Pro-choice, the Madison avenue euphemization for by the pro-abortion crowd is on some reflection an odd choice of terminology. The word “heresy” comes from the Greek hairesis (haireomai, “choose”), and means either a choice of beliefs or a faction of dissident believers. Pro-heresy might be an interesting alternative phrasing. Relabeling is in vogue these days, where it is common for those with the bully pulpit to recast the opponents and terms to favor their cause, which perhaps is why Mr Obama is trying to identify Mr Limbaugh as a conservative leader. If turnabout is fair play, perhaps recasting pro-choice as pro-heresy might help the pro-life cause within the liberal Christian community.

When making arguments one must consider one’s audience. When convincing a secular audience that one should rely on secular arguments, which is the primary place in which these arguments are taking place these days. If on the other hand, one is speaking to a Christian community, then Christian argument and theology should be used. Rarely however it seems to me does the pro-heresy community attempt to cast their arguments for abortion in the light of Christian tradition and theology. And for good reason … because Christian tradition and theology has stood against abortion for almost 2 millenia. Read the rest of this entry

If you’re curious about what Jim Wallis, CEO of the Christian social justice organization Sojouners, thinks about President Obama’s views on abortion, then take a look at the BeliefNet article, Jim Walllis Supports Obama’s Abortion Approach. An excerpt,

In breaking the symbolic cycle, President Obama showed respect for both sides in the historically polarized abortion debate, and called for both a new conversation and a new common ground. I hope that this important gesture signals the beginning of a new approach and a new path toward finding some real solutions to decrease the number of abortions in this country and around the world.

Nonsense.

Let’s take the roof off of this argument by substituting a couple of choice words into the original…

In breaking the symbolic cycle, President Obama showed respect for both sides in the historically polarized slavery debate, and called for both a new conversation and a new common ground. I hope that this important gesture signals the beginning of a new approach and a new path toward finding some real solutions to decrease the number of slaves in this country and around the world.

If you truly care about social justice, Mr. Wallis, then please call a spade a spade; but don’t patronize us with rhetoric which is illogical, at best, and immoral, at worst.

Five days in, and President Obama has made at least two significant moves: One, he signed an executive order which will effectively close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, thereby releasing terror suspects; two, he issued a memorandum which lifts a ban on U.S. funding for international groups that perform abortions.

Score:

Terror suspects – 1, Unborn children – 0

Change? Certainly. Hope? Hardly.

Christians, pray for Obama.

Another one of Obama’s first acts as President is to rescind the "Mexico City Policy" which frees up federal money to pay for abortions in other countries.  Exporting the culture of death seems to be extremely high on the list of Democrats, as this history of the policy, recounted by The Anchoress, lays out.

Interesting history here: President Reagan first put the Mexico City Policy in place and it is named for a population conference that took place in the Mexican capital in 1984 when he introduced it.

President George H.W. Bush continued the pro-life policy, President Clinton overturned it, and President George W. Bush kept it for eight years and threatened to veto any Congressional spending bill reversing it.

Your tax dollars at work.  We may be in debt up to our eyeballs during this financial crisis, but gotta’ save those women from "being punished", dontcha’ know?

From Mike Lester:

Is PETA still being taken seriously by anybody?

From CNN, Obama may quickly reverse abortion policy,

President-elect Barack Obama is considering issuing an executive order to reverse a controversial Bush administration abortion policy in his first week in office, three Democratic sources said Monday.

Obama’s second full day as president falls on the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in the United States.

The sources said Obama may use the occasion to reverse the “Mexico City policy” reinstated in 2001 by Bush that prohibits U.S. money from funding international family planning groups that promote abortion or provide information, counseling or referrals about abortion services. It bans any organization receiving family planning funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development from offering abortions or abortion counseling.

Will you begin your term, President-elect Obama, with an act that may begin to help confirm Robert George’s pronouncement of you being our most pro-abortion president ever?

Amidst the incessant proclamations of history being made, what with Obama’s inauguration,  I can’t help but wonder what Dr. King would think of how Obama has already betrayed, and will continue to betray, the most innocent in our land.

Christians: Pray for Barack Obama

FuturePundit reports on two more papers that show we can take adult stem cells and turn them in pluripotent stem cells; those just as useful and flexible as embryonic stem cells.  Since there are absolutely no ethical issues with the use of adult stem cells, the question then has to be; why don’t we funnel the research dollars going into embryonic stem cells into this instead?  You would think there’s some ulterior motive or something.

Anti-abortion activists have often claimed that for Planned Parenthood, abortion was primarily about money; more abortions, more income.  PP has insisted that it’s about freedom and choice and health.  But a new video that came out recently shows that following the law is a principle that can be ditched by PP when freedom, choice and health (or…money) is on the line.

Stop the ACLU has the story:

Many of you are already familiar with Lila Rose. About a year and a half ago, she recorded a conversation with a Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles (PPLA) staffer. She told the staffer that she was 15, and that her boyfriend was 23, a clear case of statuatory rape. The PPLA staffer told Lila to simply lie about her age and encouraged her to get an abortion. The conversation set off a firestorm. She also showed the racist eugenics that Planned Parenthood still seems to be practicing.

Earlier this month, Lila Rose’s organization, Live Action Films, released a video, the first in their Mona Lisa Project. For those who haven’t seen it, here it is:

[Embedded video]

This video has prompted an investigation from the Indiana Attorney General of Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood, in response to the video, fired the employee.

Last night, they released the second video in the series, at a separate Planned Parenthood, with nearly identical results.

The language in the two videos is nearly identical. The advice given is strikingly similar as well. It’s becoming a bit of a stretch to believe that it’s just one employee when these videos are so similar, isn’t it? Does Planned Parenthood perhaps coach their staffers on what to say? Not only do the two employees cover up for the felony of a 31-year-old having sex with a 13-year-old, they give helpful advice on how to cross state lines to avoid Indiana’s parental notification law. What kind of depraved people would do something like that?? How is it that Planned Parenthood can have what they believe to be a 13-year-old tell them they’ve been impregnated by a 31-year-old and not feel they need to take legal action? Aside from the clear fact that they’re breaking the law, do these people have no morals, no ethics?

Apparently not, which calls into question which of the aforementioned values — freedom, choice, health or money — is really more important to them.

The fig leaf that is no longer available to PP is that the employee on the first video was a lone staffer not following the rules.  Getting two examples of it starts to show how thin that leaf is.  They’re willing to close their eyes to the exploitation of a child by someone else so that they get their shot at exploitation, too. 

Your tax dollars at work.  Really.

This was the title of a post on Redstate by Aaron Gardner, regarding where the Republican Party goes from here.  Gardner started, as his foundation of what the Republicans need to stand for, from the party platform of 1980, when Reagan was swept into the White House with 489 electoral votes.  He made some of his own modifications, but overall the (lengthy) statement stands as a good starting point.

Read the rest of this entry

Work and family have kept me from posting much lately, and today is the last shot before Election Day.  So here are my thoughts about the main issues for this election and why I think John McCain stands on the correct side of each of them.

Abortion

Barack Obama’s answer to Rick Warren, that the question of when life begins was "above my pay grade", should disqualify him from consideration by anyone who is concerned about "the least of these".  Babies in the womb are arguably the least of the least of these, and while Obama claims he wouldn’t want to pick a point where life begins, it certainly doesn’t keep him from deciding where it ends.  It didn’t stop him from co-sponsoring the Freedom of Choice Act that would invalidate abortion laws nationwide, saying it would be "the first thing that I’d do".  In addition, the next President will likely be able to chose 1 or 2 Supreme Court justices, who may hear a case involving the FCA or other life and death matters.

Thus, if abortion matters to you, the only choice is John McCain.  And if you’re a Christian and abortion doesn’t matter to you, it should.

The Economy

Obama’s "spreading the wealth around" ideology, while not technically pure socialism, is certainly a shift in that direction.  As much as he insisted that he wasn’t penalizing someone for making it in America, he is.  If it was just for paying for the government we need, that would indeed be one thing, but wealth redistribution is not what the tax system was intended to do, and it is incredibly inefficient when shoehorned into doing it. 

As a Christian, I still don’t believe that when Jesus says that as individuals we should give to the poor, that didn’t mean that we should use the force of government to take from some to give directly to others.  I find that highly immoral.  I believe giving to the poor is a very good thing, something we are each individually commanded to do, but in no way do the ends justify the governmental, confiscatory means.

Right now, the economy is in a sad state, partly due to greed, partly due to a Democratic party that refused to see the signs.  The government has jumped in to help, with what could be argued as a "socialistic" means.  However, unlike other countries (Venezuela, anyone?), this is intended only as a stop-gap measure to get us past the current crisis.  Spreading the wealth around, and more and bigger government programs, are not the way to come out of it.  Creating more wealth and more opportunities are the way to bring ourselves out of this, and to ease poverty, and a vote for John McCain will help do that.  One main way to do this is…

Taxes

…lower taxes.  Both candidates say they want to lower taxes.  However, the income threshold where Obama would like to lower taxes itself keeps getting lower.  It started at $250,000, then $200,000, then Joe Biden talked about lower taxes for the middle class making less than $150,000.  So we don’t really know where the line is drawn.  And further, if a President Obama gets a filibuster-proof Congress, he’s not likely to veto whatever they come up with, and they’re not bound by his campaign promises.  Raising taxes in a down economy is deadly.

John McCain realizes this, and wants to lower taxes for everybody, including those who are rich enough to start small businesses and who create the lion’s share of the jobs in this country.  Class warfare rhetoric may sound good (and when all’s said and done, "spread the wealth" is class warfare), but if you penalize those who create jobs, you won’t get as many new jobs.  Simple.  In a down economy, the last people you want to penalize are the job-creators.  John McCain’s tax policy will get us out of this down economy sooner.

The War

The war on terror has multiple fronts, and one was Iraq.  It still could return to being one if we do what we did in Vietnam and leave too early.  Iraq is out of the news, and not because the election has pushed it off the front page; if there was bad news coming from there, the media would most certainly highlight it.  No, Iraq isn’t news because it’s going so well and Al Qaeda is losing.  In addition, contrary to most predictions 7 years ago, there has not been another successful terrorist attack in this country.

This is because we confronted evil where it was.  We took the fight to them; we didn’t wait for them to drop another building or kill thousands others.  Saddam Hussein was ignoring the conditions of the cease-fire without consequences, and was supporting terrorism both actively (e.g. subsidizing the families of Palestinian terrorists) and passively (turning a blind eye to terrorist training camps within his borders). 

The war was right, and we’re winning it.  Criticize the prosecution of it, especially early on, and I’ll agree with you, but overall it’s getting rid of the bad guys and keeping them away from us.  John McCain has been on the right side of each of these decisions and Barack Obama has been on the wrong side. 

Experience

Having been a community organizer, and being a Senator for 140 days before running for President is not the amount of experience required for the notional leader of the free world.  Especially when that community organization is filled with experiences like helping a 60s radical terrorist run an "educational" program that doesn’t appreciably increase education, but makes sure kids buck every authority in their path.  Barack Obama is as green as they come.  Supporting him precisely because of his brand of experience is to be incredibly naive. 

John McCain has a long history of working with both parties; something Democrats used to say that they valued.  But when a Republican who values bipartisanship campaigns for President, suddenly that doesn’t seem as important to them.  This week.  I don’t support every position that McCain has taken while making overtures to the Democrats, but I respect the fact that he makes that effort.  If you support bipartisanship, you should support John McCain.

Healthcare

Obama’s plan, while giving lip-service to choice, markets and keeping your current plan, will make it financially untenable for employers to keep whatever their current plan is and toss people into the government-run one.  He fakes to the right in the campaign, but he’ll cut to the left without you even noticing.  And once we socialize a little of the healthcare system, it’s nigh impossible to reign it back in once the cost overruns and ultimate lack of choices become apparent.  The entitlement mentality will expand and sink its claws into this area as well.  It’ll be a case of tweaking this and modifying that until…well, until Canadians don’t have any place to go to get the healthcare they need.

McCain’s plan keeps the market in place and doesn’t undermine it.  That’s true choice; giving you new ones without destroying the current ones.  If you’re pro-choice (in healthcare), vote for John McCain.

Sarah Palin

OK. she’s not technically an issue in the campaign, but I had to bring her up.  Democrats have laughed at her credentials — actual executive experience, true to her principles both in her public and personal lives, and the way she worked her way up herself in the world — even though they claim to value those principles, especially in a woman.  Turns out it’s all lip service.  Someone who exhibits the best in politics, and someone who lives up to so many ideals that people wish more politicians would have, was dismissed or demonized by the Left.  Seems they only value these characteristics in other Democrats.

While this attitude striped the veneer off many Democrats’ real motives, it highlighted what good choices John McCain will make as President.  If you truly value those ideals in any candidate for any office, John McCain is your man.  (And Sarah Palin is most definitely your woman.)

It’s almost Election Day, but before you vote, please consider the issues that really matter to you.  Not the sound bites or the slogans; the substance.  On many of the big issues of the day, and especially for Christians, I believe John McCain is the best choice for President.

See you on the other side.

As I noted in this post at my New Covenant blog, Princeton bioethicist Robert George, in his article Obama’s Abortion Extremism, stated,

That post, and the follow-up A Comprehensive argument against Barack Obama, were intended to expose Obama’s truly pro-abortion position, for any non-Christians that may have stumbled upon this site. Imagine my surprise when, the very week after I posted, I found myself in an argument with a Christian friend who adamantly considers Obama to have a distinctly pro-choice position.

I was astounded to hear my friend, a professor with probably close to 40 years in academia, make (what I consider) arguments typically promulgated by liberals and liberals within academia. Perhaps, in retrospect, given the fact that my friend has spent so much time within academia, regardless of whether or not it was secular academia, I should not have been surprised to hear liberal arguments.

Initially, I was informed that Obama was pro-choice and not pro-abortion. Upon my asking what the difference was I was given the argument that Obama is “personally opposed to abortion, but…”. I was about to offer the suggestion that one take that same personally opposed statement and substitute the word “slavery” or “rape” for “abortion”, and then see how absurd it sounds, but I was immediately informed that Obama has said he would sign on to a ban of partial birth abortions would they only offer an exception for cases of rape or incest. (note: Robert George’s article shreds such claims. More on that later.) I was then told that it was essentially not pro-life to allow a woman with an ectopic pregnancy to die rather than remove (abort) the “fetus”.

Do you see the problem with these arguments? They play with words (e.g., “personally opposed”). They use the exception as determiner of the rule (e.g., cases of rape or incest). They ignore the humanity of the unborn (e.g., referring to the unborn child as a “fetus”).

In further conversation with my friend, attempts were made to compare the devastation of the war in Iraq as not indicative of the Republicans truly having a pro-life position. Of course this is nothing more than diversion. Even if such a claim were true, how does that, I wonder, have anything to do with the devastating fact that 4,000 unborn children are aborted every day?

I was given this website to refer to as, supposedly, an objective basis for determining the position of Obama. I noted, to no response, that the website makes multiple references to Obama supporting a “woman’s right to choose”, yet never completes the statement (i.e., a woman’s right to choose to kill her unborn child).

I offered the article by Robert George, an article by Steve Wagner (Stand to Reason), as well as the National Right to Life Committee’s recent interaction with Barack Obama, as information outlets to help one understand Obama’s actions with regards to the abortion issue. Unfortunately, my friend considers third-party sources to be hopelessly biased and, as a result, would not even reference my recommendations, preferring to simply listen to what each candidate states themselves.

Are there other Christians who have turned a blind eye to the actions of Barack Obama with regards to the abortion issue? Are there other Christians who don’t view the issue of abortion as a major concern?

Greg Koukl, in his Oct. 20th weekly radio show, recently stated (28:30 into the program),

It seems to me, based on what Robert George has written, the lesson is this: If you are radically pro-choice, Obama is your man. But, if you think that abortion in all its forms, the garden variety of abortion, plus partial birth abortion, plus large scale production and destruction of embryos for embryonic stem cell research, plus allowing babies who survive abortion to die, plus having the government pay for all of this with your tax dollars – If you think this is wrong, because of the wanton destruction of defenseless human life. Then it seems to me you better invest your vote elsewhere. And if you believe God cares about these things, I don’t know how you can vote for Obama, and then stand before God and say, “I made the good, right, moral choice…”

If you are not aware of the candidate Barack Obama’s actions, with regards to abortion, I invite you to take a look at the data presented by Robert P. George, and see how it squares up with the statements made by the candidate Obama. It should be (painfully) clear that Obama is no friend of the unborn.

This is the 2nd and final part of my analysis of an open letter from Anne Rice. Part 1 was posted yesterday.

Abortion

Anne Rice spends most of her letter covering this issue, and she starts with an assertion that, to me, shows a lack of consideration of the history of the issue.

I want to add here that I am Pro-Life. I believe in the sanctity of the life of the unborn. Deeply respecting those who disagree with me, I feel that if we are to find a solution to the horror of abortion, it will be through the Democratic Party.

Ms. Rice does touch on these historical issues lightly later on, and I’ll hit them more in-depth then, but even looking at how the abortion issue generally falls between the parties today, I don’t see this as making sense. What I hear from Democrats are things like John Kerry with this sentiment:

I completely respect their views. I am a Catholic. And I grew up learning how to respect those views. But I disagree with them, as do many. I can’t legislate or transfer to another American citizen my article of faith. What is an article of faith for me is not something that I can legislate on somebody who doesn’t share that article of faith. I believe that choice is a woman’s choice. It’s between a woman, God and her doctor. That’s why I support that. I will not allow somebody to come in and change Roe v. Wade.

If one’s commitment to Christianity should be “absolute”, as Ms. Rice has said, there is a big problem with this statement, that is generally the line religious Democrats use when talking about abortion, and that is the canard about legislating one’s religious faith, or sometimes call ramming one’s religion down your throat. Civil rights are very much a moral issue, but does Sen. Kerry have the same problem with legislating that? No, he’s very willing to impose his view on KKK members, and rightly so. It’s right, it’s moral and it’s the law. Legislators all throughout our country’s history, and more so in our early history, based many of their decisions partly or mostly on their religious faith. This excuse is disingenuous.

Read the rest of this entry

Note: I’ve updated this post to more accurately reflect the context of Obama’s statement regarding his two daughters.

A rundown, at HotAir, of candidate Barack Obama’s positions and history on abortion, taxes, radical associations, foreign policy judgment, disdain for the heartland, use of the race card, and lack of accomplishments.

Of particular concern, and what I would argue is evidence of the consequences of our country having state-sponsored killing of over 40 million unborn children, since Roe v. Wade, is this video snippet. This candidate, my friends, is someone who would consider his own grandchildren to be a punishment upon his daughters if they had the unfortunate luck to have been conceived while his daughters were still teenagers.

When we don’t view the unborn child as a human being, then it’s not so difficult to see it as a “punishment”.

Unfortunately, I think too many Americans are buying in to the rhetoric that Obama dishes out, with regards to his views on abortion. They consider him to be “pro-choice”, rather than “pro-abortion” (after all, so they say, who in their right mind would call him pro-abortion?). They trump the argument that we cannot legislate morality (to which I argue that virtually every law we have is a legislation of morality). They trump the supposed fact that Obama would sign on to abortion restriction laws were they to include an exception for the life of the mother (to which I wonder why they ignore the FACT that abortion is legal throughout the entire 9 month term of the baby?). They trump the comparison of the thousands of dead, due to the war in Iraq, and ask how moral that decision was (to which I ask, if they want to do some comparisons, how do those thousands compare to the 40+ million abortions since 1973?).

Can anyone be called pro-abortion? What if:

• someone would consider his own grandchildren, still in the womb, to be a punishment on his daughters?
• someone would, as his first act as President, sign the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), which would “abolish bans on partial-birth abortion and parental notification laws nationwide while implementing tax-payer funded abortions” (quote via HotAir)?
• someone condemned the Supreme Court decision upholding a ban on partial birth abortions?
• someone considered that caring for an infant born alive, after an abortion, to be an undue burden on the original decision of the doctor, and mother of the child?
• someone stated, on the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, that “Throughout my career, I’ve been a consistent and strong supporter of reproductive justice, and have consistently had a 100% pro-choice rating with Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America.”?
• someone who, although he claims to be pro-choice, would strip funding from pro-life pregnancy crisis centers?

Yes, I’d call someone like that pro-abortion.

At the basis of much of the debate which goes on the subtext at which we worry was highlighted in a little book. Then Cardinal Ratzinger and philosopher Jurgen Habermas debated the following question:

Does the free secularized state exist on the basis of normative presuppositions that it itself cannot guarantee? This question expresses a doubt about whether the democratic constitutional state can renew from its own resources the normative presuppositions of its existence, it also expresses the assumption that such a state is dependent on ethical traditions of a local nature.

I wrote of that here (check it out, a few interesting quotes from the book The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion are included). Herr Habermas (here I diverge from my Mr/Mrs/Ms nomenclature as a reference merely to his Deutsche origins) argues (of course) the affirmative and Fr Ratzinger the latter.

Fr Ratzinger notes that there are pathologies of religion which are quite dangerous. It is this in fact which the atheist apologists over emphasize often and key upon, most recently JA noted “zeal” as peculiar religious problem, setting aside for some reason that other ideological zeals have been at the root cause of most of the 20th centuries mass killings. However, this misses the point. The vast majority of both the faithful and the secular are quite non-violent. The question isn’t about the fringes, although those should not be ignored, but the central question is can society function without without religious ties binding it? Charles Taylor in the book A Secular Age noted the important and central role the church had in the softening and civilizing of our social behavior over the last 600 years. Compare for example ordinary behavior by the elite between the 15th century (War of the Roses) and the Elizabethan 100 years later and then to the Victorian in the 19th. They are like night and day. The conventional wisdom was that this was driven by the Enlightenment and the secular (reason-based) move. But that doesn’t pan out to a careful examination. There was no “enlightenment” occuring in the 15th century that gave rise to the vast differences seen in that period.

But the question of whether a large scale national enterprise can hold together its society in the absence of any faith is unresolved. The French reformers of the 19th century attempting to craft a brave new world thought that the rites and rituals of the religious world gave continuity and permanence to daily life that a purely materialist secular world could not. They attempted to craft similar rituals to replace them, but as Mark Twain noted when his wife attempted using off-color language that “she’d had the notes but didn’t make music.” That is, they tried to make rituals but they, much like Mr Obama with his “clinging to guns and God” remarks, didn’t have the connection to the common man that was need to make music (rite/rituals) that the common man wanted to hear.

The demographic crises in mainly secular Western Europe, which afflicts our (secular) subcultures in the States, is not affecting the non-secular societies world wide. One of the commonalities in secular points of view that might be important to this question is how the secular culture promotes a radical individualism … and how that individualism is not very conducive to the sacrifices and commitment required of marriage and family. Without marriage and family raised as a linchpin or centerpiece of ones society, the same demographic crises will occur. People will go their individual ways and eschew raising families. Birth rates will drop and a generation or two later … the Piper will have to be paid for that particular indulgence.

So, to focus the question a little further, I might restate Herr Habermas’ eloquent question as:

Can the free secularized state exist on the basis of normative presuppositions that it itself cannot guarantee? This question expresses a doubt about whether the democratic constitutional state in the absence of religion eschew radical individualism and recall the necessary importance of stable marriage and family.

So if you disagree, and think that a secular society can in fact put family and children ahead of ego … tell me why and where are the clues that point to that notion.

Continuing to chew the abortion issue with some amiable conversation partners, Mr Boonton suggests that there is a significant problem for the pro-life communities seeming disregard and nonchalance over the fact that a significant fraction of conceptions result in no implantation (naturally) and that even after implantation spontaneous abortion remains a possibility in a significant fraction of pregnancies. Often the parents are unaware that they have conceived and a essentially symptomless termination of the pregnancy occurrs. He suggests that money well spent on natal care of ailing infants is rightly not diverted to research and development to halt this, apparent, outrage … if after all if early fetal life is worth “the same as an adult (or infant)” then not wanting to halt this outrage is … outrageous (or hypocritical). Read the rest of this entry