Category: Announcements

Dear Pastor McAtee,

Thank you for contacting my office with your concerns regarding House Bill 5912. I greatly appreciate hearing from constituents and other Michigan citizens about issues of importance to them because it helps me know what I need to be paying attention to. Your willingness to communicate with us allows me to be up-to-date and aware of those whom I represent.

HB 5912, introduced by Representative Clack on March 19, is much less an intrusion on privacy and more an accounting mechanism to see who is learning where. The bill would require the parent or legal guardian of a child being educated at home to furnish the following to the superintendent of your local school district: the name and age of each child who is being educated at home, the number/name of the school district and the city/township and county in which the parent or legal guardian resides and the name and address of the parent or legal guardian. The very same regulation is already required of those that attend nonpublic school.

Please let me assure you that this bill would not affect the way you teach your children or limit your choice to home school. If the intent of this bill were to do so I most definitely would not have cosponsored this bill. The bill would simply bring home schooling under the same umbrella as other nonpublic school entities. This “umbrella” currently does not nor does it seek to regulate non-public schools. This bill is not an effort to ease in regulations on the home schooling community.

The concern of home schooling parents, children, and other advocates is reasonable, though I urge you to consider the positive aspects of the present bill as written, rather than the possibility for negative legislation in the future. If this bill is passed, the children who are home schooled in a mischievous manner will be recognized and helped. Although these children make up a very small percentage of those who are home schooled, we cannot justify leaving these children behind and letting their guardians get away with neglecting our youth’s education.

Once again, I thank you for contacting me about House Bill 5912. I assure you that your thoughts, concerns, and suggestions will be considered when I am asked to vote on HB 5912. Please feel free to contact me again regarding this or any other issue.

Sincerely,

Bert Johnson
State Representative
District 5
517-373-0144
bjohnson@house.mi.gov

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Dear Representative Johnson,

I am a homeschooling parent. I do not want to be under the State’s umbrella. The State has no more business in regulating how I educate my children then I have any business in regulating how the State paves roads. In short I don’t want to be under your umbrella and you have no constitutional authority to try and force home schoolers under your umbrella.

Your ‘accounting mechanism’ is an intrusion of my privacy because it is none of your business and it requires me to compromise my privacy by forcing me to report to busybody school districts! Since I don’t owe the State anything as it pertains to my children’s education your bill is most certainly a intrusion of privacy, your protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

My advice remains the same and that advice is that when the State shows itself able to implement an ‘accounting mechanism’ that actually leads to government schooled children being educated past the level of moron I will be glad then to consider the possibility that home schoolers will need to have an accounting mechanism. You complain about the home schooled children who might be educated in a mischievous manner and yet every day in thousands of schools throughout Michigan children are consistently educated in a mischievous manner. I continue to believe that students not educated at all would be better served then students educated in Michigan Schools — such is the abysmal state of government education.

Thank you for taking the time to respond to me. I wish your response would have reflected more common sense on your part. I know you have good intentions Congressman but you need to provide solutions for what your are responsible for (Government schools in Michigan) before you take it upon yourself to be responsible for what is not your responsibility.

Leave my children alone,

Bret L. McAtee
Pastor — Charlotte Christian Reformed Church

I was pleased to say that I only heard one thing that set alarm bells off. The speaker was an elderly Doctor who has been a pro-life champion all his life. He was a big fan of former (and recently deceased) Congressman Henry Hyde, who was himself a pro-life champion during his whole career.

Anyway… the speaker closed with the following quote from Henry Hyde. I was burdened that the speaker found the quote so meaningful and that the gathered group were so seemingly moved by the quote.

Here it is,

“When the time comes as it surely will, when we face that awesome moment, the final judgment, I’ve often thought, as Fulton Sheen wrote, that it is a terrible moment of loneliness. You have no advocates, you are there alone standing before God and a terror will rip through your soul like nothing you can imagine. But I really think that those in the pro-life movement will not be alone. I think there will be a chorus of voices that have never been heard in this world but are heard beautifully and clearly in the next world and they will plead for everyone who has been in this movement. They will say to God, “Spare him because he loved us,” and God will look at you and say not, “Did you succeed?” but “Did you try?”‘

I gave the closing prayer, shortly after the main speaker had finished with this quote. I thanked God that in Christ the eschatological judgment was already finished and that it is not lonely nor full of terror because Jesus is our advocate and pleads for us before the Father. I thanked God that we are saved because of Jesus living and dying for us and that not one whit of our effort has anything to do with making it past judgment.

I seriously doubt that anyone noticed that I was making a conscious effort to contradict the final quote.

It really does saddened me that Bishop Sheen, and Henry Hyde thought and that the speaker tonight thinks that judgment has anything to do with our trying.

I was conflicted tonight. On one hand I was ecstatic that this medical doctor had given so much of his life to the pro-life effort and yet on the other hand I was saddened that he apparently had attached his efforts in pro-life to the eternal destiny of his soul. I was saddened that he thought the chorus of the voices of the unborn would have a leverage with God that the voice of Jesus didn’t.

There has been a great deal of work lately in some quarters to suggest that Roman Catholicism isn’t as extreme as many Reformed types make it out to be. Tonight I heard a professional who has spent his life in the Roman Catholic Church and it was crystal clear that Roman Catholicism is everything that the Reformers rose up against. If anybody tells you that there is no difference between Roman Catholicism and Biblical Christianity don’t you believe it.

“It’s not news to anybody these days – not if they watch any television or glance at the covers of the magazines lining the checkout counters at the grocery stores – that we live in a sex-saturated society where supposedly the majority of young people are “doing it,” more often than not without “benefit of marriage.” The Playboy Philosophy and its derivatives are trumpeted by a thousand voices that glamorize casual sex, while most of the shrinking mainline churches present pitifully watered-down messages about morality that confuse rather than clarify.

Academic institutions, particularly the women’s studies programs, promote the idea that marriage is optional and young people are advised to “just do it!” The secular mantra, heard from middle school on up, is that sex will make you popular and happy; it’s great recreation that is free and fun.

There is a mountain of media out there promoting a phony philosophy about the joys of casual, risky sexual experimentation; one need look no further than the junk advice featured in magazines like Cosmopolitan to see just how pernicious it is. Even the relationship advice columns in many daily newspapers spread the expectation of sexual activity even for the youngest of our teens.”

Straight Talk About Casual Sex
Janice Shaw Crouse
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/04/straight_talk_about_casual_sex.html

So, on one hand we have more sex going on at younger ages then you can find in the pages of Huxley’s ‘Brave New World.’ Furthermore, in the government schools we teach the children about sex at increasingly younger and younger ages and in doing so push sex. The culture has given its imprimatur of approval on such adolescent coitus.

But on the other hand when teen sex putatively breaks out in the context of polygamy and communal living among consistent Mormons in Texas (FLDS) suddenly pop culture is abhorred and just can’t get over the indecency of it all?

Somebody help me out here.

Naturally, as a Christian, I am foursquare against both the scenarios painted above but to be perfectly honest if I were forced to choose between the kind of fornication that is being pushed among and pursued by adolescents in our schools and the kind of polygamous marriages that might be being pushed among and pursued by adolescent girls in a FLDS commune I could see an argument being made in favor of the FLDS commune. Think about it. In the former scenario you have children contracting STD’s, or you have pregnancy out of wedlock with the eventuality of either unprepared single parents, marriages between unprepared children, or abortion. However in the polygamous FLDS compound I would bet good money you would find few STD’s, you’d find a community that is going to support the marriages and you find older men who are likely more able to support their family (even if augmented by Welfare checks) then the average teenage adolescent boy.

Now remember, I think both scenarios reprobate but if someone put a gun to my head and told me I had to choose one of the two illicit sex scenarios for adolescent girls to enter into there is a part of me that would lean towards choosing the FLDS.

I find myself wondering if the real reason that our sex crazed culture is piously agog over consistent Mormons having sex is not because 15 year old Mormon girls are having sex with older men but rather it is because the same 15 year old girls are not having sex in the context of the predominant pagan culture with adolescent boys.

After all, if abnormal illicit sex is going to be the cultural norm, any abnormal illicit sex that isn’t abnormal according to the culture norms of abnormality must be seen for the abnormality that it is.

“In short: The totality of Obama’s career since age 23 adds up to a man who has been in the business of taking from whites and giving to blacks.”

Steve Sailer
Syndicated Journalist

Read Steve painstakingly detail how and why he comes to this conclusion.

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/080413_obama.htm

“If the magistrate rules properly, the people, must obey him. But if the magistrate exceeds his authority, the people, through their representatives, have not only the right but also the duty of conscience to resist such tyranny. No magistrate should be suffered who has fundamentally breached the covenant he had sworn to God and his people. To suffer such a tyrant would insult God who had called all rulers to represent his divine being and authority on earth and to strive for divine justice and equity for all of God’s people.”

John Witte, Jr. — Summarizing Beza’s position
The Reformation Of Rights — pg. 139