Laigle’s Forum

Anthony Horvath is a contributor at Laigle’s Forum, Christian apologist, pro-life author and speaker, and publisher.  To learn more about his latest project aimed at combating the philosophies discussed in the essay below and how you can help, click here.

Tina Fey, impersonating Sarah Palin, joked, “I can see Russia from my house.”

I can see the next holocaust from my house, and it is no joke.

In the decades leading up to one of the most horrific chapters in human history, the leading lights of the day openly discussed bringing about those horrors.  Eugenics was posited as the rational position of all intelligent, well-meaning individuals.  In journals, newspapers, academic conferences, public health offices and elsewhere, they talked about sterilizing people with or without their consent, segregating them from society, or even exterminating them.  And that was in America.

In a book written in 1920 by two German experts and applauded by American experts, it was argued that it was allowable to destroy the ‘life unworthy of life.’

Who was regarded as ‘life unworthy of life’?  The handicapped, the disabled, the diseased, the mentally ill, the ‘feeble-minded.’  Really, just about anyone the experts decided was ‘unfit’ could be deemed ‘unworthy of life.’  When eugenics morphed into the Holocaust, many of its proponents quietly went to ground.  Some asked ‘What went wrong?’ but few arrived at the right answer.

Fast forward sixty years.  Enter Julian Savulescu.

You probably don’t know who Julian Savulescu is, just as your average American off the street in 1910 wouldn’t have known who Charles Davenport was.  You probably don’t know who Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva are, just as your average American in 1920 wouldn’t have known who Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding were.

But you may recall a few months ago when two ‘ethicists’ quietly submitted an article in an ethics magazine arguing that the logic of abortion does not cease after the child has fully exited the birth canal.  For all the reasons that abortion on demand was justified, so too, the two ‘ethicists’ Giubilini and Minerva argued, was infanticide.  Of course, they preferred to call it ‘after-birth abortion.’

I hope that nobody misunderstands me:  Giubilini and Minerva were correct in their analysis.  If they are to be faulted for anything, it is for stopping at the newborn.

When people heard about this article there was outrage, and not a little of it spilled over onto the journal that printed the article in the first place.  That journal was “The Journal of Medical Ethics.”  Flabbergasted, the editor defended the publication of the article, saying:

“As Editor of the Journal, I would like to defend its publication. The arguments presented, in fact, are largely not new and have been presented repeatedly in the academic literature and public fora by the most eminent philosophers and bioethicists in the world, including Peter Singer, Michael Tooley and John Harris in defence of infanticide, which the authors call after-birth abortion.”

Yes, that is quite right.  The arguments presented were not new, and have been ‘presented repeatedly.’

He continued, “What is disturbing is not the arguments in this paper nor its publication in an ethics journal. It is the hostile, abusive, threatening responses that it has elicited. More than ever, proper academic discussion and freedom are under threat from fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society.”

This embattled editor of a renown journal of medical ethics is named Julian Savulescu. Read the rest of this entry »

The commandment is:  “Thou shalt not steal.”

Most people believe that this commandment represents sound morality, even if they are not Christians.  Nonetheless, it seems that this moral precept is forgotten once we start talking politics.  And no wonder:  Americans have been making up ‘right and wrong’ for themselves for quite a while.   Obviously it was only a matter of time before it seeped into our national mindset.

A good example of this in action is the current attempt by the Democrats to extend the payroll tax cut, ‘paying for it’ by having the ‘rich’ pay their ‘fair share.’

That we are talking about theft becomes clearer when one considers exactly what the ‘payroll tax’ is.  We are talking about the portion of one’s income that goes directly into Social Security.  Your contributions, in turn, ensure that when you retire, you will be able to draw a steady check.

Now, the liberals tend to target the rich to fund a variety of their favorite programs, and many of those times there ostensibly is some ‘public’ benefit of them.  For example, we might put public infrastructure, such as roads and bridges, in this category.  Usually, though, the program favors smaller, special interest, populations.  The appearance of a socialistic transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor becomes more profound the more targeted the program.

But the funding of the payroll tax cut by the rich really takes the cake.  It is one of those few instances of a government service where the individual directly benefiting from the service is also the one funding it.  Heck, it might be the only example of such a thing.

To have the rich pay for the payroll tax cut is to ask them to directly fund the retirements of the rest of the population, in a direct and transparent manner.  The ‘99%’ are demanding that the ‘1%’ pay for a service that only the ‘99%’ will benefit from, without themselves contributing a dime.  There is no ‘public’ benefit; the ‘special interest’ group just turns out to be exceptionally large.

This is stealing.

Stealing is wrong.

Therefore, this is wrong.

The real kick in the pants here is that while the ‘poor’ and ‘middle class’ are getting behind the highway robbery of their ‘richer’ countrymen, they are actually robbing their future selves.  Since the amount of your contribution is correlated with how much you receive in your retirement account, by continuing to not pay the payroll tax, you are decreasing the amount you will ultimately receive. Read the rest of this entry »

[This is adapted from a much longer essay by Laigle's contributor Anthony Horvath, which can be read here. Anthony is a pro-life speaker and the president of Wisconsin Lutherans for Life.]

Former Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson has set the pro-life blogosphere on fire with her posting of the ‘Jaffe Memo,’ a memorandum written by Frederick S. Jaffe, former vice-president of Planned Parenthood.  Jaffe apparently was in charge of PP’s population control agenda.  The memo was written in 1969.

The memo appears to be legit but I haven’t been able to find its original source.  Read it.

This memo has all sorts of blood chilling suggestions- blood chilling if the culture of death does not run through your veins, that is.  Ideas on controlling world population include:

• Fertility control agents in the water supply
• Encourage women to work
• Require women to work and provide few child care facilities
• Compulsory abortion of out-of-wedlock pregnancies
• Compulsory sterilization of all who have two children- except for a few who would be allowed three
• Discouragement of private home ownership
• Allow certain contraceptives to be distributed non-medically
• Make contraception truly available to all

Some of my more predictable readers will go through that list and their eyes will simply glaze over for most of it.  With their eyes in a fog as they instinctively declare the above as merely an instance of “Godwin’s Law” but their blood started boiling when they saw on the list “Encourage women to work.”

Dear God, who could be against that? And who could be against making contraception available to everyone?  Clearly, this blogger is a bigot.

I included that item in order to make a very important point. Read the rest of this entry »

Most Americans are puzzled and, of these, most are angry that Tim Geithner and Obama keep forking over our cash to a failing Europe via the IMF.

In fact, these politicians are some of the few who realize that the US Left actually triggered the world economic crash and therefore, in a sense, owes Europe and everyone else an apology at the very least.

It is interesting that even the most conservative authors, writing on the economy, rightfully blame the banks, the Fed and the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall for the economic crash, but most of them fail to look back at the prime cause, the bleeding heart giveaway policies of the CRA (Community Reinvestment Act). True, these other factors were absolutely key and no one is denying that. But without the CRA, it would not have happened, at least not in the same way.

“Most people do not realize this, but derivatives were at the center of the financial crisis of 2008,” states an article at theeconomiccollapseblog.com.

Nothing wrong with that statement. (This blog is in fact one of the best sources available on the progress of the West’s current economic suicide attempt.)

Indeed, neither party noticed the enormous destructive power of these instruments back when the market was bearish.

But let’s be more specific. In the case of the current crisis, it was not just any old derivatives that caused the initial tremor in the markets. It was mostly a derivative known as MBSs, or mortgage backed securities, that got the avalanche rolling. And the repeal of Glass-Steagall (which had denied banks the right to act as both investment houses and banks) was the enabler.

However, we need to look back further to find the root cause. To recap for those who have forgotten: Back in the 70s Carter, always the bleeding heart and skeptic of the free market, decided banks were deliberately refusing to service blacks, Hispanics, etc, on the basis of race. That assumption was in itself unproven at best and maliciously phony at worst. Nonetheless, the CRA (Community Reinvestment Act) became the law of the land in 1977. No one tried to seriously enforce this law until Clinton became president because Republicans used to know that forcing banks to lend to the insolvent would inevitably lead to ruin. Ironically, by the founding of the Clinton Dynasty, businesses were even more conscientious than before about eliminating racial considerations from their lending practices. A well-off black men could secure a loan just as easily — if not more easily (thanks to affirmative discrimination) — than a white man.

But Clinton had declared himself the “first black president” and he had to live up to his absurd title. So his HUD secretary Henry Cisneros, with equal absurdity, started to put teeth into the law that had, mercifully, lay fallow in the intervening years:

Here is what the CATO Institute says:

In 1992, HUD was given regulatory authority over these government-sponsored enterprises, and it began pushing the two firms into the subprime lending business.

The ensuing horrors we see all around us could perhaps have been mitigated, or even averted, had GW Bush not tried so hard to be a “compassionate conservative” (code for socialist in sheep’s clothing). In fairness, Bush had initially warned against these policies, but by January 2004, his HUD web site was trumpeting:

“Offering FHA mortgages with no down payment will unlock the door to homeownership for hundreds of thousands of American families, particularly minorities,” said HUD’s Acting Secretary Alphonso Jackson. “President Bush has pledged to create 5.5 million new minority homeowners this decade, and this historic initiative will help meet this goal.”

It was the serious enforcement of a less-than-serious law, coupled with the repeal of another law that would have prevented the securitization and sale of mortgages that indirectly led to a debacle that has engulfed the entire world and has led to a situation in which derivatives with an estimated notional value of $1.4 quadrillion have flooded the world market – a value of about 23 times world GDP. Not only the issuance of MBSs, but the practice of creating and selling these potentially lethal instruments, is what threatens every inhabitant of our globe.

So keep this in mind: without the repeal of Glass-Steagall and without the “compassionate conservatism” and outright socialism of our past governments, you and your friends would have reasonable job security and/or a job.

Good reasons to avoid voting for a RINO or a Democrat next year.

And now they’re coming for you

Don Hank

Matt. 25:45 Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.

A few weeks ago, PayPal cut off service to Julio Severo because Julio says on his blog that he agrees with the New Testament on homosexual behavior. They did this at the behest of a homosexual activist group.

Effectively, PayPal, as the only service of its kind, unilaterally decided to try and ban Julio’s blog, which has played a key role in stopping utterly totalitarian-style legislation in Brazil that would have banned speech perceived as offensive to homosexuals. Since PayPal is effectively a monopoly, they have threatened Julio’s livelihood in objection to his faith, which they want to see banned everywhere in the world.

PayPal is therefore what I call a NGE, or Non-Governmental Enforcer, of an unconstitutional speech code, circumventing the law by using methods that would be politically impossible for government to use.
And yet you will note that government has been glaringly silent and will do nothing to help Julio barring a lawsuit. And it is far from clear whether our leftist-packed judiciary will do anything to intervene on behalf of freedom of speech.

Now, not much fuss was made over Julio’s plight outside Christian activist circles, apparently because religious freedom is now being supplanted in Western minds by sexual freedom, a favorite platform of libertarians.

Yet, I have tried to warn that when you allow government (or its proxy) to tell Christians they may not speak out against what they perceive as evil, the totalitarian system will soon direct its fury against you, in what could be called the “Niemöller effect,” even if the government per se is not directly involved in this assault. Because you see, the far left (as exemplified by the Fabian Society, which has lost no time in stealthily removing your freedom since the 1880s) has always used stealth tactics to enforce laws, even laws not yet on the books. They believe they are on the side of History, and I write that with a cap because for them history is God.

Now, the West has gradually accepted the mindset that religion is nothing but a throwback and has no place in public life. In fact, they portray Christianity as a sinister system designed to enslave people. Yet when large corporations in league with corrupt government (crony capitalism) overtly take steps to eradicate Christian speech in public, then those liberty-minded individuals who generally ignore the plight of Christians, also considering us to be knuckle dragging Neanderthals, are unwittingly cutting their own throats, because if groups of bullies can tell Christians to shut up with impunity, then they can tell you to shut up as well. It is only a matter of time.

A few scant weeks have passed since PayPal censored Christian blogger Julio Severo and now, those who sat silently by are seeing the censors moving into their own territory. For libertarians generally believe that any censorship is bad and cuts into liberty. Yet, as suggested above, they foolishly look away when Christians are censored, particularly Christians who flout the Ruling Class purportedly on the “side of history.” What they fail to see is that the censorship of Christian speech is a harbinger of much bigger things to come. Because the Ruling Class despises Judeo-Christian values (as exemplified by their behavior in Europe where they import Christian-hating Muslims by the millions, and in the Muslim World, where each war they engage in invariably has the outcome of Christian persecution and decimation of the indigenous Christian populations).

This lack of compassion for Christian speech on the part of the “freedom minded,” including numerous nominal Christians, is a classic example of the “Niemöller Syndrome” as expressed in the famous statement by Christian leader Martin Niemöller:

“When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.”

And then he goes on to say they came for the social democrats, and then the trade unionists, the Jews and so on and he said nothing each time and then finally:
“When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.”

We are at that point now, my friend. You didn’t speak out for Julio because you bought into the left’s propaganda that only homosexuals can be victims, never Christians. The far left in league with the New World Order taught you that Christianity is the enemy of freedom and compassion, when in fact it represents the only real freedom and compassion one can ever hope to have.

Now we are here:

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2011/10/25/248252/Wikileaks-turns-to-fundraising-as-US-finance-companies-cut-off.htm

He [Assange] claims that since Wikileaks began publishing thousands of secret US government files and diplomatic cables online, an “arbitrary and unlawful financial blockade” has been imposed by Bank of America, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union.

Each and every one of those corporations are nothing more nor less than partners in an unholy alliance with the most radical political apparatus we have ever seen in America. Along with many others, I had said many times before that there is no longer free market capitalism in America.

But loss of economic freedom is never alone. Loss of religious freedom and loss of political freedom are never far behind.

We are now officially in that latter phase when the right to freedom of speech has been abridged and soon will be completely abolished unless you and I have a change of heart.

Did Assange complain when Julio Severo was cruelly denied a living for his family, including 4 children?

I didn’t hear his protests.

And I didn’t hear yours either when WorldNetDaily alerted you to this outrage.

So don’t protest when they muzzle you and take away your voice and your vote.

Welcome to Gulag America, a prison of your own making, through your silent complicity.

Relevant:

http://laiglesforum.com/will-you-help-this-borther/2693.htm

http://laiglesforum.com/did-paypal-aid-and-abett-child-porn-sellers/2721.htm

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=346825