The Bible is right: marriage is good for you

By Bryan Fischer

Follow me on Twitter: @BryanJFischer, on Facebook at "Focal Point"

Scripture says, "It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him" (Genesis 2:19). Marriage was designed by God at ground level to meet our need for companionship. God's fundamental plan to alleviate our loneliness is marriage.

More empirical evidence which supports the Bible's claim emerges every day. The latest is research that conclusively reveals that married cancer patients do better than unmarried patients.

The very next day the Journal of Clinical Oncology released a study offering more than anecdotal evidence that marriage is good for cancer patients.

Controlling for demographic factors such as age, race, education and household income, researchers who analyzed records of more than 730,000 cancer patients found that married patients did significantly better than single people. They lived longer, received better treatment and were more likely to be diagnosed before metastatic cancers developed.

Marriage works, and social science confirms it. Of course, the Bible has only been saying that for 3500 years.

Yes, Virginia, the House can defund ObamaCare all by itself

House Republicans, eagerly looking for some way to run up the white flag of surrender on ObamaCare, are trying to convince a gullible American public that there really isn't anything they can do to defund ObamaCare unless Harry Reid and Barack Obama go along with them. Well, good luck with that.

Unfortunately for weak-kneed GOPers, we know better because we can read the Constitution. It clearly states that every appropriations bill must begin on the House. This means that unless the House appropriates money, no money can be spent on ObamaCare or anything else, no matter what the senate or the president think about that.

Today's piece by Andy McCarthy at NRO demolishes the cherished fig-leaf of testosterone-challenged House GOPers who say that, really, there is nothing we can do.

Positing one of the theories that have the country careening toward economic suicide, old Washington hands counter that the House may not cut off Obamacare funding because it is "mandatory" spending. That is, they argue that under decades-old federal budget legislation – somehow invoked without embarrassment by elected officials who go years without honoring the legislation's mandate to pass a budget – Congress has no discretion to withhold entitlement spending (such as Social Security, Medicare, and now Obamacare). The spending, they say, is required by the authorizing legislation itself; it does not require any separate appropriation and can be reversed only by a separate, repealing act of Congress – passed by both houses and signed by the president. In essence, they claim that by passing Obamacare three years ago, the House has already originated the funding in today's continuing resolution.

This contention fails for several reasons. To begin with, it should be obvious enough that the so-called "Affordable" Care Act that authorized Obamacare is not self-executing. Washington can call it "mandatory," but if new spending approval were unnecessary, we would not be at a stalemate now. As the Heritage Foundation points out, supposedly mandatory spending is routinely withheld in the appropriations process, and key elements of Obamacare (such as the insurance exchanges, as Hans von Spakovsky explains) are not even deemed mandatory. More to the point, as I have argued and as Heritage documents, President Obama himself has defunded purportedly "mandatory" elements of Obamacare – in the absence of any legislative authority whatsoever. In the Beltway's upside-down world, the House of Representatives is apparently the only part of government prohibited from cutting spending.

And no Congress can bind the hands of a future Congress. That's why laws are repealed every year (think "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" here) and why appropriations change every year. For example, the House is reducing funding for food stamps this year, even though it is a "mandatory" program just like ObamaCare. None of the Democrats, while vociferously saying the House should not do it, are saying that the House cannot do it.

The legislation at issue is a continuing resolution for funding the government, not expunging Obamacare. Refusing to include Obamacare in that funding would not remove Obamacare's statutory validity. It is black-letter law that a prior Congress cannot bind the present Congress, and a statute cannot supersede the Constitution. Prior law's designation of Obamacare spending as "mandatory" cannot compel the current Congress to fund it as part of continuing-resolution legislation, nor does it alter the Constitution's command that all spending in that continuing resolution must originate in the House.

Bottom line: if the House wishes to defund ObamaCare, it can do so, and it doesn't matter what Congress did in 2010 or any other year.

UN report on global warming: "It's not science – It's mumbo-jumbo"

The London Telegraph carries a piece today by Lord Lawson, now chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, on the latest global warming pap being distributed by the United Nations. Lawson reminds us all that there has been no global warming for more than 15 years. The more accurate figure is 17 years, which means quite simply that no child on the face of the globe has ever experienced global warming.

In fact, if one begins counting in 2001, we are in the middle of a global cooling trend that many scientists believe could last for decades due to decreased solar activity.

There is, however, one uncomfortable fact that the new report has been – very reluctantly – obliged to come to terms with. That is that global warming appears to have ceased: there has been no increase in officially recorded global mean temperature for the past 15 years. This is brushed aside as a temporary blip, and they suggest that the warming may still have happened, but instead of happening on the Earth's surface it may have occurred for the time being in the (very cold) ocean depths – of which, incidentally, there is no serious empirical evidence.

CO2 is the demon gas of environmentalists. However, it is not pollution, no matter what the nattering nabobs of negativism say. It is the gas of life, and responsible for every bit of plant growth in the entire world. The more CO2, the more productive growing things are. In other words, CO2 is our friend, not our enemy, and anybody who tries to tell you different is lying to you.

In passing, it is worth observing that what these so-called green groups, and far too many of the commentators who follow them, wrongly describe as 'pollution' is, in fact, the ultimate in green: namely, carbon dioxide – a colourless and odourless gas, which promotes plant life and vegetation of all kinds; indeed, they could not survive without it. It is an established scientific fact that, over the past 20 years, the earth has become greener, largely thanks to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Bottom line: This latest UN global warming scare report can safely be ignored, like all the ones which have come before it.

(Unless otherwise noted, the opinions expressed are the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Family Association or American Family Radio.)

© Bryan Fischer