By Selwyn Duke

When you hear about government controlling church sermons, you might assume that China or Cuba would be the scene of such tyranny. But now the United States is also, with Iowa state officials not only claiming the power to determine what is and isn’t a “religious purpose,” but also, shockingly, to control church sermons.

At issue is the Iowa Civil Rights Act and a state bureaucracy’s position that churches are, to use the tendentious designation conjured up by judges decades ago, “public accommodations.” This makes them subject to the same rules as businesses; meaning, they don’t get to determine who uses their own facilities, paid for with their own money. This also could have a bearing on sermons. As WND.com wroteTuesday, “The Iowa Civil Rights Act bans places of ‘public accommodation’ from expressing their views on human sexuality if they would ‘directly or indirectly’ make ‘persons of any particular … gender identity’ feel ‘unwelcome.’”

Read the rest here. 

Posted by Selwyn Duke

Here is my Monday appearance on the Radio Free Rocky D Show. My segment begins at 8:20 and runs till 21:52. 

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By Selwyn Duke

There’s an old saying, “Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are.” If this be true, Hillary Clinton’s got some 'splainin’ to do — because the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) is all in for her candidacy.

Oh, the CPUSA hasn’t technically endorsed Clinton; that would hurt its street cred because she’s not an out-of-the-closet Marxist. But they certainly are burning red with Democrat passion.

Read the rest here. 

By Selwyn Duke

Striking a blow against the unscientific “transgender” agenda, Pope Francis called the notion of “gender fluidity” the “annihilation of man” during a recent closed-door meeting. Among his remarks, made while speaking with bishops at the start of the recent World Youth Days in Poland, were, reportsBreitbart, “‘Today, in schools they are teaching this to children — to children! — that everyone can choose their gender,’ as a result of ‘persons and institutions who donate money.’ He went on to describe the process of ‘ideological colonizing’ backed by ‘very influential countries,’ which he did not identify. One such ‘colonization,’ he said, ‘I’ll say it clearly with its first and last name — is gender.’” He added, “This is terrible.”

The comments were made shortly after the pope’s arrival in the city of Krakow on July 27, but were only released this past Tuesday. And pulling no punches, Francis said “We are living a moment of annihilation of man as image of God”; explaining this statement, he elaborated, “Speaking with Pope Benedict, who is well, and has a clear mind, he was telling me: ‘Holiness, this is the epoch of sin against God the Creator.’ He’s intelligent! God created man and woman, God created the world this way, this way, this way, and we are doing the opposite,’” reports theWashington Post.   

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By Selwyn Duke

Here is an interesting video illustrating how, contrary to official polls, Donald Trump's support all across social media dwarfs Hillary Clinton's. Many observers say this represents true candidate support nationwide. I'm not quite that optimistic, as it's logical to conclude that the social media results just reflect the different levels of passion of the candidates' supporters — after all, Clinton doesn't exactly inspire passion. Nonetheless, the data presented below is worthy of consideration. 

If any of the above statistics are predictive of the November election results, I suspect it would have to be the Instagram follower numbers, which have Trump leading 55 percent to 45 percent. Still, however, that's a big "if." What I do know is that, as with the Brexit vote "leave" side, Trump is under-polling because he's the politically incorrect candidate. The question is, is the "invisible vote" enough to put him over the top? 

Posted by Selwyn Duke

Pat Caddell, Democrat and former pollster for Jimmy Carter, talks about how Reuters manipulated its polling data to make it appear that Hillary Clinton is more popular than she is — and that Donald Trump is less popular than he actually is.

By Selwyn Duke

Liberal media bias has long been an open secret. But now it’s so bad that even a liberal mainstream newspaper notes that, in an effort to destroy Donald Trump, the media have jumped the shark.

In a Los Angeles Times piece, columnist Justin Raimondo writes that to “fight Trump, journalists have dispensed with objectivity”; he then asks, “Why are the rules of journalism being rewritten this election year?” He also theorizes that the pro-Hillary Clinton bias has become so blatant it may actually backfire on the media.

Read the rest here. 

By Selwyn Duke

With reports of dead bodies and excrement floating in the water, the threat of Zika and the Russian doping scandal, the Rio Olympics appears the Frankenstein of athletic events. And now Rio seems dopey in another way: owing to political correctness, a runner with, reportedly, no womb or ovaries but internal testes will be allowed to compete with women.

This person is South African middle-distance competitor Caster Semenya. I wrote of Semenya in 2009, back when Semenya (I’m not satisfied that Semenya is female, so henceforth I’ll refer to the runner not with pronouns but as “CS”) was an 18-year-old phenom who’d just set a record while winning a world title,  dusting female opponents in the process. These outstanding results, along with CS’s masculine physique, caused suspicion and led to tests to determine the athlete’s sexual status.

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By Selwyn Duke

The media and effete powers-that-be have been twisting themselves into Halal pretzels Islamsplainin’, rationalizing how a given Muslim terrorist attack isn’t really “Islamic” or isn’t significant. These contortions can become quite ridiculous, such as suggesting that recent Allahu Akbar-shouting Munich shooter Ali Sonboly might somehow have had “right-wing” motives because, among his violent passions, was an interest in Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik.

A more common (un)intellectual contortion is the minimizing tactic of claiming, as is politically correct authorities’ wont, that a given jihadist attacker “has no ties to IS” (the Islamic State), as if there’s nothing to see here if a man doesn’t provide notarized evidence of allegiance to the boogeyman du jour. Yet this is much as if we’d claimed during the Cold War that a Marxist terrorist attack wasn’t really a Marxist™ terrorist attack because we couldn’t find a connection to the Soviet Union. The issue and problem wasn’t primarily the Soviet Union but communism (Marxism birthed the USSR, not the other way around), an evil ideology that wreaks havoc wherever it takes hold. Likewise, the IS didn’t birth Islam; Islam birthed the IS.

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By Selwyn Duke

It is her nation’s duty “to defend the Cross, not the Crescent,” Polish parliamentarian Professor Krystyna Pawłowicz (shown, hands upraised) boldly proclaimed recently. And furthermore, she implied that Germany was doing quite the opposite, saying that it was actually going to great lengths to “cover up the crimes of their Arab guests,”reports Breitbart.

While Pawłowicz was responding to the July 24 murder of a Polish woman in Germany by a Muslim, this isn’t the first time she and her fellow Law & Justice Party statesmen have locked verbal horns with their western neighbor. In January, Pawłowicz called for a boycott of German products after “Martin Schulz, the German president of European Parliament, likened the party’s ruling style to a ‘coup,’ prompting Law & Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski to evoke Nazi-era references,”reported Bloomberg at the time. The European Union has reacted to Poland like a vampire to a cross ever since Law & Justice — an anti-EU, anti-immigration party that endeavors to restore traditional values — won the nation’s October elections. In fact, the European Commission decided to investigate legislation enacted by Law & Justice after EU members accused the party of “jeopardizing the bloc’s democratic values,” as Bloomberg put it.

Read the rest here.