Rick Warren is no Billy Graham

BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION

Last August I wrote a column critical of Rick Warren's decision to host a presidential candidate forum at his Saddleback Church.

My reasoning then was that America's crisis is moral ambiguity. I argued that Pastor Warren would only contribute to this ambiguity by hosting candidates with opposing views on issues such as abortion and homosexuality and presenting himself as a neutral moderator.

Only Barack Obama would gain, I felt, being showcased as an acceptable candidate by one of the nation's best known evangelical pastors. If John McCain had wanted to clarify his social conservative credentials, he didn't need to go to Rick Warren's church with Barack Obama to do it.

Evangelicals and other Christians listened as Rick Warren called Obama and McCain "friends" and "patriots" and watched as Warren winced no more than would have Larry King when Sen. Obama said it was above his "pay grade" to consider if and when an unborn child has human rights.

Evangelicals had already been hearing from Warren, and left-leaning pastors like Jim Wallis, that they should broaden their primary concerns beyond sex and abortion.

In retrospect, I cannot prove that I was right. But I think the evidence powerfully supports my claim.

Barack Obama picked up five percentage points of the evangelical vote over what John Kerry received in 2004. Those five percentage points amounted to about a third of Obama's winning vote margin over John McCain.

Sure, the Saddleback Forum alone does not explain this shift. But the legitimacy Obama gained that night certainly didn't hurt.

The largest shift was among 18-29 year old evangelicals. Obama got 32 percent of their vote -- double what John Kerry had gotten.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal after the forum, Warren was oblivious to the vulnerability of this group. The Journal reported, "... as for the notion that younger evangelicals are ready for rebellion against their parents' ideals, Mr. Warren cites polls showing that the younger evangelical generation is even more concerned about abortion than the older one." True. But this was only one part of the picture.

In 2007 the Pew Research Center reported that Republican identification among 18-29 year old white evangelicals had dropped from 55 percent in 2005 to 40 percent.

A survey done by Greenburg Quinlan Rosner Research showed that 26 percent of 18-29 year old evangelicals, compared to 9 percent of those over 30, support same-sex marriage.

Now President-elect Obama has invited Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural. The NY Times calls this an "olive branch to conservative Christian evangelicals" and many now call Warren this era's Billy Graham.

An olive branch? Rick Warren helped get Obama elected and our President-Elect understands that there is still evangelical gold to be mined in the pastor from Saddleback Church.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright can explain how Barack Obama uses pastors. Obama sat in his church for 20 years and used his words for the title of his best-selling book, then discarded him when he became a political liability.

Regarding the Billy Graham comparison, it challenges even the most creative imagination to picture the Rev. Graham's ever hosting a forum for political candidates.

In an interview, Barack Obama recalled a previous invitation to Saddleback Church. "...I was invited to Rick Warren's church to speak, despite his awareness that I held views that were entirely contrary to his when it came to gay and lesbian rights, when it came to issues like abortion." I doubt that Billy Graham would see this in the spirit of his own calling to bring the gospel to all who would listen.

Nor would I see the Rev. Graham signing onto the Evangelical Climate Initiative, as has Rick Warren. This gives Christian cover to the left to raise our energy costs to address still-unsubstantiated environmental claims.

But on global warming, Rick Warren and Barack Obama are on the same page. Perhaps these will be the first post-inaugural chips that our new president will call in.

Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.

The awkward co-dependence of blacks, liberal Democrats

BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION

What does Caroline Kennedy have in common with black America? If your answer is not much, I'd tend to agree with you.

When I think of Caroline, I think of Manhattan and Park Avenue, not the Bronx and Brooklyn. I think of Brentwood and Beverly Hills, not Watts and South Central Los Angeles.

But there is something that Caroline and black America do have in common: The Democratic Party.

Whether or not Kennedy succeeds to slide into Hillary Clinton's soon-to-be-vacated Senate seat will have little to do with her Democratic Party bona fides. Per her policy positions ticked off the other day, she is in perfect and predictable liberal alignment with party boilerplate. If she fails, it will be for reasons other than her views.

So what exactly is the common political ground that Kennedy blue bloods share with the 90 percent of America's blacks who vote for Democrats?

A careful look shows the deep internal contradictions of the Democratic Party and the complexity of the political psyche of black Americans.

Ironically, despite Democratic Party rhetoric about economic inequities and wealth and income gaps in America, those gaps are more pronounced inside the Democratic tent than in the Republican one.

According to exit polls from November's election, Barack Obama captured the vote of America's richest and America's poorest. Fifty-two percent of those with incomes over $200,000 voted for Sen. Obama, and more than 60 percent of those earning less than $30,000 did as well.

Our wealthiest senator, John Kerry, is a Democrat, as is our wealthiest House member, Jane Harman.

The nation's two wealthiest men, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are both, by all indication, Democrats.

What political aspirations can black Americans, whose median income lags the nation's, share with these multimillionaires and billionaires?

There is little common ground regarding values.

Church attendance correlates reliably over time with party affiliation, and this remained true in this last election. Those who attend church frequently vote Republican. Those who don't vote Democratic – except blacks.

Blacks, in fact, have the highest church attendance in the country. Seventy-six percent of black Democrats attend church at least monthly. Sixty-seven percent of Republicans do and 50 percent of white Democrats do.

A recent Gallup poll shows blacks more aligned with Republicans than Democrats on social issues – moral acceptability of homosexuality, abortion and sexual promiscuity.

On energy and environmental issues, blacks poll more closely with conservatives than with liberals. It's because these are pocketbook issues. Working blacks have little interest in paying the higher taxes and bearing the higher costs that will result from chasing global warming windmills and displacing cheap hydrocarbon energy with exotic government subsidized alternatives. Lower energy costs also put blacks on the side of offshore drilling for oil and gas.

How about education? Wealthy liberals, despite having their own kids in private schools, oppose school choice. When blacks are given the opportunity to pull their child out of a failing public school and send him or her to a church school or another alternative they are grateful.

So where's the common ground? Income redistribution. A recent Zogby poll shows 80 percent of Democrats, 90 percent of liberals, and 76 percent of blacks support taxing the wealthy to give money to low-income Americans.

Despite everything else, blacks vote to stay on the liberal plantation. Pop psychologists would call the relationship between wealthy liberals and blacks co-dependence.

Republicans are wrong if they think they'll win blacks on social issues alone. They need to help blacks understand that limited government provides the economic mobility and opportunity they need and that the welfare, redistribution state does the opposite. They must help blacks gain self-confidence so that they can enjoy the benefits that can only come from freedom.

So far Republicans have failed to do this – which is another reason why they now sit on the outside looking in.

Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.

This Christmas, let's remember who we are

BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION

"Tis the season to be jolly."

But this year it's going to be a challenge for many Americans. A Washington Post survey this week reported two thirds saying they were being impacted by the current recession. In another poll, 57 percent said they'd be cutting back on their Christmas spending.

Nothing unsettles the human heart and mind more than the unknown. I think our general discomfort is compounded by a feeling of not knowing exactly what is causing this economic tsunami and how and when we'll recover.

Maybe as we consider all this, and particularly at a time of the year when we think about the blessings we do have to count, we might ponder what produced all the prosperity we have to begin with. What's behind this great economic miracle -- the greatest of all time -- the United States of America?

If we listen to the news and our politicians, you would conclude it's all kind of a big machine. Like with a stalled car, they're all under the hood trying to figure out what went wrong. A busted hose? Distributor? Spark plugs? What needs to get fixed or installed to get the thing running again?

Or, alternatively, you'd think that we're like a bunch of white laboratory mice running around in a cage. The policy makers stand over us in white coats trying to figure out, "Well, do we need to give them a food pellet or an electric shock to get them to do what we want?"

Are we so lost today that we have forgotten that our great miracle has been produced by free people living in a free country?

Yet, now we hear from politicians that the problem is we're too free. We need more government, more regulations, more bureaucrats planning our lives and telling us what to do. Who is asking, given what made us great to begin with, if the problem is not exactly the opposite?

Consider that on the other side of the world the Chinese are now celebrating the 30th anniversary of the economic reforms that introduced private ownership and free markets into their communist country. Sure, China is still run by their communist party. But 30 years ago one hundred percent of their companies were government run. Today half have been privatized.

China has been growing at double-digit rates since they opened the door to economic freedom. Income per person is ten times higher today than thirty years ago. And 250 million Chinese have been lifted out of poverty.

Now I read that another miracle is occurring in China alongside of the new prosperity which freedom has enabled.

The Economist magazine recently reported about what it called "China's fastest growing non-governmental organization." Christianity.

According to the report, there may be now 130 million Chinese Christians - some 10 percent of the population. It's estimated that maybe one percent of the Chinese population was Christian when communist China was founded in 1949.

It's particularly compelling to consider that this explosive growth of Chinese Christianity is occurring in a country that is still officially atheist and where the government remains hostile and opposed to religion. And that, according to this estimate, the number of Chinese Christians is now almost double the number of Chinese members of the Communist Party.

So why, when the Chinese are discovering both freedom and faith, is America abandoning both?

Why do we now think we need to turn to commissars in Washington to plan our economy and our lives to save our country? Is this really where we should be turning to be saved?

Let's remember, particularly now, that freedom is what made America great and that for that freedom, in the words of our first president George Washington, "religion and morality are indispensable."

This Christmas, let's remember who we really are and that the formula for American success is freedom, faith, family, and friends. Merry Christmas to all.

Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.

Republicans need to get back to business

BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION

There are now nine capable candidates vying for the chairman's job at the Republican National Committee. The day of reckoning will be Jan. 29, when 168 committee men and women from around the country will vote their preference.

The stakes are high this time around. It's different when you are looking for a caretaker – someone to keep a good thing going – as opposed to a turnaround specialist – someone to transform a loser into a winner.

Clearly, after two consecutive electoral shellackings, Democratic takeovers in both houses of Congress and the White House, and significant drop-off in the number of self-identified Republican voters nationwide, it is the latter type of executive that the RNC needs.

What kind of leadership talent should the RNC seek?

Republicans think of themselves as the party sympathetic to free enterprise. But the party has gotten off track, not applying sound business principles to its own operation.

The three most important management questions, according to famed management guru Peter Drucker, are: What is our business? Who is the customer? What does the customer consider value?

What is the business of the RNC? Some might say it is to get Republicans elected. I'd say that's inadequate. Clever marketing techniques can move product in the short run. But if customers are not happy, they don't come back.

If the party does not have a clear agenda, and is not making a positive sale based on that agenda, it's a sign of weakness. Republican national campaigns of recent years that have been defined by Willie Horton and Swift boats may have defeated the other side, but they brought candidates into office with no clear mandate and eroded party definition and discipline.

The RNC business model must be based on positive marketing of its platform of traditional values, limited government, free enterprise and strong national defense. Candidates must be groomed who genuinely believe that it's this agenda – all of it – that keeps out country great, and candidates who don't shouldn't be nominated.

Who is the customer? The RNC must genuinely view the full spectrum of the American electorate as its target market. What business can possibly grow by only focusing on customers who have already bought its product? Only going after low hanging fruit is not a business plan that any venture capitalist would finance.

Republicans must get their message to the many diverse communities that make up our great country that they have ignored. Yes, I am certainly talking about black and Latino communities.

Consider the remarkable election that just occurred in New Orleans, where a young Vietnamese American political novice, Anh Cao, unseated William Jefferson, a Democratic Congressional Black Caucus member for almost 20 years. The RNC showed little interest in a race that conventional wisdom suggested had little prospect for a Republican victory. Cao won a surprise victory on a shoestring budget.

I've seen similar opportunities in the last two years, where seats opened up in California and Ohio as result of deaths of two Black Caucus members. There were clear opportunities to run conservatives that the RNC ignored because of conventional thinking.

What does the customer consider value? Customers buy products they believe will make them better off. Although some voters are motivated by ideology, most are seeking a secure, comfortable and safe life.

Voters from every walk of American life must hear from Republicans, practically, how more freedom and less government will deliver better education, health care, jobs and security – and why the preservation of the integrity of traditional family life provides a critical foundation for our country.

Some suggest that reaching out to new communities means changing the party's agenda. What successful company builds market share by destroying its product? No, they maintain product integrity and use more aggressive and imaginative targeted marketing.

The Republican Party clearly needs change. The RNC needs a chairman that can lead it into a new era. Someone that understands that the new beginning must start with sound business principles.

Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.

GOP needs return to limited government agenda

BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION

Now that Democrats have won the White House and have widened their margin of control in Congress, does this signify that American voters have moved to the left?

Many Republicans question this claim. And a new report from the Pew Research Center seems to verify that America is still a right of center as a country. But the picture gets murky when you look at the details. And this murkiness presents a considerable challenge for Republicans who are trying to figure out where to steer their party.

According to the just published report, more Americans today call themselves conservative than liberal, and the relative percentages in each category has hardly changed since George W. Bush was elected to his first term in 2000.

Thirty eight percent of Americans self-identify as conservative, 21 percent as liberal, and 36 percent as moderate. This compares to 36 percent, 18 percent and 38 percent, respectively, in 2000.

But taking a closer look at what this means leaves you scratching your head. You have to wonder what it means today to think of yourself as conservative.

When asked if the Bush tax cuts should be made permanent, only 38 percent of those who said they are "conservative" said yes. And 50 percent of "conservatives" said they favor government guaranteeing health care "even if it means raising taxes."

Although 71 percent of "conservatives" said they oppose gay marriage, only slightly more than half, 52 percent, said that abortion should be illegal.

Many Republicans point to the fact that traditional marriage initiatives won in all three states where they were on the ballot -- California, Florida, and Arizona -- as evidence for the conservatism of the country. But pro-life initiatives lost in all three states where they were on ballots -- California, South Dakota, and Colorado.

What can be the message here for those vying for leadership of the Republican Party?

Some argue that the party should lighten up on the social agenda. The party is all white, they say, and there is no future without Latinos and blacks.

But consider the obvious. First, conservatives define the Republican Party. According to this study, 68 percent of Republicans call themselves conservative.

Second, it should be obvious from the above, that if conservatives are rooted anywhere, it's more in the social agenda than in the fiscal and limited government agenda. Where in the world would the party be if the leadership tried to uproot from social conservatism?

Third, consider what is going on with blacks and Latinos.

In this same Pew survey, 25 percent of all Democrats called themselves conservatives. But among these same Democrats, 35 percent of blacks call themselves conservative compared to 21 percent of whites.

Why? Blacks are social conservatives. Blacks understand the havoc that moral relativism has caused in their communities. And, this is also the case with Latinos.

As was widely reported, blacks and Latinos voted for Proposition 8 in California, supporting traditional marriage, despite the majority of them also voting for President-elect Barack Obama.

So where is the logic in Republicans abandoning social conservatism in order to reach blacks and Latinos?

It appears that the message getting lost is the importance of limited government and fiscal conservatism.

Health care is almost 20 percent of our national economy. Too many are not getting what it will mean when bureaucrats will define what health care is and when the IRS comes knocking to check on the policy you bought. Too many seem to have forgotten that prosperity is created by individual freedom and creativity and not government programs.

These are tough times and families are under duress. Perhaps it's tempting to think that opening the door to more government is a good idea. Particularly in an environment where every day another half trillion-dollar check is being cut in Washington for bailout programs.

When most Americans say they are conservative, they mean it. Too many, however, are forgetting that this means limited government as well as traditional values. We need new, energetic Republican leaders to get this message across.

Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.

Parker: We fail to learn from history

BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION

How can you not feel that emptiness in the pit of your stomach as you watch our financial markets spin downward? The broad stock market indices are down well over 40 percent since the beginning of the year. Losses are somewhere in the neighborhood of $9 trillion.

The real economic realities behind these numbers are starting to show up. The only question at this point is how severe the recession we are now entering will be.

Maybe, when everyone is depressed I am supposed to write cheery things to encourage folks. But I can't, because I care about our country and what I see is not encouraging.

We just had a presidential election that in some circles produced a lot of euphoria. But I believe that at some point -- I hope sooner rather than later -- many Americans are going to wake up and realize that this election was not a cure for our problems but a symptom of the disease.

I think this is what our crashing financial markets are telling us.

There is a well-known quote from a less well-known philosopher -- George Santayana -- that those who don't remember history will repeat it.

The failure of communism and socialism is not that far behind us. Yet Americans cannot seem to recall that it happened -- and why it happened.

What characterizes these systems? Government control. Central planning. And Godlessness.

Let's consider the sad and pathetic state of our American automobile companies.

As the chairmen of GM, Ford, and Chrysler sat in Washington begging for public money to survive, Honda was celebrating the opening of a new non-union plant in Greensburg, Ind., which will produce 200,000 vehicles annually.

The starting hourly wage at this plant will be $18.41 per hour -- about $10 less than at the American companies. There were 33,000 applicants for 900 job openings.

Americans want to work, can work, and can compete with anyone. They just need to be free to do it.

In 1970, GM had 50 percent of the U.S. auto market. Today it has 20 percent. What happened?

The world changed in 1973. We were hit with the oil shock. The oil producing countries' cartel, OPEC, discovered its power, and drove up energy prices.

The power of a free country and free markets is that people, when left alone, will adjust to change and do what they need to do. In fact, that's what happened in businesses that were left alone. Changes and adjustments were made and overall the country is about twice as energy efficient today as it was in 1970.

But in our high profile auto industry that's not what happened. Our politicians, with cooperation from our auto industry executives, decided that the auto companies could not be left to their own resources to adjust to new realities.

First, we enacted import quotas on Japanese cars. Second, we enacted fuel standards to dictate to our car companies what kind of cars to make. And, of course, third, the power of the union was left intact.

Now look where we are. We have a destroyed industry that is the product not of Americans not being able to compete, but of allowing itself to become dependent on government.

This is why our auto companies have failed. This is why communist and socialist countries have failed.

A few days ago Rahm Emanuel, who Barack Obama has picked to be his chief of staff, spoke to a gathering of CEOs at a Wall Street Journal conference in Washington.

He went through the agenda to expect from the Obama administration. He sounded like a commissar from the Soviet Union. Government control and planning in health care, energy, the economy, and financial markets.

Why are our financial markets so pessimistic? They are bracing. The market sees the sad news that Americans have not learned from history. And it looks like we are about to relive its hard lessons.

Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.

Parker: Does Cathy define America?

BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION

I retrieve and open a large envelope from today's pile of mail.

Inside is a press release announcing "Chik-fil-A Founder to Receive 2008 William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership."

I discover that Chik-fil-A founder is 87-year-old Atlanta businessman S. Truett Cathy. Reading about Cathy, amidst today's headlines, I am wondering if his story is what America is about, or was about.

Cathy built, and today is owner/operator, of the privately held Chik-fil-A fast food chain, with more than 1400 locations and sales of over $2.6 billion dollars. He's from humble roots in rural Georgia and opened the first Chik-fil-A store in Atlanta in 1967.

In contrast to stereotypes equating business, particularly big business, to greed, Cathy's life and work has been defined by service and Christian charity. The corporate mission statement of Chik-fil-A is "To glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us. To have a positive influence on all who come in contact with Chik-fil-A."

Chil-fil-A stores are closed on Sunday to allow employees to devote the day to faith and family.

Cathy established a scholarship fund in 1973 for Chik-fil-A employees and to date around 23,000 have received more than $24 million in scholarship funds. In 1984 he established the WinShape Foundation which last year alone spent $18 million supporting a network of foster homes, camps, scholarships, and marriage counseling programs.

The Simon Prize, which Cathy has just received, is awarded by the William E. Simon Foundation, established by Simon, who was the 63rd Treasury Secretary of the United States.

Like Cathy, Simon believed in America, in freedom and free enterprise, and was a man of faith. The giving themes of his foundation, as noted on the foundation's website, are in the areas of "education, faith, and family."

Unlike Cathy, Simon built his wealth in the area which is now quintessentially associated with greed -- finance. Before becoming Treasury Secretary in 1974, he was a Wall Street bond trader at Salomon Brothers. After, he set up firms dealing in mergers and acquisitions, financial services, and banking.

As Wall Street executives are dragged to hearings, to be mocked, blamed, and threatened by Democratic Banking Chairman Chris Dodd, it's worth quoting Simon, who passed away in 2000, as his creed appears on his foundation's website:

"The free enterprise system has blessed the United States of America with the greatest prosperity, the highest standards of living, and, most important, the greatest individual freedom known to man. If we can preserve this system, and our freedom, we can look forward to turning over to our children, and our children's children, an America that is more productive, prosperous, and stronger economically, financially, morally, and spiritually, than the one we inherited."

How, from this, did we become a nation of blame, bailouts, and entitlement?

Wal-Mart has just released its quarterly report showing sales and earnings up 7.5 percent and 9.8 percent respectively. Wal-Mart, founded and built by one of America's great entrepreneurs, has been under endless attack from the political left. Now, in tough times, Americans are happy to have a source of low priced, high quality merchandise.

Average nationwide retail gasoline prices this week are $1.95 less a gallon compared to July -- a drop of almost 50 percent. In a Gallup poll done last year, most Americans attributed high gasoline prices to oil company greed. Are they going down now because oil companies are becoming generous?

No doubt, these are hard times.

Here's my prediction. The more Americans believe that our future depends on politicians, political fixes, and bailouts, the bleaker our future will be.

If we see America as a country defined by men like S. Truett Cathy, Bill Simon, and Sam Walton, we'll re-establish firm footing on American principles and re-build our country, our prosperity, and our leadership.

Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.

Obama's vision is far from that of Founding Fathers

BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION

Pushing back on accusations from John McCain that he's a socialist, Barack Obama said, "I don't know what's next. By the end of the week, he'll be accusing me of being a secret Communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten. I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich."

Once again, we get the Obama oratorical fog. The problem isn't what he does with his toys or sandwich, it's what he sees as legitimate to do, under authority of government, with mine and yours.

"(McCain) has called me a socialist for wanting to roll back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans so we can finally give tax relief to the middle class."

Obama's plans go much further than using the tax code to redistribute wealth.

He's got about $700 billion in so-called refundable tax credits in mind, direct money transfers to individuals, to finance his social engineering ideas in education, child care, and environmental policy.

We're talking about a trillion dollars in new government spending to pay for his government-directed schemes to deal with just about every aspect of our lives.

Don Boudreaux, chairman of George Mason University's economics department, says it's more accurate to call Obamanomics "Socialism-lite", rather than outright Socialism, because we're not talking about overt government ownership of our manufacturing and financial entities.

But the line of distinction is fine, and the slope to overt and blatant socialism, as Boudreaux points out, is pretty slippery.

The real question is "So what?" Okay, so our country becomes more socialized and, by definition, less free. What difference does it make? After all, voters will have transmitted power to Obama in open and free elections. Isn't that what it's all about?

Thomas Jefferson said, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free ... it expects what never was and never will be."

Obama will have succeeded in selling a vision of America that has little to do with the vision of its founding because so many Americans are now detached from and uninformed by the documents that defined the country -- the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bible.

If we randomly surveyed voters and asked, "How is the role of government defined in the Declaration of Independence?" how many could answer the question?

How many could answer that the Declaration talks about our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and, "That to secure these rights governments are instituted among Men..."?

Government's job, according to the founders, is to protect individual liberty and guard against intrusions on our life and property -- the very wholesale intrusions that Barack Obama will begin in earnest once he is empowered by American voters.

There is no freedom without law and courts. And what is law for Obama?

He'll appoint judges who have "the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old."

The Bible tells us, regarding courts and justice, "Do not glorify a destitute person in his grievance."

Our biblical tradition, which is clear that we should love our neighbor and give charity, is also clear that courtrooms are the place to objectively apply law and not for politics.

History is filled with the dismal lessons of nations where law was turned into molding clay and citizens who abdicated personal responsibility for their lives to messianic sounding demagogues. But when we stop reading, thinking, and taking seriously the eternal truths of tradition, the only thing left is to re-learn through experience what history has already taught.

Apparently this is where much of America stands today.

And the rest?

Recall the words of Samuel Adams. "It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate and tireless minority keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men."

Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.

Traditional marriage is vital to kids and education

BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION

According to the California Teachers Association and the California School Boards Association, the Proposition 8 marriage initiative has nothing to do with what is taught in California's public schools. The "Yes on 8" campaign claims that if homosexual marriage stays legal in California, kids will learn in public schools that this kind of "marriage" is normal and legitimate.

Proposition 8 is the ballot initiative in California that, if passed in November, will amend California's constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman. The initiative follows a decision by the California Supreme Court last May that legalized homosexual marriage.

In a recent ad run by "No on 8", California State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jack O'Connell, says "Proposition 8 has nothing to do with schools or kids .... our schools aren't required to teach anything about marriage."

To call this misleading would be the understatement of the 2008 campaign season.

The California Department of Education makes a comprehensive sex education curriculum available to every school district, but specifies that it's voluntary.

A poll done by the Public Policy Institute of California in 2006 showed that 78 percent of California's adults want comprehensive sex education in the public schools. According to the "Yes on 8" campaign, 96 percent of the school districts currently provide it.

If a school district does provide sex education, it must follow the guidelines of the California Department of Education. According to these guidelines, as they appear on the CDE website, the schools "shall teach respect for marriage and committed relationships."

It doesn't take much to conclude that just about every kid in California's public school system gets some kind of instruction about marriage at some time. Should homosexual marriage remain a legal institution in California, there is little doubt that children graduating from California's public schools will see homosexuality and homosexual marriage as normal and legitimate as proverbial American apple pie.

If Proposition 8 has "nothing to do with schools or kids,'' then why has the California Teachers Association, the union of California's teachers and public school employees, contributed well over $1 million to the "No on 8" campaign?

The teachers union opposes school choice and vouchers, claiming on its Web site that vouchers "hurt students and schools by draining scarce resources away from public education." Yet the union somehow sees it helping education to write a check for a million dollars to keep homosexual marriage legal.

This same California teachers union weighed in earlier this year to support a California appeals court decision, subsequently reversed, which would have effectively shut down home schooling in the State of California.

It should concern everyone that the idea of parents having the freedom to choose where and how to educate their child is abhorrent to our public school establishment. And that this same public school establishment is obsessed with peddling left wing moral relativism to our kids.

Who is hurt the most? Our most vulnerable kids.

According to a report released earlier this year by Colin Powell's organization America's Promise, about 70 percent of kids who enter public school in our nation's 50 largest school districts graduate.

In Los Angeles, the second largest school district in the country, 45 percent of kids graduate. These are overwhelmingly Latino and black kids from largely troubled or broken families.

The greatest influence on how a child performs in school is the home from which that child comes. Take kids from already troubled homes and put them in schools where traditional values are at best taught as a footnote to a large menu of possible lifestyles, and the result is children and communities that have no future.

Maintaining the integrity marriage and family in California, the nation's largest state, is critical for children not just in California, but also in the whole country. Let's hope that Californians vote in November to save traditional marriage and help pull our nation back from moral oblivion.

Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.

McCain must state obvious: Obama is a socialist

BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION

As John McCain tries to salvage his presidential campaign over the few weeks he has left, he ought to think about the Coca Cola Company in 1985.

That was the year that Coca Cola, based on what the company thought was good internal market research, introduced a new, sweeter formula to replace the taste that American consumers had always associated with Coke.

The result was disaster. Consumers were unhappy with the new flavor that replaced a product that was more than a drink. It was a time tested American tradition. In short order, Coca Cola brought the old traditional Coke back to market, and in a real feat of marketing gymnastics, was selling both New Coke and Coca Cola Classic.

Sales of Coca Cola Classic swamped sales of New Coke, and shortly thereafter, New Coke was gone.

Today John McCain heads the ticket of a Republican Party that many Americans have fallen out of love with. It's a Republican Party that Americans once knew but now, like New Coke, has confused its customers, the voting public.

Restoring a brand that has been damaged might be an even greater challenge than introducing a new product. You've got the added complexities of confusion. But this is what John McCain has got to do. And he doesn't have a lot of time to do it.

How can anyone be surprised that Americans are confused with the Republican brand? This was the party that once captured American hearts and minds by restoring focus to principles of limited government, traditional values, and personal responsibility.

Apologies to George W. Bush, but time is too precious for tiptoeing around the truth. We've seen the biggest growth of government over the last eight years since Franklin Roosevelt, and the country is in a mess. It's only natural psychology to associate the mess with Republicans.

McCain must disassociate from the mistakes of "new" Republicanism, show that these mistakes are exactly where Senator Obama wants to pick up, and re-establish the "classic" Republican brand.

His approach in the latest debate at Hofstra University showed he is grasping the marketing challenge in front of him. His pitch about Joe the Plumber, and his market-oriented stands on big issues like health care and education, showed that he understands he needs to do more than simply say he's not George Bush.

But he's still not being clear or aggressive enough.

McCain must paint with clarity the starkly different worlds that Americans will be buying into when they step into voting booths in November.

Barack Obama is a socialist. McCain must say it. It's not slinging mud but stating fact.

Perhaps a complicating factor in explaining freedom to Americans today is that when "classic" Republicanism was selling, we all still remembered the Soviet Union and communist China. The difference between the United States and the rest of the world then was clearer than today.

When someone said "socialist" or "communist,'' we could look abroad and know exactly what this meant.

There is nowhere where Senator Obama sees Americans suffering from excessive government. The opposite. He sees all our suffering from not enough.

The collapse of communism and socialism abroad was not accidental. Central planning is both dysfunctional and immoral.

Incredibly, Obama thinks that a huge and complex market like health care, where a few hundred million Americans spend almost two and half trillion dollars a year, can be improved with more government controls and spending.

And he thinks that parents, in a country that is supposed to be free, should not be given control over where they send their child to school and the type of education their child gets.

To turn things around, McCain must quickly reestablish the Republican brand of freedom and contrast this with Obama's clear socialism.

Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.

It's time to go back to basics

BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION

When successful companies fail, when winning teams start to lose, what we're most likely to hear is an announcement from the CEO or the coach about returning to basics.

It's not unusual for success to lead to a loss of focus that indeed there are basics from which it all started. In the language of proverbs, pride precedes the fall.

Undoubtedly, at a time like this, when markets are in chaos and everyone is worried, moralizing is likely to provoke rolling of eyes. But, I think this is exactly the time to think about basics and principles.

The operative question is: If there were a national consensus about the need to return to basics, would there be a consensus about what those basics are?

If we agree that the United States is a great nation, what made it, what makes it, great? Shouldn't this be the question we're asking? Shouldn't we be concerned that no one seems to be asking it? Either there are some fundamentals or it's all a massive stroke of blind luck.

One hundred years ago, government took 10 cents of every dollar. Today, it takes 35 cents of every dollar.

Now we no longer have just government programs. As those government programs fail, instead of getting to the root and getting rid of them, we're creating new government programs on top of them.

Instead of getting back to basics, we're getting farther and farther detached from reality.

I can't help but think of the joke about neurotics building castles in the sky and psychotics moving into them.

It's no joke that we've moved into castles we have built in the sky. Today, even though some of these castles are tumbling to solid ground, it does not seem to be waking up most.

For good reasons, the financial mess we're in is bringing back memories of the 1930s.

Let's recall that we responded to events back then with fundamental changes in how we viewed government. It became less what the founders of the nation intended it to be -- protector of individual life, liberty, and property -- and it became a tool for social policy.

One product was Social Security. This is one of the castles we have built in the sky.

Sure it may take years to build these castles, and then more to realize you're moving into them. But sooner or later, reality sets in.

As we try to stay afloat with the trillions of dollars of debt we now realize we've taken on as result of government housing programs, who is thinking about the $10 trillion unfunded liabilities of Social Security?

Or how about Medicare? Social Security came from the "New Deal." Medicare was a product of President Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society." The unfunded bills staring at us for Medicare piles about another $50-to-$60 trillion on top of the $10 trillion Social Security debt.

How about our fundamental moral collapse over these years? Today, with almost 40 percent of our babies born to unwed mothers, it won't be long before few Americans will even know what growing up in a traditional family means.

Returning to basics in America means remembering what private property, personal responsibility, and traditional values mean.

After the tragedy on Sept. 11, 2001, many got upset with a few evangelical preachers who suggested that the tragedy presented good reason for Americans to check themselves and the moral condition of our society.

America was built on basics. It's time to get back to them if our children and grandchildren are to enjoy what their parents and grandparents had.

Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.

Welfare state failures are at bottom of the crisis

BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION

As our financial markets totter, as homes go into foreclosure, as Wall Street executives lose millions, as Americans have more and more difficulty getting loans, can anyone be happy?

Certainly. Those on the left who now, with unbounded glee, pen obituaries for the free market.

One can sense their joy as they have, they think, the last laugh.

Bernie Sanders, the far left senator from Vermont, was almost giddy on Larry Kudlow's TV show recently to hear free-marketer Kudlow endorse the bailout and tell Kudlow that he is glad to see he has become a socialist.

The Washington Post's Harold Meyerson writes, "The old order -- the Reagan-age institutions built on the premise that the market can do no wrong and the government no right -- is dying."

And, of course, there's the thrill in seeing greedy Wall Street capitalists laid bare for the heartless, exploitive monsters they are and see justice done as they fall by the free market sword by which they lived!

But, in fact, what we are watching is not a failure of markets, but the latest failure of the welfare state. The sad part is how few who wield political power seem to understand, or want to understand, that this is what's happened.

As the details behind the current debacle are unraveled, we see how government created one more entitlement -- the right to own a house -- and then devised an array of programs to subsidize in various ways "affordable housing." Like all welfare programs, the subsidies succeeded in influencing behavior, but the wrong behavior.

The greedy part, or, if one wishes to be forgiving, the confused part, of the Wall Street guys is their willingness to play ball with politicians over these years in turning our free country into a welfare state. Wall Street has regularly been a generous contributor to politicians who love to grow government and use it as a tool for social policy.

These smart investment bankers, commercial bankers, and traders could have gotten plenty rich, and stayed that way, by encouraging solid institutions to build our country properly. If anyone should appreciate the power of freedom and markets and want to encourage the proper role of government, the integrity of private property, and the care and nurturing of American families, you'd think it would be our financiers.

But instead of recognizing basics -- the principles of limited government and traditional values -- and fighting political pressures to undermine these basics, our financiers were happy to support the welfare state model.

They should have appreciated, as we must appreciate today, that the problem is not a failure of freedom and markets but of eroding the pillars and principles that make them possible and functional.

The best housing program this nation could have is for the government to stay out, let the price of real estate and credit reflect true realities of supply, demand, and risk, and let private people decide for themselves what they need to do and how hard they need to work to acquire what they want.

As the institution of government grows, we sadly watch the collapse of the institutions that really sustain growth of home ownership: American marriage and families.

According to the Census Bureau, the single largest incidence of homeownership, 86.3 percent, is among married-couple families. Yet, traditional families now amount to barely more than a quarter of our households.

And, sadly and ironically, the problem of family structure is most severe in low- income communities where government housing policy has been most targeted.

Social and economic policy are not separate universes but part of one fabric of institutions and laws that sustain freedom and prosperity.

Those who want to use the current crisis as an excuse to expand government and welfare state policies contribute to laying the foundation for our next crisis.

Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.

Protect us, don't expropriate us

BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION

As our presidential candidates drone on about our current financial crisis being caused by greedy Wall Street CEOs, a study just released by Canada's Fraser Institute points to what the real problems are in the United States.

This is an annual compendium called Economic Freedom of the World, which the Fraser Institute produces, in cooperation with an international network of free-market think tanks.

Of central interest here is the fact that there is a direct correlation between the extent to which a country is economically free and how prosperous it is. The more economic freedom, the more prosperity. The less economic freedom, the less prosperity.

What is economic freedom? The study provides ranking in five areas: size of government, legal structure and security of property rights, access to sound money, freedom to trade internationally, and regulation of credit, labor, and business.

The troubling news in this year's report is the precipitous drop in the economic freedom ranking of the United States. The U.S. has dropped from No. 2 in the world in 2000 to No. 8 in 2008.

According to the study's press release, only five other countries -- Zimbabwe, Argentina, Niger, Venezuela, and Guyana -- experienced a greater decline in economic freedom over the same period.

Again, the great concern here is that the most powerful predictor of national prosperity is the extent to which a nation is economically free.

This is what we should be thinking about as we consider the causes of our current financial crisis and what we should do now.

As regular folks around the country watch Washington power brokers ram through the financial industry bailout plan, what I think most find deeply troubling is seeing so clearly how insecure our property is.

It's almost incomprehensible that, in the course of a few days, politicians can slap together a package in which they will take almost a trillion dollars of our money to buy the trash securities being held by various financial institutions. And that this is legal.

It is certainly not an indicator of a good state of economic health or freedom when private property can be expropriated this easily.

But how many realize how long and to what extent this has been going on?

As Charles Calomiris, of Columbia University, and Peter Wallison,of the American Enterprise Institute point out, because of tax-payer backing, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac "were able to borrow as much as they wanted for the purpose of buying mortgages and mortgage-backed securities." And, according Calomiris and Wallison, as they pursued a mission to encourage "affordable housing," they enabled massive growth in the amount of shaky sub-prime loans flowing to the marketplace over the last few years.

It's incredible how generous you can be with other people's money. While taxpayers were driving their kids to school and going to work, politicians were setting them up to guarantee the debt of mortgage-backed securities buying behemoths.

It's the increasingly shaky state of the law -- both as it defines the constitutional limits of the federal government and the integrity of our private property -- that sits at the core of our problems today.

It stands to reason that if all it takes is a smooth talking politician to expropriate the property of individuals or businesses, that the ability and willingness to work, save, invest and do business will suffer. And that prosperity will decline.

Barack Obama is running for president to save us from ourselves and give politicians even more sway over our private lives and property. He's telling us that it's "Wall Street CEOs whose greed and irresponsibility got us into this mess."

But Obama sat by in silence as the Senate tried to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2005. And he's taken $126,349 in contributions from Fannie and Freddie, second highest in the Senate (only behind Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd).

The decline in economic freedom in the U.S. is what should concern us today. We need less political hot air and fewer politicians who want to degrade the very law that is there to protect us.

This is what citizens should be looking for as we try to get out of today's mess.

Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.

Real crisis is loss of American principles

BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION

My sense is that the attention that most Americans are paying as the power brokers of our government re-mold our future is not too deep.

Sure, we're watching to see which Wall Street firm emerges as the basket case du jour.

And the 50 percent or so of us who own stocks in some form are paying attention to the impact that each major announcement has on the market and on our nest eggs.

But beyond this, it's like watching the mechanic play around under the hood of your car. You stand by with your fingers crossed hoping that he knows what he's doing and that the price tag of the damage won't ruin you.

What's bothering me today, and what I think should bother you, is not only don't we understand exactly what these guys are doing as they play with our economic engine, but few are asking what authority they have to be playing around in there in the first place.

Talking about Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, the Wall Street Journal reports "Today he finds himself in a position of power unmatched by his predecessors. He decides whether Wall Street firms live or die, picking winners and losers with the power of the federal purse."

Somehow the idea of our Treasury Secretary sitting like a Roman emperor, giving a thumbs up or down whether firm A or firm B will live or die, just doesn't wash with the basic principles of how I believe this country is supposed to work.

The "power of the federal purse" is a nice abstract way of saying there is open season on citizens and taxpayers. We are the federal purse.

Somehow we have gotten to the point where we citizens have been written out of the equation of our own country and Constitution. Paulson can decide to commit billions of our money -- you know, what we work for every day, save, and assume we own -- to play lifeguard and we don't even get a courtesy call asking if its okay.

So I ask, is this the disease pretending to be the cure?

There is, of course, a lot of discussion about the causes of today's financial turmoil.

It may be politically expedient to blame greedy Wall Street executives. And I have no doubt there's plenty of greed on Wall Street (or in Hollywood or elsewhere for that matter).

But as unattractive as greedy behavior may be, greed is not illegal.

I have not heard a single announcement about any Wall Street executive being indicted or about any law being broken.

But somehow it is legal and constitutional in America today, our dear country that supposedly has a Constitution that protects citizens and private property, for our private wealth and incomes to be used by politicians as collateral for their social engineering.

As we taxpayers get dragged up to the plate to bail out one firm or another, let's recall that major culprits in all of this were the two massive Government Sponsored Enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Dressed in drag as private firms, they wheeled and dealed, getting involved in some way in one of every two mortgages, with us taxpayers behind the scenes guaranteeing their excesses.

Did we learn anything from the failures of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Did we learn that taxpayer guarantees for business is a formula for failure?

How can we say we learned anything if this is exactly what we are doing now to deal with the problems that this very behavior caused to begin with?

In a nice column in the New York Times the other day, David Leonhardt recalls the bailout of Chrysler in 1979. This was supposedly a success. And where is Chrysler today? And the whole American auto industry? Eclipsed by the Japanese and looking for another bailout.

Today's financial crisis is not the worst problem we have. America has survived many crises, some far, far worse than this.

Our most serious problem is a loss of focus on American principles of freedom and limited constitutional government.

It's a sign of our troubled times that there appears to be no leader -- political or business -- who even pays lip service to this.

Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.

Barney Frank and the politics of family values

BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION


Barney Frank isn't just another liberal. And he is much more than just an openly gay congressman. He is a powerful legislator who happens to be chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

This makes Frank a central and influential player in government's response to the current mortgage crisis that has rocked our financial markets. The decisions that Frank, a Democrat, makes can put taxpayers on the hook for not just billions, but trillions of dollars. These are decisions that effect our pocketbooks but also our freedom. They influence the size and scope of government in the lives of every American citizen.

So, yes, I care a lot about what Barney Frank thinks, and how he thinks, on any subject that I know matters to him.

It's why I paid particular attention when Frank decided to join the liberal chorus attacking conservatives on the issue of John McCain's selection of Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

In an op-ed in his hometown paper, the Boston Globe, Frank portrays conservatives as small-minded and intolerant folk who are willing to hypocritically look the other way, and forgive where they normally would not forgive, in order to get one of their own into a position of power.

With regard to Palin's sister's divorce, and the pregnancy of her teenage daughter, "people of the right," according to Frank, "seek to impose strict standards on others, and blame them for falling short, while making exceptions for those close to them."

This, in contrast to liberals, who for Frank are honest about and realistic in addressing life's many challenges, and ready to forgive, at the drop of a hat, those who stray off the path.

In Frank's mind, liberalism is tantamount to respect and compassion. And conservatism amounts to intolerance and self-righteousness.

My guess is that Crystal Dixon, who I wrote about earlier this year, doesn't quite see the world as Barney Frank does.

Dixon, a black Christian woman, wrote an op-ed that was published in the Toledo Free Press, as a counter point to a pro-gay opinion column that had appeared in the paper. She challenged that column and expressed her sense, as a Christian, that homosexual behavior is unacceptable. She also challenged the premise equating unwillingness to accept homosexuality to racial discrimination ("I cannot wake up tomorrow morning and not be a black woman").

Dixon was fired from the administrative position she held at the University of Toledo for writing this column and expressing her views.

I'm not holding my breath waiting for Barney Frank to write an outraged column about the abrogation of Crystal Dixon's freedom. I'm not expecting much respect and compassion from the congressman for a woman who lost her job because she is a Christian and tired of sitting by quietly and passively as others force their counter-world view on her.

Barney Frank calls James Dobson "one of the leading advocates for imposing moral choices on the rest of us."

Frank introduced last year the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2007 making it a federal crime for an employer to deny employment to an individual because of their sexual orientation.

Dobson talks on the radio. Frank, a congressman, wields major political power and wants to pass legislation imposing his sense of right and wrong on every employer in America, and yet he sees Dobson as the threat to freedom.

As the many Americans who quietly go to church and unobtrusively raise their families have sat by quietly and passively over the years, left-wing activists such as Frank have hijacked our nation and our culture. Now that those who care about traditional values respond, they are called intolerant.

Initiatives to constitutionally define marriage as between a man and a woman have not come out of the blue. They are in response to left-wing inspired judicial activism that, if ignored, would result in homosexual marriage becoming a formal and legal reality in America.

Of course, conservatives are thrilled by the candidacy of Sarah Palin.

And, of course, Christians understand that to err is to be human. Forgiveness is a pillar of our faith.

We even forgive Barney Frank. Our only intolerance is toward his campaign to tear down the traditional values foundation of our country and replace them with his culture of nihilism.


Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.

The end of race and gender politics

BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION

Who would have ever thought, when we were dozing off in the middle of John McCain's presidential campaign, that he'd reel in Sarah Barracuda and change the game overnight?

"Barracuda," of course, was what they called Gov, Sarah Palin when she was a star point guard on her high school basketball team.

I'm not fond of sweeping pronouncements suggesting that any development is "historic" or "changes things forever." But this time I'm giving in to temptation.

This presidential campaign is historic and will change things forever.

We've a black man on the Democratic ticket and a white woman on the Republican ticket, and both are out of the mold of conventional race and gender politics. The result will be, if not the end of race and gender politics, then certainly the beginning of the end.

The irony of the Obama candidacy is that it did not begin to soar until it was clear to blacks that this was not business-as-usual black politics. This was much different from electing a black candidate in a racially gerrymandered district that practically guarantees that a black is elected.

Consider the contrast between Obama and now ex-Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.

Kilpatrick has just agreed to resign his position as mayor, despite eight felony counts filed against him and overwhelming evidence that he lied to the Detroit City Council about his extramarital affair with his chief of staff, Christine Beatty.

Kilpatrick's shenanigans have cost Detroit taxpayers millions, including $8.4 million used to settle a whistleblower lawsuit filed to expose his affair.

Despite the compelling case against him, and huge costs imposed on taxpayers, Kilpatrick hung on to his mayoral job for almost nine months after the Detroit Free Press broke the story that he was lying about his affair.

It took Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm to agree, at the request of the Detroit City Council, to preside over a hearing on whether to remove him to cause him admit he lied and step down.

What fueled Kilpatrick's stubbornness in the face of obvious guilt? The sense that he could hide behind race.

Many Detroit blacks dug in with their support of Kilpatrick as white suburbanites called for his resignation.

He even pulled the gender card when he lied under oath.

"My mother is a congresswoman. There have always been strong women around me," he testified. "I think it's absurd to assert that every woman that works with a man is a whore. I think it's disrespectful, not just to Christine Beatty but to women who do the professional job that they do every single day."

This is classic race and gender politics, rooted in a core cynicism about this country and about life in general. It relegates idealism and integrity to the weak and the naive.

Obama changes all this. His candidacy, by necessity if for no other reason, transcends race. A black candidate could never succeed on the national stage if he were not a candidate who happened to be black.

And Gov. Palin? Here is a young woman who says that being governor of Alaska is a "cool job,'' calls her husband, a blue-collar worker and union member, the "first dude," and is a pro-life Christian with five children and a corruption fighting, limited government Republican.

Word is that Democrats are rolling out female surrogates to counter the surprise Palin onslaught. This to be led, of course, by Sen. Hillary Clinton.

If there is one line from Sen. Clinton's campaign that defines her, I think it would be "fairness doesn't just happen. It requires the right government policies."

It's the left-wing call to arms. Only bureaucracy can produce the good.

Yet, ironically, whether we talk about the settling of America, the abolitionist movement, the women's suffrage movement, or the civil rights movement, the initiative has been from motivated, idealistic private citizens. Not bureaucrats.

Now we have a black candidate and a woman candidate on the respective national tickets that defy political cliches.

The result can only be a new excellence.

More proof of the greatness of this country and the power of freedom.

Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.

How McCain should take on Obama's 'Trojan Horse'

BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION

Despite the careful choreography and showmanship, the Democratic Convention concluded with little in the way of news or surprises.

It's no surprise that we no longer need to refer to Sen. Obama as the "presumptive" nominee. It is no surprise that the Clintons gave rousing speeches in support of his candidacy. It is no surprise that the senator's acceptance speech, drawing on his substantial oratory skills, was socialist in substance and all things to all people in rhetoric.

It's no surprise that the video production introducing Obama made no mention of his Harvard education. And it's no surprise that, despite the intense commentary about the nomination of a black man for president, and the coincidence of this moment with the anniversary of Dr. King's famous speech, Obama barely noted this in his remarks.

Yet, despite the absence of surprises in these details, they nevertheless add up to a big picture that is enormously surprising.

This surprise is how many Americans appear willing at this point to place their bets for the nation's highest office on a candidate whom they still hardly know and who brings a resume to the job he is applying for that shows no experience in anything that he wants to get hired to do.

Moreover, in areas of policy, Sen. Obama's proposals are uniformly big government socialism that, in the past, has never delivered anything but mediocrity or failure.

Yet, despite all this, a Gallup poll of recent days showed registered voters saying they felt, by substantial margins, that Barack Obama would handle every single major domestic issue -- health care, economy, energy, taxes -- better than John McCain. It was only in foreign policy that McCain was favored.

Yes, the Obama candidacy is appealing to a lot of unhappy Americans and giving these folks hope.

Hope is a healthy and critical emotion. Without it, no one can go on.

But hope should be connected to prudence. It should accompany plans and behavior that are responsible and sensible. It should be what kicks in when we know we have done our part and then, with appropriate humility, acknowledge that everything is not up to us.

What is so unsettling about the Obama candidacy is that the hopefulness that it is eliciting does not have these characteristics. It's a kind of hope that is more accurate to call wishful thinking.

It's the kind of hope that goes along with behavior in which there is no logical connection between inputs and expected results. You just hope that what you want to happen will.

This is the "hope" that characterized so much of the subprime mortgage market that now sits in foreclosure. Folks getting loans for properties that they weren't asked to show in any meaningful way they could afford. The whole transaction was driven by the "hope" that prices will go up and up to justify the commitment that's been made.

There's a lot of speculation about why the Obama campaign has not soared. Why, when today's voter identification with the Democratic Party is 13 points higher than with the Republican Party, is the presidential race virtually tied?

I think it's because of the sense that the foundation of the whole Obama enterprise stands on emotional quicksand.

There are two ways that the Republicans can handle this.

One is the way Obama himself in his acceptance speech suggested they would: To drive a negative campaign and feed the many doubts that already plague the Democratic candidate.

The other is to reach out to the troubled hearts and minds of Americans today with a vision of substance.

Obama suggested in his speech that his lofty visions would be dismissed as a "Trojan Horse" for the abandonment of traditional values. He said this amounted to making a "big election about small things."

This was the most significant misstatement of his speech. Traditional values are not "small things." They are the biggest things. And the only terra firma that we really have in an uncertain world.

John McCain can hammer Obama into the quicksand on which he stands. Or he can point the way to the firm ground of real values on which this country was built and on which we must continue to stand.

I hope Senator McCain chooses the latter.

Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.

Morality and liberalism, John Edwards style

BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION

Certainly we've not heard the last about the John Edwards scandal. Despite the former presidential candidate's public statements of remorse, there remains far too much that doesn't add up.

For instance, we're being asked to swallow a bizarre story that a member of his campaign staff is the father of Edwards' mistress's child. Either John Edwards is not done lying to us or we don't fully appreciate the scope of the behind-the-scenes moral depravity of his self-righteous campaign.

Let's assume for the moment that no legal infractions occurred and that Edwards' lapses were exclusively moral. What is the relevance of this behavior to his qualifications as a political leader and possible president?

Scandals in the private lives of politicians are, sadly, hardly rare. There is a line of reasoning that suggests it's prudish to see them as relevant to the man's fitness for his job.

As put in a recent op-ed by a university journalism professor: "history is full of courageous leaders who in their private lives were terrible and abusive spouses and parents -- depressives, drunks, bullies. Individuals have a way of partitioning their lives, handling one set of duties commendably and another abysmally."

I would argue that for liberals, typified by John Edwards, such partitioning of private from the public is highly unlikely, if not impossible.

Why? Because to be this kind of liberal you've got to stand traditional morality on its head.

Traditional morality is a bottom-up process. It starts at the individual level. The Ten Commandments are addressed to "thou," not "We the People." It begins with individuals taking personal responsibility for the moral tone of their own lives and the social reality that results is the collective product of that individual behavior.

Traditional guidelines are to love our neighbor, our brother. Not mankind. The focus is specific and individual, not vague and abstract.

But liberal politics are top-down. Despite the pretense about being driven by caring about people, unique individuals are at the end of the liberal food chain. Liberal politicians make broad pronouncements about our "social" problems and propose social engineering programs that will allegedly fix them.

Candidate John Edwards called poverty "the great moral issue of our time." And his antidote for solving this moral crisis was massive government programs with the modest objective of eradicating poverty in 30 years.

How particular individuals who happen to be poor actually behave, which is where the real moral issues lie, is of marginal interest to this liberal mindset. Their interest is the grand solution from above that will supposedly change the condition of the poor individuals below, who are viewed as innocent bystanders in their own lives.

It never seemed to interest Edwards that Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in 1965, and more than 40 years and $10 trillion or so later, it accomplished nothing.

When I was on welfare, I'd deal with indifferent bureaucrats who had little interest in me personally. They were just doing a job, no different from any civil servant in the post office or the department of motor vehicles. But behind the faceless bureaucracy was a grand liberal vision. For me, it was all irrelevant. It was just a system to work to get a check.

Ironically, Edwards' marketing of his "moral" crusade was his Two Americas pitch. Get people on board by inspiring envy, chucking the 10th commandment out the window. And use political power to finance the massive programs with other people's money, which can be reasonably viewed as theft.

In an interview last year, Edwards was asked what he thought would most outrage Jesus about American life today. His response: "Our selfishness; ... our focus on our own short-term needs." Not only was this guy, in the midst of an adulterous affair, oblivious to his own hypocrisy. He saw himself as master of the universe, who had to lecture the rest of us about how we behave.

So it shouldn't surprise anyone that during a campaign defined by pronouncements of morality and compassion, Edwards was being immoral and cruel to the real individuals around him and closest to him.

For liberals, individuals are footnotes to their own grand schemes and ambitions.

Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.