Engaging Culture: ESPN’s Chris Broussard faces media guillotine declaring homosexuality a SIN.

Jason Collins: ESPN anchor Chris Broussard says gay NBA player “not Christian”

By Jeremy Binckes, Digital First Media

On Monday morning, NBA player Jason Collins came out in a Sports Illustrated piece, becoming the first active male athlete in a major sport to declare he was gay. ESPN handled the breaking news by bringing in sportswriter Chris Broussard. Broussard came out saying he did not believe that Collins was a Christian, not simply because he was gay, but because he is “walking in open rebellion to Jesus Christ.”

In Sports Illustrated, Collins wrote:

I’m from a close-knit family. My parents instilled Christian values in me. They taught Sunday school, and I enjoyed lending a hand. I take the teachings of Jesus seriously, particularly the ones that touch on tolerance and understanding. On family trips, my parents made a point to expose us to new things, religious and cultural. In Utah, we visited the Mormon Salt Lake Temple. In Atlanta, the house of Martin Luther King Jr. That early exposure to otherness made me the guy who accepts everyone unconditionally.”

Chris Broussard stands against Homosexuality

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While everybody is “coming out” Chris Broussard is “going in”!  This is how we engage culture, we speak the TRUTH.  Please pray for Broussard and his family!

Broussards blog after former NBA player John Amaechi came out in 2009

 

Error of Man: Police stake out hydroponics shops, harass customers who grow their own food

By: J. D. Heyes at NaturalNews.com

Apparently Americans who employ hydroponics are the newest targets in an insane “drug war” that has gone from bad to ludicrous since it was first “declared” in the early 1980s.
Consider this case in point: A couple of years ago, narcotics officers knocked on the door at the home of a man who had just purchased a seed starter kit from a local gardening shop. The police officers were demanding to know just what it was he was planning to grow.

“Tomatoes,” he told them, and the officers finally left – but only after they were convinced he was not growing marijuana.

Since that day the gardener, who asked the Kansas City Star not to identify him over fears he would once again be hassled by police, began parking a block away from that same garden center, in order to avoid police stakeouts.

The harassment of hydroponic gardeners has only gotten worse since them.

In fact, owners of garden centers are increasingly complaining that police surveillance and stakeouts are hurting their businesses – sometimes even driving smaller garden centers out of business. Few people, it seems, are comfortable shopping under the watchful eyes of the Police State.

A number of customers, the paper said, have reported being followed home by police after making their purchases, regardless of what they were growing.

‘You don’t hear about when there is no case’

As is always the case, cops are defending this horrendous abuse of the public trust by saying, you know, such surveillance is necessary and prudent because it is keeping marijuana off the streets. To even believe such nonsense makes you wonder if the narcotics officers making that claim are smoking dope themselves.

Police say that local narcotics officers have been watching hydroponics shops – which sell equipment for growing produce indoors – for years. They write down license plate numbers of customers and then follow up with search warrants after first looking through their garbage for any evidence of drug use. They say all of this is justified because marijuana growers shop at hydroponic shops too – in addition to the vast majority of customers who grow flowers and crops inside their homes.

Sometimes such arrests become high-profile events. Many times, however, there are no cases to make.

“[What y]ou don’t hear about are the cases where there is no case,” attorney Cheryl Pilate told the Star. She added that she wonders how often innocent people are questioned by police just for shopping at a hydroponics gardening store.

She knows of what she speaks. She is currently representing a Leawood, Kan., family that was the target of an April 20, 2012 drug raid in which officers turned up no evidence – zero – of illegal substances. That family, Robert and Adlynn Harte, were raising tomatoes and other veggies that grow under lights.

They were never even told why they were targeted, so they have filed a suit against the Johnson County, Kan., Sheriff’s Department “to gain access to records that would reveal why they were initially under suspicion,” the Star reported.

The couple, and their attorney, believe that they were suspected of growing illicit drugs in part because they shopped at Green Circle Hydroponics, one of three local stores that specialize in indoor gardening supplies.

The Police State is bad for business

That explanation would not surprise Jeffrey Hawkins, owner of a similar gardening center called Hooked On Ponics. His place, too, is under constant police surveillance; he knows this because his customers have told him of being questioned after they have shopped there, including one woman who grows orchids.

“What they do is target all the grow shops,” Hawkins, who said he closed his original store in Liberty, Kan., after business dropped off due to police scrutiny, told the paper. He said he now operates on weekends at a northeast Kansas City flea market.

“It’s a serious problem,” he said. “They profile people.”

The surveillance and harassment of customers “is getting more serious,” said Sam Williams, the owner of Grow Your Own Hydroponics in Independence, Mo.

“It’s not right. They’re driving business away from me,” he said
.

Antichrist Superstar – Even the secular media knows this is a bad idea! President Obama to daughters: if you get a tattoo, I will too

By SOPHIE WARNES at Independent.co.uk

It’s every parent’s nightmare: the little darlings you’ve spent years raising say they want body modifications.

President Barack Obama shared his tattoo prevention tactics on NBC’s Today show, saying that if his daughters Malia, 14, and Sasha, 11, get tattoos, they will be publicly humiliated on popular video sharing site YouTube.

“What we’ve said to the girls is, ‘If you guys ever decide you’re going to get a tattoo, then mommy and me will get the exact same tattoo, in the same place, and we’ll go on YouTube and show it off as a family tattoo,” he told Today’s Savannah Guthrie.

“Our thinking is that might dissuade them from thinking that somehow that’s a good way to rebel.”

He also explained the slip-up that his wife Michelle made when she accidentally referred to herself as a “busy single mother”. The President said: “I tend to cut my wife or anybody some slack when it comes to just a slip of the tongue. But there’s no doubt that there’ve been times where Michelle probably felt like a single mom.”

The Truth Behind Hip Hop 5: Confirmation! Forget Scientology, celebs are now falling for an even more sinister ‘religion’: Introducing the Satanic sex cult that’s snaring stars such as Peaches Geldof

By RICHARD PRICE Dailymail.com

PUBLISHED: 16:00 EST, 21 April 2013 |

Taken at face value it was an innocent enough remark, encouraging friends to explore ‘a belief system to apply to day-to-day life to attain peacefulness’.

But when Peaches Geldof chose to share her ‘religious’ convictions with her 148,000 followers on Twitter, it lifted the lid on a much more sinister world than first impressions would suggest.

The socialite, 24, is a devotee of Ordo Templi Orientis, known as OTO, and even has the initials tattooed on her left forearm.

Given her tendency to flit between fads and fashions (at one point she was a Scientologist, more recently she has wandered into Judaism), this could be dismissed as another harmless flirtation.

But a closer look at OTO — and Aleister Crowley, its founding ‘prophet’ — gives the lie to that assumption.

Crowley, who was born into an upper-class British family in 1875, styled himself as ‘the Great Beast 666′. He was an unabashed occultist who, prior to his death in 1947, revelled in his infamy as ‘the wickedest man in the world’.

His form of worship involved sadomasochistic sex rituals with men and women, spells which he claimed could raise malevolent gods and the use of hard drugs, including opium, cocaine, heroin and mescaline.

Crowley’s motto — perpetuated by OTO — was ‘do what thou wilt’. And it is this individualistic approach that has led to a lasting fascination among artists and celebrities, of whom Peaches is the latest in a long line.

Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, for example, routinely took part in occult magical rituals and was so intrigued by Crowley he bought his former home, Boleskine House, on the shores of Loch Ness in Scotland.

And there are now OTO lodges scattered around the country, practising the same ceremonial rituals and spreading the word of Crowley.

While membership is secret, Peaches is said to have been initiated into it, raising the prospect that many of her impressionable fans could try to do the same.

Indeed, when one of her Twitter followers asked how she could find out more about Thelema, another word for Crowley’s teachings, Peaches directed her to read his books, which she described as ‘super interesting’.

Other celebrities linked to OTO include the rapper Jay-Z, who has repeatedly purloined imagery and quotations from Crowley’s work.

Whether wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with ‘Do what thou wilt’ or hiring Rihanna to hold aloft a flaming torch in his music videos (a reference to the Illuminati, an outlawed secret society whose name supposedly derives from Lucifer, or ‘light bringer’), he has given the sect priceless publicity.

His clothing line, Rocawear, is shot through with OTO imagery such as the ‘all seeing eye’ in a triangle, the ‘eye of Horus’ (an ancient Egyptian symbol frequently referenced in occult texts) and the head of Baphomet (the horned, androgynous idol of Western occultism).

Some conspiracy theorists have seized on this as evidence that he is a member of a secret Masonic movement which they believe permeates the highest levels of business and government.

Others take a more pragmatic view: that it is commercial opportunism, cashing in on impressionable teens’ attraction to the ‘edginess’ of occult symbolism.

Yet OTO is much more than a marketing opportunity for attention-seeking celebs. It is a living religion, with adherents still practising occult rituals set out by Crowley in his books.

This week I tracked down John Bonner, 62, the head of OTO in the UK, to his home in East Sussex. He told me: ‘We are not a mass-appeal sort of organisation  — in the UK we number in our hundreds. Worldwide it’s thousands.

Malevolent: OTO was set up by Aleister Crowley, who revelled in the title of ‘the wickedest man in the world’

Celebrities are not always a boon or a benefit. ’We are used to being misunderstood. Many stories about Crowley, like people saying he filed his teeth down into fangs, are nonsense.

‘You could call us a sex cult in a way, because we recognise, accept and adore the whole process which goes towards making tangible the previously intangible.’

According to adherents of OTO it takes years of study before you can begin to understand what the religion is about — much like the equally controversial Church of Scientology.

Bonner takes issue with the comparison, saying it is ‘extremely expensive’ to study Scientology, yet  OTO demands no financial contributions.

Given her own dabbling in heroin and casual sex, particularly during a rootless period when she lived in Los Angeles a few years ago, it is perhaps natural that the troubled offspring of Bob Geldof and Paula Yates should be attracted to such a liberal school of thought.

And if Peaches’ own interest is so shallow, heaven knows what her impressionable — and mostly very young — fans will take from it.

A former FBI agent, Ted Gundersen, who investigated Satanic circles in LA, found that Crowley’s teachings about ‘raising demons to do one’s bidding’ suggested human sacrifice, preferably of ‘an intelligent young boy’.

John Bonner is dismissive of any idea that he and his fellow believers would even begin to countenance such excesses, pointing out that his is the only religion that sends people a letter of congratulations when they decide to leave (‘because they are exercising free will, which is what we’re all about’).

But he accepts many people may not be able to deal with Crowley’s complex teachings.

‘You’re not supposed to just jump straight in to it. It takes time and study, but our rituals are not for public consumption. You need to join us and go through the initiation process before you can begin to understand.

‘But according to our beliefs we can’t turn anyone away. So if you are over 18, are passably sane and are free to attend initiations, then you have an undeniable right of membership.’

Peaches Geldof is playing with fire. One can only hope her fans treat this latest pose with the scorn it deserves.

Creation Role: Model leaves industry to honor God and her husband “I quit being a VS model to be a Proverbs 31 wife.”

I gave modeling for God

By Kate Story, New York Post

Kylie Bisutti had reached the pinnacle of her career as a Victoria’s Secret Angel. But instead of feeling proud, she felt exploited. She tells why she turned to faith after the fashion industry put her through hell

I’m lying on a bed wearing a tight, little T-shirt and boy-cut panty bottoms while camera flashes keep popping away. I’m giving the camera that seductive, bombshell look I’d become famous for.

“Pull the top further up,” the FHM photographer encouraged me. “Hold up the covers like you don’t have any panties on.”

I didn’t feel comfortable but he kept urging me on.“This is what Victoria’s Secret models do,” he said. “This is why they hired you. If you want to be like Gisele, this is what you have to do.”

That’s when it hit me. I was being paid to strip down and pose provocatively to titillate men. It wasn’t about modeling clothes anymore; I felt like a piece of meat.The next day, I broke down and started sobbing. I was in my bedroom and dropped to my knees and started to pray.“God, why did you have me win the Victoria’s Secret Angel competition if it was going to make me feel this way? I’m not honoring my husband. I just want answers!”

That was two years ago. Today, I’m living in Montana with my husband, enjoying the fresh air and volunteering with our church.

The old me would never have believed that I gave up my career for this quiet, country life. When I was a little girl growing up in Las Vegas, surrounded by billboards of half-dressed women, I dreamed of becoming a Victoria’s Secret Angel.

I thought the models I saw defined beauty, and beauty meant you were important. I would watch the Victoria’s Secret fashion shows at home on TV and imitate the models’ signature struts when I’d walk to my bedroom at night.

Adriana Lima was my favorite. I don’t remember wanting to be anything other than a supermodel. And people were always telling me I should model — family, teachers, even random people on the street.When I was 8, I won my first casting call, but my parents couldn’t afford to send me to California for the photo shoot — my dad was a poker dealer and my mom was a housekeeper. So I started modeling every weekend at the Fashion Show Mall in Vegas.Until I was 15, modeling was the most important thing in my life, but then a girl I barely knew at school invited me to her church’s youth group. That party changed my life. I’d never been to church, but hearing that Jesus died for my sins was just amazing to me.

Shortly after that party, although I was just becoming a Christian, I didn’t think twice about moving to New York to pursue my dream of becoming a model.I moved in with four other models on the Lower East Side. One of my roommates was a Christian, and we’d take the long subway ride to the Upper West Side to go to church, but we were the exceptions. I’d see girls getting into black SUVs with club promoters at night and getting home when the sun was coming up the next day — teenagers my age!I was never tempted by alcohol because I have relatives who were alcoholics, so I knew how destructive it could be, but I could relate to wanting the attention that those older men would give the girls. But the girls didn’t seem happy, and it broke my heart.

Over the next two years, New York really opened my eyes to the dark side of the modeling industry. One of my roommates was so bulimic she would involuntarily throw up when she ate. She would go to sleep crying every night and just look at herself in the mirror thinking that she was so fat. And she was so thin.I had photographers and male models hitting on me constantly. Once, a photographer actually pushed me up against the wall and tried to kiss me.And while I was still going to church and consulting my Bible, I was so desperate to succeed in the business that I complied when my agent told me, “All models have a topless shot.” I was only 16 when I posed for mine.

I pretty much restricted my diet to oatmeal, fruits and vegetables to meet runway expectations. I’m 5-foot-10, and I got down to 115 pounds with measurements of 34-24-34. In February 2007, New York Fashion Week was approaching, and while everyone I knew was being sent out to auditions, I wasn’t.

“Why am I still going on test shoots?” I asked my agent.

“It’s because you look like a fat cow right now, Kylie. You need to lose 2 inches off of your hips,” the agent said.

After cutting my diet even further to just pineapples, watermelon and liters of water while exercising two hours a day, six days a week, I finally dropped down to 108 pounds, which satisfied my agent, and the gigs started rolling in.

I didn’t recognize the names of most of the designers I walked for, except for the American Eagle show. All I knew of fashion was what I’d seen in the mall, like Hollister and Express.

For my 18th birthday, I got to escape from the pressures of the city for a week. My dad had won a trip to Mexico, and he and Mom paid extra to bring me along.

At dinner the first night, I noticed the most handsome man I’d ever seen in my life at the table next to ours. Our eyes met, and I can’t really explain it, I was just drawn to him. It was like nothing I’d ever felt.

Turns out that my dad knew the handsome stranger from work. His name was Mike Bisutti. We spent the next couple of days snorkeling, riding ATVs and getting to know each other. At a group dinner, Mike began praying before the meal. He was a Christian!I hadn’t dated many Christians, but before the trip to Mexico, I told my small group leader back in Vegas that I was totally done with dating and I was going to wait for the guy God had in mind for me.Turns out God had a plan all along. After meeting Mike, I knew I didn’t want to return to New York. Things had been tense with my roommate, and I was still reeling from the comments about my weight. I had the agency ship home the rest of my belongings, and rented out my room to someone on Craigslist.

Mike and I were married about a year later at a beautiful ceremony on the beach in Cabo San Lucas. I had taken a break from modeling and was living a quiet life with Mike in Montana.A couple of months later, Mike and I were visiting his dad and stepmom, Susan, when Susan brought home a flier from the mall advertising a Victoria’s Secret Angel search.Mike said, “You should go for it, sweetie.” And all of those old, competitive feelings of needing attention returned. I wanted to be an Angel.

Mike’s sister drove me to the LA auditions, where we saw thousands of girls waiting in line. Once it was my turn, I did my runway walk for Victoria’s Secret, and top exec Ed Razek told me it was one of the best walks he had ever seen.

A few days later, Victoria’s Secret called and said I had made it into the Top 10, and they would be flying me out to New York to compete. I was so excited, it took everything not to scream into the phone.

I was a hit at the competition. The curves that made me “too fat” by runway standards were perfect for Victoria’s Secret. And even though I was only 19, a newlywed and growing in my relationship to God, I didn’t think twice about strutting my stuff in skimpy bikinis and underwear in the TV contest.

Then came the moment that would change my life forever: Heidi Klum announced that I had won. I gave the runway my best sexy walk that I’d been practicing since I was a kid — blowing kisses, rocking my hips and winking at the camera — and the crowd went wild. And my husband was right there, cheering me on. I was on top of the world.

But my euphoria didn’t last long.

The day after I won, one of the Victoria’s Secret execs e-mailed to tell me that I’d caught the eye of one of the celebrities at the after-party.“You should get together with him,” he said. “But I’m married! And completely in love with my husband,” I replied, refusing to meet.

During the Angel competition, I was encouraged to play down my marriage to Mike, because I was supposed to be flirting with everyone all the time. A lot of models don’t talk about their relationships unless they’re married to a celebrity, like Miranda Kerr and Orlando Bloom, which is more of a draw to the brand. [Kerr recently decided to hang up her Angel wings.]

After winning the competition, I signed with the top modeling agency in the world, IMG. Mike and I got an apartment in California, because that’s where a lot of the photo shoots are, but I was also flying to New York every other week for shoots there, too.

One of the first shoots I was sent on was at a photographer’s studio in Brooklyn to help build my portfolio. They raved about his artistic work.Mike stood outside while the photographer convinced me to slip on a nearly-sheer bikini.“Don’t worry, we’ll Photoshop it if it’s too sheer,” he assured me.

I tried not to think too much about it, but a couple of weeks later, I was Googling myself and saw that the photos had been uploaded onto a porn site.

It was heartbreaking for me, but even more heartbreaking for Mike. He was furious at the photographer and called our lawyer.

IMG said they would handle it, and they encouraged us not to take action. They sent a cease-and-desist letter to the photographer.

A week after showing up on the porn site, my agency booked me with Maxim, and then FHM shortly after that. They were men’s magazines, not pornography, but they were still selling sex.

The day after that FHM shoot, I knew my life had to change. I told my agent that I wouldn’t model lingerie anymore. So, they sent me to bathing-suit shoots. Then, I got a call to do the famous Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. But looking through the magazine, those bikinis are sometimes skimpier than lingerie. So I turned that down, too.

Two years after I won the Angel Search, I realized I didn’t want to model anything that sold sex. At the time, a Victoria’s Secret lingerie show was airing on TV, and I was looking at Twitter and saw loads of tweets from women comparing themselves to the impossible image of the models.

It made me think back to earlier in my modeling career, when my 8-year-old cousin was watching me put on makeup and said to me, “I’m going to throw up my food so I look like you.” I realized my career was sending a bad message to women about confidence and body image.

I was traveling with my husband on a business trip and, from the hotel room, I sent out my own tweet.

“I quit being a VS model to be a Proverbs 31 wife.”

(Proverbs 31 talks about being a virtuous and capable wife that a husband can trust. It says, “Charm is deceptive, and beauty does not last; but a woman who fears the Lord will be greatly praised.”)

I hadn’t modeled lingerie in months, but it was the first time I’d gone public with my reason. Surprisingly, my agent, who I hadn’t warned about the tweet, was supportive of my decision. The only backlash I got was from some models I know who felt judged by my decision who commented on my tweets.

Quitting modeling has probably cost me millions of dollars. Victoria’s Secret Angels have the longest careers in the business. Even after they stop modeling lingerie, they can go on to host TV shows, like Heidi Klum, or design clothes, like Gisele.

But I’ve never been more content. These days, I’m living in Montana with my husband. Mike is the best Italian cook, and just last night, we canned 40 jars of fresh pasta sauce.

I no longer restrict what I eat. I weigh 124 pounds right now, but my ideal weight is 125. I want young girls to see me at a healthy size.

After my infamous tweet, I turned down an offer to do “Dancing With the Stars” and an opportunity to act on a show on The CW because I didn’t think it was promoting the right message. I didn’t want to dance with a man other than my husband on the reality show or shoot scenes in a bikini for The CW.  ( Story continues)

 

 

Error of Man: Middle School Girls Forced to Ask Classmates for ‘Lesbian Kiss’ During Anti-Bullying Presentation

By: Heather Clark Christiannews.net

Red Hook, New York – A recent anti-bullying presentation at a middle school in New York that focused on homosexuality and gender identity has angered parents after their daughters have come home to tell them they were forced to ask another girl for a kiss.

According to reports, the session occurred last week at Linden Avenue Middle School in Red Hook, New York, near Poughkeepsie. A group of students from Bard College led two workshops for the youth, separated by gender.

During the workshop for girls, the 13 and 14-year-olds were told to ask one another for a kiss. They were also taught words such as “pansexual” and “genderqueer.”

Parent Mandy Coon told reporters that her daughter was very uncomfortable with the exercise.

“She told me, ‘Mom, we all get teased and picked on enough; now I’m going to be called a lesbian because I had to ask another girl if I could kiss her,’” she lamented. “They also picked two girls to stand in front of the class and pretend they were lesbians on a date.”

Coon stated that she was especially irate over the matter because parents were given no warning about the presentations, nor an opportunity to opt out. She is also dismayed that college students were granted the right to come into the classroom and encourage her daughter to be sexually active.

“I am furious,” she declared. “I am her parent. Where does anyone get the right to tell her that it’s okay for her to have sex?”

“The school is overstepping its bounds in not notifying parents first and giving us the choice,” another parent remarked. “I thought it was very inappropriate. That kind of instruction is best left up to the parents.”

According to reports, during the workshop for the adolescent boys, the students were counseled to keep a condom in their pocket at all times, and were taught how to identify a woman who is a “slut.”

“I was absolutely furious – really furious,” an anonymous parent told reporter Todd Starnes. “These are just kids. I’m dumbfounded that they found this class was appropriate.”

However, both the school principal and the district superintendent are defending the workshops, and are advising that they will schedule more. Superintendent Paul Finch told The Poughkeepsie Journal that the presentation was “focused on improving culture, relationships, communication and self-perceptions.”

“[We] may require more notification to parents” in the future, he said, contending that the sessions are required under the state Dignity for All Students Act, which prohibits harassment and bullying in the classroom.

He advised that Principal Katie Zahedi and guidance counselors at the school worked with Bard students to plan the workshops. Likewise, Mark Primoff, a spokesman for Bard College, said that students had volunteered to give the presentation after the school invited the institution of higher learning to participate in the workshops.

Zahedi asserts that the sessions were rather about saying no to unwanted advances as opposed to encouraging homosexual acts.

“In planning the discussion, we made it clear that absolutely no discussion of any sexual acts is appropriate to middle school, and they used the examples of a kiss,” she wrote in an online forum for parents. “It was a separate activity for boys and girls and ultimately about respect and safety.”

However, parents remain livid over the matter. A public meeting was held this week for residents to express their concerns.

It is not known whether girls actually had to kiss one another, or if the exercise stopped at the request.

A True Church Perspective – Christians Don’t Cuss! The Trouble with Cussing Christians Do Christians have a unique call to avoid strong language?

By Carolyn Arends Christianitytoday.com

Recently, rushing late to my son’s orthodontic appointment, I missed a critical left turn. Much to my surprise, I exhaled a “bad” word by our family’s standards. (Please understand, dental receptionists don’t suffer tardiness lightly, and my punctuality track record isn’t strong.)

“Mom!” exclaimed my children.

“What?” I stammered, feigning innocence, and adding the sin of deception to strong language.

Apparently my mother was right all along. One sin leads to another. And we shouldn’t use bad words.

Except … it’s cool these days to be a Christian who swears. It gives the curser an “I’m into Jesus, but I’m not legalistic” badge. A recent tweet about a behavioral study that linked swearing and honesty went viral among my church friends (although no one could produce a link to the actual study). Many of these friends point to the arbitrariness of the cuss-word system.

“What if table was a swear word?” asked my daughter. “Or elbow?”

She has a point. There is something absurd about the designation of particular words as profane. And yet, neither tablenor elbow is in the curse category, and the majority of swear words have earned their designation according to a certain logic. Other than words associated with deity, most profanity involves associations with biological function in the areas of sexuality and waste elimination. The God-related curses are right off the table, if one takes the third commandment seriously at all. But what is a Christian to do with the remaining “strong language”?

All language is a kind of social contract. We agree—as heirs of centuries of etymological development—to call the pointy thing in our arm an elbow, just like we agree to label things we find despicable with words we identify as profane. The words themselves hold only the power we give them. But curse words tend to be powerful indeed, because to linguistically reduce something or someone to the level of biological functions (and their resultant products) is almost always an act of contempt. And contempt is toxic.

In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell describes the work of psychologist John Gottman. In Gottman’s lab, spouses were asked to discuss something mildly contentious while sensors recorded their physiological responses. After years of studying the nuances of these exchanges, Gottman became startlingly successful at predicting which couples would divorce. The most telling indicators, he claims, are expressions of contempt. An eye roll or a mildly disdainful put-down was more worrisome than outright conflict. In fact, the presence of contempt in a marriage affects not only the survival of the relationship, but even the immune systems of the parties involved; spouses who live with chronic contempt get more colds than those who don’t.

Contempt is a mixture of anger and disgust, expressed from a position of superiority. It denigrates, devalues, and dismisses. It’s not hard to understand why even subtle levels of contempt are damaging—not only in marriages but in all human interaction.

If profane language has a privileged place in the lexicon of contempt, then Christians have a unique mandate to avoid profanity. It’s not that abstaining from pejorative language outfits us with some holier-than-thou halo. It’s that we are called to live with a servant’s heart, affirming the dignity of every human and the sacredness of existence.

Theologian John Stackhouse points out that our primary vocation as Christ followers is not to “stay pure,” but rather to cultivate shalom. From Isaiah’s picture of a wolf living peacefully with a lamb (11:6), to Paul’s description of a new reality that obliterates racial, socioeconomic, and gender-based power structures (Gal. 3:28), the biblical vision of shalom dissolves any notion of hierarchy. All of creation joyfully submits to the beautiful rule of its Creator. There’s no room for one creature to hold another creature (or creation itself) in contempt; God alone occupies a superior plane.

Of course, it’s possible to religiously avoid disdainful language while being seized with contemptuous thoughts. But, as the Book of James reminds us, our tongues are like rudders to the ships of our thought lives. Taming our language, in other words, is a good place to start.

And so I am trying to avoid language that expresses contempt towards people, situations, and yes, even traffic lights that dare to defy my will. Such an endeavor goes beyond comedian George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television”—even the most innocuous words, if uttered from a contemptuous heart, can mutate into curses. Conversely, certain evils can indeed be worthy of contempt and there are times when “adult language” is appropriate. But in every case, our words should reflect our calling to participate in hallowing, rather than profaning, the world. If it’s truly stronglanguage that we’re after—language with power and impact—what could be stronger than the language we use to cultivate shalom?

TBHH: Hip hop is the symptom of social ills because of fatherlessness

ESPN’s Chris Broussard: Hip hop is symptom of social ills, not root cause

By David Daniels, The Daily Caller

Hip hop is often blamed for negatively impacting American culture, but Chris Broussard, an ESPN NBA insider and the president of Christian men’s movement K.I.N.G., believes critics are missing the big picture.

“Hip hop is a symptom of the problem,” Broussard told The Daily Caller. “It’s not the root cause of the problem.”

Al Sharpton criticized hip hop in the wake of radio host Don Imus’ “nappy-headed hoes” on-air comment. Actress Ashley Judd blamed hip hop and its “rape culture” for promoting misogamy, and conservative talker Rush Limbaugh argued hip hop promotes the use of words like ”slut” and “prostitute,” which he took heat for using last year to describe liberal activist Sandra Fluke. And a Fox News personality John Gibson has suggested the hip-hop culture plays a role in marijuana use and even some deadly shootings, like a 2007 attack at an Ohio school. Broussard admitted hip hop exacerbates some problems, but stressed that systemic cultural failings are the real issue.“[Young rappers] are writing about the things that they see and may, in some cases, experience in their neighborhoods,” said Broussard. “Poverty, injustice, crime, fatherlessness, family breakdown — because all this exists in their community, they’re writing about it.”Broussard cited the results of two studies released in 2013 by the Sentencing Commission and researchers at Brandeis University’s Institute on Assets and Social Policy. Black males typically receive prison sentences that are approximately 20 percent longer than the sentences received by white males who commit similar crimes, according to the Sentencing Commission. That percentage has increased since the 2005 restoration of judicial discretion in sentencing.“You’ll literally have black people going to prison for crimes that white people are not going to prison for,” said Broussard. “This impacts the family.”Home ownership is 28 percent higher for white families than it is for black ones, according to the researchers at Brandeis University’s Institute on Assets and Social Policy. Their study revealed that among the households whose wealth grew from 1984-2009, white families’ wealth grew 30 percent faster than black families’ did. Family income, college education, inheritance and unemployment accounted for 65 percent of that gap. A young white male from suburbia may receive a slap on the wrist for marijuana possession and go on with his life like nothing happened, Broussard said. Meanwhile, a young black male may go to prison, which would earn him a criminal record, cost him a job and disrupt his education — consequences than can lead to fatherlessness.Bizzle, a God Over Money Records hip-hop artist, recently released the single “Dear Hip Hop,” a letter addressing complaints about the musical culture that commentators like Sharpton and Limbaugh often make.

Hiphop practically raised me,” Bizzle told TheDC. “Everything that I saw my favorite rappers doing, I wanted to do, and everything I saw them being, I wanted to be.”He said that, while his father was in the picture growing up, he wasn’t in the house. He said his mother — and hip hop — helped raise him.

Bizzle explained that “Dear Hip Hop” told the story of how the genre shaped his perception growing up. He believes hip hop numbs its listeners to issues like violence and degradation of women.

“[Social ills] that we might have been offended by or saw as wicked, we see as normal now, because we’ve singing about it for five years to different records,” said Bizzle. ”Hip hop in general, you’ve got a lot of [big-name] rappers like your Lil Waynes or your Rick Rosses, who are very influential, and of course I think there’s a better way to use that influence and really paint a full picture of reality.”

The artist admitted that before he became Christian, he rapped about whatever would earn him the most money. Selfishness fueled him. He didn’t care about the repercussions, or potentially twisting his listeners’ perceptions of reality.

When artists don’t care about their listeners, negative influence is inevitable, he said.

“I don’t see hip hop as a compartmentalized part of culture,” Dr. Terriel Byrd, president of the African American Caucus of the Academy of Homiletics of North America, told TheDC. ”I just see it as a part of the culture in which we live. So, it’s going to influence the lives of people in the culture because it’s a part of culture.”

Byrd added that hip hop transcends racial, ethnic and cultural lines.

“Music that [some rappers] are putting out is reaching people who don’t live in that neighborhood and reality,” said Broussard. “It’s impacting and making them want to do those [negative] things. You have young kids who are from nice, two-parent households who have a good education, and they may be dumbing themselves down to act like the rapper that they idolize.”  //end//.

“.. The community rare up and used it as an opportunity to attack our hip hop station, wanted me to change the music and play positive hip hop and things of that nature,” said Alfred Higgins, Radio One President and CEO  ”I had to explain to them that there is a segment of the population that wants this music, your kids, your young adults in your family. That radio station, that hip hop station by the way is the number one station in the market and we make a lot of money..”

EX Times editors response:

This has been an ongoing argument since Calvin butts and the late C. Deloris Tucker, who both led a fight against gangsta rap during the 1980s.  However in 2013 can we assume that Bizzle, Lecrae  and the Christian Hip hop community are the remedy to this negative images within the (Hip hop) sub culture? Do we now give the world a not so “preachy” socially imperfect-gospel with a sincere hope of healing?  Image this, “dear Hip hop (dear momma), we are writing you a letter but at the same time we want to authentically be you. We need the larger platforms, BET, MTV, VHI etc. so we can be heard by those in the industry who publicly embrace our talent but reject our message.”

But the message of sex, drugs, violence and death sells and positivity don’t according to Alfred C. Liggins III, President and CEO of Radio One.Since when has good music been the answer to the many deficits within the black community and the American Culture?  That methodology is equivalent to placing vaseline on a gunshot wound.  After all, the so called “authentically Christian, authentically hip hopper” still suffers from an identify crisis of his own. They seek affirmation and the approval from the same symptom of social ills identified as Hiphop. Even after the music STOPS, its Hip hop Idolatry.

Lecrae Church Clothes – Co sign “I am so authentic, I am so authentic. They try to figure me out, but this is not a gimmick. Hi  Hip Hop. Don’t act like you don’t know me, We got the same momma. Don’t you try to disown me..”

The article cited that one of  many issues are fatherlessness and the destruction of the family.  If there were more fathers taking responsible for their families and operating within their God given created roles we wouldn’t have a subculture of angry and rejected  youth. ( Malachi 4:6)  However what about the churches and their role in the community. What about the greatest message of Hope, the  saving Gospel?

Some would suggest that God is raising up Indigenous or urban evangelist to engaging the CULTURE. Well check (Acts 17) again. Paul didn’t use his talents to redeem subcultures. In Athens he was never seen going into theaters to perform Pantomime to reach the youth. The apostles didn’t hangout in the bath houses bathing with prostitutes and passing out Jesus tracks.  They never went out into the music halls singing and performing to get the people of athens to believe the gospel and nor did they use a myriad of ministries to bait and switch people with a positive alternative. Paul preached Christ and him crucified without using art and entertainment. (2 Timothy 4:2)  Paul and the Apostles would have never subscribe to a seeker sensitive approach to the gospel. They would have forbidden The Purpose Driven Church philosophy and the ministry of Pragmatism.

“But Jesus ate with sinners,” well the sinners came looking for him at Matthews house. (Matthew 9:10). Jesus didn’t go looking for them so he can look and act like them to win them.The Gospel being lives and preached is the only answer and Jesus Christ is the only way. Not the Arts, Music or a sub culture. (Romans 10:14, John 14:6).

The antidote to the social ills will always be Christ and him alone. They won’t be drawn by you or your methods but by His spirit.