Shoulder to Shoulder with Our Friend Israel

Since modern Israel's birth as a nation in 1948, the United States has been Israel's best and sometimes only friend. But in return, Israel has been our only true friend in the Middle East. As a result, we have promised to stand shoulder to shoulder with them and defend them. That is why, as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas rejected direct negotiations and showed up last week at the U.N. to demand that the United Nations vote to recognize Palestinian statehood, the United States had to say, "NO!"

Not that anyone objects to a Palestinian state. Even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, "If we have their recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and the security requirements, there's no reason that" we not recognize a Palestinian state.

But that's just the point. According to Netanyahu, "They're trying to set up a state to continue the conflict with Israel rather than to end it." Indeed, the stated goal of the Palestinian Authority is to drive Israel into the sea. This little country of Israel, occupying an area about the size of Rhode Island, has seen some 12,000 rocket attacks by their neighbors. Israeli children live in constant fear of suicide bombers targeting their school buses. And if they retaliate, they are called the aggressors by the world. The prophet Jeremiah said it well in Jeremiah 6:14, "Peace,peace, when there is no peace." Until there is, we must stand with Israel.

Why should we stand with Israel? We share a common heritage. Jesus Christ was a Jew. The prophets were Jews, as was Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon, etc. The apostles were all Jews. It was through the Jews that we got our Bible. It was on the Law of Moses that we based our laws. Our Judeo-Christian heritage shaped our morals. We are what we are because of the Jews.

We share common ideals. Israel is the only true democracy in the Middle East. In the past few decades, Israel changed leadership at least a dozen times through peacefully contested elections. As we watch the Arab spring unfold, we see that changing leadership in the rest of the Middle East is a matter of bloodletting and people are kept under the iron fist of Sharia Law and women live in subjugation.

Yet, the United States and Israel both respect individual freedom and honor the rights of the individual. We tolerate dissent, and we practice religious freedom. Pat Robertson writes,

"Of course we, like all right thinking people, support Israel because Israel is an island of democracy, an island of individual freedom, an island of the rule of law, an island of modernity in a sea of dictatorial regimes, the suppression of individual liberty, and fanatical religion intent on returning to the feudalism of eighth century Arabia."

We share a common enemy. On September 11th, as we were in shock and horror watching the images on TV of planes crashing into the twin towers, we also saw images on TV of people throughout the Middle East dancing in the street in celebration. But not in Israel. In Israel, the Jewish people cried with us. They flew their flag at half mast. Quoting Gary Bauer, "They shared our grief." Then he adds, "On September 11th, many Americans came to understand what it is like to be an Israeli and to face barbaric terrorism that targets innocent civilians."

The great conflict of our time is between the west and radical Islam. Israel is the front line ally in the war. Israel is surrounded on all sides by Muslim nations and daily faces Muslim terror. Bauer writes,

"It is the same philosophy that motivates the government of Sudan to kill 5 million Christians in the last decade. It inspires the gunmen with AK47's who run into churches in Pakistan and open fire on women and children. It inspires the kidnappers of Daniel Pearl who tormented him on video tape, forcing him to say over and over again, 'I am a Jew,' before they decapitated him and sent pictures of his severed head throughout the Middle East as a recruiting tool. This philosophy causes the Palestinian mother to leap for joy at the news her teenage son has blown himself up as long as it assured that he killed Jews in the process."

That philosophy targets both the "Little Satan" Israel and the "Big Satan" United States for destruction.

Finally, we share a common blessing. From the day when God first made His irrevocable covenant with Abraham giving him the land of Israel, God included all who bless Israel in His blessing. In Genesis 12:3, we read God's promise, "I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you." God restored Israel to the land of promise. God will preserve them. But if we expect to continue receiving the blessings of God, we must continue to stand with Israel.

History bears this out. Egypt prospered as long as their Pharaoh blessed the Jews through Joseph. When they refused, their armies were drowned in the Red Sea.
Spain thrived and ruled the world until the Spanish Inquisition expelled the Jews from the land. Hitler was well on his way to building his thousand year Third Reich, but he ended as a suicide in a lonely bunker.

Quoting John Hagee,

"Where are the Babylonians? Where are the Romans? Where are the Greeks? Where are the Persians? Where is the Ottoman Empire? Where is that lunatic Adolph Hitler and his Nazi hordes? They are historical footnotes in the bone-yard of human history. Where is Israel? Where are the Jewish people? They are alive and well in the only democratic society in the Middle East. The Jewish people have survived pogroms and persecution. They have outlasted Pharaoh's slavery and Hitler's final solution. They are living testimony that there is a God in heaven who keeps His word."

Amen!

As I close, let me leave you with a question asked by Tom DeLay,

"We need to ask ourselves: Do we want the Middle East to look more like Israel, or do we want Israel to look more like the rest of the Middle East? In a lands largely barren of freedom, we must preserve the lone fountain of freedom."

Yes! We must stand shoulder to shoulder with our friend Israel.

Is Rick Perry a Knuckle Dragger?

In my last article, I looked at Rick Perry's big problem with the secular media - he takes his Christian faith too seriously. In this article, I look at why the media considers him deficient in natural intelligence. It goes way beyond being dumber than George W. Bush because Perry attended Texas A&M while Bush attended Yale. Perry is dumb, according to the media, because he believes in creation - proof enough that he is a knuckle dragging Neanderthal right out of the backwoods.

The media had a "gotcha" moment when Perry expressed doubts about evolution to a young boy, and it was caught on tape. He had the nerve to call evolution a "theory," not a fact, and he claimed there were "gaps" in it. Now, mind you, Perry isn't a young earth Biblical creationist as I am, but he does believe God had a hand in shaping this earth. That was enough to cause the famous atheist, Richard Dawkins, to call Perry an "uneducated fool."

Michele Bachmann received that same kind of treatment because she supported a Louisiana law allowing teachers to introduce supplemental textbooks to help students critique and review the scientific theory of evolution. No! Critiquing evolution is off limits, we are told. And how could she support such a thing? But isn't that what scientists are supposed to do?

That kind of intimidation has caused many in the church to dig a hole and crawl in. Or it has caused them to abandon their faith in the Bible as they try to reconcile the Bible to the most recent scientific theory. Shame on them.

Dr. Karl Giberson, a Nazarene author and theistic evolutionist, is an example of a "Christian" who drank the cool aid. In his HuffPost rebuttal to Bachmann, he as much as said scientists are not to be questioned. In other words, have blind faith in evolution or be a heretic. Giberson further stated that it is "disastrous" to allow high school students in Louisiana or elsewhere to critically analyze evolution. Really?

Isn't that what scientists are supposed to do - question and test their theories? Apparently not any more, at least not with evolution. We must meekly accept what we are told by these high priests of the religion called science. Funny, isn't it, that while scientists restrict inquiry, the Bible calls for it. First Thessalonians 5:21 says, "Test all things, hold fast to what is good."

There's a good reason the evolution "cult" refuses to tolerate argument. They can't win - the evidence is stacked against them. Their theory is a house of cards. Even Charles Darwin knew this. Recognizing that the fossil record showed no evidence for his theory, he faulted the "extreme imperfection of the geological record." The fossil record should contain vast numbers of intermediate species (missing links) if this theory of slow change over time were true. What we do find in the fossil record is vast numbers of species appearing complete and fully formed, but we find no intermediaries.

Darwin's excuse was that paleontologists would eventually find the intermediaries in abundance, and he encouraged them to get looking. But they never found any. According to David Raup, geologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, since the time of Darwin, "the situation hasn't changed much." Of course not. The evidence for evolution would have been found, if it were true. But there's no evidence for this false theory.

There are no transitional fossils showing animals in the process of evolution - NONE! ZIP! ZERO! This is why the late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard, the nation's preeminent evolutionist, called the absence of transitional fossils the "trade secret" of paleontology. Indeed, it wasn't the theologians who first opposed Darwin, it was the paleontologists.

I was once a fervent evolutionist myself, totally indoctrinated by the educational system. I majored in zoology as an undergraduate and did post graduate work in the sciences. But it took a bright young girl, whom I later married, and her common sense questions to get me to think critically.

What I discovered from the evidence totally convinced me - evolution is a sham, a farce, a fraud built on theories totally misrepresenting the data. There is no way that the intricacies of even a simple single cell, or even part of a single cell, could ever have happened by chance no matter how many billions of years you give it to try. Even Antony Flew, the most prominent atheist apologist of all, announced that DNA research showed "almost unbelievable complexity," convincing him that "intelligence must have been involved." That intelligence was God. No thinking person could believe otherwise. The awesome design of life must have had a designer.

I became frustrated and angry at the hoaxes and frauds perpetuated as fact and taught in our schools, many of which are still in our children's textbooks - things like "embryology recapitulates phylogeny," or the horse evolution charts, or moths changing color from light to dark because of the amount of soot in the air in England, the Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man, and Java Man. All hoaxes. Who can believe liars and frauds to present the unvarnished truth? Rather, evolutionists are religious fanatics that will go to any extreme to explain their existence apart from God. They might have to admit their accountability to God if they did. Blind chance and billio0ns of years is the only answer they can come up, as totally impossible as that is.

The only answer that makes sense is the one presented in the first verse of the Bible, Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." I take my stand on the Word of the One who was there and gave us his eyewitness account - God.

So, no, it is not the closed minded scientist who have it right. Rick Perry makes immensely more sense by questioning evolution than they do with their blind faith. It won't hurt Perry or Bachmann with the Republican voters either. A Gallup poll showed that "just 8% of Republicans . . . said they believed in evolution without any other intervention." Most Americans can see through this theory of evolution.

Now certainly these articles have not meant to be an endorsement of Rick Perry's candidacy, but a way to point out the folly of the media that have attacked him and the other Christians running for public office. I hope you will see the foolishness of their attacks. If you too want to be opened minded and take a critical look at the evidence, I would recommend checking out the Answers in Genesis website at www.answersingenesis.org or the Institue for Creation Research web site at www.icr.org.

Rick Perry's Problem - He's a Christian!

First, let me set the record straight. I'm not the one who said that. Rather, it is the recurring theme the media continues to publish as they attack Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, and even Sarah Palin. These politicians take their Christian faith too seriously. How horrid, say the pundits.

An example would be the editorial by Dana Milbank in the Bangor Daily News this past week. Milbank made the direct accusation,

"Rick Perry is a theocrat. By his own account, he is a cultural warrior, seeking to save marriage, Christmas, and the Boy Scouts from liberals, gay people, and moral relativism."

That's supposed to be a bad thing? It is if you are a Dana Milbank, who goes on to chronicle Rick Perry's own statements of his Christian faith - statements, by the way, that I find refreshing - as proof that Perry is unfit to be President.

But this is just one example of the multitude of attacks on people of faith who dare enter public life. Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, argues it is time to stop being "squeamish" about "aggressively" digging into politician's religious convictions. He urges reporters to "get over" any "scruples" about the "privacy of faith in public life." That's why he can worry that Perry and Bachmann are "afflicted with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity."

That kind of rabid, anti-Christian rhetoric is heard from coast to coast in the media. Collins English Dictionary defines a bigot as "a person who is intolerant of any ideas other his or her own, especially on religion, politics, or race." And they have the nerve to call us bigots after these kinds of diatribes?

Commenting on people like Keller, Jeff Jacoby writes,

"When they see Christian conservatives on the campaign trail, they envision inquisitions and witch hunts and the suppression of liberty. They dread the prospect of a President respecting 'any higher authority than the Constitution,' and regard ardent religious faith as the equivalent of space aliens."

But God and His Word is higher than our Constitution.

Oh, religion is OK with them if you don't take it too seriously or let it affect your life. President Obama claims to be a Christian, and that's perfectly OK; yet, he hardly ever attends church. He favors the destruction of unborn babies in the womb. He refuses to defend DOMA. He forgets Easter proclamations, but never forgets a Ramadan proclamation. He mocks Biblical passages and seldom quotes the Bible, but quotes instead from the "holy Qur'am."

In a 2008 interview with George Stephanopolos, candidate Obama spoke passionately about his Muslim faith. After a few moments, Stephanopolos corrected him, "Your Christian faith." Just a mistake, right? Just a slip of the tongue? How many other "Christians" would make that kind of a silly error. But Obama's kind of faith is OK.

And we aren't supposed to be concerned that Obama sat for twenty years under the teaching of rabid anti-Semite and racist Rev. Jeremiah wright and his hate filed "G__D__ America" rants. Shouldn't that be a concern to us? No. After all, Obama wasn't paying attention.

As David Limbaugh writes,

"Bill Keller's concern isn't with the religious beliefs of all candidates, only Christians; and not all Christians, only those who take the Bible seriously. He doesn't seem to have a problem with the religious beliefs of non-Christians or about the charlatans who opportunistically pass themselves off as Christians. Wouldn't an objective reporter have as much interest in someone fraudulently proclaiming a certain faith as he does in one who sincerely professes a faith he finds repugnant?"

So, it is perfectly legitimate, Keller thinks, to ask Michele Bachmann about her following the Biblical mandate of submission to her husband as found in Ephesians 5:22, or to ask them about their belief in Creation over evolution as they asked Perry, all so they can gloat over their back woods answers.

The goal, of course, is to get them to back down and slink away in shame. And so many of the "Christian-in-name-only" types do just that. Ah, but Christians who truly believe, what can you do with them? You have to discredit them as mind dead hicks from the sticks.

Since when did being a genuine Christian become a disqualification for public office? What they don't understand is that our founding fathers, most of whom took their Christian faith very seriously, were champions of individual rights. But they based those rights in the context of moral responsibility. George Washington in his farewell address stated,

"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports."

I guess Washington would be as unacceptable now as a Perry, Bachmann, or a Palin are. In the early days of this country, faith in God was necessary to get elected. Now, according to Bill Murchison,

"It's kind of fascinating, in a carnivalesque sort of way, the notion of religion as a force alien and dangerous to the American polity, hence to be regarded as fear."

The truth is, according to David Limbaugh, "Liberty has no greater ally than believing Christians of all stripes." Certainly, there would be no liberty under Sharia law. Limbaugh says,

"Ironically, it is the left who are far likelier to use the power of government to selectively suppress political and religious liberties."

Yes, we Christians are narrow minded. Yes, we Christians do think we have the truth. But that is only bad if we don't. Let me give you an illustration. When I go out at night when I am camping, I take my flashlight. As I shine the light, the beam spreads out and diffuses as it goes out along the path, getting weaker and weaker the further from the source. But the closer to the source, the narrower and more intense the beam becomes. Likewise, the closer one gets to the truth, the less room there is for deviation and the more narrow minded one becomes. Truth is very narrow, while error is broad and diffuse. Give me a genuine Christian candidate any time who believe in absolute truth.

But let them realize they will pay the price for their belief. Jesus told us in John 15:20,

"Remember the word that I said to you. 'A servant is not greater than his master.' If they persecuted Me, they will persecute you. If they kept My word, they will keep yours."

It is not you they hate, but the truth and the one who spoke that truth.

Let me close with this challenge from Perry Himself,

"We are close to a tipping point in American society, If we believe there is right and wrong, that there are acceptable standards of behavior . . . then you have a stake in this war. If the attackers win many more victories . . . the culture war may be lost before we kinow it. If that happens, we will find ourselves living isn a world where moral relativism reigns and individualism runs amok. Now is the time to enlist in this effort to stand up and be counted."

Amen!

The Case of the Missing Girls, and Joe Biden's Bungles

There is an amazing phenomena happening worldwide. There is a shortage of girls. According to a Fox News article by Debra Saunders,

"In China, the sex ratio is 121 boys to 100 girls. In India, it is 112 to 100. Sex selection is a force in the Balkans, Armenia, and Georgia."

How can this be happening? It happens through selective abortions.

In her book, Unnatural Selections: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, journalist Mara Hvistendahl writes that ultrasound has allowed women to determine which child should be kept and which to abort. The result? She writes, abortion has "claimed over 160 million potential women and girls - in Asia alone." By the way, that is more than the entire population of females in the USA.

Recently, a mother told me her daughter couldn't find a decent, godly man to marry, claiming there weren't enough out there. But apparently worldwide it is the other way around, and it is the men who can't find wives. One would think it would make girls more valuable, and it does, but not in the way one might think. Saunders remarked,

"As surplus men have trouble finding mates, young girls are forced into prostitution. Others are forced into arranged marriages."

Hvistendahl writes that on Taiwan's eBay three Vietnamese women were on sale for $5,400.

But I thought abortion was a good thing for women? Isn't that what we've always been told? It looks like we've been sold a bill of goods. The truth is the feminist agenda has always done more damage to women than it has ever helped them, and abortion is one of the biggest culprits. Abortion has backfired on women.

Which brings us to Joe Biden, our less than eloquent vice-president, and his remarks concerning China's one child per family policy. On Sunday, August 21st, at the Sichuan University in Chengdu, Biden told his Chinese audience,

"Your policy has been one which I fully understand - I'm not second guessing - of one child per family."

He understands? Our own State Department in their latest human rights report has affirmed that China's one child policy "in some cases resulted in forced abortion or forced sterilization." The report also said,

"Female infanticide, sex-selective abortions, and the abandonment and neglect of baby girls remained problems due to the traditional preference for sons and the coercive birth control policies."

Didn't Joe Biden know that?

The London Sunday Times reported the trauma of Zhang Linla, the mother of a four year old daughter, who happened to get pregnant again. The paper quoted her account as follows:

"Six days before the due date, 10 strong strangers came to my house, forced me into a truck, then took me to the family planning clinic, where the doctor gave me the injection (a drug to induce labor). The child began to struggle in my womb and one of the scum kicked me in the abdomen. Then the baby came out and they threw it in the rubbish bin. I could even see it was still moving."

Didn't Biden know that over and over that kind of barbarism is repeated on woman after woman - on baby after baby? Even as a U.S. Senator, rather than vote present as he usually did, Barack Obama voted against a law that would have given protection to U.S. babies born alive from botched abortions. Obviously Obama would approve of China's policy too.

But wasn't the whole abortion issue about choice? No! It never was. Just take a few minutes some time to read the words or Margaret Sanger. She was the founder of Planned Parenthood and a prominent abortion advocate. On blacks and immigrants, she wrote, ". . . human weeds, reckless breeders, spewing . . . human beings who never should have been born." In her plan for peace, she argued that couples should be required to submit applications before being allowed to have a child. She wrote that the purpose of birth control was "to create a race of thoroughbreds." She wrote, "Eugenics is the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political, and social problems." Page after page the quotes could could go on and on. Adolf Hitler was a big follower of her ideas, with predictable results.

Thank you, Joe Biden, for showing us the true color of abortion advocates like you. Abortion has nothing to do with choice. It has everything to do with getting rid of unwanted human beings. It is a population control device first and foremost. And the ones who suffer most are the women.

God's Job Approval Rating

The glaring headline on Fox News is that President Obama's job approval rating hit the lowest level ever. Only 39% of those polled believe he is doing a good job. But what else I saw recently was a little more astonishing.

The same folks who brought us the Obama job approval rating decided to take the same poll for God. They felt it wouldn't be fair to God to take into account the answers of the atheists. They don't believe in God anyway. Nor did they take into account the answers of the agnostics who admit they don't have a clue. So they only tabulated the answers from those who who claim to believe that God exists.

What were the results? Fewer that 50% felt God was doing a good job. The most common reason listed for His bad grade was the abundance of terrible tragedies that take place - tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, plane crashes, terrorist attacks, murders, rapes, robberies, etc. People felt that either God could have prevented them and didn't, meaning He didn't care; or that God was incapable of doing anything about it, meaning He isn't up to the job.

Politicians live or die based on their job approval ratings, and I'm sure our President is pretty nervous about his. But I doubt that God is up in heaven wringing His hands over this. Yet, the reasons given by people need to be explained. The truth is the ratings show a complete lack of understanding about the way the world operates.

The truth is it isn't God's fault the world is messed up. It is ours. Starting with Adam and Eve, we've lived in rebellion against God and His rules. We've ignored The warnings of God. Then we complain when we get the outcome.

Adam started it off. Adam disobeyed the one and only restriction God placed on him in paradise by eating the forbidden fruit, and he suffered the promised punishment. He died - spiritually at first and eventually physically.

Beyond that, this entire world was cursed. Genesis 3:17-19 gave the details as God addressed Adam,

"Cursed is the ground for your sake; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken, for dust you are, and to dust you shall return."

We bear the burden of living in this cursed world - a world cursed because of man's sin.

Throughout history, men knew their sinfulness, and they knew who to blame for the curse. The Puritans used to say, "Life is brutish and short, and then you die." But they never lost their faith because of it. Why? Because their pulpits thundered against sin. They never thought to blame God when they were so obviously sinful. They were simply grateful for the opportunity to repent and receive forgiveness.

Now it seems like lots of God's spokesmen are embarrassed by the God of the Bible and by the Bible itself. They have eradicated any mention of sin, judgment, punishment, or hell. Rather God is presented as a jovial Santa Claus like figure who doles out goodies and winks at our failings.

Bob Burney wrote that these pastors have done to God what they used to do to criminals and mentally ill patients in the 40s and 50s. They lobotomized God to make His behavior acceptable to society (A lobotomy being a surgery to remove part of the brain to alter behavior). He writes,

"His holiness makes us uncomfortable. His justice seems a little harsh. His righteousness seems totally out of touch with our culture as a whole. So what do we do with a God who makes us feel uncomfortable and inferior? It's easy. We perform a lobotomy. We simply perform an operation to remove the offending attributes."

Jeromy Johnson tells why:

"Cause if God behaves and thinks like that, that is not a God worthy of my - nor anyone else's worship or even respect. This god would be deemed as evil, hating, unjust, and demented."

Really? And this from His so-called spokesmen?

So instead of preaching the God of the Bible, we hear of a kinder and gentler God. Quoting Burney,

"It's not hard to find this gentler, kinder God. Turn on the TV or radio and you're likely to hear from Rev. Johnny Glitter-teeth smiling broadly and telling the congregation that God only wants to do good things for them. Think happy thoughts and God will give you all you want whenever you want it. You will hear wonderful platitudes like 'Turn your scars into stars' and other wonderful possibilities."

No wonder people blame God when it doesn't come true. They have been offered a false god, not the God of the Bible. The God who allows tragedies doesn't fit that modern template.

What you won't hear from their pulpits are the words of Scripture, words like these from Hebrews 10:28-31,

"Anyone who has rejected Moses' Law dies without mercy on the testimonies of two or three witnesses. Of how much worse punishment do you suppose will he be thought worthy who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, counted the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified a common thing, and insulted the Spirit of grace? It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God."

But no one is warned about that from most pulpits.

Rather than be surprised by tragedy, pain, or suffering, we should wonder why any of us are ever spared. Yet we are. Praise God that He sent His Son to die on the cross to bear the penalty of our sins.

But as to the job rating of God, the blame should never be laid at the feet of God. Rather, it should be laid at the feet of the church, and more specifically the pulpits. Jesus said in Matthew 5:13, "You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned?"

Salt was the preserving agent that was rubbed into meat to keep bacteria from growing. Symbolically, the salt is the church (the individual believers making up the church) rubbed into the world, permeating it and providing a preserving influence on society by teaching and modeling Biblical truth. If our world has gone rotten to the core, who is to blame? Is it the meat's fault of the salt? Obviously, the church has lost her saltiness.

Chuck Baldwin wrote.

"There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the biggest reason America is in the mess that it is in today is directly due to the apathy and indifference of the American pulpit."

Isn't it time the American pulpits thundered again?

Cheating Scandals - No Longer Confined to Students

Cheating is probably as old as tests. Considering the sin nature that dwells within each of us, it's not surprising it pops up from time to time. But usually cheating is done by the students, not the teachers and the administrators. That is why the cheating scandal that enveloped the Atlanta Public Schools is so shocking to us.

Now the scandal has reached Maine. On Saturday, August 6th, the Bangor Daily News ran a front page article on a Newport teacher who resigned after a state probe into cheating on standardized tests. The resigning teacher is alleged to have reviewed MEA Science Test answers with his students before the test, which in turn allowed the students to score better. This is only the latest shocker.

The widespread scandal on standardized tests from the Atlanta Public Schools (and Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia, Washington, and other cities) shows the failure of the system. Rather than simply teach the test, these educators changed answers to cover up their academic failure. Cheating took place in 44 of the 56 schools examined in Atlanta. Apparently some 178 educators, including 38 principals, were involved. What incredible widespread corruption. It's understandable that families would flee from that kind of system.

What was to blame for this scandal? Why, the standards, of course. That's what we were told. It put undue pressure on the schools to perform better. It was, "No Child Left Behind," which tied federal subsidies to performance. This is the reason given by Diane Ravitch, research professor of education at New York University.

Seems to me this is the same reason kids give for cheating. The test is too hard. It must be too hard to teach competency in reading, writing, math, science, and history. So rather than work to improve performance of the students, many of the educators cheated to raise test scores.

If we looked at performance, indeed the standards do seem too high, until one examines the facts. Education Secretary Anne Duncan states that by next year as many as 82% of all public schools could be failing. She writes,

"When a child is meeting the state standards, they are in fact barely able to graduate from high school. And they are absolutely inadequately prepared to go to a competitive university, let alone graduate."

Apparently the standards aren't really that high. Yet, turning out an educated student is too much to expect. That's why some educators had to cheat.

As I've written before, the focus of public education is wrong. Our President's friend Bill Ayers, Weather Underground founder and former professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was an influential thinker formulating the modern philosophy of education. Mr. Ayers has written that subject mastery isn't necessary for teaching. In other words, your child's math teacher doesn't have to know math. Rather, Ayers and his cohorts who have hijacked education advocate that teacher colleges train teachers to engage in "social justice," and even teach subjects like math and science in the context of social consciousness. Little Johnny can't read, but he can learn to be a leftist activist.

Quoting Marybeth Hicks,

"When teachers don't view their role as imparting information, knowledge, and skills, but rather as preparing students to be 'agents of social change' through 'critical; thinking,' it's no wonder that the kids aren't capable of passing standardized tests."

She concludes,

"It must be said: we aren't training our teachers to do the job we say we want done in our classrooms."

What is the answer? Parents need to reclaim their right to determine the education of their children, not bureaucrats. Part of the answer has to be competition. Charter Schools are a start, but just a start. Give parents vouchers that they can use in whatever way they deem best to educate their children - public, charter, private, Christian, or home school. It should be a parent's choice where the money is spent to educate their child. Unfortunately, this is the one answer that the educational establishment resists with a passion.

Why We Home School

Every parent has the right and responsibility to determine the education of their children. I don't intend to denigrate anyone else's decision, but my children are among the 2 million k-12 home school students in this country (the figure is provided by the National Home Education research Institute). We would not consider any other method of educating our children because it works.

A recent poll showed that more and more parents are leaving public education, fleeing a system that undermines their values yet fails to educate. That's understandable. In spite of well meaning educators, the system itself is the problem.

We have a system that crams up to thirty kids in one room and treats them as if they were all the same. It doesn't recognize that boys and girls are different, and doesn't accommodate the difference. These children spend most of their waking hours for five days a week within four walls where every aspect of their day is programmed. Students are expected to do and learn the same things and at the same pace. It's a place where dreamers like Thomas Edison, who was labeled addled by the school he attended, don't fit. Anthony Esolen has called the schools human warehouses where any act of imagination is dangerous.

No wonder they turn out bland uniformity. Like at McDonalds, anywhere you go in this country, every Big Mac is the same. Shopping malls all look the same. The same brands are in every grocery store. And we mass produce mediocre students. Now there is a push for a nationwide standardized curriculum to assure even more uniformity. but children are not all the same. That's why for many of us, we home school out of a simple desire for a better education for our children.

This desires includes wanting my children to be good citizens. The National Assessment of Educational Progress reported a couple of weeks ago that only one in four high school seniors scored at least "proficient" in knowledge of U.
S. citizenship. History is just as bad, and the older the student the worse the results. It showed 20% of sixth graders, but only 12% of high school seniors could demonstrate a grasp of our nation's history. That is scary to think about these kids getting old enough to vote. I want my children to know why our country is the greatest on earth.

I want my children to have a rigorous and broad liberal education. Bruce S. Thompson, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and professor of classics and humanities at Cal State, surveyed the educational offerings of colleges. His bleak conclusion,

"No longer do they provide students with a grounding in the best that has been said and thought, as (Mathew) Arnold put it. What they do provide is a poor substitute: vocational training and unexamined left-wing orthodoxy."

According to Thomas Sowell,

"Unfortunately, an increasing proportion of American education, whether in the schools or in the colleges and universities, is closer to the baton twirling end of the spectrum than toward the nuclear physics end. Even reputable colleges are increasingly teaching things that students should have learned in high school."

Sowell continues,

"Too many of the people coming out of even the most prestigious academic institutions graduate with neither the academic skills to be economically productive nor the intellectual development to make them discerning citizens and voters."

That's not good enough. We want better for our children.

What is an educated person? Robert Heinlein, the noted sci-fi author, defined it like this:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

I couldn't agree more. As home school parents, we try to give our kids a wide variety of experience. Our children have helped butcher pigs and chickens. They have written poetry. They have followed the Oregon Trail and explored Civil War battlefields. They have taken boards and nails and made elaborate tree houses. They have taken years of Latin. They have compared the Code of Hammurabi with the Law of Moses. They have read Eusebius and Plutarch's Lives - not snippets, but the whole books. They have practiced fencing with home-made swords. And they are thoroughly grounded in the Bible.

Someday, I want my children to be the leaders in their communities, not followers. I want them to be able to think and use their reservoir of learned knowledge, not follow blindly anywhere the so-called elites take them. And above all, I want them to be grounded in their faith. That is why we home school.