Planned Parenthood -- Abortion behind your back. Big money for us.

I was disappointed in the Knoxville News Sentinel (KNS) editorial about sex education in Knox County Schools.

I’m not a KNS basher. Some of my conservative friends say it’s a liberal rag. I laugh because I remember what the Charlotte Observer was like, when I lived there in the late 1980s. That paper was comical, sort of a cross between the Washington Post and the old Pravda. But in all my time in Knoxville, KNS has covered my newsworthy activities faithfully and without prejudice. They have accurately printed my letters and I hope they will keep doing so.

But I was disappointed at the misstatements of fact in this editorial, as well as the failure to recognize and address the key issues. Perhaps it’s too much to expect. After all, I struggle to be competent on just one or two subjects. I can’t imagine having to become an expert on a new topic every day.

The most obvious error was the statement that Planned Parenthood (PP) “offers abortion services in some locations across the country but not in Knoxville.” In 2009, the KNS itself reported that PP “will dispense RU486, the ‘abortion pill,’ to women up to nine weeks pregnant.” On their website, PP lists “abortion services” as being offered in Knoxville.

Further, it has been widely reported that PP has directed all of their local affiliates to operate abortion clinics by 2013. That explains why PP’s former office at Downtown West was no longer big enough and they recently moved to a larger space.

Their status as an abortion clinic is a critical fact, because it means that PP stands to make a lot of money by marketing themselves in our schools. This is an outrageous conflict of interest that completely escaped the notice of KNS reporters and editors.

The editorial went on to say that PP’s website “linked to material that was inappropriate for the classroom and could be seen by some parents as offensive.” That’s an astonishing understatement that could have been written only by a person unfamiliar with the PP material. It would be like saying that Pat Summitt “has won a few ball games and could be considered by some fans as an adequate coach.”

Evidence of PP’s criminal behavior all over the US, including their institutional willingness to cover up sexual abuse of minor children, was completely ignored. Nor was it mentioned that PP routinely arranges for judicial bypasses that allow minors to get abortions behind their parents’ backs. Were these deliberate omissions or just plain sloppiness? No rational person could think them unworthy of mention.

The tone of the editorial suggested that the issue at stake was whether or not teens needed to know about sex. I don’t recall anybody on our side of the issue ever suggesting teens should be ignorant on matters of sex. We do, however, oppose the approach to sex that tells 13-year-old children that they might be ready for sex if they “trust each other,” “care about each other,” and “have fun together.” We object to PP’s “anything-goes” approach to sex. And I do mean anything.

To my knowledge, no KNS editor ever spoke with any of the parents about this matter. I don’t know if they interviewed the other side or not. Maybe KNS just takes at face value whatever Dr. McIntyre tells them. Maybe an ad hoc collection of parents just can’t overcome years and years of taxpayer-funded PP propaganda. Maybe KNS is a liberal rag and I’m too naive to see it.

I don’t know, but I have to think KNS could have written a more insightful piece had they bothered to do a little independent research. Speaking with some of the pro-family leaders who raised this issue might have been helped.

KNS, I love you, man, but you really needed to dig deeper on this one.

Some of the organizers claimed 175,000 or so attended, and one left-winger even claimed more attended Saturday’s rally than attended Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally in August.  FletcherArmstrongBlog should win the prize for this, because nobody — not CBS, not MSNBC, not NBC, not even Fox News — is reporting the story like you are about to see it!

I went online and found a photo of each rally taken from the Washington Monument.  (See caveat below.)  See if you can figure out which crowd is bigger.

A Tale of Two Rallies - One Nation (upper) and Restoring Honor (lower)

Charles Krauthammer

I wanted to share with you two op-ed pieces by Charles Krauthammer.  Well worth the read.

• The last refuge of a liberal - The theme of the column is summed up in two words near the end, “undisguised contempt”.
• It’s nonsense to say the U.S. is ungovernable – The Left’s contempt for American institutions.

Restoring Honor Rally at the Lincoln Memorial

I was at the National Mall Saturday.  It was a huge crowd, much larger than the “tens of thousands” reported by the MSM.  I’ve been to many football games at the U of Tennessee, so I know what 100,000 people looks like.

For comparison purposes, I saw a photo (on the world-wide-interwebs) of an Obama election rally at the Gateway Arch  (St. Louis), which was reported to be 100,000 people.  I looked at areal shots of both venues (National Mall and Gateway Arch) at the same scale.  The Beck crowd was many times larger in size, although perhaps not as dense in some areas.  My best guess is 300,000 or more were there Saturday.  No way the crowd was smaller than 200,000.  I wouln’t scoff if you told me 500,000.

The remarkable thing about the crowd Saturday is that the rally got very little pre-publicity, except on Beck’s TV and radio shows.  I’m on a bunch of e-mail lists and I frequently get appeals to do this or that, especially when somebody is trying to drive up numbers.  I never once got an e-mail to come to the Lincoln Memorial.  (I was there because I just happened to be in DC last week.)  I wouldn’t have known about it if my wife hadn’t told me about it, so I was shocked to see so many people.

More important than attendance was the actual message.  More on that later.

Check out this video on media fraud at the annual March for Life in Washington, DC.  Look for the CBR truth truck!