More Media Spin (Right Round Baby Right Round....)

If you grew up in the 80's you remember this little gem....



You remember it and now that you listen to it in 2017 you remember why this was a one-hit wonder band (well two hits I guess). As an aside, in case you are wondering what ever happened to them, the lead singer Pete Burns died in 2016. You will be shocked to learn that he was a homosexual and according to his Wikipedia page he was raped as a young boy. Early sexual trauma seems awfully common among homosexuals (i.e George Takei, Milo Yiannopoulos, etc.). It is almost like there is a connection between sexual abuse and later sexual confusion manifested as aberrant sexual behavior....

Anyway. Dead or Alive had nothing on CNN when it comes to spin. This story is technically a political story but I think the broader issues of media manipulation of public opinion belong on this page. The story in question was on CNN and the headline is so click-baity as to be almost farcical: 'Trumpcare' would send her to Mexico for birth control. The basic gist is that Trump is going to make people go to Mexico to get their birth control because he is going to close down Planned Parenthood. Gasp! If that Planned Parenthood clinic shuts down she would have to travel to a FOREIGN COUNTRY to get her birth control!

All Ariana and Kevin Gonzalez want is birth control.

As far as health care needs go, that's pretty simple.

But the California couple says that if the Republican alternative to Obamacare becomes law, they'll be driving over the border to Mexico to get it.

It's not that the Gonzalezes don't have insurance; they have very good insurance through Ariana's job as a high school teacher.

The problem is that "Trumpcare," as Ariana calls it, would probably run her health clinic out of town. It's Planned Parenthood, which the Republican health care proposal defunds because it performs abortions.

The Gonzalezes live in the Imperial Valley, an agricultural area two hours east of San Diego, with a severe doctor shortage. On average in California, there's one primary care physician for every 1,341 people. In the Imperial Valley, there's one physician for every 4,170 people, according to the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.

For Ariana, that means it takes well over a month to get an appointment with her gynecologist and then four or five hours in the waiting room to see him, which means she has to take the day off work. At Planned Parenthood, she gets an appointment the next day and is in and out in about 30 minutes.

So she will have to go to a doctor and sit in the waiting room, and that is a hassle and takes a lot of time, even time off work. The outrage! It isn't like any American has to take time off work and sit around in the waiting room to see a doctor for literally every other health issue. And aren't we told over and over and over that what Planned Parenthood provides is "Reproductive Health Services"?  I guess for this one "health" issue someone having to sit in a waiting room and take time off of work is an outrage. I am sure that if the Left gets their dream fulfilled of single payer health care and there is no cost to going to the doctor or emergency room for any reason at all it will drastically reduce the wait times to see a doctor. (that was sarcasm BTW)

This seems like an outrage to me, those villainous Republicans sit around smoking cigars in secret meetings, twirling their moustaches like Snidely Whiplash and plotting ways to keep people from enjoying their sex lives. Every time a woman takes a birth control pill you can almost hear Donald Trump saying "Curses, foiled again!"

It has been a while and with eight kids it obviously wasn't a common feature in our lives but it seems to me that a prescription for birth control pills lasted a while, like a year or more. Another question that seems to jump out at me. The report says that Ariana has to take a day off of work because it takes a month to get an appointment and she has to wait in the waiting room for four or five hours, which, as someone who spent a lot of time in the offices of OB/GYN's the idea of  a 4-5 hour wait to see a doctor (more than half of the working day?!) seems like it might perhaps be an exaggeration (although the article quotes those timeframes more than once). But even if it is not, let me throw something else out there. Mrs. Gonzalez has a good job. Doing what? Well she is "a high school teacher". Now I seem to recall that high school teachers don't work in the summer for like 3 months. It takes a month to get an appointment. Doesn't it make sense that maybe you schedule that sort of time-consuming appointment, I don't know, IN THE SUMMER!? An emergency trip to the doctor is one thing but something you need to do annually that is time consuming for someone who gets the summer off sort of seems like a no-brainer to schedule in the summer months. I am a little concerned that someone who teaches high school students can't figure out that she should schedule lengthy medical appointments that require a long lead time to get during that part of the year when she is not at school? My sister is a high school teacher and has been teaching since well before I was in high school and as far as I know she has never missed a day of school. Maybe the issue here isn't that she has to miss work but that Mrs. Gonzalez doesn't seem to plan ahead at all.

It would also be great if you could use some other forms of birth control other than a birth control pill provided by Planned Parenthood or Mexican doctors. Like for example a condom. I looked it up and sure enough there is a Wal-Mart right in the town the Gonzalez family lives in, El Centro, Wal-Mart store number 1555. The store is on North Waterman Avenue and their phone number is (760) 337-1600 in case Mrs. Gonzalez happens to be reading this. I have never been there but I am confident that they sell condoms in their health and beauty department. If they don't, a simple search at Amazon for condoms brings up 20 pages of results, most available with free shipping in a couple of days. I did a Google search and there are at least a dozen drug stores in El Centro as well. The Wal-Mart is open 24 hours a day so if you run out they are always open. So pretty much anyone can get some sort of birth control for not much money 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (except Christmas Day of course and who has sex on Christmas Day?). I get that not everyone likes using condoms or other forms of contraception or natural family planning but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. If you can't be bothered to plan a OB/GYN appointment in the summer when school is not in session and you can't be bothered to go to Wal-Mart to get a box of condoms, well maybe you just need to exercise a little self-control and restraint.

But Mrs. Gonzalez tells me this is un-American!

Ariana has a message for senators as they contemplate whether to pass the law, also known as the American Health Care Act.

"If (Planned Parenthood's) doors are shut, you'll be driving your own constituents to an entirely different country in search of health care, and that's not America," she said. "I don't think that's who we are as a country."

That is not who we are as a country. Huh. I hope Mrs. Gonzalez isn't teaching civics because I am pretty sure that being able to get oral contraception from a clinic that murders babies because you can't be bothered to make a doctor's appointment ahead of time or buy a box of condoms is not one of the central reasons this country was founded. I don't think birth control is in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. I haven't checked but I am pretty confident I am on solid ground with that assumption. When anyone says "That is not who we are as a country", you can pretty much bet that person has no idea what this country was founded on in the first place and doesn't care because an awful lot of people don't care about the Constitution or history, for them America means whatever they want it to mean and it usually involves someone else paying to make that vision a reality. But CNN isn't quite done with the human interest story.

Ariana, 23, knows what life would be like without Planned Parenthood in her town because she's lived it.

Before Planned Parenthood opened in the Imperial Valley two years ago, she became pregnant when she didn't want to, and then later she couldn't get pregnant when she did want to.

Without easy access to birth control, Ariana became pregnant at 15. A doctor tried to convince her to have an abortion, saying she was one of countless teen moms he'd seen just that week.

Without easy access to birth control, she "became pregnant". Weird, how did that happen? Did an angel appear to her and tell he that she would conceive and bear a son? I have eight kids and my wife never just magically "became pregnant".

Planned Parenthood was formed in 1942 out of the "American Birth Control League". I didn't realize that prior to 1942 every 15 year old girl "became pregnant" because they didn't have Planned Parenthood. Who knew? It just happened as part of puberty. Girls begin menstruation, breast development, hairy armpits and "become pregnant".

Oh that's right, she had unprotected sex even though literally everyone knows how to avoid pregnancy via contraception, which as mentioned above is readily available pretty much everywhere including where she lives. According to the story, Ariana Gonzalez is 23. I am almost twice her age and even back in the Dark Ages when I went to school and bands like Dead or Alive were churning out awful music we knew where babies came from. I am guessing that 8 years ago when she was 15 and "became pregnant" that same Wal-Mart store was there and they sold condoms and that the school she attended probably gave them out as well. I am glad she kept her baby instead of murdering it. It just seems odd that while she said that "her "maternal instinct kicked in," and she never considered termination", presumably because she knew that after she "became pregnant" that what was in her womb was her child, a human life, that she wants to keep the El Centro Planned Parenthood clinic open even though they kill babies as part of their "reproductive health services".

By any measure (here is a fairly neutral article from the Brookings Institute) out of wedlock births have exploded in the last fifty years, a time frame that coincides quite neatly with widespread contraception and legalized abortion. Far from reducing out of wedlock births, contraception and abortion has coincided with a major explosion in those births. Whether from a change in sexual morality or something else, like the lack of a stigma associated with out of wedlock births and the corresponding reduction of "shotgun marriages", having ample access to birth control has not reduced out of wedlock births, it has seen it explode. As the article I linked above (from 1996) notes:

What links liberalized contraception and abortion with the declining shotgun marriage rate? Before 1970, the stigma of unwed motherhood was so great that few women were willing to bear children outside of marriage. The only circumstance that would cause women to engage in sexual activity was a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy. Men were willing to make (and keep) that promise for they knew that in leaving one woman they would be unlikely to find another who would not make the same demand. Even women who would be willing to bear children out-of-wedlock could demand a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy.

The increased availability of contraception and abortion made shotgun weddings a thing of the past. Women who were willing to get an abortion or who reliably used contraception no longer found it necessary to condition sexual relations on a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy. But women who wanted children, who did not want an abortion for moral or religious reasons, or who were unreliable in their use of contraception found themselves pressured to participate in premarital sexual relations without being able to exact a promise of marriage in case of pregnancy. These women feared, correctly, that if they refused sexual relations, they would risk losing their partners. Sexual activity without commitment was increasingly expected in premarital relationships.

So in the past sexual activity was linked to pregnancy and therefore there was an implicit understanding of a commitment from men if their partner got pregnant. That is still true in Amish communities. It is not spoken of often but there are a fair number of "Sunday weddings" among the Amish which is a code for a shotgun wedding when an Amish girl "becomes pregnant" out of wedlock (most weddings around here are on Thursdays, so a Sunday wedding is squeezed into the church service and everyone knows what it means). There simply are essentially no, as far as I can tell, Amish single mothers. That reality, that having sex leads to babies and that leads to a commitment, was commonplace in human history for all but the last 50 years, or 98% of human history since the birth of Christ. But now, even though you can get contraception easily and cheaply everywhere (except the Imperial Valley in California apparently), women get knocked up at alarming rates. If you search this you will see liberal sources crowing about the "reduction" in unplanned pregnancies but they only look back a few decades rather than looking back when out of wedlock births were still socially stigmatized. Now instead of a social stigma for having a child out of wedlock, there is an expectation of sexual activity without commitment. That was true in 1996 when this article was penned and it is exponentially more true today. 

Women used to understand that there were "consequences" for sexual activity, that it was simply a biological fact. Not just pregnancy but serious emotional consequences as well. Those consequences used to be offset in part by an implicit commitment. If a man gets you pregnant, he is responsible to marry you and raise that child with you. If you don't think he is someone you would want to marry, don't have sex with him. That didn't always work out perfectly of course. But now men are free to demand sex from women with absolutely no commitment and women feel compelled to acquiesce because if they don't, their man will just go somewhere else where he can get sex without any strings attached. Remember the old saying "Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?". Crude perhaps but true. Now men are getting the milk for free from lots of different cows and the cows are sending them nude photos. The hook-up culture on college campuses is a prime example of this. Women who want to have a boyfriend better plan on giving them sex on demand and whatever kind of sex he wants and without a corresponding commitment or the guy can just find someone else willing to do so. Women have paradoxically been turned into prostitutes by feminism without the pay. Is that the sort of progress they expected from their feminist "leaders"? Back to Ariana Gonzalez...

She said it scares her to think what will happen if her clinic closes.

"I don't think this is the direction that our country needs to be going. I think we're taking steps backward," she said.

She thinks about a photo that made the rounds on social media in March. It showed Vice President Mike Pence and a group of congressmen discussing the passage of the GOP plan, called the American Health Care Act.

"I see a bunch of men sitting around a table, discussing what I should be allowed to do with my body," she said. "My husband and I can decide what's best for us."

Not men, how can MEN make proper decision about ANYTHING! I guess I wonder what it would be like if the majority of Congress were women. Would Mrs. Gonzalez think that they were unqualified to make decisions that impact men? Maybe we should have a separate government for men and women, which is a problem since there are new "genders" cropping up everyday. Again I hope that Ariana Gonzalez isn't teaching civics because those awful men who are "sitting around a table, discussing what I should be allowed to do with my body" were elected by both men and women. 

See, here is the problem. You want to decide what is best for you and your family. That is pretty ironic for a lot of reasons (like penalizing people under Obamacare who didn't buy insurance and the general attitude of Senators from her state of California that want to tell the rest of us what we can do with every aspect our lives) but I get that. I am all for people making decisions for themselves. You can do whatever you want to with your body. That is your decision. The issue is that you want the rest of us to pay for your decisions. I don't have any interest in doing anything with Ariana Gonzalez's body but I also don't have any interest in subsidizing whatever she chooses to do. You want force the rest of America to continue to subsidize Planned Parenthood, including the clinic in El Centro where babies are routinely cut apart, dismembered, vacuumed out of the womb and disposed like trash (or sold as parts for profit). You demand that America fund these clinics because it is just so inconvenient to schedule a lengthy appointment with a physician for someone who has a job where they get 3 months off in the summer plus winter break plus other holidays throughout the year. You don't want to plan ahead, you don't want to use other forms of readily available and cheap contraception and you don't want to go to Mexico to get your birth control pills. You just want to swing by the Planned Parenthood for your birth control pills and I guess pretend that in the room next door a woman is having a "doctor" ripping apart a baby. Even though, as the article grudgingly admits, the GOP plan would provide half a billion dollars for community health clinics that provide contraception, she thinks it is "shameful" and "un-American". This from someone who thinks that America was founded on the promise of subsidized birth control.

The reality is that this is not about Planned Parenthood clinics being the most cost-effective and timely places to get birth control. That is never what it was about and that is not why Democrats are willing to sacrifice everything else to keep those clinics open. If another organization magically appeared that would replicate Planned Parenthood in every respect except abortion, it wouldn't be good enough. What liberals and their lackeys in the media care about is keeping Planned Parenthood funded and operating because abortion is their highest virtue, the unholy sacrament in their pagan religion of "Choice".

As an aside, if you think the primary care physician shortage is bad now, just wait until single payer goes into effect. As the son of a family doctor I can tell you that the prospect of going to medical school/internship/residency for years and years, getting into an enormous amount of debt, working an often stressful and time consuming job for hundreds of thousands of dollars less than specialists and basically being a government lackey is not going to attract the best and brightest for much longer.

This article from CNN is a prime example of the way the media distorts and outright lies. It is clearly aimed at eliciting a specific response from readers, a response of outrage. How dare those dastardly White men tell this sweet, innocent mom, who happens to be a minority of course, with her touching tale that she has to go to MEXICO to get her birth control pills! This isn't "news", it is brazen partisan propaganda no different from what you would get from Breitbart or National Review. If you want to consume what CNN or MSNBC or Slate or Mother Jones is selling, that is your business. Please at least be honest enough to admit that what it is doesn't fit into the category of news or journalism, it is little more than an opinion piece.

I read stuff like this nonsense from CNN and then I just have to laugh at those who seem genuinely baffled as to why so many Americans have no faith in the mainstream media. Pay attention folks, because you are getting inundated every single day with messages aimed at confusing the issues and squashing dissenting thought. It is only going to get worse.

Another Bitter Irony Of Black Lives Matter

The "Black Lives Matter" movement is one full of irony, not least that while the name of the loosely affiliated groups under their banner implies a concern for black lives, the groups generally focus exclusively on black lives lost to police shootings, most of which, while lamentable, are justified. There are cases where the cops are in the wrong, like the recent Philando Castile case (and even there some question remains as to whether the shooting was unjustified), but the overwhelming majority of cases, even highly publicized ones like Michael Brown in Ferguson, were justifiable uses of deadly force by cops.

The bitter irony I want to point out today is highlighted in a very good, very comprehensive piece in National Review, Planned Parenthood’s Century of Brutality. The vile beliefs of Margaret Sanger and Clarence Little, early "pioneers" in the practice of eugenic infanticide are laid bare for the reader. Keep in mind that Ms. Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, is considered a saint for the acolytes of abortion. Planned Parenthood gives abortion supporters an award annually named after her, an award they consider "Our highest honor", including then Secretary of State and notable Presidential election loser Hillary Clinton in 2009. Mrs. Clinton herself praised Margaret Sanger in her acceptance speech:

Now, I have to tell you that it was a great privilege when I was told that I would receive this award. I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision ... And when I think about what she did all those years ago in Brooklyn, taking on archetypes, taking on attitudes and accusations flowing from all directions, I am really in awe of her.

She is in "awe" of a woman who would put the David Duke to shame in her racist ideology, receiving an award from organization that kills more blacks in a given year than the Klan ever did combined. This is the woman who Thabiti Anyabwile voted for.

The attitudes of Sanger, Little and others were not unusual for their time. As laid out in the book Imbeciles (my review here), eugenic sterilization of people deemed undesirable for reproduction was considered quite sensible and enjoyed broad scientific consensus (another irony...). That such attitudes were common is one thing, but that some would revere these people today as heroes and champions is obscene. Sadly Sanger and Little would likely be happy to see the result of their work today. Widespread abortion, reduced birth rates, more and more women in the workforce. Even their racial animus is being lived out:

Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy, might be gratified to note that, in Planned Parenthood’s hometown of New York City, a black woman is more likely to have an abortion than to give birth: 29,007 abortions to 24,108 births in 2013. African Americans represent about 12 percent of the population and about 36 percent of the abortions; Catholics, disproportionately Hispanic and immigrant, represent 24 percent. In total, one in five U.S. pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) ends in abortion, and most women who have abortions already have at least one child. The overwhelming majority of them (75 percent, as Guttmacher reckons it) are poor. The public record includes no data about the “feebleminded” or otherwise “unfit,” but the racial and income figures suggest that Planned Parenthood is today very much functioning as its Progressive-era founders intended.

I am not at all interested in inflated claims about blacks being killed by cops when black babies are murdered at a higher rate than black babies are carried to term. The real war on blacks is not carried out by white cops looking for an excuse to shoot a black, the war is carried out by polite and well groomed "doctors" in friendly seeming abortion clinics who take the money of black women and murder their children in return.

If black lives matter is not concerned first and foremost with the millions of black babies that have been murdered by abortion, then their name is a lie. Every single "progressive" policy you can think of, from providing an incentive to have children out of wedlock to widely available infanticide for black children, has the effect of weakening the black family and prolonging generational poverty. Progressives, including many in "Black Lives Matter", don't really care about black lives. They just care about keeping the money flowing and themselves in power.

Protect Livestock But Not Children

In the state of California where up to a third of residents are in favor of secession because of the election of Donald Trump, two pro-life activists have been charged with multiple felonies. Their crime? Recording representatives of arch-abortionist Planned Parenthood discussing the viability of selling the component body parts of children they murdered. The recordings were done, as far as I can tell, in public venues.

When I read about it this morning, my first reaction was that this reeks of political correctness and hypocrisy. People on the left love it, absolutely love it, when people deceive employers to get jobs in private farm/meat facilities and take video of animals being allegedly abused. The videos of alleged animal abuse are done under false pretenses, on private property and are clearly edited to only show the most egregious examples. That is OK though because it helps advance the narrative. Videos shot of Mitt Romney giving a private speech or other conservative groups are likewise OK because they are on the right side of the political spectrum. Filming people selling human parts? That must be punished or at least the threat of punishment must appear to keep people from asking inconvenient questions. I am not the only one who noticed this, David French at the often useless National Review put out a piece that makes the same point, California Shamelessly Persecutes Pro-Life Journalists. Here is a sample:

California’s case not only fails on the merits, it reeks of selective prosecution. There is no shortage of examples of concealed-camera videos in California exposing scandalous behavior (the Federalist’s Sean Davis has been tweeting them since the indictment), often in the arena of animal rights. In 2014, a group called Mercy for Animals released an undercover video that “allegedly show[ed] widespread animal abuse and cruelty at one of California’s largest duck farms.” Authorities reportedly responded to the video — by investigating the farm.

In 2015, the same group released yet another undercover video, this time exposing “apparent mistreatment of chickens at a Foster Farms poultry slaughterhouse in Fresno and at three poultry farms in Fresno County.” Once again, authorities responded — once again by investigating the farm.

But the lives and deaths of chickens and ducks rate higher than the lives and deaths of human babies in the womb, so the Center for Medical Progress triggered an entirely different law-enforcement reaction. Pro-life journalists must be prosecuted.

That is so obviously true that only someone with their head buried in the sand up to their knees would not see it. That doesn't matter unfortunately because no matter how many hoax hate crimes are exposed or falsely labelled "Muslim bans" generate protests or whatever, the truth is irrelevant to far too many people and all that matters is pushing their agenda, even when the victims of their agenda are the most vulnerable human beings among us.

Whatever your opinion of using deceit and hidden films to expose wrong-doing, you have to recognize that there is rampant hypocrisy in this prosecution of David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt and especially when you consider that the charges amount to potentially 15 felonies. You can also be sure that if found guilty, the courts in California will impose the harshest possible sentence to send the message: you don't mess with the butchers at Planned Parenthood.

When your worldview sees one action when taken to "protect" livestock raised for food as being OK and even noble but sees the same action, and a less intrusive one, being done to protect unborn children as being a felony worthy crime, your worldview is exposed as irredeemable evil. Evil is a word we shy away from in our culture but there is no other word that suffices for those who approve of, engage in and profit from selling the human remains resulting from the willful aborting of an otherwise viable human life. It is evil and no amount of "nuance" or word-games will change what it is.

The Women We Are Really Without

Apparently there is some sort of protest going on today under the hashtag #DayWithoutAWoman. Don't worry, the women who are going to be absent today are sadly not really going away, they are just not going to work or something for a day. Why are they taking the day off? Well I am glad you asked! Here is the scoop from www.womensmarch.com:

On International Women's Day, March 8th, women and our allies will act together for equity, justice and the human rights of women and all gender-oppressed people, through a one-day demonstration of economic solidarity.

In the same spirit of love and liberation that inspired the Women's March (my note: "spirit of love", you mean like Madonna talking about blowing up the White House?), we join together in making March 8th A Day Without a Woman, recognizing the enormous value that women of all backgrounds add to our socio-economic system--while receiving lower wages and experiencing greater inequities, vulnerability to discrimination, sexual harassment, and job insecurity. We recognize that trans and gender nonconforming people face heightened levels of discrimination, social oppression and political targeting. We believe in gender justice.

Wait, so is it a day without women or a day where women stay home or something to support sexually deviant mentally ill people? I guess they are going to wear red, because that doesn't have any historic connotations or anything and not shopping ("with exceptions for small, women- and minority-owned businesses" of course) and not doing any work. Don't worry ladies, the dirty dishes will still be there in the sink tomorrow! I am thinking about giving Amish women free rides to Wal-Mart today....

I wonder if any of the organizers of the Day Without Women gave any thought to the women we are really without today?

Since the legal perversion that gave us "the right to abortion", Roe v Wade, the abortion holocaust has claimed over 58,000,000 lives. Assuming that at least half of those were women (I would guess that sex selective abortions disproportionately target female children), that means that America is without over 29,000,000 women. Since "legal" abortions started in 1973, the earliest victims of the abortion holocaust would be in their 40's today. They would be wives and mothers, many would have careers and many others would be caring for their homes. One of those aborted women might have been less morally repulsive than Hillary Clinton and could have perhaps been the first female President. Or maybe they would just be a bunch of normal women trying to make it in this world. We will never know because they never got the chance to even draw their first breath. They were slaughtered in the one place that they should have been the safest in order to appease the goddess Choice.

The greatest injustice against women (and men and minorities and humanity itself) we have seen in the last 40 years will get no airtime from the media, no mention from virtue signaling celebrities and political activists, but we know and we don't forget. The regular people in this country know that our fellow citizens, our fellow image bearers, have been sacrificed on the blood-stained altar of feminism and no amount of marching or wearing red will undo that. We don't buy into the idea that this  "Day Without Women" has anything to do with average women. It is a leftist political stunt to provide cover for income redistribution and the normalization of perversion. It is not pro-woman, it is anti-male, anti-family, anti-children and really anti-women who don't bow to the altar of political correctness.

Don't be fooled. The agenda here is one of death, destruction and deviancy. It is an agenda dedicated to destroying families, destroying any sense of morality, destroying genuine femininity and destroying life. Real women will take care of their families and their homes tomorrow and not demand special recognition for it. They will go to work, they will wash dishes, they will comfort sick kids. They will sacrifice themselves for the sake of others because that is what women do. That is what makes them so indispensable to our society. Let the angry women march and be huffy about injustice. Real women will keep doing the often invisible work that helps to keep this country running and will not ask for nor expect anyone to make a big deal about it. That is just what they do, at least the ones who were lucky enough to escape the abortionist's scalpel.

Tone Down The Rhetoric? Not Hardly.

That sound you heard was me dropping the gloves. I am not even vaguely interested in being cowed into silence by infanticide profiteers and proto-fascist politicians. If you are feeling especially squeamish, find something else to read.

Over the weekend I commented on Facebook that the shooting at a Planned Parenthood "clinic" in Colorado Springs was fortuitous for some on the Left. It was a perfect storm, the dream trifecta for Leftist talking heads. 1) A white male perpetrator. 2) A gun used in the commission of a crime. 3) The location being the sanctified grounds of an abortuary. Behind closed doors they had to be giddy. After all we are talking about the same crew that Rahm Emmanuel belongs to, the don't let a crisis go to waste troop. It took almost no time at all for the High Priestess of Baal. Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, to hit the airwaves assigning blame for this criminal act on everybody who dares question the pro-abortion orthodoxy. Shortly thereafter the fundraising emails went out as Planned Parenthood sought to cash in on human tragedy, something they do in their "clinics" every day with the aid and assistance of the United States government. Of course the President of the United States took time out of being a shill for "climate change" to call for more gun regulations. Fortunately no one is really paying attention to him anymore.

Don't be fooled here. The calls for reining in the rhetoric are simply thuggish tactics designed to silence dissent, just like President Clinton blaming "talk radio" for the Oklahoma City bombing. These are the same people who refuse to recognize the connection between radical Islam and the overwhelming majority of terrorist attacks but waste no time in trying to paint all white pro-life Christians as in league with someone who by any measure was a loony bird, a time bomb waiting to go off. You wouldn't know it to hear the media tell it but attacks like this involving abortion clinics are pretty rare and are condemned by pro-life advocates.

I for one am not someone who is going to cede the field to the bad guys because of one outlier event that has no bearing on the peaceful protests being conducted at abortuaries around the country every  day. We can't pretend to care about human life when adults are shot by a criminal lunatic while ignoring the slaughter that goes on in the same clinic everyday. Cecile Richards can race to get herself on TV with her fashionable suits and perfectly coiffed hair and try to seize the moral high ground but her expensive suits and professionally done hair are paid for with the blood of innocents. She sits in front of the TV camera smiling while her minions are carving babies apart for profit. Her smugness is a reflection of the Enemy.

A loner, with no apparent connection to the pro-life movement and who likewise never seemed all that interested in abortion allegedly made a comment about baby parts, murders three people. That is where the focus should be, on the grieving process and the legal system. Instead this has been callously used to advance the agenda of a murderous organization that kills thousands more each day than Robert Dear in his rampage. Some say we should not take a stand while families are grieving and I wish that were possible but while we mourn the mass murderers collect money and gather influence and all the while the most defenseless and innocent among us are slaughtered. Their cronies in the mass media and the Hollywood actors/clowns who are famous for pretending to be someone they are not are doing all they can to gain advantage from a horrific crime perpetrated by a deranged individual. We cannot unilaterally surrender the discourse until we get their permission to speak again. 

While many sit silent, cowed into silence by those who hate everything they stand for, the forces of evil keep pressing their advantage. The innocents who die in the womb cannot defend themselves. It would be proper for those who can stand up for them to do so, not just when it is easy but especially when it is hard. We do the children dying tomorrow around this country no favors by being shushed in a vain effort to be the adults in the conversation. While children die in these abortuaries there can be no quarter, no pause, no let up and no cowardice. Nothing less than ending the practice of infanticide will do and nothing less than complete commitment to that cause is appropriate. 

Talking About Morality In The Most Immoral Of Acts

As someone who has listened cautiously to the news on NPR since my college days, I have to admit that it is becoming increasingly difficult to filter out the nonsense. It is a rare NPR story that doesn't focus on abortion, "climate change" or homosexuality. Today I heard a blurb leading to a story on Fresh Air interviewing Gloria Steinem. She is 81 years old and apparently has a new book coming out, a book is dedicated to the abortionist who murdered her child way back before the blood-letting under Roe v. Wade became so commonplace. So at 81 years old one of the most important people in her life, someone worthy of a book dedication, was the man who killed her child. What a sad, tragic commentary on her life. There was no way I was going to listen to that entire interview, I would rather wade in a septic tank, but I did read the transcript and saw this little gem:

On the morality of abortion

It seems to me that every child has the right to be born loved and wanted, and every person has the right to control — male and female — to control their own bodies from the skin in. I think we need a legal principle called something like "bodily integrity" which recognizes that though the state may jail us, they can't insist on injections or tests or pressuring us for organ transplants. Our skin needs to be the line of defense between our own dignity and will and any outside force. ...

The definition of patriarchy is to be able to control reproduction, and that means you have to control women's bodies.

So only children that will be adequately "loved" and "wanted" have a right to be born and women control anything "from the skin in", so even though a unique human being is dwelling in her womb, she has absolute control over that life until it is outside of her skin, where ironically the same people calling for abortion on demand are mistrustful of those same parents raising their own children. If she really wants to talk about bodily integrity she could maybe talk to young women about sleeping around and getting pregnant is they don't want to get pregnant at this particular juncture in their lives. Since the overwhelming majority of abortions are, like Ms. Steinem's, electively done after a voluntary sexual act it would seem to me that the time to talk about "bodily integrity" is before a woman has sex without taking the commonplace and cheap methods provided by modern "progress" to prevent pregnancy. Even still those methods have a failure rate so it might just be wise to abstain from having sex during the window of fertility if you absolutely don't want to get pregnant. It would be swell to see a feminist give women a little credit and assume that they can exhibit some self-control for a few days a month. That one can even speak of "the morality of abortion" as if there is a moral position to be found in the extinguishing of a human life should be baffling but unfortunately I have lived long enough to hear this sort of sub-human nonsense for much of my life.

The last line killed me. I have never heard patriarchy defined that way but I guess when getting an abortion is the most important day in your life it sort of makes sense. Again the idea of "controlling women's bodies" assumes that women are uncontrollable sex machines who can't abstain for sex or take readily available measures that they have been taught to use in our public school system to avoid pregnancy. I guess I have a higher view of women and think that women can be trusted to control their bodies before they hop in the sack with someone who is not capable of being a father. 

One more item jumped out at me. Apparently women can't even be trusted to be in the same house with a man (emphasis mine)...

If you add up all the forms of violence, whether it's domestic violence in this country, which is at an enormously high rate — I mean, the most dangerous place for a woman in this country is her own home, and she's most likely to be beaten or killed by a man she knows...

Let me state unequivocally that there is no place in the world that my wife is less likely to be struck by a man than in our house. That is true for every other family I know. But for Ms. Steinem all men are just potential rapists, woman beaters and deadbeat dads. With that sort of attitude toward men it is a wonder any women get impregnated and need an abortion in the first place. 

This poisonous mindset is being force-fed to women throughout the "educational" system. It is little wonder that the relationship between men and women has never been worse in our society in spite of all of the wonderful "progress" we keep hearing about. It is a worldview like the one Ms. Steinem is selling that the church needs to respond to with God honoring Kingdom families. The world needs to know that there has to be a better way than  the bleak and blood soaked worldview that the Gloria Steinem's of the world live in.

Faithful In A Little, Faithful In A Lot

All across social media for the last week I have repeatedly seen the story and accompanying picture (see to the left from LifeNews) of a group of women clergy "blessing" am abortion clinic and praising the "bravery" of the staff and patrons of this clinic, at least the mothers who abort their children, the children being killed don't warrant prayer apparently.  From the LifeNews story United Methodist and Episcopalian Church Clergy Lead Prayer Rally to“Bless” Abortion Clinic.

In Ohio, United Methodist Church pastor, Reverend Laura Young, says she believes pro-life protesters in front of Planned Parenthood and other abortion facilities have “misguided faith.” In fact, she thinks these clinics should be blessed, which is why she went out to an abortion facility called Preterm on October 8th in Cleveland. In 2014, Preterm was involved in the abortion-related death of Lakisha Wilson.

Young explained her acceptance of abortion like this: “Christianity, like most faiths, is founded on love. Watching protesters shouting judgment and hate based on what they call religion is horrible. Is that loving God? Is that loving your neighbor as yourself?” 

Think Progress reports that the group hopes their “blessing” will protect Preterm from “preachy protesters, as well as encourage the strength and bravery of those providing and relying on its services.” Young plans to go out to other abortion facilities in the state if their event in Cleveland is successful.

Young also says religious groups are fueling the so-called war on women. She explained, “Women are being attacked at a moral level by the radical Religious Right. They’ve hijacked the political discussion. This event is an opportunity for progressive religious leaders to stop the silence. We need to be in the conversation.”

I hate to break it to Ms. Young but there is nothing progressive about infanticide. It was going on under the auspices of false religion long before Jesus walked the earth and it is condemned as an abomination by the Bible. Along with the article itself is the picture reproduced to the left of a group of clergy exclusively made up of women, dressed up in religious robes and with short haircuts.

This sort of grotesque display doesn't happen in a vacuum. One doesn't go straight from orthodoxy to blessing abortion mills. There are plenty of warning signs that a group or individual is abandoning orthodoxy and walking down the path of damnable error and it usually starts with a position that is uncomfortable to hold in our modern culture. In other words, when the Scriptures are forced to compromise with the world, the world doesn't get more holy but the Scriptures inevitably lose their power and authority.

I have seen a disturbing trend in the church to diminish the significance of the Scriptures, relegating them to a nice source of sermon quotes and memes but really being guided by the world, by pragmatism and an amorphous definition of "following Jesus" which more often than not seems to be "making things up as I go without really consulting Scripture". This is not restricted to United Methodists, ELCA Lutherans, Episcopalians and MC USA Mennonites. It is cropping up more and more in people who generally are pretty orthodox.

The United Methodists and Episcopalians started down this road in the 20th century and one of the most visible signs is the presence of women elders. A lot of people seem very willing to decry the blessing of the abortion mills but are silent on the leading indicator of this sort of blasphemy, namely the recognition of female elders/pastors.  It is easy to post something publicly on Facebook about how terrible it is to bless abortion mills but it is a lot less popular to point out the errors that led to this point, including the calling of women to a function in the church that is reserved for men.

The Bible forbids women elders in both the way it speaks of elders as exclusively a male calling and also by directly forbidding  to women one of the most critical aspects of the elder, namely the teaching function within the church. Women can and are encouraged to teach younger, less mature women but are absolutely forbidden to teach the broader church including men. This is one of the least debatable positions in the New Testament but man does it rub a lot of people the wrong way.

I often get pushback on this that includes some language about how talented a woman is and that my wife/my mom/my sister "feels called" to ministry. I can't speak to what led women in each of the cases I have been cited to think they were called to be elders but I do know this for certain, if you think you are being called to something that is contrary to what Scripture teaches, your "calling" is not from God. That may sound harsh but that is just the plain truth of it. I may also seem to be beating a dead horse here but the evidence is right before your eyes and one of the most obvious places we see capitulation and fear of judgment is in the ordination and calling of women to roles reserved for men.

I am not suggesting that straying from Scripture invariably leads to women "pastors" with short hair cuts blessing abortion clinics but I am quite certain that when we are less faithful in what seems to be the small matters, it is much more difficult to stay faithful with the big stuff. It seems to me that saying women shouldn't be pastors is a much easier pill to swallow than saying that a Jewish guy was killed and rose from the dead three days later in the first century. I am also aware that it is possible and pretty common to get so focused on the "small stuff" that you gloss over the "big stuff" and cause unnecessary division. That doesn't mean the "small stuff" in unimportant, just that we need to beware of spending all of our time focused on it.

Beware of those voices that call for capitulation in the "small stuff". It is tempting and it is pretty easy to shrug off stuff in the Bible that seems so old fashioned and dated but it is always critical to remember that God chose that time and that place to reveal the fullness of revelation in His Son and to preserve that record of revelation in the Bible. Jesus didn't come in the 60's to lead the vanguard of the sexual revolution. He didn't come in contemporary times to bless same-sex "marriage". No, He came in the midst of a primitive time but the truths that He and His chosen apostles revealed are timeless. We twist and ignore Scripture today at our own peril. The real blame for women clergy blessing an abortion clinic is found many decades ago when humans started to echo the serpent in the Garden "Did God actually say...?". Yes He did and we are not permitted to revise what He revealed.

The Gospel Is The Heart Of The Question

Recently Jorge Bergoglio, aka "The Pope", made headlines for announcing that he would permit Roman "priests" to forgive the sin of abortion. The entire thing is a counter-Gospel but it met with the approval of the world who saw it as a move in their direction, a first step toward acceptance of abortion on demand. It was nothing of the sort but it caused a ruckus of adoration from the adoring secular media. The reason this is of concern is that the entire thing makes clear the huge difference between the Roman notion of sin and forgiveness versus what the Bible teaches. Russell Moore, who has been on occasion a touch too cozy with Rome in my opinion, wrote a powerful piece today that sets the record straight for those who think that being anti-abortion is sufficient to make on not an unequal partner in the Gospel yoke. From Where Pope Francis Is Right–and Wrong–On Abortion and Mercy:

That said, the Pope’s pronouncement reminds those of us who are convictional Protestants of what we are, in fact, “protesting” against after these 500 years. In Roman Catholic theology, the church is the dispensary of the grace of God through its sacraments and rites. This is at the heart of Martin Luther’s theses against the medieval church for the selling of indulgences, which were also from the pronouncement of the Pope and also for the forgiveness of sin. The very conversation brings up just about every fracture between Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants—from the papacy to the doctrine of the church to, most fundamentally, the question that prompted Mr. Luther’s protest in the first place: “What shall I do with my guilt?” 

In an evangelical doctrine of the church, apostolic authority adheres not in a succession of bishops but in the ongoing witness of the apostolic writings—the Bible. The Apostle Paul’s authority, for instance, did not come from the other apostles but from his encounter with Christ Jesus and from the content of his gospel (Gal. 1:11-2:10). Forgiveness comes not from a system of rites and clergy but from a personal encounter, by faith, with the content of the gospel of the blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ. The sinner who looks to Christ, as offered in his atonement for sin, is forgiven, full stop (Jn. 3:14-17). The entire point of Paul’s letters to the Romans and to the Galatians is that the sacrifice of Christ is received by the sinner through faith. The entire point of the epistle to the Hebrews is that Christ Jesus now serves as high priest, standing and interceding before God with his own blood, for any sinner who comes to him by faith. The church bears witness to this gospel and recognizes those who are defined by it through baptism and the discipline of the church, but the church stands under the gospel, not as the dispensary of it. The Spirit blows where he wills.

That is good stuff. You should read the whole article, I think it generally hits the right tone and is more gracious than I tend to be. Grace is not something that man gets to turn on and off like a water spigot. Grace proceeds from the cross and is offered directly and without any strings attached via the proclamation of the Gospel and the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit. There is no greater divider between Rome and Christianity than how each views grace and forgiveness.

To quote Dr. Moore a final time: The greatest antidote to an abortion culture is the gospel.

Non-resistance In Light Of The Selling Of Human Beings Piecemeal

I write a fair bit about the genteel genocide that happens on a vast scale in America in the sterile offices of abortionists. I don't apologize for that. Just the opposite, the national horror and staining of our character that is abortion demands the church speak out. If I posted something about abortion every day of the year I would still count myself timid in the struggle for basic human dignity for the least of us.

This past week has introduced an entirely new level of gruesome brutality as undercover videos show representatives of the falsely named organization "Planned Parenthood" bartering for the left over pieces of human infants. While "comedians" cried crocodile tears over the death of a single lion, the media did their level best to ignore the whole topic but thanks to social media and a few outspoken voices, this topic will not go away. What makes these videos so chilling is not the brutal act of abortion. Everyone knows (but few will say) what happens when a woman enters an abortuary pregnant with a human child and leaves no longer pregnant. We hide the brutal carving, crushing and vacuuming of over a million children each year behind clever euphemisms and concepts like "choice" and "women's reproductive rights". It is murder for hire hiding in plain sight, little different from rail cars filled with Jews going away and never coming back. The Germans knew something was going on but no one talked about it. Likewise we avoid talking openly about abortion and certainly refuse to look at the results. No, what really makes the videos grotesque is how casual the representatives of history's greatest mass murderer are about the entire thing.

Casual brutality is far worse than other kinds of brutality. The brutality that is often on display in our popular culture and evening news is bad enough but when brutality is hidden behind shrugged shoulders and polite conversation there is something far more disquieting about it. We sort of get it when people who are unhinged are savage but when savagery happens in lovely offices with not so much as a moment of regret by people purporting to be "medical professionals", it is so much worse. When you compound this brutality with the half a billion the tax payers provide to these butchers and the reality that one political party, to quote George Will's brilliant column, has as a sacred cow the unlimited, anytime, anywhere, any age support for abortion...

The nonnegotiable tenet in today’s Democratic Party catechism is not opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline or support for a $15 minimum wage. These are evanescent fevers. As the decades roll by, the single unshakable commitment is opposition to any restriction on the right to inflict violence on pre-born babies. So today there is a limitless right to kill, and distribute fragments of, babies that intrauterine medicine can increasingly treat as patients.

...you are left with no choice but to act. But how in keeping with Biblical non-resistance?

What then ought a non-resistant Christian do in light of abortion, especially with the new revelations of Planned Parenthood harvesting the "non-crushed" parts of tiny human being for sale?

I have some serious moral qualms about the way the videos were gathered. Being false even in the defense of the helpless is something that bothers me. I also have absolutely zero faith that electing a sufficient number of Republicans would do anything to stop abortion. My understanding of the Biblical mandate to Christians is, in the King James vernacular, that we "resist not evil" (Matthew 5:39) and "overcome evil with good" (Romans 12:21). So what then? Shall we sit on the sidelines and think positive thoughts?

Of course not. Being non-resistant never has been intended to be inactive, just that we seek the way of the cross in fighting injustice rather than employing the coercive and violent methods of the world. We can and we must be outspoken, prophetic voices calling those who commit abortion and those who seek abortion out to repent. Even as grievous a sin as abortion is, it is not beyond the reach of the blood of Jesus. Even those who profit handsomely from infanticide and are enemies of God and a type of anti-Christ in doing so demand not our hatred but our love and our prayer. We also must continue to emasculate the false dilemma posed to pro-lifers that we only care about a child until they are born. The evidence that the opposite is true is overwhelming but we must continue to do more to show the love of Christ to women and men alike who have chosen life instead of death for their child. That means education and that might mean material support, both of which are provided in vast measure by the many crisis pregnancy centers operating around the country. For those who have had an abortion and now repent must be treated as brothers and sisters. None of us has a clean slate before we were born-again. Of course we must pray, often and fervently, for God to stop this barbarism because only God can change a human heart.

It often seems bleak and even hopeless but little by little I believe that the people of this country will roll back the legal abomination created out of thin air by the Supreme Court. We are limited in the tools God has given but those tools possess unlimited power if we only have the courage and humility to use them.

All Human Lives Matter Especially The Smallest Of Us

Brit Hume crushes it when discussing the blood soaked merchants of death at Planned Parenthood and the grisly video where prices for the component parts of fellow human beings are being negotiated like the price of a new car. These modern day Josef Mengeles traffic and profit in the slaughter, dismemberment and sale of human beings. For those who have been speaking out against this crime against humanity for a long time, these revelations are not unexpected although the casual way it is discussed is still chilling. Hopefully those who blithely cover their ears and eyes and try to explain away the slaughter taking place every day in America and around the world by converting human beings into amorphous and ambiguous dehumanizing terms will be forced to face what they are doing and examine the position they hold so dearly. Let me be clear:

Calling a tiny human being "tissue" is no different than calling a human being "nigger".

It rips away their humanity and turns an image bearer of God into a thing, something distasteful and unworthy of consideration. Why not enslave blacks, after all they are just niggers? Why not tear apart a tiny human, after all it is just "tissue"? Why not herd millions of Jews into gas chambers, after all they are just vermin?

One can easily imagine a casual meal like the one in the released videos where the speakers are wearing the uniform of Nazi Germany and discussing rates for rail cars carrying Jews to Auschwitz.

So don't be fooled. This is not an anomaly. This is business as usual for our nation's premier serial killer, a murderous organization that is funded by the tax dollars of Americans and the payment for services of desperate women who have been convinced that an abortion is their only sensible choice and after all it isn't a baby, it is just "tissue".

Somewhere in the deepest pits of hell, Josef Mengele is applauding his modern day offspring as they go about their daily task of murder for hire. Watch the video in this link and be thankful that there are still voices who will not be silent about real injustice in America.

It Is Time For The Abuse To End

As a follow-up to my post, Had Enough Yet?, regarding the latest betrayal of pro-lifers by the Republican Party, I wanted to talk through this a little more. I am still seeing some pretty serious backlash across social media and it is refreshing in spite of the infuriating actions of the Republican majority. 

Christians are in an abusive relationship with the Republican party, a relationship where the GOP takes and takes and heaps abuse on us and we still keep coming back convinced that they actually like us when in fact I think a lot of establishment Republicans either sneer at us behind our backs or find us repulsive chumps that are tolerated for our votes. I am not alone in that opinion. 

The redundantly named Eric Erickson writing for RedState opines in his elegantly titled essay, The Pro-Life Movement Must Stop BeingWhores of the Republican Party, that pro-lifers are to the Republican party what black voters are to the Democrats, a reliable voting block that has nowhere else to go:

In short, the pro-life movement must stop being the whores of the GOP. The Republican Leadership knows the pro-life movement is in its pocket. They have nowhere else to go. They have no one else to vote for. As much as Republicans look at black voters and tut-tut that they are being taken advantage of by a Democratic Party that knows black voters will not go anywhere, the Republicans are doing precisely the same to pro-life voters.

I actually think the better comparison is that Christians are to the Republican party what working class union folks are to Democrats, a reliable voting block that shows up to vote and contribute funds but gets nothing in return. I was just talking to my eldest son about this today. Contemporary Democrats are mostly concerned with taking money away from people who work to bribe those that don't and pandering to sexual deviants and illegal immigrants even though that not only does nothing to help working class Americans, it often is at odds with their economic self-interest and their own personal values. Likewise Christians and other pro-life religious groups (mormons, Catholics, etc.) vote overwhelmingly for the GOP but in return get lip-service about abortion and policies that mostly are aimed at the richest Americans (many of whom are ironically Democrats) or otherwise are at odds with Christian principles. 

What!? I have to be joking, right?! Of course Republican policies are Christian principles! Like for example:

- Pre-emptive wars of aggression! Ok maybe that is not a good example.

- Lower taxes! While that is a good social policy it isn't really an issue that Christ spoke about. He told us to render unto Caesar, not to lobby Caesar for tax breaks.

- Insistence on working for a living, see 2 Thessalonians 3:10-12! Well in context that is speaking about people in the church and is not speaking to broader social policy (which I agree is a dehumanizing policy and bad for the economy and for those who receive the aid). Ironically we are incredibly intolerant of the welfare recipient that may or may not be part of the church but we not only tolerate but celebrate clergy in our midst who take money from the church gathered from the work of others. 

You get my point.

Eric goes on to say, and I hope actual conservatives are listening, that:

We will remain conservative in the primary, but now we must say we will generally be Republican in the general. There must come a time, however, when we are willing to blow up a Republican in a general election and make an example of them for betraying our first principles.

That time is now.

This site must now commit itself to defeating Republicans in general elections, even if it means a Democrat will get elected, should those Republicans betray the first principles of our party. Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC)  must be first on that list. If she is not beaten in a primary, the fight must continue in the general election.

Pro-life voters must do the same. Our shared agenda will never advance if they keep serving as agents of the GOP. National Right to Life, among others, must stop working so hard to give seals of approval to the GOP and must start fighting the GOP. The pro-life cause must stop being a job protection racket for otherwise failed political consultants and must be a child protection effort willing to fight those failed political consultants and the politicians they back.

It is clear the GOP thinks the pro-life cause can be taken for granted and its voters will come home every election because of the Supreme Court, the Mexico City policy, etc. But it must be a two way street. The pro-life cause must stop acting like the Republican Party’s whore and must, instead, show New Testament grace to the world and Old Testament vengeance to politicians.

If you pay attention to politics and especially pro-life politics, that statement is staggering.

I am less than convinced that trying to bludgeon the GOP into obedience or forming a third-party will get the job done. The coercive power of the state is universally corruptive to the Kingdom. What we really need to do is completely divorce the church from all forms of statism, refusing to be patsies for any secular political movement and instead taking the way of the cross as our marching orders, trading in the sword of the state and the ballot box in return for the towel and the basin of servant-hood and humility. Nevertheless it is always encouraging to see an abuse victim seeing he light and leaving their abuser.

Had Enough Yet?

Many of my fellow Christians who are also politically conservative see abortion as a non-negotiable issue. It is not hard to understand. Unborn children epitomize the concept of "the least of us". They are the most vulnerable, most powerless in our society and have served as a political football for decades.

For those of my political and faith persuasion our concern for the unborn means that we are expected and obligated to show up in droves on election day to vote for Republicans. No matter how incompetent or odious the GOP candidate might be, the alternative is almost certainly an avowedly  pro-abortion Democrat, someone who is somewhere on the spectrum between reluctantly supporting abortion and wildly enthusiastic about abortion as a secular sacrament.

So understandably many Christians were cheered by the rather lopsided win for Republicans in the elections last fall. Perhaps a new era was dawning and the GOP would finally actually respond to our faithful support by making substantive policy changes to protect the unborn.

Nope.

Today the GOP House of Representatives, with an overwhelming majority largely sent to Congress by people like me, botched and failed to advance a very popular bill preventing abortion after 20 weeks. This should have been an easy bill to pass but it was completely bungled (assuming it wasn't callously sabotaged by the GOP, something that seems pretty likely).

The social media backlash has been swift, angry and exhibits a sense of being fed-up. Ross Douthat tweeted:

The idea that GOP is a party of moneyed interests posing as a culturally conservative party is, um, not always without empirical support.
— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) January 22, 2015

Mollie Hemmingway wrote a scathing piece, Why Everyone Should Be Terrified By The GOP’s Abortion Bill Debacle, including video from two female Republican supporting the bill when it didn't matter before helping to block it today.

Here is a poorly kept secret. The GOP establishment leadership doesn't really care about abortion except as a flashy, emotional issue that drivs voters to the polls. What they mostly care about is keeping their moneyed donors happy. Rod Dreher had this to say "Once again, social conservatives are useful idiots for the Koch Party." Pretty much.

It might be time to divorce the Republican party and to disavow these vain attempts at soft theonomy and realize that we are getting played as chumps by politicians. We are making very little progress in actual protection of the unborn while at the same time being unequally yoked with the party of preemptive war and capital punishment.

The historical Anabaptists look wiser every day.

Our Pro-Life Blinders

Tim Challies linked to an article, You're Not Really Pro-Life Unless..., that quotes a book where the author chastises those who ask why the pro-life movement is so narrowly focused on just abortion when there are other ills in the world. His response is typical and includes the usual labeling of the argument as being liberal (because only liberals care about life outside of the womb apparently) and a loutish complaint about scare resources. Malarkey. It is not just a lack of tangible action, it is all too often an utter lack of concern or even a tortured position where one weeps over murdered babies in the womb but demands preemptive military action around the world to defend our "freedom".

If being "pro-life" for you means being anti-abortion and a concern for little else when it comes to the loss of life for innocent (or even not so innocent) image bearers of God, your concern for unborn children is laudable but your understanding of the sanctity of life is woefully underdeveloped. I don't oppose abortion because I think killing unborn children is wrong (although I do and it is). I oppose abortion because Scripture teaches me that all human life is made in the image of God. While I have a special loathing of infanticide as a act of violence inflicted on the most vulnerable of God's image bearers in the one place in the world that they should be cared for and comforted in a way never to be duplicated, that does not give me a free pass to ignore the other unjust killing of my fellow image bearers just because they have a different skin color, a different passport, a different language or are part of a different faith.

Being pro-life is not less than being anti-abortion but it certainly is more than that. Our life witness to the world is incomplete and hypocritical and even if we refuse to see this by closing our eyes, hands over our ears and chanting "liberals!", the very people that we hope to and must influence see right through it. Even more so, Christ sees through it when we pray to end abortion on Sunday and vote to send more children to their death on Tuesday. All human life is precious and deserving of justice from the unborn child in Boston to an unarmed 12 year old gunned down by police in Cleveland to the elderly woman in Afghanistan killed as collateral damage in a drone strike to the teen in Syria killed in the civil war we meddle in. We cannot ignore the unjust taking of life no matter where it happens if we claim to be pro-life and follow the Prince of Peace.

41 Years Of Shame

Sacrificing children has a long and horrifying history. Throughout the existence of man some cultures have brutalized the most vulnerable members. We rightly look back with horror on such abuse of the innocent, the old, the infirm, women and most of all children. From the pagan worshipers of the Old Testament era who delivered children to be burned to the Holocaust to the intentional killing of civilians by military forces, we are rightly outraged by those who kill for the sake of terror and ideology. At least that used to be the case.

Forty one years ago today, the Supreme Court of the United States decided that a "right" to abortion existed in the United States Constitution, rendering an entire class of people disposable. In an absolutely travesty of tortured reasoning divorced from even a cursory attempt to base their decision in the Constitution, the Justices decided with the stroke of a pen to disenfranchise millions of Americans without due process.

The repercussions of the creation of the "right" to an abortion have been staggering. Around 55 million Americans have been killed by medical professionals, doctors who take an oath to first do no harm. 55 million people who will never get a chance to take their first step, to play in a park, to go to school, to get married.

55,000,000 babies.

The smallest and most vulnerable. The weakest and most dependent. The very people that common decency and human nature should cause us to defend. They are not just some abstract concept. You cannot rightly dehumanize people by reducing them to catch phrases like "choice" or "reproductive freedom" any more than you can dehumanize Jews in Nazi Germany or blacks in the pre-Civil War South by painting them as subhuman no matter how you try. No one deserves to be forced into a gas chamber because they are Jewish. They are human beings. No one deserves to be enslaved because of their skin color. They are human beings. No one deserves to be cut apart in the womb because of their relative size. They are human beings.

Matt Walsh wrote a powerful piece yesterday on the latest feminist flavor of the week, Texas representative Wendy Davis who has made her political fortune by advocating for infanticide. Sure she lied about her touching background story, from trailer park dweller to poster child for infanticide, but that doesn't matter to the forces of "choice". All that matters is that she stood up to The Man and made a spectacle of herself anf in doing so has become an apostle for the death cult of Choice. She even managed to trump Sandra Fluke who only demanded that taxpayers subsidize her promiscuity. Poor Sandra will never get ahead unless she gets on board with abortion advocacy. At the end of Matt's post, Planned Parenthood: still a bigger liar than Wendy Davis, he writes:

So, Wendy Davis lied? Yes, of course she did. She lied about a lot more than her divorce and her stint in a trailer park. She lied the moment she stood up and positioned herself as a champion for women. In reality, she isn’t championing anyone but herself, and she’s stepping on the carcasses of dead infants in the process.

Planned Parenthood has been doing that for decades.

Wendy Davis, you learned from the best.

What do you call a political movement that has as their highest ideal, their one non-negotiable article of faith, the legal right to murder unwanted people? About 70 years ago you called it Nazism but today we have nice, neat clinics with friendly staff and magazines in the waiting room instead of guards, barbed wire and dogs. I guess some would call that “progress”. Is that extremist? Is it lacking nuance? Is it hyperbole? Not at all. If anything it is too mild.

Slavery and abortion are the two great stains on America. We can only hope that the conscience of the American people one day views abortion as an evil at least as bad as the enslavement of a race of people. The little ones who have no legal rights, barred from justice by a thin layer of skin, deserve our strongest efforts. The scourge of infanticide demands our outrage, our prayer and our action. Make a point today to pray for those who work in these clinics. God has powerfully saved many and shown them the truth. Pray for women who are waking up this morning terrified by an unexpected pregnancy. Pray that they will pick up the phone and call a pregnancy resource center rather than an abortuary.  Pray for those who labor on the front lines of this fight for life. We will likely never overturn abortion by he power of Caesar but by God's grace we can overcome abortion one saved child at a time by the weapons He has given us: prayer, faith and our own weakness. Pray for God's forgiveness of the apathy of His people for so long in standing up for life.

Fifty five million slain. God have mercy on us.

(see also today from Al Mohler Abortion and the American Conscience )