A Federal judge has ruled that honking your horn (in the City of Ferndale, MI - where the WLQV studios are located) is a form of protected speech!

Detroit’s mayor used his church (and his wife) tonight as props for an “apology” to the City of Detroit. If you listen carefully to what he said, he never apologized for his affair or for lying about it under oath. He apoligized “[F]or the embarrassment and the disappointment, the events of the past few days have caused you…” In other words, he didn’t apologize for his behavior, he apologized for the fact that the media had made it front page news.

The mayor’s speech was staged perfectly to make it appear that this is a personal matter that the media has overblown. The mayor’s philandering is certainly between him, his wife, and his family. However, lying under oath to cover it up is a public matter, and even more importantly, a legal matter. When a public official costs the tax payers in excess of $9 million dollars to settle a lawsuit stemming from his bad judgment, it is a public matter.

But alas, the city council of Detroit, the mayor’s pastor, and I fear even the prosecutor who is considering charges against the mayor lack the will to hold the man accountable for his actions.

One news report characterized the mayor as “humbled.” Was I watching the same speech? Tonight’s speech was over the top with arrogance, quickly diverging from “apology mode” to “I am in charge of the city,” followed by a litany of “successes” he has brought to the city since becoming mayor in 2002. He actually reassured the city he wasn’t going anywhere, as if his potential resignation was what has put the city on edge for the last ten days!

This city is in the grips of a crisis of spiritual authority characterized first by the moral failure of the mayor, second by the mayor’s pastor refusing to hold him spiritually accountable, and finally by elected public officials acting as accomplices by allowing this moral degenerate to continue to drag the city down with him.

ICHABOD! 1 Samuel 4:21

When Florida moved up its primary date the Democratic Party stripped them of their delegates and ALL of the Democratic candidates agreed NOT to campaign in the state in advance of today’s primary.

But of course the rules don’t apply to Hillary Rodham Clinton who has been operating a stealth campaign in the state for weeks, winning the Democratic Primary there tonight in a landslide and now saying today she will fight to get Florida’s delegates restored.

If Hillary can’t keep her word to her own party, how can she be trusted to keep her word as president?

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-flaclinton0128sbjan28,0,4122238.story

That’s how Chris Matthews summed up Giuliani dropping out, endorsing McCain, and Huckabee staying in at least through Super Tuesday to draw the social conservatives away from Romney.

McCain WILL BE the Republican nominee for president. How do the establishment conservatives who have aligned themselves against McCain - in sometimes very hurtful ways - coalesce around McCain to defeat Hillary in November? Have the Republicans shot themselves in the foot with their primary season treatment of the man who will be their nominee?

It would seem Barack Obama’s position on abortion depends on the audience to whom he is speaking when responding to questions about his views on the subject.

In a recently posted interview at Christianity Today, Barack said this about abortion:

I don’t know anybody who is pro-abortion. I think it’s very important to start with that premise. I think people recognize what a wrenching, difficult issue it is. I do think that those who diminish the moral elements of the decision aren’t expressing the full reality of it. But what I believe is that women do not make these decisions casually, and that they struggle with it fervently with their pastors, with their spouses, with their doctors.

Our goal should be to make abortion less common, that we should be discouraging unwanted pregnancies, that we should encourage adoption wherever possible. There is a range of ways that we can educate our young people about the sacredness of sex and we should not be promoting the sort of casual activities that end up resulting in so many unwanted pregnancies.

Ultimately, women are in the best position to make a decision at the end of the day about these issues. With significant constraints. For example, I think we can legitimately say — the state can legitimately say — that we are prohibiting late-term abortions as long as there’s an exception for the mother’s health. Those provisions that I voted against typically didn’t have those exceptions, which raises profound questions where you might have a mother at great risk. Those are issues that I don’t think the government can unilaterally make a decision about. I think they need to be made in consultation with doctors, they have to be prayed upon, or people have to be consulting their conscience on it. I think we have to keep that decision-making with the person themselves.

However, on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade he issued a statement highlighting his 100% pro-choice record:

Thirty-five years after the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, it’s never been more important to protect a woman’s right to choose. Last year, the Supreme Court decided by a vote of 5-4 to uphold the Federal Abortion Ban, and in doing so undermined an important principle of Roe v. Wade: that we must always protect women’s health. With one more vacancy on the Supreme Court, we could be looking at a majority hostile to a women’s fundamental right to choose for the first time since Roe v. Wade. The next president may be asked to nominate that Supreme Court justice. That is what is at stake in this election.

Throughout my career, I’ve been a consistent and strong supporter of reproductive justice, and have consistently had a 100% pro-choice rating with Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America.

In October of 2007, 138 Muslim clerics produced a letter adressed to Pope Benedict XVI and “to the leaders of all the world’s churches, and indeed to all Christians everywhere” seeking common ground for cooperation between Christianity and Islam. It is in reality a continuation of the original “open letter to the pope” written by 38 Muslim clerics in October 2006 in response to The Pope’s Regensburg Lecture in September of 2006 in which he quoted a 14th Century Byzantine emperor citing the inconsistency between Islamic holy war, or conversion by compulsion, with what the Q’uran itself teaches about compulsory conversion: it’s against it.

This new letter, timed for release on the first anniversary of the original open letter to the Pope,  has come to be known as ‘A Common Word Between Us and You.’ It focuses on what both the Q’uran and the Bible ostensiby say about loving one’s neighbor in the name of the One who is Love (Allah and/or Jehovah).  The Introduction to the Letter says in part:

Muslims and Christians together make up well over half of the world’s population. Without peace and justice between these two religious communities, there can be no meaningful peace in the world. The future of the world depends on peace between Muslims and Christians.

The basis for this peace and understanding already exists. It is part of the very foundational principles of both faiths: love of the One God, and love of the neighbour. These principles are found over and over again in the sacred texts of Islam and Christianity. The Unity of God, the necessity of love for Him, and the necessity of love of the neighbour is thus the common ground between Islam and Christianity.  

What could possibly be wrong with seeking dialogue and cooperation between Muslims and Christians? Wouldn’t many of the world’s tensions be relieved if Muslims and Christians could learn to live together in peace?

The Yale Center for Faith and Culture, representing a wide spectrum of evangelical Christianity, was quick to issue a conciliatory response to A Common Word (much to the dismay of conservative theologians within evangelicalism) which says in part:

We receive the open letter as a Muslim hand of conviviality and cooperation extended to Christians world-wide. In this response we extend our own Christian hand in return, so that together with all other human beings we may live in peace and justice as we seek to love God and our neighbors.

Muslims and Christians have not always shaken hands in friendship; their relations have sometimes been tense, even characterized by outright hostility. Since Jesus Christ says, “First take the log out your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye” (Matthew 7:5), we want to begin by acknowledging that in the past (e.g. in the Crusades) and in the present (e.g. in excesses of the “war on terror”) many Christians have been guilty of sinning against our Muslim neighbors. Before we “shake your hand” in responding to your letter, we ask forgiveness of the All-Merciful One and of the Muslim community around the world.

But is A Common Word Between Us and You what it appears? Dr. Peter Sookhdeo is the International Director of the Barnabas Fund and Director of the Institute for the Study of Christianity and Islam. Dr. Sookhdeo is also a convert to Christianity from Islam and an internationally recognized authority on Islam. We discussed ‘A Common Word’ on one of my recent programs.

What we have here is a Muslim polemic and second, Islamic Dawah because Islamic Dawah is Islamic mission. It’s taking the message to unbelievers to say to them, “This is who we are, this is what we are. We are very close to you. What is going to be the next step.” Islam at this moment in time, and the authors of this letter, are concerned with how they are going to make their faith appealing in such a way as to be embraced.

Now, I fully understand that there is a huge diversity in the 138 scholars. Not all of them may have this as their intention. The dilemma is, given the nature of Islam, practical Islam, and many of those who signed up from the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood, and others, we have to look at the nature of their faith, how they see it, and how they are wanting it understood and proclaimed in our day.

The problem with interfaith dialogue between Muslims and Christians is that we are not speaking the same language. What Islam means by love in its relationship to God and neighbor is not at all what Christianity means by the same terms:

The point about the open letter is this: love of God is not central in Islam; it is submission. Their own theologians, both past and present, would say, “Love is an attribute. Love is not in the nature of God. That’s blasphemous.”

Secondly, Islam does not teach love of neighbor. What it does is to define the duties one would have towards people around you according to shari’a. If I may give you a simple illustration: Last weekend the Al Azhar University in Cairo, which is the foremost theological institution in the world in Sunni Islam, issued a fatwah on reconversion, people who have converted to Islam are now not just to be apostate and killed, but rather their body parts are to be cut off until they die. Two of the signatories of the Yale response are the senior leaders of the Al Azhar. So the question is this: how can they on the one hand affirm ‘love of neighbor’ and on the other hand call for, effectively, the crucifixion of converts of Islam to Christianity? And this is where the issue of truth has become crucially important.

The reality is that it is very possible that the intention of the letter is to infiltrate Christianity with the message of Islam, softening any opposition to its teachings, so as to prepare Christians for an all-out embrace and ultimate submission to Islamic teaching, which after all is the goal of Islam: submission of every human being to Allah.

Looking at the common letter and the words which describe it out of the Q’uran, it sounds good until you look at the verse of the Q’uran in the context, and then you discover it is a dawah context, it actually attacks the Trinitarian position. So whilst on the surface the words are ok, when you look at it from the context you have a real problem.

Secondly, when the Yale letter responds by speaking of the Abrahamic faiths, it presupposes that Jews, Christians, and Muslims derive their faith from a common source, and so we are “Abrahamic faiths.” That presupposes that our understanding of God is the same. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, based on both the Old and New Testaments, we can accept the common understanding of God. In the Islamic tradition their understanding of God is radically different. And so, it’s difficult to understand how we can use the term “Abrahamic faiths.”

But furthermore, I would agree (and I’m sure we all would) that it is important for Muslims and Christians to sit together and discuss common problems which we all face in our world today. I think meetings of such a nature, I think is essential. Secondly, that Christians must love. At no point are we called to hate anyone. Christians have no enemies; we love our enemies. But herein lies the dilemma. If we’re going to sit down and discuss, what do we discuss? Is it fine points of theology which we have in common? Or is it going to be society, how we live together? So what is the position of Christian minorities in the Muslim world, human rights, and religious liberty? If we’re going to talk about, therefore, our understanding of God in that context then it must begin to shape that kind of discussion. And this is where I think the Yale letter has fallen short, because it mixed up theology with practice. Practice says, “Yes we can discuss; yes we can love our enemies, but nowhere do we embrace the ideaology of our enemies.” Nowhere are we called to embrace the principles of Islam.

But just how much damage has been done to ‘the faith once for all delivered to the saints’ by Christian leaders who signed the Yale response apologizing for ‘the war on terror’?

If I may touch on a crucial issue within the Yale letter, which has caused us all much concern, that is the apology. It does say some Christians, in fact many Christians, may wish to apologize for the Crusades. But then it goes on to link the Crusades with, it says, “the excesses of ‘the war on terror’ which many Christians may wish to apologize for.”

Now American citizens may or may not agree with what their government have and are doing in the context of the Muslim world, on wars on terror. And they have every right to disagree or to agree. But to say that that is a ‘Christian’ war, and the ‘war on terror’ is a Christian act, I believe is woefully wrong and is now putting Christians in the Muslim world at risk, and also our troops at risk because the Muslims are now saying, “See, we told you. We were right and you were wrong. Christians are violent and they’re brutal and their ‘war on terror’ is hurting all of us, and here are Christians having to apologize for that. I don’t believe that the Yale signatories would have wanted that. I think those who wrote this letter (the Yale response) got it wrong.

We mark two milestones on The Paul Edwards Program today at 4:00 pm. Dr. Robert George, professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton and one of the leading conservative voices in defense of life, will join me live today from the March for Life in Washington, DC to discuss Roe v. Wade on its infamous 35th Anniversary.

Then Baseball Hall of Fame Broadcaster and Voice of the Tigers Ernie Harwell will join me to talk about his 90th Birthday coming up this Friday, January 25th.

Stream the program live from 4p - 6p EASTERN at http://www.am1500wlqv.com.

Reflecting on the South Carolina Republican Primary, Joe Carter says,

Prediction — In a few weeks, when the conservative punditry realizes that a man they truly despise (McCain) will be the eventual nominee, they’ll suddenly “discover” that Huckabee’s record and positions were more conservative than they had led people to believe. The admission will lead to a backlash among conservatives who trusted that the pundits were telling the truth about Huckabee rather than unfairly maligning him because they were ashamed to have a barefoot hillbilly preacher as the head of their party.

With John McCain’s win in South Carolina tonight, look for a redux of the aging vet vs. the hip and in touch politico vis-a-vis Bob Dole v. Bill Clinton. And look for the same outcome in November.