After Super Tuesday, it was defensive Wednesday for abortion groups like Planned Parenthood. On one side of the street, the Supreme Court was debating common sense clinic regulations — and on the other, a panel of House members was getting to the bottom of Planned Parenthood’s black market of baby body parts. Both events hold tremendous sway in the future of the abortion business, which has been under heavy scrutiny since last year when undercover videos caught the industry’s own joking about the dark world of baby organ harvesting. “There is something going on,” said Select Investigative Panel Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), “something that deserves investigating and that demands our best moral and ethical thinking.”

In the panel’s first hearing, six witnesses (two invited by Democrats and four by Republicans) talked about everything from futility of fetal tissue research to the exploitation of women. Casting doubt on the need for Planned Parenthood’s grisly side business, Kathleen Schmainda pointed out, “It needs to be made clear that no current medical treatments exist that have required using fetal tissues for their discovery or development…there has never been a scientific reason requiring fetal cell lines for vaccine development…”

One Democratic witness, Dr. Lawrence Goldstein, insisted he followed the law but admitted that there is a financial side to tissue donation. The Center for Medical Progress was especially interested in his testimony, since he was a frequent customer of Planned Parenthood’s. In a statement before the hearing, CMP urged the panel to “ask Dr. Goldstein the hard questions about how much money he gave Planned Parenthood in exchange for aborted babies’ brains, and what Planned Parenthood may have done to their abortion process to accommodate his orders.”

The GOP brought up some of the more disturbing documents they found through their investigation, including an email where a researcher specifies his/her need for a “first trimester human embryo, preferably around 8 weeks, and up to 10 weeks gestation.” Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.) was disgusted by the chain. “This is not dignity. This is not respect for human life,” she said. “I want to ask the panelists — have we reached a point in our society where there effectively is an Amazon.com for human parts, including entire babies?” Hopefully, that’s a question the panel will be able to answer as it continues its work. In the meantime, we applaud the House for placing a priority on human dignity — not a price on it, as Planned Parenthood has done.

Originally published here.

Voters Get Court Side View of SCOTUS Clash

Justice Scalia may be laid to rest, but the questions about his Court are far from it. “Nino,” as he was affectionately called at a small, intimate memorial this week, left a hole in the Court that no one can fill — including, Senate leaders have vowed, President Obama. Republicans have been clear from day one that they’d do exactly what Senate Democrats suggested when they were in power: leave the vacancy open for the next president to fill.

Now, years after pushing back on President Bush’s nominees, selective amnesia seems to be setting in. Senators Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Vice President Joe Biden, and President Obama are desperately trying to explain away statements like then-Senator Biden’s: “It is my view that if the president … presses an election year nomination, the Senate Judiciary Committee should seriously consider not scheduling confirmation hearings on the nomination until ever — until after the political campaign season is over.”

In a grand (and frantic) gesture, President Obama invited Senate Republicans to the Oval Office to see how serious Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was. Very, it turns out. The meeting was a quick one. “The president asked [the] Republican senators if they had names they wanted him to consider in the nomination process, but neither offered any,” Senator Reid said. “This vacancy will not be filled this year,” McConnell told reporters afterwards. “Whether everybody in the meeting today wanted to admit it, we all know that considering a nomination in the middle of a heated presidential campaign is bad for the nominee, bad for the court, bad for the process, and ultimately bad for the nation,” Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) explained later. “It’s time for the people to voice their opinion about the role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system of government.”

For now, Scalia’s legacy is a question on everyone’s minds — including voters’. In a new national poll commissioned by FRC from WPA Opinion Research, 64 percent of likely voters (71 percent who identify as Republicans and 63 percent as Democrats) agree that the Supreme Court will be “an important factor in determining who you vote for in November’s elections.” Among weekly churchgoers, the national number is even higher: 71 percent. But just because people don’t go to church doesn’t mean Justice Scalia’s seat isn’t weighing heavily on their minds. Even 59 percent of those who never worship consider the Supreme Court important to their vote.

Obviously, reality is starting to sink in for voters of both parties that the next president will probably appoint two or even three justices to the U.S. Supreme Court — men and women who will impact our nation for decades to come. For people in the pews, the level of concern is easy to understand. They’ve watched the justices undermine their values — and more importantly, the social consensus — by imposing their radical views on marriage and abortion on all 50 states.

With record turnout in the primary states, it’s clear the Court is a great motivating factor for conservatives, who are anxious to have a voice in whether the next justice is a wannabe legislator — or an arbiter, as the Constitution intends. With religious liberty, state abortion laws, gun control, and immigration hanging in the balance, the American people should be allowed to decide who picks the next Supreme Court justice.

Originally published here.

A Broadway to a Narrow Agenda

The State Department already has an official LGBT envoy — it doesn’t need two! Tell that to Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., who is determined to join the administration’s goodwill tour for homosexuality. Like Secretary John Kerry, who seems oblivious to any problem not preceded by the letters L-G-B-T, Power is adding to the president’s embarrassing diplomatic legacy by trying to export Obama’s sexual extremism to a world preoccupied by far more important issues.

On Tuesday, Power, who has the ear of some of the international community’s most important leaders, decided to spend her influence persuading them on the need to celebrate homosexuality. This week, she hosted 15 U.N. Ambassadors at a gay Broadway musical called “Fun Home.” Representatives from Russia, Namibia, and other more culturally conservative countries sat through New York’s latest sexual propaganda, followed by a personal thank you from Power herself. “Thank you,” she told the cast, “for bringing all of this home in a way that resolutions and statements never can.”

It was a stunning display of political tone-deafness, considering the real crises happening right now on the real world stage. Unfortunately, as far as this president is concerned, the most urgent message America can send to the international community right now is “that protecting the rights of LGBT people will remain a key foreign policy priority of the United States.” And its only priority, seemingly. While the world is experiencing the largest forced migration since WWII, the White House can’t bring itself to say much about the persecution endured by men and women of faith.

Where is this same boldness when it comes to the real suffering of Middle East Christians? Apparently, Power and others think world leaders need to be educated on the sexual proclivities of a few rather than the genocide of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. When you juxtapose what’s happening at the State Department with what’s happening in the rest of the world, it’s easy to see why the president isn’t taken seriously — at home or abroad.

Originally published here.