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Lee Habeeb
Lee Habeeb is the vice president of content at Salem Radio Network. He lives in Oxford, Miss., with his wife, Valerie, and daughter, Reagan.
Guilty of Being Southern
Over the years, my African-American friends have shared with me stories of the senseless traffic stops they’ve endured for nothing more than driving while black. There’s an acronym for it: DWB. They admit it happens less than it used to, but it’s wrong, it’s bad, and Americans should not face a presumption of guilt for being who they are.
Which is why...
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Joe Dolan: A Father Remembered
You probably don’t know Tony Dolan, but you know his work. I’ve known him for many years. He’s been a second father to me — and I have a great first father, so that’s no small compliment. He’s also been a great mentor, though he’d never admit it. He’s advised me. He’s inspired me. He’s told me things I didn’t want to hear — things I...
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I Drive Your Truck
It happens now and then. You hear a story so sad, so beautiful, so filled with loss and pain and grief and love, that it makes you cry. Really cry.
Two years ago, I was making a grocery run for my family on Memorial Day when a story came on the local NPR station in Oxford, Miss. It was about a father whose son had been killed in action in northwest Afghanistan....
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The Islamist War on Women
The facts just keep coming out of Ohio. It is hard to comprehend what they went through, those young women. What they felt while trapped by a monster through those lost years of their early adulthood is almost impossible to fathom. How did they cope? How did they get through each day?
A close friend of mine was sexually abused as a teenaged girl. It was a man...
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The Improbable Irving Berlin
He did it without anyone’s help, and without any formal music education. He wrote “God Bless America” in 1918 while serving in the Army. But it didn’t lead to anything. He set it aside for 20 years and returned to it only in 1938, after Hitler rose to power. Kate Smith recorded it. The rest was history. The song became America’s unofficial national...
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Dubiously Disabled
It happens all the time. I head out to the nearest mall to work through my weekly honey-do list. After spending five minutes securing a parking spot, I walk to my destination. As I pass the handicapped parking spaces located a hop and a skip from the entrance — the spaces reserved for people in wheelchairs, or really old people with walkers, or other genuinely...
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The Accidental Activists
It happened by chance. Jay Crenshaw didn’t plan on changing his views on illegal immigration. His experience with an illegal immigrant changed him. It happened when a Colombian friend was arrested for driving without a license. That friend was a white-collar professional who’d lived in Florida for years. He was an active member of Crenshaw’s Orlando church...
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A Tale of ‘Government Investment’
It was the early 20th century. America was in a race with the powers of the world to invent the first airplane. Much was at stake. Our leaders feared that the Germans, the British, and, if you can suspend your disbelief, the French might beat us to the punch, giving the winning country a huge advantage militarily and economically.
Who better to win the race for...
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The Speech I Would’ve Given at CPAC
Good evening, and thanks for coming. What you are about to experience will — I hope — entertain, perhaps enlighten, and maybe even move you.
To begin, I want to promise you what I won’t talk about. I won’t talk to you about current events. No talk of President Obama. Or Nancy Pelosi. Or the Senate Democrats. I won’t talk about the national debt. Or the...
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Next Play, GOP?
It’s that blessed time of the year for college-basketball fans: March Madness. It’s even good fun for people who couldn’t care less about the sport but want to get in on the office betting pool. And if there’s one basketball program that exemplifies everything college hoops is about, it’s Duke University’s.
Since 1980, Duke has made the Final Four...
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How Hollywood De-Christianized Johnny Cash
It’s an early scene in the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line. The young Cash, played by Joaquin Phoenix, is auditioning for the man who might make him the next Elvis Presley. That man was Sam Phillips, the Sun Records impresario from Memphis.
The fictional Cash walks into the room and begins playing a Gospel song. The fictional Phillips is not impressed,...
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Remembering Captain Phil
He died on February 9, 2010. Fans and friends from around the world mourned the loss of their favorite TV sea captain — Captain Phil Harris. He wasn’t the kind of man Americans get to meet very often on TV. Not the kind of man TV writers know much about. They generally create soft, goofy men dominated by more capable and competent wives.
But not even the...
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The Moral Case for Conservatism
In the early 20th century, two of England’s towering minds, the socialist George Bernard Shaw and the Catholic G. K. Chesterton, engaged in a series of debates. Shaw was an atheist, socialist, and vegetarian; Chesterton a Catholic, moralist, and meat-eater. Shaw argued against private property, and for redistribution of wealth. Chesterton argued for private...
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Ex Uno Plures?
It was, it seemed, a slip of the tongue. Al Gore was giving a speech in 1994 in Milwaukee when he uttered these words: “We can build a collective civic space large enough for all our separate identities, that we can be ‘e pluribus unum’ — out of one, many.”
Out of one, many. That’s how the then–vice president of the United States described the...
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King’s Media Makeover
Listen carefully to all the celebrations of Martin Luther King Jr. this week. Listen very carefully. There is one aspect of King’s life that you won’t hear much about, no matter how hard you try: his devotion to his faith, his devotion to God, his devotion to Jesus Christ.
Listen carefully and you’ll hear endless mention of Doctor Martin Luther King —...
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The War Against Black Men
The date was January 12, 2013. You probably didn’t hear about this tragedy involving guns and two teenage boys. But this was the headline in the Chicago Tribune: “Boys, 14 and 15, killed in separate shootings Friday.” You didn’t hear about it because such events aren’t news in Chicago. They’re ordinary daily occurrences. As we continue to hear calls...
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