Excerpted from District Threatens Truancy Charges Against Parents Who Keep Kids Home, published Oct 5, 2006, by WorldNet Daily:

The Philadelphia School District has launched a new advance in the battle to indoctrinate school children into the “gay” agenda with its announcement that October is “Gay and Lesbian History Month.”

And a report on Family News in Focus said officials there will make sure parents relinquish their children for that “education.”

“If there is a parent who wants to remove their child from school,” district spokesman Fernando Gallard told the report, “they would have to deal with the truancy regulations.”

…And Peter LaBarbera, president of the conservative Americans for Truth, told Baptist Press in promoting homosexual rights “by definition you have to undermine people’s religious rights and religious beliefs.

“If you have a gay history month, you’re basically saying, ‘This is a wonderful part of American history – homosexual history – let’s celebrate it and let’s teach the kids that this is like civil rights.’ Are they going to teach the role that homosexual behavior had in the onset of HIV and AIDS?”

Continue reading at WorldNet Daily…

Exodus Youth offers an excellent resource for young people (as well as for parents, Bible class teachers, and youth ministers) entitled “Truth & Tolerance: A Student’s Guide to Understanding Homosexuality.” The 20 page booklet is available FREE in pdf form HERE.

AFT’s Peter LaBarbera will be the guest on

WVCY’s Crosstalk America Radio Talk Show

with Vic Eliason on Friday (Oct 6, 2006) at 2 pm Central.

Find a station in your area or click HERE to listen online.

Click HERE to download a podcast.

AFT President Peter LaBarbera was Janet Folger‘s guest on

Faith 2 Action Radio Talk Show

on Thursday (Oct 5, 2006) at 2 pm Eastern.

Click HERE to listen online or to download a podcast.

Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day He visits us.

– I Peter 2:11-12

Excerpted from Psychologist’s Association with Family Group Costs Job, published Oct 4, 2006, by WorldNet Daily:

…Technically, Michael Campion’s work for the department simply was ‘not renewed,’ but since even city officials confirm they have been unable to attract a single complaint about him, pro-family groups are citing liberal interests’ objections to his former association with their efforts as a reason.

“They want to demonize Christians, and they’re willing to play hardball,” Pete LaBarbera, spokesman for the Illinois Family Institute, told WND.

…LaBarbera said Campion’s difficulty was that he was run over by a strong homosexual lobby in the city. He said his own organization also took a hit from a Minneapolis news report that said the IFI opposes civil rights for gays.

“The position we take on a sexual orientation law is that by making a right based on sexual behavior it doesn’t fit the traditional civil rights model,” he said.

…”Obviously he’s being treated because of his Christian association in the past,” LaBarbera said. “People all over the nation have to be watching this case with a great amount of care. If you go to the Catholic church that believes homosexuality is a disorder, does that mean you can’t have a federal job?”

He said simple logic confirms that one cannot determine rights on “how people have sex.”

…”The liberal ‘diversity’ lobby is going after Mike because of his deeply-held religious and moral beliefs. In fact, no homosexual police officers have come forward with charges of bias,” LaBarbera said. “How ironic that the forces of ‘tolerance’ are now leading a new assault on civil rights, this time against people of faith.”

Continue reading at WorldNet Daily…

Excerpted from “Same Sex Marriage Harms Children’s Rights” Marriage Symposium Hears, published Sept 21, 2006, by LifeSite News:

Louis DeSerres, co-founder of Preserve Marriage – Protect Children’s Rights, addressed the issue of harm to children’s rights resulting from same-sex marriage at symposium on marriage held at Brigham Young University Law School last week. The ‘What’s The Harm? How Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage Will Harm Society, Families, Adults, Children and Marriage’ symposium was jointly sponsored by The Marriage and Family Law Project at Brigham University Law School and The Marriage Law Project at the Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law. The symposium was held on September 15-16, 2006.

DeSerres asked if there is a more natural and self evident birth right for a child than to have a mother and a father. More specifically, while nature creates every child with two biological parents, same-sex marriage leads to the creation of fatherless and motherless children, taking away one of the child’s natural parents.

…Man-woman marriage provides the child with many benefits, said DeSerres enumerating fourteen such benefits which are all lost with same-sex marriage.

Some of the harms caused by same sex ‘marriage’ are irreversible, suggested DeSerres. “Unfortunately, the harm is permanent as no legal authority can bring back the missing biological parent of a child born from an anonymous sperm donor or a surrogate mother. Only prevention can protect children’s rights to a father and a mother.”

Continue reading at LifeSite News…

Excerpted from Speculation Flies on Fallout from Foley, by Douglas Turner, published Oct 4, 2006, by The Buffalo News:

… “This is a story that people can understand,” Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute told The Buffalo News. “Other issues, like the conviction of [lobbyist] Jack Abramoff and two congressmen, may have gone over people’s heads. This is about the welfare of young people. For that reason I think this will have a very, very significant effect on the election.”

…Peter LaBarbera, spokesman for Americans for Truth, an evangelical lay organization, denounced what he called “the GOP’s growing flirtation with pro-homosexual policies.”

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said, “When a party holds itself out as the guardian of values, this is not helpful.”

Continue reading in The Buffalo News…

Excerpted from The Road to Nowhere? Middle Church, by Dr. Albert Mohler, published Oct 3, 2006, by Crosswalk:

Bob Edgar wants to rescue America from the religious right. In his new book, Middle Church: Reclaiming the Moral Values of the Faithful Majority from the Religious Right, Edgar intends to reset the nation’s agenda when it comes to matters of Christian concern.

…Edgar could have offered a careful, exegetical, historical, and theological engagement with moral issues. Instead he offers irresponsible generalizations such as this: “The Bible mentions abortion not once, homosexuality only twice, and poverty or peace more than two thousand times. Yet somehow abortion and homosexuality have become the litmus test of faith in public life today.”

How can an intelligent reader, armed with even the slightest knowledge of the Bible and the Christian tradition, take such a statement seriously? The Bible does not mention abortion only in the sense that it does not make direct reference to the practice of surgical abortion as is common today. The Bible speaks clearly to the sanctity of human life and to the priority of protecting unborn life. Furthermore, to state that the Bible mentions homosexuality “only twice” indicates that Edgar has redefined homosexuality as something other than that which the Bible addresses in numerous passages.

There can be no doubt that the Bible’s consistent judgment is that homosexual acts are inherently immoral and sinful. The Christian church in all of its major branches has understood this for two thousand years. This has been a true ecumenical consensus until recent years when some more liberal churches in the West have abandoned the Christian tradition in order to endorse homosexual practice.

Thus, it is an act of intellectual dishonesty for Edgar to claim to speak for “classic historical Christianity.”

Just in case we might miss his point, Edgar offers this assessment of Scripture: “The far religious right is fond of condemning homosexuality because they say the Scripture is immutable and its words are literal.” Again, Edgar identifies the scriptural consensus that homosexuality is sinful as an example of the radical nature of the “far religious right” [italics his]. Once again, one need not be very conservative to end up in Edgar’s category of the far religious right…

In an amazing passage, Edgar asserts: “People of faith must be able to conduct a respectful and open conversation about all aspects of sexuality including homosexuality. God has a lot to say on all these topics, and if we skip the listening and rush straight to the judging–an enterprise in which we’re not supposed to be involved anyway–we can’t hope to make serious progress in our discussion.”

Statements like this must leave us wondering if this author actually means to be taken seriously. His book is filled with moral judgments–judgments about ecology, justice, racism, and a host of other issues. But when it comes to sexuality, Edgar offers the facile suggestion that moral judgment is “an enterprise in which we’re not supposed to be involved anyway.”

In other words, when Edgar makes moral judgments, he’s not being judgmental. But when others moral judgments, they are being judgmental. The Bible does not say that we are not to make moral judgments, or that we are not to judge moral behavior. Indeed, the Bible makes absolutely no sense if that is the case. The Bible–in both Old and New Testaments–is filled with moral judgment and with advisement on how we are to make such judgments. Of course, the judgments we are to make concern behavior, not the heart. We are expressly forbidden to judge another’s heart. That distinction is missing from Edgar’s analysis.

…What separates Bob Edgar and biblical Christianity is the fact that God has told us how He is going to judge humanity–and the crucial issue in that judgment is faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

When it comes to matters of public policy, evangelicals surely do not have all the answers. Furthermore, evangelicals are well served by a reminder that our moral agenda needs to be broader than the issues of the daily headlines.

Nevertheless, conservative Christians did not decide to make abortion, homosexuality, and stem cell research front-line issues. It is nothing less than intellectual dishonesty to suggest that evangelicals prompted the national debate on those issues. On all of these fronts, evangelicals are simply calling on the Christian church to stand by its historic convictions and moral wisdom.

Continue reading at Crosswalk…