Democrats’ Scorched Birth Campaign
It was four days before a vote that will be talked about for years. Of course, that irony was probably lost on Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash.) — but it wasn’t lost on us. The same woman leading the fight for legal infanticide chose last Thursday to tour Seattle Children’s Hospital, walking the long hallways where she would argue only wanted kids deserve care.
It was four days before a vote that will be talked about for years. Of course, that irony was probably lost on Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash.) — but it wasn’t lost on us. The same woman leading the fight for legal infanticide chose last Thursday to tour Seattle Children’s Hospital, walking the long hallways where she would argue only wanted kids deserve care.
“It was wonderful to visit the @seattlechildren’s Hospital-North Clinic in Everett, WA this week,” the senator tweeted. “I had a great time meeting the dedicated staff and seeing firsthand how they use their resources to serve children and families throughout Northwest WA.” But early last evening, Patty Murray took the unbelievable position that some children don’t deserve those resources — not even when they’re lying alone in a hospital just like that one, fighting to survive.
There will be people like Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va.) who try to hide what they’ve just done. They’ll cloak their votes in comfortable words and euphemisms. “This bill,” he said earlier, “would establish new requirements for health care practitioners in the case of a fetus who survives an abortion.” There’s no such thing as a “fetus” who survives an abortion. There are only newborns. Infants. Children.
“The word ‘fetus,’ of course, is already working overtime to assist those who wish to disguise the reality of what takes place during an abortion procedure…” NRO’s Alexandra Desanctis points out. “But abortion defenders use the word as medical-sounding jargon, a crutch to dehumanize the unborn… But the bill doesn’t require transporting a fetus to the hospital. It requires transporting an infant to the hospital… It is the same human being both in and outside of its mother. That is the truth they are desperate to avoid.”
It’s the same sick logic Senator Barbara Boxer used in a 1999 debate with colleague Rick Santorum. When did the child become a human being, the Pennsylvanian asked her? When you bring it home from the hospital, she replied. Twenty years later, Senate Democrats agree. But they may be the only ones.
Polling companies that have been in business for decades can’t believe the waves of opposition rolling through the country over abortion right now. Masses of people, horrified by what’s happened in New York and Virginia (and disgusted by Democrats’ defense of it) are walking away from the “pro-choice” label. Almost overnight, the numbers have completely shifted away from the radicalism of the Democratic Party to a much more moderate — if not conservative — approach.
After just releasing their annual numbers last month, the people behind the Marist survey decided to repoll Americans to see if opinions had changed in the brief, four-week span. And boy, have they. In January, 55 percent of Americans called themselves “pro-choice,” compared to 38 percent who identified as “pro-life.” A 17-point gap. Today, the number of Americans who call themselves pro-life and pro-choice is dead-even at 47 percent. Just how significant is that? This is the first time in the history of the Marist abortion poll that as many Americans have identified as pro-life as pro-choice. “This has been a measure that has been so stable over time. To see that kind of change was surprising. And the increased discussion [of late-term abortion] in the public forum in the past month appears to have made the biggest difference…” director Barbara Carvalho said.
President Trump certainly deserves some of the credit for that, as he shows the influence of his bully pulpit on life. In plain and vivid terms, he’s described the gruesome realities of abortion — and helped to significantly move the needle of public opinion. And it’s no accident that filmmakers are driving those powerful messages home with movies like Gosnell and, now, Unplanned. It’s impossible to watch these films and not be motivated by what New York has just done.
In Unplanned, the true story of Planned-Parenthood-Director-turned-pro-lifer Abby Johnson, the truth about what abortion really is led the Motion Picture Association of America to give the movie an R-rating. To some, it was the first clear acknowledgement that abortion is violence. To others, it was ironic. By restricting it to people over 17, a lot of teenage girls won’t be able to see the movie about a procedure that they can get legally at the same age. “We are pushing the boundaries of what has never been before on such a wide scale by showing America exactly what abortion is. [It] is disturbing. It is violent… No one will be able to walk away after seeing this movie and say, ‘I didn’t know.’”
Originally published here.
No Draft Dodging for Women, Judge Rules
It’s getting old to say “we told you so,” but in the three and a half years since Obergefell, conservatives have been proven right in ways most of us wish we never were. Remember the days of “my same-sex marriage won’t affect you?” Well, according to U.S. District Judge Gray Miller, it’s affecting you — and every single daughter in America.
Sixty-five hundred U.S. girls turn 18 each day — and every one of them will be eligible for the military draft, if Judge Miller’s ruling stands. Historical restrictions on women serving in combat “may have justified past discrimination,” he argues — but no longer. Quoting from the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage, he ruled that gender restrictions “must substantially serve an important governmental interest today.” A men-only draft, he insists, is unconstitutional under the mandate that “no person be denied the equal protection of the law.”
The suit, brought by the National Coalition for Men, is an eye-opening one. The plaintiffs say they wanted to raise “awareness about the ways sex discrimination affects men and boys” — but they’ve raised awareness about a lot more than that. Namely, how the radical LGBT agenda is deconstructing society and putting every woman in harm’s way in the process. Apparently, it wasn’t enough to throw privacy out the window and subject girls to peeping toms, sexual predators, or worse — now, in this phony race for “gender equality,” we’re willing to force them on the front lines too.
We’ve already lived through one administration — Obama’s — assigning America’s wives and daughters to ground combat units. Now, it looks like the courts are continuing that surrender to the forces of radical feminism. “The average woman,” Miller writes, “could conceivably be better suited physically for some of today’s combat positions than the average man, depending on which skills the position required. Combat roles no longer uniformly require sheer size or muscle.”
That’s not what the military’s studies have found. “Marine teams with female members performed at lower overall levels,” the Corps’ year-long study found, “and completed tasks more slowly and fired weapons with less accuracy than their all-male counterparts. In addition, female Marines sustained significantly higher injury rates and demonstrated lower levels of physical performance capacity overall.” No one is suggesting that women are not capable or have not served their country with distinction. They are and have. FRC’s Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin (U.S. Army-Ret.) knows several of them. But we don’t do women any favors by pretending that they’re the same as men.
Unfortunately, Barack Obama paved the way for this misguided attempt at parity when he opened up true combat positions to women. Once the Defense Department removed the barriers to women serving in all positions, it removed most barriers to drafting them as well. And let’s remember, if (or, under judges like Miller, when) America drafts women, they’ll have no say in where they’re assigned, including the infantry. Most parents would agree that it’s one thing to let our daughters choose this kind of life — and quite another to force it on them. But then, this is the natural consequence of a nation redefining the genders with no thought to the practical outcomes.
As we’ve said with the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the push for open transgenderism, women in the infantry, and now the draft, the military wasn’t meant to be the great societal equalizer. But that’s exactly what it becomes when you decide there’s no distinguishing between the genders and no recognizing or respecting their differences. That kind of policy “inverts natural law and the rules that have grounded our civilization for thousands of years,” the editors of NRO argued. “Men should protect women. They should not shelter behind mothers and daughters.” “Ground combat is barbaric… It is not a video game. It is not a movie, where young Hollywood starlets karate-kick their way through masses of inept thugs and goons. When we order women into ground combat, we are ordering them into situations where men larger and stronger than they will show no mercy.”
This matters, Lt. Col. Bob Maginnis points out, because the military is “running out of qualified personnel to fill our ranks.” Inevitably, “war will happen in the future that requires some form of conscription, the mission of the Selective Service. Then, women will be part of the conscripted force — and yes, young women will be forced into places they don’t belong except in the eyes of those who are driven by politics and gender equity and not by the realities of ground combat.”
The far-Left is emasculating the culture one radical policy after another. And women are the ones paying for it — with their lives, if we aren’t careful.
Originally published here.
FRC Makes a Maryland House Call
Pornography has been called all kinds of things — degrading, harmful, addictive. But the state of Maryland has another phrase for it: public health hazard.
Thanks to concerned legislators, Maryland may be the next stop on the train of states trying to get their residents’ attention on the harms of pornography. For the last few years, the drumbeat has gotten louder — helped along by a string of shocking true-life stories about the adult content culture and how it’s ruining lives. A Time magazine story cover told the sobering testimonies of young men in 2016 — 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.
Now, more concerned citizens are pressuring states to spell out the dangers of porn — including FRC’s Director of Life, Culture & Women’s Advocacy, Patrina Mosley, who testified on Maryland’s House Joint Resolution 4 yesterday. In particular, she focused on sex trafficking, and how pornography feeds one of the greatest human rights crises of our time.
“Pornography consumers may be unaware that the "entertainment” they are consuming may be of victims of sex trafficking. What viewers may be watching is someone’s humiliation being played and distributed over and over again.“
"Former Senior Advisor on Trafficking in Persons at the U.S. Department of State, Laura Lederer, found that 29.3 percent of sex trafficking victims had to recreate scenes from pornography and 17.1 percent were forcibly recorded for pornographic purposes.8 Across all ages and in nine different countries, 49 percent of rescued sex trafficking victims report they were forced to participate in the production of pornographic material.”
“Traffickers will force their victims to produce pornographic images as advertisements for selling their victims again. Producing pornography allows traffickers to capitalize twice off of their victims financially. Also, pornography is often used by traffickers as a training tool for their victims, so they will know how to perform for buyers. It might be better described as what they will have to endure from buyers.”
“For the state of Maryland, combating violence against women and bringing justice to victims of sex trafficking can start here — by supporting this resolution declaring pornography to be a public health hazard.”
To read Patrina’s full testimony, click here.
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.
