Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Should Those Bucking Public Opinion Be Banished Unto Utter Desolation?

Acolytes of tolerance and inclusion are applauding one Indiana town where these values are not to be extended to a congregation daring to exercise its First Amendment rights with a sign simply reading “LGBTQ is a hate crime against God.”

For nothing more than summarizing a basic Christian doctrine or moral presupposition, the congregation has been kicked out of the structure in which its services were convened.

Those holding to an absolutist libertarianism will likely respond that the individual should be able to evict any tenant that advances values with which they do not agree.

Perhaps so.

So should landlords be able to remove from their premises leasees that are practicing coupled homosexuals or heterosexual shackups that romp in the sack without benefit of matrimony?

In response to this message, one activist little better than a graffiti vandal rearranged the letters to read “Stay open minded”.

If private property is now to be upheld as the inviolate standard, will there be as much hue and cry over this particular individual imposing their preferred morality upon a means of public expression that does not belong to them.

For unless we have indeed descended into mob rule, property rights are not predicated upon compliance with the herd mentality.

By Frederick Meekins

Friday, July 6, 2018

Fundamentalist Attends Baseball & Auto Races But Not Ministerial Association

In the 8/12/16 edition of the Sword Of The Lord, the publication's editor Shelton Smith composed an article titled “The Fellowship Thing: A Clearly Defined New Testament Concept”.

In the column, the minister concluded that, even if someone professes to be a born again believer, you really ought not have much to do with the individual unless they pretty much march lockstep with you in agreement on a comprehensive litany of secondary matters.

One wonders how Smith feels regarding other denominations as leery of those wild-eyed Fundamentalists.

As evidence of his hardline position, Shelton Smith referenced a ministerial association he had been pressured into attending as a young pastor and seminary student.

To justify the fact that he never went back, Smith mentions seeing so-called ministers of the Gospel caught smoking cigars and hearing others engaged in “off color conversations”.

Some might have even remarked how good a lady might have looked in tight-fitting jeans and a short haircut (ha ha).

As shocking as that might have been, can he really insist that what he might have been exposed to at such a meeting in the 1970's was really worse than what he was in the vicinity of during the NASCAR races and baseball games he is on the record of having attended in the pages of the Sword of the Lord, a publication that at one time published an article explicitly stating viewers of Stat Trek were not fit to teach school?

By Frederick Meekins