Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid has promised a vote on a hate-crimes bill before Congress leaves Washington for its summer recess. A hearing scheduled this week in the Senate Judiciary Committee may serve only to create the illusion of support for this outrageous proposal to legitimize an illegitimate minority.

Click here to ask your U.S. Senators to oppose hate-crimes legislation.

It only took 146 years, but the U.S. Senate has finally apologized to African Americans for the evil practice of slavery. While this action won’t, by itself, do anything to end racial tensions in this nation, it’s an important symbolic step, and we’re glad our elected representatives chose to take it.

Click here to thank your U.S. Senators for passing this resolution. Click here to ask your U.S. Representative to follow suit.

The fears of the “civil rights” lobby and the hopes of federalists were both quashed by a June 22 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act, which held that a Texas utility district had the right to handle its elections as it sees fit.

Defenders of the First Amendment guarantee of free speech will be glad to learn that President Barack Obama’s choice to head the Federal Communications Commission has no intention of championing the long-discredited Fairness Doctrine. That doesn’t mean, however, that values voters should abandon efforts to keep that fatally flawed policy from ever poisoning our national dialogue again.

Click here to sign an online petition in support of the Broadcaster Freedom Act.

Yet again, scientists have announced a discovery that suggests it’s not necessary to destroy human embryos for research purposes. When will politicians in this country get the message, and stop wasting our tax dollars on the immoral practice of extracting stem cells from human embryos instead, destroying life in the process?

It is, as a smart headline writer put it, like eminent domain in reverse: a Christian Science congregation in Washington, D.C., is facing incredible bureaucratic hurdles in its attempt to raze its current building so it can erect a new one on the same site. Historic preservationists who want the building to stay, when confronted with the concept of religious freedom, are essentially responding with a not-so-well-reasoned “So what?”

If you’re a parent, you may have become discouraged with the feeling that you have failed to love your children adequately. This story will help you feel better about yourself – but it won’t help the 2-year-old daughter of Deborah and Ariel Levy.

With the calendar year roughly halfway completed, we’ve been astounded at the response our reporting and analysis on this Web site has been received. The mainstream news media has primarily focused on economic and foreign-policy concerns, but there has been more than enough change in the areas that concern us to keep us – and you – as busy as we’ve ever been in sharing public-policy information of interest to Christians.

By the measure we track the most – the number of e-mails our activists have sent to government officials – CMC has already had more impact than at any time in its history. We don’t know why God has given us the opportunity to influence policy with our united voices, but we are humbled and grateful that he has. As we enter the second half of 2009, we are no less committed to bringing the biblical view of righteousness and justice to bear on public policy, and we hope you’ll continue to join us.

If these e-mails and our other resources bless you, won’t you consider supporting CMC with a one-time gift or, better yet, a monthly sustaining offering? Click here to give.

Auto-pay is a one-time process that takes the guesswork out of your giving and allows CMC to process your gifts more efficiently. You’ll be working alongside Rod Parsley in speaking biblical truth to the powerful forces who would lead this nation astray.

How you respond today will profoundly affect the impact we will be able to make in Washington D.C., and in the popular culture. To sign up for an auto-pay gift to CMC, click here.

Susan Boyle briefly became a worldwide singing session recently not just because she has a great voice – and she does – but because that voice came from an unexpected source. Our surprise the first time we heard Boyle sing certainly said more about us than it did about her. But regardless, her debut on “Britain’s Got Talent” was a revelation.

We got a similar vibe June 11, when the Obama administration weighed in on a federal lawsuit challenging the nation’s Defense of Marriage Act. Now the question becomes, how long will their political supporters allow them to stay on the side of biblical marriage?

Click here to thank President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder for their important stand on this issue, and encourage them to abandon their apparent plans to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act later in their term in office.

Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu has, for the first time, supported the creation of a Palestinian state – with important conditions that are consistent with Israel’s need for security. In doing so he underlined a fact that has struck us for as long as we have been observing the Middle East: Israel is not the problem in this region, but rather the only legitimate hope for a solution.

Click here to ask your Member of Congress and U.S. Senators to support Israel in its efforts to forge a peace with the Palestinian people that it can live with.

It’s now up to either Congress or the courts to preserve the definition of marriage in the District of Columbia. The district’s Board of Elections and Ethics June 15 decided that citizens didn’t have the right to approve or reject the recognition of same-sex marriages performed in states where that’s legal. So there won’t be a referendum on the council’s outrageous vote, at least for now.

A U.S. appeals court has further muddied the waters on the government’s ability to acknowledge the divine source of its laws by declaring a monument featuring the Ten Commandments unconstitutional. We hope the U.S. Supreme Court takes the inevitable appeal of this case to settle this religious liberties issue once and for all – as it failed to do in 2005.

The federal government’s recent economic stimulus package included $100 billion for education. And despite that largesse, it shouldn’t go unnoticed that a piece of it goes to encourage the states to implement and empower one of the most promising education reforms of all: charter schools.

Ross Douthat is the new token conservative on the op-ed page of The New York Times, which must be a lonely position indeed. We’ve liked what we’ve read of him so far, even though we have agreed with only some of it.

Recently he waded into the abortion debate, using the recent murder of the notorious Dr. George Tiller as his launching pad. His column on the subject prompted a response by pro-choice pundit William Saletan of Slate. Together, they managed to have what, at first glance, was a reasonable discussion without the demonization of the other side that we usually find whenever abortion is discussed. The problem? Neither ever mentioned why a majority of Americans find abortion a moral outrage in the first place.

At Pace High School, members of the graduating senior class responded to a local debate over whether the school district should permit prayers at commencement service emphatically: they prayed, clearly and in unison, without waiting for anyone’s permission.