Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Today's church services

Your Rivrdog went to church today. That's unusual for me, because while I generally accept, follow and definitely DEFEND Judeo-Christian principles, I am not a committed Christian, and rarely attend church.

My wife is more committed than I, and attends more regularly, here at Good Shepherd Community Church not far from Schloss Rivrdog. Her best galpal is also a member of that church, and sings in the choir there.

Last week, Roxanne asked me to attend services this weekend, and mentioned that it was the annual Patriotic Weekend, where veterans are honored, opening a week of celebrations of our Nation's Birthday.

So, I got up this morning, pressed a pair of Dockers and a shirt, got out a tie which matched my socks, strapped on a nice 9mm (Kel-Tec P11 if you are curious), put a tweed sports coat over all of it and we went to church for the 10:45 service.

The church is very new and impressive, huge and cavernous inside, like a cathedral. It must seat a congregation of over 1,000 easily, and has three worship services for the sabbath.

The church was festooned inside and out with our Flag, and as we took our seats, the audio/visual system was playing patriotic airs and photos of (mostly) young men and women were being flashed on the screens. As I focused on the screen, this recent photo of PFC Drew Holman was shown. Drew is a Stryker driver in the 25 ID Stryker Battalion, and is Roxanne's son:

 

He's doing final training for his second Iraq tour. His outfit will be the last combat outfit assigned to Iraq (under the current plan). He ships out (OpSec, can't tell you) soon. A few years ago he was cutting my lawn, trying hard to master the complexity of my Honda HR-214 lawn mower. Now he's driving a late-model assault vehicle.

Soon, a photo of Roxanne's nephew, ANOTHER Cavalry Scout, flashed up. Serious military family. ARMY family.

The service proceeded with fine martial music by their excellent Orchestra (heavy on brass, Sousa would have approved!), then by a solemn ceremony of "passing the flag", where past and present service members, in uniform, take flags and pass them to their grandchildren, and the grandchildren, some as young as 4 years, carry them to a uniformed Army S/Sgt, ramrod-straight in his WW2 Class A uniform, who built a flag circle on a dais from them. Very moving. I will try to get a video and link to it here.

Next, the service anthems of the five military branches were played, and veterans in the congregation were invited to stand while their service anthem was played. It appeared that a full third of the congregation were veterans.

Three Marines in full-dress then presented the colors in a proper military manner (VERY PROPER manner, the Detail Leader, a Drill Instructor, saw to that).

Then it was time for the sermon, which was delivered by Lt. General Jerry Boykin, USA, (Retired). You may remember GEN Boykin, and how he got shafted by the MSM. You can read about it here, here, or here. The General's church, Kingdom Warriors, has recently gotten started as a result of his decision to make war on the culture killers.

The General's testimony, and his message, was for ALL Christians to quit feeling sorry for themselves, pick themselves up, put their armor back on and get back into the battle against Satan. He later emphasized that he sees the splitting of the Christian Church into it's denominational factions as a fatal mistake, and he constantly calls for Christian unity. He is a very moving and persuasive speaker.

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UPDATE: 062909 2316 PDT: The audio of GEN Boykin's talk is up on the Good Shepherd website. You can download it there either as an internally-played file or as a podcast. The site has the date wrong, but it is titled correctly in the audio index.

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Now, to take away from here with you, my final thought: do you know that excellent feeling that you get when you are in the company of stalwarts who have your back? The company of brave souls you KNOW, in your heart, would fight to the last for you?

I've had that feeling twice recently. The first time was meeting the fine folks, serious marksmen and women all, at Boomershoot. The second was today, in church, in the company of many people who I fought alongside (so to speak, I did my fighting at 35,000 feet and above!) in the Vietnam War, and many who preceded me, and quite a few who have fought in later wars after mine.

That's a good feeling, but it comes with a premonition of dread: I have the definite feeling that I am going to have to fight once more for my Nation. After today, I know just what to say to myself when that day comes and I look at myself in the mirror:

"Get up off your face, get back into your armor, and get back into the battle."

Thank you, GEN Boykin, and especially I thank Randy, the Yacht Club Chaplain, who, in an earlier incarnation as a tough street cop, came to my aid during a bar fight I was trying to control near Scappoose, OR. He was probably the first to say those words to me.

Whither goest thou, GOP?

The GOP is at a fork in the road, and they can't idle there too long, lest events pass them by forever.

Let's cut to the chase: the religious right and the GOP are a bad fit for each other right now. When the GOP abandoned it's highly successful "Contract with America" which swept them into control of Congress in 1994, and was still strong enough to win the Presidency in 2000, they had to know that they were on a downhill slide.

It's tempting for any conservative critic of the debacle of the just-completed election campaign to say it's all about the "RINOs", but that statement leaves out a lot of blame.

The religious right needs to accept some blame for the debacle as well. The religious right is the faction with the money, with the organization, and with the zeal to carry conservatism forward. Neither the bucks, the org or the zeal worked this time.

Why?

Conservatism is dynamic, just as the Left is dynamic. The Religious Right has a solid message supportive of conservative principles, but that message leans too heavily on the static tenets of the Christian religion to suit many of the more dynamic conservatives, such as myself.

If you're Christian, I have no beef with you, unless you place your religion ahead of your conservatism in political matters.

It's that simple. The religious right can't effectively be both religious and right at the same time, and be a dynamic political force. Our Constitution demands that the church law be left at the church door when canvassing the hustings, but that isn't being done. My wife's church enrolled her with some sort of Political Action Committee that had only two "political" moves: anti-abortion and anti gay marriage (there were no initiatives or referenda on either subject on the ballot this year). No positive program at all, just the two "antis". During the course of the just-lost campaign, this PAC virtually buried my mailbox with "anti" literature, but not one single church (or PAC of a church, the IRS forbids churches to actually campaign) in my (politically sort-of-conservative) area put out any actual politically positive campaign material in favor of conservative candidates.

There needs to be a political meeting of the minds, and it must be done soon, if the Right is to have ANY effect on the 2010 Congressional elections. The Political Right must agree that it will refuse to put any more big-government candidates up before the voters, and the Religious Right must agree that it will work for the candidates the Political Right puts up, while leaving their Christianity at their church doors.

The abortion issue, for one, has paralyzed the right. It must be defused as a bomb with a smoking fuse if the right is to gather all it's strength for the next fight. I don't pretend to have the answer for the position which will do that, but I do realize that it must be done. The right to life and heterosexual marriage are not the only principles of the political right deserving of support, but at the moment, they're the only ones getting any major support from the church.

Protection of the Founders' view of the Constitution should be the most important principle of the Right, but it gets little in the way of major support because 85% of the religious right's effort is directed at right-to-life and heterosexual marriage issues.

It's this way: we of the right either have a united message with which to counter the insidious blandishments of the Left, or we need to get fitted for our own good-little-commie uniforms. There's not much ground in between, and certainly not enough ground to support the rise of the RINOs and their claim to power.

You want to be fanatical, fellow righties? Good. Let's be fanatical about the Constitution for a change, and when we succeed, we not only elect a government we can live with, but we elect a government which will again raise the USA to supremacy amongst the other and lesser nations.

Hillary People: They're going to vote McCain/Palin

And this is why.

If you are a Hillary follower, you have a discernible amount more ability to think than an Obama person. Obama people are like the fundie Christians who just shake their Bible at you and tell you, "God said it, it must be so". THOSE folks have severed all connections of critical thinking from their lives. Obama people don't have a Bible, they don't need it, they just have Hope and they believe in Change. Matters not what they are hoping for, matters not what the changes will be, they Believe. See the connection? They are fundamentalists in a religion as much as the Christian fundies are.

So, what does a truckload of discarded American flags have to do with all this? Glad you asked. Don't bother to sit down, this won't take long.

Hillary people believe in a lot of things I don't, but having known a few of them, I rate most of them as thinkers. They are going to ask themselves why the Obama people, who controlled all physical aspects of the Democratic National Convention, bothered to put up American flags to show their "patriotism", then threw those flags away, when part of Patriotism is knowing how to properly dispose of the American flag.

Several answers to my question might be conjured up, but the only obvious one, and the one that many Hillary people are going to agree with, is that the Obama people don't give a damn about the Flag, or what it stands for. Their use of the flag was a trick to fool the eye, nothing more. The eyes to have been fooled were ours. We were supposed to have our eyes tell us what our brains wouldn't, that Obama was an upright American, patriotic to the core.

I don't cotton to some of the beliefs that Hillary holds, but I do believe that she would not have led the nation to the disaster, both internally and externally, that will be our reward if Obama gets the voters' nod.

So, I think that those Hillary people will, with their rational brains, control their angst over voting for someone not of the Left, and they will vote for McCain/Palin in droves, and our nation shall be saved.

Thanks, GuyK, for pointing me at this tidbit. Have another cuppa and continue chalking out that evac loading for the Red Ram.