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Ken Starr Laments, Warns of Decline of Religion in Society

Former Whitewater independent counsel Ken Starr lamented the decline of the influence of religion in today’s society on Friday, suggesting the retreat of faith and how political leaders used COVID-19 to restrict it further was at least in part responsible for a diminished social and community life.

Appearing on Fox News on Friday to promote his book “Religious Liberty In Crisis: Exercising Your Faith in an Age of Uncertainty,” Starr referred to the first Congress, which adopted the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of the exercise of religion.

“We have huge problems,” Starr said. ”The founding generation had a benevolent view of the role of faith in American life.”

He continued by noting how the first U.S. Congress also passed the Northwest Ordinance to govern then-territories in Ohio and Indiana, which specifically encouraged religion.

“Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged,” Starr said.

”That was the law of the land but it also reflected the first two words, religion and morality, as well as education and knowledge, are necessary to human happiness. The country doesn’t seem to be particularly happy right now. Does that have something to do — I happen to think it does — with the decline in social life and community life and also frankly churches, synagogues losing membership in so many parts of the country?”

Starr also pointed out the outbreak of COVID-19 invited political leaders to quickly restrict religious worship, banning church services, some of which at least initially were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court — by the liberal bloc with Chief Justice John Roberts — in cases in California and Nevada.

The Nevada case drew stinging rebukes from Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh, who decried the denial of the fundamental liberty religious worship by the Court under the guise of public health, yet did not see a contradiction by allowing gambling casinos and liquor stores to remain open.

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‘I’m In!’: Caitlyn Jenner Announces Bid for California Governor

ormer Olympic athlete and television personality Caitlyn Jenner announced on Friday morning she is throwing her hat into the ring for the contentious California gubernatorial race, as Republicans look to recall incumbent Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA).

“California has been my home for nearly 50 years. I came here because I knew that anyone, regardless of their background or station in life, could turn their dreams into reality. But for the past decade, we have seen the glimmer of the Golden State reduced by one-party rule that places politics over progress and special interests over people. Sacramento needs an honest leader with a clear vision,” she said in a release, adding that “Californians want better and deserve better from their governor. For too long, career politicians have over-promised and under-delivered…This isn’t the California we know. This is Gavin Newsom’s California, where he orders us to stay home but goes out to dinner with his lobbyist friends.”

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Christians in West increasingly targets of ‘polite persecution’

Attacks ‘may not be as immediate or acute, but they can be culturally lethal’

Beneath the cloak of “progress,” an increasingly hostile secularism is threatening Christians in the West with a “polite persecution,” contends an annual report on religious freedom worldwide.

“If Christians in the Middle East need to fear the machete, Christians in the Western world need to fear the media, higher education, activist organizations and government,” says Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, in a commentary on the report. “They are the ones advocating, or imposing, a secular agenda on religious institutions.”

The 2021 report on Religious Freedom in the World is published by Aid to the Church in Need, an international Catholic pastoral aid organization headquartered in Germany.

The persecution of Christians takes two forms today, the report says. Everyone is familiar with the violence against people and property, but there is a more subtle form, Donahue said, “relying on restrictive measures encoded in public policy and law.”

The second form is called “polite persecution,” the ACN report explains, because it hides under a veneer of “enlightened” secularism.

Donohue says attacks of that kind against religious believers “may not be as immediate or acute, but they can be culturally lethal.”

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Courageous Mom Stands Up to School Board: “This has to stop, defend our children.”

Amazon Offers Whole Foods Customers an Easier Way to Pay, Just Hand Over Your Biometric Data

Amazon One, which lets you pay with your palm print, is about to get tested at a Whole Foods in Seattle

(Eater) Amazon is introducing a handy (sorry) new way to pay at some Whole Foods stores in Seattle. Amazon One allows customers to associate a credit card with their palm print, so all that’s required is swiping your hand so Amazon can verify your biometric data. And we’re sure Amazon, a historically good and chill company, isn’t planning on doing anything weird with that information!

As The Verge reported last year, Amazon One is really an “identity technology,” and the company absolutely has plans to expand the ways in which customers can use their palm print to do just about anything. They can do that by storing your palm print in the cloud, unlike with Apple’s Face ID, which stores the data in your phone. By putting it in the cloud, “you’re exposing it to hackers as well as potentially making it more accessible to interested third parties, like governments.” And also, unlike a password, you can never change your palm print if that information is compromised.

Amazon has already been using Amazon One technology at its Go and Books stores. It says the technology will launch at the Whole Foods near its Seattle headquarters today, and will be expanding in the Seattle area in the coming months. It will not, however, implement the cashier-less, “Just Walk Out” technology it employs at some of its other stores, as it says that would mean cutting jobs. Jobs where workers have had to protest unsafe working conditions and have repeatedly been denied the ability to unionize, but still jobs.

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Parents Organize to Push Back Against Critical Race Theory

A growing number of American parents are getting together to find ways to block the spread of the quasi-Marxist critical race theory (CRT) in schools where they send their children.

They see the doctrine as a culprit in creating a toxic environment and exacerbating problems it claims to ameliorate. School officials have been responding with denials or silence.

CRT has been spreading throughout academia, entertainment, government, schools, and corporations. It redefines America’s history as a struggle between “oppressors” (white people) and the “oppressed” (everybody else), similarly to Marxism’s reduction of human history to a struggle between the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat.” It labels institutions that emerged in majority-white societies as “systemically” or “structurally” racist.

CRT’s entry into schools went largely unnoticed by parents due to its being dressed up as “equity,” “anti-racist,” or “culturally responsive” initiatives. It has spawned an industry of speakers, trainers, and consultants who get paid to diagnose an organization as “systemically racist,” prescribe CRT-based initiatives as the remedy, and then to help implement it over the years to come.

The existence of “systemic racism” is usually claimed based on disparate outcomes for different groups, such as lower average test scores or more detentions for black students.

Scholars have pointed out that the argument is specious.

“Every system you could possibly think of produces some kind of racial or sexual or class discrepancy,” said Wilfred Reilly, an associate professor of political science at Kentucky State University who specializes in empirically testing political claims. “And this allows the radicals to be radicals eternally, and to claim that everything is racist.”

Once parents learn what CRT is, they often disagree.

One group that attracted media attention is the Parents Against Critical Theory (PACT) in Loudon County, Virginia.

Local parents began to organize in June 2020, asking for the reopening of schools that had been shuttered in response to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic. However, it was the remote learning the district put in place that allowed parents to learn more about what their children are being taught, which raised some red flags.

“We’re seeing what our kids are learning and our goal changes from opening schools to ‘Oh my gosh. What are we sending our children back to?’” one parent, who asked to remain anonymous because of concern about reprisals, told The Epoch Times.

“Basically, they’re categorizing children by race to determine the quality of education each will have, which is absolutely unacceptable,” she added.

She said her children won’t be returning to that school.

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What Jack Phillips would say differently to gay couple he refused to make wedding cake (interview)

In July 2012, when the federal government and most states in the United States did not legally recognize gay marriages, a Colorado baker found himself the subject of an anti-discrimination case for refusing to make a same-sex wedding cake on religious grounds.

Years later, Jack Phillips found himself before the highest court in the land, where the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

Phillips details experiences with the litigation, his upbringing and faith background in the book The Cost of My Faith: How a Decision in My Cake Shop Took Me to the Supreme Court, scheduled for release through Salem Books on May 18.

In the book, Phillips documents his multiple legal battles over his decisions not to make a cake celebrating a same-sex wedding or a cake celebrating a gender transition.

Even though Phillips eventually won his legal battle against the same-sex couple with a 2018 Supreme Court victory, he is still dealing with litigation surrounding his refusal to make a cake celebrating a gender transition for transgender attorney Autumn Scardina.

In March, Denver District Court Judge A. Bruce Jones dropped one of the two charges leveled against Phillips, with the other being argued in trial court later that month; a decision is pending.

The Christian Post recently spoke with Phillips, covering topics such as why he wrote his book, the struggle to convey his beliefs to those who disagree with him and how he felt about one conservative activist’s efforts to sue bakeries that refused to make a cake with an anti-gay message. Below are excerpts from that interview.

CP: What led you to write this book?

Phillips: The first thing that came to my mind about writing this book was that I want my kids and my grandkids to know the true story of what happened back there in July 2012 and what’s happened since, as it’s difficult to find all of those kind of facts on the internet, or at least factual facts.

CP: You mentioned in the book about wanting to go back to July 2012 to explain more to the same-sex couple about why you refused to make the gay wedding cake. What would have you said if you could have done it again?

Phillips: The same thing I’ve been saying to hundreds of people ever since — that I serve everybody who comes in my shop, but there are certain cakes that I can’t create because of an inherent message or written message that the cake would contain and that I can’t convey.

In their case, it was a cake that had a different view of marriage. I believe the biblical view of marriage. It’s between a man and a woman. I would gladly serve these people, these two men, any other cake, other custom works or sell them anything out of my showcase. [I would tell them] that it was not them that I was not serving. I was just declining to create a cake that went against my core beliefs. But they were welcome in my shop.

That’s what I would try and explain to them.

I tried to explain it to this attorney, Scardina, that is suing me this go-around. We had a face-to-face meeting, Scardina and myself, this attorney. And in that meeting, I tried to explain that there are just certain cakes that I couldn’t create and that I would gladly create other custom work for this attorney. It was just the particular cake, in this case celebrating a gender transition, that I couldn’t create.

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Risk of Dying From AstraZeneca Vaccine Higher Than of COVID, Norway Finds

“We believe that such an alternative may appear unethical…”

While waiting for the final decision on the controversial vaccine, Norway has decided to distribute its stock of AstraZeneca to fellow Nordic countries that actually want to use them despite the associated risks.

Norwegians run a greater risk of dying from being inoculated with AstraZeneca’s vaccine than from COVID-19, the National Institute of Public Health (FHI) concluded in its analysis, recommending the vaccine, previously linked to serious complications in the form of rare blood clotting and haemorrhage amid low platelet counts.

Abstaining from the vaccine could possibly prevent up to 10 deaths related to side effects, the FHI said, according to the newspaper Verdens Gang.

So far, Norway has seen five cases of serious incidents reported shortly after vaccination, with three fatalities. FHI has calculated the mortality rate from the AstraZeneca vaccine as 2.3 people per 100,000 vaccinated.

The FHI stressed that continuing to inoculate will by contrast expose younger women to an “unreasonably high risk”, given the current relatively levels of infection in Norway.

Furthermore, the institute is against offering the vaccine on a voluntary basis, which has been proposed both in Norway and fellow Scandinavian nations.

“We believe that such an alternative may appear unethical and with a high risk that those who make such a choice have not fully understood the risk to which they are exposed,” the institute said.

The FHI also ventured that recommending the AstraZeneca vaccine for further use could lead to lower confidence among the population in vaccination programmes in general.

“This could lead to a lower vaccination rate and vaccination rate in the long run, and that patients in risk groups will also say no to vaccines.”

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Twitter Banned Trump but Takes No Action Against LeBron James Tweet

Twitter won’t decide whether NBA superstar LeBron James should be banned from the social media platform for his tweet about the police officer who shot and killed 16-year-old Columbus, Ohio resident Ma’Khia Bryant.

James on Wednesday posted a photograph of Nicholas Reardon, identified as the police officer who shot the teenager, and added the words “YOU’RE NEXT #ACCOUNTABILITY.”

He pulled the tweet down after an outcry from people who said he was inciting violence against Reardon.

But Twitter said it is unable to judge tweets that have been taken down.

“Our teams are unable to evaluate tweets that have been deleted since they no longer exist on our service,” a Twitter spokesperson told the Washington Examiner on Thursday.

The Daily Caller said that the tweet was up for over an hour and garnered tens of thousands of likes and retweets. James has almost 50,000,000 followers.

It said that Twitter’s policy warns that users may “not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. This includes wishing or hoping that someone experiences physical harm.”

The Daily Caller posted the deleted tweet. And the Examiner noted Twitter appeared to apply a different standard to Donald Trump when he was president. Twitter repeatedly censored Trump’s posts over accusations of misinformation and later permanently suspended his account in the wake of the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Democrats Sue To Block AZ Election Audit.

Arizona Democrats are suing to halt the state’s ballot recount and audit of the 2020 election.

The lawsuit, filed by the Arizona Democratic Party and the sole Democrat on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, alleges “Republican Senate President Karen Fann and another GOP senator promised a judge that they would protect the secrecy of the ballots and voter privacy before he ruled the Senate could access 2.1 million voted ballots and the tabulation machines used to count them.”

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