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Sunday, August 30 at 6:45 p.m. at the IBEW Hall on Elizabeth and Hampton.  The ObamaCare crowd is busing in activists to chant in favor of socialized medicine.  Let’s show them we care about healthcare by OUTNUMBERING them on their own turf.  The show starts at 7:00, so get their early.

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I absolutely believe this, and my wife and I focus much of our lives to make our belief in God real in the work we do to reach out to others. We are joined by many of our friends in our church in this important work, to worship God by being His servant to the last and least. We care for our family, we care for our friends and neighbors, we act in concert with our church to support those in need in our city.

This is not offered to point out how wonderful I am. Frankly, if I were a better steward of resources, I imagine the Father would entrust me with more. I say this all to note that I have a body of experience, and in my experience, charity is a task that churches and people do well, and government bureaucrats do poorly.

Consider recidivism. Recently, I served on a jury where we had the unfortunate task to convict a young man of a serious crime. From my days working in prison ministry, I learned that if an inmate will involve themselves in a faith-based program while in prison, their chances of staying out of jail improves dramatically. You cannot replace immorality with nothing – you have to offer a moral code to displace it. Our Government in its attempts at rehabilitation must by its very nature and structure (separation of church and state) choose a set of instructions and procedures that are demonstrably less effective.

I can all but guarantee that any man who is impoverished is far less likely to remain impoverished should he find a church in which his bad habits are confronted and replaced with good habits. We have decades of history in which multiple generations are ensnared in poverty where immoral behavior is not resisted. Government cannot tell a man he is offending a loving God by abandoning his responsibility to his children, but until that mans abandons his wretched behavior, the cycle will continue.

Worse, the more we expect the Government to do, the less we undertake ourselves. The links below demonstrate the gulf between giving the religious and irreligious in charitable work. Consider this from Arthur Brooks:

On average, people of faith give more than 50% more money each year to non-church social welfare organizations than secularists do.

Many of my Christian friends voted Democrat, citing their belief that the Democrats will fashion a more generous government. I think the opposite is likely the outcome. We who believe cannot outsource our hard work to the State.

Charitable Explanation

Why Get Involved?

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Yesterday a young man stopped by my house.  Bedecked in his Boy Scout uniform, he carried with him a flag, a hammer and a lengthy spike.  To fund his summer camp experience, he was offering a flag subscription.  For 25 bucks he’d post Old Glory on my lawn for Independence day, Veteran’s Day and a few other holidays.

I appreciate the Boy Scouts greatly, and I have a great deal of respect for a young man who will hustle door-to-door.  I let it slide that I have the Stars and Stripes flying on my porch already, and offered to make a donation in any case, perhaps to have him post the flag on one of my hippy neighbors.

The young man noted that he thinks he already ran across a hippy.  I asked why, and he stated that the man had called him a German Brown-Shirt.

My Scout visitor was a refugee from Bosnia, by the way something fairly obvious if you took the time to hear the rhythms and tones of his speech.  I was immediately enraged that one of my neighbors had leveled such an insensitive insult.

There is a stripe of liberal who is so full of their own superiority, that they feel that they are above the normal rules of social intercourse.  Brown Shirts were truly awful, racist thugs who assaulted German citizens, destroyed their property and acted as the mailed fist of Hitler’s rise to power.  Name for me one Boy Scout who has been linked to such crimes.

Moreover, my young Bosnian friend’s family had likely been on the receiving end of Nazi-Style thuggery.  Maybe I can find a survivor of the Rwandan genocide he can call a storm-trooper.

If I knew which idiot had said such a thing, I’d deliver a fresh piece of my mind hot off the grill.  Still, the same sort of jackass who would call a Boy Scout a Brown Shirt is the same kind of idiot who thinks September 11th was an inside job and most likely has a quarter in thick of Reason-Impervious paint.

I try to be patient with those with whom I disagree.  I genuinely believe that knowledge is a thing to be held humbly, shared gently and sought after earnestly.  I am firm in my convictions because I careful about the convictions I adopt, nevertheless I realize that this is a big world and I have been known to be wrong, off base, ill-informed or flat out bat-snot crazy upon occasion.  That said I cannot tell you how often I have heard or read some incandescent liberal spout off the most ignorant self-refuting bile radiating self-righteousness so bright you could get a first-degree burn.

I know my side is hardly above name calling, but calling John Kerry a flip-flopper is a lot different than calling George Bush the moral equivalent to Hitler. It seems to me that for many folks on the Left, their righteousness absolves them of the need for class.

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