McDonald's USA President, Don Thompson

I read an interesting article in Crain’s Chicago Business yesterday that talked about how McDonald’s USA is urging their franchise owner-operators to call their representatives to oppose the so called “Employee Free Choice Act” currently being considered in Congress.

McDonald’s USA President Don Thompson (photo left) warns the owner-operators of the “gravity of the issue” and how this legislation would negatively impact their industry.

So, what’s this all about anyway? It sounds like McDonald’s is fighting against a good thing – right? I mean, even president-elect Obama supports this bill. Hold on… not so fast!

Under current law, even McDonald’s employees have the right to organize unions. There is nothing stopping them from doing so. What this law changes is the way the vote is taken. Currently it must be a secret ballot. Under the new law it would be a “card-check” system where each person voting would have to sign their name along with their vote. This of course opens the employee up to fear of pressure and consequences for their vote. McDonald’s employs many younger people who would be especially susceptible to big union coercion.

The United States has long viewed voting as a private matter, and a history of using the relative safety and security of the secret ballot. This new law seeks to circumvent this foundational principle and historical practice.

I agree with McDonald’s USA on this one… we must protect and keep the principle and practice of the secret ballot alive and well in the USA.

HowObamaGotElected.com

You might want to check it out at HowObamaGotElected.com. There is a video there that has been viewed over 1.4 M times on YouTube to watch, then links to all the data and backup on the video including:

• A video of John Ziegler (the filmmaker) interviewed on Fox News
• Data on a research poll/survey by John Zogby
• Links to all the attacks being made against this video and data

It’s all very interesting.

My thoughts the last few days have been more along the lines of how will life, work and the living out of an orthodox Christian faith be affected in the next four years? I don’t have lots of answers yet, but here are a few others who have been thinking along the same lines, and coming up with some good early thoughts that I appreciate and find helpful.

Michael Hyatt - President of Thomas Nelson Publishers – My Four Commitments to Barack Obama

Cal Thomas – syndicated writer and columnist – Transforming Culture

Ajith Fernando – National Director of Youth for Christ in Sri Lanka – Thoughts After the US Elections

• In the history of the church, sometimes when she faced some challenges to its beliefs and practices, she responded with restatements and demonstrations that presented the Christian truths challenged in a more beautiful, clear, appealing, persuasive and practical light. I pray that this would be the response to possible challenges coming to our belief in the sanctity of heterosexual marriage and the sanctity of human life.
• We must always battle for legislation that accords with the plan of the Creator of humanity. Surely, the Creator’s plan alone is what is best for humans. Therefore, legislators must continue their battle for social righteousness. However, no amount of bad legislation can overcome the power, the joy, the appeal and the goodness of biblical morality demonstrated in the lives of Christians. We now have the challenge of demonstrating this afresh.
• Whether we like it or not, people in the non-western world associate Christianity with the USA. Recently there has been a growing sense among people in the non-western world that the USA is not concerned about or sensitive to their feelings, sentiments and convictions. There even has been a sense that the US thinks it is superior to others. Because of the unhealthy association of the USA with Christianity, this sense has negatively affected people’s attitude towards the gospel. Insensitivity is alien to the Christian spirit, as Christians are those who become all things to all people so that by all means they may save some (1 Cor. 9:22). Superiority is alien to the Christian spirit because this spirit springs from grace—resulting in the acknowledgment that all our merit is undeserved—and issues in Christians always in humility counting others better than themselves (Philip. 2:3).

Christianity Today – The Evangelical Electoral Map (This is interesting)

Barack Obama keeps saying his economic policies are not socialistic. However, in this 2001 radio interview broadcast on Chicago’s WBEZ public radio station, it sure sounds like a duck, walks like a duck…

"If (my daughters) make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby."

If you want another clear, reasoned and well-written viewpoint on Barack Obama’s views on life and abortion, and why any thinking person needs to think twice about casting a vote for a potential Obama Presidency, then this article is worth reading.

Obama’s Abortion Extremism

by Robert George
Oct 14, 2008
Sen. Barack Obama’s views on life issues ranging from abortion to embryonic stem cell research mark him as not merely a pro-choice politician, but rather as the most extreme pro-abortion candidate to have ever run on a major party ticket.

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Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics and previously served on the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Cover: The Faith of Barack Obama

I recently finished reading The Faith of Barack Obama by Stephen Mansfield [Thomas Nelson, publisher].

I agree with Mansfield’s introductory book premise that understanding a man’s religious vision and personal faith will illuminate how he will lead. To Mansfield, Barack’s faith uniquely positions him as a “healer” and prophetic conscience for our nation, on the level of Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, William Wilberforce and others.

The pertinent question, then, is what IS Barack Obama’s faith and religious vision and how will it inform his leadership?

Although Barack professes to have a personal relationship with Jesus (the historical object of Christian faith), this book reveals little about how Barack’s faith is rooted in that relationship. To me the book reveals his faith to be more rooted in traditions, ethics, black liberation theology and an attractive community life that fits with his personal values, rather than in a personal submission to the God-man, Jesus Christ, as revealed to us in Scripture.

As Mansfield observes, Barack’s faith is in a belief that “Christianity is but one religious tree rooted in the common ethical soil of all human experience.” For Barack, “there are many paths to the same place.”

According to Mansfield, Obama “is the product of a new, post-modern generation that picks and chooses its own truth from traditional faith, much as a man customizes his meal at a buffet.”

I also find it enlightening that his religious vision and faith is guided, not by revealed truth, but by doubt. “Doubt is at the heart of Obama’s religion. Indeed, it is not going too far to say that for Obama, doubt is a form of worship.”

Mansfield moves from these quotes and statements to his conclusions in the last chapter. That religion, to Barack Obama, “is transforming, lifelong and real. It is who he is at the core . . . While Americans are used to religious insincerity from their political leaders, Obama seems to be sincere in what he proclaims. It was his faith that gave him the will to serve in public office and the worldview of that faith that shaped his understanding of what he would do once he came to office.”

“Obama’s faith infuses his public policy, so that his faith is not just limited to the personal realms of his life; it also informs his leadership.”

In what way will a faith rooted in doubt and customized at will inform leadership? Every person must wrestle with doubt, but do doubt and uncertainty qualify a person for leadership? What does it say about our times and culture that our most admired individuals are those who cannot affirm what they believe? That not knowing truth is valued above knowing truth? If doubt is a form of worship for Barack Obama then our country’s infatuation with Barack Obama belies an infatuation with doubters and those who readily admit that truth is unknowable.

We would all do well to remember the famous and timely words of C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a good moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic-on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg-or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great moral teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

In conclusion, there is much to admire about Barack Obama. He is gifted and able in many areas. I commend him for his many good qualities, and respect the hardships he has overcome, and hope that many will emulate the positive choices he has made in his life. But on the question as to whether or not his faith as presented in this book makes him more attractive to me as a leader and presidential candidate, it does not. Rather, the faith of Barack Obama is deeply concerning to me–for him as a person, and for our country.

Unlike Mr. Mansfield, I do not see Barack Obama as a prophet, ready to heal the wounds of our nation. Rather, he is a brilliant politician, a winsome, sincere and transparent communicator, who is seriously confused about the object of his professed faith.

Even though I disagree with the conclusion of this book, I would recommend it to anyone seriously following the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama and the critically important choice ahead for our nation on November 4th.

This book is… written in the belief that if a man’s faith is sincere, it is the most important thing about him, and that it is impossible to understand who he is and how he will lead without first understanding the religious vision that informs his life.

I agree with that statement. What remains to be seen is if Mr. Mansfield can convincingly reveal that Barack Obama’s faith is first “sincere” and then what it is about that faith that would convince me to trust him as the de facto leader of the free world.

I am an independent who most often finds himself voting Republican, so I am skeptical. I’ve already posted the problems I have with his stand on partial-birth abortion and marriage. However, I am interested to see if there is anything in this book that would help me understand how his “faith” can allow him to hold these positions, and other positions that I have problems with.

We shall see.

Barack Obama and Pastor Jeremiah Wright

There is one more big reason why I cannot support Barack Obama in good conscience. It is because of his stance on issues related to marriage, the family and sexuality. A friend of mine recently compiled the following list of positions that Barack Obama favors, from the public record.

Barack Obama Favors

• “the full and unequivocal repeal of the federal Defense of Marriage Act,” which protects states from forced legal recognition of same-sex “marriages” performed in California or Massachusetts.
• Homosexual civil unions (the legal equivalent of marriage with respect to childrearing, adoption, inheritance, tax and hiring law and freedom of association, requiring costly new government and insurance benefits that natural, traditional families and the rest of society must subsidize).
• He seeks to “ensure that the 1,100+ federal legal rights and benefits” of natural, traditional marriage are extended to same-sex couples.
• State-by-state homosexual marriage (by way of Supreme Court orders to override legislatures as necessary, dignifying what we once called “sodomy” with religious legitimacy)
• Condom distribution in prisons (de facto facilitation of “safe sodomy” )
• Full, open homosexual integration into our military. Our military women aren’t required to bunk and bathe with male soldiers; is it appropriate to force any of our troops to bunk and bathe with declared homosexuals? What about the morale of our troops?
• Automatic “same-sex citizenship” for foreign homosexual “permanent partners” of American gays.

If you are going to call yourself a Christian, you have to deal with the fact that from Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is clear about God’s rejection of all sexual immorality in general – and homosexual behavior in particular. Does Barack hold that Moses (echoed by Paul in Romans 1) is merely offering an option from the Lord Almighty in Leviticus 18:22-23?

“Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is an abomination.”"

“Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.”

Barack Obama recently contested the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by declaring that “I do not agree with General Pace that homosexuality is immoral.”

I ask you then, Mr. Obama… on what grounds do you call yourself a Christian, yet reject publicly and categorically the position your historic faith holds on marriage, the family and sexuality? As a fellow Christian, I just can’t support you in this! I don’t see how any other Christian can either.

(Thank you to Steve for the compiling of public data)

Michelle and Barack Obama

Michelle Obama wrote in a 2004 fund-raising letter that the federal ban on partial-birth abortions “is clearly unconstitutional” and “a flawed law.”

Even though this barbaric procedure involves delivering the head of a fully-developed infant in the second or third trimester, piercing the baby’s skull, and sucking her brains out, Barack Obama’s wife describes it as “legitimate” medicine. She wrote further that,

“The fact remains, with no provision to protect the heath of the mother, this ban on a legitimate medical procedure is clearly unconstitutional and must be overturned.”

She went on to say that the Bush administration should not encourage the abortion practitioners who sued to reverse the ban to drop their lawsuit to make it unconstitutional. Obama told prospective donors that they could “count on” Barack to “keep the Bush team from appointing the Supreme Court justice that will vote against Roe v. Wade.”

I can only conclude that if elected president, Barack Obama and the First Lady would allow the horror of Partial Birth Abortion to continue in the USA.  The Obama’s would support late-term, tax-funded abortion on demand, for any reason, at any time, and for minors, without parental consent.

Sorry, I just can’t accept that.

Wow! Really? Yikes!