A petition to the White House calling for President Obama to directly respond to the situation in Sudan with Christian mother Meriam Ibrahim is rapidly moving toward the required number of signatures.
The petition needs to gather 100,000 signatures within a month for the White House to be required to respond. Currently, the petition has almost 2/3 of the necessary total in just one week.
“We strongly urge the administration to take action in the case of Dr. Meriam Ibrahim, the Sudanese mother who with her toddler and newborn baby (who pending the proper documentation are American citizens) is languishing inside a prison in Khartoum,” the petition states. “We urge you to pressure the Sudanese government to release Meriam and her children so she can escape execution and possible death of her children and be rejoined with her husband in the U.S. Please grant her expedited safe haven in the U.S., where she could seek asylum.”
Ibrahim is married to an American, meaning her two children are American citizens. The State Department has been refusing to take action in the case to get her children brought to America despite the evidence of her husband’s citizenship.
Ibrahim has been sentenced to 100 lashes and then being hung to death for her faith in Christ.
A new crisis between Israel and its closest ally is developing because of the Obama Administration’s glowing support for a Hamas-supported government in Palestine.
Several key Israeli officials expressed their anger publicly concerning the U.S. State Department saying they are willing to work with the new Palestinian unity government that was built with the help of Hamas. Even U.S. officials identify Hamas as a terrorist group yet the State Department ignored that in their endorsement of the new government.
“I have to say I do not understand this American announcement,” said Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz. “You cannot present it as a Hamas government internally, then present it publically as a government of technocrats. If these (ministers) are people who identify with Hamas, Hamas identifies with them and appointed them, then they are representatives of Hamas. This is a Hamas government, and Hamas is a terror organization.”
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki tried to avoid reporter’s questions about Hamas’ intimate involvement with the new Palestinian coalition.
“At this point, it appears that president Abbas has formed an interim technocratic government that does not include ministers affiliated with Hamas,” she said. “With what we know now, we will work with this government.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly was “betrayed and deceived” by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry who told him that the U.S. would not recognize the new government immediately but then did so within five hours.
A number of residents and students protested at the offices of the Ector County (Texas) Independent School District after officials said they would be making prayer in the graduation ceremony optional.
High school students in the district had voted to have prayer as part of the ceremony but the administrators completely ignored their wishes in scheduling an “opening” and “closing” delivered by students instead of an invocation and benediction. The students would not be chosen by the graduating seniors or by academic achievement but entirely by random selection.
The move came because the anti-Christian group Americans United for the Separation of Church and State threatened to sue the school if they allowed the students to follow through on their vote to have a prayer included in the event.
Students held up signs saying “We are a democracy; we voted to pray” and “As Americans, we have the freedom to pray.”
School board member Doyle Woodall said that the board did not want to take the action they did but that it was forced upon them by anti-Christianists using the courts to force their will on the majority.
Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu is calling on the Christian community to rally support for a piece of legislation that is aimed at making orphan care a priority in U.S. foreign policy.
Landrieu said that it’s not a well-known fact that the U.S. State Department does not hold the belief that children belong in families. Therefore, the State Department does not usually consider the importance of children having parents in their actions.
“Government do a lot of things well but raising kids isn’t one of them,” Senator Landrieu said at a press conference. “It’s time to make that very clear.”
The bill, Children in Families First, would require a reorganization of the State Department to handle orphan care and move oversight of international adoptions from State to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The focus on the new office would be to keep families together and to place orphans in loving homes.
Senator Landrieu said that the law will make the State Department “work for us, not against us.”
Several major Christian organizations have endorsed the Senator’s bill, including Focus On The Family, the Southern Baptist Convention and Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church.
Planned Parenthood’s latest attempts to undermine the truth of the Gospel and the sanctity of life come from a “pastoral letter” that tells patients the Bible doesn’t condemn abortion.
The letter from the group’s “Clergy Advocacy Board” says that they were there to support their decision and that neither Jewish nor Christian scriptures mention abortion. The letter goes on to say that no one should have “faith beliefs” forced upon anyone else.
The letter tells makes the blasphemous claim “no one knows the circumstances of your life as well as you know them” and that “no one knows what’s in your heart better than you.”
The letter says that God will be with them even if they choose to kill their baby through abortion. It also says the Planned Parenthood office will find them a clergy member that will support and endorse their decision to abort their child.
A woman who posted a video online that she said was aimed at “stopping the stigma” on abortion is now being questioned after the former actress’s video has been shown to have inconsistencies.
Emily Letts posted the video showing her smiling and praising her abortion procedure as part of a contest organized by pro-abortions groups, including one that advocates for underage girls to have abortions without parental consent.
Since the video was posted, it’s been released that the clinic where Letts works as a counselor paid to settle a malpractice lawsuit in 2003 after their abortionist performed on an underage girl without parental consent. The Cherry Hill Women’s Center also falsified the underage girls’ records.
The Christian Post tried to contact Letts about the situation but the Center would not return CP’s calls.
Pro-life organization Live Action took apart the video and noted what they called “many red flags.” Live Action said it was unlikely the baby was the age claimed based on the procedure and that one of the people shooting the video was behind the overall pro-abortion campaign.
But the possibility of the video being false is only part of the problem.
“Certainly it’s good to call into question the factors of the video and whether or not it was an actual video of her undergoing the procedure. But I think the most shocking aspect that makes it surreal and lacks reality is that women do not go into abortions with smiles on their faces,” Live Action head Lila Rose explained. “And when she’s having the abortion, we never actually get to see the victim of the abortion or the violent aspects of it, and how this is killing a person. The fact that she shielded that from view, whether it’s because it never actually happened and the whole thing is a hoax, or if it’s because it’s part of her propaganda, either way, the viewer doesn’t see the reality.”
Atheist activist Michael Newdow has lost another court case in his quest to eradicate all references to Christianity from society.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled to uphold lower court rulings that the phrase does not violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution and does not mean the government is choosing a religion to force on citizens.
“As the Supreme Court has repeatedly indicated in dicta, the statutes at issue in this case have a secular purpose and neither advance nor inhibit religion. The Court has recognized in a number of its cases that the motto, and its inclusion in the design of U.S. currency, is a ‘reference to our religious heritage,’” the Court ruled. “We therefore hold, in line with the Supreme Court’s dicta, that [the motto appearing on currency does] not violate the Establishment Clause.”
The Court went on to say that they disagree the plaintiffs have had a substantial burden placed on them and their religious beliefs.
The Alliance Defending Freedom praised the ruling.
“Americans need not be forced to abandon their religious heritage simply to appease someone’s animosity toward anything that references God,” ADF’s Rory Gray said to the Christian Post. “The Second Circuit rightly reached the same conclusion because this suit was based on a deeply flawed understanding of the First Amendment.”
Jeff Foxworthy, clean comedian and Christian husband & father, says that Christians today don’t know Scripture as well as they did years ago.
Foxworthy, who hosts “The American Bible Challenge” on secular cable channel Game Show Network with gospel music legend Kirk Franklin, spoke of the lack of Biblical literacy he’s seen during his time hosting the show.
“We have way too many distractions these days,” Foxworthy told the Christian Post. He said the people on the show are very knowledgeable but that it’s that head knowledge which initially made him not want to host a “Bible game show.”
“My faith is very important to me, but when they first asked me about it I had to say, ‘Let me go think about this, because can you do a game show about the Bible?’ Really, I didn’t want to be in line at hell looking up going, ‘It was a game show, right? That’s why it was a game show.’ And we kind of went back and forth because – and I’ll tell you where I landed. I thought it would be kind of weird to just reward people for the things that they knew, because the only people Jesus got sideways with were the Pharisees who had all this head knowledge but they had no heart knowledge.”
Foxworthy is the one who came up with the idea that those who win would get a financial award to give to their community.
Foxworthy also told the Post that it was 20 years ago during the height of his “You Might Be A Redneck If..” period that he felt led to be bolder about his faith.
“That happens in so many ways, whether it’s sharing a testimony at a Wild game dinner, leading a small group Bible study at a homeless shelter for years or hosting the “American Bible Challenge”,” Foxworthy said.
In a blow to efforts to stop a deadly virus that has wiped out 10 percent of the U.S. hog population, an Indiana farm has confirmed being re-infected with PEDv.
PEDv, or Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus, has killed 7 million pigs and driven pork prices to record highs since first being found in the United States a year ago. The disease is almost always fatal to baby piglets.
Matt Ackerman, a veterinarian in southeastern Indiana confirmed the re-infection but declined to name the farm. The confirmation is a blow to containment efforts because federal and state officials had been working from the assumption when a pig was infected it would develop an immunity for a number of years.
Rumors had been spreading that the assumption was faulty and up to 30 percent of farms were seeing second outbreaks but the Indiana case is the first one officially confirmed by government officials. The virus was also confirmed to be the same exact strain of the virus as the previous infection.
The virus is known to spread through pig manure and can transmit from farm to farm on trucks. Veterinarians are now examining if the virus can spread through animal feed.
The outbreak is likely to cause even more reduction in the U.S. hog population and further drive up pork prices.
A new Gallup poll shows that the problem for the pro-life movement isn’t motivating the people who believe to get to the polls.
The problem is that fewer voters value life.
According to a new poll conducted May 8th through 11th, a majority of registered voters say they are in favor of ending the lives of babies through abortion by a 47 to 46 percent margin.
The survey also showed that pro-life voters consider the issue of abortion to be a major problem. When asked if they only support candidates that are pro-life, one in four “pro-life” voters said they only vote for pro-life candidates. Only 16 percent of anti-life voters vote mainly on the anti-life position.
The poll also said that 32 percent of anti-life voters believe abortion is not a major issue. Surprisingly, 21 percent of pro-life voters consider abortion not to be a major issue.