Homeschool News & Views
Issue 64, March 30, 2008
From Homeschool Helpers
In association with Pass It On Ministries
By Dan L. White
This week I noticed
something in the news that was trivial, inconsequential and significant.
Ellen whomped Oprah.
There were other things
which were notable.
First, a California
appeals court vacated a previous court decision to criminalize homeschooling,
and will review that case. Since the
previous court decision was vacated, that means it has no effect. California homeschoolers are free to continue
homeschooling as they have been doing.
A petition filed with the
appeals court said that the court should take into consideration other cases
from Michigan and Texas that upheld the right of parents to homeschool based on
the free exercise of religion clause of the First Amendment. Ultimately, that’s really what this gets back
to, whether in Germany or the US. Can a
parent teach his child the parent’s most basic values, or must the parent allow
the government to teach his child values which may oppose the parent’s, in
effect turning the child against the parent?
The California decision to
criminalize homeschooling shocked many folks in California, including the
governor. Indeed people all around the
nation were stirred by this. The
decision made nationwide news, and a petition was begun which gathered a
quarter million signatures.
The California judges’
decision to make homeschooling illegal can seem discouraging and frightening,
but it wasn’t so long ago when homeschooling was illegal in many states. There was no uproar about that then. Most people thought homeschooling should be
illegal. The fact that a court’s
decision to criminalize homeschooling caused such an outrage all across the
country, with demonstrations and petitions and emails flowing like rivers, has
to be favorable for homeschooling. Many
people now consider homeschooling to be a fundamental Constitutional right of a
parent. It will really be a challenge
for the liberals to shut down Christian homeschooling.
In a second thing of note,
Sally Kern had a debate with a homosexual Christian pastor. Sally Kern is a Republican legislator in
Oklahoma, the wife of a Baptist preacher, who gave a speech before a small
group of conservatives opposing the homosexual anti-Christian agenda. That speech was recorded and put on YouTube,
and it has been viewed over a million times.
The homosexual activists have threatened multiple times to kill her.
How do you debate a
homosexual Christian pastor? Of course,
there is no such thing, in the sense of Christian meaning Christ-follower. Saying homosexual Christian pastor is like
saying Christian prostitute or Christian murderer. It is the ultimate in an oxymoron.
Anyway, Kern agreed to
debate this “Christian” homosexual pastor.
I don’t necessarily think that was a good idea, because it makes it seem
as if you have this Christian here who opposes homosexuality and that Christian
over there who practices homosexuality.
It kind of gives legimitacy to them.
However, it surely must be said that Sally Kern is a bold woman, unlike
almost all Christians of all denominations.
In the debate Kern said,
“[The homosexual activists] are out there putting forth -- funding very heavily
-- homosexual and pro-homosexual candidates to run against, and defeat,
conservatives across the nation. Just
like terrorism destroys and tears down, [the homosexual agenda] is at the heart
of trying to tear down what is the bedrock foundation of our society, which is
the family and traditional marriage.”
Kern went on, “On many
occasions, Christians have been compared to terrorists because of our beliefs
in traditional family and sticking to the Bible. There's a website right now called American
Taliban, where Christians are identified as worse than terrorists and you don’t
hear anything being said about that.”
The man she was debating
said that while he denounces hate speech, he wanted to know whether Kern
thought gay people were like cancer and terrorists – both something that people
want to “kill” or “annihilate.” The
implication is that what Kern had said would cause people to kill
homosexuals. In fact, Christians were
not threatening to kill homosexuals, but the homosexuals were repeatedly
threatening to kill this Christian lady.
None of the homosexual activists were upset over that.
Kern maintained that
homosexuality is “a lifestyle that has deadly consequences for our young
people, a lifestyle that will – if it becomes mainstream throughout society – …
destroy the Christian religion.”
Besides the California
court reversal and the Kern debate, one of the biggest things of note this week
was the fact that Ellen whomped Oprah.
It’s true this is trivial
and inconsequential. I’m talking about
two daytime TV show hosts, Ellen Degeneres and Oprah Winfrey, neither of which
is worth watching at all. But it is
significant because it shows how the heart of America is changing.
Oprah Winfrey has been
queen of daytime TV for a number of years.
That has given her great influence in the country. She has won Emmys for her show, she had a
book club, she was nominated for an Academy Award as an actress, and she
publishes a magazine. She has been
called the richest African American of the twentieth century, the world’s only
black billionaire, and the world’s most influential woman.
She has used that
influence to attack Bible morality. For
years she has openly campaigned to promote homosexuality, and has practiced
open adultery herself. Media critics
have said that her show has blurred the line between normal and deviant sexual
behavior.
Oprah, day time trash TV
talk show host, has become a spiritual leader in America. Christianity Today ran an article in 2002
called "The Church of O" which said that Winfrey had become an
influential spiritual leader. “Since
1994, when she abandoned traditional talk-show fare for more edifying content,
and 1998, when she began 'Change Your Life TV', Oprah's most significant role
has become that of spiritual leader. To her audience of more than 22 million
mostly female viewers, she has become a postmodern priestess—an icon of
church-free spirituality.”
That spirituality is not
from the word of God but from the mind of man, or in this case, the mind of
woman. This anti-Bible spiritual leader,
though, has had a catastrophic personal life, bouncing from affair to affair, living
in open adultery, never being able to simply succeed at a lasting, loving
marriage.
Now her audience is losing
their love for her.
America On Line web site
AOL Television asked which daytime TV host made their day. Their
viewers gave Ellen Degeneres 46% of the vote compared to only 19% for Oprah.
This is a new thing in
America.
Ellen openly practices and
advocates lesbianism. She has been promoted
extensively by the liberal media. At
first her shows were not popular at all, and unable to gain traction. But the media obviously wanted to push a
homosexual talk show host on America, so they kept trying different
things. Finally they hit it, and now the
lesbian lady, although that is another oxymoron, is the queen of daytime TV,
soundly whomping Oprah, who actually helped Ellen get started in the business.
It can easily be said that
people who watch daytime network TV are not necessarily middle of the road,
super sane people. If you’re a normal
Christian homeschool family, you don’t give a flip about Ellen or Oprah. But the fact is that millions of Americans
now idolize Ellen, just as they have Oprah.
Just as Oprah helped make adultery mainstream, so Ellen has helped make
lesbianism lovable.
Ellen whomped Oprah. In a way, that’s really a big event. Symbolically America has now progressed from
mainstream adultery to mainstream homosexuality.
Sally Kern warns of the
dangers of the homosexual lifestyle, and she is widely attacked and threatened
with death. Ellen Degeneres lives openly
as a lesbian, and she is picked as America’s favorite TV host.
That’s where evolution
comes in. Christian parents usually
think that it doesn’t make much difference if their kids are taught evolution
in the public schools. But what they are
really taught, and what the whole school culture is based on, is the belief
that God isn’t and His law ain’t. If
evolution is, God isn’t. If God isn’t,
then there is really no ultimate right and wrong. Each person decides right and wrong, and it
then becomes wrong to say that anything is wrong. And this all started with the schools teaching
America’s children that God isn’t and His law ain’t.