It looks just like any other online shopping cart. There’s a drop down menu for parts and sizes. Click over to checkout, the website says, and choose your shipping option. But this isn’t your average Amazon order. It’s a ghoulish shop of horrors, where tiny human hands, hearts, eyes, scalps and livers are for sale.

It’s the business that — just this past September — Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards said she was “proud” to supply. Now, the House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives knows why. Richards was helping the middlemen, the procurement business, make tens of thousands of dollars carving up her clinics’ lifeless bodies for profit. After months of denying the allegations — and getting their liberal friends to do the same — Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) produced the most damning evidence against President Obama’s pals yet — including proof that Planned Parenthood was not only making a profit from its organ harvesting ring, but almost certainly breaking federal law in the process.

While Planned Parenthood has spent the better part of a year trying to discredit David Daleiden’s undercover videos, these facts will be a much bigger challenge for the Left’s spin machine. From stomach-turning charts to expert witnesses, Blackburn’s committee blew apart Richards’s claims that hers was a goodwill mission for “tissue research.” “You don’t have to be a lawyer to see what’s going on here,” Blackburn told a packed audience. “You put up a website that offers any baby body part imaginable — and why on earth do they need a baby scalp? Then you pick a gestation period and check out. To offer that service you need abortion clinics — a lot of [them] — so you grow your number of clinics and you offer the clinics money to sign up… You tell the clinic that you will do all the work… This does not sound to me like tissue donation for research. This sounds like someone who wants to make money — a lot of money — selling baby body parts.”

This relationship between groups like StemExpress (also caught by Daleiden) is a lucrative one. Holding up a pamphlet, the Tennessee Congresswoman pointed out, “This is the procurement company brochure that it handed out at national conferences where abortion clinic managers were in attendance. Notice it says ‘financially profitable… fiscally rewards… financial benefit to your clinic.’” Partner with us, one said, “and improve the profitability of your clinic.” Based on the Panel’s exhibits, the procurement business started in 2010 with three clinics. By last year, they were negotiating partnerships with as many as 250 clinics. Obviously, those deals fell apart once Center for Medical Progress’s videos hit the web. Still, Blackburn’s team revealed, at that time, one in every five clinics (roughly 100) “was involved in the sale of baby body parts.”

Considering the piles of evidence, the majority of witnesses at [yesterday’s] hearing agreed that there is more than enough material to substantiate a full-blown federal grand jury investigation. Michael Norton testified that “It seems clear from the documents and evidence… that there has been profiteering at multiple levels in this grisly business.” Catherine Glenn Foster echoed that concern, explaining, “The Panel’s evidence reveals that abortion clinics are being promised a profit and are paid even when they have no apparent costs to be reimbursed, which further multiplies a clinic’s windfall via savings on disposal services. Tissue procurement companies are likewise paid exorbitantly by their customers. This market in baby organs and tissues demonstrates a flagrant and repeated disregard for the rule of law.”

Yet still, the Obama administration is so beholden to Planned Parenthood that it’s threatening to strip states of their Medicare and Medicaid funding if they cut ties with Richards’s group. That would have been shocking enough, since the group is under congressional and criminal investigation. But now, when there’s ample evidence that the organization likely broke federal law, the president wants to force all 50 states into complicity? After selectively throwing its weight around in Texas and Indiana, Health and Human Services sent a first-of-its-kind blackmail letter to every state, warning that if they redirect Planned Parenthood money to the thousands of community health center alternatives, they can kiss their Medicaid funding goodbye.

It’s the same thuggish federal carrot-and-stick approach that’s served Obama well in radical education, health care, LGBT, and abortion policies. With a massive sea change underway in state pro-life policy, the administration knows the only way to get its way is resorting to brute force. That’s an embarrassment for a party that claims to care about women. Not only do these other health centers serve eight times more women patients than Planned Parenthood, but they provide much more comprehensive care — at a fraction of the cost (or criminal baggage)!

The bottom line is the bottom line. Planned Parenthood wants patients’ money. They’ll sue the states for it, overbill for birth control to get it, lie to women to get it, even sell baby body parts for it. And why do liberals stand for it? Because the 13,000 community health centers that could provide better care do not provide something else: $20 million in Democratic political contributions over the last two election cycles alone. While the administration and far-Left side with the inhumane, our hats go off to Rep. Blackburn and the many pro-life leaders for doing what taxpayers have asked for some time: demand some accountability from an industry that pockets hundreds of millions of our dollars every year.

Originally published here.

Utah Does the Dirty Work on Porn

Pornography has been called all kinds of things — degrading, harmful, addictive. But the state of Utah has another phrase for it: public health hazard. Thanks to the state legislature, Governor Gary Herbert (R) had the chance to sign a groundbreaking new resolution that calls attention to the number-one killer of today’s marriages. “We hope that people hear and heed this voice of warning,” Herbert said at a crowded signing ceremony. “For our citizens know that there are real health risks that are involved and associated with viewing pornography.”

The bill’s sponsor, Todd Weiler, told reporters that he was “mocked and scorned” when he introduced the measure last year. Then, slowly, ridicule turned to alarm, as more major publications started warning about the devastating effects of porn on this generation. That drumbeat has continued through this month, when a Time magazine cover story told the sobering stories of young men — most non-religious — who have lost years, relationships, money, and self-respect in their addiction. The Washington Post followed suit, putting aside the morality question to focus on science — which, Gail Dines insisted, is “beyond dispute.” “After 40 years of peer-reviewed research, scholars can say with confidence that porn is an industrial product that shapes how we think about gender, sexuality, relationships, intimacy, sexual violence, and gender equality — for the worse.”

The Barna Group piled on with the help of Josh McDowell, who spelled out the crisis in — and to — the church. According to their study, Porn Phenomenon, 64 percent of Christian men say they’ve viewed pornography at least once this month. In the pulpit, the struggle is just as real: 57 percent of pastors and 64 percent of youth pastors admit they’ve used porn, “either currently or in the past.” The devastation to marriages and families is no longer hypothetical. “Just as the tobacco industry argued for decades that there was no proof of a connection between smoking and lung cancer, so, too, has the porn industry… denied the existence of empirical research on the impact of its products,” Dines wrote. Herbert continued that thought, insisting, “If a library or a McDonald’s or anyone else was giving out cigarettes to our children, we would be picketing them. And, yet, our children are accessing pornography on their tablets on these sites and we seem to be okay with that.”

Although Utah’s resolution is non-binding, it does encourage more community action on the problem of pornography — something every state could stand to emulate!

Originally published here.

Texas Baker Called for Icing

Liberal activists have stooped to all sorts of shenanigans to help paint the broadest picture of victimization possible. The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway points out a string of examples — from a lesbian waitress writing fake anti-gay notes on checks to people spray-painting their own homes with graffiti, the “fakery” is everywhere. Unfortunately, there are very real stories of intolerance — like vandalizing bakers’ cars or trying to kick a grandmother out of her own home — carried out against Christians.

Now, in the latest attempt to gin up outrage, a “gay pastor” is accusing a Texas Whole Foods of writing an anti-LGBT slur on a cake order. Instead of just “Love Wins,” which he ordered, a colorful word was added at the end. Or so he claims. After creating a social media firestorm, Jordan Brown’s version of the account is starting to crumble. For starters, officials at Whole Foods point out, the surveillance video shows that the box he left with had been tampered with. The label had been moved to the side of the package, despite Brown’s insistence that he hadn’t opened it. What’s more, Whole Foods fired back, “our bakery team member is part of the LGBTQ community.”

Not only can’t Brown find anyone to corroborate his story (wouldn’t he have complained to the store when he saw it?), but “no one,” the store writes, “including the cashier who rang the guest up, saw this word on the cake.” Even bakers who saw the picture and headlines say the icing color and handwriting aren’t consistent.

“Consider,” Hemingway points out, “that in this country we have actual cake bakers and other artisans who have been forced out of business for declining to cater events that offend their conscience. And rather than have tens of thousands of stories about the shuttering of those businesses or the lawsuits their proprietors are fighting, we ignore their plight. Fake social justice warrior hoaxes get massive press coverage and nationwide sympathy, while actual rights-violations, like bakers being forced to bake gay wedding cakes or get sued, get mocked (a good gaslighting if you’ll ever see one, even) on ‘Saturday Night Live.’”

The Left is so desperate to continue their narrative of harassment and intimidation that they have to invent stories to do it. If only the hostility toward Christians were as fictional! Instead, they’re losing jobs, businesses, property, and livelihoods for their beliefs. These hoaxes are exactly what FRC has warned against in the debates over the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and other special rights laws — that they would open the door to all kinds of fraudulent claims and litigation. Of course, under ENDA type laws, these frauds would also have the power of the government to put the business or organization on the defensive — guilty before proven innocent. In the meantime, people have to wonder about a “LGBT pastor.” But should we really be surprised by his inability to tell the truth about the writing on a cake, given that he can’t (or won’t) acknowledge authoritative writing of Scripture on human sexuality?

Originally published here.