Life in the Gov Compartment
“It has happened here.” Her words hung there, in the air of a crowded North Carolina Assembly. “I’ve been a witness,” state Rep. Pat McElraft (R) told the quiet crush of people lining the upper galley. She described the horrible moment she saw the tiny bodies stored at a doctor’s office.
“It has happened here.” Her words hung there, in the air of a crowded North Carolina Assembly. “I’ve been a witness,” state Rep. Pat McElraft (R) told the quiet crush of people lining the upper galley. She described the horrible moment she saw the tiny bodies stored at a doctor’s office. “Nurses told the stories of those babies who were born alive,” she remembers. “[They] were taken by the doctor,” she pauses, “and turned face down in the saline.” Then, looking around the chamber, she says quietly, “Infanticide has happened here.” Whether it keeps happening is now up to one man: Democratic Governor Roy Cooper.
Like so many of the abortion debates since New York, it was an intense one. But in the end, it took less than 24 hours for North Carolina to do what the Democrats in Congress will not: step in and stop legal infanticide. Even after flipping an impressive number of state seats blue, Democratic leaders in North Carolina still couldn’t overcome the national tide against newborn violence. After a quick 28-19 vote in the Senate Monday night, the House raced to follow suit — handing pro-lifers a massive victory with a 65-46 vote on Tuesday afternoon — and sending the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act straight to the governor’s desk.
Cooper has 10 days to decide if he stands with the radicals like Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) or thousands of innocent babies. While Sanders and company rush to save cats and dogs, they see no sense in rescuing actual human beings, whose only crime is being born. On Monday night, Sanders reiterated the Democrats’ extremism, telling a roomful of Pennsylvanians that killing is okay if it doesn’t happen often. “I think that that happens very, very rarely,” Sanders said. “At the end of the day, the decision over abortion belongs to a woman and her physician, not the federal government, not the state government.”
Terrorism doesn’t happen every day either. Does that mean we should shutdown Homeland Security? And if it’s so rare, then what’s the problem? End it. If murder is wrong, then it’s wrong every time. The law doesn’t suddenly kick when you hit a certain quota. If there’s a gunman on the scene, police don’t wait for the casualties to pile up before they act. A life is a life. I guarantee if it were Bernie Sanders’s child dying on a hospital table and doctors refused to treat him, he wouldn’t say, “Well, that’s your decision.” Rareness doesn’t equal rightness.
And the reality is, even our own government admits: infanticide isn’t rare. There are literally hundreds of infants being thrown out like garbage every year — a fact we know thanks to eye witnesses like Jill Stanek. When the CDC says there were 143 cases of babies born alive between 2002-14, they’re only basing that number on the reports from six states! The lifeless bodies Pat McElraft saw weren’t included — just like the hundreds of undocumented “snippings” and blows to the head by monsters like Kermit Gosnell and Douglas Karpen.
Still, Cooper and his indifferent party shrug and insist people like Melissa Ohden are all figments of our imagination. It’s “unnecessary legislation,” his office insisted Tuesday, because infanticide “simply does not exist.” Instead, the spokesman said, legislators should be concentrating on “expanding access to health care to help children thrive.” What does he think life-saving infant treatment is — if not health care to help children thrive?
If the governor vetoes this bill, as his spokesman seems to suggest he will, then it will take every single Republican and eight Democrats (one in the Senate and seven in the House) to override him. Hopefully, they’ll find the courage that Reps. Raymond Smith (D), Garland Pierce (D), Charles Graham (D), and James Gailliard (D) did to stand up to their party and end birth day abortion.
A single person can change the world. One life ended apartheid. One life saved 1,200 Jews in World War II. One life could cure cancer — or end suffering around the world. One person is always worth it. Join us. Sign on to our newborn hat campaign and help us send tens of thousands of reminders to Nancy Pelosi that every life matters. And every life, everywhere, is worth fighting for.
Originally published here.
Hypocrisy and Hate: Ad Nauseum
If you opened a copy of the Wall Street Journal yesterday, then one page hopefully stood out. In big bold letters, FRC went public today with our campaign to expose the hypocrisy of the Southern Poverty Law Center. After a month of revelations that exposed the real SPLC, we want to know how much longer the media and big tech companies will use the disgraced group as an authority on hate and extremism.
In particular, the ad — which was joined by American Family Association and in cooperation with SPLCexposed.com — calls on Spotify, MSNBC, CNN, YouTube, Amazon, and PayPal to stop aligning with the group after former employees exposed the wealthy “charity” as a “con” that raised millions of dollars redefining “hate,” while their leaders built a 25-year legacy of racism and bigotry.
The ad quotes from former SPLC employees who have spoken out about the toxic environment of the “poverty palace.” Christine Lee, a Harvard Law School graduate and 1989 SPLC legal intern, insisted, “There was not a single black employee with whom I spoke who was happy to be working there. The organization had ‘a way of talking about black people that hasn’t — I don’t think — been done in 30 or 40 years,” Lee concluded. Former SPLC attorney Gloria Browne agreed, “I was surprised at some of the things I saw, because it was a civil rights organization… I’ve heard racial slurs in the place.”
A former employee told the New Yorker, “You will never step foot in a more contradictory place as long as you live.” Another remarked, “It could be racial, sexual, financial — that place was a virtual buffet of injustices.” Former SPLC writer Bob Moser admitted, “We were part of the con, and we knew it.”
Of course, this is hardly a surprise coming from an organization where senior fellow Mark Potok set the record straight on the SPLC’s ultimate goal. “Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate groups, I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, completely destroy them.” At FRC, we know the very real danger SPLC poses to conservatives and Christians around the country. The campaign to expose SPLC has been one of our top priorities since their “hate map” inspired gunman Floyd Corkins to walk into our lobby with the intent of killing the whole staff. We won’t stop until everyone is safe from the domestic terrorism SPLC has been linked to in federal court. Corkins admitted in federal court that he made FRC at target using SPLC’s list. We won’t stop until everyone can exercise their freedom without fear of that same violence.
Now that Americans know the truth about the organization’s hypocrisy, what will the SPLC’s allies in the media and Big Tech do? The Daily Caller already heard from Twitter, which confirmed this week that it had dropped SPLC the group from its pool of “safety partners.” If it can’t police the hate in its own office, what business does SPLC have trying to label anyone else’s? Good question — one that Spotify, Google, MSNBC, CNN, Amazon, Paypal, and others should answer soon.
Originally published here.
A One-Tracking Mind: China Hunts down Uyghurs
It’s racial profiling at epic proportions. Last weekend, the New York Times stunned everyone by blowing the lid off the Chinese government’s futuristic attack on faith. According to new documents, the regime actually created special facial recognition software to secretly track and crack down on the Uyghur Muslim population. “It is the first known example of a government intentionally using artificial intelligence for racial profiling, experts said.” And hopefully, Ambassador Sam Brownback told me on Tuesday’s “Washington Watch,” the last.
It’s bad enough that the regime of President Xi Jinping has taken his war on faith to another level, throwing millions of Uyghurs into reeducation camps — where torture and trauma are daily routines. Now, with the government spying on its people with sophisticated surveillance systems, there’s no end to the threat. “Police documents show demand for such capabilities is spreading. Almost two dozen police departments in 16 different provinces and regions across China sought such technology beginning in 2018, according to procurement documents,” the Times warns.
“Take the most risky application of this technology, and chances are good someone is going to try it,” said Clare Garvie, an associate at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law. “If you make a technology that can classify people by an ethnicity, someone will use it to repress that ethnicity.” That’s exactly what the Trump administration is worried about.
Asked what he thought was behind this disturbing trend, Brownback told me, “It seems to be their view of control and desire for complete control and fear of any faith community group that might be something that people could rally or organize around, it could challenge them.” And it’s not just the Uyghurs, he explains. “…[T]hey are going after the house church members, they are going at Tibetan Buddhists, they are going at Falun Gong, it really kind of seems to be almost any and all religious groups and it seems to be around their concern for control.”
It sounds like science fiction, but the technology is real. The Chinese government is even collecting DNA samples from the Uyghurs — disguised as “free health checks.” Using that database, Uyghurs who refuse to conform could be chased down and punished. It’s getting to the point, Ambassador Brownback told me, where they’re treating them like actual criminals.
“Here’s the fear point for me… in the future in a place where they want to persecute a minority, and particularly a religious minority, they may not end up putting a lot of people in jail; what they may end up doing is just marginalizing you in society to where you can’t move, you can’t buy and sell, because they won’t let you because everything is run by the computerized systems and the artificial intelligence and you’ve got a bad social credit score and so you are not allowed to rent an apartment, go to school or get a job.”
This is, quite seriously, the future of oppression. “It doesn’t look like lots of people in jail. It looks like people marginalized, and anybody that calls you on your cell phone can be tracked and they can get the same social credit score that you get… This is a very diabolical situation and one that people should be deeply concerned about because it is in a system that can easily be replicated and sold broadly to authoritarian regimes or various places around the world.”
Fortunately, the Trump administration doesn’t intend to side-step the situation. In just the first half of his term, the president has changed how America treats international religious liberty. Not by talk, but action, the entire world has seen what genuine engagement looks like on a global scale. Leaders at the highest levels of government — from President Trump to Vice President Mike Pence and later, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Ambassador Brownback, started making international religious liberty a priority in other conversations about trade and national security.
Now, after two years of skepticism, people on both sides of the aisle see Brownback — and the Trump administration by extension — as advocates for religious freedom for everyone. And in the case of the Uyghurs, not a moment too soon.
If you feel burdened for the persecuted church — especially in China — please take a minute and sign your name to our prayer petition for American pastor David Lin, whose family continues to worry about his safety in prison. Details here. Also, don’t miss my new Fox News column about David with fellow USCIRF Commissioner Kristina Arriaga.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
