MEN AND ABORTION: The Paternal Paradox

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“No uterus, no opinion? Not so fast. Men’s roles in abortion are varied, and society’s standards for fathers and men’s voices are contradictory and complex. To understand their involvement in abortion, and the repercussions that result, we need to examine the paternal paradox…” Sarah Quale

No uterus, no opinion

It isn’t too often that men get a say. Not in the deaths of their own children, unless of course, they support the mother’s decision to abort them. Not in the case of Ryan Magers, the father in Alabama who is suing the abortion facility and pharmaceutical company in the wrongful death of his aborted child, who Alabama law and the Alabama Supreme Court declare is a person with rights. Just yesterday, Judge Chris Comer heard arguments for and against dismissal of Ryan’s case, which he declined to throw out.

Over the past several years, the abortion industry and its feminist allies have run an aggressive campaign against fathers like Ryan, to bring more men into their movement, right alongside the “no uterus, no opinion” mantra. While this seems like a contradiction on the surface, there is a consistent, underlying criterion for membership in the #BroChoice in-crowd. You must unequivocally and unabashedly champion legal abortion.

On Twitter in May, feminist author and Vox media host Liz Plank called for men to respond with stories of how legal abortion benefits them. Responses to her controversial tweet varied.

According to #BroChoice men, who reflect an oversexualized culture that discourages chivalry and responsibility, women have the absolute right to “do whatever they want with their own body.” But there are rules.

  1. Bodily autonomy especially applies to a woman who enters an abortion facility.
  2. Bodily autonomy doesn’t apply to a woman in a dorm room, at a party, or in Hollywood.

Why is that?

Because abortion frees men, not women.

Abortion frees men from responsibility and commitment. It frees them to be totally unaccountable to a woman’s heart and to any life that’s created from his sexual relationship with her. But there is a cold truth that remains.

Every aborted child has a father.

The six roles men typically play

When it comes to abortion, the father is typically involved in one of six ways:

  1. He supports the abortion and usually brings her to the appointment and/or pays for it.
  2. He pressures her into having the abortion, sometimes threatening harm or loss of support.
  3. He abandons her and the decision altogether.
  4. He passively leaves the decision to her, often because he is confused or feels voiceless.
  5. He fights for the life of his child, but fails to convince her not to abort.
  6. He doesn’t even know about the pregnancy or the abortion until later, or possibly never.

Out of this complexity of roles springs the paternal paradox, described in brief by another response to Liz Plank’s tweet.

Here’s what this paradox looks like a little more broadly:

  • When women have an abortion, it’s viewed as an exclamation of their “reproductive rights” and freedom from male oppression.
  • When men pressure women to abort, they are labeled controlling, abusive, and oppressive.
  • When women ignore a man’s objection to an abortion, men have no legal recourse for the death of their own children.
  • But when women allow their children to be born, men are legally obligated to take financial responsibility.

To further understand this paradox, we must also consider what research shows about how men’s involvement, or lack thereof, impacts an abortion decision.

The father’s impact on decision making and outcomes

Ever since Roe v Wade, academic journals and research institutes have published studies on the reasons women have abortions. More recently, inquiries have focused on how lack of support and coercion impact the abortion decision and the effect coercion has on post-abortive emotional outcomes. Here is a small glimpse into this ever-growing body of research:

Sources of pressure from the father of the child can range from threats of abandonment to domestic abuse, and even homicide, which is one of the leading causes of death of pregnant women.  Other sources of pressure come from:

  • Parents of minor children that fear a pregnancy will bring shame on the family
  • A shame-based or secretive environment within a woman’s church
  • Counseling that’s rushed and driven by abortion profits
  • Doctors who insist women abort pre-born children with poor or terminal diagnoses
  • Traffickers in their attempts to control or punish their victims
  • Situations in which children are conceived in rape or incest, as Jennifer Christie, a mother from rape, can attest.

Aside from coercion, several surveys report that single motherhood and concerns about current relationships also contribute significantly to the decision to abort.

We can reasonably conclude that, in playing the roles of abortion supporter, coercer, abandoner, and passive bystander, men contribute directly to the confusion, fear, and uncertainty that often accompany a woman’s unexpected pregnancy and impact her decision to abort.  So much for “no uterus, no opinion.”

A shift in our understanding

Up until recently, the pro-life answer to “no uterus, no opinion” has been a simple historical reminder that one doesn’t have to be a victim of an injustice to stand up against it. The South’s argument for slavery was essentially “no slaves/no opinion,” yet scores of white abolitionists stood against the horrors perpetrated against those of African descent.

Similarly, the fight for women’s suffrage surged forward to obliterate the “no property/no say” argument. Yet there is a rich history of “suffragents” who helped make the right to vote (and own property) a reality for women.

But the time has come to move beyond this historical rebuttal, as empirical evidence is beginning to show that men are directly and deeply impacted by abortion, even though they aren’t the ones on the abortion table. Here are a few of the organizations that showcase this work:

  • The Alliance for Post-Abortion Research and Training (APART) houses current research papers, literature reviews, clinical reports, and academic publications on this subject. On the Fact Sheets page of their website, select the Men and Abortion tab.
  • The Life Issues Institute’s Men & Abortion Network (MAN) initiative provides studies on the effects of abortion on men and links to counseling and mentoring services.
  • The Abortion and Men area of the Elliot Institute’s website includes peer-reviewed research, academic articles, and post-abortive healing resources for men.

Anecdotal evidence is also growing and inspiring new ministries to help men work through the deaths of the children they couldn’t or wouldn’t protect. For example:

Lost fatherhood and God’s design

Every person who reports feelings of regret after abortion experiences his or her grief in different ways, yet a growing body of evidence here, too, suggests common behavior patterns and psychological symptomsassociated with post-abortion trauma. What’s not often considered, however, is post-abortion trauma in the context of God-designed gender.

Men are created by God to be leaders (Exodus 18:21, 1 Corinthians 11:3), and they are called by God to be honorable (1 Peter 3:7) and sacrificial (Ephesians 5:25-27). Deep in the spirit of a man is an innate need to be respected; to protect his loved ones from harm. To deny a man this core need and fundamental design is to strip him of his natural, God-ordained purpose. The result is a drifting powerlessness that can take its toll on a man’s self-image, causing a profound sense of loss and hopelessness. It can also bring excessive guilt and shame, fear, depression, sexual dysfunction, alcohol and drug abuse, significant damage to his peer relationships, and even suicide.

Men suffer greatly, but differently, from abortion. Yet our society continues to deny there is any suffering or regret from anyone at all.

If you or someone you know is experiencing emotional and spiritual trauma as the father of an aborted child, please reach out using the resources provided above. Men, like women, deserve to replace the death connection abortion creates with a life connection that forgiveness and healing through Jesus Christ brings.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Personhood.org column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

The Green New Deal: What It Means for Medicine

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Preview: 

  • The truth has been acknowledged by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s own chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti The Green New Deal is not primarily about greening the planet or controlling the climate. It’s about socialism, as the people from whom she plagiarized it have said all along. It’s a fundamental transformation of our way of life.
  • What Americans need to know is the gritty detail behind the virtuous-sounding platitudes. How will their choices be constrained? How much will costs go up—for rent, utilities, fuel, food, and, of course, taxes? How will their standard of living be affected? And how will their actual medical care and health—as opposed to their health insurance card—be affected?

The truth has been acknowledged by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s own chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti The Green New Deal is not primarily about greening the planet or controlling the climate. It’s about socialism, as the people from whom she plagiarized it have said all along. It’s a fundamental transformation of our way of life.

Since everything you do leaves a “carbon footprint,” the GND encompasses literally everything—especially your medical care.

The first question is whether you should be alive at all. In his sensational 1968 book, The Population Bomb, entomologist (insect specialist) Paul Ehrlich predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s. That bomb fizzled, but he still believes that civilization is doomed within decades, as humanity places inexorable burdens on our Planet’s life support systems. The optimum population of the planet is less than 2 billion, he thinks, or 5.6 billion fewer than we have now.

Once you’re here, Ehrlich and his acolytes would apparently tolerate your presence, although the decline in U.S. life expectancy for the third consecutive year would likely be good news. But having children is another matter. The demographic legacy of one person, calculated over the average time for that person’s lineage to die out, is about 6 person-lifetimes in the U.S., with eventual emission of 9,441 tons of carbon dioxide. So, “reproductive health” ideally means no reproduction for most people, and many millennials (and celebrities) seem to embrace that idea. Predictably, unrestricted or even free abortion is an article of faith among Democrat candidates. And the LGBTQ agenda, also favored by all, tends to contribute to the goal of population reduction.

Ironically, politicians still talk about “our children and our grandchildren,” though they may work to assure that many of us don’t have any.

The U.S. health care sector is said to account for around 10 percent of the CO2 generated in the U.S. and thus “could be implicated” in 10 percent (20,000) of the nearly 200,000 premature deaths attributable to air pollution annually in the United States. (There are about 3 million annual deaths in the U.S., and it is impossible to identify even one as being premature because of air pollution; the argument is purely statistical.) Thus, hospitals are supposedly killing people, albeit indirectly, by using carbon-based energy for heating, air conditioning, elevators, lighting, ventilators, etc.

Surgery is a special problem, beyond the use of electricity, because anesthetic gases that might have a greenhouse effect are vented to the atmosphere. So, are anesthesiologists to worry about a hypothetical tiny effect on the climate 50 years from now, instead of the best treatment for the patient?

“Social determinants of health” are the trendiest subject in “healthcare reform.” GND prescriptions would profoundly affect those. Diet would be mostly plant-based foods, with meat limited, ultimately to 1 oz per day. Living space would be restricted, some propose to 320 sq ft per person, with no single-family homes allowed except for trailers. Energy efficiency standards would entail restrictions on entry of outside air, without regard to effects on indoor air pollution, including bacteria and viruses. (More than 300 people in a huge Hong Kong apartment building were infected with severe acute respiratory distress syndrome [SARS] because of this.) Transportation would be mostly walking, bicycling, or public transport. Private vehicles, except possibly electric, might be banned entirely, with roads converted to parks and walkways. It is not clear what emergency responders would do. If electricity came mostly from wind and solar it would be scarce, unreliable, and many times more expensive than now. (Already tens of thousands of deaths in the UKare attributed to inability to afford adequate heating, as costs of “renewable” electricity soared.)

The Democratic presidential debates, except for some squabbling over things like alleged racism, were a display of groupthink. Everybody raised a hand in favor of the GND and universal health care. Some are more radical than others; Kamala Harris insists that we have a “climate crisis,” not just “climate change.” What Americans need to know is the gritty detail behind the virtuous-sounding platitudes. How will their choices be constrained? How much will costs go up—for rent, utilities, fuel, food, and, of course, taxes? How will their standard of living be affected? And how will their actual medical care and health—as opposed to their health insurance card—be affected?

© All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: The Green New Deal: Less About Climate, More About Control

VIDEO: Ilhan Omar Bashes Progressive Muslim Leader

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The first ever Muslim Caucus, designed to collect and amplify Muslim voices in the media, came with heavy blows and criticisms against Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

During a panel event, Omar was asked two questions by Ani Zonneveld, president of Muslims for Progressive Values. The second question was about female genital mutilation (FGM). Zonneveld asked Omar to make a statement against FGM.

FGM particularly affects the Somali community Ilhan Omar is from and represents. It was an opportunity for Omar, a political leader who has supported a bill against FGM, to go one further and use her broad platform to remind people that FGM should be outlawed in every state.

Instead, Zonneveld received a harsh backlash from the freshman congresswoman. Berating Zonneveld, Omar said,

Your second question is an appalling question because there are bills that we vote on, bills we sponsor, many statements we put out, and then we’re in a panel like this and the question is posed: ‘Could you and Rashida do this?’ And it’s like, how often — should I make a schedule? Does this need to be on repeat every five minutes? Should I be like, ‘So today I forgot to condemn al-Qaeda, so here’s the al-Qaeda one, today I forgot to condemn FGM, so here it goes, today I forgot to condemn Hamas, so here it goes, you know what I mean?

Ilhan Omar’s harsh response to a respected Muslim progressive leader triggered a wave of reaction from Muslim Americans. While many Muslim Americans were not pleased by the lack of diversity of Muslims in the Muslim Caucus, many were even less pleased that a legitimate question from one Muslim human rights activist to a Muslim political leader would yield such a harsh response.

Watch Omar:

I spoke with Democratic activist and female imam, Rabi’a Keeble to unpack the events of the day and what we can learn from the conflict within the American Muslim community when it comes to pushing forward a human rights agenda.

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PODCAST: ‘What Am I Doing?’ Gender Hysteria Takes Its Toll

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“I was 17… I finally started on testosterone gel, later switching to injections. It was a huge thing when my voice broke, and my figure started changing — my hips narrowed, my shoulders broadened. It felt right. Passing as a man, I felt safer in public places, I was taken more seriously when I spoke, and I felt more confident. Then I had chest surgery. It was botched, and I was left with terrible scarring. I was traumatized. For the first time, I asked myself, ‘What am I doing?‘”

Moya Sarner is in her late 20s now. She fights the waves of regret over what she did to her body almost every day, especially when she thinks about having children. If only someone had counseled her, she says wistfully. “I might not have transitioned. I was so focused on trying to change my gender, I never stopped to think about what gender meant.” The people treating her should have. And now there are Moyas all around the world suffering because no one told them the truth — that there’s freedom from their pain without destroying how they were made.

In England, gender clinicians, nurses, and therapists are pleading with the country to stop putting children on this irreversible path. The medical staff at Tavistock, England’s only gender clinic, was horrified enough to go public, many of them resigning over the horrifying things they witnessed behind closed doors. Some doctors, they said, would openly lie to patients and parents, fast-tracking what turned out to be extremely painful and devastating surgeries for children, who were usually suffering from deeper issues. When staffers like Kirsty Entwistle tried to intervene in certain cases, she was considered intolerant.

“Since leaving…” she writes in an open letter, “I have continued to follow transgender issues online and one of the things that I have felt concerned about is seeing the bullying and intimidation for those people who raise valid concerns about children making a medical transition… I am also concerned that the attempts of Tavistock & Portman professionals, including former GIDS clinicians, to voice concerns about GIDS practice do not appear to have sunk in.” Several employees have gone to the press, something, Kirsty points out, “clinical psychologists are not known for.” And when they do, desperate to protect children’s well-being, “you have to take them seriously.”

Psychoanalyst Dr. Marcus Evans, who also quit, told the BBC he was worried the clinic was searching for “quick solutions” for young patients. “This is the opposite of what needs to be done,” he insisted. “There is a lot at stake here as these decisions have far-reaching consequences.” In a secret report sent to the U.K.’s Sunday Times, multiple staffers accused Tavistock of using puberty-blocking drugs or surgery as the cure-all for “multiple problems such as historic child abuse in the family, bereavement… and a very significant incidence of autism spectrum disorder.”

But if the medical staff ever suggested that these experiences might be tied to a child’s “wish to transition,” Entwistle said, they “ran the risk of being called transphobic.” There’s an “unspoken rule,” she explained. “Clinicians do not tell families: ‘Your child is not transgender.'” That’s especially disturbing now, since the clinic is overwhelmed with referrals for kids. More than 2,510 have asked for appointments this year — a 400 percent spike from the 97 in 2009!

Other doctors walked out because their objections were flat-out ignored. They thought their patients were being subjected to “long-term damage” because Tavistock refused to stand up to the pressure” from “highly politicized” transgender-activist groups. They are “making decisions that will have a major impact on children and young people’s bodies and lives … without a robust evidence base,” Kirstey fumed. One example, she points out, is that parents were routinely told that puberty blockers are “fully reversible,” when the effects, she argues, are impossible to know. Girls like Moya may never be able to have children because no one told them the risks. Risks like infertility, sexual dysfunction, memory loss, bone fractures and osteoporosis, strokes, testicular cancer, suicidal tendencies, and on and on, Dr. Michelle Cretella explained on “Washington Watch.” “So these are not benign drugs.”

“I mean, we have physicians and drug companies profiting off of the suffering of children… when some of these kids who are gender confused are suffering from an emotional disturbance — and others are being talked into it by the very people who are supposed to be helping them… [P]rior to the wholesale promotion of transgenderism, the vast majority of children who were confused about their sex, if they were supported through natural puberty, outgrew the confusion. That’s a fact [that’s] been documented in at least 11 studies. But again, that was before all the transgender propaganda.”

For the time being, the Tavistock headline seems to be generating a surprising amount of outrage. Conservative activists who’ve been waiting for the public to catch on to the nightmare that is gender ideology are relieved that these clinicians are brave enough to stand up and say, “Enough.” “I’ve always thought if the public really knew what ‘transition’ entailed,” one conservative activist said, holding gruesome photos of patients’ surgery scars, “they would object, and it would stop. I think the U.K. is collectively reaching a point of critical mass where too many of us know what is happening.”

Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

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EDITORS NOTE: This FRC column with podcast is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

VIDEO EXPOSE: The Secret History of Kinsey’s Pedophiles

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EDITORS NOTE: There is a global movement to mainstream pedophilia. This effort has the goal of re-branding pedophiles as “minor attracted persons.” Pedophiles are attempting to join the LGBTQ movement.

The following videos are a Yorkshire Television production for Channel 4, produced and directed by Tim Tate, aired August 10, 1998. The show features interviews with Kinsey team members Paul Gebhard and Clarence Tripp, Kinsey Institute director John Bancroft and several of Kinsey’s biographers.

PART 1:

PART 2:

PART 3:

PART 4:

PART 5:

PART 6:

ABOUT YORKSHIRE TELEVISION

ITV Yorkshire, previously known as Yorkshire Television or YTV is the British television service provided by ITV Broadcasting Limited for the Yorkshire franchise area on the ITV network.

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The Searing of the Conscience Over the Issue of Abortion

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Four years ago, citizen journalist David Daleiden shocked the civilized world by releasing a series of undercover videos that documented the trafficking of baby body parts for profit. Planned Parenthood was gearing their abortions—for which they already make lots of money—so that they could also sell the baby body parts for great profit.

On the one hand, Planned Parenthood denies that the unborn babies are human. On the other hand, the baby brains, hearts, kidneys, lungs, etc. bring a handsome price for the researchers that pay for them. Furthermore, to extract those body parts from the unborn babies they killed, Planned Parenthood had to engage in some forms of abortion that are illegal, such as partial birth abortion.

This is all old news. Four years have come and gone. Ironically, it is the citizen journalist who exposed all of this who faces ongoing legal threats. Last week, thankfully, he weathered a major storm in this area.

Conservative Review (7/19/19) notes that a San Francisco judge ruled against the abortion giant and in favor of the First Amendment.

Planned Parenthood was suing David Daleiden and his team at the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), seeking some $20 million in damages because of fallout from his four-year old revelations.

Judge William Orrick III gave a tentative ruling that Daleidin’s First Amendment rights outweighed Planned Parenthood’s claim that some could be incited to violence by witnessing the abortion provider’s behavior. It should be noted that this is not a final ruling.

However, Judge Orrick did note that Daleiden could still be liable for expenses incurred by Planned Parenthood in investigating security and intrusions, since they allege that Daleiden trespassed. For this, Daleiden may be on the hook for $100,000 in damages—a far cry from the $20,000,000 that the abortion giant was seeking.

After last Wednesday’s decision, Daleiden declared, “Now that all the facts, evidence, and testimony are in, even Planned Parenthood’s favorite judge refuses to buy into the abortion giant’s fake news and lies about the honest motives and protected speech of pro-life citizen journalists.”

Meanwhile, Daleiden faces other legal problems as well—such as a fine against him for nearly $200,000 for allegedly violating a judge’s gag order.

It seems to have been like this ever since Daleiden revealed his undercover videos to the world. It has been a case of: Society doesn’t like the message, so it shoots the messenger.

That said, his videos have made a difference. Cheryl Sullenger, Senior Vice President of Operation Rescue, listed for me a few such changes in the last four years:

  • Ongoing FBI investigation into Planned Parenthood.
  • Two medical research companies were heavily fined and ordered to close for trafficking in aborted baby body parts obtained from Planned Parenthood.
  • Defunding of Planned Parenthood by several states.
  • Attempts to pass the Born Alive Infant Protection Act on state and federal levels.
  • Government contract with Advanced Bioscience Resources for fetal remains cancelled.
  • Federal defunding of aborted baby body parts used in NIH-sponsored research.

Thank God for these victories. To me, the sad thing about this overall story is that, while America was initially shocked by CMP’s revelations, after a while, the story of the sale of baby body parts was met with a collective yawn, or so it seems.

Dr. George Grant, an author of a definitive expose on Planned Parenthood, Grand Illusions, told me: “Four years after David Daleiden’s stunning revelations, I am more concerned about the silence of Christians in the face of undeniable evil than I am about the brazen Orwellian collusion of the media and the political establishment in covering up the gruesome business of Planned Parenthood. It is both more dangerous and more disheartening.”

Mother Teresa once said, “Abortion is a crime that kills not only the child but the consciences of all involved.”

While he was president, Ronald Reagan wrote a book, Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation (1984), in which he states, “As an act of ‘raw judicial power’ (to use Justice White’s biting phrase), the decision by the seven-man majority in Roe v. Wade has so far been made to stick. But…Roe v. Wade has become a continuing prod to the conscience of the nation.”

Perhaps, since Roe v. Wade in 1973 and the subsequent killing of more than 60 million preborn children by abortion, we have become jaded. As the saying goes, “Tell me something I don’t know.”

David Daleiden’s work exposed that babies were being aborted so their body parts could be harvested (with or without the consent of the mothers having the abortions). Initially, many shocked people were reminded of the infamous Nazi doctors, e.g., Mengele, and their medical experiments on Holocaust victims.  I fear abortion is allowing our consciences to be seared.

Planned Parenthood Just Admitted It Doesn’t Care About Women’s Health

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Planned Parenthood is America’s largest abortion company. It kills hundreds of thousands of babies each year, scarring women, damaging fathers and destroying families.

It also just fired its first physician CEO in a half-century and replaced her with a political activist. Its famed former CEO Cecile Richards, who stepped down last year, was a political activist, not a health care professional.

If Planned Parenthood is more about politics and abortion than women’s health, then why do corporations and non-profits give hundreds of millions of dollars to Planned Parenthood each year? Why did Bank of America feel funding Planned Parenthood was more important than being honest with shareholders?

It’s because corporations fear the abortion industry more than 2ndVote Americans. It’s time to change that – here’s how:

1. Most importantly, continue to elect pro-life politicians in Washington, in your state government, and locally. Your work to elect pro-life politicians has brought great results in our nation’s capital and in certain states where elected officials are defending life!

  1. Use your 2ndVote power. Refuse to buy from, or donate to, any organization which backs Planned Parenthood. Then spend your money at competitors of companies which fund Planned Parenthood. For example, Coldwell Banker (3 – Neutral) is neutral on abortion, and its parent company donates to the Salvation Army (5 – Conservative).

A 2ndVote score of 3 or greater is the goal of 2ndVote for all corporations and non-profits.

The irony is that ending unborn life is just one of Planned Parenthood’s horrific policies. The company also covers up sex abuse of underage girls. It used to illegally sell baby body parts, and it is a necessary service for prostitution and sex trafficking. It defrauds taxpayers. It is ripe for losing all governmental and corporate support – so let’s dig deep and make it happen.

It won’t be easy, but the most important things never are. The children are worth it.

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Remember Wen? Meet Planned Parenthood’s More Extreme Boss

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Get used to the name Alexis McGill Johnson. The new interim president of Planned Parenthood is already making her media rounds, and one thing’s clear: she doesn’t suffer from the same anxieties as Leana Wen. She’s quite content making abortion a political issue — and a religious one.

The Christian Post met Johnson back in 2014 during a revealing interview about the intersection of faith and life. “We all recognize that abortion and terminating a pregnancy is a very complicated decision, but that issue needs to be left to a woman, her doctor, and her God — not a politician,” she insisted then. And as far as God is concerned, women have nothing to worry about, she argued. Planned Parenthood, she promised, has plenty of support from “female ministers” and other “members of faith.”

The Radiance Foundation’s Ryan Bomberger is equally troubled by Johnson’s criticism of the pro-life agenda. “I feel like it’s an assault on black women’s ability to make a decision,” she argued. But Johnson, Bomberger pushed back, as a multiracial woman, ought to know that her organization has aborted hundreds of thousands of future black women in its intentional targeting of minorities. But she claims that pro-lifers, who’ve done everything they can to expose the eugenics movement behind Planned Parenthood, are the “racist” ones.

Meanwhile, the editors at the Wall Street Journal are just as stunned. “Progressives are hurtling to the Left so fast that even liberals in good standing are casualties of the tornado. Witness the coup this week at Planned Parenthood, which is a tacit reminder that the group is less a health-care outfit than a political lobby.” Dr. Wen, they shake their head, was pushed out of the group because she wasn’t radical enough on abortion. But, they remind everyone, “Dr. Wen wasn’t moderate or timid about abortion.”

“The coup reveals the dishonesty of Planned Parenthood’s requests for public funding. The outfit demands taxpayer money in the name of health services for women but then sacks its doctor president because she wasn’t political enough. The group claims abortion is only part of its portfolio even as it acts like it is Planned Parenthood’s singular purpose.

Planned Parenthood ought to drop the pretense and rely on private funding like other lobbies. There is no shortage of rich liberals. Facebook‘s Sheryl Sandberg told the Huffington Post last month that she was donating $1 million to Planned Parenthood’s advocacy arm, not her first large donation. American taxpayers who disagree with Planned Parenthood’s message should not have to underwrite a political shop that lobbies for abortion up to the last minute before birth.”

To that I say, Amen!

Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

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EDITORS NOTE: This FRC column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

SPLC Targets, Shuts Down Faith-Based Crowdfunding Site

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JERSEY CITY, N.J. (ChurchMilitant.com) – A non-profit is fighting back against a lawsuit from the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has forced its closure and shut down its crowdfunding platform.

Arthur Goldberg has been a target of SPLC since 2012. He and non-profits with which he is affiliated have been sued twice, once as the co-director of Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH) — which offered counseling for those struggling with unwanted same-sex attraction — and most recently as co-director of Jewish Institute for Global Awareness (JIFGA), the parent organization for Funding Morality.

On Thursday, Hudson County, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Peter Bariso, Jr. slapped Goldberg and JIFGA with over $3.2 million in punitive fines and legal fees for allegedly violating a 2015 injunction and settlement agreement against JONAH that forbids him from providing counseling referrals.

In a move meant to “deter and punish,” he also barred Goldberg from serving as a director of any nonprofit organization in the state of New Jersey — a condition that may violate Goldberg’s rights. As a result, JIFGA and the crowdfunding site, Funding Morality, will have to suspend operations.

Church Militant spoke with Goldberg, who told us he is planning to appeal. “We expect to appeal the decision, which we believe is at odds with the facts and infringes upon our constitutional rights to freedom of speech, religion, and association,” he said.

“Our appeal seeks to vindicate our constitutional right to promote biblical values,” he said. “Today’s politically correct progressive ideology seeks to eliminate the free exchange of ideas whenever certain views may be antithetical to current prevailing opinions.”

“This is part of the left-wing agenda to cut off conservative speech and shut down voices that disagree with them,” Goldberg said.

Goldberg added, “JIFGA as an organization is totally different than JONAH. It does not refer people with same-sex attractions for therapy.”

JONAH was started to serve the Jewish community by pairing counselors with clients who wanted help with their unwanted same-sex attractions. Goldberg was not paid for his work and sought only to help the Jewish community and those of other faiths find support that was in line with their religious beliefs.

“JIFGA was started to promote the universal underlying morals for the Judeo-Christian worldview,” Goldberg told Church Militant.

In 2015, Bariso ruled against JONAH and prohibited the group from “engaging in conversion therapy and promoting conversion therapy-related commerce.”

Goldberg said the same judge extended his decision to JIFGA “based upon the incorrect belief that ‘JIFGA was a successor in interest and a mere continuation of JONAH.'”

The SPLC brought its initial action against him and JIFGA in January. It filed a motion for right of discovery in March asking for access to Goldberg’s emails.

Its claim that JIFGA is a continuation of JONAH and that he was providing counseling referrals to people with unwanted same-sex desires was the impetus for Judge Bariso to grant the motion and give the SPLC 70,000 of Goldberg’s emails.

Luke Barefoot, partner at Cleary Gottlieb Steen and Hamilton LLP, one of the three legal firms co-representing the SPLC, said, “When we learned that JONAH continued to operate under a new name and, in defiance of the jury’s verdict, carry on the same unconscionable practices that harmed so many vulnerable young people, we knew our job was not over.”

Goldberg believes he was maligned and vilified to the judge by SPLC lawyers and they he lost the case based on several innocuous emails that were “ridiculously” misinterpreted.

He explained that SPLC mistook acquaintances’ requests for information as referrals. In one email cited, he provided a therapist’s email address to someone who specifically asked for it.

Another was an email exchange where the name of a marriage counselor was provided. Goldberg said the marriage counseling was completely unrelated to counseling for unwanted same-sex attractions.

The SPLC successfully argued that JIFGA and Funding Morality needed to be shut down and fined $3 million based on the content they found in his emails.

They also argued a project on Funding Morality to document the work of the late Joseph Nicolosi was “evidence” JIFGA was still facilitating “fraudulent gay-to-straight ‘conversion therapy.'”

Goldberg explained his organization was approached by Nicolosi’s family shortly after he died and they wanted to honor his life’s work. “I didn’t see how that would be a problem,” he said.

Political Motivations

Church Militant spoke with Christopher Doyle, executive director of Institute for Healthy Families and the author of The War on Psychotherapy, and one of the expert witnesses denied the opportunity to testify on behalf of JONAH in 2015.

He called SPLC a “bully organization” and said, “This case has always been about a political organization that is targeting low-hanging fruit — smaller organizations with little means to defend themselves.”

JIFGA had an operating budget of around $200,000, while SPLC has assets approaching half a billion dollars. Goldberg said during the trials, there were between 10 and 14 lawyers representing SPLC in the courtroom at all times. Goldberg had one attorney.

In his book, Doyle outlined the JONAH trial and how it was the first time consumer fraud laws were applied to an organization that was not a commercial business operating for profit. JONAH was the first non-profit organization in the country to be sued for fraud.

Goldberg did not have a financial motive, as he and other JONAH co-directors were never paid for their work. Goldberg never drew a salary for his work at JIFGA, either.

Doyle wrote in his book, “It’s clear from the court affidavits that the lawsuit against JONAH was well-thought-out and coordinated, in conspiracy-fashion, by certain gay activists. In fact, court documents indicated that the SPLC actually recruited these plaintiffs in order to take down JONAH.”

The strategy of SPLC to destroy organizations is to “bring a legal cause and cut off their financial purse-strings,” Doyle said. By diminishing their financial influence they “basically make them indigent.”

Doyle said the work of the gay lobby has been brilliant and wildly successful in the past 50 years.

Homosexuals faced laws “worse than the Jim Crow laws” that allowed them to be thrown in jail. They now have “protected status,” Doyle said. “Unfortunately, so much of it based on fraud.”

That fraud was cited in the case against JONAH as the reason Bariso refused to let six experts, including Doyle and Nicolosi, testify for the defense. Nicolosi was the preeminent expert and pioneer in reparative therapy.

Judge Bariso completely sided with the SPLC opinion “that it is a scientific fact that homosexuality is not a disorder, but rather it is a normal variation of human sexuality, and thus any expert opinion concluding that homosexuality is a disorder is inadmissible.”

He further concluded that “the theory that homosexuality is a disorder is not novel but — like the notion that the earth is flat and the sun revolves around it — instead is outdated and refuted.”

SPLC asserted that “their testimony is nothing more than inadmissible net opinion” and the experts’ testimony was “unreliable” because their belief that homosexuality is a disorder “conflicts with the understanding held by every legitimate professional association.”

That statement is false. Doyle explained that despite years of research, not one study has identified a gay gene, a gay brain or even a gay hormone. The American Psychological Association’s (APA) own Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology explicitly states that homosexuality is not genetic: “The inconvenient reality … is that social behaviors are always jointly determined by nature, nurture and opportunity.”

Doyle is among thousands of licensed mental health professionals and clients that have formed a coalition called The National Task Force for Therapy Equality (NTFTE) to counter the “born that way” lie.

They documented blatant lies from gay activists seeking to ban reparative therapy, whose aim is to help those struggling with gender dysphoria and unwanted same-sex attractions to find peace and healing.

Doyle explained that many of the gay activists speaking out against “conversion therapy,” the derogatory term for reparative therapy, were lying. He said that in the case of New Jersey, the entire testimony that influenced then-governor Chris Christie to sign the conversion therapy ban into law was “lifted from a RuPaul movie.”

NTFTE obtained enough evidence to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission specifically accusing SPLC, Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) of “mass deception and fraud in their efforts to ban counseling by licensed professionals for clients distressed with unwanted same-sex attractions and gender identity conflicts.”

The FTC has yet to address the complaint.

GoFundMe Is No Option

Goldberg started Funding Morality in 2016 as a result of the SPLC’s first lawsuit against JONAH.

While he was able to raise funds for his initial legal defense, he wondered what would happen to others who couldn’t afford to pay for their legal defense, a position in which he now finds himself.

Many crowdfunding sites won’t support campaigns dedicated to defending Judeo-Christian biblical values, especially ones that are branded “anti-gay.”

GoFundMe shut down campaigns to support the legal defense for Sweet Cakes by Melissa and Baronelle Stutzman, who both refused to provide services for same-sex weddings.

“JIFGA was started to promote the universal underlying morals for the Judeo-Christian worldview,” Goldberg said. Funding Morality was founded to provide financial support for faith-based people.

“As far as I know, we were the only one,” Goldberg noted. “We welcomed submissions on pro-life, pro-family, pro-religious liberty causes that were consistent with biblical values.”

Some of the current campaigns on Funding Morality include raising funds for pro-life seminars for black-American pastors, support for a Catholic seminarian, a consecrated religious and persecuted priests such as Fr. Jeff Windy and Fr. Paul Kalchik.

Another campaign was started to help to overcome the stigma Christian street cleaners in Pakistan experience in daily life.

These Christian sewer workers are denied personal protective gear, and those who are injured on the job are often denied life-saving care by Muslim health care workers because they are considered “unclean.”

Two new campaigns were recently started to provide funding for pro-life research that did not receive university funding. One research project is looking for a surgical technique to transfer an embryo/fetus in the case of an ectopic pregnancy. Currently, all ectopic pregnancies are ended through abortion.

The second research project is to complete a second detailed study of the potential physical and behavioral consequences of abortion. The results of their first study have indicated negative behavioral effects and that full-term deliveries have a protective effect on women’s health.

The SPLC’s targeted attack on JIFGA has resulted in the suspension of Funding Morality’s biblically based crowdfunding. It is unclear whether these campaigns will be able to find another crowdfunding site that will allow their campaigns when Funding Morality suspends operations later in the month.

COLUMN BY

Anita Carey

Anita Carey is a staff writer for ChurchMilitant.com.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Church Militant column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Planned Parenthood’s Nuremberg

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Planned Parenthood has exterminated 10 times more people than the Nazis. Justice demands that they be tried in the same manner.

These Are The Cities And States Helping Women Obtain Abortions

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  • As more states pass restrictive abortion legislation, other cities and states push back with pro-abortion legislation.
  •  New York, Illinois, Maine, Vermont, and Nevada have each taken steps to protect abortion access.
  • New York City and Illinois have made it clear that women can travel to those areas from other states to obtain abortions.

Several cities and states have passed legislation or taken steps to help women obtain abortions despite a variety of restrictive abortion legislation passed in 2019.

Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio, Georgia, and Louisiana have all passed bills banning abortions after a heartbeat can be detected. Republican Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed a bill into law in May criminalizing abortion procedures for doctors. Meanwhile, Missouri’s last abortion clinic may close due to failure to comply with the Missouri Department of Health and Human Services requirements.

In response to this restrictive abortion legislation, both New York City and Illinois have taken steps to make abortion more accessible for women traveling from other states. Maine, Vermont and Nevada have also passed laws that enable abortion access on a smaller scale, NBC News reported.

New York City

The New York City Council allocated $250,000 to the New York Abortion Access Fund (NYAAF) in June to help women travel to New York City and obtain abortions.

Pro-abortion activists claim this allocation was the first time that a city allocated money specifically designated for abortions, The New York Times reported.

Officials said that the allocated money would enable about 500 women to obtain abortions, the Times reported.

NYAAF board member Janna Oberdorf told NBC that the funds can be used by any women in or traveling to New York City and is intended to cover the abortion procedure rather than travel or lodging costs.

Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo also signed the Reproductive Health Act in January, allowing non-doctors to perform abortions according to the Times. The bill also allows women to obtain late-term abortions — after 24 weeks — if their health is in danger or if the fetus is not viable.

Cuomo did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Illinois

Democratic Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed the Reproductive Health Actinto law in June, a law that makes abortion “a fundamental right” in the state of Illinois.

The law is designed to alert women in surrounding states that they can travel to Illinois to receive abortions if they cannot receive them at home, according to NBC.

The Reproductive Health Act allows non-doctors to perform abortions, abolishes Illinois’ parental notification law, forces religious and private health care organizations to provide abortions, and eliminates required investigations into deaths of mothers.

The law also eliminates requirements to publicly report abortion data, including “the number of abortions performed on out-of-state women or underage girls” according to a press release from the Susan B. Anthony List. (RELATED: Lawmakers Repeal Abortion Safeguards To Build ‘A Firewall Around Illinois To Protect Access’ To Abortion)

“Should you live in a state that has restricted your right to a safe and legal abortion, we want to make sure you know that Illinois is a place where it is safe and legal,” Democratic state Sen. Melinda Bush said to NBC News. The publication reports that Bush sponsored the bill.

“We want it to be clear that Illinois is a beacon for women’s reproductive rights,” Bush added.

Guttmacher Institute state policy analyst Elizabeth Nash told NBC that protecting abortion access in Illinois “means you’re protecting access not just in Illinois” but also in the surrounding conservative states.

Pritzker did not respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.

Maine

Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills signed “An Act To Authorize Certain Health Care Professionals To Perform Abortions” into law in June, a law that permits non-doctors to perform abortions in Maine.

The law will allow physician assistants and advanced practice registered nurses to perform abortions, according to a press release from Mills’ office, and is set to go into effect in September. (RELATED: Maine Will Allow Non-Doctors To Perform Abortions)

“Allowing qualified and licensed medical professionals to perform abortions will ensure that Maine women, especially those in rural areas, are able to access critical reproductive health care services when and where they need them from qualified providers they know and trust,” Mills said in a statement.

“Expanding who is allowed to perform an abortion does not expand the safety of the procedure,” Republican state Sen. Stacey Guerin of Maine said in June, according to the New York Post.

Mills did not respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.

Vermont

Republican Vermont Gov. Phil Scott intends to allow bill H.57 to become law, his communications director told CNN.

The bill would “recognize as a fundamental right the freedom of reproductive choice” and “prohibit public entities from interfering with or restricting the right of an individual to terminate the individual’s pregnancy,” according to CNN.

The bill also would protect women’s “rights to choose or refuse contraception or sterilization or to choose to carry a pregnancy to term, to give birth to a child, or to obtain an abortion.”

“The Governor is and has been pro-choice and believes in a woman’s right to choose, so he has ruled out vetoing the bill — it will become law,” Scott’s communication director, Rebecca Kelley, wrote in an email to CNN.

Kelley also told CNN the governor has not received the bill and has not received notice of when he will be given it.

Scott did not yet respond to a request for comment from the DCNF, and his office did not respond to questions as to the bill’s status.

Nevada

The Nevada Assembly passed a bill in May that would no longer require doctors to inform women about the “emotional implications” involved in abortions according to CNN. Democratic Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak signed the bill into law on May 31.

The bill, SB179, “removes the requirement that a physician certify a pregnant woman’s marital status and age before performing an abortion” and “also removes the requirement that a physician certify in writing that a woman gave her informed written consent.”

Democratic Nevada Rep. Dina Titus praised the bill in May, calling restrictive abortion legislation “dangerous anti-choice agenda.”

Sisolak did not yet respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Can You Keep a Secret? So Can Your Daughter’s School.

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Imagine sending your daughter off to school only to find out that she was headed for an abortion appointment instead. Then imagine this: her teachers knew and never told you. In California, parents don’t have to imagine it. Thanks to a new undercover video, they know — it’s already happening.

It’s unreal footage, even by the ACLU’s standards. When the meeting between state teachers and the far-Left group was leaked, most people had a hard time believing it. And that, the team at Our Watch said, was the point. “[We] know what it’s like to say, ‘Okay, well, I heard somebody said this is happening, but I want to see it for myself.'” So the organization sent someone into a training session and pushed “record.” What they caught was a coordinated effort to keep parents in the dark about one of the most dangerous decisions a teenager could ever make.

“Regardless of how old the student is,” ACLU attorney Ruth Dawson starts off (at 21:08 of this video), “they can walk into a doctor’s office and consent to services without their parental consent. Those services are pregnancy and prenatal care, contraception and emergency contraception, abortion — and for these there is no parental notification.” As school officials, Dawson goes on, “I think a good way to think about this is that these are services that California has decided are so important that… students really need to be able to access them.” So no matter what, she said, “Young people have the right to leave school and seek confidential medical services without the consent or notification of their parents and guardians.”

But Dawson didn’t stop there. Every school, she argued, has a responsibility to keep these secrets — at all costs. “The key thing to remember here is about Confidential Medical Release. The right belongs to the young person. It doesn’t belong to the parent. It doesn’t belong to the school. The right lies with the young person. The most important piece of this is that schools cannot share this information with parents or guardians. Also no parent calls. So a teacher or attendance office can’t call home and say, ‘So-and-so was out at the doctor’s office receiving [whatever procedure]. Did you know about this?’ You cannot do that.” In fact, Dawson goes on, California schools should be in the habit of covering up these appointments on the district record.

Teacher: “So are they considered absent?”

ACLU: “I think it qualifies as, like, an excused absence.”

Teacher: “But once they’re absent, the school calls automatically.”

ACLU: “Right, so I think what has to happen is that the school must develop a policy so that doesn’t happen. When it comes to online attendance tracking, it gets a little trickier, because schools — as everyone in this room knows — have to report attendance.”

Administrator: “Because attendance is financial…”

ACLU: “Right. But if you say [it’s] medical, that’s actually a violation of the student’s privacy rights. If you say ‘unexcused absence’ and penalize them, that’s a violation of state law. So what the heck are you supposed to do? Some districts do things, like, they’ll say the student was with an administrator… and they won’t answer further questions. It’s a little tricky though, which is why it’s more of an art than a science… But saying it was an ‘excused absence’ does not, like, directly violate the law.”

Since when has falsifying state records not violated the law? What if there’s a medical emergency while a girl is off getting her excused-absence abortion? Can you imagine the liability issues if a parent found out the school not only knew about the appointment but covered it up? “No, it turns out, she wasn’t ‘with an administrator.’ She was taking the life of your future grandchild.” This is a world where giving a teenager a Tylenol without asking could launch a thousand lawsuits. Yet somehow, it’s okay to send them on a deadly field trip that destroys one life and forever alters the other without ever calling home?

Amazingly, the video doesn’t stop there. Dawson’s encore for the free lesson in abortion deception is a dose of radical sex ed. She goes through the state’s controversial new guidelines, taking great pains to remind teachers that even when it comes to the most extreme material (which one parent insists is so graphic, he could be brought up on charges for showing it to a child), it’s illegal for parents to opt students out. “In grades K-12, no matter where you teach sex ed… no matter whether you’re teaching fifth graders or twelfth graders, all of that has to be inclusive of LGBTQ…” Schools, she insists, “may not facilitate a selective opt-out just of the queer stuff. We’ve heard, unfortunately, from a lot of parents who say, ‘I want my kid to learn sex ed — it’s important. However, none of the gay stuff. They can’t do that. Practically, it should be impossible.”

By now, you shouldn’t need convincing that your involvement in the local school district matters. If you do, this video is more than enough proof that the Left is targeting your children. But if there’s one thing the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and every other liberal is afraid of, it’s engaged parents. There’s a reason they’re hosting these hush-hush trainings and passing laws to keep moms and dads in the dark. They understand that the more you know, the harder you’ll fight. And in a world where the other side will do anything to get to our children, that’s exactly what we need — fighters.

Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

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Numbering You Won’t Stop the Opioid Crisis

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Preview:  

  • Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.) introduced a proposal that he claims would “go a long way to fight the practice of doctor shopping for more prescription pain pills amid a deadly opioid crisis.” Doctor shopping “involves visiting multiple doctors.” Hardly new, this proposal, now passed by the House of Representatives as an amendment to a $99.4 billion Health and Human Services appropriations bill, lifts the ban on funding a Unique Patient Identifier (UPI).
  • If Rep. Foster’s amendment is not removed, you might have to have a UPI to get legitimate medical care—“no card, no care”—but the drug cartel won’t mind. You can shop drug dealers as much as you like. There is a flood of fentanyl, mostly from Mexico or China, coming across our borders. 
  • The UPI is ideally suited for government tracking and control of all citizens. People like J. Edgar Hoover or Lois Lerner might find it very useful. But it would be the end of privacy, and the foundation for a national health data system.

People are dying all over the country from opioid overdoses. There’s a movement to have the antidote naloxone available in all ambulances and even over the counter. This temporarily reverses the fatal effect of opioids, which stop the patient’s breathing. First responders themselves may need a dose because of contact with a tiny amount of fentanyl, an extremely potent narcotic, while attending a patient.

No, the fentanyl does not come from the patient’s bottle of legal prescription drugs.

Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.) introduced a proposal that he claims would “go a long way to fight the practice of doctor shopping for more prescription pain pills amid a deadly opioid crisis.” Doctor shopping “involves visiting multiple doctors.” Hardly new, this proposal, now passed by the House of Representatives as an amendment to a $99.4 billion Health and Human Services appropriations bill, lifts the ban on funding a Unique Patient Identifier (UPI).

The UPI is part of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996. You don’t have one yet because former congressman Ron Paul, M.D., (R-Tex,) sponsored a prohibition on funding it as part of a 1999 appropriations bill. Rep. Foster’s amendment repeals Dr. Paul’s prohibition.

So how is this 1996 idea supposed to work? And why would it be better than the Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs) now in effect in nearly every state? Every prescription for a controlled substance must be reported to the PDMP, and the doctor must check it before writing a prescription, to be sure the patient is not lying about having prescriptions from other doctors. This costly program that creates time-consuming hassles for doctors has not prevented opioid deaths.

PDMPs are ineffective because doctor shopping is not the cause of the problem. Only 2.5 percent of misused prescription pain medicine was obtained by doctor shopping. And this small percentage apparently increased after PDMPs. More than 97% of misused medications are obtained from a single physician—or from an illicit source. The spike in opioid deaths after 2013 was caused by illicit fentanyl, as Dr. John Lilly concludes from painstaking analysis of official data.

If Rep. Foster’s amendment is not removed, you might have to have a UPI to get legitimate medical care—“no card, no care”—but the drug cartel won’t mind. You can shop drug dealers as much as you like. There is a flood of fentanyl, mostly from Mexico or China, coming across our borders. Rep. Foster is apparently unaware of the armed lookouts protecting the smuggling routes in the Tucson sector. And once here, the drugs go to distributors—such as illegal aliens protected in sanctuary cities.

So, what about the other touted benefits of the UPI? “Specifically, assigning a unique number to a patient would give doctors a way to immediately identify a patient’s medical history,” said Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.). He says it “would lower the cost of medical mix-ups due to misidentification.” His elderly father was nearly given the wrong medication.

To prevent medical errors, you need to alert nurses and doctors—and the UPI is not going to fix the hazards of the electronic health record. The EHR, touted as the solution that will bring efficient, quality care, has created its own type of errors.

There is no guarantee that a UPI will improve access to the record, and critical information will still be buried in voluminous, repetitious data of dubious reliability, some of which may have been cut-and-pasted from another patient’s record. There may be critical gaps as patients withhold information they don’t want in a federal database. The new problem that brings the patient to the hospital won’t be in the old record—but may be the result of an old misdiagnosis that should be corrected instead of copied.

Patients need to be able to shop for doctors, especially if the one they have has not solved their problems. Some of them desperately need opioids, which are increasingly difficult to obtain. They do not need a UPI, and neither does their doctor.

The UPI is ideally suited for government tracking and control of all citizens. People like J. Edgar Hoover or Lois Lerner might find it very useful. But it would be the end of privacy, and the foundation for a national health data system.

VIDEO: Alpha Male America

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Bring back manhood in America! Feminism is a poison that must go.

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Adding ‘P’ for Pedophile to LGBT

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EDITORS NOTE: In an April 1977 report, co-authored by Ruth Bader Ginsberg, professor at the Columbia Law School and Brenda Feigen-Fasteau, former director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s women’s rights project, titled “SEX BIAS IN THE U.S. CODE A Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights” recommended 18 U.S.C. §2032 be changed as follows:

Eliminate the phrase “carnal knowledge of any female, not his wife who has not attained the age of sixteen years” and substitute a Federal, sex-neutral definition of the offense patterned after S. 1400 §1633: A person is guilty of an offense if he engages in a sexual act with another person, not his spouse, and (1) compels the other person to participate: (A) by force or (B) by threatening or placing the other person in fear that any person will imminently be subjected to death, serious bodily injury, or kidnapping; (2) has substantially impaired the other person’s power to appraise or control the conduct by administering or employing a drug or intoxicant without the knowledge or against the will of such other person, or by other means; or (3) the other person is, in fact, less than 12 years old. 

Matthew Hanley: If brazen attempts succeed in normalizing pedophilia, many people may finally come to reject the sexual revolution outright.

I don’t want to write about pedophilia. You don’t want to read about it.  But the threat of pedophilia becoming acceptable isn’t going away. The sudden embrace of transgenderism didn’t come from nowhere. And it isn’t going to stop there, as I argued in this space not long ago.

Targeting children comes in two general phases. The first involves bombarding them with LGBT messaging in schools. Or now, on public television (PBS) cartoons in which an 8-year-old Aardvark named Arthur and his peers are portrayed as pleased that his male teacher is “marrying” another male.

Other offenses in this category include Drag Queen Story Time at public libraries, which now seem to be cropping up all over the country. Scary to say, but chances are your local librarian may also be a monster-enabler – or at least too feeble a frog to jump out of water that is now well past the boiling point.

Drag Queen Story Time typically gives a platform to gay males (some are even convicted sex offenders) to abuse children by encouraging them to flout reality and to explore gender “fluidity.” Who thinks that is a good idea? Relatively few, in all likelihood.  But that doesn’t tell us how many otherwise decent people are unwilling to draw a line in the sand.

Appeals to “tolerance” show their true colors when they are enlisted to support the blatant grooming of children – grooming being a term we used to be happily unacquainted in this abusive context.  Such grooming also presents some commonality with certain elements in Islam; I refer to authorities in the UK willfully ignoring the systematic rape of local girls by Muslim “grooming” gangs for decades.

In short, a great many people in positions of authority are so keen on protecting both Islam and homosexuality that even the grotesque abuse of youngsters must be swept under the rug.

Sure, one could say that not all LGBT folks are on board with pedophilia.  But a larger point is in play: when the goal is rationalizing LGBT behavior, the very innocence of children must be targeted. Concepts of normality, morality, and virtue must be radically inverted because they stand as a rebuke to the depravity we must now esteem with “pride” – or else!

The second phase involves attempts to accommodate or actually espouse pedophilia. This can take the form of classifying it as a clinical condition, which amounts to a plea for exculpation; after all, no blame is attached to the person who comes down with Parkinson’s or pneumonia.  But it can also be couched in terms of advancing “rights,” breaking down barriers, and allowing “love” to win out.

Indeed, influential medical bodies seem to be biding their time to classify pedophilia not as a disease but as just another sexual orientation.  One that is unchangeable, you understand – because according to current dogma, anything that goes against human nature and common decency is unchangeable.

This would essentially amount to adding a P to LGBT.  Another P, I should specify; not Pansexual, which is already included in the ever expanding LGBTQIAP+ acronym. (Look it up – and ask: what does the “+” exclude?)  We all know what that would mean: “hate” would be the only thing standing in the way of legitimizing pedophilia.

So which is it: a disease one haplessly contracts, or a legitimate orientation that is unjustly oppressed? Who cares; doesn’t matter; whatever “argument” will do. Innocence will be targeted.

Pedophilia-friendly messaging can be found on TV and on stage; a recent play appearing in Chicago and London portrays pedophilia in a sympathetic light.  It can be found on social media and even in academic journals; one such journal published in 2018 a convicted pedophile’s contention that “child-adult sexual relations” should be seen as virtuous.

Benedict XVI recently asserted that, “Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of ‘68 was that pedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.” He sheds a bright light on the disturbing developments during this past half-century. But this matter goes all the way back to the confrontation between Christianity and the paganism of antiquity, which was fine with treating children as sexual objects.

Christianity reversed the prevailing approval of such practices, which makes our current crisis even more troubling because it entails the paganization of the Church and not just the de-Christianization of Western society.

So we now contend with bishops (in the UK) actively endorsing curricula developed by gay activists, while dodge ball is derided by some educational authorities on the grounds that it inappropriately treats kids as “human targets.” As if kids throwing balls at each other on the playground is of more concern than insidiously targeting them via perverted indoctrination.

It’s curious that, even on the heels of revelations that some of the Catholic hierarchy are in the business of perpetuating homosexual predation, there are nonetheless actors out there saying that maybe such targeting, grooming, and abusing of youngsters is not really such a bad thing after all.  

Apparently the task for those in the driver’s seat of our post-decency culture is to strike the right balance: condemn Christianity for its views on sexuality, and also for the violation against those norms by its pastors, while promoting such transgressions in the wider world – in just the right doses as the timing of our ongoing collapse permits.

We are not just dealing with a simple or abstract disagreement here.  We are dealing with dangerous people and disastrous ideas.  Perhaps the ever more brazen attempts to target children will lead people to see how one transgression logically leads to the next, and reject the sexual revolution outright.

But our degradation runs so deep, our divide is so unbridgeable, that talk of some sort of pending civil war is not rash. Nobody wants that, but if we can’t push back against the ongoing – indeed accelerating – targeting of children, we’ll have lost without firing a shot.

COLUMN BY

Matthew Hanley

Matthew Hanley is senior fellow with the National Catholic Bioethics Center. With Jokin de Irala, M.D., he is the author of Affirming Love, Avoiding AIDS: What Africa Can Teach the West, which recently won a best-book award from the Catholic Press Association. The opinions expressed here are Mr. Hanley’s and not those of the NCBC.

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