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news | current events (47)

Disenfranchised by Top-Two Open Primaries

Pious Eye (David M. Hodges) posted a comment on someone else’s IVN article, as well as a related one on his own. Bottom line: old closed primary was better than California’s current top-two system, and David wants a “none of the above” option. Comment 1. Comment 2.

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My Sad Farewell to the Pro-Life Movement

As I began to realize a few days ago, when I spoke of the “Baffling Clash: Pro-Life Leaders v Donald J. Trump,” some of us cannot be part of movements. As someone who believes every person’s inalienable right to life begins at conception, I’m saddened to discover I cannot be part of the pro-life movement. The insistence of this movement’s leaders on lockstep conformity to the women-who-abort-are-guiltless-victims position, however, has made clear…

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Baffling Clash: Pro-Life Leaders v Donald J. Trump

Trump image by Michael Vadon, used under license (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons. Today’s “Morning Jolt...with Jim Geraghty” e-mail (free from National Review) contains an interesting passage on the latest Donald Trump controversy. Here it is, as it appears in my response to the sender: I have to admit, the dominant view of career pro-life activists on this issue has me baffled. If you hire a hit man and he accepts…

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Conservative Abortion-Ban-Exception Delusions

Believing true what one wants to be true rather than what actually is true may be a less prevalent phenomenon among conservatives than liberals, but it is certainly not unknown among conservatives. For instance, one needn’t watch Fox New, the Fox Business Network, or an economics-related conservative event for long to hear someone who has been successful in the free market argue that his experience is “proof” that all one has to…

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The Carson Option: Viable for Evangelicals?

I just read an interesting document, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and General Conference of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church’s 2001 “Report of the International Theological Dialogue between the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches” (hereafter, the Dialog Report). As was the case with the Mormon faith of Mitt Romney, some evangelicals have (well, at least one evangelical has) seen the Seventh-Day Adventist faith of Ben Carson as…

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A Month that Will Live in Infamy: October 2014 (Reflection on News in My Local Paper)

Introduction Having decided to waste no more effort sending letters to my local paper, the U-T San Diego, I’ve no longer needed to formulate quick responses to “the latest.” This has freed me to indulge my preference for prolonged reflection (also known as brooding) about news items. Two sets of articles have especially caught my attention this past month: articles related to homosexual “marriage” and miscellaneous other “gay” (or more broadly sinful…

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Consent: Only Repeated Yeses Will Do, Say State Lawmakers

Image: California State Capitol, courtesy Wikipedia user Coolcaesar (Creative Commons license). The local paper today informed me of my state’s passage of an interesting bill to formally define, in the context of sexual assault investigations on college campuses, what does and does not qualify as “consent” to sexual activity (Fenit Nipappil [Associated Press], “State Ban on Plastic Bags OK’d; Bill Moves to Senate,” U-T San Diego, A1-A2; among “In other action, lawmakers...”…

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Pride, Parting in Sodom Diego

Main Remarks Well, I’ve been able to disprove the theory that my prior, somewhat-related letter only failed to make it into print because of U-T San Diego’s word limit (see also the follow-up letter I opted not to send). I disproved the theory by writing a very short letter that U-T staff could easily have used for filler, which I forwarded to them by email back in July. Here it is: From:…

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Protest Unwarranted: Robertson's Remarks Were Just Ducky

No sooner had I recovered sufficiently from an illness to watch some news than I was greeted by a story highlighting once again the sorry state of our dieing culture. Members of the homosexual lobby (known in corrupt contemporary English as “gays”) apparently read GQ, since their (as always) loud and emotional condemnation of public statements unfriendly to their irrational and unbiblical worldview has gotten Phil Robertson, patriarch of the hugely popular…

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Evolutionists' Fear and Loathing in San Diego

Earlier this week, an email from my local creation museum informed me that said museum had been refused membership in the area’s Museum Council. I’d spoken to employees and friends of the museum the day that some representatives of the Council had visited, so I knew those representatives had been favorably impressed and that museum employees and friends fully expected their Council application to be approved. Dour gloom-and-doomer that I am, my…

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