"The War On Christmas: A History" | Classic Episode
Episode Stats
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Summary
Is there a War on Christmas? Of course there is. It's a staple of the holiday season, but is there a war on Christmas really a thing? Is it really so bad that it needs to be fought in the name of Christmas?
Transcript
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Hey everybody, Michael Knowles here, host of The Michael Knowles Show.
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One thing I know a lot of people like to do at Christmas is take a look back.
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You know, go back and look at old scrapbooks and photographs and family movies.
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We're going to go all the way back to episode 71 of this show years ago.
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I know a lot of conservatives even deny that the war on Christmas exists.
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All the leftists deny that the war on Christmas exists, but it does.
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So for your delight, for your edification, for the cause of fighting the war on Christmas
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and defending the Christmas side of that, in which I consider myself a three-star general,
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please enjoy this classic episode and Merry Christmas to everybody.
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Today, I assume the role of candy cane-chomping Douglas MacArthur in the war on Christmas.
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I will explain why the war on Christmas really matters, and I will be wearing this helmet
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the whole time in case any lefties try to break in and attack me with euphemistic language.
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I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Stop trying to be a cool guy and get the New York Times to like you by pretending there isn't.
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It's now fashionable in some conservative circles, where people care what the New York Times thinks,
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to say that the war on Christmas is some crazy illusion of conservatives.
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And I'm, you know, I'm not that kind of conservative.
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I'm educated and fancy, and I think, wait, wait, don't tell me is clever.
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I'm not one of those middle state rubes who pays attention to the degraded culture belched out every year
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Barack Obama struck the word Christmas from the White House Christmas card.
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A quick look back through history shows this is not the norm.
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Calvin Coolidge wrote in his 1927 White House Christmas card,
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The real spirit of Christmas, if we think on these things, there will be born in us a savior,
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and over us will shine a star, sending its gleam of hope to the world.
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FDR wrote some variation of Merry Christmas from the President and Mrs. Roosevelt,
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each of the 150 years he reigned in the White House.
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As 1950 ebbs to its close, our hearts turn once more to Bethlehem and to the coming of
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a little child, the divine infant that brought love to a weary world.
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Six paragraphs later, six paragraphs later, he concluded, quote,
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Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace and goodwill toward men.
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Eisenhower wrote a curt, typical season's greetings for Christmas and New Year.
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The pieces of LBJ's card available still don't show the wording,
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but given his preference for four-letter epithets, that's probably for the best.
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Language on the other cards is hard to track down as well until we get to George W. Bush,
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who included verses from Psalms on the Christmas card.
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Then we get to Barack Obama, who not only struck mention of Christmas entirely,
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but according to his own White House social secretary, tried to ban the creche,
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the nativity scene, from the East Room of the White House.
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Because they wanted to make Christmas more, quote, inclusive.
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That's how you know that there is a war on Christmas.
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School districts will replace Merry Christmas and Happy New Year with the vague
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Happy Holidays, retail outlets, work environments.
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Christmas parties have become vague holiday parties.
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In many circles, particularly in the cultural centers of the country,
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to say Merry Christmas has become a political act that expresses to the retail worker
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or the acquaintance your political and politically incorrect point of view.
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And if you harp on this long enough, as I do, as I do every year,
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Well, yeah, but why shouldn't the greeting be more inclusive?
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You know, not everybody celebrates Christmas, you know,
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The other trick that those who deny the cultural movement will say is that it isn't a war.
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Christmas is not literally being cut down by machine gun fire.
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That's because the war on Christmas is a figure of speech,
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Poverty is not being cut down by bullets because, like Christmas, it isn't material.
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What is meant by the, quote, war on Christmas is a battle of language and culture.
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There is a belligerent group of left-wing cultural warriors which seeks to replace clear,
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traditional, precise language, Christmas, with vague, meaningless euphemisms like happy holidays
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Of course, both phrases have been around for a long time.
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But whereas in the past they referred specifically to Christmas and New Year's,
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like Eisenhower's Christmas card, season's greetings for Christmas and New Year,
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now they serve as a replacement for the politically correct term,
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what the modern mind considers the grave offense of Christmastime, Merry Christmas.
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But aren't there other major holidays during Christmastime beside Christmas and New Year's?
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There are holidays, to be sure, but no major ones.
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The closest contender we have is Hanukkah, which is the Jewish festival of lights.
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But while Hanukkah is indeed an ancient holiday, it dates back about 2,000 years,
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Because Hanukkah is non-biblical, there are few religious restrictions on work.
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According to historian Diane Ashton, Hanukkah rose to prominence in America as it did,
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not in the rest of the world, because of two Reform rabbis in 19th century Cincinnati
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who worried their children had little connection to the synagogue.
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Before that, there is little record of Hanukkah celebrations.
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The rabbis modeled the celebration in gift-giving after Christmas.
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They didn't see Christmas as something they could do easily because it's Christian,
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but they did want to do something like that because it was American.
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So kosher restaurants even started serving turkey dinners after the American custom.
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The far less credible pretender is Kwanzaa, which is a socialist contrivance invented by
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a criminal L.A. City College Africana Studies professor named Malana Karenga in 1966.
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He created Kwanzaa to be a holiday specifically for black Americans,
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even though black Americans already celebrated Christmas.
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Ironically, while virtually all African slaves were brought to America from the west coast
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of Africa, Kwanzaa is a Swahili word meaning first fruits that originated in East Africa,
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which means none of the slaves brought to America would have understood it.
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Now, one of the seven principles of Kwanzaa is communism,
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and Malana Karenga himself was sentenced to prison in 1971
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for felonious assault and false imprisonment after he sexually assaulted and tortured multiple women.
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As the L.A. Times reported, he ordered them to strip naked,
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whipped them with an electrical cord, and beat them with a karate baton.
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Karenga then placed a hot soldering iron in one woman's mouth and against her face
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He finally put detergent and running hoses in their mouths
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As the black power movement of the 1970s has waned,
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On the high end of estimates, 0.3% of Americans acknowledge the supposed holiday.
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So why pretend Christmastime does not center around Christmas?
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Why pretend there are so many other major holidays on equal footing?
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and we've long said good tiding for Christmas and a happy new year.
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But by the way, we don't say happy holidays instead of happy Labor Day,
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even though Rosh Hashanah, which is a far more important Jewish holiday than Hanukkah,
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We don't say happy holidays or season's greetings instead of happy Columbus Day,
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even though Yom Kippur, another much more important Jewish holiday,
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Well, actually, now we don't say happy Columbus Day either.
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We say blessed Indigenous Peoples Day or something like that.
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There's Kwanzaa, a virtually non-existent holiday.
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There's Boxing Day, which no one in the United States celebrates.
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There's the winter solstice, which people pretend is a thing, but nobody celebrates.
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And of course, it isn't about the celebrants of Hanukkah or Kwanzaa
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or the winter solstice who are waging the war on Christmas.
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It's the atheist left who constantly seeks to replace clear,
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vivid language with bizarre, secular euphemisms.
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The essence of political correctness is to replace clear language
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with euphemisms to remove the strength of that language.
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Abortion isn't the killing of babies in the womb.
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Assisted suicide isn't killing the old and the sick.
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Euthanasia is a word that literally means good death.
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So it's no surprise that as political correctness reached peak potency
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in the late 1990s and early 2000s, we see the war on Christmas.
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Denver banned religious floats from its Christmas parade.
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New York mayor Mike Bloomberg displayed the city's holiday tree.
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Major department stores like Macy's removed references to Christmas.
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Public schools began removing Christian symbols from Christmastime display
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Now, the left alternately denies that the war on Christmas exists,
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and then when they can't deny it any longer, they say it doesn't matter.
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If the language doesn't matter, then why are the war on Christmas belligerents
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so insistent on changing the traditional, clear, and precise language?
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Those who insist on the bizarre, vague euphemisms, they know precisely that.
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You know who else knows that is President Trump.
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You know, we're getting near that beautiful Christmas season that people don't talk about
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They don't use the word Christmas because it's not politically correct.
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You go department stores and they'll say Happy New Year and they'll say other things
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They'll have it painted, but they don't say, well, guess what?
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People didn't really take it seriously because they don't take these language issues seriously.
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The Christmas story begins 2,000 years ago with a mother, a father, their baby son, and
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the most extraordinary gift of all, the gift of God's love for all of humanity.
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Whatever our beliefs, we know that the birth of Jesus Christ and the story of this incredible
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life forever changed the course of human history.
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Each and every year at Christmastime, we recognize that the real spirit of Christmas is not what
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That is the true source of joy this time of the year.
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And now as the President of the United States, it's my tremendous honor to finally wish America
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There's nothing like just sitting here with a little candy cane pipe and watching that.
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The great news in the war on Christmas is that clear language and tradition are finally
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According to a 2005 Gallup poll, 41% of respondents deferred to Happy Holidays over Merry Christmas.
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Ten years later, a similar survey, albeit through a different research center, found that number
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Now, the last two years have brought a cultural exuberance to the right, and it's given us
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We've got tax reform, originalist judges, responsible foreign policy, massive deregulation,
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Now, all of this has been possible because of a cultural shift in the country away from insidious
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euphemisms and political correctness, the pinnacle of insidious euphemisms.
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Now is not the time to retreat or seek the approval of the New York Times.
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David McCullough observed that to write well is to think clearly, and that's why it's so hard.
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Don't give in to fashionably muddled thinking, especially around the incarnation of the divine
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I'm going to put down my candy cane pipe, and we're going to get into the mailbag.
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Well, first, I'd like to point out I'm a big fan of your show.
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I understand having great respect to Mary as the woman chosen by God to bear Jesus in
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human form, but I'm curious as to how does praying to Mary not conflict with the first
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I myself am a Christian and base my faith on scripture and use scripture as the basis to
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A good time of year to be asking that question.
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You know, I think a lot of this boils down to this question that some Protestants ask,
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Or why would you have people on earth pray to you?
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And when he had taken it, the four living creatures and the 24 elders fell down before
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Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers
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So we have the saints offering prayers to God in heaven.
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So as early as the first century of the Christian tradition, we see people asking for intercession,
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And we have the city of God, the saints who are in heaven, praying for those of us who
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We have 1 Timothy from Paul, which is pseudepigraphal, but it might tell you something.
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First of all, then I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgiving be
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made for all men, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a quiet
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and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way.
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This is good and pleasing to God, our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come
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Now, Paul asks others to pray for him all the time.
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And Romans and Ephesians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians.
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Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
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Why wouldn't he tell them, I'll just have them pray to me directly.
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Jesus regularly supplies for one person based on the faith of another person.
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Be it done for you as you desire and her daughter is healed.
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It's someone interceding for the daughter and praying.
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And based on the woman's faith, the daughter is healed.
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Lord, have mercy on my son for he has seizures and he suffers terribly.
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In Mark, teacher, I brought my son to you that he has a spirit that makes him mute.
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So one thing we also know from James is that the prayers of the righteous work especially well.
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So James says the prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects.
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She was selected to be the ark of the new covenant, to give birth to the incarnation, to our risen Lord.
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Seems to me she would be a good person to pray for you as well.
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I think probably you could answer that question by saying she's the mother of Jesus.
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But I hope that clears it up a little bit because very often I think people say,
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well, I don't think we should do these rituals or these traditions or have this liturgy because it's not in Scripture.
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And you just have to read a little more broadly or more closely to see exactly how that fits in.
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It's not always clear to people who aren't in the tradition itself.
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So I've made a bit of a political come around in 2016 due to all the election craziness.
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I was pretty far to the left in most ways and still am on a lot of economical issues.
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But I've recently become more devout in my Catholic faith and have changed my position from pro-choice to pro-life.
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I'm afraid to tell my pro-choice friends and family because I'm afraid they'll ostracize me.
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I was pro-choice back when I was – I wasn't really left-wing, but I was pro-choice.
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New York Republicans are just not terribly conservative.
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As I got more conservative, it was clear to me that abortion isn't good and we shouldn't have it be a legal thing.
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Diana Schaub, who's a bioethicist, convinced me of this over a lunch.
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And when it happened, I didn't know how to tell my friends.
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The way you have to do it is two things, unapologetically and patiently.
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Usually the first person to get angry and start screaming in an argument is the one who doesn't understand really what you're arguing over.
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Louis C.K., the now disgraced comedian, but he had a good bit.
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He said, you know, abortion, I don't think it's a big deal.
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It's either completely meaningless like excretion or it's murdering a baby.
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And I think you have to explain those premises because if you explain those premises and it's perfectly logical and compassionate from there and then you just debate the premise.
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So is it independent or is it part of the mother?
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It has a beating heart within not very many days.
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It's obviously dependent for food on its mother.
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And so if all of those things are true, then the question is, are you willing to risk what is the moral equivalent of murder?
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Because on the premise that it doesn't yet have human dignity when you're going to abort it, if you put it in those terms, I think you might not bring them totally to understand.
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The Daily Wire hopes you're having a terrific Christmas holiday.
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We will be back January 4th with new episodes of The Michael Knowles Show.