In December, the Jewish people celebrate Hanukkah, an eight day feast in remembrance of the triumph of the Maccabees over the forces of Antiochus Epiphanes in the year 165 B.C. The story has a lesson for us.

Antiochus promoted an ancient form of political correctness. He insisted that everyone give up their own religion and traditions and embrace the Greek way of doing things. Heroic Jewish men and women died terrible deaths rather than eat one bite of pork, a violation of their laws. Today the purveyors of modern political correctness are trying to force us to swallow the whole pig.

Just as the Maccabbees called on their countrymen to rise up and oppose the political correctness of their day, the recently issued Manhattan Declaration calls on Catholics, Evangelicals and Orthodox Christians to rise up and defend “the sanctity of human life, the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife, and the rights of conscience and religious liberty.”

Like the ancient Maccabees, those who add their names to the declaration are pledging their determination not to compromise for the sake of expediency, harmony or politeness.

Here are a few simple suggestions as to how to live the declaration.

1. We will speak the truth. We will not call the relationship between two persons of the same sex a marriage, no matter what the state calls it. People cannot change their sex, and therefore we will not call a man who presents himself in public a woman, even if he has been surgically altered.

2. We will defend the right of the unborn, because a woman has no more right to choose to hire someone to kill her unborn child than she has a right to hire someone to kill her husband. We will not vote for politicians who pretend that they are good Catholics and support abortion.

3. We will not allow public schools to indoctrinate our children, either in so-called sex education classes, through literature, or in other programs.

We may be called names, told we are rude, or even hateful, but we cannot surrender.

I know that for some the hardest thing will be to ask our children to stand up to the school administration. If this seems too much to ask, think of the example of courage recorded in the book of Maccabbes.

For more, read here.