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It has been widely reported that the Susan G. Komen Foundation caved to pressure from Planned Parenthood (PP).  I said so myself in an e-mail to CBR friends and supporters.  But it might be too early to tell.  At any rate, Komen will not be getting the personal donation that my wife and I had planned.

Here is Komen’s statement.  Three points about it:

1. Komen has said that they will continue to fund existing grants.  We already knew that.  It’s called “keeping your commitments.”
2. Komen clarified that they would disqualify grantees who were under investigations that are “criminal and conclusive in nature and not political.”  Again, no surprise there.  Planned Parenthood is certainly guilty of criminal misconduct, and the video evidence is conclusive.  (Note:  This is true if you consider PP to be one organization, as we certainly do.  But if Komen intends to only disqualify PP affiliates who are currently under criminal investigation, then this is a big loophole.)
3. Komen said that PP would be eligible to apply for future grants.  I suppose anybody can apply; that’s no guarantee they will get anything.  We can’t assume anything, except that Komen is keeping their options open.  We shall have to wait and see.
4. Komen also said that they would maintain “the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.”  Hiding behind affiliate autonomy is a common tactic to disavow responsibility for bad behavior.  That ruse won’t work with us.  Komen would never allow any affiliate to give a grant to the KKK.  If we see that Komen affiliates are giving new grants to PP, we will know that Komen has caved.

So where does that leave us?  One Komen board member said this is not a reversal.  I think we’ll just have to wait and see.

Interesting commentary:

• Planned Parenthood: Vicious Not Victorious, by Micheal New
• Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer Press Release.  (They will be getting that donation from my wife and myself.)
• Media genuflects before Church of Planned Parenthood.

One reader told me there are better places to give our money than the Susan B. Komen Foundation.  I agreed, but I pointed out that few of us decide how to spend our money that way.  If we did, there would be plenty of money for pro-life work and Comcast would be trying to figure out how to get Christians to support cable TV every month.  (Full disclosure: we have cable TV at our house, but we give more every month to pro-life work than we give to the cable TV company.)

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We’ve been trying to make sense of the controversy over a Canadian doctor’s proposal that doctors be prohibited from telling parents the gender of their children until 30 weeks into a pregnancy.  Editorial by Dr. Rajendra Kale here.  Coverage from here and here.  Favorable commentary in the Calgary Herald here; opposition in the Ottawa Citizen here.

According to Dr. Kale, who is from India, “Female feticide happens in India and China by the millions, but it also happens in North America in numbers large enough to distort the male-to-female ratio in some ethnic groups.”

Reaction has been mixed, but a narrative is beginning to emerge:

1. It’s a perfectly acceptable choice to abort your baby if the child might be poor, might delay the attainment of educational goals, is incompatible with the parent’s chosen lifestyles,  might be handicapped, etc.  In fact, for any reason or for no reason at all.
2. Abortion to kill a baby because the parents wanted a different gender is “abhorrent” and “deplorable” and “repugnant.”
3. Abortion should be an absolute right, except when it shouldn’t.  Articulated here.  Supported by polling here.

They hypocrisy of this narrative is so obvious, we struggle to see how it can be advanced, outside a Saturday Night Live (SNL) parody or an MSNBC editorial.  (Note: SNL, no doubt, would be offended by our grouping them with MSNBC, so let us stop to reassure SNL that we recognize the difference between comedy and folly.)

Anyway, this all has to make sense.  One might have to stand on his head to see all the pieces line up, but they do line up.  But how?

Under the Judeo/Christian/Western (JCW) ethic, each of us is a created being, endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights.  In this hemisphere, we created a collective (i.e., the good ole US of A) for the primary purpose of protecting the rights of each and every human person.

We are held accountable by our Creator to protect the rights of others.  Not because of any good that might accrue to the collective or to ourselves, but because each person is created with value equal to our own.  Hence, depending on whose rights are in jeopardy at the moment, white people are required to advocate for black slaves, men to advocate for women, born people to advocate for the preborn, etc.  To the JCW like us, abortion is wrong because each abortion destroys an individual person.

But under the Darwinist/Marxist/Leftist (DML) worldview, we are not created.  We are evolved.  We are simply a reformulated extention of primordial organic soup.  We have no claims to individual liberty, any more than dogs or rocks.  As individuals, our only identity is our membership the collective (e.g., the “human race” or perhaps the “life energy of the cosmos” or whatever).  We get more rights than dogs only because we can.

However, what we do have is an instinct for survival.  (We can’t justify why our survival is important, only that our instinct for it must have evolved into existence and therefore must be accommodated.)  So we make laws that protect ourselves and other members of our collective.  But these laws are an expression of our instinct for personal protection; they are not based on the notion that every human being has intrinsic valuable.

For the DML, abortion is OK because, first of all, it does not threaten the DML himself.  He is already born.  Unlike other forms of murder, he isn’t threatened by it, even if it is conducted on a large scale.  Nor does he believe it to threaten his collective.  It only threatens other individuals (who have no intrinsic value).

If that were all there was to it, the DML would remain neutral about whether abortion should be legal or not.  But there is more.  He is selfish.  He likes sex and he demands to have it without responsibility.  (We know about selfishness, because our sin problem is just as big as his.)  Therefore, in his mind, unlimited abortion must be a “right.”

But wait a minute, the good Canadian doctor has alerted us to a form of abortion that threatens our own society.  When we imagine a culture in which young men outnumber young women by 10 to 20%, we reel in horror.  “Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live,” Mara Hvistendahl wrote in her book, Unnatural Selection.  “Often they are unstable. Sometimes they are violent.”

The DMLs don’t want to live in such a place, so their instinct for self-preservation kicks in.  The abortions that lead to this horror are, unlike every other kind of abortion they can imagine, “deplorable” and must be prohibited.

But the DMLs won’t want to think about this for very long.  They won’t want to defend the hypocrisy that some children may be killed and some may not.  Or that the “reproductive rights” of some women are inviolate, but the rights of others women (i.e., Indian, Korean, and Chinese minorities living in Canada) must be trampled upon.

When they see how big and ugly this hypocrisy truly is, they will quit talking about it.  They will reason that sex-selective abortions threaten somebody else’s collective, not their own, so they will let this dog go back to sleep.

What do you think?

Robert Pierre

From LifeSiteNews.com:

Although he was always against abortion, Pierre told LifeSiteNews.com that the song arose in his heart after a guest at his high school showed his class images of children killed in abortion. His sentiments deepened after a visit to the former Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, where he said it was not the horrors of the slaughter itself, but the indifference of the surrounding communities, that shocked him most.

Full story here.

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In Holland, I’m told that senior citizens often refuse to go to a hospital from fear that their doctors might kill them, without request or consent.  Sound far-fetched?  Such murders happen 550 times/year.   Also, 8% of all infant deaths are from lethal injections.  In Holland.  More here.

Merry Christmas! (Click image below to see video.)

Back by popular demand, this is too funny!

Joseph on Facebook

What if Mary and Joseph were on Facebook?

Annie Murphy Paul

Great video from CNN’s TEDTalk (link here).

For more information on prenatal development, check out www.EHD.org.

Sen. George Allen

Strategic pro-life activism means being at the right place, at the right time, with the right message.  That’s what we do at CBR.

A decisive blow for ObamaCare and other pro-abortion legislation in the US Senate was delivered in the state of Virginia, way back in 2006.  In November of that year, the pro-abortion candidate won a seat in the US Senate by fewer than 10,000 votes.  Had just 5,000 voters switched from pro-abortion to pro-life (just over 2 voters/precinct), then the pro-life candidate would have won in 2006 and ObamaCare would have been rejected in 2009.  Remember the midnight vote in the US Senate two years ago?

Just as Virginia was key to the pro-abort victories of 2009-2010, it is also key to undoing the damage in 2013-2014.  Don’t take our word for it.  Listen to the pro-life former Senator from Virginia, George Allen:

Virginia’s key.  Our U.S. Senate race here in Virginia is one that objective observers say is crucial.  If we win Virginia, the Republicans, the conservatives, take over the majority in the U.S. Senate and everyone recognizes that whoever wins the presidency, they need to win Virginia.

That’s why CBR is focused like a laser on expanding pro-life activism in Virginia and other key states.  CBR can’t endorse any particular candidate or party, of course, but we can put abortion on the election-year agenda by forcing people to see what abortion is and does.

Abortion advocates and their allies in the media portray pro-life candidates as “extreme,” “arch-conservative,” “right-wing,” etc., but they portray pro-abortion candidates as “moderate.”  By helping us take abortion pictures to Virginia, we can show young people that killing babies is an extremist act of terror, whereas saving babies is a rational act of compassion.

In 2011, we took GAP to 3 major universities in Virginia.  We started 2 new pro-life clubs on campus.  These students will constantly remind their classmates that abortion is an act of violence that kills a baby.  We have invitations to take our GAP project to George Mason U and Virginia Commonwealth U in the Spring.  But we can’t do it without your help.  Please help us show voters in Virginia that voting for abortion is absolute evil.  Click here to join us!  No gift is too small; no gift is too large!

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Thought you might enjoy reading this poem, My Little Baby Boy, which is dedicated to our work on campus!  This is part of Family Friend Poem’s “We Care” program!

Somebody else should pay off his student loan. He is entitled.

We are sometimes criticized for writing about the economy, freedom, etc., on these pages.  Best to focus on pro-life issues, they say.

There is some merit in that assertion.  In our Pro-Life Training Academy (PLTA), we teach pro-life activists how to convince even atheists and communists that abortion is wrong.  Even if they believe we are wrong about politics, economics, etc., that does not justify killing a child.

But it’s important for us to understand how saving children is related to saving the economy. 

Over the past 50 years, a deadly idea has been growing in the collective American psyche:  the notion that all of us are “entitled” to whatever we need, and sometimes even what we want, and we have no responsibility to work for it or pay for it.  The list of “entitlements” includes food, shelter, health care, a college education, etc., … and the list is growing.

Entitlement, along with its twin monster Dependency, are cultivated and used by political charlatans as tools for obtaining and consolidating political power.  They make outrageous promises, but of course, those promises must be kept by somebody else (i.e., the productive class), if they can be kept at all.  But it really doesn’t matter if they can be kept or not, because the people on the receiving end are ”entitled.”

As to paying for the promises?  Well, somebody else can worry about that tomorrow.

Couple that general sense of entitlement with the non-stop portrayal of free sex on TV, in movies, at school, etc.  Everybody is having sex, nobody gets pregnant, and nobody gets STDs.  In the popular culture, sex is just an expected part of teenage life.  So it’s easy to see how young males would think sex without responsibility is just one more item on their long list of ”entitlements.”  All a boy has to do is get a girl to give in to his “request,” and when she does, it’s all good.

Since contraception so often fails or is simply forgotten (source), recourse to abortion is necessary for having sex without responsibility, so abortion must be a “right” as well.  They will even say it, “But if I agree with you about abortion, I’ll have to give up sex!”  Not necessarily, but they might have to accept responsibility, and of course, responsibility is antithetical to entitlement.

Some are more callous than others, “Yep, my girlfriend has the right to kill my child, and I’ll do anything in my power to make sure she does, but the ultimate guilt … er, decision … is hers!”

The more we promote the entitlement philosophy, the more abortions we will have.  The politicians who work hardest to cultivate entitlement/dependency also promote the most extreme child-killing policies, because responsibility and entitlement are incompatible values.

Conversely, although the 2010 elections were not a pro-life mandate, per se, but rather a mandate to roll back entitlements gone wild, the result was a record number of pro-life laws passed at the state level in 2011.  Many of the newly-elected lawmakers who promised fiscal sanity also worked to protect children and moms from abortion.

Furthermore, we must always remind ourselves that the first order of business for the political class is to stay in power.  That means paying off powerful political allies like Planned Parenthood.  They tell us our money will go for food, shelter, education, health care, etc., for people who need it.  But in reality, they take money from the productive class and use much of it to grow the bureacracy and pay off their political friends.

You know about Solyndra, but the half-billion they got is chump change.  Planned Parenthood stands to take in billions of dollars (that’s “billions” with a “b”) annually from ObamaCare (source).  (Annually means every year, for all you people in Rio Linda.)  The more we feed the beast that is our federal government, the more entitlement, dependency, and abortions we will have.

What do you think?  Please comment!

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Princeton University Professor Cornel West

Interesting op-ed in the National Review asks the question, “Are Evangelicals or University Professors More Irrational?”

At the same time, the opposite position — the position of nearly the entire liberal intellectual world, that everyone’s sexual orientation is fixed — is also driven by ideology rather than by science. Society has a huge influence on how people act out their sexuality, including the sex with whom they choose to be sexual. Human sexuality — especially that of the human female — is far more elastic than the intellectual community admits. And the widespread liberal belief that, all things being equal, it makes no difference if a child is raised by a mother and father or by two fathers or two mothers is hardly rational. On the issue of homosexuality, the intellectual Left is just as driven by ideology as are evangelicals.

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If you disagree with race-based affirmative action, you are a racist; disagree with the ever-expanding welfare state, you lack compassion; disagree with redefining marriage in the most radical way ever attempted in history, and you are a hater.

Entire article here.

The Waltons

Neat, feel-good video about an old TV show many of us remember.  I guess you can still see reruns of The Waltons.  It was one show that celebrated family.  Check out this video.

Happy Thanksgiving from FAB!

As the Thanksgiving holiday winds down, check out President Reagan’s Thanksgiving greeting from 1985.  It will be a real blessing to you.  I promise!

Hope you had plenty to be thankful for this year.  We sure did!  Even in a terrible economy, we’ve had one of our best years of pro-life activism on campus!  We visited 11 major universities in 7 states, reaching nearly 180,000 students.  I am so thankful for all that God is doing through your generosity.

But I’m not the only one who thanks you.  A few months back, Angel called me to say, “I was going to get an abortion today.  I saw your pictures, and I changed my mind.  You saved my baby’s life.  I guess you saved mine, too.  Thank you for those pictures.”

Anna thanks you too.  She’s displaying CBR “Choice” and GAP signs a few hours each week at George Mason U (GMU).  She wrote me, “Let me tell you, it is moving!  Truly the best part of my week. … Thank you for all you do, and for finding me at GMU last summer.  This has all changed my life.”

I am thankful for so many blessings!  Here are just a few:

• For Anna at GMU and Lisa at Virginia Commonwealth U, who are starting pro-life student groups so they can host GAP at their schools this coming March.
• For GAPs at 11 major universities in 7 states, reaching nearly 180,000 students.  Nationally, we visited 23 schools that enroll more than half a million students!
• For Cracker Barrel. I’ve been to every one along I-75, I-40, and I-81.  I can work that silly peg puzzle blindfolded (which is a surprisingly awesome way to embarrass your wife).
• For Gary Johnson, our “super-duper” volunteer, who made every GAP trip and saved Angel and her baby with the “Choice” signs you provided.
• For hundreds of pro-life students who we trained in pro-life activism.  We are preparing the generation that will overturn Roe v Wade.
• For the Pro-Life Training Academy (PLTA) in 9 cities across 7 states.  Biggest year ever.
• For discounted hotel rooms at Hotwire.com and chicken soup at 35 different Panera Breads.
• For our new promo video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8Rk44gn824.
• For post-abortive women who are Silent No More at every GAP event.
• For Ole Betsy, my 2005 Buick, and every one of her 115,839 miles.  She’s taken me from Pensacola to Providence and all points in between.
• For dedicated staff and volunteers, whose passion is winning hearts, changing minds, and saving lives.
• For you, because God has used you to touch so many lives.
• For all of the great work ahead.

It’s really quite remarkable to add up what you’ve done through your prayers and support.  We thank you for that, and we thank God for you!

O come, let us sing unto the LORD: let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.
Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving, and make a joyful noise unto him with psalms.
For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods.
In his hand are the deep places of the earth: the strength of the hills is his also.
The sea is his, and he made it: and his hands formed the dry land.
O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the LORD our maker. (Psalm 95:1-6)

Thank you,

Fletcher

P.S. I wasn’t going to ask, but if you must, click here. Thank you!