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Gays in committed relationships have a “partner.” Polyamorous people like Diana Adams, who runs a Brooklyn-based legal firm that fights to offer traditional marriage rights to untraditional lovers, have a “primary partner.”
Primary partners because, well, polyamorists subscribe to the philosophy of being head over heels in love—or at least romantically involved—with more than one person at the same time. The Polyamory Society defines the practice as “the nonpossessive, honest, responsible and ethical philosophy and practice of loving multiple people simultaneously.”
“I remember from a very young age realizing that I was bisexual and that I tended to be attracted to many different people at the same time,” Adams told Roc Morin in a recent article in The Atlantic entitled “Up for Polyamory? Creating Alternatives to Marriage.”
“I really think that polyamory for me is an orientation, like being heterosexual or homosexual,” Adams said. “Humans in general have a hard time with monogamy. That’s always been the case. We used to have a sense that it was acceptable for husbands to go out and have other lovers, but with the shift to egalitarianism, rather than to say that woman could do that too, we’ve gone in the other direction.”
This mainstream media reporter went on to ask Adams the intimate details of her polyamorous love life, such as: What are the consequences of polyamory? What do your other lovers give you that your primary partner can’t? How do your different lovers get along with one another? What role does jealousy play in your relationships? How do you deal with those emotions? and How does your family view your lifestyle? Morin left few rocks unturned—and may have turned them if the answers weren’t potentially too pornographic for a mainstream publication.
Yes, the mainstream media is setting out to push polyamory into the mainstream in much the way it pushed gay rights. On Valentine’s Day, The Week magazine ran a piece headlined “Everything You Wanted to Know About Polyamory but Were Afraid to Ask.” Yesterday, the Globe and Mail served up a Q&A about how one couple saved their marriage by embracing nonmonogamy and having sex with others. And just this morning, the Mail & Guardian published “Polyamory: Two’s Company, Three’s a Charm.”
Meanwhile, sites like Live Science are working to debunk the myths around polyamory. And—would you believe it?—Scientific American last week put out an article called “New Sexual Revolution: Polyamory May Be Good for You“ that reveals about 4 to 5 percent of Americans are looking outside their relationship for love and sex—with their partner’s full permission. It goes on and on.
Of course, it didn’t just start. Woody Allen’s 2008 film Vicky Cristina Barcelona celebrated a polyamorous relationship. Slowly and steadily, the push for polyamory is rising in the media, in many ways taking a page from the gay agenda’s playbook.
In The Atlantic article, Adams made her polyamorous relationships sound like the path to enlightenment. Even her religious family is warming up to the notion of the immoral lifestyle, finding it wonderful that she has “not just one smart, compassionate, great boyfriend, but two” after two of Adams’ sexual partners went to visit her “fundamentalist deacon” father in the hospital.
Notice how the polyamory agenda introduced acceptance by strict religious people into the article. It’s subtle, but it’s there—and it’s no coincidence how many media outlets ran stories about polyamory right before, on and right after Valentine’s Day, either. Make no mistake, the polyamory push is on. Polyamory people will begin coming out first in strategic drips and later in droves.
Some have called polyamory the next civil rights movement that will vie for full marriage equality. Polyamory is already a legislative issue in Canada. Rest assured, America is next. The shadow of Sodom and Gomorrah hangs over America. The question is: Will churches bow to polyamorous immorality like they did to the gay rights movement? When is enough finally enough?
Jennifer LeClaire is news editor at Charisma. She is also the author of several books, including The Making of a Prophet. You can email Jennifer at @ or visit her website here. You can also join Jennifer on Facebook or follow her on Twitter.
I played an angel on Touched by an Angel for almost a decade, and I’ve learned a thing or two about spiritual warfare:
Tired of cursing the darkness, my husband, Mark, and I wanted to shine a light. To do this, we set up a production company called LightWorkers Media. The Bible miniseries, born out of this intention and released last year, grew so popular that we were able to make it into our Jesus film, Son of God.
The Bible series was in its third week when Jesus began to appear on the big screen. There was great excitement that Jesus was coming, with our trailers, various talk shows and even Twitter buzzing with anticipation.
He was beautiful and strong and kind and compassionate. His presence uplifted and encouraged people. It was everything we had hoped for.
But there was supernatural opposition at work. The devil was also in that episode. Someone made a comment that the actor who played the devil vaguely resembled our president, and suddenly the media went nuts. It went global, showing up all over TV and the Internet. That next day, when I was sure everyone would only be talking about Jesus, they were talking about Satan instead.
This is a battle of light and darkness.
It became ugly when people started making nasty statements. Something that had been born of a beautiful intention was suddenly under attack, and we were caught in the middle of spiritual warfare.
I knew it was just like Satan the narcissist to make it all about him and create division. I am sure he loved being the center of attention for even one day.
But for our movie, Son of God, I wanted all of the focus to be on Jesus. I want his name to be on the lips of everyone who sees this movie, so we cast Satan out. It gives me great pleasure to tell you that the devil is on the cutting room floor. This is now a movie about Jesus, the Son of God, and the devil gets no more screen time, no more distractions.
You may think of me as a gentle Irish angel, but nobody, not even the devil, should mess with me. Get behind me Satan. This is a love story, and nothing anyone can do will stop that message from reaching millions of people. The darkness is no match for the light, something we are assured of in the book of John where it says: “And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”
In Morocco, on the set of the movie, we had a snake man, to clear our locations of snakes and scorpions. Each day he would clear one or two snakes. But on the morning of the crucifixion scene we had asked everyone we knew to pray. That morning when I got to the set, the snake man had a writhing cloth bag at the side of the road with over 40 snakes in it. He had cleared them from around the foot of the cross. The symbolism of the snake was not lost on us. Prayer—and the snake man—had cleared the way.
We have so many people praying for the movie and we are grateful for all the prayers for us, our team and our movie. We pray that all the “snakes” that may be thrown in our path will be cleared between now, and Feb. 28, so that the movie will have a successful opening, and will bring glory to God.
Roma Downey plays Mary, the mother of Christ, and is the co-producer along with her husband, Mark Burnett, of the film Son Of God. This commentary first appeared in USA Today.
When I really started examining what I was eating, I went back to the Bible—my playbook—for some guidance as to what I should or should not be eating. I mean, Jesus had to be pro food, right?
He was human as well as divine, so He had to eat while He was here on earth. But what did He eat? I know He created the Milky Way, but I’m pretty sure He wasn’t munching on Milky Way candy bars.
What I discovered is that even though the Bible does not tell us everything Jesus ate, food was on His mind and was a topic of concern during His ministry. He used food in His illustrations, as evidenced by parables such as the sower and the seed (Matt. 13:3-9), faith and the mustard seed (Matt. 13:31-32), and the great banquet (Matt. 22:2-14).
He used wheat fields to depict a spiritual harvest that was ready to be reaped (John 4:35). He performed miracles with food, such as the feeding of the 5,000 with five loaves of bread and two fish (Mark 6:30-44). Another time, when the disciples were on the boat fishing, He told them to cast their nets into the water. They had caught nothing that day, but after following His command, they reaped an extraordinary take of fish (Luke 5:1-7). Even Jesus’ first miracle involved food, when He turned water into wine at a wedding feast in Cana (John 2:1-11).
Perhaps Jesus’ most important illustration with food is the one He used with His disciples during their last Passover meal together to explain what would happen when He died on the cross. This is a practice that continues today in the taking of Communion, or the Lord’s Supper (Matt. 26:17-30; Mark 14:12-26; Luke 22:7-39; John 13:1–17:26). And just think about that great feast God has promised up in heaven at the time of the marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev. 19:6-9).
Jesus was all about food, and His desire is for us to be fit and healthy—not take our food away.
He just wants us to make healthy choices when it comes to eating. Not only did Jesus talk about food, but as a member of the Trinity, He also created food for us to enjoy. In Genesis 1:11, God the Father said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth.”
In Genesis 1:29, He told Adam, “See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seeds; to you it shall be for food.” These verses show that God wants us to enjoy the food we eat. He created us with an average of 10,000 taste buds and placed them along the path our food travels when we are eating it.
Think about this for a moment. God chose to put those taste receptors—called papillae—in that location so we could enjoy the tastes of the wonderful foods He created for us to enjoy.
God’s plan has always been for the bulk of our diet to come from “living food”—foods such as fruits and vegetables that are uncooked, unrefined and unprocessed. Chips, soda, cookies and candy do not fit into this category. Many of these “dead foods” can last several years without going bad. If you don’t believe me, just check out the “use by” date on a box of macaroni and cheese and see how long it can last.
It’s time to clean house. Start by taking stock of the food you currently have. Survey how much of it is living food and how much of it is dead food. Get a garbage can, open the doors of your cupboards and pantry, and start tossing out the junk food. Get it out of your kitchen. Start eating living food to live!
Steve Reynolds is the senior pastor of Capital Baptist Church in Annandale, Va. He is the author of the books Bod4God and Get Off the Couch. He is also the creator of the Losing to Live Weight-Loss Competition. Steve has lost more than 120 pounds and has led his church to lose more than nine tons of weight.
Americans are eating more hidden sugar in their foods than they think, and it is putting their hearts at risk.
That’s the warning from one of the nation’s top cardiologists in the wake of a new study showing that even moderate sugar consumption leads to a higher death risk from heart disease.
“Most people don’t realize how much hidden sugar is in the foods—and what they don’t know is killing them,” Chauncey Crandall, M.D., tells Newsmax Health.
“We’ve all been hoodwinked into thinking a moderate amount of sugar is OK, but that theory is falling apart with the new research,” says Crandall, author of the No. 1 Amazon best-seller The Simple Heart Cure.
“We don’t even realize how much sugar we are consuming. We think that sugar is in only candy or ice cream, but manufacturers sneak sugar into almost everything, including soups, catsup, canned salmon, cured meat—even toothpaste,” he says.
The new study found that consuming even a moderate amount of sugar translates into a higher rate of death from cardiovascular disease. Drinking only two cans of regular sugar-sweetened soda a day significantly increases death risk, according to the researchers.
Previous studies had linked diets high in sugar with increased risks for non-fatal heart problems, and with obesity, which can also lead to heart trouble. But the new research found that obesity didn’t explain the link between sugary diets and death. Even normal-weight people eating sugar were found to have a higher death rate.
“My main concern has been that this higher sugar consumption leads to obesity, diabetes and hypertension, but now this new study shows that sugar can lead to unhealthy inflammatory changes, even in people who are not overweight. This means that everyone is at risk,” says Crandall, director of preventative medicine at the Palm Beach Cardiovascular Clinic.
The study, published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, examined the dietary habits and health of more than 30,000 Americans over 15 years.
“The message is clear,” says Crandall. “We need to reduce the amount of sugar we consume—especially in soda—because it is more dangerous that most of us think.”
For the original article, visit .
Mary divorced Don because he was unfaithful, but she had never been unpleasant about it. If anything, she killed him with kindness, which only made him feel even more rotten.
Don was not a scoundrel. He didn’t set out to fail. He didn’t wake up one day and think, “Well, I wonder what I can do to ruin my life today.” Rather, his fall followed on the heels of thousands of small, daily choices he made in his private thoughts over several years.
It all started the day after he and Mary moved into their first home, when he fixed the blinds just right so he could watch the woman next door sunning in her backyard. What began as a single act of curiosity snowballed into a regular habit of lust.
He was also a little too huggy-kissy around the office, where he led in sales year after year. Don was no Brad Pitt, but he could tell women found him attractive. This flattered his ego, especially since girls had not noticed him at all in high school. He tended to let his eyes fix a moment too long on his female associates. Often Don found himself engaging in sexual fantasies as he would creep along the freeway toward home after work.
Evelyn was an ambitious young woman also in the sales department. She was bright, a quick learner and already earning more commissions than most of the men in the office. By her ambition she was eager to learn from Don, and by her upbringing she was lonely for love. She had not been hugged enough by her daddy.
There was a natural sexual attraction between Don and Evelyn. But for Don, this was no more than most men felt toward a physically sensuous woman, which Evelyn certainly was—she had “the look.” Neither of them ever overtly acted on the physical attraction by flirting, but the chemistry was there.
One of the company’s biggest customers was interested in getting a quote for a privately labeled product. If the numbers worked, it could be one of the biggest sales in the history of their company. Four top salespeople were assigned to work out the details, including Evelyn and Don. About two weeks into the project, it became clear that the four of them needed to travel to the customer’s home office to work out kinks in the pricing.
After checking in at their hotel, two of them wanted to hit the downtown entertainment district that night, but Don and Evelyn both declined. They waved goodbye as their associates’ cab pulled away from the curb.
As they walked inside, Don’s senses were alert. There was a sense of danger in the air, and he welcomed it. He said, “I’m going to get something to eat. Would you like to join me?”
Evelyn simply nodded as her eyes fell to the carpet, and they walked to the dining room. The maitre d’ seated them in a booth near the back of the restaurant. Don had already made his first mistake but not his biggest mistake. His biggest mistake was mixing wine with dinner. But his real mistake had been made thousands of choices earlier.
The wine lowered both of their inhibitions, which led to exploratory questions. The questions became more and more provocative. Each successive answer signaled interest in going further. By the time Don signed the check, he had pulled the noose tight around his own neck. They walked to the elevator, went up to her room, and Don became an adulterer.
Don woke up the next morning laden with guilt, remorse and shame. The balance of the business trip was extremely awkward. He resolved in his mind that it was a one-time tryst and that he was going to change a number of his ways. Unfortunately, that thought came several years too late. Don was addicted, and he couldn’t walk away from his lusty habits.
Evelyn, his correspondent, was equally flustered by the affair, but she was single. She was also highly attracted to Don, and that fed his ego. Less than two weeks later, Don found himself at Evelyn’s apartment during lunch. For the next three months, that became their regular rendezvous two or three times a week.
Meanwhile, Mary had been frustrated several times because she had been unable to reach Don during lunch, which he usually ate at his desk. He explained by lying to her that he had started taking key customers to lunch from time to time. Meanwhile, it didn’t take long for Evelyn’s and Don’s co-workers to add things up. Several of the women in the office felt scandalized. Don naively didn’t think anyone had noticed.
One day Mary called and reached Susan, one of the scandalized women. She asked, “Is my husband there?” Susan, who could be vicious as a cornered cat, shot back in a villain’s voice, “No, and you may want look into it a little further.”
Mary sat with the phone hanging limp in her hand until the phone company’s you-didn’t-hang-it-up-right ringer brought her back to earth. The next day Mary—she couldn’t help herself—followed Don’s car from the office at lunch. When she saw him go into an apartment, she didn’t want to see any more. She sped away, sobbing hysterically.
As soon as she arrived home, Mary called her mother and spent 10 emotional minutes telling her what she had just seen. “Mom, I’m just so scared. I don’t know what to do.”
“Honey, I am so, so sorry,” her mother began, then followed with 20 questions. After talking out every possible explanation and course of action, they agreed that Mary would tell Don that very evening exactly what had happened step by step, starting with Susan’s offhand phone remark.
After the children were in bed, Mary asked Don into the den and shut the door. She began trembling, and tears streamed along the creases of her face. Don knew he had been caught before Mary said a word. The guilt had been eating away at him. He started crying too. He made it easy for her by asking, “How did you find out?” For the next two hours they covered every angle. Don, a former altar boy, was defrocked. He confessed how it all got started and the hundreds of little sins that led up to the big one.
Mary heard more than she thought she could bear. That night she set her course, and she never wavered from it once. She was a woman of faith—strong faith—but she would not be married to an unfaithful husband.
The divorce took six months. The awful pain didn’t begin to recede for two years. Then she met Sid. Sid was a lot like Don. After all, she had never found anything wrong with Don’s personality, just his character. At the end of 12 months of dinners and picnics with Mary’s three children, they both started thinking, “This might work.”
Four years after Don took Evelyn to be his unlawful mistress, Sid took Mary to be his lawful wife.
It took another year or so to work out the details of shared parenting. Eventually, the children each had two toothbrushes, two beds—two of everything. The children spent every other weekend with Don, and he could attend all their contests and concerts, which he faithfully did.
One Saturday morning, he arrived a few minutes early to pick up the kids for the weekend. Don’s children—ages 14, 12 and 9—were sitting at the breakfast table when he knocked on the kitchen door.
Mary and new-husband Sid were scurrying around the kitchen, fetching more milk and cooking scrambled eggs. Mary went to the door, swung it open, smiled a genuinely friendly smile, and invited Don to come in for a cup of coffee while the kids finished breakfast.
Don came in and, feeling quite awkward—this was their first time all together in the same room—sat down at one end of the kitchen table. The kids were at the other end of the table, with a couple of empty chairs between him and them. The kids didn’t greet him right away because they were arguing about who should get the last piece of toast. He felt like he wasn’t really even there—like he was a ghost, and he felt like a giant horrible, smelly toad.
Mary intervened and calmed the toast storm. Sid said, “Thanks, honey,” gave her a soft kiss on the cheek, then served the kids their eggs and asked if they wanted more milk. Sid tousled Tommy’s hair, and Tommy smiled that toothy grin that always melted Don. But today he was flashing it at Sid. Don was melting anyway, but for a different reason.
Then Sid turned to get the milk bottle and brushed his arm across Mary’s back and gave her a love pat. He poured the milk into Anna’s glass, and she said, “Thank you.” Sid said, “You’re welcome, sweetie.” Sid turned toward Don and exhorted the children, “OK, now, kids, your dad’s here. Aren’t you going to say hello?”
I cannot believe this is happening to me, Don thought as he turned numb. Here is another man doing what I am supposed to do. Here is another man calling my wife “honey,” kissing her face, cooking for my children, tousling my son’s hair, touching my wife’s body, calling my daughter “sweetie,” and my children can’t seem to get enough of him. Meanwhile, it’s like they didn’t even see me come in. There must be some mistake!
There had been a mistake, but it was too late to do anything about it now. Don was going to watch another man love his wife and raise his children.
Patrick Morley is founder and CEO of Man in the Mirror. After building one of Florida’s 100 largest privately held companies, in 1991, he founded Man in the Mirror, a nonprofit organization to help men find meaning and purpose in life. Dr. Morley is the best-selling author of The Man in the Mirror, No Man Left Behind, Dad in the Mirror, and A Man’s Guide to the Spiritual Disciplines.
Ann Coulter, in Treason, asks why so often “are liberals consumed with the assailant’s motive. How about: Until we understand why rapists would rather violently rape a woman than take her to dinner and a movie, we cannot respond to the crime of rape.”
With a liberal president in office, there is no acceptable motive for the Obama administration’s proposal to monitor newsrooms across the country.
Against this backdrop, Federal Communications Commissioner Ajit Pai says this program could be used in “pressuring media organizations into covering certain stories.”
As Pai states in the The Wall Street Journal, “Last May the FCC proposed an initiative to thrust the federal government into newsrooms across the country. With its ‘Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs,’ or CIN, the agency plans to send researchers to grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run. A field test in Columbia, S.C., is scheduled to begin this spring. The purpose of the CIN, according to the FCC, is to ferret out information from television and radio broadcasters about ‘the process by which stories are selected’ and how often stations cover ‘critical information needs,’ along with ‘perceived station bias’ and ‘perceived responsiveness to underserved populations.'”
The Obama administration, which is collecting the phone records of millions of Americans, has admitted to spying on reporters at the Associated Press and Fox News, and has published an enemies list—not enemies like foreign combatants or domestic terrorists, but political and ideological thoughts leaders who do not agree with this president’s policies or actions—is now going to try and oversee the media. Can one imagine if the right engaged in these sorts of un-American activities?
Soon enough, Americans can be in legal trouble if they do not have health care. Jail time and fines can be imposed if you do not comply with Obamacare’s requirements. As a resident of the New York, the least-free state in America, according to a study by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, these policies are absurd. America’s media capital, New York, is by far the least-free state in the union, with the highest taxes, poor economic regulation and restrictive personal freedoms.
Those of us who work in public relations and in the communications business must stand up against this move which would purport to send government researchers into newsrooms to determine how news organizations decide which stories to run.
As Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, says, “We have seen a corrupt IRS unleashed on conservatives. We have seen an imperial president bypass Congress and change the law with executive orders. And now we see the heavy hand of the Obama administration poised to interfere with the First Amendment rights of journalists. It’s clear that the Obama administration is only interested in utilizing intimidation tactics—at the expense of Americans and the Constitution. The federal government has no place attempting to control the media, using the unconstitutional actions of repressive regimes to squelch free speech.”
The Obama totalitarian is indeed exposed.
Ronn Torossian is one of America’s most prolific and respected public relations experts. He is the best-selling author of “For Immediate Release: Shape Minds, Build Brands and Deliver Results With Game-Changing Public Relations and a featured op-ed columnist for the Huffington Post, Newsmax, Wired magazine and others.
Watch Bound4LIFE Director Matt Lockett explain the pro-life organization’s vision for ending abortion among minority groups specifically targeted by abortionists.