No McDonald's Today

By Rick Pearcey

My son and I often stop by McDonald's for a bite to eat after homeschool bowling on Fridays.

But not today.

I first heard about McDonald's in 1963. I was a kid. Kennedy had been shot. I heard the news on the radio in a new white Ford station wagon while crossing a D.C. bridge.

We were returning from having been stationed in Germany. The Cuban missile crisis had come and gone. I saw the howitzers in Gelnhausen, lined up and ready to roll.

Sometime later, stateside, we were in Columbus, Ohio. Twenty-five cents, I think, for a McDonald's hamburger. What fun! A great welcome home!

But not now.

Not today, in light of reports that McDonald's has decided, apparently, to declare war on my family. And to declare war on the civilization of liberty, independence, creativity, and humanity under God that my Dad fought for in World War II.

Reports such as this -- "Pink Arches? McDonald's Buys Into Homosexual Agenda."

And reports such as this: "McDonald's Gives Support to Homosexual Agenda."

And this: "McDonald's Signs Onto 'Gay' Agenda."

For Christians, this is a matter of stewardship and "loving thy neighbor" -- Why spend good money on a morally and socially corruptive business?

For families, this is a matter of child protection -- Why support a business that helps fund organizations that disrespect the heart of family life?

For human beings, this is a matter of liberty under God -- Why help finance groups that turn their backs on the Declaration of Independence, the Founding vision, and the living Creator who holds it all together?

If you say you can do without all of that, then I say we can do without McDonald's.

Why, apparently, those McDonald's people can't tell the difference between right and wrong.

Between the wrongness of discriminating against someone on the basis of his or her beautiful and God-given skin color and the correctness of rejecting trumped-up victimhood and pretend discrimination based on membership in an ethically challenged but politically powerful interest group.

Information from the Creator, not to mention simple lessons in biology, says there's a difference between diversity and perversity, between being pulled over for driving while black and being guilty of sinning while human.

A hamburger's worth giving up and giving in to all that?

Hardly.

McDonald's is now on trial.

The fries are good. Even great. But the worldview they support isn't fit for human consumption.

Maybe we'll stop by Chick-Fil-A instead. It's a little out of the way, but I hear they like families.

Real families -- not ones made up by the ACLU last Tuesday.

And what's an extra mile or two to vote with your pocketbook? One way or another, you always pay for your convictions.

* Update: Chicago radio host Sandy Rios and I are scheduled to discuss "No McDonald's Today" at 4:35 p.m. Monday afternoon, April 7, 2008. More here. Central Time.

** Update: See also, "Faggot" Easy to Defend: Surprising Help From Secular America

*** Update: See also, Rosie O'Donnell's Oppressive Coat

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Rick Pearcey is editor and publisher of The Pearcey Report (articles).

Modern Secularists Not So Brilliant

By Rick Pearcey

The Founding Fathers understood that human rights are rooted not in the state but in the Creator, in whose image all people are made.

Thus, the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.

The Founders were brilliant in that they understood that a humane balance of form and freedom in society and governance could be achieved if "we the people" as individuals self-consciously built our polity upon information given by the Creator.

Not so brilliant are modern secularists, who reject the truly progressive Judeo-Christian concept of a Creator whose liberating norms speak to all of life, public and private.

Now comes this today from AP, "Clinton promises to expand homosexual rights":

Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said she would defend and expand homosexual rights as president.

Clinton said states such as New Jersey and Massachusetts are extending rights to homosexual couples "and the federal government should recognize that and should extend the same access to federal benefits across the board. I will very much work to achieve that." Clinton's comments came in an interview with the Philadelphia Gay
News that was posted on its website Thursday.

The problem, in a word, rogue government. Rogue, as in "vicious and solitary."

Vicious? Yes, for few things are as savage and destructive and hateful as the "gay" attack on family, freedom, and human nature defined not by the subjective imaginations and pretended "rights" of finite interest groups pushing private agendas, but by verifiable, empirically vouchsafed data from the Creator himself.

Solitary? Yes, for what the Hillarys of the world are pushing is a social order alienated from the Declaration, alienated from community with our true Creator, and alienated from our true selves as amazing creatures male and female created in the image of God. How dark and confining and inhumane is the "light" of secularism.

It demands that human beings reduce themselves to the embrace of genes, groups, genitalia, and skin color under the power construct of an autonomous federal government cut loose from the spiritual-intellectual framework that lifted the U.S. up from the Greeks, Romans, and barbarians not so long ago. Against this human nature properly and necessarily rebels.

Far better to rebel for God, man, and neighbor. Far better to say yes to love, but no to an expanding vicious "rights regime" imposed by a temporary power establishment. Yes to community, yes to humanity, but no to the loneliness of the empty, secular soul.

It's how you keep a republic.

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Rick Pearcey is editor and publisher of The Pearcey Report (articles).