Month: May 2014

John Catanzaro Fights Back and Starts Fund Raising; Hearing Slated for August

On Saturday (May 10), the Everett (WA) Daily Herald carried an article following up on naturopath John Catanzaro’s response to the suspension of his license in January over cancer vaccines provided by his clinic.  Although not a focus of the complaints against him, Catanzaro also claimed to have a professional relationship with the University of Washington and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard University. Both institutions denied any connection to Catanzaro and Dana Farber Cancer Institute demanded that Catanzaro stop claiming that he was working with the clinic. Subsequently, all references to Dana Farber as well as to the University of Washington disappeared from his materials without explanation.
According to the DailyHerald, Catanzaro has launched a website to defend himself and serve as a platform to raise money. His defense now is in the court of public opinion, but his formal hearing before the naturopath board is not slated to take place until August 6-8 of this year.
Catanzaro also told the Herald that he hopes to raise money in order to reimburse cancer patients for funds spent on vaccines. According to the Herald, Catanzaro said, “These are stage 4 cancer patients waiting on treatments we had to throw away and I just want to be able to pay them back for all they’ve lost.”
It is unclear why unused vaccines would require payments from patients. Patients pay as they go for treatments and if the vaccines are not going to be used, the clinic might suffer loss but the patients should only have to pay for what they use. Furthermore, Catanzaro’s non-profit arm seems to have sufficient resources to cover these research costs. According to the 2012 990 for the HWIF Cancer Research Group, the organization set up to fund vaccine research, the organization had a fund balance of $818, 301. The document demonstrates that revenues from program fees exceeded clinic expenses by just over $300,000 in 2012. Perhaps 2013 was a leaner year (the 990 is not available) but it appears that the non-profit should be able to step in for patients.
In the media coverage since Catanzaro’s suspension, additional questions are still unanswered.
Catanzaro has yet to address why he told the public that he had working relationships with the University of Washington and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard University. While he removed these references from his website after the lack of relationships came to light, he has not addressed the claims that he needed funds from clients to secure the services of Dana Farber. Dana Farber denied performing these services.
His relationship to his non-profit organization raises questions as well. According to the state of Washington, he is a director of the HWIFC Cancer Research Group, but his name does not show up as an officer or key employee on the organization’s IRS 990 report. According to the most recent 990, two of his employees, his wife and his accountant make up four of the six board members.  As with the 2011 990, the 2012 report also shows significant transactions between the non-profit organization and Catanzaro’s for profit business.

Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore Says First Amendment Only Protects Christians

This is a few days old but still worth talking about.
Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore preached a sermon recently in which he said the First Amendment only applies to people who believe in the God of the Bible.
Here is the video:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY8xf1uJOqI[/youtube]
At 1:15, Moore said:

Everybody, to include the Supreme Court, in the United States has been deceived as to one little word in the First Amendment called religion. They can’t define it. That’s what the 10 Commandments’ case was about, I wanted to define it but they backed off just decided not to take the case because they can’t, can’t define it the way Mason, Madison and even the United States supreme court defined it, “The duties we owe to the Creator and the manner of discharging it.” They don’t wanna do that, that acknowledges the Creator God. Buddha didn’t create us. Muhammad didn’t create us. It’s the God of the Holy Scriptures. They didn’t bring the Koran over on the pilgrim ship. Let’s get real, let’s go back and learn our history. Let’s stop playing games.

I’ve been over this before. The Founders used the word religion to signify a person’s conscience and beliefs about God, however conceived. Some, such as early Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, claimed that the framers meant “sects of Christianity” but those who debated the Constitution in the states and some of the Founders took a different point of view. There is no religious test for public service in the Constitution. See the links below for more on why the First Amendment does apply to all religions.
Moore has been supported by the Institute on the Constitution and aligns with the Christian reconstructionist movement. I feel sorry for the citizens of Alabama.
For further reading on this topic, see:
Did the First Amendment Create a Christian Nation?
Politifact Debunks Bryan Fischer’s Christianity Only View of the First Amendment
Does Ted Cruz Believe the First Amendment is Only for Christians?
Answering Matt Barber on Jefferson and the First Amendment
Dean of Liberty Law School Says Islam Not Protected by the First Amendment
AFA takes a stand on religious freedom
David Barton: Pluralism not the goal of the First Amendment

Mars Hill Church Wants $40 Million to Buy Bellevue College Building and Build New Church

According to a February 2014 communication from Mars Hill Church Executive Pastor Sutton Turner to MHC staff and elders that I obtained this week, Mars Hill Church is seeking to raise $40 Million to buy a Bellevue Community College building and build a new church. The building is in Bellevue, WA at 10700 Northup Way. Here is the pitch to buy the facility:

Why?

  • Jesus has called us to be a Jesus-loving, Bible-preaching, multi-generational church.
  • We want to see more people saved by Jesus, more people grow in Jesus, and more people be on Mission with Jesus for generations and generations.
  • It’s all about Jesus.

How?

  • We have a vision to plant 50 church across 50,000 people. It is a specific prayer of ours to see Jesus lead 4,000 people to get baptized in a single year.
  • We must serve and love all of our churches more effectively. We also must train up the next generation of leaders. Finally, we must continue to stay rooted in and faithful to the Bible and to Jesus.
  • It’s all about Jesus.

What?

  • To do all of these things, it requires a Ministry Center that will house Mars Hill Schools (College and Seminary), Ministry Development, Leadership Development, and all Mars Hill support staff. It will be critically important that we are all connected and rooted in a local church.
  • We need to raise $40M. This allows us to purchase the land, purchase the Ministry Center building, and build an 1,800 seat church building debt-free.
  • It’s all about Jesus.

Who?

  • Every staff member
  • Every leader
  • The entire Mars Hill family
  • It’s all about Jesus.

Please earnestly seek the Lord’s guidance about how he is leading you to join in this generation-changing opportunity. Pray, and then here to sign in to your global account and make your pledge. As of today, all staff and elders have the ability to post your pledge. You should see this pledge box appear when you sign in.

 

Mars Hill has been looking for a large property in Bellevue since at least last year. The current location is slated to be the site of a massive project managed by the Rockerfeller Group. Since they need to move, MHC made an offer on a building owned by International Paper in 2013 only to find that Seattle Sound Transit had first refusal on the building. According to an October 2013 Seattle Times article, Mars Hill spokesman Justin Dean said the International Paper building was the property God intended for MHC to have.  The church still has a page on the website where members can contact the Sound Transit Board to advocate for Mars Hill to purchase the International Paper building. The last tweet in the campaign #goodforbellevue was in November, 2013. I cannot find anything on the Mars Hill website which indicates that the congregation has been informed of the Bellevue College initiative.
I have asked MHC Executive Pastor Sutton Turner for comment and will add new information as it become available. A source with knowledge of the situation tells me that the real estate project could be jeopardized due to declining donations.
Note: Mars Hill removed most of the original links I used to research this post. I have saved many of the pages and have some archived pages substituted for the original links. It appears Mars Hill leaders would like to scrub the history of this incident.

Institute on the Constitution Pretends to Have an American Club at Calvin College

The Institute on the Constitution is a pro-Confederacy, Christian reconstructionist organization based in Pasadena, MD. Recently, they have promoted clubs in high schools and colleges called American Clubs. IOTC makes the ACs sound like an all-American enterprise but the presentations promote the merger of Christian reconstructionist religious views and civil government. Peroutka teaches that any law not in line with the Bible is not a real law. IOTC also promotes nullification which proposes that states and local jurisdictions can ignore federal laws if officials in the local jurisdictions believe the law to be unconstitutional. They are certainly entitled to their views and apparently these clubs have equal access, but parents should be aware of what the IOTC is bringing to school.
I don’t know how these clubs are being received in schools. There is one in Spanish River High School in FL. And Peroutka recently put pictures on his Facebook page of what he said was a high school in Hudsonville, MI. Other pictures of the same school room had a caption placing the school in nearby Grand Rapids.  While in Michigan, he also visited Calvin College and according to his Facebook page said an American Club had been established. However, according to Calvin College representatives, there is no approved American Club on campus. A group of students heard a talk but there is no officially recognized club at Calvin College.
That fact hasn’t stopped IOTC from using the picture of the Calvin College students as a promotional picture on their website for the American Clubs. See below:

Now compare this picture with the Facebook picture of the Calvin College group. They are the same.
In a way, it is fitting that IOTC is pretending that the Calvin group is a club. IOTC pretends to be a pro-American group when in fact Peroutka is a former board member of the League of the South, a group that advocates for the South to secede from the nation and set up a white Southern homeland. Senior instructor David Whitney at IOTC is the chaplain of the VA/MD branch of IOTC. Peroutka called the Confederate army the real American army in a op-ed on the IOTC website. Articles on the IOTC website justify discrimination and Southern slavery and attack Lincoln. As with the picture, there is a lot of pretending going on.