Imagine you are standing in a check-out line at a store, having a conversation with your spouse and someone overhears it, disagrees with you, calls the police, has you arrested… and it is perfectly legal.

Absurd you say? Well not if the conversation was about abortion, you are pro-life and the eavesdropper is pro-choice. And not if the Supreme Court fails to overturn a Colorado State statute that criminalizes free speech if the topic is abortion.

It is referred to as the “floating bubble zone” case or Hill vs. Colorado. This law actually says that a pro-life person cannot even have a conversation with a pro-choice person without their permission, if they are less than eight feet away.

The purpose was to protect women outside abortion clinics from being assaulted. But we already have assault laws. The First Amendment makes no guarantees that you will agree with what someone says… but it does ensure that you have the right to say it.

For those who think the next President doesn’t matter . .. watch the decisions and the outcome of this case . . . and then decide. Your freedoms may be one vote away from being terminated. And that one vote could be decided by the next President.

Think about it . . . we are at ninamay.com.

There was a very interesting law suit recently that makes you long for the days when we pondered what is… “is”.

Federal Magistrate William Sanderson, decided that he knows best what “better” means. This very subjective word, that is used in everything from the Oscars to the Miss America pageant, is now a tangible, definable word that is not allowed even in the most personal of opinions.

Apparently, Pizza Hut is offended that Papa John has declared their pizza to be “better” because of its ingredients. But a judge, who must prefer Pizza Hut pizza, said that Papa Johns could not say they were “better” any more, and awarded Pizza Hut $468,000. But what if the consumer thinks it is? Does that matter?

What if taste tests were done and even one person said it was better than Pizza Hut’s pizza would that matter? The point is, why should the government — in any form – be defining taste for consumers?

Obviously many people think it is better otherwise they would choose the other pizzas when offered a choice. So I think we should all go to Papa John’s and decide for ourselves if their pizza really is better than the competition. Let us know what you think after tasting their pizza.

We’re at ninamay.com.

I remember watching the Sound of Music as a young girl and being caught up in the politics of the film.  Nice songs, cute dancing… great matching outfits… but the setting of the movie was chilling.

Life seemed pretty great for the Von Trapps… until people start telling them what to believe and what flag to display in front on their home.

I remember burning with anger as a young girl, seeing some stranger come to his home, trying to intimidate him about flying the Austrian flag, as opposed to the Nazi flag of Germany. I’m not Austrian… so it must have been the principle that upset me.

What is so poignant is that Sybil Peachlove of York, Pennsylvania, is experiencing the same thing at the hands of the City officials. She has been told she can not display the flag of her religious faith in front of her home. What harm was it doing the Germans to have this man display the flag of his nationality, in his own country, in front of his home? What harm is it doing the City of York, to have Sybil display a flag, in front of her own home, which simply says . . . Jesus is Alive?

The similarities are very chilling.

If you read the writings of George Washington, there is constant reference to the United States being a Christian nation, ordained by God as such.

Should we have a “do over” and really apply the precepts of the founding fathers, who established this as a Christian nation, and say no other religions allowed? You know… real intolerance?

Like many countries in the world that have a state-sponsored religion where opposing beliefs are not allowed and practitioners are punished, or worse. If the United States had stayed within the strict precepts paradigm, then no one of another faith would ever have been allowed to immigrate… and it would be purely Christian today.

In spite of what many would have us believe, that is not what Christianity is all about. The biggest accusation you can level against it, is that it is too tolerant, too open, too accepting of different ideas and beliefs because guess what?  That is the nature of Christ.

Remember, He was the guy who hung with the tax collectors and prostitutes, and condemned the religious hypocrites? That is the paradigm of Christianity and to embrace Christ means to embrace, and love, the whole world.

Hate Crimes bills, that target people with sincerely held religious beliefs, are unconstitutional, because, the state is showing hostility to various religions and preventing the free exercise of it.

For example a devote Muslim, who reads in his Koran that “Allah’s curse is upon women who appear like men and upon men who appear like women,” could be arrested for sharing this statement with a cross-dresser.  It could be considered a hateful statement, therefore a pure violation of the hate crimes bill.

So the teacher in Minnesota who complained to the Department of Human rights that a cross-dresser was using the women’s room could be arrested. Even if she is Muslim and the Koran teaches her this.

And for those wondering about what Allah thinks of Bill’s tryst with Monica, the Koran says, “Allah will not look at a person with pleasure who commits sodomy with a man or a woman.” But for a Muslim to express this might put them on the wrong side of the law.

Hopefully though, our lawmakers will realize that we already have laws that prevent hate crimes called assault, battery, slander and libel laws, and will leave the First Amendment alone.

Clinton says his only enemy is the “religious right” and he is open in his hatred for them. But he was quick to point the finger at G. Gordon Liddy and other conservative talk show hosts for being “purveyors of hatred and division,” and that they were “encouraging violence” that resulted in the bombing in Oklahoma City.

So now we have a horrible situation in Fort Worth Texas where a deranged person comes into a church and kills seven people while shouting blasphemous statements about God. Could we be so bold as to connect the dots between Clinton’s anger directed at the religious right and this man’s actions? I mean if G. Gordon Liddy can be blamed for Timothy McVeigh’s actions in Oklahoma, and Gary Bauer and the Family Research Council can be blamed for the death of Matthew Shepard, why shouldn’t we blame Clinton for the death of these seven people?

After all, if hate speech is so powerful that people are no longer held responsible for their own actions, then its the speech of others.  Since Clinton openly shows disdain for the “religious right,” then could we assume that he is a “purveyor of hatred and division,” and is “encouraging violence.”?

Recently I have met more and more people wearing crosses, from countries where the government dictates the religion, and where Christians are regularly persecuted. But they aren’t just wearing crosses around their necks, they are also carrying one on their backs.

They have escaped religious persecution in their countries, have witnessed family members killed, have escaped with their lives and now live in freedom. They now have the freedom to wear a cross openly, to smile and respond when the name Jesus is mentioned, to share information about where they worship without fear of jeopardizing the lives of the people they worship with.

They have not only been liberated by the cross of Jesus from the burden of their sins, they have been liberated from government systems that would tell them this liberation is wrong, is illegal and is deadly.

What is most gratifying, as an American, is that they chose this country to express and share their new found freedom… their new liberty.

How appropriate, in this day of sensitivity to human rights violations, ethnic cleansing, and genocide that America still opens its doors to persecuted Christians.

I remember my son when he was five, explaining to his kindergarten class what his father did for a living. “My Daddy,” he said, “pretends to be people.” There have been quite a few of them. Prophets from the Old and New Testaments, a couple of Christian saints, generals of various nationalities and different centuries, several kings, three American presidents, a French cardinal and two geniuses, including Michelangelo.

If you want the ceiling repainted I’ll do my best. There always seem to be a lot of different fellows up here. I’m never sure which one of them gets to talk. Right now, I guess I’m the guy.

As I pondered our visit tonight it struck me: If my Creator gave me the gift to connect you with the hearts and minds of those great men, then I want to use that same gift now to reconnect you with your own sense of liberty of your own freedom of thought … your own compass for what is right.

Dedicating the memorial at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln said of America, “We are now engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.” Those words are true again. I believe that we are again engaged in a great civil war, a cultural war that’s about to hijack your birthright to think and say what resides in your heart. I fear you no longer trust the pulsing lifeblood of liberty inside you … the stuff that made this country rise from wilderness into the miracle that it is.

Let me back up. About a year ago I became president of the National Rifle Association, which protects the right to keep and bear arms. I ran for office, I was elected, and now I serve … I serve as a moving target for the media who’ve called me everything from “ridiculous” and “duped” to a “brain-injured, senile, crazy old man.” I know … I’m pretty old … but I sure, Lord, ain’t senile.

As I have stood in the crosshairs of those who target Second Amendment freedoms, I’ve realized that firearms are not the only issue. No, it’s much, much bigger than that.

I’ve come to understand that a cultural war is raging across our land, in which, with Orwellian fervor, certain acceptable thoughts and speech are mandated. For example, I marched for civil rights with Dr. King in 1963 – long before Hollywood found it fashionable. But when I told an audience last year that white pride is just as valid as black pride or red pride or anyone else’s pride, they called me a racist.

I’ve worked with brilliantly talented homosexuals all my life. But when I told an audience that gay rights should extend no further than your rights or my rights, I was called a homophobe. I served in World War II against the Axis powers. But during a speech, when I drew an analogy between singling out innocent Jews and singling out innocent gun owners, I was called an anti-Semite. Everyone I know knows I would never raise a closed fist against my country. But when I asked an audience to oppose this cultural persecution, I was compared to Timothy McVeigh.

From Time magazine to friends and colleagues, they’re essentially saying, “Chuck, how dare you speak your mind. You are using language not authorized for public consumption!” But I am not afraid. If Americans believed in political correctness, we’d still be King George’s boys — subjects bound to the British crown.

In his book, “The End of Sanity,” Martin Gross writes that “blatantly irrational behavior is rapidly being established as the norm in almost every area of human endeavor. There seem to be new customs, new rules, new anti-intellectual theories regularly foisted on us from every direction. Underneath, the nation is roiling. Americans know something without a name is undermining the nation, turning the mind mushy when it comes to separating truth from falsehood and right from wrong. And they don’t like it.”

Let me read a few examples. At Antioch college in Ohio, young men seeking intimacy with a coed must get verbal permission at each step of the process from kissing to petting to final copulation … all clearly spelled out in a printed college directive.

In New Jersey, despite the death of several patients nationwide who had been infected by dentists who had concealed their AIDs — the state commissioner announced that health providers who are HIV-positive need not ….. need not ….. tell their patients that they are infected.

At William and Mary, students tried to change the name of the school team “The Tribe” because it was supposedly insulting to local Indians, only to learn that authentic Virginia chiefs truly like the name.

In San Francisco, city fathers passed an ordinance protecting the rights of transvestites to cross-dress on the job, and for transsexuals to have separate toilet facilities while undergoing sex change surgery.

In New York City, kids who don’t speak a word of Spanish have been placed in bilingual classes to learn their three R’s in Spanish solely because their last names sound Hispanic.

At the University of Pennsylvania, in a state where thousands died at Gettysburg opposing slavery, the president of that college officially set up segregated dormitory space for black students. Yeah, I know … that’s out of bounds now. Dr. King said “Negroes.” Jimmy Baldwin and most of us on the March said “black.” But it’s a no-no now. For me, hyphenated identities are awkward … particularly “Native-American.” I’m a Native American, for God’s sake. I also happen to be a blood-initiated brother of the Miniconjou Sioux. On my wife’s side, my grandson is a thirteenth generation native American … with a capital letter on “American.”

Finally, just last month … David Howard, head of the Washington D.C. Office of Public Advocate, used the word “niggardly” while talking to colleagues about budgetary matters. Of course, “niggardly” means stingy or scanty. But within days Howard was forced to publicly apologize and resign. As columnist Tony Snow wrote: “David Howard got fired because some people in public employ were morons who (a) didn’t know the meaning of niggardly, (b) didn’t know how to use a dictionary to discover the meaning, and (c) actually demanded that he apologize for their ignorance.”

What does all of this mean? It means that telling us what to think has evolved into telling us what to say, so telling us what to do can’t be far behind. Before you claim to be a champion of free thought, tell me: Why did political correctness originate on America’s campuses? And why do you continue to tolerate it? Why do you, who’re supposed to debate ideas, surrender to their suppression?

Let’s be honest. Who here thinks your professors can say what they really believe? It scares me to death, and should scare you too, that the superstition of political correctness rules the halls of reason. You are the best and the brightest. You, here in the fertile cradle of American academia, here in the castle of learning on the Charles River, you are the cream. But I submit that you, and your counterparts across the land, are the most socially conformed and politically silenced generation since Concord Bridge. And as long as you validate that … and abide it … you are — by your grandfathers’ standards — cowards.

Here’s another example. Right now at more than one major university, Second Amendment scholars and researchers are being told to shut up about their findings or they’ll lose their jobs. Why? Because their research findings would undermine big-city mayor’s pending lawsuits that seek to extort hundreds of millions of dollars from firearm manufacturers.

I don’t care what you think about guns. But if you are not shocked at that, I am shocked at you. Who will guard the raw material of unfettered ideas, if not you? Who will defend the core value of academia, if you supposed soldiers of free thought and _expression lay down your arms and plead, “Don’t shoot me.”

If you talk about race, it does not make you a racist. If you see distinctions between the genders, it does not make you a sexist. If you think critically about a denomination, it does not make you anti-religion. If you accept but don’t celebrate homosexuality, it does not make you a homophobe. Don’t let America’s universities continue to serve as incubators for this rampant epidemic of new McCarthyism. But what can you do?

How can anyone prevail against such pervasive social subjugation? The answer’s been here all along. I learned it 36 years ago, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, standing with Dr. Martin Luther King and two hundred thousand people.

You simply … disobey. Peaceably, yes. Respectfully, of course. Nonviolently, absolutely.

But when told how to think or what to say or how to behave, we don’t. We disobey social protocol that stifles and stigmatizes personal freedom. I learned the awesome power of disobedience from Dr. King … who learned it from Gandhi, and Thoreau, and Jesus, and every other great man who led those in the right against those with the might.

Disobedience is in our DNA. We feel innate kinship with that disobedient spirit that tossed tea into Boston Harbor, that sent Thoreau to jail, that refused to sit in the back of the bus, that protested a war in Vietn Nam. In that same spirit, I am asking you to disavow cultural correctness with massive disobedience of rogue authority, social directives and onerous laws that weaken personal freedom.

But be careful … it hurts. Disobedience demands that you put yourself at risk. Dr. King stood on lots of balconies. You must be willing to be humiliated …. to endure the modern-day equivalent of the police dogs Montgomery and the water cannons at Selma. You must be willing to experience discomfort. I’m not complaining, but my own decades of social activism have taken their toll on me. Let me tell you a story.

A few years back I heard about a rapper named Ice-T who was selling a CD called “Cop Killer” celebrating ambushing and murdering police officers. It was being marketed by none other than Time/Warner, the biggest entertainment conglomerate in the world.

Police across the country were outraged. Rightfully so-at least one had been murdered. But Time/Warner was stonewalling because the CD was a cash cow for them, and the media were tiptoeing around it because the rapper was black. I heard Time/Warner had a stockholders meeting scheduled in Beverly Hills. I owned some shares at the time, so I decided to attend.

What I did there was against the advice of my family and colleagues. I asked for the floor. To a hushed room of a thousand average American stockholders, I simply read the full lyrics of “Cop Killer”- every vicious, vulgar, instructional word.

“I GOT MY 12 GAUGE SAWED OFF. I GOT MY HEADLIGHTS TURNED OFF. I’M ABOUT TO BUST SOME SHOTS OFF. I’M ABOUT TO DUST SOME COPS OFF…”

It got worse, a lot worse. I won’t read the rest of it to you. But trust me, the room was a sea of shocked, frozen, blanched faces. The Time/Warner executives squirmed in their chairs and stared at their shoes. They hated me for that. Then I delivered another volley of sick lyric brimming with racist filth, where Ice-T fantasizes about sodomizing two 12-year old nieces of Al and Tipper Gore.

“SHE PUSHED HER BUTT AGAINST MY ….”

Well, I won’t do to you here what I did to them. Let’s just say I left the room in echoing silence. When I read the lyrics to the waiting press corps, one of them said “We can’t print that.”

“I know,” I replied, “but Time/Warner’s selling it.” Two months later, Time/Warner terminated Ice-T’s contract. I’ll never be offered another film by Warner’s, or get a good review from Time magazine. But disobedience means you must be willing to act, not just talk.

When a mugger sues his elderly victim for defending herself … jam the switchboard of the district attorney’s office.

When your university is pressured to lower standards until 80% of the students graduate with honors … choke the halls of the board of regents.

When an 8-year-old boy pecks a girl’s cheek on the playground and gets hauled into court for sexual harassment … march on that school and block its doorways.

When someone you elected is seduced by political power and betrays you…petition them, oust them, banish them.

When Time magazine’s cover portrays millennium nuts as deranged, crazy Christians holding a cross as it did last month … boycott their magazine and the products it advertises.

So that this nation may long endure, I urge you to follow in the hallowed footsteps of the great disobedience’s of history that freed exiles, founded religions, defeated tyrants, and yes, in the hands of an aroused rabble in arms and a few great men, by God’s grace, built this country.

If Dr. King were here, I think he would agree.

Thank you

There is a move by pro-abortion advocates to ban Anti-Abortion web sites on the Internet. The claim is that they foster violence against abortion clinics and abortionists.

Forget the fact that most are merely sources of information and offer alternative solutions to abortion. What’s odd is that the very voices who scream the loudest to allow hardcore pornography on the Net, based on the erroneous belief that it is constitutionally protected, are trying to ban a sight they don’t approve of. But a site that is legal none-the-less.

What is ironic, on several levels is that abortion is one of the most violent acts performed on a human being, destroying one life and scarring many others.  Pornography degrades, debases, and destroys the lives of millions of men and women. So if the people trying to prevent the anti-abortion sites really cared about the safety of the doctors, then they should at least extend that compassion to the babies, the mothers, the exploited men and women of pornography and the millions of victims it ravages every year.

This is Nina May encouraging you not to let double standards hide the truth.

Rita Warren wanted to set it up a nativity scene on public property in Fairfax, Virginia but was told she couldn’t because of separation of church and state.

These words are no where in the U.S. Constitution. What is does say is that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Rita understood the promises of our constitution, and fought and won the decision not to allow her to display a nativity scene. She wasn’t a right wing religious fanatic. She just remembered the day more than 50 years ago when Mussolini’s police stormed into her school and ripped the crucifix off the wall, replacing it with photos of Mussolini and Hitler.

Instead of reciting the Lords prayer, the children were forced to salute the two dictators. Rita says that If we Italians had put up a fight years ago, we may have avoided that horrible war.

Wise words for a nation struggling with the definition of freedom of religion.