This is a children’s book (for kids from kindergarten to sixth grade) recommended by the Anti-Defamation League’s website. "A young girl participates in the Gay Pride Day parade."
Then there’s My Two Uncles. "A young child’s grandfather has trouble accepting the fact that his son is gay."
I read about this in David Klinghoffer’s new book, How Would God Vote? Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative.
I’m on page 11. Here’s the most powerful sentence I’ve read so far: "I have never met one, not one individual, who as a result of becoming more engaged with the Bible has become more politically liberal."
From page 28: "Something that unites all liberal policy positions relating to women is that they seek to ease the way to separating women from child-rearing."
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: "Religion is often unable to restrain man from the numberless temptations which chance offers; nor can it check that passion for gain which everything contributes to arouse; but its influence over the mind of woman is supreme, and women are the protectors of morals. There is certainly no country in the world where the tie of marriage is more respected than in America."
In her book "Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage," Professor Stephanie Coontz writes that as a social ideal marriage "has become optional and more brittle."
Coontz describes gay marriage as "an inevitable result of the previous revolution in heterosexual marriage."
This Klinghoffer book is shaking me up.
To tell the truth, I’m pretty tired of God and His demands. I want to do my own thing. I’m happy to go to shul at times and engage in religious rituals, but overall, I’m pretty God weary. I want to keep Him in his place. I want to think about politics in secular terms.
When I heard about this "God is a Republican" book, I just wanted to laugh and mock.
Now I’m reading it and it is subtle and moving. God and the Bible do have something to say about politics. And it is not all stuff that I can intuit. I can just feel my way to God’s directives. It takes study.
I took the book to shul and people got angry with the title. They are Modern Orthodox Jews who like to keep their politics and their religion separate.
David Klinghoffer writes for National Review:
Obama’s candidacy represents not just a set of policy preferences — about which he’s often vague — but rather, a potential source of such meaning for his supporters. In a time like ours when there is no obvious and immediate threat to our physical existence, ultimate questions come begging at our sleeve to be answered.
We live in a strange and sad time when secularism has hollowed out confidence in the traditional answers to the great questions of life. To be so ungrounded, as many Americans are, in a faith in anything greater than your own appetites and interests is bound to evoke anxiety, even dread. Obama implicitly addresses himself to that existential condition.
As for John McCain, more invocations of “service to country” are not going to cut it. A country, even a great one, is not a source of ultimate meaning or value.
Life has meaning to John McCain. Let him tell us why, in his own style, even if he must preface the discussion by admitting that to speak so personally makes this old-fashioned man uncomfortable. The military has its unique idiom for discussing matters of spirituality, a way of communicating that’s available to McCain.
The gesture of opening himself up, telling us candidly what he believes beyond Social Security or health-care reform could go a long way toward giving his unenthused admirers reason to care about him. We would admire him, then, not for what he did at the Hanoi Hilton 40 years ago but for the quality of his soul now.
