Tag: religious freedom

1986 Ellis Island Medal of Honor recipients: Joe DiMaggio, Victor Borge, Anita Bryant, Muhammad Ali, Rosa Parks, Donald Trump.

In 1986 the Ellis Island Medal of Honor was given for the first time. It is an American award founded by the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations (NECO), presented annually to American citizens whose accomplishments in their field and inspired service to our nation. Among the very first recipients were:

Joe DiMaggio: An American baseball center fielder who played his entire 13-year career in Major League Baseball for the New York Yankees. He is perhaps best known for his 56-game hitting streak. He is also widely known for his marriage and lifelong devotion to Marilyn Monroe.

Victor Borge: A Danish and American comedian, conductor, and pianist who achieved great popularity in radio and television in the United States and Europe. His blend of music and comedy earned him the nicknames “The Clown Prince of Denmark,” “The Unmelancholy Dane,” and “The Great Dane.”

Anita Bryant: An American singer and political activist. She scored four Top 40 hits in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including “Paper Roses“, which reached #5 on the charts. She was also a former Miss Oklahoma beauty pageant winner, and was a brand ambassador for the Florida Citrus Commission (which marketed orange juice) from 1969 to 1979. In the 1970s, Bryant became known as an outspoken opponent of gay rights in the US. In 1977, she ran the “Save Our Children” campaign to repeal a local ordinance in Dade County, Florida that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. This involvement significantly damaged her popularity and career in show business.    In spite of her downfall defending traditional family values she was recognized at this event.

Muhammad Ali: born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.; January 17, 1942 – June 3, 2016) was an American professional boxer and activist. He is widely regarded as one of the most significant and celebrated sports figures of the 20th century. From early in his career, Ali was known as an inspiring, controversial, and polarizing figure both inside and outside the ring. He converted to Islam and as such refused to be drafted into the military.

Rosa Parks: An activist in the Civil Rights Movement, whom the United States Congress called “the first lady of civil rights” and “the mother of the freedom movement”. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey bus driver James F. Blake‘s order to give up her seat in the “colored section” to a white passenger, after the whites-only section was filled.

Donald Trump: Yes, He too was honored. This in no way negates his lifelong compassion for sports, showbiz, political activism, religious freedom and civil rights.

The Pope warns visiting U.S. bishops of Radical Secularism. A Limerick.

The Pope warned of Radical Secularism.

As bad as his youth was in Hitler’s Nazism.

Religious freedom

Gone from our czardom.

What remains is a Secular Humanism.

Pope Benedict XVI issued a solemn warning about the erosion of religious freedom in the United States, in a January 19 address to visiting American bishops. He told the bishops that “it is imperative that the entire Catholic community in the United States come to realize the grave threats to the Church’s public moral witness presented by a radical secularism which finds increasing expression in the political and cultural spheres.” He added: “The seriousness of these threats needs to be clearly appreciated at every level of ecclesial life.” The US should be a land thoroughly committed to religious freedom in light of its history and the fundamental principles of the nation’s founding, the Pope argued. He said: “At the heart of every culture, whether perceived or not, is a consensus about the nature of reality and the moral good, and thus about the conditions for human flourishing. In America, that consensus, as enshrined in your nation’s founding documents, was grounded in a worldview shaped not only by faith but a commitment to certain ethical principles deriving from nature and nature’s God. Today that consensus has eroded significantly in the face of powerful new cultural currents which are not only directly opposed to core moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but increasingly hostile to Christianity as such.” The loss of religious freedom, the Pontiff warned, is “a threat not just to Christian faith, but also to humanity itself.” He explained: “When a culture attempts to suppress the dimension of ultimate mystery, and to close the doors to transcendent truth, it inevitably becomes impoverished and falls prey, as the late Pope John Paul II so clearly saw, to reductionist and totalitarian readings of the human person and the nature of society.”

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