Posts from the “Culture” Category

Unholy Marriage: Planned Parenthood and Obamacare

Posted on May 14th, 2013

In Planned Bullyhood, Karen Handel notes the financial windfall that comes to Planned Parenthood through Obamacare—and how Obamacare provides better coverage of contraception and sterilization than for actual illnesses. Planned Parenthood stands to gain under Obamacare. Nearly all insurance plans must provide contraceptives without a co-pay. Contraception services account for about one-third of its total services (according to Planned Parenthood’s most recent annual report). Clearly, Planned Parenthood benefits financially from this mandate— and one can see clearly why Cecile Richards aggressively lobbied for it. And, before anyone jumps to the conclusion that I am against all contraception, let me say that I am not. What I am against is forcing this mandate on religious organizations. It is a flagrant infringement on religious liberty and conscience.…

Categories: Culture, Politics

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How much of Planned Parenthood’s grisly work is abortion?

Posted on May 7th, 2013

Planned Parenthood claims that 97% of its work is unrelated to abortion. In Planned Bullyhood, Karen Handel explains why that is misleading: Planned Parenthood distorts its numbers through the way it defines a “service.” In calculating its claim that 97 percent of its services are not abortion-related, Planned Parenthood counts the distribution of a single condom as a service, just like an abortion is counted as a service. So in a given day, a clinic could give away 97 condoms, perform three abortions, and say that abortion is a minuscule part of their work. However one plays with the numbers, Planned Parenthood has an annual budget in excess of $1 billion – with millions from federal, state, and local government funding. In other words, this…

Categories: Culture, Politics

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The Prophecies of Paul VI

Posted on April 22nd, 2013

A professor in seminary had me read Humanae Vitae, the 1968 papal encyclical on human birth and sexuality, the document most associated with the Roman Catholic stance on contraception. It’s something I ought to reread, having had more time to reflect on it. Mary Eberstadt (in Adam and Eve after the Pill) outlines the predictions of Paul VI on how the world would change if contraception became widely accepted: The encyclical warned of four resulting trends: a general lowering of moral standards throughout society; a rise in infidelity; a lessening of respect for women by men; and the coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments. It all has happened. Exhibits A & B: the “see no evil” approach to Gosnell’s “House of Horrors”; the trampling on religious…

Categories: Culture

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Why Christians should care about homosexual “marriage”

Posted on April 5th, 2013

George Neumayr at the American Spectator argues that there is a major consideration being overlooked in the homosexual “marriage” debate. Many Christians would like to retreat, under the supposition that it won’t affect them. In “Religious freedom’s Drip-by-Drip Death,” Neumayr contends this is wrong: The end point of liberalism is a coercive secular state in which the religious have no meaningful rights. American church leaders are kidding themselves if they think the gay-marriage juggernaut is going to stop at civil marriage. It won’t. It will quickly travel past court houses to churches, demanding that all religions bless gay marriages. He cites examples of European state churches compelling their ministers to bless homosexual unions. It’s tempting to imagine that cannot happen here, since we have…

Categories: Culture, Politics, Religion

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The untold story of the Philadelphia Massacre

Posted on April 5th, 2013

David Freddoso of the Washington Examiner wonders why major news outlets—always in a rush to cover the sordid, the gruesome, the sensational—have declared a blackout on one of the most sensational court cases we’ve seen in some time. You might not know it, but there’s a mass murder trial going on in Philadelphia. There has been plenty of courtroom drama, and the death penalty remains a possibility. The media are seldom shy about such sensational affairs, but they have been with one. Perhaps it’s because the accused mass murderer is an abortion doctor, who along with his medically untrained staff is accused of killing a female patient and several babies who had already been born, alive and breathing. Gosnell’s preferred method of murder was…

Categories: Culture, Media

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Priests in white lab coats

Posted on April 4th, 2013

Stop and ponder the arguments our leaders use in insisting on depriving us of our constitutional freedoms—including the freedom of religion, upon which the Obama administration is waging war. Then read this from Jonah Goldberg: Therein lies a common principle: the state should be allowed to get away with anything, so long as it is for “good reasons.” This is the common principle among fascism, Nazism, Progressivism, and what we today call liberalism. It represents the triumph of Pragmatism in politics in that it recognizes no dogmatic boundaries to the scope of government power. The leader and his anointed cadres are decision makers above and beyond political or democratic imperatives. They invoke with divine reverence “science” and the laws of economics the way temple…

Categories: Culture

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Schizophrenic doctors

Posted on April 1st, 2013

You have to become a bit schizophrenic. In one room, you encourage the patient that the slight irregularity in the fetal heart is not important, that she is going to have a fine, healthy baby. Then, in the next room you assure another woman, on whom you just did a saline abortion, that it is a good thing that the heartbeat is already irregular … she has nothing to worry about, she will NOT have a live baby … All of a sudden one noticed that at the time of the saline infusion there was a lot of activity in the uterus. That’s not fluid currents. That’s obviously the fetus being distressed by swallowing the concentrated salt solution and kicking violently and that’s to…

Categories: Culture

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Physicians destroying life

Posted on March 28th, 2013

Even now I feel a little peculiar about [abortion], because as a physician I was trained to conserve life, and here I am destroying it. -Dr. Benjamin Kalish, abortionist LifeDate, Spring 2013, p8 (reprinted from Live Action News, 1/5/13)

Categories: Culture

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“My baby was clogging the drain of the shower”

Posted on February 22nd, 2013

The tragic, yet hopeful story of a woman who took the abortion pill RU486: It was the third day when I finally had enough energy to shower. I felt so dirty and shameful that I couldn’t wait to clean myself. It was the first time I had stood for more than a minute and I was starting to feel a little bit better by then. I got about halfway through my shower when I started to bleed again. I bled so much that it clogged the drain. It was in that moment, me trying to cleanse myself from my sin of the abortion that the truth was exposed. It was the “blood clot” or the “blob of tissue” that the clinic talked about. It…

Categories: Culture

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