Trump: National Security Is Worth Wall
At first, Maria Salinas didn’t understand why her guide was offering her birth control. Of all the things she could take on her trip through the desert, why this? Later on, she says, it made sense. The money she paid to get to the U.S. border was nothing, she found out, compared to the real cost.
At first, Maria Salinas didn’t understand why her guide was offering her birth control. Of all the things she could take on her trip through the desert, why this? Later on, she says, it made sense. The money she paid to get to the U.S. border was nothing, she found out, compared to the real cost.
“These coyotes [guides and smugglers] know what they’re going to do in the middle of nowhere,” Maria says quietly from a soup kitchen in Nogalas. For most women, the entire trip is one, non-stop sexual assault. When she couldn’t keep up with her group, one of the coyotes leading Maria’s caravan said he’d wait for her — but only if he could have sex with her daughter. She refused, and he left them. If it weren’t for Border Patrol, Maria remembers, they would have died. “It’s awful,” she shakes her head, “making this trip as a woman.”
Younger girls are even bigger targets. Older men promise their parents they’ll take them to America, only to sell them to brothels by the border or force them into sex slavery once they get there. Along towns like Mapastepec and Frontera Comalapa, the houses of prostitution are full of young women who were tricked or trafficked. Their moms or dads send them anyway, knowing with 80 percent certainty in some countries that they’ll be raped — or never seen again.
That’s just part of the “cycle of suffering” President Trump is talking about. “Women and children are the biggest victims, by far, of our broken system,” the president pointed out. And the compassionate response isn’t sitting by and letting our porous border give these thugs more business. The compassionate response isn’t encouraging more parents to gamble with their kids’ lives by leaving more loopholes open to abuse. The compassionate response is enforcing the law — not just for their safety, but for ours.
While the media’s attention is usually on the hardship of these immigrants, they’re far from the only victims. When drug smugglers and gang members cross into the U.S., they rarely leave their culture of violence behind. “In the last two years, ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records,” the president said during his primetime appeal for more border security Tuesday night, “including those charged or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes, and 4,000 violent killings.” Thousands of Americans — from 16-year-old girls to Air Force veterans — have been viciously murdered by the wave of criminals entering our country illegally. “This is a humanitarian crisis,” the president insisted. But more than that, it’s a crisis for the future of our country. Every American is hurt — either physically, or emotionally, or economically by the people who refuse to enter our country legally.
The 1,933 miles separating the U.S. from Mexico is also feeding our country’s catastrophic drug addiction. Ninety percent of the heroin making its way into America is streaming across our southern border. The cost of those illegal drugs — and others — is more than $500 billion a year. “Vastly more,” the president points out, “than the $5.7 billion we have requested from Congress.”
A wall may not solve everything, but it will solve some things. Take Yuma, Arizona, for instance. “The area had only about five miles of fencing in the mid-2000s, then saw the extent of its fencing increase tenfold. Illegal crossings plummeted,” NRO’s Rich Lowry points out. A wall, he argues, is actually a mild form of enforcement. It “doesn’t involve deporting anyone. It doesn’t separate families. It doesn’t prosecute and detain anyone. It doesn’t deny any illegal immigrant currently working in the United States a job. All it does is seek to avoid getting in a situation where these other things are necessary in the first place.” A wall, Rich writes, “doesn’t close down the border, or close us off to the world.”
But a wall is a reminder that we are a nation of laws, whose first commitment is to protect the people inside. Congressional Democrats may not be interested in real solutions. But until they are, there’s little hope of preserving the America that so many people are desperate to call home.
Originally published here.
Sweets Revenge for One Baker in Court
These days, baker Jack Phillips is more used to being in court than in his cake shop. What he’s not used to — after the last five years — is being on the offensive.
The Phillipses’ story was supposed to end with a victory at the Supreme Court last June. After a half-decade of legal twists and turns, the justices agreed that Jack shouldn’t have to check his Christian beliefs about marriage at his cake shop’s door. Apparently, his opposition didn’t get the message. People hostile to Jack — and everything he stands for — seem intent on making the baker’s life miserable.
Their odds of succeeding just went down, thanks to a federal district court that is letting Jack’s case against the Colorado Civil Rights Commission go on. Of course, his lawsuit wouldn’t have been necessary if the other side had decided to simply leave the Phillipses’ cake shop alone. Instead, a customer came knocking on his shop’s door with another set-up: a cake celebrating a person’s sex change.
Obviously, the shoppers knew Jack wouldn’t agree to the order. “Because of Jack’s beliefs — he’s a cake baker, of course, but he’s also a Christian — he believes that sex cannot be changed and it’s immutable,” FRC’s Director of Religious Advocacy, Alexandra McPhee, pointed out in a special Facebook Live interview. He turned down the request, so the individual filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission — the same commission the Supreme Court found guilty of bias last June. Well, apparently, they haven’t learned anything from the ruling, since they decided to pursue the investigation 24 days after the decision in Jack’s favor at the Supreme Court.
Fortunately, Jack is fighting back. He’s sued the individual members of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission for harassing him for his faith. Those same people tried to get Jack’s lawsuit dismissed — but thankfully, a judge refused, insisting that “evidence of unequal treatment remains.” This “disparate treatment,” the court said, “reveals” the state officials’ ongoing “hostility towards Phillips, which is sufficient to establish they are pursuing the discrimination charges against Phillips in bad faith, motivated by Phillips’…religion….”
Even the liberal cheerleaders at Slate see the writing on the wall for activists determined to make Jack pay. In a surprising editorial, they urge the state’s commissioners to let it go. “It is in no one’s interest for such a trial to proceed,” Eric Segall writes. “…[T]he state will lose this case if it reaches the United States Supreme Court again, which will make matters much worse for [LGBT activists].” In its ruling, Segall points out, at least three of the constructionist justices wanted to rule on the merits of Jack’s case — which would have been a landslide victory for men and women of faith in every business. If the Left keeps prodding, Slate warns, Brett Kavanaugh is likely to agree.
For now, the momentum is on Jack’s side — and a lot of the credit for that belongs squarely in the Oval Office. President Trump made it priority number one — from day one — to appoint stricter constructionists than any of his predecessors. So far, he’s set records for the pace of those confirmations, which are finally bringing the courts back in line with the Founders’ intent. That shift, to judges who respect and understand their constitutional boundaries, is creating a culture where true freedom can breathe again. And that is nothing but good news for Christians like Jack.
For more on Jack’s case, check out the full Facebook Live video below.
Originally published here.
Planned Parenthood: This True Shall Pass
Planned Parenthood’s new president has one thing going for her: she isn’t shying away from the truth. Now that Leana Wen’s taken over for Cecile Richards, she’s finally admitting what the rest of us knew all along. Planned Parenthood may talk about a lot of issues, but it only really cares about one — abortion.
After 12 years of lying low on its abortion business (“lying,” being the operative word), Leana Wen has a different strategy for Planned Parenthood. Telling it like it is. After a Buzzfeed story suggested that the Chinese-American doctor wants her group to “focus on non-abortion healthcare,” Wen surprised everyone by saying exactly what Planned Parenthood’s real priority is. “Our core mission,” she tweeted, “is providing, protecting, and expanding access to abortion and reproductive health care. We will never back down from that fight,” she vowed. “It’s a fundamental human right, and women’s lives are at stake.”
Her tweet, which she followed up with even more militant defenses of abortion, blew more than a decade of subterfuge and hyperbole to bits. Planned Parenthood, who meticulously scrubbed any reference of abortion from its public statements under Richards, is finally making an admission that ought to cause elected officials across America to rethink its half-billion dollar taxpayer investment.
The truth hasn’t exactly been good for business, the Washington Examiner’s Philip Wegmann points out about Planned Parenthood. To tamp down on the criticism that our government is sending money to America’s biggest abortion chain, Richards used to insist that the procedure only makes up “three percent” of its services — “as if,” Wegmann says, killing is okay as long as you only do it occasionally. Eventually, even outlets like Slate and the Washington Post rejected the statistic as meaningless and misleading.
“For years, it has guarded the three percent figure jealously, and a complicit press has reprinted it uncritically. Its former president, Cecile Richards, repeated it during congressional testimony. Journalists at CNN, Politico, and the New York Times publish it without qualification. It’s repeated so often, it has become an ironclad lie. Unraveling the truth would be a disaster for Planned Parenthood. Congress might not write it as many taxpayer checks if the public learned that the largest abortion provider does, in fact, make its money by performing abortions — 328,348 abortions a year, according to its latest annual report.”
Maybe, others point out, Wen’s new strategy is her way of appealing to the new House majority. After all, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) already promised that hers would be a “pro-choice gavel.” But where Wen’s honesty may backfire is with voters, more than half of whom (55 percent) have no idea that the organization performs abortion — let alone that it’s America’s biggest supplier.
The media likes to talk about Planned Parenthood’s grassroots support. But, Gallup points out, it’s “not clear whether Americans have a favorable opinion of Planned Parenthood because of its role in the national abortion debate or in spite of it.” In the end, Wen’s admission may have done pro-lifers a favor. The more people who know what business Planned Parenthood is truly in, the better.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC Action senior writers.
