollars, Coptic Christians are being slaughtered. In Syria, amid the civil war, a genocide of Syrian Christians is proceeding apace. Meanwhile, here at home, nobody has been killed yet, but Christians are under attack. Every year at Christmas, there are cities who want to ban Nativity scenes, or put up "holiday trees," as if the name "holiday" did not derive form Holy Day. People everywhere urge us to drop "Merry Christmas" and instead use "Happy Holiday." I am always torn here because much of the Christmas symbolism is pagan in origin, but has become so attached to Christmas that many think somehow a lighted tree is somewhere in the Christmas story. In the end, like the icons of old, if putting up a tree and decorating it allows parents to teach their young about the miraculous birth of Jesus, who am I to complain. Now, of course, the atheists have taken aim at the central event of the Christian faith: Easter. Of course, decorated eggs have nothing to do with Easter, which is about the Crucifixion, dying, and Rising of our Lord and Saviour. He is Risen. Again, if coloring eggs, and hiding them in the lawn allows parents to teach their children about this miraculous event, who am I to complain.

Christian response (to the attack on Christianity) has generally been weak. There are many reasons for the lack of concerted outrage, but there are at least two reason Christians are allowing their immense contributions to American society and its culture to be attacked and sidelined.

One is the generally pacifist view many Christians have toward conflict of any type. Most denominations embrace a view of Christ that is gentle, meek and mild, a Christ that advised patience with one's enemies. Jesus did advise patience. But many forget the Christ who excoriated the leaders of his day for their oppression of the masses and who strongly confronted their idiocies with scalding contempt. Almost forgotten as well is the Christ who condemns and judges evil and who is committed to its complete eradication.

This attitude wasn't always so. I remember as a child the many hymns that used military metaphors to teach Christian theology. Onward Christian Soldiers, and A Mighty Fortress are examples of hymns that no longer feature in the regularly sung hymns of the Church. We need to revive the image of Jesus as a strong, masculine man, who was attractive to both men and women. We also need to revive the image of the Jesus who experienced the full range of emotions we all deal with. He could be tender with women and children.  He could be angry with the money changers. He could be understanding of the tax collectors, and saddened by the rich young man who would do what it took to follow Him. He could be compassionate with lepers and the lame. He could be frightened of His coming Crucifixion, yet courageously take all our sins unto himself, and ask His Father to forgive those who had crucified Him.

There is only one way to stop the marginalization. There is only one way to stop the iconoclasm of the Left that would eliminate Christian symbols and influence from society. That way is to fight, because if Christians don't resist with all their might the attempts to deprive them of their symbols of faith, their constitutionally protected right to express their faith and their right to influence the society in which they live and work and worship, the next step by the iconoclastic Left will be overt persecution and attempts at elimination from any significant role in society -- and seventeenth century Japan shows how far human beings are able to go down that path.

As Christians, we must become more militantly so. Yes, we must be like Christ in all things, but we must be prepared to defend our beliefs at every turn as well.