NY Pro-Choice Group Files Lawsuit Challenging TX Sonogram Law

According to the June 14 issue of The Daily Texan, “A New York-based reproductive rights group filed a class-action lawsuit Monday against a new law passed by the Texas Legislature that increases regulations on Texas women seeking abortions and physicians who perform the procedure.”

The legislation in question is of course the so-called sonogram bill, signed into law by Governor Rick Perry on May 19 of this year. The law requires that women in Texas be given a sonogram before an abortion. The woman is not required to view the ultrasound, but the doctor is required to point out features such as the size of the fetus.

The argument the Center for Reproductive Rights is using to advance its anti-life agenda is privacy, and it is as unsurprising as it is unconvincing. Abortion proponents have been screaming “PRIVACY!” at the top of their lungs since roughly the 1960s. Ironically enough, the “right to privacy” is guaranteed nowhere in our Bill of Rights or other founding documents. (The right to life, however, is the first one mentioned.)

The CRR is behaving as though every abortion took place after a heartfelt, informative discussion between a woman and her private physician, when in actuality the patient at an abortion clinic usually doesn’t see her doctor until she’s got her feet in the stirrups. As former abortion clinic owner turned pro-life activist Carol Everett described in her testimony to the Pro-Life Action League of Chicago, “The doctor walks in, sees the patient for the very first time, pats her on the leg, says, ‘Hi, baby, how are you?’ You call them ‘baby’ so you don't have to remember their name. And she says, ‘Oh, I'm scared,’ or, ‘I'm cold.’ Never anything positive. And he doesn't really ask her any questions. It's just get the abortion done.”

So much for the myth of the noble doctor and his trusting patient, having their sacred and private relationship intruded upon by the tyrannical State. So much for the image of the empowered woman nodding soberly as her comforting physician helps her make an informed decision. That is what CRR would have us believe is going on when they lament, “The law treats women as if they are too immature or incompetent to make their own important medical decisions… It’s very demeaning and patronizing to women.”

Really? It’s demeaning and patronizing to women to require their doctors to make them aware of a medical procedure before they do it? Please give me just a small break.

Can we consider that maybe it’s demeaning and patronizing to women to pretend like we find this law demeaning and patronizing? Do you know how anti-lifers really find this law? Not demeaning. Not patronizing. Threatening. They know that if a woman views an ultrasound of her baby she is less likely to abort it, so they are going to do everything in their power to stop that from happening.

Behind every well-meaning feminist who has performed the logical acrobatics required to convince herself that giving medical information to a woman is somehow demeaning to her, there is a Planned Parenthood lackey who is desperate to protect a multi-billion dollar business.

Carol Everett again: “I have seen doctors walk out after three hours work and split $4,500 between them on a Saturday morning.” Not too shabby.

And speaking again of an abortion doctor, she said, “If he discovers that she may be farther along than anyone thought she was, they stop right there, collect the money, and then finish the procedure… If abortion is such a good thing, why don't they give them away? If abortion is such a good thing, why don't they go ahead and do the abortion then, and trust you to pay the extra $200 when they're finished?”

I would add: if abortion really doesn’t kill anything, really just rids the woman’s body of an extra clump of cells, why are they worried about showing her a sonogram? Is it because they’re afraid she might see something recognizable, something with a heartbeat, something human?

The sonogram image is a powerful one. It was another abortion provider turned pro-life activist, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, whose documentary “Silent Scream,” which showed a sonogram image of a fetus during an abortion, shocked the world in the early 1980s. President Reagan even had it screened at the White House. Former Planned Parenthood employee, now a best-selling pro-life author, Abby Johnson, had the epiphany that changed her life while viewing an ultrasound. Carol Everett said, “I've seen sonograms with the baby pulling away from the instruments...”

Who are we helping by withholding this information? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not women.

It’s an industry. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry.

The abortion clinic is not like a birthing center. You won’t find caring people, soft lighting, and comfortable chairs. You won’t have intimate heart-to-hearts with nurses who remind you of your great-aunt and doctors who remind you of your grandpa. You will find instruments of death and people who want your money. It’s a joke that these places are even referred to as “health care” facilities. They are factories, and the products they manufacture are dead children and wounded, empty women.

A Texas-Sized Slice of Truth

Rick Perry, governor of the Great State of Texas – and I’ll admit I’m a bit partial – is about to sign a bill into law that will require women considering abortion to receive a sonogram at least 24 hours before the procedure. According to the New York Times, “Though the woman can choose not to view the images and hear the heartbeat, the doctor must describe what the sonogram shows, including the existence of legs, arms and internal organs."

This law will save lives.

Sonogram laws are a powerful victory against abortion because sonograms provide a window into the hidden world of the womb. In other words, sonograms tell the truth. Because the abortion industry subsists on secrecy and lies, the greatest weapon against abortion is truth.

Based on personal experience, it is my firm belief that most people who support abortion don’t know what it is they’re supporting, and most women who have abortions don’t truly understand what abortion is.

I was pro-choice until November of 2006, when a pro-life friend had a Conversation with me. I capitalize it because it was a Conversation that changed my life forever. I began it with the firmly held belief that being pro-choice was the enlightened, humane way to be; pro-choice was on the side of human rights, caring about women, and just generally being an intelligent, ethical person. When I saw pro-life bumper stickers on my friend’s car, I scoffed openly. “You’ve gone a little too far, don’t you think?” I said to her. She was calm and polite when, later that night, I brought it up again.

“How can you possibly be pro-life?” I asked her.

She explained the issue to me with clarity and reason, and told me that photos had played a large part in convincing her of the inherent wrong of abortion. Towards the end of the Conversation, almost (but not quite) persuaded against my will, I asked to see the photos. When I was done looking at them, I was pro-life. And not only was I pro-life, I was an activist, and have remained one.

There is a lot of debate in the pro-life community about whether graphic images are a good idea. I looked at graphic photos a million times as a pro-choicer, and all I saw was something to anger me at pro-lifers. It didn’t register to me that I was looking at a dead baby. It was simply one more thing about which to get angry and indignant at the anti-choice wackos. However, when a person is ready to see them, to really see them, as I was after that Conversation, they are the most powerful tool we have against the ignorance that is the calling card of the pro-choice base.

Most people think, as I did, in terms of “tissue,” “clumps of cells,” “the products of pregnancy,” all the euphemisms Planned Parenthood and the entire anti-life front use to dehumanize an unborn child. An image of an aborted baby says in one second what even the most well-informed and eloquent pro-life crusader could not say in two hours. It says: “This is a human being, and it is dead.” A picture of an abortion does not show you a terminated pregnancy or some discarded tissue. It shows you, clearly and finally, a child that has been killed. Legally.

Most people, almost all people, have a conscience, which means most people have a visceral reaction to such photos if they have been prepared to see them. Something in them says, “That is wrong.”

The sonogram image is the most powerful visual tool in the pro-life arsenal. It is far more effective and powerful to the woman considering abortion than even the most horrifying photo of an aborted baby, because the child is alive and the child is hers.

Women who go to abortion clinics are bombarded with the aforementioned euphemisms: tissue, clump of cells, product of pregnancy. But a moving image of the child inside her, in some cases fully formed and active, its strong little heart beating away: this belies the euphemisms. It negates the propaganda. It is the truth, in front of her eyes, and it is the most powerful weapon we have to fight the people who would kill that child and collect their fee.

Planned Parenthood and their many allies and supporters are furious  about the sonogram bill in Texas and others like it all over the country. They are angry because they are not concerned with helping women make an informed decision. They are concerned with the money they make committing abortions.

Sonogram laws are devastating to the abortion industry. The last thing in the world they want is for the woman to think about the living child inside her as a living child. After all, then she might act on her instinct to protect it and, God forbid, leave with her body, soul, and baby intact, and her money in her pocket.

As usual, organizations like NARAL clamor that the law is “designed to shame women.” This is ludicrous and condescending. If abortion is the empowering act organizations like NARAL would have us believe, they would shrug off sonogram law. If abortion is the nonchalant casting-off of useless tissue anti-lifers would have us believe, a woman could look unflinchingly at the “clump of cells” on the sonogram and say to the abortionist, “Go for it.” But NARAL, Planned Parenthood, NOW, and their ilk know that the woman is going to see a baby. And to NARAL I say, if it is shame that makes her decide not to kill it, then so be it.

But it is possible, and I like to believe probable, that it is a higher emotion that will cause a woman to keep her baby upon viewing a sonogram. I think it might even be appropriate to call it something very silly, like love.

No Exceptions, No Apologies

As someone who has spent the last three and a half years involved in various ways in the pro-life movement, I hear the phrase “except in cases of rape or incest” a lot. It’s kind of a buffering clause, an apologetic little qualifier that people – especially politicians – like to throw out to soften their big mean “anti-choice” message.

The most oft-quoted figure, from a study by Planned Parenthood's own Guttmacher Institute, states that only around 1% of aborted babies are the product of rape or incest. Yet I know a few people who are pretty firmly pro-life, but still waver on the rape/incest issue. They shouldn’t. We should be pro-life without exception, and we should declare this firmly and without apology.

I will explain why this is so using a scene from a film.

The movie Rob Roy (1995) starred Liam Neeson as the title character, Robert MacGregor, a real-life legendary Scot who lived in the 1700s, and Jessica Lange as his devoted wife Mary. A nobleman called Cunningham, believing MacGregor owed him money, paid a visit to his home while MacGregor was away and burned it down, but not before raping Mary.

Mary decided not to tell her husband, because she knew he would challenge Cunningham to a duel, and no one ever survived a duel with Cunningham.

Later, MacGregor found out himself that his wife had been raped, and when he confronted Mary about it, she told him, “There is more. I am with child, and I do not know who the father is.”

Sobbing, she told him, “I couldn’t kill it, husband.”

And he replied, “It’s not the child that needs killing.”

The filmmakers may not have intended to make the argument against abortion in cases of rape and incest, but they did, quite succinctly, through the fictional dialogue of an 18th century Scottish commoner. Having a rugged, simple man utter this bit of wisdom highlights how plainly commonsensical it is; even someone with the most rough-and-ready plebeian take on morality and logic can reason that if anyone deserves to be hurt or killed as a result of a rape, it’s the rapist, not the innocent, defenseless product of his crime.

Rape is a heinous act of violence committed against an innocent person. So is abortion.

Organizations like Planned Parenthood use this rape/incest clause to their advantage. The truth is, as long as people believe abortion is "okay" only in some cases, it is going to keep being okay in any case at all. Adding the “except in cases of rape or incest” phrase to a pro-life message reinforces the mistaken idea that abortion is somehow therapeutic to a woman who has been harmed, and that is not only false, but is a slippery slope to elective abortion on demand. If it can be argued that abortion “helps” a woman in a state of psychological trauma due to rape or incest, it can be argued that she is “helped” by having an abortion in any number of traumatic circumstances.

Proponents of the rape/incest exception argue that the woman who carries her rapist’s child to term (even if releasing for adoption) suffers great psychological trauma. Assuming this is correct for the sake of argument, it is still true that abortion causes great psychological trauma as well. The difference is, one option kills an innocent person and the other doesn’t.

There is no procedure that can erase the pain of rape. A woman does not skip out of the clinic after aborting her rapist’s baby, cleansed of all pain and ready to go shoe-shopping, nor does an abortion catalyze a profound healing process. Quite the opposite: the woman has been violated twice, first by a criminal who gets off hurting women, and second by a greedy “doctor” willing to kill her child for money.

The same goes for incest: it is a grave wrong that should not occur, but if it does, and if a child is the result, the child does not deserve killing, nor does killing it erase the crime or ameliorate the effects.

As Patricia Heaton of Feminists for Life of America said, “A woman experiencing an unplanned pregnancy deserves to experience unplanned joy.” This should apply even to the victims of rape and incest. A child is not guilty of its father’s sins, and even the child of a rapist deserves a life lying before her full of joyous possibility. Whether she is parented by her birth mother or released to a loving family through adoption, her fate needn’t be determined by her tragic origin.

As pro-life citizens, we fight for the right to life of every unborn child, no matter the circumstances in which he or she was conceived, and we are committed to the care of mothers as strongly as we are to their children. Women who have been raped or abused – just like all women in crisis pregnancies – deserve care and honesty, and that means not the deadly greed of an abortion clinic, but the kind of support only the pro-life community gives women and their children, through churches, crisis pregnancy centers, other non-profits and individuals. These women need special help to heal and make positive decisions for themselves and their babies. They do not need to be violated again by the abortionist’s grisly tools. Killing is not healing.

Confessions of a Former Hater

I had a dream a few weeks ago that I ran into George W. Bush in an ACE Hardware store. He was wearing the “ranchin’ boots” I saw on the Hannity interview with some jeans and a button-down shirt. The former president tapped me on the shoulder and asked my opinion on bolt cutters. The weirdest thing about the dream – despite the idea that someone might, upon looking at me, figure I would know something about bolt cutters – is that it wasn’t weird. He is exactly the kind of guy you might run into in a hardware store in Dallas.

In the dream, Dubya asked me, looking directly into my eyes with that squinty grin of his as we knelt in the aisle, “How come you hated me so much?” In the dream I felt terribly embarrassed, and also like I might burst into tears for some reason. George seemed to sense my consternation, and patted me on the back, as if to say, “Never mind.” Then we went back to looking at bolt cutters.

I woke up feeling that dream sensation of embarrassment and sorrow, but I shook it off, the way we all shake off the emotions we feel in dreams, so that the stunned terror of the car wreck or the jubilant elation of the water balloon fight with the Goonies is gone by the time the coffee starts to drip.

I shook the feeling, but I didn’t shake the question: “How come you hated me so much?”

It seems like there are a growing number of people like me: Americans who were quite young when Bush was elected and are now, in the wake of the current administration, a few years of perspective, and a lot of soul-searching, finding our opinion of the man has changed. It almost feels right that we would gather in church basements, sit on folding chairs with Styrofoam cups of coffee, and share stories of recovery from our deep personal hatred of George W. Bush. I'll start.

“Hi, my name is Kristen, and I hated George W. Bush.”

I don’t use that word lightly. There is a short list of living people I can honestly say I have at one time hated, and Dubya was near the top, right under Courtney Love, who remains on the list. (That is a subject for another essay.)

Actually, do I really need an essay? I think this picture should just about do it.

I was editor-in-chief of one issue of a biannual student magazine in college; this would have been around 2002. The topic I chose was “War.” The issue, under my direction, excoriated Bush, personally and presidentially, for page after page after page. One feature I remember vividly was my take on a letter from President Bush to the family of a slain soldier. It was a “Bush is stupid” gag piggybacked on a “Bush doesn’t care about soldiers” gag, featuring poor spelling and a postscript noting that a 30% off coupon to Domino’s Pizza was included with the letter.

If you had asked me, at age 23, what I thought about Bush, I would have found myself unable to answer you without swearing.

Over the course of a few years, I stopped believing he was blood-related to Lucifer, and started, like many Americans around 2004ish, believing he was a stupid, misguided puppet controlled by evil men who met in shadowy Pentagon rooms and plotted… stuff. Lots of conspiratorial stuff. Probably concerning oil. Oooh, oil! Yes, it was all about oil!

Later, around 2006 or 2007, I stopped thinking he was necessarily a puppet and started thinking he was probably a really convicted guy who thought he was doing the right thing but was too simple to understand all the super complex issues involved in the conflict… which I, apparently, understood? I guess? He had CIA briefings, I had The Nation online. But somehow I “got it” and George W. Bush didn’t.

By 2008, I was even able to find Dubya likeable. I came to enjoy his folksy Texanisms and even feel a little, well, proud, that he was a fellow Texan, adopted or otherwise. I couldn’t have explained why. I even began to quip that I wouldn’t mind floating the Guadalupe with him (preferably sharing a raft with other likeable Texans, especially Ron White and Matthew McConaughey) but I still thought he was a bad president.

Ron White 2012!

It’s possible my suddenly warm-hearted, if condescending, feelings toward Bush were a reaction to Obama’s “big bad Bush” rhetoric during the 2008 presidential campaign.

It wasn’t until late 2009 that I began to reconsider my estimation of ol’ Dubya, not just as a person, but as a president. By this time I had become, quite against my will, a conservative. Then, in late 2010, when his book Decision Points was published, I read a few pages of my dad’s copy and was particularly affected by an account of his mother’s miscarriage, an episode that formed Bush’s early understanding of the sanctity of unborn human life. (He has the most strongly pro-life record of any U.S. president.)

Sitting here today, in the year of Our Lord 2011, I can say not only that I like Bush, but that I think he was a good president. I don’t worship him, and I don’t think he was perfect. But I do think history will treat him far more kindly than did his own country during his administration. The change of heart has already begun. 

My change of heart began when I reconnected with my Catholic faith and immediately regretted my decision to vote for Barack Obama. I have mentioned before in this blog that as a liberal and even moderate I was terribly uninformed about politics. Perhaps, you are thinking, I am still uninformed, and maybe so. But in those days I was really uninformed.

When I was in my late teens and early 20s I got most of my “information” and ideals from online magazines like The Progressive and Counterpunch, shows like “The Daily Show,” organizations like MoveOn.org and CrimethInc., and books like Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men and Nietzche’s Beyond Good and Evil. I did not read mainstream newspapers, which I felt had a conservative bias. (It is important to note that I did not think the newspapers had a conservative bias because I read them and found one, but because all the progressive magazines told me they did.)

Years later, after my abrupt conversion from pro-choice to pro-life and my gradual conversion from agnostic to Catholic, I voted for Barack Obama, having somehow convinced myself it was a pro-life thing to do. He’ll fix our country so fewer women will want to have abortions! Such was my rationalization. Dallas Bishop Kevin Farrell circulated a letter to all the Catholics in his diocese urging us to vote pro-life. His argument was, of course, in perfect keeping with Catholic teaching, and basically said that our consciences can guide us one way or the other on almost every issue, from immigration to war to taxes to spending, but there is only one stance we as Christians are allowed to take on abortion, the most important moral, ethical human rights issue of our time. It followed, therefore, that we must vote pro-life.

I agreed with all of that but I still voted Democrat. I regret it to this day.

Mainly because, according to UglyDemocrats.com, Republicans are prettier.

I had not been practicing my faith for about a year when I cast my vote for Obama. The Bishop’s letter actually pissed me off. How dare they tell me I have to vote for McCain! A few months later, I returned to church and inevitably to a deeper understanding of the administration I had helped elect. By late 2009 I was not only not impressed with Obama; I was deeply troubled by him. In trying to understand what troubled me I began to compare and contrast him with President Bush and discover, to my chagrin, that I had been unfair to the man, that we as a nation had been unfair.

Victor Davis Hanson can defend Bush far more eloquently than I can, and I suggest you read what he has to say. As one of the world’s preeminent military historians, an expert on Western warfare and a best-selling author, the Stanford professor’s endorsement of the Bush administration, particularly Bush himself and much-maligned former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, speaks volumes.

When I look back at Bush now, I see, first of all, a moderate, not the hard-right ideologue the left made him out to be. Domestic policies such as No Child Left Behind found him not only reaching across the aisle but spending money more like a Democrat than 2011 Kristen would like. But 2003 Kristen would have condemned him anyway, using words like “unilateralism,” which sounded evil to me because The New York Times said it was evil. If you had pointed out that Congress voted overwhelmingly for war with Iraq, I would have said it was because of lies about WMDs. And if you had countered that there were actually 23 separate items in the Iraq War Resolution on which Congress voted, I would have said it was all a front, a lie told to America so the evil right wing conspiracy could blow up innocent brown people and take their oil.

The widespread hatred for George W. Bush went far beyond disagreement with his policies or even the war. It was a personal loathing. A major publisher released a book about Bush being assassinated. Bookstores around the country had whole designated sections of anti-Bush books and gifts; I saw one myself in a major chain bookstore in Texas. Celebrities and journalists called him names on TV; one even lamented that there was no John Wilkes Booth or John Hinckley, Jr., when we needed him.

The animosity was instigated, as public opinion so often is, by the leftist elite in Hollywood and New York and the intellectual elite in the news media and on college campuses around the country and abroad. They could not stand Bush’s perceived simplicity. They whined that he was not inquisitive. They condemned him as anti-intellectual, unwilling to see other cultures as just as valid as America’s, uninterested in why the terrorists hated us, narrow-minded about other values systems, and too stubbornly convinced that America was right and the rest were wrong. They hated his down-home accent, his brush-clearing vacations to Crawford, his traditional marriage to a classy woman, and, maybe most of all, his born-again Evangelical Christianity.

These are all the things I hated about Bush. Today, these are the things I like about him.

People hate Sarah Palin for very similar reasons – folksy populist rhetoric, back-of-beyond gun-toting frontier sensibility, a traditional family life, flag-waving patriotism, a straight-forward belief in good vs. evil, and an attitude toward national defense that can best be defined as “Don’t retreat. Reload.” These things at which the elites scoff and roll their eyes are the character traits that make a president who will defend American values at home and abroad… which is exactly what the left doesn’t want.

You betcha.

 Don’t get me wrong – I’m not advocating for willful anti-intellectualism, and neither is Hanson when defending Bush, who upon meeting the president found him to be an avid reader and quite “learned… the opposite of the popular caricature.” I’m just saying that if I have to choose between someone who can use big words to speak at length about various themes in the work of Virgil and someone who can use small words to explain and defend the Constitution, I’m going with the latter. How many pompous academic blowhards have you met who know everything, but know nothing? (See Obama.)

I don’t particularly care to have a president “smart” enough to understand “why the terrorists hate us” and see things from their different, though “equally valid,” point of view. I would prefer a president with the common sense and the moral fiber to know that a terrorist is a terrorist and the proper response to terrorism is not deep bowing, apologies, or UN resolutions, but bombs. And, later, when the time is right, more bombs.

The problem is the moral relativism of the hyper-educated progressives, which they picked up in their universities. For example, a noted professor of bioethics – I am not making this up – at Princeton University has taken the brave though rare ethical position in favor of infanticide up to the age of about one year. What a heroic intellect! What an ethicist! 

This moral relativism, which the left clings to harder than us mean-spirited right-wing bigots cling to our religion and our guns, is best summed up in the idea that there is no such thing as absolute truth, just differences of perspective. There’s no such thing as good and evil, just different values systems, all of which are equally valid. And so forth. Pardon me for my abject simplicity, but I want a president who not only believes in good and evil, but recognizes evil and is willing to fight it. 

I like my American leadership like I like my American literature: muscular, simple, timeless, decisive – like Hemingway. Not sophomoric, banal, silly, amoral, and ambivalent, like Anne Rice. Anne Rice can be a fun read, and she’s oh so very provocative and stylish! But that’s not what I want in a president.

Dubya is not exactly Hemingway – he’s too centrist and, in some ways, too soft – but he goes in the right direction. Obama is Anne Rice up and down: in love with his own words, incapable of discipline, and stuck, like all leftists, in the mindset of a rebellious adolescent who doesn’t understand that all his bold new ideas for creating equality and peace and understanding are not new at all, but have been tried and found not only wanting but dangerous.

I understand that way of thinking because it was once my way. I know how dangerous it is for the soul of our country because I know what it did to my soul.

Today, when I see George W. Bush on television, I smile. I remember what it was like to have a real man for a president, arrogance and shit-eating grin and all, and I imagine I would really like to run into him at a hardware store, though I doubt he would ask my opinion on bolt cutters. If I were lucky enough to have such a confrontation, or if my prayers were answered and I actually found myself tubin’ the Guadalupe in a raft with Dubya, Ron White, and McConaughey, I would have a pretty good answer for G-Dub if he asked me that simple, somehow heartbreaking question: “How come you hated me so much?”

“I was stupid, Mr. President,” I would say. “I was stupid…”

“…Pass the O’Doul’s.”

Hooray for Hollywood

Life Decisions International has compiled a lengthy list of celebrities who support Planned Parenthood and legal abortion, either through simple lip-service or by donating considerable time and money. In case you’re wondering who’s on the list, the answer is: almost everyone. Brace yourself before you read it. You’re going to see people on that list you really like, and you’re going to feel disappointed.

From music to film and beyond, most of Hollywood not only supports legal abortion but rallies around Planned Parenthood to defend it, showing once again how out of touch the entertainment industry is with the rest of America. As Ramesh Ponnuru delineated in his book The Party of Death, most Americans are unaware just how few restrictions there are on abortion in the United States. The average American is probably not aware that there are places in this country where a woman can go have her baby killed at any time before the due date, for any reason at all. Most Americans are not aware that the ban on Partial Birth Abortion was a ban on one particular method of killing the baby in the second trimester. It was not a ban on late-term abortions. Those still happen, and they are still legal in some states.

Gwyneth Paltrow, who along with her mother Blythe Danner is a Planned Parenthood supporter, appeared on the hit TV show “Glee” the other night as the substitute sex ed teacher. In an episode I like to call “Planned Parenthood: The Musical,” the show's writers played mouthpiece to the PP approach to educating the young about sex: abstinence is stupid, more information -- even in the Google age -- is the only way, and here’s a cucumber-based demonstration of how to put on a condom. The only missing plank on the platform was abortion, which I imagine the show will get around to eventually.

Paltrow’s character Holly, in a conversation in which another teacher (Jayma Mays) advocated celibacy, referred to her as a “crazy Pope lady.” Holly began the class’s sex ed “lesson” by singing a song, along with the class, that featured a refrain of “Do you want to touch me there?” After a few minutes, the two girls from the celibacy club shrugged, smiled, and got up and joined in the fun, after Holly assured them they were “naïve, and possibly frigid.” Meanwhile, throughout the episode the president of the celibacy club confirmed this assertion by being both naïve and frigid. Later, Holly encouraged two girls in their fledgling lesbian relationship while the father of the main gay character lamented that there were many schools without sexual education that covered gay sex.

The opposing argument – that celibacy is often chosen by teenagers and adults who wish to make an intelligent moral decision; that abstinence education has been proven to reduce teen sex; and that condoms and birth control pills often lead to unwanted pregnancies and hence abortions – this opposing viewpoint was non-existent. The only advocate for celibacy was, as mentioned, a woman with a personality disorder who couldn’t stand to be touched, even by her husband. (See “flippancy.”)

It’s common sense that abortion doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It begins with a lack of basic sexual morality, the kind of lack we often see touted, even in "family" programming, as routine and even enlightened. The simple truth is if people only had sex with those with whom they intended to have children, abortion would not be a problem. This is why Planned Parenthood offers more than just abortion services. It’s not because they care about women; their own stated reason for existing is population control. No, they peddle cheap pills and free condoms and encourage the underage to have sex, as Live Action’s investigations have discovered, even when their partners are adults who are endangering them.

They do this because, as former abortion clinic director turned pro-life advocate Carol Everett has said, “… [B]irth control sells abortions. If I could get into fourth, fifth, sixth grades, I’d say, ‘Your mother’s an old fuddy-duddy about sex, isn’t she?’ They would all nod and say yes. So I’d tell them to come to me. I’d give them a low-dose pill.’”

The great battle cry we’ve heard for years is, “They’re gonna do it anyway!” This is true. But to illustrate an extreme example, people are going to commit murder anyway, but as a society we still pretty strongly encourage people not to do it, and I daresay, were it perfectly legal, they’d probably do it quite a bit more often.

Sex before marriage is not new to our time, but what is new is that in the last fifty years or so, beginning with the sexual revolution of the 1960s, we as a culture have slowly unburdened ourselves of a high standard, or really any standard, when it comes to sexual morality. In 1955, a young woman having sex with her boyfriend, though not unheard of, was considered far from ideal. Today, there is no ideal, and the fact that teenagers will have sex with each other is par for the course – as are teen pregnancy, abortion, single motherhood, the welfare state, and juvenile delinquency. Coincidence? No.

Planned Parenthood delights in the death of sexual standards, and Hollywood helps them sell it. Like Paltrow's "Holly," they break down a young woman’s natural modesty about sex and assure her it’s the most natural thing in the world to pack her purse with flavored condoms. Why? Because a young woman who says “yes” to sex before she’s ready could one day be a young woman who says “yes” to an abortion, allowing PP to continue their intended mission: ridding the world of “human weeds.”

And my, how the money rolls in.

Big Mean Israel

Women of the Israeli Defense Forces. Courtesy IDF, Copyright 2008.

In 2008, a staggering number of Catholics and Jews voted for Barack Obama. I don’t feel like looking up the numbers and I’m not getting paid for this, so I won’t. But rest assured it was a lot.

I will tackle Catholics on another day, and since I am a Catholic, I will not go easy on us. Today I address the issue of our spiritual progenitors, the Hebrews.

I can’t speak for Jews, although I can speak to them, as Rudy Giuliani did recently when he visited Israel and, as he related in his interview with Sean Hannity a couple days ago, said to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “You must be the first Israeli prime minister in history who is not absolutely certain he has the support of the president of the United States.” Netanyahu did not reply, Giuliani hypothesized for diplomatic reasons.

I have met many secular pro-Palestinian Jews in the U.S. They freak me out. Fortunately – and obviously – most of their Middle Eastern brethren feel very differently. As military service is compulsory in Israel, every citizen walking the streets of Jerusalem or Caesarea feels a personal sense of responsibility for the safety and continued existence of their country. The woman standing in front of you in a Tel Aviv Starbuck’s knows how to krav maga you to the ground and handle an Uzi. The Israeli Defense Forces, or IDF, is known around the world as a formidable force, second only to the United States military, and even that is arguably more about size than strength.

What Israel has is something we are sorely missing in the United States. I am not advocating for the draft necessarily, although I understand that Israel, a nation that could fit inside North Texas yet is surrounded by countries dedicated passionately to its destruction, may not have much of a choice. No, I am not lamenting the lack of mandatory armed forces training in our country, but I do regret that the people of the United States do not have the same personal sense of responsibility for the integrity of their country felt by the Israelis.

Americans are soft. We sit around in dive bars with our ironic beards, playing with iPhone apps and repeating what we just heard on “The Daily Show” about how Palin is dumb and Bush is evil and war is bad mmkay while we drink our faggy European beer. If there were a draft, I would heartily suggest it be restricted to only those guys, the Stella Artois-swigging Whole Foods shoppers who know nothing of the ancient and rather tired origins of the "progressive" ideologies they espouse, or the bloody, genocidal, and terribly recent history of the Fascist Left.

Not pictured: Christian, Republican, or conservative.

As for Israel, many American Jews engage in the same kind of armchair strategizing about what Israel should and should not be doing about Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Hezbollah, et. al., as their non-Jewish counterparts. I find it upsetting. Just as I feel we should let the fighting men, not the sociological activists, decide whether or not to allow gays in the military, and the American people, not the courts, decide on abortion law, we should let Israel decide what Israel needs to do, and then we should back them up. If this sounds extreme, well, first of all, I don’t care, and second of all, maybe I can explain.

Whether you personally, reader, are a Christian or not, you are still a product of a culture, a history, and a nation that was born out of what used to be called, with fierce pride and terrible love, Christendom. The United States is based on a document most of us have never read in toto called the Constitution, which is based inarguably on Judeo-Christian morals. Your beliefs, reader, are based in no small part on Judeo-Christian morals, whether you like it or not.  (I’m not gonna get into a debate about the origins of morality. If you want to argue a Darwinian basis, that we condemn killing and raping and condone loving our families for the biological survival of the species, I’ll let you roll around in that mud puddle of lunacy in the comments.)

Christianity, and therefore America, was born out of Judaism. We have an eternal link. They’re not into Jesus being the Messiah, but other than that, we have a helluva lot in common. I remember being told by a Jewish convert to Catholicism that the first time she went to Mass, she was startled to find that it was “just like Temple, but with Jesus.”



Jews and Christians share a strong historical, cultural, and spiritual bond. One half of our Holy Bible is the Jewish Tanakh, or Written Torah. You can almost say we have half our religion in common, which is quite a bit. If it weren’t for the Hebrews, Christianity, Christendom, the West, would not exist. We owe them a great debt.

Since they gave us Jesus, we can forgive them for Bette Midler. Barely.

As a card-carrying member of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, I am undeniably biased towards Israel; my point is, so should you be.

Peter Kreeft makes a strong argument that the Jews’ claim to be the chosen people is in fact a humble one. Were they to claim that their remarkable history were based on their own merits or actions, we could condemn their hubris. But no, they say, God chose us for some reason. That’s the only explanation. Christians of course believe the Hebrews were chosen to bring forth the Son of Man Jesus Christ.

Israel exists, as we know, as a refuge for 20^th century Jews who somehow survived the horror of the Socialist-Fascist-atheist genocide of the Nazis. It is also exactly where the Jews belong: the Holy Land. It was Jesus Christ the Jew who carried his cross down the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, which is marked and treated with respect by Jews to this day.

Israel is the keeper of the Holy Land for Jews and Christians alike, in fact for all the West, formerly known as Christendom. Our shared history is there. Were it to fall into the hands of Muslim terrorists, those sacred places where Christ and his Hebrew fathers and brothers walked, dined, and got all miraculous would be desecrated or, at the very least, placed in the hands of those who hold such history in contempt, and all that implies. I am not making this up or hypothesizing. I am not being “mean” in claiming Islam hates Christianity as well as Judaism and wants to destroy it all. This is them talking. Don’t kill the messenger.

There is a fundamental difference between Israel and the Muslim world. That difference is that Israel, one tiny nation, has never threatened to wipe Islam off the face of the earth or declared that all Muslims everywhere should die forever and ever. Meanwhile, Israel is surrounded by extremists who want to turn it into a smoking hole in the ground, which they will then, I’m assuming, fill with the bodies of women who talked to white men or had the gall to get raped.

Let’s say our country were a nation of sovereign states – as they once sort of were, but whatever – and suddenly all those rectangular states in the middle decided to pick on, I don’t know, let’s say Kansas.  If Oklahoma, Utah, Indiana, all those middle states you got mixed up in elementary school geography tests, declared their intention to wipe Kansas off the face of the earth, surrounded it so closely on all sides that it had four or five minutes to rally defense in case of attack, as Israel does, and proceeded to launch rockets at it and send suicide bombers into it and threaten it with nukes, Kansas would be justified in doing whatever they had to do to survive, up to and including nuking the living hell out of all the rectangular states that were trying to kill it. It is the right of a sovereign nation to defend itself.  A nation is made up of people who have the right to fight for their lives if attacked. It’s pretty simple, folks. But, like Chesterton said, moral issues are always very complicated, for those who have no morals.

(By the way, if you want to know if you have morals, go here. If you look at it and think anything other than, "That is wrong and should not be legal," then congratulations, you have no morals.)

Israel is our sister nation for many reasons. We have promised her she is. Reagan called Israel “our friend,” and you don’t treat a friend the way the current administration has treated Israel. I won’t go over the various put-downs of Israel made by Obama, Biden, and Clinton (oh my!) in the past three years. Google it or something. I will only say if our government, whether under Obama or anyone else, chooses to be anything but supportive of Israel, we are not only insulting a friend, but our own history, our own culture, and our own commitment to the sacred, moral right of a nation to use reasonable force to defend itself.

When you google "reasonable force," you get a lot of pepper spray photos.
Courtesy NJLawman.com 

Perhaps, as my friend who has visited Israel suggests, we should drop every Israel-bashing American, Jew or not, by parachute into Palestine or Libya or Syria or Iran. If they are lucky enough to get out, after their rape shower we can ask them again what they think of big, mean Israel, and all the poor Muslims.

The Media Battleground

A couple weeks ago, after the House voted to defund Planned Parenthood, I found myself on my couch late one evening, half-working and half-watching a rerun of “The Daily Show.” The lead-off segment was about the PP bill, and Jon Stewart, with the help of Daily Show correspondent Kristen Schaal, proceeded to satirically skewer the House’s decision and its supporters.

How did they do this? By providing a biting yet cogent refutation of the bill’s argument? By looking soberly at both sides and presenting a humorous yet fair analysis?

No. They did it by being completely dismissive of the defunding argument, acting as though it were not even worth considering a ludicrous idea that was clearly designed for the express purpose of denying women access to “convenient" health care. In fact, the title of the segment was “Motherf#@kers,” in reference to the imaginary motive of the bill’s supporters: harming women. They did not even come close to accurately representing the opposing argument.

“Among flippant people,” said C.S. Lewis, “the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it.”

In this way, the Daily Show writers and comedians, like many others in the media and especially in comedy, dismissed the whole idea of defunding PP without actually having to make an argument. All they had to do was act as though it were already obvious that it was a ridiculous idea, and the audience – many of them – nodded in agreement, enjoying that smug sense of self-satisfaction that comes with knowing they have the “right” idea, just like Jon Stewart, when in fact they don’t have any idea whatsoever.

Sure, “The Daily Show” is a comedy. It’s supposed to be entertaining. But it is also a major source of political commentary in our culture. Last year’s Rally to Restore Sanity, Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s “moderate alternative” to the Tea Parties, was supposed to call for a return to centrism and reason and fairness and open dialogue. But there is nothing fair about the way the argument against Planned Parenthood was treated by Stewart and his show.

Flippancy is not the only tool the popular media uses to discredit pro-lifers by making us look like a deranged group of violent, zealous lunatics. For example, this past January the Catholic Pro-Life Committee of Dallas, in cooperation with many pro-life organizations, held its annual downtown Roe v. Wade memorial activities, including the March for Life. Of course, the big march every year is in D.C., but in Dallas we feel a special obligation to demonstrate on that day, considering the original suit leading to the Roe decision was filed in the courthouse to which we march every year.

There were several thousand people at the march and rally holding several thousand pro-life signs. I saw many that were religious, some that were challenging, a few that were a little weird, but only one did I find to be truly bizarre. Someone had fastened a baby doll to a piece of poster board, and words – no idea what they meant – were scrawled on the sign in Spanish.

The next day, the Dallas Morning News story on the march featured a giant photo of – you guessed it – the crucified baby doll, replete with a headline reading: “Hundreds March for Life Downtown.” Hundreds. Not thousands. Deliberately misleading? As Sarah Palin would say, “You betcha.” And she knows a thing or two about bad press.

From dismissing us as nutcases to misrepresenting our motives – as in a recent blog by a Dallas Observer writer who claimed the pro-life cause is an elaborate excuse to engage in “slut-shaming” – we are continuously misrepresented and ridiculed by those who don’t even bother to learn what we’re about. I used to do it myself. I was what I call a “Sure Why Not?” pro-choicer. I thought it just kind of came with the territory of being a young, hip, intelligent woman. This is what G.K. Chesterton called “the degrading slavery of being a child of [ones] age.” I had no idea, as most people don’t, what an abortion was, what it did, or what was its miserable aftermath, but I nonetheless proclaimed loudly all the talking points about why “a woman’s right to choose” was as sacred as… actually I don’t think I believed in the sacred at the time. (That was my first problem.)

So how do we combat these injustices? Largely, by doing what we’re already doing: using the media to speak the truth whenever and wherever we can. If you’re not using Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Blogger, and more, to disseminate the truth about abortion, you can start today for free. Do it with intelligence and class and humor and grace. Show them we’re not morons, lunatics, or mean-spirited woman-haters. Avoid flame wars and endless, counterproductive arguments with those who are inflammatory and hateful. Like Jonah Goldberg said, "Don’t wrestle in the mud with pigs. You get dirty and the pig likes it."

But be unafraid. You have nothing to fear from the truth. So you may lose a few Facebook friends. You’ll give them something to think about before they click “Delete,” and you never know when that tiny seed you planted will grow and blossom into a converted soul, profound healing, or even a single, miraculous, human life.

As an actor and entertainer who works for a live music company, I often wonder if I have not damaged professional relationships. We don’t speak about politics or religion in the workplace, but I am anything but shy about voicing my opinion on Facebook. I’m sure I work with people who disagree with me, and it’s quite possible I have lost opportunities due to my beliefs. I may never know. But I will never stop. “Our lives begin to end the day we stop talking about things that matter,” said Dr. King.

Keep talking about and acting on the things that matter. In the end, truth will prevail.

Fall 2010 Update



"The Tempest" by John William Waterhouse

 Lots of stuff going on, and it's been forever since I've written. Let's bullet point!

Last Wednesday night was the Dallas screening of Carol Everett's documentary, Blood Money: The Business of Abortion. It was profoundly effective, moving, and important. I bought a copy of the DVD and plan to force-feed it to whoever will let me. (That's kind of an oxymoron, huh?)

Did a shift for 40 Days for Life the other night, and may attend the closing rally tomorrow night at Shiloh Worship Center in Garland. Carol Everett will be there as well.

It's Halloween! I'll be going to a party at the Delarosa's this evening, dressed as either as a grunge chick or Red Riding Hood, depending on which is easier.

Southwestern Women's Surgery Center in Dallas at Greenville and Royal, where Dr. Curtis Boyd commits abortions up to 24 weeks (about 6 months), has been open for one year this week. Prayer and action are needed to get this place closed.

I am thinking of going through training at Catholic Pro-Life Committee to either do sidewalk counseling or join the speaker's bureau. Haven't decided yet what I should do.

October is Respect Life Month, but it's also Breast Cancer Awareness month, which is ironic, to say the least. Since I shop at Tom Thumb, every time I check out, I get asked, "Would you like to donate a dollar to cure breast cancer?" And I say, "Is it Susan G. Komen?" And they say, "Yes!" And I say, "Absolutely not!" I am thinking about getting little cards printed up with the words pinkmoney.org /  Your heart's in the right place but your money isn't" and just handing one over whenever someone mentions Komen. It's easier than explaining that Komen gave $7.5 million to Planned Parenthood last year, and why that's antithetical to their mission of ending breast cancer.

If you would like to volunteer or have questions about the pro-life movement, the New Feminism, or just want to send me hate mail or large sums of money, you can reach me here.

I hope to be updating this more often from now on. I'm also going to be starting a new blog solely for my comedy writing. I kind of have a split personality: half funny/irreverent, half super duper serious. But this is healthy. We need to have both great joy and great gravity in our hearts, because some things naturally and rightly cause rejoicing, while others cause sorrow and anger. A healthy soul recognizes that the universe contains much of both.

The Party of Death

In his book The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life, Ramesh Ponnuru explains how the leadership of the Democratic party shifted from a conglomerate of pro-life and pro-choice politicians to a party that is synonymous with across-the-board social liberalism, especially abortion "rights." In 2006, Ponnuru predicted that if the Democrats continued on their current path towards more and more radical support of no-holds-barred elective abortion, they would begin to seriously alienate their base.

Look what happened last night.

Bart Stupak (D-MI) disappointed pro-lifers all over the country when he fell for Obama's ridiculous executive order ploy. But according to this video taken last year in Cheboygan, he never planned to hold firm. Take a look here.

Note that his constituents were booing when the camera stopped filming.

Also, in a March 19 press release, Stupak reveleaed that his state had been the recipient of a $700K FAA grant. Just coincidence, surely. While the left-leaning media screams that there is "no proof" that Stupak took an executive bribe, and that many other states have also been awarded FAA airport improvement grants, a cursory glance reveals that Michigan got significantly more money than most, if not all, the other states.

But it's probably just a coincidence.

In his book, which is highly recommended reading for all pro-life activists, Ponnuru devotes an entire chapter to an analysis of polls taken in the U.S. regarding abortion and other bioethics issues, and what he found is that Americans favor far more restrictive abortion laws than their pro-choice representatives in Congress, the White House, and the courts. Ponnuru's analysis found that most people who favor legal abortion would restrict it to only the first trimester; some are even unaware that late-term abortions are legal on demand in this country.

Ponnuru's hypothesis was proven last night when a Democratic majority in Congress enacted sweeping new legislation which, according to every major poll taken in the past several months regarding health care reform, is not desired by the American people.

This is grisly proof that Democratic politicians have gotten too radical for their base. They have moved further left of center than the average Democrat.

Come election season, a cold November rain is going to fall on representatives who ignored their constituents.

This blog was cross-posted from LiveAction.org.

But She Shoots Wolves!

I freely admit I am new to conservatism. When Sarah Palin was campaigning for the vice presidency, I was vehemently condemning more or less everything about her. I shared her belief in the sanctity of life, but that was about it.

Today, I am far more educated, and when I say "educated" I mean more truly knowledgeable, not just more skilled at repeating talking points, which is what "educated" meant to me when I was a radical left-wing pro-choice agnostic. I have spent countless hours in the past few months, to the increasing detriment of what was once a thriving social life, tracking down footnote after footnote, following the references and citations where they lead. I have more or less constant headaches from eye strain, my back hurts all the time, and I am thinking of hiring a research assistant just to field arguments from Facebook friends. Do you know anybody who'll work for cookies and gold star stickers?

When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I read books by Al Franken and Michael Moore (yes, on purpose) condemning Ann Coulter as a lying liar who lies. In the few years in which I was deeply interested in liberal politics, I admit the only thing I ever read by Ann Coulter was the famous quote extracted from her column published in Human Events three days after 9/11. It said, referring to Muslim terrorists and those who sheltered them, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity." I remember the "moral" outrage I felt (I put the word "moral" in quotations because I had no morals to speak of then) at reading that quote, and I remember reading or hearing Ann referred to in the "mainstream" press as a hateful, venom-spouting polemicist skeleton. A lot of the vitriol was mixed with a weird amount of reference to her physical attractiveness, but I ignored the obvious sexism because it didn't suit my purpose at the time, which was to reaffirm my current beliefs that Ann was a lot like a cockroach, if you could imagine a cockroach who was also a willowy blonde WASP from Connecticut. (Most of us can.)

I didn't read even a single column of Coulter's, but that didn't stop me from bitching about how hateful and dishonest and horrifying she was whenever anyone mentioned her name (usually to bitch about how hateful, dishonest and horrifying she was). I can't remember which, and can't stomach the thought of tracking it down seeing as how I'm not getting paid, but it was either Franken or Moore who accused Ann Coulter of citing phony or misleading sources, when she cited anything at all. I took the liberty of tracking down a random selection of footnotes from her most recent book, and found to my total lack of surprise that they were neither phony nor misleading.

It's an uncomfortable feeling, finding out that a lot of what you believed was utter rubbish, such as that Bill Clinton is an honorable human being and Sarah Palin is a moron.

All I knew about Sarah Palin when I commenced to hate her was that she was a conservative, her daughter was knocked up, and the religious right LOVED her. I also found out pretty quickly, via an email forward, that she shot wolves from helicopters. As a lover of animals, this disgusted me. I watched a video online of Ashley Judd condemning Palin for destroying Alaskan wildlife, which should have been my first clue that Palin wasn't all bad. Judd, after all, is an outspoken proponent of Planned Parenthood and opponent of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban. How I was able to take seriously Ashley Judd weeping for "defenseless" anything is beyond me.

In true liberal form, I started emailing this video to everybody I knew, proclaiming loudly that the media was covering it up, although I had personally found the information via the media. A Google search for "Palin shooting wolves" done today gets 176,000 hits, the first few pages of which almost exclusively contain material which (a) was published before March 2009, and (b) fails to defend Palin's actions in any meaningful way. Instead, headlines scream: "Sarah's Cruel Streak" and "Alaska's Dead Wolf Pups Demand Justice." The left does this all the time and I know because I did it all the time. I would find a million references in the press to something "the right" was "covering up," get really pissed about the conspiracy, and tell everyone I knew about it. This happened all the time, from Halliburton to Guantanamo to Dick Cheney being the ogre under the bridge from The Three Billy Goats Gruff. (Not yet confirmed.)

I ignored the obvious, sexist jab at Palin made by Obama (the "lipstick on a pig" remark) and I laughed at the callous, though very funny, jokes my friends made about her baby. Sample exchange:

Me: She named her new baby something weird, too. Trig.
Friend: Guess what class he'll never be in.

Really funny, but totally mean. I admit it: I laughed. I thought about the hundreds of thousands of babies with Down syndrome who are aborted every year, and I was very glad she kept her baby, and glad she encouraged her daughter to keep her baby, but I still laughed. And I defended David Letterman when he made the terribly inappropriate joke about Bristol Palin, a teenager, on his talk show.

Why? Why did I hate her so much?

I honestly don't know. Maybe because it's what everyone else was doing. All the smart people are liberal! Tina Fey, who is so intelligent and funny and cool, nailed Palin to the wall on SNL. Everybody smart thought Palin was stupid, backwards, and contrived. And I'm smart! Ergo, I should find Palin stupid. Right?

This is the kind of non-thinking I did for years as a liberal. I absorbed the default position on every issue from media and pop culture, gleaned the talking points, and let 'er rip.

Sarah Palin was the target of blatant sexism during the 2008 campaign. For an idea of how she was perceived by liberals, Google her image now and you will find a plethora of images of her head pasted onto the bodies of naughty secretaries with their blouses popping open. Most of them accompany websites that denigrate Sarah's politics and beliefs. Conservative, pro-Palin websites do not indulge in fantastical images of her behaving like a soft-core porn star because they respect her.

Then there was Obama's "lipstick" remark, and the constant noise from the "feminist" camp about everything from her parenting skills to her "anti-woman" pro-life stance. While they should have been praising her for raising five children in a loving marriage to her high-school sweetheart as she ascended to governorship of a state and candidacy for the vice presidency of the United States, they called her, the only woman in the race with executive experience, a vacuous, vapid, ridiculous floozy. Meanwhile, liberal "men" blogged about her stupidity while in another browser window they collected photos of her for an... ahem... personal file. Ann Coulter is absolutely right: from Ann herself to Sarah Palin to Carrie Prejean, people go nuts lust-hating beautiful conservative Christian women.

Sarah Palin was the target of a pro-Obama (prObama?) media. While they lobbed him softballs about how hard it must be to be a black man in his position, and how hard it must be to be attacked by the right wing conspiracy, and how hard it must be to be so brilliant and so handsome at the same time, Palin was being asked tough questions, some of which were pointedly obscure or vague (experts had to point out later that there really was no one policy or group of policies that could be pointed to as the "Bush doctrine").

In a move typical for the prObama media, they went after divorce records -- not Sarah's but her alleged lover's. They found not a shred of evidence that she'd had an affair with Brad Hanson or Scott Richter, so eventually they had to shut up about it. I'm sure they sent her and her family a heartfelt letter of apology, just as I'm sure Judas and Hitler regularly go ice-skating together in Hell.

I defend Sarah now because in these instances she deserves to be defended. I do not defend her for shooting wolves from a helicopter or for encouraging others to do so. From what I have learned, this is not a terribly controversial activity in Alaska, where moose, caribou and other herd animals are depended on for food by many people and high predator populations can lead to food shortages. The majority of the few wildlife and hunting experts whose opinions I read online (3 out of 4) said that bear populations need more culling than wolves. Nevertheless, Palin is far from rare in believing Alaskan wolf populations have to be thinned by humans for various reasons.

I disagree with Sarah on this. I don't think she should shoot wolves, and I don't think anyone else should without a damn good reason, such as being in immediate danger from one.

But the same so-called bleeding hearts who tear their hair out with grief for the poor wolves who threaten human food supplies defend a woman's right to have her child murdered in the womb for any old reason at all, such as that she prefers a boy and is pregnant with a girl, or doesn't want to lose her figure, or can't stand the thought of having Bill Clinton's baby. All I can say is: give me a break. Please. Cut out the crocodile tears. This "defenseless" animal is a predator who had at least a shot at life. It's an animal. If it were hungry and you were nearby, it would rip your throat out without a second thought. The victim of abortion is a truly defenseless, utterly trapped and dependent human child. How dare you weep for the hundreds or thousands of predators culled by hunters in the wilderness while simultaneously dismissing without a thought the millions of human babies killed every year legally in your very own neighborhoods?

The attack on Sarah Palin is rife with double standards, sexism, hypocrisy, irrationality, and the left's typically twisted "moral" posturing. And it is not over. The way it looks now, Sarah is a "definite maybe" for 2012, and it will only get worse. As Obama and his supporters, who include the entire establishment media, try desperately to save his presidency for a second term (which, at the rate he's going now, will be desperate indeed) the attacks on Palin will only worsen and increase.

This time, though, for what it's worth, they won't have me on their side.

A slightly modified version of this blog was posted at Modern Conservative.

A Week of War

This Friday, Congress will vote on President Obama's health care reform bill. If it passes, it will be the greatest threat to the physical life of the unborn and the spiritual life of the human family since Roe v. Wade in 1973.

President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean, and others have vociferously argued in the press that this bill will not use taxpayer money for abortions, will not expand abortion rights, and is not a partisan, pro-choice piece of legislation.

In response to each of them, I can only echo Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC): "You lie!"

On July 30, 2009, Democrats in the Senate saw to it that a proposal to add explicit language to the bill, stipulating that no public funds would be used to finance abortion, was voted down. If they really intended to protect public money from paying for abortions, why not put it in the bill?

According to a non-partisan, non-biased analysis by the Associated Press (which, when it sides, sides with the left), Obama's health care bill would allow coverage for abortion. Also, the bill's particularly vague language makes it ripe for interpretation by activist courts and the Federal Health Commission -- almost all of which skew pro-choice.

We learned in an analysis of the bill distributed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) that about $7 billion earmarked for Community Health Centers does not fall under the protection of the Hyde Amendment, leaving it wide open to be used for elective abortions.

A vast majority of moderate, conservative and non-partisan analyses of Obamacare agree: this bill will eventually, if not immediately, require each and every one of us, free Americans all, to see our tax dollars spent on other people's elective abortions. And if we refuse to pay in, according to the same legislation, we will be subject to fines which will make their way directly to the coffers of the publicly funded health care program. In other words, in order to keep our money from funding abortion, we will have to refuse to participate in the program, refuse to pay the fine, and accept whatever punishment is meted out.

I don't know about you, but I will literally -- literally -- go to prison before I will let even one red cent of my money be used to pay for someone else's elective abortion. And I am not the only one.

Whether you agree with socialized medicine or not, you have to admit that it is contrary to the principles on which our country was founded, and for which its citizens have always stood. This health care program will strip the United States of our identity as a bastion of liberty and individuality.

Recently I overheard a middle-aged black man and a younger white woman discussing the health care debate in the advising center of my college. I heard the black man say to the woman, "What these people need to understand is, it's legal. They may not like abortion, I may not like abortion, but the fact is, it's legal, and they need to accept it."

I desperately wanted to lean across and say to the man, "Slavery was legal once, too." But I decided to err on the side of politeness and decorum.

This week, I urge you not to make the mistake I made. Leave decorum behind. We shouldn't worry about hurting anyone's feelings when we're at war. We are on a battlefield at this very moment, and it is not a metaphorical battlefield of ideals and philosophies. Lives are very literally at stake, and not just a few: thousands, even millions.

If President Obama and his supporters have their way, it will become even easier and cheaper to have your unborn child killed in our country. And you and I will be forced to foot the bill.

If you know in your heart this is unacceptable, if you are determined to win this war for the lives and souls of your generation and the one to come, act today!

There are many things you can do this week to get the word out about the upcoming vote, but the most important thing you can do is call the wavering Congressional Democrats! We need them to vote NO! Let them know you support them even if their fellow Democrats do not. Their contact info is here. Get everyone you know to call them. Post it on your Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. Invite friends over for an informal phone bank. Draft a simple email and forward it to your whole address book so everyone you know can send it to a Congressman, too.

We're all busy. We all have too much on our plates: work, school, family, boyfriends and girlfriends. A few minutes out of your day can save lives. Don't hesitate. A few phone calls now could avert a serious crisis to come.

If you are looking at this blog, it means you care. It means you are a fighter. Don't be silenced because you're too busy watching "American Idol" or playing your X-Box. That's what they want. They want a youth that is disengaged and easily distracted. They are counting on us to roll over and play dead. Disappoint them.

If those in power insist that we are no longer "the land of the free," they will learn very quickly that we are still "the home of the brave."

Kristen Walker is Vice President of New Wave Feminists for Life, a Dallas-based organization intent on returning virtue and morality to women’s empowerment.

Coming Out

As I learned in Political Science 101, political socialization is a lifelong process. Thus, it is no surprise that it took me 30 years to become a conservative. I hesitate to even write that word, because I have been indoctrinated to believe that "conservative" is a dirty word, synonymous with cruel, lying, ignorant, bigoted, fanatical, brainwashed, and stupid. If it is difficult for those of the Millennial generation -- those born in the 80s through mid 90s -- to declare themselves, let alone become, conservative, it is far more difficult for Gen Xers. Our entire identity was rebellion against the establishment, to the point that even our jeans were not allowed to be clean or fit properly until we were well into our 20s. (Mine are still questionable.) This mindset of radical liberalism became so prevalent that it is now its own institution, with its own protocol and dogma.

As a dyed-in-the-wool Gen Xer, it was inevitable that I rebel against it.

What I have learned over time is that modern liberalism is sentimentalism without substance. It's all very fine and good to see someone in trouble -- say, an out-of-work single mother -- and want to help her. The difference between modern liberals and modern conservatives is that liberals want to hand her a chunk of other people's money, while conservatives would prefer that she be empowered to earn a chunk of money, and keep earning more chunks, and keep that money to spend as she sees fit, rather than having to give large chunks of it away to perpetuate an endless cycle of need.

The other -- probably more important -- difference is that modern conservatives feel it is necessary for the good of the single mother, and by extension society itself, to point out the mistakes (conservatives believe in mistakes) that led her to be in a position so desperate that she requests a chunk of money from the taxpayers in the first place. Among the mistakes conservatives would point out are a failure to follow the basic tenets of sexual morality (conservatives believe in morality) such as having sex with someone she was not married to. Children of single mothers are more likely to do poorly in school, have sex as teenagers, and become single mothers or absent fathers themselves. At some point someone's got to stop the cycle of terrible decision making by pointing out that some decisions are terrible. Liberals would rather we affirm the "valid choices" of promiscuity and irresponsibility and instead teach our first-graders how to apply condoms and choose the IUD that's right for them.

The great Catholic writer and philosopher Peter Kreeft points out that the reason why the God of the Old Testament is often seen as cruel when compared to Christ (usually by whiny atheists who don't believe in the Bible anyway) is because compassion without justice is mere sentiment, and God had to instill a sense of justice -- a sense of right and wrong (something else liberals don't believe in) -- in His people before they could understand real love, a love with muscle. Love without muscle becomes something puny, that thing the liberals call "tolerance." Tolerance implies putting up with something. It invokes images of nameless masses, not separate individuals. It is not the hearty Christian love the Greeks call agape, which is true charity, which is not only active, vivid, and honest, but gets things done. Agape requires accountability. A parent doesn't teach her child responsibility, doesn't in fact teach her child anything of use, by giving her whatever she wants no matter what. That is simply not love. It is easy, and it makes the child temporarily happy, but it is not love. Ultimately, it's not even a particularly nice thing to do.

This is why liberal attempts to recast Christ as a misty-eyed hippie are so ridiculous. Yes, Jesus rescued the woman about to be stoned for committing adultery, but He also told her, "Go, and sin no more." This incident, among hundreds of others, implies that Jesus believed there was such a thing as sin, which immediately takes Him out of the running for hippiedom in particular and modern liberalism in general... although it never fails to confuse me why people who don't believe in Jesus want Him on their side so badly. It also tells us, more specifically, that Jesus believed adultery was a sin -- a decidedly un-liberal point of view. If He were a liberal, He would have instead said, "Go, and do whatever you want with whoever you want. Here are some condoms and, just in case, the number to your local Planned Parenthood and Medicaid office."

If you are wondering how I went from being the far-left radical I was at 22 to the conservative Libertarian/Republican I am at 30, the answer is complex... unless of course I strip it down to first causes and just say: God did it. Because that is the truth. It is also exactly the kind of answer that drives liberals crazy. I know this because I was one, remember? That phrase -- "God did it" -- is where I probably would have stopped reading and started ranting about the irrationality of belief in an interventionist deity and quoting loudly from Beyond Good and Evil.

My conversion to conservatism began with my conversion to Catholicism, and my conversion to Catholicism began with my conversion to pro-life from a default pro-choice position that was part-and-parcel with my liberal mindset, although I had never honestly considered the issue seriously by itself. No, I don't think you necessarily have to be a conservative or a Christian to be pro-life, but I think if you are going to be intellectually honest, if you are going to follow the pro-life argument to its logical conclusion, you are going to end up somewhere around conservative Christian. Recognizing the sanctity of life is recognizing that there is God, whether you want to call It that or not, and recognizing the right to life is going to cause you to ask some serious questions of modern liberalism, such as: how can the party that proclaims itself the champion of the poor and defenseless condone the ultimate in might-makes-right thinking? How can the same jerk in your workplace with the skinny jeans and ironic beard who got all up in your face about the innocent children dying in Darfur calmly dismiss the innocent children dying in their mothers' wombs at the rate of 1.2 million per year in the U.S. alone?

It's because liberals, for all their posturing about compassion, hold a functionalist view of humanity. That's because they have replaced Christ with Darwin, and they believe the solution to poverty is to kill poor people. (See Planned Parenthood.) One thing is for sure: it works! Just like blowing up your house will rid you of your termite problem. This is as brilliant as advocating that we cut off our feet because our pants don't fit. Your pants exist for your legs, not the other way around. These are the same idiots who recommend we conquer child abuse by killing children before they leave the womb, while suggesting we don't care about child abuse because we encourage people not to kill their unborn children. Then when we suggest people not have sex unless they fully intend and expect to make and subsequently care for a baby, we are accused of being Puritanical tyrants.

Having developed a healthy distaste for nonsense, I can no longer call myself a liberal, and having decided that, my only recourse is conservatism, which looks better and better the more I learn, the more I experience, and the more I think of Barack Obama, a black man, giving a speech at a conference for Planned Parenthood, your friendly neighborhood genocide factory, which has killed more black people than the KKK could ever dream of, and which operates legally in thousands of low-income minority neighborhoods around the world. How could I not identify with the only political ideology in the U.S. that recognizes this and condemns it? How could I not be proud to identify with that ideology, in an age when it is terribly unpopular to condemn anything besides condemning things? (Intolerance is the only remaining sin, according to liberals.)

Admittedly, I still have a lot to learn and wrestle with where conservatism is concerned. I am still learning about so many issues: civil unions, states' rights, isolationism vs. interventionism, the free market, the Fed, etc. But like St. Anselm, I belive in order that I might understand. And I refer here to Christianity, because where conservatism departs from Christianity -- and I am beginning to see that it rarely does -- I shall happily depart from conservatism.

The really difficult part is just beginning. I have to "come out." I have to admit to my peers, the people with whom I have identified and fraternized my entire life, that I am not one of them in a very fundamental and important way. I have to tell them that I can no longer support Barack Obama, that I am no longer convinced Ann Coulter is the Antichrist, and that there really is a liberal bias in the media. I am going to lose friends -- dear ones. And I am going to be faced with questions I probably can't answer just yet. But this is a part of life, if you're living it right: standing up for what you believe in, even when it's very unpopular.

I must become and remain a conservative pro-life Christian who speaks her mind as nonchalantly and unapologetically as pro-choice liberal atheists speak theirs. This is not easy. It means being ready to defend my position almost constantly, which is both tiresome and daunting. But it is necessary. Pro-choice liberals don't get up in the morning knowing they're going to have an abortion debate with someone, because theirs is the default position, at least in my age group. But to be a defender of righteousness, you must be perpetually armed and ready for battle, because your foe never sleeps. He is everywhere. He is lurking on Facebook right now, poised to click on the link to this blog and say insulting things, knowing he will be backed up by many anonymous commenters.

But once the friendly fire stops and the smoke dies down, I will be stronger and wiser for this experience. I will know who my friends are, and at long last, they will know who I am. Eventually, everyone will get used to the fact that I can no longer hide my beliefs. I will feel better, and they will get over it.

Meeting new people will be a bit trickier. I don't fit the conservative Christian profile. I'm not married and I have no kids. I work in the music industry. When it comes to other Gen Xers, I've read the same books, spouted the same arguments, made the same Rush Limbaugh jokes. I listen to the same music, go to the same places, sound the same, eat and drink the same stuff, wear the same Converse sneakers. I even have a facial piercing and tattoos. (When I voted in the GOP primary recently, the elderly gentleman who checked me in said, "You know you're at the Republican polling location, right?") I don't look the part, and this isn't going to change. On the outside I look just like your average 30-year-old MSNBC-watching Palin-basher.

They will never see me coming.

This blog was cross-posted to Modern Conservative.