An Excerpt From Ronald Reagan’s Farewell Address

History,

Today is the late President Ronald Reagan’s 103rd birthday.

Below are an excerpt and a video clip from President Reagan’s 1989 farewell address. Both contain some excellent thoughts from Reagan on freedom and American greatness.

Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: “We the People.” “We the People” tell the government what to do; it doesn’t tell us. “We the People” are the driver; the government is the car, and we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world’s constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which “We the People” tell the government what it is allowed to do. “We the People” are free. This belief has been the underlying basis for everything I’ve tried to do these past 8 years.

Ronald Reagan
January 11, 1989

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Same-Sex Marriage Increases Potential Conflicts with Religious Freedom

Religious Freedom, , ,

Justice Scalia in his dissenting opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 DOMA ruling.

Heritage Foundation has published a research piece examining the potential for conflict between religious liberty and same-sex “marriage.”

We have written about examples of this conflict before–specifically when it comes to bakers, florists, and photographers forced by courts to participate in same-sex weddings or face severe penalties. In fact, this loss of religious liberty was called by one judge, “the price of citizenship.”

Heritage Foundation writes,

“Legal recognition of same-sex marriage will increase the potential for conflicts with religious freedom. The recent Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Windsor intensifies these concerns by characterizing traditional marriage policy as a form of irrational prejudice.”

(more…)

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Study Finds Cannabis Impairs Fetal Brain Development

Marijuana

A new study conducted by a group of international researchers has found cannabis use during pregnancy endangers development of the unborn child’s brain.

According to the Karolinska Institute in Sweden–one of the medical schools involved in the study–the study shows “consuming cannabis during pregnancy clearly results in defective development of nerve cells of the [fetus’] cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that orchestrates higher cognitive functions and drives memory formation.”

Researchers indicated the effects would be long-lasting–possibly lifelong–and may not materialize until well after the child is born.

Researchers also noted that as marijuana plants are increasingly cultivated to contain greater levels of THC, the risk posed to unborn children rises as well.

“During the past decades, selective agriculture of Cannabis spp. resulted in increased THC content at the expense of cannabidiol (Pitts et al, 1992; Pijlman et al, 2005). In the context of the present study, this is of particular concern since we predict that higher THC concentrations will be, upon efficient cross‐placental transfer (Grotenhermen, 2003), increasingly detrimental for fetal development and postnatal health. Therefore, irrespective of the legal status of cannabis, caution must be exercised to hinder fetal cannabis exposure due to its unequivical impact on the establishment of synaptic connectivity in neuronal networks underpinning memory encoding, cognition and executive skills.”

This just goes to show, yet again, that marijuana may be a lot of things, but “harmless” simply is not one of them.

Click here to read the study.

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