QAnon Believer Arrested For Trying To ‘Take Out’ Joe Biden

A follower of the QAnon conspiracy theory has been arrested by police in New York City for attempting to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. The Illinois woman traveled to New York with more than a dozen illegal knives in an attempt to 'take out' Biden to save children from an alleged Democrat pedophile ring. Biden was never in imminent danger.

Citing law enforcement and the woman's own social media posts, The Daily Beast reports that Jessica Prim, 37, a stripper from Peoria, was arrested on Wednesday after she began acting strangely on a New York pier near the USS Intrepid, a retired aircraft carrier that is now a museum, and attracted the attention of police.

In a Facebook live stream of the arrest, Prim is in her truck and tells police that she thinks she has Coronavirus. As she talks to the officers, she says that she was watching the Coronavirus Task Force press conferences and felt like President Trump “was talking to me.”

She goes on to say that someone sent her a YouTube video that detailed the conspiracy theory that prominent Democrats are involved in a pedophile ring.

“I felt like I had to come here, to this ship, because I need help,” Prim told officers. “I feel like I’m the Coronavirus.” She was apparently trying to get to the USNS Comfort hospital ship, which was departing the following day.

The Facebook video shows officers putting Prim into handcuffs as they explain that she is not under arrest but is being detained as they wait for an ambulance to arrive. At that point, Prim is moved away from the camera in her truck which makes the conversation difficult to understand, but she can be heard wailing in the distance.

Later, she can be heard telling officers, “You should really look at my Facebook. It will explain everything.”

Among the numerous pro-Trump and conspiracy-related posts on Prim’s Facebook page is a post that says, “Hillary Clinton and her assistant[s], Joe Biden and Tony Podesta, need to be taken out in the name of Babylon! I can’t be set free without them gone. Wake me up!”

A separate post calls Mike Pence “the Antichrist” and notes that “if they hurt Trump, Pence becomes president and Pelosi vice president.”

As officers search her vehicle, she yells in the background, “You are violating my rights. I’m not going anywhere.”

In the course of the conversation with police, Prim said she smokes pot every day “throughout the day.”

The New York Post reports that the Secret Service had put out an alert for Prim after she made threatening the Facebook post about Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. Secret Service agents were on the scene when the arrest was made per the report. Prim has since been released and has resumed posting to Facebook.  

After her arrest, Prim was taken to Mount Sinai West for evaluation and is being charged with multiple counts of criminal possession of weapons and marijuana. New York City has very strict knife laws that prohibit blades longer than four inches in public places.

There are numerous lessons to take from the tragic tale of Jessica Prim. The most obvious is that conspiracy theories are not harmless. Conspiracy theories and their close cousin, fake news, can be socially destructive and dangerous especially when paired with drug use and mental illness.

Not all Republicans or Trump supporters embrace conspiracy theories but in recent years many conspiracy theories, from Obama’s birth certificate to Jade Helm to Coronavirus skepticism, have found widespread acceptance among Republicans. QAnon is another one of those conspiracies.

For those who are not familiar with QAnon, it is a conspiracy derived from the Pizzagate conspiracy of 2016, which claimed that Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats were operating a child-sex ring out of a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor.  

Adherents of the QAnon conspiracy believe that an anonymous government official who goes by the pseudonym “Q” is posting messages to social media that detail the secret inner workings of the Trump Administration. This is a world in which President Trump and Robert Mueller were secretly working together to expose and arrest Democratic crimes, including the Pizzagate pedophilia, and treason. If you’ve seen pro-Trump posts saying a storm is coming, that is a reference to QAnon.

It isn’t know how widespread belief in QAnon is among Republicans, but several Republican congressional candidates this year were avowed supporters of the Q conspiracy. Only about 18 percent of Republicans say that they are familiar with the conspiracy.

Since the onset of the pandemic, which they believe was caused by either a Chinese bioweapon or Bill Gates, Q believers have been focused on the field hospitals in New York and the hospital ship Comfort, reports Buzzfeed. The conspiracies surrounding the Comfort may explain Prim’s motives in going to the ship.

Prim’s attempt to kill Biden and Podesta was not the first crime that the conspiracy has spawned. In 2016, a North Carolina man fired several shots into the restaurant named in the Pizzagate conspiracy. Fortunately, no one was injured and the man was arrested.

A few days later, a Louisiana man was arrested for making a threatening phone call to another pizza restaurant in the area. The man said he was “coming there to finish what the other guy didn’t,” per the Daily Beast.

“I’m coming there to save the kids and then I’m going to shoot you and everyone in the place,” the man said.

A second lesson is that the Secret Service pays attention to online threats. Such threats should never be made, even in jest, and are not protected the First Amendment.

Third, don’t do drugs. Marijuana is not the harmless substance that many make it out to be. There is now strong evidence from numerous studies that marijuana use contributes to the development of schizophrenia, paranoia, and other mental disorders. This is especially true among adolescents and young adults.

Not all of the details about Jessica Prim and her mission to kill Joe Biden are public, but we do know that it was related to the QAnon conspiracy theory and that she was a heavy marijuana user. Her experience is a cautionary tale that both should be avoided, especially in combination with one another. Responsible people should “just say no” to drugs and conspiracy beliefs.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Medical marijuana bill might pass in Georgia this session

On February 1, Jim Galloway of the Atlanta Journal-Consitution reported that Rep. Allen Peake (R-Macon) has introduced a bill in the General Assembly that would legalize a medical form of marijuana for use in treating epileptic seizures in children. Even more surprising is that Peake hopes to have the bill become law within a matter of weeks.

The bill, dubbed H.B. 885, has been given the nickname of “Haleigh’s Hope Act” for Haleigh Cox, a Monroe County four-year-old who suffers from severe seizures. Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta spokeswoman Patti Gregory told the Macon Telegraph that hospital sees hundreds of children like Haleigh who have as many as 100 seizures each day and who don’t respond to other medications.

The bill would allow cannabis extracts and compounds such as cannabidiol (CBD) to be recommended by doctors at academic research hospitals. CBD is a non-hallucinogenic oil derived from the cannabis plant. Although there has been little research so far, there is anecdotal evidence that CBD can help some young victims of acute epilepsy.

Rep. Ben Watson (R-Savannah) told the Telegraph, “The evidence that’s there relating to seizure disorders looks like when it is added on, it sometimes has very dramatic results.” Watson, a medical doctor, was the first cosponsor of Peake’s bill. Galloway reports that about 90 members of the 180 seat House of Representatives have also signed on to cosponsor the bill.

“At present, there has not been enough evidence-based research around the use of CBD studying its safety and tolerability in children with seizure disorders, and thus should not be used generally,” CHOA’s Gregory said. “However, we are in support of legislation that would allow clinical research by academic institutions.”

The Georgia bill would not be an attempt to usher in de facto recreational use of marijuana as medical marijuana bills have been in some states. The text of the bill contains a clause that explicitly rejects the recreational use of the drug. The proposed law would not allow stoners to self-medicate by smoking a joint.

“What I kept hearing when I jumped into this thing is that (the bill) needed to be tightly restricted, very regulated, managed by doctors, limited in scope, in oil-based form. That’s what we drew up,” Peake told the AJC. “We had to fight the perception from some of my colleagues that we were going to go down a path allowing 6-year-olds to smoke a joint and that we were going to have pot shops on every corner. Or that any physician in the state could prescribe it.”

Marijuana for research and prescription would come from the National Institute on Drug Abuse if the law is passed. This federal agency, a part of the National Institutes of Health, grows a limited amount of marijuana for research purposes. Research facilities would apply to the Georgia Composite Medical Board for authorization to conduct cannabis research and the Georgia Drugs and Narcotics Agency would create rules for storing and distributing the drug.

The bill will likely be assigned to the Health and Human Services Committee in the House. To become law, it must pass both the House and Senate before the current General Assembly session ends in March.

Originally published in Atlanta Conservative Examiner

Who killed Trayvon Martin? An honest discussion of race and crime

Earlier this week on July 16, Attorney General Eric Holder addressed the NAACP convention in Orlando in the wake of the George Zimmerman verdict. In the speech, Holder said that the “tragedy provides yet another opportunity for our nation to speak honestly – and openly – about the complicated and emotionally-charged issues that this case has raised.” In truth, the national conversation about the killing of Trayvon Martin has been anything but honest. 

George Zimmerman admits that he shot and killed Trayvon Martin. Even though Zimmerman pulled the trigger to fire the shot that ultimately killed Martin, he was not the only cause of Martin’s death. There seems to be plenty of blame to go around.

As noted in Examiner, Zimmerman, a registered Democrat, lived in a racially mixed neighborhood. In fact, Martin’s father’s girlfriend lived in the same neighborhood. It is unlikely that Zimmerman would have thought the mere presence of a black teenager would be alarming unless he was acting suspiciously. The Daily Caller reported in April 2012 that Zimmerman was one of few people in Sanford who pushed for justice in 2010 when the son of a white police officer beat a black man.

It seems likely that there is more to the case than the media narrative of a racist neighborhood watch captain killing an innocent black teenager. In many accidents, investigators point to a chain of events that lead up to the final incident. If any of the events that link together to cause the accident had not occurred the accident chain might have been broken. In the case of Trayvon Martin, there are several links in the chain.

The most obvious link in the chain is the string of burglaries that occurred in George Zimmerman’s neighborhood prior to his encounter with Trayvon Martin. According to CNN, there were at least eight burglaries within the previous 14 months. CNN notes that witnesses reported black males were responsible in three to four of the incidents while the other four had no witnesses or suspects. One resident said that George Zimmerman had called to alert police to a burglary in progress at his home on Feb. 2. Zimmerman’s call noted that the burglar in this case was also a black man.

According to the FBI, blacks represent 28 percent of arrests in the United States even though they make up only 13 percent of the population according to the Census Bureau. This means that they commit a disproportionate number of crimes compared to other demographic groups. Half of all murder arrests and more than half of robbery arrests are blacks. Thirty-one percent of burglary arrests are blacks. The statistics are even higher for juvenile arrests. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks are “disproportionately represented among both homicide victims and offenders.”

None of this means that every black person should be automatically suspected of criminal behavior. However, it does show that if a black teenager is acting strangely and looking into houses as Zimmerman alleges, investigating further is not unreasonable. The very purpose for the existence of a neighborhood watch is to be alert for suspicious activity regardless of race.

The question is why crime and incarceration rates among blacks are so much higher than their share of the total population. The answer can likely be found in the destruction of the black family. Data from the Annie E. Casey Foundation shows that 67 percent of black children live in single-parent households. This is a far greater rate than for other races. Seventy-two percent of black children are born to unwed mothers according to NBC News.

The link between single-parent families and risky behaviors of children is well established. According to the National Fatherhood Initiative, especially when the absent parent is the father, children are much more likely to become sexually active, use drugs, and have increased risk of juvenile delinquency.

The underlying truths represented by these statistics may have shaped Trayvon Martin’s young life. Martin’s step-mother, Alicia Stanley, raised him for 14 years until she and Trayvon’s father, Tracy Martin, divorced. Trayvon apparently changed after the divorce. In a CNN interview, Stanley said that he wasn’t a “thug” and that language like “creepy-ass cracker” was not used their home. Stanley said that she did not believe that race was a factor in the shooting.

Nevertheless, New York Times reported that, after the shooting, pictures and text messages found on Trayvon’s cell phone included guns, drugs, fighting and the fact that he had been kicked out of his mother’s house. One picture apparently shows Martin smoking marijuana, which has been shown to cause aggression, anxiety and paranoia. The Daily Mail reports that Trayvon was suspended from school three times in the months before his death. Reasons for the suspensions were possession of a burglary tool and jewelry, truancy, and possession of marijuana paraphernalia. Twitter messages refer to Trayvon hitting a bus driver. (Martin’s complete tweets can be viewed here.) ABC News also reported that Martin’s autopsy showed THC, the drug found in marijuana, in his blood.

In one eerily prescient exchange of text messages, reported in the Miami Herald, a friend asked Trayvon “so you just turning into a lil hoodlum [?]” and then warned “Boy don’t get one planted in ya chest.” Three months later, Trayvon was dead.

There were many links in the chain that led to Trayvon Martin’s death. George Zimmerman’s ill-considered decision to follow the teen is only the most obvious. Directly related to Zimmerman’s paranoia was the spate of burglaries that local police either could not or would not solve. The “broken windows” theory of policing holds that prosecution of small crimes can prevent larger, more violent crimes. In this case, if the police had solved the string of burglaries, they might have prevented an assault and killing. Likewise, if Trayvon’s parents and school administrators had reacted more strongly to the warning signs in his academic career, he might have been “scared straight.”

The biggest and most difficult link to break is the destruction of the black family. Trayvon Martin’s problems may have stemmed from the divorce of his father and step-mother. Like many children of divorce, Martin seems to have begun having trouble at school, become involved with drugs, and finally graduated to violence. Eyewitness testimony, reported by ABC News, supports Zimmerman’s story that he was pinned by Martin and screamed for help. If Martin had returned to his father’s girlfriend’s home rather than turning to confront Zimmerman, regardless of who threw the first punch, he would be alive today. His anger, resulting from anger at his parents’ divorce and compounded by drug use, may have played a role in his decision not to walk away.

Bill Cosby is one of the few black leaders who is willing to speak frankly about the problems facing the black community. In a 2011 interview with the Christian Post, Cosby decried the rise in single-parent families and the “media that romanticizes criminal behavior, things that a person will say against women, profanity, being gangster, having multiple children with multiple men and women and not wanting to is prevalent.”

The way to prevent more Trayvon Martins is not banning stand-your-ground laws, guns or hoodies. Preventing the deaths of more young black men and women starts with repairing the damage to the black family, a much more difficult task than demonizing George Zimmerman. Perhaps that is why so many choose to ignore the problem.

Originally published as Atlanta Conservative Examiner

God save America

freestockphotos.biz

This Fourth of July it might be time to amend the traditional patriotic song and sentiment of “God bless America.” In recent years, America has become so divorced from godly values that it now seems mocking and irreverent to seek his blessing. It might be more appropriate to prostrate ourselves and seek his forgiveness.

The most recent rejection of God is the wave of gay marriage laws sweeping the nation. Twenty years ago, gay marriage was unheard of. Denmark passed a gay partnership law in 1989, but same-sex marriage did not exist legally until 2000 when the Netherlands first passed a gay marriage law. In what would become a familiar theme, gay marriage was legalized in Canada the next year after two gay couples sued. In the U.S., Massachusetts became the first state to legalize gay marriage in 2004, again after a lawsuit. In 2007, Iowa followed suit, again after the state’s marriage law was struck down by courts. Gay marriage did not pass through the legislative process until 2009 when Vermont’s legislature approved the redefinition of marriage. At this point, gay marriage is legal in twelve states, but recent Supreme Court decisions indicate that the Court will probably strike down state definition of marriage laws in the near future.

One of the few truly scientific studies that has been done on the radical changes to the structure of society’s most basic unit, the family, is the New Family Structures Study of 2012. The study reported that gay families are much less stable than comparable heterosexual families. The instability leads to many negative effects in children including being “more apt to report being unemployed, less healthy, more depressed, more likely to have cheated on a spouse or partner, smoke more pot, had trouble with the law, and report… more sexual victimization.”

In the New Testament, particularly Romans 1, homosexuality is described, not as an unpardonable sin, but as a consequence of judgment. Paul wrote that homosexuality is one of the consequences of a society that rejects God. Homosexuality is not the only result of judgment, however. Paul’s roll call of depravities reads like a list of twenty-first century special interest groups:

“…filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.”
The issue of abortion has also seen setbacks in recent years. President Obama’s signature piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act, was billed by Life News as “the greatest expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade.” The ACA, “Obamacare,” mandates that all insurance policies cover abortifacient drugs without copayments. The ACA also ignores the Hyde Amendment that once prohibited federal tax money from being used for abortion. Together with federal funding for Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, Obamacare means that the United States government is in the business of funding and encouraging abortions.

Abortion was at the forefront in the trial of Kermit Gosnell. Although the trial of the Philadelphia abortionist was largely ignored by the media, the news of how Gosnell and his staff allowed babies to be born only to murder them in cold blood spread around the country via social networks. Gosnell was found guilty of three counts of first degree murder as well as a number of other charges. An estimated 50 million Americans have been aborted since the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973.

Also in 2013, Colorado became the first state to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. The use of the drug is being normalized in spite of the fact that there are clear links between marijuana use and schizophrenia and aggression. Writing in the Wall St. Journal, Samuel Wilkinson of the Yale School of Psychiatry points out that heavy users of marijuana who start at a young age have a 200 percent increased risk for schizophrenia, which affects more than three million Americans. About one third of homeless Americans are schizophrenics.

The expansion of abortion and homosexuality corresponds to attacks on religion in spite of the First Amendment. Christian teaching on these issues is being called “offensive” by liberal activists. Members of the Obama Administration talk of “freedom of worship” rather than “freedom of religion.” What this means in practice is that religion, specifically the Christian religion, is being driven underground. Advocates of traditional marriage or pro-life causes can have their jobs threatened or be forced to attend sensitivity training. Christian businesses are sued if they refuse to supply their services to gay weddings, even in states where gay marriage is not legal. In New Jersey, a Methodist church has already been sued – and lost – for refusing to rent their facility to a lesbian couple for their same-sex union.

The fundamental problems with America today are rooted in the decline of Christianity and the corresponding rise of government. The beginning of the decline of American marriage in the 1960s is clearly visible on a Heritage Foundation graph. A separate graph shows the simultaneous rise of out-of-wedlock children at the same time. Both correspond to the “Great Society” programs of President Johnson in which the federal government began to take responsibility for caring for the poor and children away from families, churches, and charities. Unsurprisingly, the federal debt began a meteoric rise at the same time.

At the same time, American church attendance fell sharply. Gallup reports that in 1955 U.S. church attendance over the past week was at 75 percent. Now, even though 78 percent of Americans identify as Christian, only 43 percent attend church regularly. Consequently, many American Christians are ignorant about the doctrines of their professed faith, leaving them open to pseudo-Biblical arguments for liberal policies.

These social trends mean that out-of-wedlock births now account for almost half of U.S. births. The average age of a woman at her first marriage is 26.5 years while the average age at her first childbirth is 25.7 according to CBS News. This is causing a rise in single-parent families that poses dire consequences for the United States because these families are much more likely to live in poverty and require government financial assistance than traditional families. There are also negative effects on the children of single-parent families, such as being more likely to be abused and more likely to become involved in violent crime, drug abuse, and premarital sex according to the National Fatherhood Initiative. The cycle repeats as children of broken homes grow up to have their own children, often in single-parent homes as a result of premarital sex or divorce, and the dependency on government entitlement programs becomes more pronounced.

It may already be too late to reverse America’s decline. Jonathan Cahn, author of “the Harbinger,” believes that recent history, from the Sept. 11 attacks to the economic crash, are warnings from God and that America is running out of time for repentance. Cahn pointed out to Examiner that the “macro pictures of end-time prophecy” do not include America. The current series of “harbinger” warnings “fill in the gap with specific detail” as to how America will “lose its crown as the head of nations” although Cahn is careful not to commit to a specific timeline.

Last year, no less a man of God than Billy Graham published a letter to America in which he wrote, “My heart aches for America and its deceived people…. The farther we get from God, the more the world spirals out of control.” Graham related how his wife Ruth had exclaimed, “If God doesn’t punish America, he’ll have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.” Nevertheless, Graham also points out, “The wonderful news is that our Lord is a God of mercy, and He responds to repentance.”

Later in the year, Graham ran ads that urged Americans “to vote for those who protect the sanctity of life and support the biblical definition of marriage between a man and a woman. Vote for biblical values this November 6, and pray with me that America will remain one nation under God.” For his involvement in politics, Graham’s ministries were targeted by the Internal Revenue Service.

America is at a crossroads. Either our country will continue to reject God and continue to decline or we will seek his forgiveness and begin the process of repentance. The process of turning America around begins with individuals. Even if the country faces the ultimate judgment, individuals can be saved. As Jonathan Cahn said in his interview with Examiner, “We all live in the face of judgment.  And the time to repent, to be saved, and to get right with God . . . is now.”
Originally published on Examiner.com:

Pat Robertson endorses legal marijuana

Evangelical leader Pat Robertson shocked the nation recently when he advocated the legalization of marijuana. In an interview with the N.Y. Times, Robertson said, “I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol. I’ve never used marijuana and I don’t intend to, but it’s just one of those things that I think: this war on drugs just hasn’t succeeded.”

Robertson said that his views on legalization formed over time as he came to realize that the U.S. “has gone overboard on this concept of being tough on crime.” He believes that legalization of marijuana would be a way to reduce social and financial costs of the drug war as well as reducing rates of incarceration.

According to the Justice Policy Institute, about one quarter of the two million prisoners in U.S. jails have been convicted of drug offenses. Sixteen percent of state prisoners and 18 percent of federal prisoners had committed crimes to get money for drugs. Department of Justice statistics show that 12 percent of prisoners at both the state and federal level were convicted of offenses involving marijuana. The number of inmates serving time for marijuana offenses is a relatively small portion of the total U.S. prison population.

Other arguments for legal marijuana cite statistics that show that states with more drug treatment admissions have lower rates of incarceration. According the Justice Policy Institute, the national average is 433.7 drug treatment admissions and 491 people incarcerated per 100,000 people in the general population. Georgia has fewer drug treatments than average at 369.28 and higher than average incarceration at 533.

Proponents of legalization also cite savings from ending the war on drugs and tax revenue from legal marijuana. It is likely that these benefits would be offset by the increased social costs of legalization as more people would use the drug if it were legal. These would include costs such as healthcare and treatment, lost productivity, auto accidents, crime, and social welfare programs according to a study by RTI International.

European countries have experimented with more liberal drug policies. The Netherlands does not enforce laws against marijuana which resulted in an international tourist trade for Amsterdam’s “coffee” shops. The government recently banned non-Dutch residents from the shops. In the Netherlands, there are strong penalties for possessing, selling, and producing drugs, but not for using. According to an article in Science, increases in use did not accompany decriminalization, but “later growth in commercial access to cannabis, after de facto legalization, was accompanied by steep increases in use, even among youth.”

A paper by the American Academy of Pediatrics examined the effects of decriminalization. The paper points out that legalization would decrease the perception of risk and make adolescents more likely to experiment with drugs. The AAP notes that even though alcohol and tobacco are illegal for minors, both drugs are widely abused by adolescents and companies actively market these products to minors.

The AAP also cites two studies by the American Medical Association and the Institute of Medicine that point out that there is no rigorous data to support the use of marijuana as a medical drug. While both studies call for more research, they note that, when smoked, marijuana delivers “harmful substances” into the body. Because inhaled marijuana cannot provide the “precisely defined drug affect” of pharmaceutical drugs, “there is very little future in smoked marijuana as a medically approved medication. If there is any future in cannabinoid development, it lies with agents of more certain, not less certain, composition.”

Far from being harmless, marijuana carries a host of negative effects for users. Emotional effects cited on About.com include paranoia, aggression, depression, anxiety, a distorted sense of time, random thinking, and loss of memory. When eaten rather than smoked, marijuana can also cause hallucinations, delusions, and disorientation. Marijuana increases the heart rate and decreases blood pressure leading to an elevated risk of heart attacks. Smoking marijuana causes the same respiratory problems as smoking tobacco and a link to cancer is suspected. The drug is also believed to suppress the body’s immune system, which can lead to other health problems including an increased risk of bacterial infections and tumors.

While marijuana is not as addictive as other drugs, including tobacco and alcohol, the National Institute of Drug Abuse found that estimated nine percent of users become dependent on marijuana. That number almost doubles for users who start young and is as high as 50 percent for daily users. Marijuana users also have higher rates of use for other drugs and drug problems than nonusers. More than half of the Americans who use illegal drugs use marijuana.

If marijuana were legalized, prices would fall as the supplies of the drug increased and became easier to obtain. Economic laws of supply and demand show that as prices fall, demand rises. Therefore it should be expected that use of marijuana would increase under decriminalization. The number of people addicted to marijuana and introduced to other drugs through marijuana would increase as well. While alcohol and tobacco are more harmful to society than marijuana today, if marijuana were legalized its negative impact on society would increase as well.

Ballot initiatives in several states are attempting to decriminalize marijuana. California voters rejected a proposition to legalize the drug in 2010, but Gov. Schwarzenegger signed a bill into law that made possession of less than an ounce a civil infraction rather than a misdemeanor. Colorado and Massachusetts are currently the forefront of attempts to decriminalize marijuana.

In Georgia, possession of less than an ounce of marijuana will normally mean probation on the first offense according to NORML. Subsequent offenses can lead to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. Possession of more than an ounce can mean 10 years in jail. According to marijuana.com, Georgia allows distribution of medical marijuana that is received from the federal government. There is no notable movement to decriminalize marijuana in Georgia.

Most other Christian leaders are not following Robertson’s lead. In a 2010 commentary, Chuck Colson of Prison Fellowship pointed out the flaws in the legalization arguments. Colson said, “There is no legitimate moral or pragmatic reason to legalize a drug that destroys the lives of those addicted to it and that fuels crime and corruption.”

Robertson told the Times, “I believe in working with the hearts of people, and not locking them up,” but he has a lot of work to do in convincing other conservatives and Christians. Several prominent conservatives and libertarians have endorsed legal marijuana in addition to Robertson, such as presidential candidate Ron Paul, talk-show host Glenn Beck and the libertarian Cato Institute. Nevertheless, while 41 percent of Americans favor legal marijuana according to a Pew poll, only 25 percent of Republicans and 33 percent of Protestants do.

Originally published on Examiner.com

http://www.examiner.com/conservative-in-atlanta/pat-robertson-endorses-legal-marijuana

ACLU: Ron Paul is more progressive than Obama

Ron Paul supporters claim that Rep. Paul is the only candidate who represents a change from what they see as the almost identical policies of Presidents Obama and Bush. A closer look reveals that just the opposite is true. Not only are the policies of President Obama starkly different from those of President Bush on most issues, but the platform of Rep. Paul is almost identical to that of President Obama in many key areas. A new report card by the American Civil Liberties Union, Liberty Watch 2012, ranks Paul higher than Obama on a host of progressive and anti-war issues.

The area where President Obama and Ron Paul are the most alike is on foreign policy. Both seem to share the conviction that the United States is to blame for many of the world’s problems. Obama said in 2009 that “America has shown arrogance.” In many other statements, he has made clear his belief that the U.S. does not have the moral authority to lead the world. In a similar vein, Ron Paul stated in a 2007 presidential debate on Fox News that the 9/11 attacks were “blowback” from U.S. interference in Middle Eastern politics.

Both Paul and Obama opposed the War on Terror. In 2001, Paul voted for the Authorization to Use Military Force (H.J.R. 64) in Afghanistan, but the next year he voted against the authorization to use force against Iraq (H.J.R. 114). More recently, Paul has called for an end to U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and would like to have the U.S. exit from the U.N.

For his part, President Obama also originally supported the war in Afghanistan while opposing the war in Iraq. In 2002, just prior to the congressional vote on Iraq, in a video on CNS News Obama said, “… After September 11th, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this administration's pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from happening again. I don't oppose all wars.  ... What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.”

A central part of Obama’s 2008 platform was the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. At the end of 2011, the last U.S. troops left Iraq on Obama’s orders. He is currently withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan with the last American soldier scheduled to leave in 2014 according to the New York Times. At the same time, Obama has stepped up drone attacks on terrorists, a policy which Ron Paul has criticized.

On the issue of gay rights, Ron Paul also shares similarities with President Obama. Paul was not in Congress in 1996 when Georgia’s Bob Barr (then a Republican, but now a Libertarian) sponsored the Defense of Marriage Act and President Clinton signed it into law. He did state on Fox News that he opposes a federal marriage amendment on the grounds that marriage is a religious and state issue and that the federal government should not be involved, although he did co-sponsor the Marriage Protection Act, which never became law. Paul was one of only 15 Republicans to vote for the repeal of “Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell.”

President Obama has called the Defense of Marriage Act “unconstitutional” and instructed Attorney General Holder not to defend the law against legal challenges. Obama signed the repeal of “Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell” into law, and under his authority the Pentagon permitted military chaplains to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies. Hillary Clinton, Obama’s Secretary of State has said that U.S. policy is that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.”

On a number of issues, Ron Paul is even farther to the left than President Obama. President Obama recently rebuffed a petition to legalize marijuana. Ron Paul advocates an end to the drug war, which he claims is rooted in racism. In a 2011 debate on Fox News, Paul also defended the legalization of prostitution. Paul would end all foreign aid. Paul voted against the PATRIOT Act. President Obama reauthorized the law in May 2011.

Ron Paul has criticized President Obama for the targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who was a senior recruiter and theological leader of al Qaeda. Paul believes that Awlaki should have been given due process, even though he was beyond the reach of the American legal system in Yemen when he was killed in 2011.

Paul is also the only candidate of either party who does not believe that Iran’s nuclear program poses a threat to world peace. On December 30, 2011, Paul told ABC News that “they [the Iranians] don’t threaten our national security,” in spite of the recent revelations of an Iranian plot to plant a bomb in a Washington, D.C. restaurant. President Obama has called a nuclear Iran “unacceptable” and pursued sanctions as a means of isolating that country. Ron Paul calls these sanctions an “act of war.”

Rep. Paul and President Obama travel on two different ideological roads, but they often reach the same destination. Often Paul is farther down the road than Obama. Perhaps that explains why more members of Occupy Atlanta favored Ron Paul than Obama.

 

Read this article on Examiner.com:

 

http://www.examiner.com/elections-2012-in-atlanta/aclu-ron-paul-is-more-progressive-than-obama