THE CHURCH MILITANT
Ephesians 5:11-"And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them". This Christian News Blog maintains a one stop resource of current news and reports of its own related to church, moral, spiritual, and related political issues, plus articles, and postings from other online discernment ministries, and media which share the aims to obey the biblical commands to shed light on and refute error, heresy, apostasy, cults, and spiritual abuse.
The number of state-level bills being presented to outlaw abortion is increasing nationwide, with more lawmakers submitting legislation to ignore and defy Roe. Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Indiana are all currently considering legislation that would protect the unborn as persons and criminalize the act of abortion as murder.
As previously reported, in Idaho, Rep. Heather Scott, R-Blanchard, and Rep. John Green, R-Post Falls, have introduced the Idaho Abortion Human Rights Act, which would remove an exemption for abortion from the state’s homicide laws.
“Idaho code defines a fetus as a human and says killing a human is murder. Abortion is in contradiction to the inalienable rights recognized in the Idaho Constitution, and the State of Idaho has the authority to nullify federal laws that would allow abortions,” the bill reads in part.
A number of Idaho pastors have also joined together to release a “Mercy Statement” in support of Scott and Green’s legislation.
“We hereby appeal to our elected lawmakers to establish laws that will ensure this right [to life] be properly applied to every child in the womb. We even go as far as to stand ready to make available safe homes to every unwanted child within the land,” it reads. “We give our hearty agreement with the proposed language of the Idaho Abortion Human Rights Act. We are asking you to do what is right in the eyes of God and pass this bill.”
In Texas, Rep. Tony Tinderholt, R-Arlington, has again presented the Abolition of Abortion in Texas Act, which was first filed in 2017 in response to language in the Texas Republican Party platform that calls for “legislation stopping the murder of unborn children; and to ignore and refuse to enforce any and all federal statutes, regulations, executive orders, and court rulings, which would deprive an unborn child of the right to life.”
“A living human child, from the moment of fertilization upon the fusion of a human spermatozoon with a human ovum, is entitled to the same rights, powers, and privileges as are secured or granted by the laws of this state to any other human child,” the bill reads in part.
Similarly, in Oklahoma, Sen. Joseph Silk, R-Broken Bow, has re-filed Senate Bill 13, which outlines that the definition of a human being includes the unborn, and “from the moment of fertilization.”
Therefore, under existing state homicide statutes, which define the crime as “the killing of one human being by another,” the unborn would be equally protected, and specifically regarding “acts which cause the death of an unborn child committed during an abortion.”
“Any federal statute, regulation, executive order or court decision which purports to supersede, stay or overrule this [bill] is in violation of the Constitution of the State of Oklahoma and the Constitution of the United States of America and is therefore void,” the bill also declares.
In South Carolina, State Sen. Richard Cash, R-Anderson, and state Rep. Josiah Magnuson, R-Spartanburg, have sponsored the Personhood Act, which “acknowledges that personhood is God-given, as all men are created in the image of God” and “[t]he right to life for each born and preborn human being vests at fertilization.”
It also outlines that if a woman’s life is at risk, “the physician shall make reasonable medical efforts under the circumstances to preserve both the life of the mother and the life of the preborn human being in a manner consistent with accepted medical standards.”
Last month, Indiana Rep. Curt Nisly, R-Goshen, re-filed the “Protection at Conception” bill, House Bill 1430, which “redefines ‘human being’ for the purposes of the criminal code to conform to the finding that human physical life begins when a human ovum is fertilized by a human sperm.”
It also nixes language in state statutes pertaining to the allowance and the regulation of abortion in Indiana.
When Nisly filed the legislation last year, he plainly declared that the purpose of the bill is “to bring the Roe v. Wade era to its logical conclusion” and “to deregulate abortion right out of existence in Indiana.”
“I am pleased how mainstream this approach has become across the country over the last few years,” Nisly said in a statement. “There are many other states that are considering protection of life legislation, and the federal government also had a bill last year that acquired 117 sponsors, including 3 congressmen from Indiana.”
Similar bills were filed in Colorado and Missouri in 2016 and 2017, respectively, but were unsuccessful.
As previously reported, even in early America, the belief that abortion is murder was not uncommon.
Wharton
Philadelphia legal writer, educator and Christian apologist Francis Wharton, who wrote several books on American law, penned an entire chapter on abortion in his book “American Criminal Law,” published in 1855.
Wharton called abortionists “persons who are ready to degrade their humanity to this occupation” and stated in regard to abortion in general, “Such conduct cannot be too strongly condemned, and is the more deserving of receiving the punishment awarded for the criminal offense in question.”
In 1850, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court became the first high court in the nation to declare that abortion must be prohibited at any stage of gestation for any reason. While other state courts allowed preborn babies to be aborted up to four months of gestation by reason of a “quickening” theory, which stated that a person was not protected until the mother felt them kicking in the womb, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court would accept no such argument.
In Mills v. Commonwealth, the court declared that the theory “is not … the law in Pennsylvania, and ought never to have been the law anywhere.” The ruling became a strong precedent that other state courts began to review and follow.
By the 1900’s, due to the influence of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, nearly every state in the nation prohibited abortion for any reason, with the exception of Arkansas, Mississippi and North Carolina.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. —Two lawmakers in Tennessee have again filed a bill that declares the State’s intent to only recognize “natural marriage” and consider “void” and “of no effect” the 2015 Obergefell Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex “marriage” nationwide.
According to The Tennessean, the “Tennessee Natural Marriage Defense Act” has been re-filed for the 2019 legislative session. Put forward by Sen. Mark Pody, R-Lebanon, and Rep. Jerry Sexton, R-Bean Station, the bill asserts state sovereignty on the issue of marriage and proclaims that the Supreme Court “is not the sole and final arbiter of the powers of the states.”
“[T]he United States Supreme Court is not infallible, and has issued lawless decisions which are repulsive to the Constitution and natural law,” it declares, noting the cases of Scott v. Sandford, Buck v. Bell, Korematsu v. United States and Roe v. Wade, as well as Obergefell v. Hodges.
The bill also points to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which a number of states refused to follow, along with the Scott decision, “as they were a violation of the rule of law and of natural law.”
It cites the Virginia Resolution of December 24, 1798, which said that the states “have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights, and liberties appertaining to them.”
The legislation additionally quotes from Sir William Blackstone, whose Commentaries on the Common Law were used by attorneys and the courts throughout early America. Blackstone taught that a man’s rights come from God, and that all law must be based on God’s law.
“[The] law of nature, being coeval with mankind and dictated by God himself, is, of course, superior in any obligation to any other,” Blackstone stated. “It is binding over all the globe in all countries, and at all times; no human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this.”
The Blackstone Institute outlines that “[i]t was only in the mid-Twentieth Century that American law, being re-written by the U. S. Supreme Court, repudiated Blackstone.”
The bill, therefore, declares that “[n]atural marriage between one (1) man and one (1) woman as recognized by the people of Tennessee remains the law in Tennessee, regardless of any court decision to the contrary. Any court decision purporting to strike down natural marriage, including Obergefell v. Hodges is unauthoritative, void, and of no effect.”
The Tennessee Marriage Protection Amendment, put before voters in 2006 to add an amendment to the state Constitution affirming that “the relationship of one man and one woman shall be the only legally recognized marital contract in this state,” passed with 81 percent of the vote. Pody and Sexton believe that the will of the people should be upheld.
This will be the fourth year that Pody and Sexton have filed their Natural Marriage Defense Act, as attempts for passage in 2016, 2017 and 2018 were unsuccessful. Sexton told The Tennessean that while he is unsure if the bill has a greater chance this time, there are some new faces in the legislature that might be sympathetic to the effort.
“I think we’re probably a more conservative legislature now than we have been, but that remains to be seen,” he said.
2 Chronicles 9:16 reads, “And [he] said to the judges, ‘Take heed what ye do: for ye judge not for man, but for the Lord, who is with you in the judgment.’”
“When you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks” (Qur’an 47:4)
Sunnis consider Shi’ites to be unbelievers, and have attacked them frequently throughout Islam’s 1400-year history. But there is no reason to be concerned about this: Saudi authorities are claiming that the cab driver is “mentally ill.” They likely picked up that idea from Western authorities, who have been routinely claiming that jihadis are mentally ill for years now.
“Taxi driver hauls boy, six, from cab then ‘beheads’ him with shard of glass as his screaming mother fought to save him in Saudi Arabia,” by Dianne Apen-Sadler, Mailonline, February 9, 2019 (thanks to Mick):
A six-year-old boy was reportedly beheaded with a shard of glass as his mother desperately tried to save him in Saudi Arabia.
Zakaria Al-Jaber was in a taxi with his mother on their way to the shrine of Prophet Muhammad in Medina when the driver stopped the car and forced the boy out.
He dragged him to an area near a coffee shop in the Al-Tilal neighborhood, before smashing a glass bottle, reports TMV.
The taxi driver slit his throat with a shard of glass before stabbing him repeatedly as both his mother and a nearby police officer attempted to stop the brutal attack.
It is not known why the driver attacked the boy, but Saudi officials have reportedly claimed he was suffering from mental health issues.
Shia Rights Watch have claimed the boy was killed on Thursday in an act of sectarian violence.
The group said that an unknown man had asked the mother if she was Shia moments before the attack happened….
Shia Rights Watch, whose headquarters are in Washington D.C., said the beheading must be addressed ASAP….
In 2011, Obama ordered the removal of all mention of Islam and jihad from counter-terror training, making it difficult, if not impossible, for law enforcement and intelligence officials to understand the motivating ideology of jihad terrorists. Trump has been under tremendous pressure to fall into line with this thinking, which claims that we only encourage the jihadis if we identify them properly. He has not yet, however, removed all the obstacles that Obama placed in the way of the intelligence community knowing and understanding the enemy, and his “radical” adjective is incorrect: the jihadis are well within the mainstream of Islamic theology and law. Still, this is progress, albeit slow, toward a realistic appraisal of what we are up against, which has been lacking since September 17, 2001, when George W. Bush proclaimed that Islam was a religion of peace.
“WATCH: Trump Vows to Stomp Out ‘Radical Islamic Terror’ at Anti-ISIS Conference,” United with Israel, February 7, 2019 (thanks to the Geller Report):
Unlike his predecessor, the current U.S. president is not afraid to single out the ideology behind Mideast strife, from terrorism in Israel to Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons.
U.S. President Donald Trump addressed the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS after his State of the Union speech just one day prior.
Trump got straight to the point, vowing that the U.S. would continue to fight the forces of “radical Islamic terror,” and vanquish the Islamic State (ISIS), an ultra-violent group that has murdered and pillaged its way through Iraq and large swaths of Syria for the past five years or so.
While ISIS is on the ropes, it is holed up in a concentrated area, with a handful of never-say-die adherents refusing to surrender. If Trump has his way, these remnants of ISIS will be taken care of as well.
Yet another convert to Islam gets the idea that his new religion commands him to commit treason and mass murder. Despite the fact that this is a frequently occurring phenomenon, authorities have nowhere shown the slightest degree of interest in studying it.
“Anderson man, who warned of jihad, sentenced to 30 years for using homemade explosives,” by Daniel J. Gross, Anderson Independent Mail, February 8, 2019:
An Anderson man who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State has been sentenced for using weapons of mass destruction after authorities found several homemade explosive devices around Anderson County.
Wesley Dallas Ayers, 27, was sentenced to more than 30 years in federal prison and five years of supervised release after previously pleading guilty, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced Friday.
Ayers admitted that he constructed and placed three explosive devices in various parts of Anderson County between Jan. 24, 2018 and Feb. 24, 2018, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Ayers pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in letters and warned of a jihad, according to investigators’ testimony in a federal court hearing before he pleaded guilty.
One of the devices, placed at the intersection of Travis and Martin roads in Anderson County, detonated and injured one person, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The other two devices were located and intercepted by law enforcement before they caused any harm.
Three hoax devices were also placed around Anderson County that resembled explosives but were not. In some devices, Ayers left notes indicating that more powerful devices were to come, according to the statement.
His arrest came after a month-long investigation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the Anderson County Sheriff’s Office and various other law enforcement agencies.
Authorities searched Ayers’ property that showed items consistent with the manufacturing of explosive devices.
The Pope of Islam goes to the UAE and gets played for a fool by Muslim sharpies. My latest in FrontPage:
Pope Francis and the Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar, Ahmed el-Tayeb, have published “A Document On Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together” during the Pope’s trip to the United Arab Emirates. It’s as filled with falsehoods and wishful thinking as one would expect coming from a practiced deceiver such as el-Tayeb and someone so eager to be deceived as Pope Francis.
Here’s one of its egregiously false statements:
Terrorism is deplorable and threatens the security of people, be they in the East or the West, the North or the South, and disseminates panic, terror and pessimism, but this is not due to religion, even when terrorists instrumentalize it. It is due, rather, to an accumulation of incorrect interpretations of religious texts and to policies linked to hunger, poverty, injustice, oppression and pride. This is why it is so necessary to stop supporting terrorist movements fuelled by financing, the provision of weapons and strategy, and by attempts to justify these movements even using the media. All these must be regarded as international crimes that threaten security and world peace. Such terrorism must be condemned in all its forms and expressions…
Terrorism is due to “an accumulation of incorrect interpretations of religious texts and to policies linked to hunger, poverty, injustice, oppression and pride.”
So are the authoritative sources in Sunni Islam, the schools of Sunni jurisprudence (madhahib), all incorrect in their interpretations of the Qur’an and Sunnah? Here is what they say about jihad warfare against non-Muslims:
Shafi’i school: A Shafi’i manual of Islamic law that was certified in 1991 by the clerics at Al-Azhar University, one of the leading authorities in the Islamic world, as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy, stipulates about jihad that “the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians…until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax.” It adds a comment by Sheikh Nuh Ali Salman, a Jordanian expert on Islamic jurisprudence: the caliph wages this war only “provided that he has first invited [Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians] to enter Islam in faith and practice, and if they will not, then invited them to enter the social order of Islam by paying the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya)…while remaining in their ancestral religions.” (‘Umdat al-Salik, o9.8).
Of course, there is no caliph today, and hence the oft-repeated claim that Osama et al are waging jihad illegitimately, as no state authority has authorized their jihad. But they explain their actions in terms of defensive jihad, which needs no state authority to call it, and becomes “obligatory for everyone” (‘Umdat al-Salik, o9.3) if a Muslim land is attacked. The end of the defensive jihad, however, is not peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims as equals: ‘Umdat al-Salik specifies that the warfare against non-Muslims must continue until “the final descent of Jesus.” After that, “nothing but Islam will be accepted from them, for taking the poll tax is only effective until Jesus’ descent” (o9.8).
Hanafi school: A Hanafi manual of Islamic law repeats the same injunctions. It insists that people must be called to embrace Islam before being fought, “because the Prophet so instructed his commanders, directing them to call the infidels to the faith.” It emphasizes that jihad must not be waged for economic gain, but solely for religious reasons: from the call to Islam “the people will hence perceive that they are attacked for the sake of religion, and not for the sake of taking their property, or making slaves of their children, and on this consideration it is possible that they may be induced to agree to the call, in order to save themselves from the troubles of war.”
However, “if the infidels, upon receiving the call, neither consent to it nor agree to pay capitation tax [jizya], it is then incumbent on the Muslims to call upon God for assistance, and to make war upon them, because God is the assistant of those who serve Him, and the destroyer of His enemies, the infidels, and it is necessary to implore His aid upon every occasion; the Prophet, moreover, commands us so to do.” (Al-Hidayah, II.140)
Maliki school: Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a pioneering historian and philosopher, was also a Maliki legal theorist. In his renowned Muqaddimah, the first work of historical theory, he notes that “in the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” In Islam, the person in charge of religious affairs is concerned with “power politics,” because Islam is “under obligation to gain power over other nations.”
Hanbali school: The great medieval theorist of what is commonly known today as radical or fundamentalist Islam, Ibn Taymiyya (Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya, 1263-1328), was a Hanbali jurist. He directed that “since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.”
This is also taught by modern-day scholars of Islam. Majid Khadduri was an Iraqi scholar of Islamic law of international renown. In his book War and Peace in the Law of Islam, which was published in 1955 and remains one of the most lucid and illuminating works on the subject, Khadduri says this about jihad:
The state which is regarded as the instrument for universalizing a certain religion must perforce be an ever-expanding state. The Islamic state, whose principal function was to put God’s law into practice, sought to establish Islam as the dominant reigning ideology over the entire world….The jihad was therefore employed as an instrument for both the universalization of religion and the establishment of an imperial world state. (P. 51)
Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, Assistant Professor on the Faculty of Shari’ah and Law of the International Islamic University in Islamabad. In his 1994 book The Methodology of Ijtihad, he quotes the twelfth century Maliki jurist Ibn Rushd: “Muslim jurists agreed that the purpose of fighting with the People of the Book…is one of two things: it is either their conversion to Islam or the payment of jizyah.” Nyazee concludes: “This leaves no doubt that the primary goal of the Muslim community, in the eyes of its jurists, is to spread the word of Allah through jihad, and the option of poll-tax [jizya] is to be exercised only after subjugation” of non-Muslims.
How did someone with incorrect interpretations of religious texts become a professor on the Faculty of Shari’ah and Law at International Islamic University?
Anyway, as for the idea that poverty causes terrorism, it’s just a call for Western nations to write more checks to governments of Muslim countries. It’s also demonstrably false. The New York Times reported that “not long after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001…Alan B. Krueger, the Princeton economist, tested the widespread assumption that poverty was a key factor in the making of a terrorist. Mr. Krueger’s analysis of economic figures, polls, and data on suicide bombers and hate groups found no link between economic distress and terrorism.”
CNS News noted in September 2013 that “according to a Rand Corporation report on counterterrorism, prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2009, ‘Terrorists are not particularly impoverished, uneducated, or afflicted by mental disease. Demographically, their most important characteristic is normalcy (within their environment). Terrorist leaders actually tend to come from relatively privileged backgrounds.’ One of the authors of the RAND report, Darcy Noricks, also found that according to a number of academic studies, ‘Terrorists turn out to be more rather than less educated than the general population.’”
Yet the analysis that poverty causes terrorism has been applied and reapplied and reapplied again. And now here is the Pope signing on to this falsehood.
Here is another of the statements from the Pope/Tayeb document – one that raises questions about el-Tayeb’s sincerity:
Freedom is a right of every person: each individual enjoys the freedom of belief, thought, expression and action. The pluralism and the diversity of religions, color, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings. This divine wisdom is the source from which the right to freedom of belief and the freedom to be different derives. Therefore, the fact that people are forced to adhere to a certain religion or culture must be rejected, as too the imposition of a cultural way of life that others do not accept…
Great. But el-Tayeb said this as recently as 2016:
Contemporary apostasy presents itself in the guise of crimes, assaults, and grand treason, so we deal with it now as a crime that must be opposed and punished….Those learned in Islamic law and the imams of the four schools of jurisprudence consider apostasy a crime and agree that the apostate must either renounce his apostasy or else be killed.
Has el-Tayeb renounced this view? Doubtful, since it is standard Islam. The death penalty for apostasy is part of Islamic law. It’s based on the Qur’an: “They wish you would disbelieve as they disbelieved so you would be alike. So do not take from among them allies until they emigrate for the cause of Allah. But if they turn away, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them and take not from among them any ally or helper.” (Qur’an 4:89)
A hadith depicts Muhammad saying: “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him” (Bukhari 9.84.57). The death penalty for apostasy is part of Islamic law according to all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence.
This is still the position of all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence, both Sunni and Shi’ite. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most renowned and prominent Muslim cleric in the world, has stated: “The Muslim jurists are unanimous that apostates must be punished, yet they differ as to determining the kind of punishment to be inflicted upon them. The majority of them, including the four main schools of jurisprudence (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali) as well as the other four schools of jurisprudence (the four Shiite schools of Az-Zaidiyyah, Al-Ithna-‘ashriyyah, Al-Ja’fariyyah, and Az-Zaheriyyah) agree that apostates must be executed.”
Qaradawi also once famously said: “If they had gotten rid of the apostasy punishment, Islam wouldn’t exist today.”
So has el-Tayeb departed from Islamic orthodoxy, or is he deceiving Pope Francis and trying to deceive the world?
The Pope is certainly thoroughly deceived. Back in the Vatican from the UAE, he told crowds: “Despite the diversity of cultures and traditions, the Christian and Islamic worlds appreciate and protect common values: life, family, religious sense, honor for the elderly, the education of the young, and others as well.”
Life? Yes, unless you’re not Muslim. In Islamic law, Muslim lives are explicitly worth more than those of non-Muslims. The Shafi’i Sharia manual Reliance of the Traveller dictates: “The indemnity for the death or injury of a woman is one-half the indemnity paid for a man. The indemnity paid for a Jew or Christian is one-third the indemnity paid for a Muslim. The indemnity paid for a Zoroastrian is one-fifteenth that of a Muslim.” (o4.9) Sikhs rank even lower, as they are not People of the Book.
The Shafi’i madhhab is not the only school of Islamic law that teaches this. The Iranian Shi’ite Sufi Sheikh Sultanhussein Tabandeh explains: “Thus if [a] Muslim commits adultery his punishment is 100 lashes, the shaving of his head, and one year of banishment. But if the man is not a Muslim and commits adultery with a Muslim woman his penalty is execution…Similarly, if a Muslim deliberately murders another Muslim he falls under the law of retaliation and must by law be put to death by the next of kin. But if a non-Muslim who dies at the hand of a Muslim has by lifelong habit been a non-Muslim, the penalty of death is not valid. Instead, the Muslim murderer must pay a fine and be punished with the lash….Since Islam regards non-Muslims as on a lower level of belief and conviction, if a Muslim kills a non-Muslim…then his punishment must not be the retaliatory death, since the faith and conviction he possesses is loftier than that of the man slain…Again, the penalties of a non-Muslim guilty of fornication with a Muslim woman are augmented because, in addition to the crime against morality, social duty and religion, he has committed sacrilege, in that he has disgraced a Muslim and thereby cast scorn upon the Muslims in general, and so must be executed….Islam and its peoples must be above the infidels, and never permit non-Muslims to acquire lordship over them.”
Family? Sure: a husband and his wife and his wife and his wife and his wife. Polygamy dehumanizes women. The Qur’an also calls for the beating of disobedient women (4:34), and Islam devalues women in numerous other ways.
The Pope has been played for a fool by deceptive sharpies including, but not limited to, Ahmed el-Tayeb.
In his weekly fatwa session, which he uploads to his YouTube channel, Kuwaiti cleric Othman Al-Khamis said that apostates must be killed. In a video uploaded on January 9, 2019, Sheikh Al-Khamis said that apostasy is tantamount to scorning Islam. In an October 14, 2015 video, Sheikh Al-Khamis said that only infidels may be enslaved, adding that people who do not worship Allah must convert to Islam, pay the jizya poll tax, be forced into slavery, or be fought against and killed. He urged people to not be ashamed of their religion and not to feel sorry for the apostates Al-Khamis added that people should not feel sorry for infidels who are punished for refusing to obey Allah.
The state of Virginia is in trouble. Recently it was discovered that Governor Ralph Northam’s 1984 yearbook reveals him in blackface or dressed as a Klan member. The yearbook photo was of a man in blackface and another man in a Klan costume. Northam was not sure which one he was; then he denied that he was even in the photo but he did confess that he had imitated Michael Jackson in blackface.
Gasp!
Everyone is aghast at such actions but few gagged and gasped for breath at the governor’s defense of killing newborn babies; so it seems blackface is anathema but baby killing is acceptable. President Trump was right when he declared, “All children, born and unborn, are made in the image of God.”
It got worse for the Democrat administration when the state’s Lt. Governor Justin E. Fairfax was accused of a 2004 sexual assault by a college professor. Then it was revealed that the Washington Post (champions of the double standard) had the story a year ago but refused to publish it. You may remember that they were not reticent to run an unsubstantiated story about Judge Brett Kavanaugh. But then, he is a Republican.
Then, another shoe dropped when Virginia’s Attorney General Mark R. Herring confessed to wearing blackface at a party in the 1980s—now all three top officeholders are in trouble.
Of course, like buzzards circling over a road kill, Al Sharpton showed up and called forcefully for Northam and Herring to resign saying, “If you sin, you must repent for the sin.” Such sanctimonious hypocrisy would gag the aforementioned buzzards. Sharpton is America’s number one race-baiter, with Jesse Jackson a close second. Sharpton has never answered for the Tawana Brawley hoax that destroyed six innocent men in 1987.
Tawana was 15 years old when she told police and reporters that she had been raped by six white men, including a local prosecutor and a police officer, who scrawled racial epithets on her body and left her in a vacant lot, according to The New York Times. Her lie, supported by Sharpton, ruined six men but made Al a television commentator on MSNBC although he has major problems reading plain English from his teleprompter. His show is seen by hundreds, maybe thousands of viewers.
Al is back doing his thing (race-baiting) since blackface is a terrible crime against humanity. But is it? Is it possible that one can do a blackface routine without being a racist?
It seems admitting doing blackface is worse than killing helpless babies. Most of Virginia’s Democrat leaders and many national Democrat leaders demanded that Northam resign. However, they were not concerned with him advocating the killing of newborn babies, just his blackface or KKK episode.
To most people, the photo of him (or whomever) in blackface and the other of a man in a KKK robe are equivalent. They are not. They are worlds apart. It must be remembered that the Klan was a white terrorist group of southern Democrats founded after the Civil War. A group of former Confederate veterans founded the first KKK as a social club in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1866. When it reached its peak in the 1920s, the membership had more than 4 million members in many states.
The KKK members (mostly Democrats) were incensed that Blacks were elected in the Reconstructed south (as Republicans) during the late 1860s. During those days, seven black politicians were killed by the Klan. Klan members adopted a white, hooded costume—a guise intended to represent the ghosts of the Confederate dead—to avoid identification and to frighten and intimidate white and black Republicans. The Klan specialized in murder, lynching, arson, rape, whippings, and bombings.
To condone or to defend the Klan is irresponsible; however, blackface should be looked at as the immature actions of college students who have more time than they have social consciences. The guilty Whites parading as Blacks were not necessarily bigots; only thoughtless morons. It is said that the earliest blackface performances stereotyped black men and women as “ignorant, hypersexual, superstitious, lazy people who were prone to thievery and cowardice.” After watching a blackface act in 1848, abolitionist Fredrick Douglass called the white performers “the filthy scum of white society” in his The North Star newspaper.
Yes, there was that aspect of blackface but there is another side also.
In the early 1900s, Blacks were played by white actors in blackface because the white elite did not think Blacks could learn their lines and fake emotions required by the script. Moreover, Blacks were banned from Broadway productions and were finally employed in movies as dumb, slow-talking, lazy, stumbling, or dangerous “darkies.” This practice was common into the 1930s. Then Al Jolson, in blackface, became a sensation to Blacks and Whites. Al Jolson was a Jewish immigrant who became the most famous and highest paid entertainer in America. He was considered “The World’s Greatest Entertainer.” He is perhaps best known for his portrayal of Blacks by wearing blackface.
While Jolson appeared in other roles, he became famous for The Jazz Singer where he won the hearts of Americans even in blackface. The oldest black newspaper in the nation Amsterdam News stated that The Jazz Singer in 1927 was “one of the greatest pictures ever produced,” and that, “Every colored performer is proud of him (Jolson).” Jolson chose to star in The Jazz Singer which defied racial bigotry by introducing black musicians to audiences worldwide.
Jolson introduced America to Black musicians and actors according to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture stating, “Almost single-handedly, Jolson helped to introduce African-American musical innovations like jazz, ragtime, and the blues to white audiences.”
Jolson, as a 25 year old, fought discrimination on Broadway and later in the movies. Furthermore, he promoted a play by Garland Anderson (a black) which became the first production with an all-black cast produced on Broadway. Jolson demanded equal treatment for Cab Calloway, with whom he performed duets in the movie The Singing Kid.
Noble Sissle was a black songwriter in the 1930s who declared, “[h]e was always the champion of the Negro songwriter and performer, and was first to put Negroes in his shows.”
Jeni LeGon, a black female tap dance star, recalls her life as a film dancer: “But of course, in those times it was a ‘black-and-white world.’ You didn’t associate too much socially with any of the stars. You saw them at the studio, you know, nice—but they didn’t invite. The only ones that ever invited us home for a visit was Al Jolson and Ruby Keeler.”
British performer Brian Conley, former star of the 1995 British play Jolson, stated during an interview, “I found out Jolson was actually a hero to the black people of America. At his funeral, black actors lined the way, they really appreciated what he’d done for them.”
No one considered Jolson a racist in his day and it is contemptible for moderns to make unfair, untrue, and unwarranted judgments about his blackface performances. Haters and bigots do not treat the object of their hatred as did Jolson. His blackface performances were not proof of bigotry, but were his way of helping black performers by putting first himself and then them in front of his audiences.
There is an inclination to judge the past in the light of modern standards. It is unreasonable to criticize early Americans and their relationship to Indians without knowing what it was like to live in constant fear of being scalped, raped, or burned alive while living in a lonely cabin many miles from assistance.
Likewise, it is unfair, even silly to hold anyone’s feet to the fire for what he or she did in college. I refuse to fault the governor or any other politician for doing blackface when they were younger; however, I do believe anyone who defends, promotes, and advocates the killing of babies should be recognized as baby butchers and be shunned by polite society.
Killing innocent, defective babies is not just a slippery slope; it is a bottomless pit.
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(Publisher’s comment: In my opinion this is one of Don’s best essays. I remember seeing Al Jolson perform many times in “Blackface” and considered him one of the greatest. Never one time did I ever consider him demeaning or belittling blacks. Would to God they were writing and singing those kinds of songs that he was singing now. Who can forget his, “Mammy”, and “That’s what I like about the south etc.”. Never was there a filthy or suggestive word that came from his mouth, never did he denigrate the negro race. The only thing I would add a little stronger to Bro. Don’s article is the hypocrisy of Northam’s Democratic supporters. They have been brutal against Kavanaugh and other so-called Republican “racists and “sexists”, but where are they now when we need them?)
He was commonly referred to as "the world's greatest entertainer!"
There hasn't been anyone quite like him since!
Stroll down the memory lane of music for melodies and reminiscences of the incomparable Al Jolson. A delightful collection of fashion hats and compelling tunes awaits you, including such signatures as:
