Columnist.
The summer weather is no match for the heat on Planned Parenthood. Two weeks and four incriminating videos later, the stress on Cecile Richards's group is starting to show. With some of the most shocking footage tied up in court, Planned Parenthood and its baby part buyers are desperately trying to keep the lid on the latest bombshell — that the abortion giant sometimes ships out *fully intact infants* to its clients. Just when Americans thought the most stomach-turning details were already released, the Center for Medical Progress's David Daleiden told CNN that there's a reason Planned Parenthood and company are working so frantically to keep the fifth video under wraps. "In a meeting with their top leadership," Daleiden explained, "they admitted that they sometimes get fully intact fetuses shipped to their laboratory from their abortion clinics they work with, and that could be prima facie evidence of born-alive infants." For now, the grisly confession, taped over lunch with high-ranking StemExpress officials, is in the hands of federal judges who will decide when and if the footage is released.
Good news from the Texas Supreme Court today. As you may recall, Houston Mayor, Annise Parker, and the Houston City Council passed a controversial pro-LGBT ordinance in late May 2014. Among other things, the law, the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance — dubbed "HERO" — allowed transgendered persons to sue businesses that prohibited their use of *their* preferred bathroom. There was overwhelming opposition to the law in Houston and that triggered an effort by the citizens to repeal HERO by referendum. The repeal campaign was led primarily by a group of Houston pastors and churches who collected twice the number of signatures required to get the repeal option on the ballot. According to the city secretary, Anna Russell, the petitioners collected a sufficient number of signatures. However, the Mayor and the City Attorney, David Feldman, defiantly refused to recognize that a sufficient number of signatures had been collected.
In today's world of reality TV and virtual video games there is very little that seems to shock the senses of Americans, so when something does, you know it has to be significant.
It's not just your tax dollars that are supporting Planned Parenthood -- proceeds from your coffee and shampoo may be too!
While Planned Parenthood is being investigated, President Obama is tightening federal funding rules -- for pro-lifers!
What do you have to do to lose your government funding these days?
What do you have to do to lose your government funding these days? Try believing in natural marriage or running a pro-life charity. But defraud taxpayers, cover-up child sexual abuse, botch abortions, and scavenge babies for body parts, and you're untouchable. Or at least you used to be. After a breezy lunch conversation about selling baby organs, Planned Parenthood's invincibility is being put to the ultimate test, along with the resolve of lawmakers to stand for human decency. Decades of lies and corruption have all come to a head this week after Cecile Richards's group was accused of running a black market of baby parts. Out of the mouth of the organization's own senior medical director, more than two million Americans have watched the President's closest ally talk about changing their abortion procedures (often at risk to the mother) to protect — not the woman's or baby's interests, but Planned Parenthood's.
For years, Planned Parenthood has fought against late-term abortion bans. And now we know why. The earlier babies are aborted, the less profitable their parts are. That's just one of the nauseating revelations from the undercover video that has the President's closest allies in crisis mode. Three days and two million YouTube hits later, Planned Parenthood is in full-blown crisis mode after a three-hour recording implicated Cecile Richards's group in a ring of baby organ harvesting. Now the organization, which has always touted every service *but* abortion, is being forced to talk about a savage side business that treats aborted babies as if they were junkyard cars being scavenged for parts. It's a difficult reality to swallow, even for the group's cheerleaders. Texas Monthly's Erica Grieder, a long-time advocate of Planned Parenthood, says both sides of the debate should be horrified by what they've seen. "From a pro-life perspective ... the discussion in the video is morally appalling, obviously. But I don't think many pro-choice people would disagree."
Partner with Planned Parenthood, and you'll pay for it. That seemed to be the message [Tuesday] from the U.S. House upon learning that the country's largest abortion business was running its own little shop of horrors. Hours after the Center for Medical Progress exposed the group's ghoulish side business of selling human body parts, the effects of the scandal started hitting home for organizations like Susan G. Komen — longtime donors to Cecile Richards's group. What should have been a routine vote on a commemorative breast cancer coin became anything but, once members were alerted by FRC and Heritage Action that the bill included funding for Komen — which is a major supporter of the "nonprofit" caught peddling baby parts. That association was too toxic for House conservatives, who refused to turn over $4,750,000 to one of Planned Parenthood's biggest donors on the same day it was implicated in a Frankenstein-like plot. Komen had tried to cut ties with Richards's group in 2012 and fund organizations actually performing mammograms, but ultimately caved to left-wing pressure.
We may never know the full extent of evil that goes on behind Planned Parenthood's closed doors. But we know enough. In a world where killing is currency and empires are built on the backs of innocent children, maybe nothing should surprise us. And yet, it does — with every new story of the abortion industry's inhumanity. [Yesterday] morning, pro-lifers awoke to another scandal: the news that Planned Parenthood — the same organization President Obama routinely praises, speaks to, and fundraises for — is involved in a black market of body parts. The ghoulish details are the subject of [an undercover video just released by the Center for Medical Progress](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjxwVuozMnU) (CMP), featuring a woman extremely high up in Planned Parenthood's chain of command: Senior Director of Medical Services Dr. Deborah Nucatola.
Redefining marriage in the courts may not have been difficult, but persuading Americans to accept it is another story entirely. Their supporters may be cheering the Supreme Court now, but those five black-robed lawyers may also be responsible for something else: America's spiritual revival. In church after church, the story is the same — pastors preaching powerful sermons on God's design for marriage and urging their congregations to accept no substitutes. If what's happening in the pews of America is any indication, the Supreme Court didn't weaken people's resolve — it strengthened it. And if liberals truly believe that evangelicals are the "only cultural holdouts" on marriage, they're about to find out how wrong they are. Across denominations, ethnicities, and political parties, there's a growing outrage over the Court's presumption — and the President's betrayal.
By redefining marriage, the Supreme Court's five justices did more than undermine democracy. They undermined their profession too. And for principled judges across America, that was just as offensive. The country's confidence in the courts was already in a freefall — slumping to its second lowest score (32%) since 1973, when SCOTUS made its other great mockery of justice in Roe v. Wade. Now as the highest court in the land chases the cultural winds, the rest of the bench is left to clean up the mess. In Louisiana, justices at the state supreme court reflected the deep division the June 26 decision caused when its effects made their way to the justices doorstep this week. Soon, what should have been a routine order certifying the ruling became anything but. In one of a thousand cases sure to trickle down, Louisiana's court was asked to recognize the gay adoption of two women "married" out of state. It did — but not without unloading on the Supreme Court for putting them in this position first.
Same-sex "marriage" isn't about building homes — it's about destroying them. Ask Aaron and Melissa Klein. The Christian bakers just learned that they stand to lose a lot more than their business for following their faith on marriage. According to the state, it could cost them their house too. In another sickening twist, the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries is ordering the family to pay their $135,000 fine by next Monday or the state will put a lien on their home. Apparently, Commissioner Brad Avakian is so fiercely committed to his agenda that he's willing to put five kids on the street to prove it. Conform or go homeless. Sounds like tolerance to me! Like florist Barronelle Stutzman, whose home also hangs in the court's balance, the Kleins are finding out how low the Left is willing to sink to demand conformity on their redefinition of marriage.
In the 12 days since the Supreme Court's marriage ruling, the Left's army is already marching on its next target: the First Amendment. At least two movements are finding more common ground in the wake of the decision — secular and LGBT activists. The pair are becoming fast allies against what they view as a common enemy: religious freedom. Since June 26, that bond has only strengthened, as both sides converge on the church in the first wave of post-ruling attacks. Like us, they heard Solicitor General Donald Verrilli's threat to strip religious schools' tax exemptions and are moving quickly to turn that possibility into reality. Barry Lynn, a longtime thorn in the First Amendment's side, is the first to capitalize on this new foothold for religious crackdown, announcing [Tuesday] that his Americans United for the Separation of Church and State would be launching an initiative to destroy the tax relief for faith-based schools. Starting with Christian colleges, Lynn's "Protect Thy Neighbor" project promises to use the IRS as a weapon to force same-sex "married" housing on universities with natural marriage views.
What part of "cease and desist" don't conservatives understand? Apparently, a lot — or so the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industry would like us to believe. After four days of negative PR, officials are in full-blown damage control over Commissioner Brad Avakian's $135,000 ruling against Aaron and Melissa Klein, which included a decree that the Christian bakers no longer speak publicly about the decision. When news of the order went viral, Oregon officials tried to refute the story by recruiting their friends on the Left to explain it away. Slate obliged, posting a lengthy column on how the gag order wasn't, in fact, a gag order. With verbal gymnastics that could have medaled in the London Games, the site took the Daily Signal to task for "misreading" the commissioner's threat. That was a difficult assignment for Slate, given that on more than one occasion, Avakian insists that the Kleins must "cease and desist from publishing, circulating, issuing or displaying, or causing to be published... any communication to the effect that any of the accommodations ... will be refused..."
No wonder people like Cokie Roberts don't think same-sex "marriage" has "tangible, identifiable victims." The victims are being ordered not to talk about it! That's the latest twist in the long and bitter suit against Aaron and Melissa Klein, the young Christian bakers who turned down a lesbian wedding cake order in Oregon — and have been paying for it ever since. As prepared as the Kleins were to hear their $135,000 fine had been finalized, nothing could have prepared them for the Bureau of Labor's second punishment: forced silence. Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian decided to put his own stamp on the punishment by ordering the parents of five "to cease and desist from publishing, circulating, issuing or displaying, or causing to be published ... any communication to the effect that any of the accommodations ... will be refused, withheld, or denied to..."
Gay activists weren't the only ones celebrating after last Friday's marriage ruling. Polygamists popped the cork on a little champagne of their own, as they wait their turn for nationwide acceptance under the court's elastic definition of marriage. Like us, they knew that once the courts redefined marriage, Americans would have a legal foundation for almost any arrangement between consenting adults — a fact that polygamists are already testing. Just four days after the Supreme Court's decision, a Montana man drove up to the Yellowstone County Courthouse and applied for a marriage license for multiple wives. When the office turned him down, he said, what about marriage equality? "We just want to add legal legitimacy to an already happy, strong, loving family," Nathan Collier told reporters. "All we want is legal legitimacy... We just want to give our marriage and our family the legitimacy that it deserves."
The five justices of the Supreme Court weren't the only ones with a strong opinion on marriage. And dozens of county clerks are risking everything to prove it. Five days after five justices bulldozed the votes of 50 million people, the Left was wrong to assume everyone would just fall in line. They didn't count on an army of local officials standing in the wreckage of judicial activism, refusing to budge. For most of them, it wasn't a question of *if* their beliefs would come under attack, but *when*. Like Jennifer Schoenrock, the wife of a disabled veteran and family breadwinner, they knew the day was coming when they'd have to choose between their convictions and their career. "I want to do the right thing," Jennifer explained. And that means obeying God's law — not man's. After last week, these clerks take seriously the reality that their offices are the new front lines in the battle for religious liberty — and many of them have no intention of going quietly. As far as they're concerned, a lot of things have changed since Friday, but their First Amendment rights weren't one of them.
If there's one thing the Supreme Court accomplished last Friday (besides unleashing cultural chaos on America), it was ending the liberal media's charade. Whatever scrap of journalistic impartiality existed flew out the courtroom window Friday when the press decided these five justices not only invented a right to same-sex marriage but to censorship too. Less than a week after the Court trampled the Constitution, one of the biggest stories of the ruling is the industry tasked with relaying it — the mainstream press. After years of trying to drive out debate, the liberal media is using the cloak of the Court to do it. Desperate to take away the voice of Christians at the public table, the Left is already on the march to undermine the very freedom that gives breath to the speech it now enjoys.
They were God's covenant colors — a warm arc of reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues, and purples — transformed and splashed across the White House in a defiant display of pride. It was a stark contrast to how the Supreme Court was lit up — with the candles of hundreds of men and women gathered to pray. Heeding a call that spread like wildfire through social media, Christians from across the city made their way to a vigil until the sidewalks were covered with the lights of God's people. One by one, they pleaded for mercy, protection, and forgiveness in these difficult days. "God's not looking for a lot of people," FRC's Chase Jennings said, "He's looking for a faithful people." And those faithful people have an important mission: showing the love of Christ by speaking the truth of Christ. But to do it, the church needs to rise up and realize that this isn't the end of the struggle for marriage — but the beginning of the fight for freedom.
