When I heard of the tragedy of Steven Curtis Chapman’s adopted daughter Maria Sue suddenly dying in an accident, I was stunned, and I honestly didn’t know what to say. So I’ve been silent on this blog for awhile and today I decided I would put up a small tribute to Maria Sue. She was only 5 years old.

Please keep the whole family in your prayers because all the reports are saying that Maria Sue was accidentally run over by her older brother. I cannot even begin to imagine the pain this man feels right now. I can’t imagine the pain the whole family is going through either, but we do know that the Lord is able to comfort them and carry them through this tremendously sad time.

Here is a video of Steven with Maria Sue washing dishes.

If you would like to donate to Maria’s Miracle Fund.

Miracle of the Moment

AP Photo

I just got home from work about an hour ago and I just heard about the terribly sad news that Senator Ted Kennedy has brain cancer.

According to the press reports Senator Kennedy may have 1-3 years if the cancer spreads slowly.

The good news is that he apparently has accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior, which is something I heard Janet Parshall mention on her program today.

Please keep this precious man in your prayers, I know I will be, because any type of cancer is a horrible thing, and if you’re like me and you know someone who had cancer and watched them die, you know it’s not a pretty thing.

The following is reprinted with permission from Peter LaBarbera from Americans for Truth About Homosexuality.

Can Homosexual Couples ‘Have Children’?

Photo appearing on homosexual group Equality California’s website. The group will be leading efforts to oppose a proposed constitutional amendment to protect marriage as one-man, one-woman in that state.

By Peter LaBarbera

One of the factors that makes the homosexual activist agenda so peculiarly evil is its habit of glomming on to humanity’s most noble institutions and truths — parenting, marriage, love, honesty, justice and “equality” — and putting them in the service of its starkly ignoble cause of winning acceptance for immoral and unhealthy homosexual behavior.

Dear AFTAH Readers,

Either I’m going nuts or the sentence in blue below is one of the strangest every to begin an opinion piece — especially one titled, “Ordinary, Like Us.” Lesbian writer Jennifer Vanasco writes in the homosexual newspaper Chicago Free Press:

Young gays and lesbians want to be married. And have kids.

That’s what the first survey of the aspirations of gay and lesbian youth discovered.

Rockway Institute reported that more than 90 percent of the lesbians and more than 80 percent of the gay males they surveyed “expect to be partnered in a monogamous relationship after age 30.”

About two-thirds of the males and just over half of the females said they thought it was very likely they’d have children.

What’s extraordinary about this is just how very ordinary it is….

Gay and lesbian youth want stable marriages and children?

Of course they do.

Because they have grown up in an America where being gay is starting to seem unremarkable. Where being gay doesn’t need to mean living a particular way. Where being gay doesn’t have to mean putting limits on your future.

Young gays and lesbians don’t want to destroy “traditional marriage” the way social conservatives fear. They want to be traditional – and one state, Massachusetts, allows them to do that. Hopefully others will follow. … [Click HERE to read the whole piece reprinted on the Independent Gay Forum website]

Now, Vanasco’s entire piece deserves a response point-by-point, but here I only want to discuss the calculated semantic distortion by her and fellow homosexualists of using the words “having kids.”

Think about it: what’s the phrase we use regarding infertile couples? “Oh, have you heard? John and Nancy can’t have children.” In this context, to “have” means to beget, to produce, to procreate, through God’s wonderful plan of conception and pregnancy. The context is always people who normally could produce children, but something has gone awry preventing Nature from taking its course.

So why do Vanasco and so many homosexual apologists use the phrase “have kids”? Because they are appropriating normal, ancient language to advance the abnormal — their latest theft in a series of lexicographical heists of which the word “gay” is only the most infamous. (Pity the poor people whose parents named them “Gay” before the word was linked to homosexuality.) Homosexual strategists seek to fool people by invoking traditional family values and justice — hence their mantra demanding “marriage equality” — even as they agitate to overturn centuries of understanding and God’s revealed purpose for both family and marriage.

What about straight infertile couples?

When we bring up the fact that homosexual couples are far from “equal” in part because they cannot produce children, pro-homosexuality activists swiftly turn to the many straight couples that are infertile. This polemical trick is as deceptive as comparing counterfeit, sodomy-based “marriages” to interracial marriages. Black-white couples — a man and a woman joined together as one — produce beautiful children. Past laws banning such marriages were wrong. (Yes, Christians and others sinned in using the Bible to rationalize racism and slavery.) In contrast, homosexual sex acts are a biological and anatomical dead end — in addition to being a rebellion against our Creator that grieves Him as He is grieved by all sin.

Homosexuality, a human wrong, has nothing to do with marriage, or civil rights for that matter. Only a fool, or perhaps a manipulative social crusader, would argue that the modern tragedy of “gay” parenthood — intentionally (and selfishly) placing helpless children in homes that are motherless or fatherless by design — is “equal” to natural, mom-and-dad parenthood and should be treated as such in the law.

Unlike homosexuals, infertile straight couples are not mocking God’s plan. In fact, they are trying desperately to fulfill it, and copy it, using methods both high-tech (invitro) and low-tech (adoption). The fact that homosexual couples have access to the same technology and also can now easily adopt babies does not make the plight of children placed in same-sex households any less tragic, or more “moral.” Rather, by turning the perversion of homosexuality into “just one more kind of love” (to quote the homosexual children’s book, Daddy’s Roommate), they are putting THEIR wants above the best interests of children.

LaBarbera, you brutish homophobe, how can you say that adopting children, with all its required sacrifices, is selfish?

That takes me to this point: one of the factors that makes the homosexual activist agenda so peculiarly evil is its habit of glomming on to humanity’s most noble institutions and truths — parenting, marriage, love, honesty, justice and “equality” — and putting them in the service of its starkly ignoble cause of winning acceptance for immoral and unhealthy homosexual behavior.

They’ve fooled a lot of people (and here come the gullible Christians!), but don’t let them fool you. As the father of five, I can’t blame homosexuals for wanting children, and loving them, but let’s tell the truth: two men or two women can’t “have kids” together any more than a tree can “have” puppies.

Now look at the “gay daddies” propaganda photo again. What emotions does it evoke in you? Righteous anger, pity, sorrow, deep frustration? (If your answer is “joy” at this happy “family,” then you are either lying, deceived or you’ve lost your soul, and your mind.) Now explain to all the young people in your extended network of family and friends why God’s perfect plan for “having children” — through true, lasting marriage — is the right way to live, and how even though cheap imitations are possible — or even legal — they will never come close to the real thing.

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Great article from Janet Folger posted on WorldNetDaily today.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008
FAITH2ACTION
How same-sex marriage
points to end of the world
Exclusive: Janet Folger looks to rabbinical wisdom,
New Testament to interpret California’s court ruling
Posted: May 20, 2008
1:00 am Eastern

By Janet Folger

What do May 17, 2004, and May 15, 2008, have in common? One judge and a redefinition of marriage against the will of the people.

Both the Massachusetts Superior Court and the California Supreme Court by a one-judge margin redefined what marriage has always been in every culture and every religion for more than 5,000 years of recorded history.

Why does this matter?

As I wrote about in my book, “The Criminalization of Christianity,” Jeffrey Satinover, who holds an M.D. from Princeton and doctorates from Yale, MIT and Harvard, was on my radio program one day and I asked him about where we are in history. He explained that according to the “Babylonian Talmud” – the book of rabbis’ interpretation of the scriptures 1,000 years before Christ, there was only one time in history that reflects where we are right now. There was only one time in history, according to these writings, where men were given in marriage to men, and women given in marriage to women.

Want to venture a guess as to when? No, it wasn’t in Sodom and Gomorrah, although that was my guess. Homosexuality was rampant there, of course, but according to the Talmud, not homosexual “marriage.” What about ancient Greece? Rome? No. Babylon? No again. The one time in history when homosexual “marriage” was practiced was … during the days of Noah. And according to Satinover, that’s what the “Babylonian Talmud” attributes as the final straw that led to the Flood.

On my Faith2Action radio program on Thursday, Rabbi Aryeh Spero verified this to be true.

Rabbi Spero spoke of God’s compassion before the Flood, in hopes people would repent and turn back to His ways. He showed patience for hundreds of years.

But, he said, the Talmud’s writings reveal that “before the Flood people started to write marriage contracts between men, in other words, homosexual ‘marriage,’ which is more than homosexual activity – it’s giving an official state stamp of approval, a sanctification … of homosexual partnership.”

In fact, he said, “the writings indicated that it wasn’t even so much the ’straw that broke the camel’s back,’ but that the sin in and of itself is so contrary to why God created the world, so contrary to the order of God’s nature, that God said then and there ‘I have to start all over … to annihilate the world and start from the beginning. …’”

Rabbi Spero went on to say, “Even in ancient Greece they did not write marriage contracts between men. There was homosexuality, and it was wrong, but there was not an official ‘blessed’ policy. … Marriage is ’sanctification’ (not simply a partnership).” He said to confer the title of sanctification and holiness upon this behavior is “probably one of the greatest sins of all that one does against God’s plan for this world.”

The one time it happened was: “During the days of Noah.” When I first heard this, my mind immediately went to a verse I’ve heard many times but never with such relevance. The verse is found in Matthew 24:37. It reads:

As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. – Mathew 24:37 (NIV)

I used to read this verse and think: It was bad at lots of points in history; it doesn’t necessarily mean now, but if these Jewish writings are true, we are uniquely like the “days of Noah” right now – and only right now.

But it can’t be yet, you say. You have a lot going on in your life? You’re getting married? Here’s how the New Living Translation describes that very sentiment in Luke:

When the Son of Man returns, the world will be like the people were in Noah’s day. In those days before the Flood, the people enjoyed banquets and parties and weddings right up to the time Noah entered his boat, and the flood came to destroy them all. – Luke 17:26-27

Happily going about as if everything was fine was what they did, too.

You don’t like this possibility? Don’t even believe in the Flood? Doesn’t matter. Some things are true whether you believe them or not. How can you be sure? There’s a way. Did you know that about one-fourth of the Bible is prophecy? A quarter of the Bible is a lot – it’s a big book. And did you know God’s standard? Perfection. That means that if even one of those prophecies is wrong, you can discount the whole thing. Kind of like a prophet who makes a false prediction – that made him a false prophet and a candidate for stoning. Did you know that 4,000 prophecies in that Bible have already come true down to the last detail? That leaves about 1,000 left to be fulfilled – those are the ones regarding the last days before the return of Christ, which are being checked off the list right now.

If 4,000 out of 5,000 prophecies have already occurred exactly as the Bible predicted they would, you might want to pay attention to the rest.

The good news is that 1.1 million people across California have signed a petition to bring marriage to a vote of the people through a state constitutional amendment (just like 27 other states have done). And guess what? An amendment to a state constitution trumps even the most out-of-control state judiciary. We’ll likely know if these signatures are validated before this tyrannical ruling goes into effect, and I predict they will be since they gathered 400,000 more signatures more than they needed to qualify. Besides, they already voted – eight years ago where more than 61 percent of Californians declared marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Now they just need to turn that same language into a constitutional amendment.

I don’t live in California, so why am I sounding the alarm? Here’s why:

But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, and the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood I will require at the watchman’s hand. – Ezekiel 33:6

I’m praying and working to protect marriage in California (and the rest of the country) not only because I care about marriage, but because I care about civilization. And, if we obey God, he just may spare us from the judgment we deserve.

This story doesn’t surprise me one bit because when I attended a Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network meeting a few years ago, there was a whole class on how to intimidate and bully Christians and anyone that would disagree with homosexuality, or transgenderism. But it looks like in Maine the transgenders are really threatened by pro-family people because they want to “shadow” them.

If I was in Maine, I’d make sure I brought a team with a video camera to shadow the transgenders and people bullying them. That’s the only way they will have proof of the crimes committed against them.

Read the story at WorldNetDaily.

Posted: May 16, 2008
8:35 pm Eastern

© 2008 WorldNetDaily

A lobby for homosexuals and transgenders in Maine has announced plans to shadow individuals who will be working to collect signatures on the “YES for Marriage and Equality” pro-family referendum, which is intended to put a marriage protection plan on the 2009 election ballot.

In a report in the New England Blade this week, Betsy Smith, executive director of the Equality Maine activist organization, outlined “a plan that asks volunteers to stand with the people the [Christian Civic] League recruits to collect signatures for the petition.”

“I think it is disgusting that so-called ‘gay’ groups plan on harassing dear Christian grandmothers who simply want to gather signatures on Primary Election Day. Shame on Equality Maine,” said Michael Heath, chief of the CCL.