Socialism & Communism vs Capitalism: CA Immigrant Pastor Explains
Pastor Gheorghe Discovers Parallels between CA Curriculum and Communist Romania
Pastor Gheorghe Rosca’s days and nights were crammed. As a railroad and structural engineer, he worked with local cities in his role as a transit project manager. As a bi-vocational associate and worship pastor, weekends were busy preparing for Sunday at New Hope Church in Placentia. As a married father of four, evenings were active with family matters, including his kids' school.
A year ago, Rosca’s wife alerted him to a new “comprehensive” sex-education curriculum that would be implemented in their children’s school. Critics have called the curriculum inappropriate for its graphic promotion of sexuality, abortion, homosexuality and transgenderism, as well as medical inaccuracies.
born a U.S. citizen on February 7, 2019!
Rosca decided to investigate further by attending a meeting of the Orange County Board of Education, which provides support services to the county’s 27 school districts. He was mortified at what he discovered. Many of the pro-LGBT laws being introduced by the California legislature have served to squelch religious liberty and parental rights. These tactics hit incredibly close to home for Rosca, who was only seven years old when his parents fled Communist Romania, seeking religious freedom in the United States.
Before Rosca was born, his father was jailed for singing Christian hymns in the family’s front yard. Under constant harassment because of his faith, his father spent one month behind bars, and was then ordered under house arrest for six more months. He could only leave home for work — where he earned only 30 percent of his salary. The government took the remaining 70 percent for penalties and fines they had assessed on the worship leader.
“My parents experienced the persecution because we were Christians,” Rosca said. “Anybody who was that bold in their faith was in the crosshairs of the Communist party.”
As dangerous as it was for believers to live in Communist Romania, it was even more dangerous to leave. Several years before Rosca’s parents escaped with their nine children, a couple of his uncles fled to safety through the closed border under gunfire.
“Those who escaped were shot on sight,” said Pastor Rosca. One of his uncles was fired upon as he escaped by swimming across the Danube river. He survived and made it to the United States in 1983.
And while the persecution faced in America has not reached the violent levels seen by Rosca’s family in Eastern Europe, the pastor said the parallels are alarming.
“What they [California lawmakers] are doing to stifle freedom, in particular, religious freedom and freedom of thought, and expression and speech — that is what the Communists were proficient at,” he said.
Capitalism is an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. Alternatively, Communism and Socialism are economic and political structures that promote equality and seek to eliminate social classes. The two are interchangeable in some ways, but different in others. In a Communist society, the working class owns everything collectively, and everyone works toward the same communal goal (Note: North Korea and China consider themselves to have a Socialist government — not Communist).
Rosca added that Americans are at great risk of losing their freedoms completely. Christians are already being censored on college campuses and clubs, via social media and in other public venues.
“I don’t think that Americans understand,” he said. “You are promised, with one hand, the crumbs of equality and with the other hand, they [Communists] steal the entire plate of liberty. They shut down every voice outside their own. If Americans don’t come to that realization soon, they will continue to see their freedoms erode.”
This threat has compelled Rosca to continue to fight for the very freedoms his family sought when coming to America in the early 1990s.
“I just have this fire that is unquenchable,” said Rosca. “It really started off from what I call my ‘road to repentance from complacency.’ I look at what my dad had to go through as a Christian in Romania,” he said, adding that his father was frequently followed and interrogated by the secret police. His family’s phones were tapped and the mail was always being checked.
“If he can do that in that kind of environment, why can I not do this?” Rosca questioned. “Even if it means working full time, being a husband, a father, and a pastor. Nobody is putting a gun to my head. I have no excuse. If that means sleeping less, or whatever else I need to sacrifice, it pales in comparison to what my parents and other Christians around the world went through and have to go through.”
So, he continues to push forward, despite his packed schedule. The process is made easier, however, by tapping into the resources of Church United and into his network of parents and pastors. Together they are developing teams of parents to monitor the actions at each school district, training them on how to provide oversight in their districts and how to fight back against the powerful teacher’s union, which supports much of the progressive agenda in California.
“We are not some special interest group here,” Rosca said. “We’re not part of this bigger lobby. We are just parents. We care about children, putting the safety of children first and not indoctrinating them ... from an early age, which is what AB 329 does. We want to protect children and we want to protect parental rights.”
Pastor Rosca concluded by emphasizing how important and influential our roles are as adults, especially when it comes to standing up for our rights and the safety of our youth.
“If we, as adults, don’t stand up to school boards, to city councils, to state governments, how do we expect our youth in school to stand up to the Planned Parenthood representative that is teaching them these perverted things?” said Rosca. “We need to do our parts as adults before we can call on our young people to stand up for their faith in the school system.”