Well friends and neighbors we are coming up on our one year anniversary, February 9, 2014, and so I felt it was time to take a look back at where we came from, and why we started this little adventure.

I can only speak for myself, and so that is the story I will tell. As many of my readers know I once wrote on another blog called Delaware Politics. That in itself is a story.  You see I had been invited to write for a blog known as First State Politics, and was asked to leave due to a post I had written on abortion. I am pro-life and I wrote an article that described in medical terms the grisly details of how abortions are performed. The owner of the blog felt that I had gone too far and I was terminated.

I could have apologized and asked to be reinstated, but my principles and values told me to stick to what I felt was right and proper.

So I started my own blog, Politically Frank. Now I have to admit it never achieved the following that First State had, but I was able to write what I chose to write, and had to answer to no one but my own conscience and God. If I do say so myself, I wrote some pretty interesting stuff, and I guess others felt so as well, since I was asked to return to the new and improved First State Politics, which was now named, Delaware Politics, and under new ownership. I was assured by the new owner, David Anderson, that I would have full creative control of my articles. And David being a man of his word, I did.

However, over time other bloggers were added to the list of contributors at Delaware Politics. One in particular became what can only be described as a thorn in my side. When Don Ayotte was first added as a contributor I took little notice of him, his writing was unimaginative and full of talking points and rhetoric and little in the way of original thoughts. He was easily angered if challenged in any way about what he had written. His anger progressed over time into outright violent attacks on anyone with a counter position or who dared to question him.

The owner of the site took no actions to rein in this behavior and I took every opportunity to point out the flawed logic and total lack of facts in Ayotte’s so-called writing.

This of course only escalated the animosity between us. Ayotte began deleting my comments from not only his post, but from the post of other contributors. He would come onto my post and delete the comments of others. This of course goes against what is recognized as blogger etiquette . It also showed a total lack of integrity. You see Ayotte saw himself as a “HARD NEWS” writer and was always talking about the fact that he had a degree in English, or journalism or some such thing.

What he didn’t have, was integrity. He felt the need to self inflate his own self-worth. He would write things and state them as facts that were beyond question. Unfortunately for sad little Ayotte, his so-called facts were often little more than his wishful thinking or figments of his own stunted imagination, which were easily disproved. Of course when confronted with real facts Ayotte would simply return to calling names and making wild accusations about how he was going to sue this person or that person for casting his name in a “false light”. I was often the recipient of these attacks.

This all went on under the watchful, yet inactive eye of the owner David Anderson. He continued to allow Ayotte to become more and more out of control, with deleting of comments becoming his only source of rebuttal, name calling his only form of debate.

I like to think of myself as a person of integrity, I attempt to be consistent, and honest in my views. If I make a statement it is most likely my opinion, and is stated as such, not as fact beyond question. Being this type of person I could no longer coexist at Delaware Politics with the likes of Don Ayotte, and instead of forcing David Anderson to choose, I chose to once again go it alone on Politically Frank.

This time however I wouldn’t have to wait very long before I was again offered a place to write, that would be this site that you find me at currently. I have an exclusive contract with the owners of the site and its board of advisors. I have again been given free rein over what I write and when. I am answerable only to myself and God.

The problem is that there are far too many people out there in the new media of the internet like Don Ayotte. They feel since they have a keyboard and something to say, that it doesn’t matter what they say or how they say it. Mr. Ayotte is currently suspended from Delaware Politics due to the fact that he posted an article that contained accusations and a quote attributed to a person Mr. Ayotte claimed to have spoken to in person, and which has been proven that this was impossible.

There are basically two types of blogging styles. One is an investigative style, where the writer will investigate and research a topic and then put together an article laying out what they have found, and either forming a conclusion or leaving it to the readers to form one.

The other style is the one I most often fall into, though I have delved into the  investigative style from time to time, I usually stick to the editorial style of blogging, or in other words I give my opinion on topics and issues. I do not insist that all agree with me, I am always willing to defend my views with the facts as I see them, but again I am always clear to couch them as such, just my views.

The problem with people like Don Ayotte who write in the new media, is that they give all bloggers a black eye. When Ayotte makes false claims and states them as facts, he cast all bloggers in a bad light.  It is a simple thing to simply write what you feel, and what you can prove. Anything beyond that and you have lost all credibility. Unfortunately Don Ayotte was allowed to run what was once a darn good blog site into the ground. In all honesty Mr. Anderson has been away serving in Afghanistan, and Ayotte has had a free hand up until just recently when he went off the deep end and fabricated so-called facts.

Unfortunately this type of behavior is not limited to just the new media and blogs. There are plenty of people working in the old media who use the same tactics, they twist words and attack people simply for having the nerve to challenge or disagree with them, or worse, for daring to have principles and to hold to them no matter what the cost. There are some out there with microphones who use them simply to tell lies. Why WGMD hasn’t fired them yet is beyond me.

It is hard to sort through all of the people in the world today who are attempting to gain your attention to their views and agendas. It is even harder to know whether or not they have integrity.

I hope that the guest here at Delaware Right see that I have always attempted to be honest, and consistent. I may have opinions that you do not agree with, but I will listen to your views with respect, and expect the same in return.

In the coming months we here at Delaware Right hope to be making some changes to the format of the blog pages, adding some new things and maybe adding some new people as well. We hope to broaden our scope and our appeal. We hope always to offer a product that people will enjoy, and trust. For all of us here at Delaware Right, I would like to thank all of our guest and readers.

What follows is but a small number of the best and the worst of Delaware. Some are political, some are simply members of our communities, some are guest here at Delaware Right. Some are serious, some are just silly, and others are seriously silly.  Some are god natured fun, others are serious shout outs to people who work hard to make our small state the great place it is to live, work and raise a family.  Some will embarrass people, some will anger people, some will make you laugh, some will make you say, “Oh no he didn’t”.

This is a small list, our guest are invited to add to the list. We ask that you keep it fun, lite hearted and non-actionable.

The award for bringing more transparency to politics and government, goes to Jim Weller and Collin Walls for their Catch It Live broadcast on the final day of the legislative session on June 30th, 2013.

Taking the biggest risk award, goes to all of the legislators who were willing to be interviewed during that broadcast.

The award for taking the job nobody wants, goes to Charlie Copeland for taking the position of State GOP Committee Chairman.

The award for speaking in the third person the longest, goes to one of our frequent guest here at Delaware Right, Tuxamus Maximus.  This award may have to be cut into several pieces, and shared, we are just not sure how many pieces yet.

Rising Republican star, goes to State Senator Ernie Lopez. Senator Lopez has shown an ability to campaign hard and honestly, he has more over shown the ability to remain connected to his community and district, these along with him being a genuinely nice guy, guarantees that he will go far in politics if he so chooses.

The under the radar award goes to Mark Blake who in his run for New Castle County Executive received more votes in New Castle County than did even Mitt Romney.

Rookie of the year goes to Senator Brian Pettyjohn. The Senator may have backed into an election, but has proven to be one of the most consistent conservative votes in the Republican caucus.

Most conservative Democrat goes to Rep. Trey Paradee.   I know Trey Paradee personally, and I know why he is a Democrat, however, except for a few rare exceptions, Rep. Paradee has voted an astoundingly conservative record, which goes to show, it’s not always the party that defines the person.

Biggest Republican goes to Chris Christie. According to reports though, this will be the last year he will win this award.

The Hispanic outreach award should have gone to GOP State Committee Vice Chair Nelly Jordan, since this was one of her campaign planks, however I have seen little evidence of anything she may have done to reach out to the Hispanic community. Therefore I will award the Hispanic outreach award to Ernie Lopez. Not for any one thing he has done specifically. But simply for being an example of what any person can achieve if they work hard enough, regardless of their ethnicity.

The year’s funniest home videos award, goes to Lacey Lafferty, who after announcing her intention to run for governor of Delaware in 2016, launched into a video campaign, creating some of the funniest videos I have ever seen. Thanks for the laughs Lacey, that is unless you were serious.

The Good Deed Of The Year Award goes to Judi Mangini. Judy has, for quite some time now, been running what she calls Operation Cookie Drop Off. It started with her and some friends baking cookies and sending them to troops overseas. It has grown into a yearly event that collects cookies from around the state. Judy does many other things that would earn her this award, however this one is just too special to ignore. Thank you Judy.

The hardest working man award goes to Judy’s husband Paul. Paul collects boxes for shipping the cookies. He helps collect, count, pack, and ship the cookies. One might say Judy couldn’t do it without Paul, but I bet she could.

There was a tie for the, I didn’t see that one coming award, the award goes to both Sussex County Sheriff Jeff Christopher, for not seeing the inevitability of his court case loss.  And to Governor Markell for not seeing that Fisker Automotive was a rat hole for tax payer dollars.

The NSA lifetime achievement award goes to another of our frequent guest here at Delaware Right, William Christy, for tracking IP addresses and documenting sock puppet identities and gathering meta-data better than the NSA.

The what the hell award goes to the entire Delaware Democrat Party for the last Legislative Session in which they ran more social issues bills and gun bills than they did any bills concerning jobs, the economy, energy or anything having to do with the fiscal responsibility of the government.

And finally the award for the person who did the most to move the GOP forward, who did the most to encourage new people to join the GOP, and maybe some who left the GOP to return, the person who did more for the GOP in one decision than many have been able to do in years of volunteering and working on campaigns. This award goes to Don Ayotte for leaving the GOP. Thank you Don, you can’t know how much this was  appreciated, and by how many. Not Don Ayotte in 2014! Or Ever.

Attention, Attention, this just in, a late breaking alert.  It seems that an article was posted at another blog site on December 20th, 2013 which wins its author the Pinocchio award.  It seems as though Don Ayotte is a two-time winner this year. http://www.delawarepolitics.net/hexavalent-chromium-found-at-closed-vlasic-pickle-plant-and-possum-point-groundwater/#comments   Be sure to read through the comments to find out how Mr. Ayotte won this award.

‘I Stand With Phil’: Religions Old and New

By

Stephen Richard Turley, Ph.D.

Fans of the A&E television show, Duck Dynasty, were dealt a blow a couple of weeks ago. After making rather disparaging remarks toward homosexual behavior, the patriarch of the show, Phil Robertson, was suspended by the network, which affirmed their support for the ‘LGBT community.’ In response to the suspension, cyberspace lit up with a firestorm of online petitions inviting supporters to ‘stand with Phil Robertson.’ 

While Phil Robertson was reinstated after a rather peculiar though politically correct mea culpa from A&E, the debate that ensued betrays the complexity surrounding the emergence of gender communities and so-called ‘same-sex marriage.’ This is because such an emergence draws into itself several points of reference, such as theology, cosmology, gender, sexuality, love, society, history, politics, and law. It would thus seem that a mature and insightful conversation would seek to disambiguate the historical and cultural contingencies in which this controversy is situated.

I am, however, under no illusions that such a conversation will or even can take place. This is because the issue surrounding the fallout over the Robertson interview is not ultimately one of free speech, intolerance, or bigotry; rather, it involves the clash between two fundamentally different embodiments of religious fidelity.

If a century of cultural anthropological research has taught us anything, it is that ‘religion’ is not merely a private or personal set of values or beliefs in gods or spirit beings. Rather, anthropologists see religion as constituting the rules, understandings, and goals that govern any social order. All social orders operate according to communally shared presuppositions that are considered absolutely true and unquestionable and thereby provide the foundation for a collective sense of the common good. If I get pulled over by a police officer for speeding and I voice my displeasure at that law, he may say, “That’s all fine and dandy, but you still broke it.” In this case, the law is absolute, it is unquestionable; I don’t define it, it defines me. I may want to have the law changed, but if I do, then there is a procedure to do so that is itself absolute and unquestionable. There is no social order that can operate without basic rules, understandings, and goals that define the common good for society in ways that are considered absolute and unquestionable.

What this means then is that there is simply no such thing as a social order that is organized and governed apart from religion. All social orders are by definition religious; all social orders are organized and governed according to some vision of the sacred: rules, understandings, and goals considered absolute and unquestionable. It is therefore not a question of whether our society is going to be organized by a religion, but rather which religion is going to organize our society.

For lack of a better term, the religion that dominates our modern Western age is what we might term ‘secular statism,’ which is characterized by a unique monopolization of the state over the public square, such that everything we now associate with the term ‘public’ is under the aegis of the state. This has not always been the case. For hundreds of years prior to the eighteenth-century, the state was merely one of a plurality of mediating institutions that organized and governed social life, chief among which was the church. And it was in such a pluralistic context that gender, marriage, and sexuality were interpreted and practiced socially in the biblical terms of a cosmic marriage between Christ the bridegroom and his church the bride. Marriage was thus considered a foretaste of resurrection life, the coming together of heaven and earth (which are hetero, not homo) in a grand cosmic banquet, where every square inch of the cosmos will be completely rid of evil.

But no more; over the course of the last couple of hundred years, there has been a dramatic recalibration of social and economic life around the state, which has expelled progressively the plurality of institutions that once constituted Western public life. This is where, of course, secularization comes in. Secularization represents a nexus of social strategies that maintains the state’s monopolization over the public square by marginalizing the church into the private sphere of life. Hence, Christians are no longer the church but merely ‘people of faith’; that is, people of private and personal beliefs.

And with such a permutation, a new set of public values emerges. What we have to understand is that social orders are like biological organisms in that they have immune systems. Social orders, if they are going to survive, have to maintain an equilibrium of power relations between the various institutions and structures in the social nexus. And part of maintaining that equilibrium is spotting perturbations or disturbances to that social equilibrium. And this is precisely where the sacred comes in: the rules, understandings, and goals that establish social normalcy by virtue of their assumed givenness, in turn also identify and correct threats to social stability. This is the essence, the nature, of modern values such as political correctness, tolerance, multiculturalism, inclusivity, and moral relativism. These values only appear to be givens; they are in actuality radically contingent, in that they exist to perpetuate the recalibration of social and economic life around the state.

Having repositioned the church into the private sphere of life, the state has replaced the church’s cosmic vision of creation mediated by clergy with impersonal nature mediated by scientists. And having been amputated from the church’s cosmic vision, marriage, gender, and sexuality in the West have become whatever sovereign individuals, completely devoid of any objective divine obligation, want them to be. Today, romantic relationships are interpreted by pop-artists, not pastors; by movies rather than ministers.

And we can of course expect to see, not merely an absence, but indeed a hostility toward the classical Christian values that once defined marriage, gender, and sexuality. Christian moral denunciations are fundamentally different from those of secularists. Christians have always recognized a contradiction in the human person: every person is created in the image of God and is thus endowed with the stamp of infinite worth and dignity, while every human person defiles that divine image because of their fallen nature. Rooted in the Hebraic prophetic tradition, Christian discourse is characterized by a mercy-entailed judgment: moral denunciations are pronounced in light of the salvation freely offered in the sacrificial death of Christ. Sins are thus denounced by fellow prisoners, the apostle Paul designating himself as chief among them.   

However, this is simply not the case with the new religion. It, too, morally denounces, but it has no savior, no cross, and no sacrificial basis for mercy. And thus proponents of secular values morally denounce others, not as fellow prisoners to sin and death, but as those wholly removed from the sins they are denouncing. They denounce bigots while considering themselves untainted by bigotry; they renounce the intolerant while purporting to be guardians of tolerance. They thus appear as the ones who could legitimately cast the first stone.

Thus, as it turns out, this new religion is actually a very old one: the religion of self-righteousness. And like all religions of self-righteousness, its faithful justify themselves at the expense of others. Today there are those who are intolerant of the intolerant, hateful toward the hateful, discriminatory against discrimators, and excluding of exculsivists. This is what it means to be faithful to the new religion; hostility is fidelity.

And standing over against this religion of self-righteousness is the one represented by Phil Robertson, the one that over the course of 1,500 years shaped every aspect of social, economic, political, and cultural life in the West. Unlike secular statism, this is a religion that is in but not of this world; it is a religion that in fact believes that there is not one square inch of the cosmos that can save us. It is a religion that dawned with the first Christmas, as a gift. In the midst of a world characterized by murderous states such as those of Herod and Caesar, a true king entered our cosmos, one who came to serve rather than to be served, who bore our sins upon the cross, who rose into newness of life unto God, shattering the tripartite tyranny of sin, death, and the devil, and thus incorporates the totality of the cosmos into his transformative life, death, and resurrection. And it is this religion that calls all religions of self-righteousness to drop their fads and fashions and collapse into the eternal embrace of nail-marked hands.

This is the religion for which Phil Robertson stood. And I stand with Phil.

Stephen Richard Turley (Ph.D., Durham University) is a faculty member at Tall Oaks Classical School in New Castle, DE, where he teaches Theology, Greek, and
Rhetoric, and Professor of Fine Arts at Eastern University. He lectures at universities, conferences, and churches throughout the U.S. and abroad, on such topics as classical Christian education and modern secular education, liturgy and ritual, aesthetics and beauty, and the historic relationship between church and state. His research and writings have appeared in such journals as Christianity and Literature, Calvin Theological Journal, First Things, Touchstone, and The Chesterton Review.

Jenga is the game of mental and physical skills in which players first build a solid tower of  equal sized wooden blocks. The goal of the game is to then remove a single block from anywhere  within the tower and place it upon the top of the tower. The goal is to not be the last person to remove a piece that causes the tower to topple and fall.

In many respects the Affordable Health Care Act, or Obama care as it is also known, reminds me a lot of the game Jenga.

You see when it was first conceived by President Obama and the Democrats, they simply put together all of their wishes, and liberal dreams of what the perfect liberal health care plan would consist of. And they built quite the tower of Babble.

However, since its passage, the President and his fellow travelers have had to suspend and delay any number of deadlines and requirements. In other words they have pulled pieces out of the tower and placed them on top, all the while denying that the tower was a failure and that it would ever fall.

The latest piece to be pulled, was pulled and placed on top of the tower by non other than one of the President’s shiny pennies, Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor. It seems that Justice Sotomayor has delayed the timing of the mandated contraceptive clause of the AHCA. This is the clause that requires employers to provide health insurance that also pays for contraceptives. Even if the employer is a nonprofit organization whose beliefs condemn the use of contraceptives, such as the Catholic Church.

It seems as though The Little Sisters of the Poor, of Baltimore, have been granted a stay from the part of the AHCA that required them to supply health insurance to their employees that included paying for birth control and other medications designed to induce abortions.

The government has until Friday to respond to Justice Sotomayor’s ruling. Of course if this piece of the tower is lost, it may well be the piece that causes the tower to fall. After all, how can liberals support a health care act that does not fund one of their pet issues?  A woman’s right to choose.

Only time will tell how many pieces the President and his fellow travelers can pull from the bottom and move to the top before the whole thing comes crashing down.