The Patriot Post® · The Inclusion Illusion
It’s hard enough to get the truth out on a level playing field — but in today’s news, it’s downright impossible. The Left has disinformation down to a science, especially when it comes to LGBT issues. That’s dangerous in any situation — but on the president’s new adoption rule, it could mean the difference between a child finding a home and growing up without any love at all.
Last Friday should have been a good day for everyone — a good day for children, a good day for adopted parents, and a good day for religious freedom in America. Instead, the liberal media took the administration’s decision to open up the adoption process to anyone and turned it into another moment of fake martyrdom for the Left.
As usual, the problem goes back to Barack Obama and his pattern of strong-arming Christians into surrendering their beliefs. In more and more states and big cities, liberals were following that lead in the adoption debate, ordering faith-based agencies to place kids with same-sex couples or shut down. Enter the Trump administration, who saw the damage this was doing to the country — and children in particular. Suddenly, major networks like Catholic Charities, who did the bulk of adoption matching, were closing their doors in hostile areas. So last week, HHS issued a rule that makes it clear the federal government can’t force religious groups to choose between their faith and serving communities.
Of course, the Left went ballistic — screaming that President Trump was banning gay adoption. Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) went even further, vowing to sue the administration over a policy that he called “heartless,” “dumb,” and “repugnant to our values.” “Our message to the Trump administration is simple: there is no place for hate in New York or in our nation, and we will not allow this noxious proposal to stop LGBTQ New Yorkers from becoming parents or providing care to children in need.”
Congressman Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) could only shake his head. “The truth eludes these [extremists] anytime they talk! …But they say these things — and I think they say them long enough and loud enough that they [hope] people will just start to take it as truth… But they’ll do whatever they need to do to get [whatever they want] — lie, cheat, steal, whatever. In this case, these are such false statements. In fact, our piece of legislation is called the Inclusion Act.” All we’ve ever asked, he explained, is that when it comes to faith-based communities — the ones who’ve been the most involved in adoption and foster care throughout history — that they aren’t excluded.
Absolutely nothing in the Trump rule or the Inclusion Act, Rep. Kelly’s bill in Congress, would make it harder for anyone to adopt — including same-sex couples! “Don’t get confused about what’s taking place here…” Kelly warned. “This is about children, and this is about putting children with loving families… And we — the faith-based community — were getting excluded.”
The far-Left had this idea that if they could shut off the flow of federal dollars to these groups, they could force them to accept a liberal approach to adoption. “Our feeling is always: let’s make it all inclusive,” Rep. Kelly explained. “Let’s let adoptive families and foster care families decide where it is that they want to go — and not have these agencies shut down because somebody says, ‘Unless you do it our way, we’re not going to allow you to participate.’ And that’s exactly what’s happened.”
But, as another court points out, it’s Cuomo’s approach that’s unconstitutional — not Trump’s. Just this week in Syracuse, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals issued an emergency order to keep New York officials from threatening a faith-based agency called New Hope Family Services. Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Roger Brooks was relieved, at least for the moment. “New Hope’s faith-based services do nothing to interfere with other adoption providers, but banishing it means fewer kids will find permanent homes, fewer adoptive parents will ever welcome their new child, and fewer birth parents will enjoy the exceptional support that New Hope has offered for decades.”
Liberals can bully a lot of people — but thank goodness the president isn’t one of them. “There has never been an administration that’s kept its word more than the Trump administration,” Rep. Kelly told listeners on “Washington Watch.” “And I think that the faith-based community needs to realize — other presidents have made other promises, but never follow through. Well, this president has followed through on everything he said he was going to do, especially when it comes to religious freedom.”
Originally published here.
Legends of the Fault in Kentucky
Heading into Tuesday night, not even the pundits knew what would happen in the Kentucky governor’s race. But there was one thing the president was sure of: if Governor Matt Bevin lost, “they’re going to say, ‘Trump suffered the greatest defeat in the history of the world. The greatest.’” He was right. This morning, the mainstream media was downright giddy at the chance to pin any of the blame on Trump for a race so close that even the AP didn’t call it. But how much of voters’ ire is really directed at the president? Based on the big picture in Kentucky, not much.
If you listen to the liberal talking heads (and based on the ratings, not many do), Bevin’s razor-thin loss is an “embarrassment,” “failure,” even a “bad omen” for Trump. But the real experts have a different take. “Reality check,” NBC and Cook Political Report analyst Dave Wasserman warns. “A <1% Dem win against an unpopular GOP governor is not a sign KY is competitive at the federal level in 2020.” Democrats are trying to make the president the anvil that sank Bevin, when in reality, pollsters say, the president probably is the one who helped make Bevin so competitive. Josh Kraushaar, the political editor at National Journal, cautioned “against extrapolating too much from the statewide results. Bevin was uniquely unpopular, even within his own party. Barely won majority in primary. Lowest approval of any governor in America. Rest of the GOP ticket doing fine in Kentucky.”
This is a candidate, the president pointed out, who made up a significant deficit to come within striking distance of being the first Republican governor to win reelection in Kentucky history. In a state where eight of the last 10 chief executives were Democrats, the governor’s mansion hasn’t exactly been a conservative stronghold. Still Trump tweeted, Republicans “won five out of six elections in Kentucky, including five great candidates that I spoke for and introduced last night. Matt Bevin picked up at least 15 points in last days, but perhaps not enough (Fake News will blame Trump!).” If the governor does concede, he will be the only Republican in Kentucky who lost Tuesday (thanks in large part to the libertarian syphoning off two-percent of the vote!). Every other statewide office went to the GOP, including a historic win for Daniel Cameron ®, the first African-American attorney general ever elected in the Bluegrass State. If that’s a referendum on Trump, it’s a good one.
Nationally, the Republicans picked up another attorney general seat in Mississippi — giving them two in Tuesday’s election. They also won the other statewide races, including governor and lieutenant governor. Purple Virginia did manage to flip the legislative majorities to the Democrats, which was on par with recent trends. And, as Wasserman points out, it wasn’t as bad as conservatives feared. “Republicans lost control of the VA Senate, but it could’ve been a lot worse: they managed to win all four of the closest races, by margins ranging from 0.9 to 4.4%.”
In deep-blue New Jersey, Republicans were thrilled by a small surge in the legislature, where the GOP gained seats in both chambers. So while the Left is proclaiming that even red states are turning liberal under Trump, that’s just not the case. As for Bevin, Inside Elections’ Leah Askarinam says people need to remember the uniqueness of our governors’ races. “[Those] candidates can campaign on issues that are state-specific like the state’s budget and education funding — and they can cross party lines without facing the same kind of political pressure as Senate candidates who have to work with a national legislature,” she pointed out.
Keep in mind that Republicans picked up about 1,000 seats in the states (including governors, attorneys general, etc.) during Barack Obama’s tenure. As FRC’s State and Local Director Quena Gonzalez explains, the losses in Virginia and for Bevin are significant, “especially given the aggressive, abortion-until-the-moment-of-birth stance of the Democratic Party — but the Left has a long way to go to cancel those conservative gains.”
Originally published here.
Gang Green Lobbies to Abort More Kids
Donald Trump is more committed than anyone to cleaning up the environment — at least the one Barack Obama left behind. Mopping up an eight-year mess is no easy task, but the new president kept at it on Monday, starting the process to pull America out of a dollar-sucking, job-crushing climate treaty that wouldn’t have made a degree’s worth of difference in the earth’s temperature!
What it would have done is put 2.7 million people out of work by 2025, costing the U.S. some $3 trillion in “lost economic output.” And for what? A manufactured “crisis” that crumbles under the weight of real-world evidence. With liberal theories on thinner ice than most polar bears, the president said he couldn’t support a deal that punishes the United States. And while the treaty “was designed to make it difficult for countries to leave the deal once it was ratified,” the Wall Street Journal explains, that didn’t deter Trump. The minute the three-year opt-out kicked in, the administration set the wheels in motion — keeping another promise and outraging the radical Left.
But as far as environmentalists are concerned, it’s not just the climate we should control — but people. On the heels of America’s withdrawal from the Paris accord, thousands of “experts” released a letter calling for something more extreme. “We declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.” And how do they intend to deal with it? The simple answer: population control. The number of humans on our planet “must be stabilized — and, ideally, gradually reduced — within a framework that ensures social integrity.”
Now, nothing about the call of population control is new. Environmental extremists have been carrying that banner for years. The only difference now is that the Democratic Party is embracing it. Just this past September, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) shocked people with the suggestion that third-world women should abort more babies — and the U.S. should fund it. “The Mexico City agreement, which denies American aid to those organizations around the world that allow women to have abortions, or even get involved in birth control, to me is totally absurd. So I think especially in poor countries around the world… where they can have the opportunity… to limit the number of kids they have — [is] something I very, very strongly support,” he said.
Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley seized on that in a recent email, pointing out that “liberals continue going around the country touting their radical climate change agenda.” Front and center, she said, is the Green New Deal, which goes so far as to “promot[e] abortion in third world countries to control the population!” PolitiFact took issue with the suggestion, slamming Haley’s claim as “Mostly False.” That’s quite a leap from PolitiFact, considering that even the person behind the policy, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), was pretty clear that the last thing America needs is more children. “There’s scientific consensus,” Ocasio-Cortez argued, “that the lives of children are going to be very difficult. And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, is it okay to still have children?”
Abortion has been a mainstay of the Left’s “family planning” agenda for decades. It’s hardly a secret, especially when taxpayers are funding groups like Planned Parenthood to the tune of a half-billion dollars a year. The only thing that’s “Mostly False” is the need for any population control at all.
As Christians, the idea that we should ignore God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply” is a direct contradiction of Scripture. FRC’s David Closson, on Wednesday’s “Washington Watch,” warns that this whole mentality of “children as consumers” — not as blessings — is a repudiation of the Christian worldview. As believers, we don’t need to fear what might happen to the earth, while we are to be good stewards, we can no more save the planet than we can save ourselves. And historically, these calls for population control have been rooted in predictions that never came to pass. Paul Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb, predicted millions of people would die of starvation in the 1970s and 80s. That hysteria actually paved the way for the creation of the U.N. Population Fund — which was used to promote things like the one-child policy in China.
Virtually nothing Ehrlich wrote came to pass. So I would ask those who are calling for population control because there is a climate crisis on the horizon, aren’t you concerned about being on the wrong side of history here? Because most of these claims have been proven false over time. As Christians, the only way to be safe is standing on the side of God and what He says about children and the earth we inhabit. Nothing else matters.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.