In the transgender debate, even Bert and Ernie are puppets for the Left! Incredibly, “Sesame Street,” the once-beloved kids’ show, is making the best case for defunding PBS yet: inviting drag queen Billy Porter on to teach kids the virtues of gender confusion.

Wearing a “tuxedo dress,” Porter, the star of Kinky Boots, has already been tweeting about the appearance. “I was tickled to meet Elmo and the gang,” he posted. Parents, on the other hand, aren’t nearly so thrilled. More than 55,000 have signed a LifeSite petition calling on the network to drop the episode. “By contributing to this social contagion, ‘Sesame Street’ is forcing children to deal with adult concepts and notions about sexuality which are beyond their level of maturity, and which can leave psychological scars. Many jurisdictions define this kind of behavior as abuse… We are demanding the producers of ‘Sesame Street’ stop this attack on children and their innocence.”

When word of the backlash made its way to Porter, he hit back at parents. “Stay out of my bedroom, and you’ll be fine. That is none of your business.” Leave the bedroom out of our children’s shows, and it won't be our business. That’s what moms and dads object to. It wasn’t that long ago that LGBT activists were trying to get the government out of their private lives. Now they want to throw their private lives into our faces, our children’s faces, and every classroom in between. Personally, I don’t want to know what Billy Porter — or anyone else — does in private. I do, however, care if it’s flaunted in front of my kids.

Like most activists, Porter could care less. “I’m a part of the first generation of gay men, ever, who gets to be out loud and proud in the world,” he said. “My generation is the first. B**ches are scared. And they should be.”

For PBS, though, this is all par for its liberal course. Taxpayers have fought for years to stop the government’s broadcasting arm from sexualizing kids on everything from the Muppets to “Sesame Street.” When Donald Trump became president, one of the first things his budget proposed slashing was the $445 million for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting. His latest version, just released this week, tries again.

Liberals always plead with Republicans to lay off Burt and Ernie, but what they really mean is — don’t stop funding the Left’s free microphone! For years, NPR and PBS have taken advantage of the airwaves to spout their radical agenda. And in the end, taxpayers are the ones who’ve been played. But now that PBS has shown that it can’t be trusted, it’s time for Big Bird’s liberal friends to feather their own nest!

Originally published here.

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Manslaughter or Medical Choice? Ask a Democrat.

The pills were supposed to kill her baby. Kalina Gillhum had ordered them from India and taken 12. She was in her third trimester, a dangerous time to try an at-home abortion. But Kalina and her boyfriend, Braden, had decided they didn’t want their son. So when he was born in their bathroom, alive and breathing despite the drugs, they let him die. When police found the baby’s body in a trash bag, tucked away in a shoebox, an Ohio prosecutor charged the couple with manslaughter. The question Princeton Professor Robbie George has for Democrats is: “Should they be?”

For liberals, the story out of Licking County couldn’t come at a more inopportune time. Senate Democrats had just spent the day defending infanticide in committee when this pair of 20-year-olds put a face on the horrific crime they call “choice.” If a local hospital hadn’t been suspicious of the couple, this baby — like the thousands of other abortion survivors — would have probably gone unreported. Only when a doctor noticed Kalina’s overly large umbilical cord, with no child attached, did they realize something was horribly wrong. It was far too big, the police were told, “for it not to be a full-term infant.”

A search of the apartment found what nurses and eyewitnesses say happen every day: a born baby, treated like common waste. The only difference is, this newborn was left to die home — not at a hospital or abortion clinic, where Democrats argue he’s fair game. Apparently, if it’s do-it-yourself infanticide, it’s murder. But if a doctor does it, 44 senators say, it’s “health care.”

It’s an absolutely shocking position for anyone to take, let alone four dozen leaders in the U.S. Senate. And yet, for whatever reason, these men and women refuse to acknowledge that at its very core, protecting born-alive babies has nothing to do with abortion. “This is not about a woman’s body,” FRC’s Patrina Mosley, one of the expert witnesses at Tuesday’s hearing, argued. “This is about the infant who’s become the patient.” Eighteen years ago, this was a no-brainer for both parties. “We’re about a living, breathing infant who survived one of the most violent acts you can undergo — abortion — defied the odds and survived. Shouldn’t they be given a chance to defy the odds again and receive medical care? You would think that would be bipartisan.”

Of course, Democrats rushed to their familiar talking points: we don’t need a born-alive law because we already have homicide laws on the books. (A lie, since 35 states and the federal government don’t have adequate protections for babies who live through a botched abortion.) This is just another attack on reproductive rights, others cried. But, as Patrina and so many conservatives fired back, this doesn’t have anything to do with abortion! “We’re just saying don’t discriminate against infants who are born as a result of a failed one.”

In all honesty, Patrina said, “there is no good reason for obstructing care to infants born alive from abortion, except for two reasons. One, that you buy into the philosophy of eugenics, meaning [you believe in targeting] the disabled, the minorities, and the poor. You think these children should not have been born at all, so why not kill them? Or, you have something to gain financially from the illegal harvesting of fetal parts that we know has been taking place for years now and [thanks to video] captured by the Center for Medical Progress.”

As Senator Marsha Blackburn pointed out on “Washington Watch,” under any other circumstance, a newborn in distress “would be rushed to the hospital and given neonatal care… But [Democratic leaders] think this… should be a mother’s choice. But they don’t stop and think about it… [T]hey’re saying it’s okay for a woman to decide if she wants to keep that baby or kill that baby. But they try to change the language and nuance this so that it doesn’t sound quite that barbaric.” But barbaric is exactly what this is. And no civil society — least of all ours — should tolerate it.

Originally published here.

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NH Voters Take Klobuchar’s Record for Granite

It wasn’t a fancy app or electronic wizardry that delivered the first real results of 2020. It was good, old-fashioned paper ballots. “Try to hack that!” a New Hampshire official joked a couple years ago, holding up a pencil. After the embarrassment of Iowa, Granite State voters sat down, hand-colored their bubbles, and declared the Democrats’ winner: Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). If you’re wondering how badly Democrats are hurting, a man who doesn’t even belong to the party is now the front-runner in a race that is anyone’s to win.

To a lot of Americans, the idea that an open socialist with a heart for ruthless dictators won any delegates is shocking. Or “terrifying,” as Brad Polumbo calls it. Maybe this was bound to happen, the National Review editors muse. With the party’s “decades-long march to the Left,” where else could they go? And while Sanders may have a clearer path to the nomination than past years, the general consensus — even from people like Joe Biden — is that America isn’t ready for a communist sympathizer as president.

“He calls himself a Democratic Socialist,” Biden pointed out in a chat with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “Now you’ve been around George… [who’s] going to win with that label? …You’re going to win in North Carolina? You’re going to win in Pennsylvania? You’re going to win in those states in the Midwest?” President Trump, USA Today’s Gabriel Schoenfeld agrees, has to be salivating at the chance to expose Bernie’s wacky views in a general election. And there are plenty to choose from.

So naturally, heading into South Carolina and Nevada, the attention — at least internally — is turning to the Democrats’ other options. Biden and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have been spectacular flops out of the gate, and while Mayor Pete Buttigieg enjoyed an early edge, there’s a lot of concern about how he’ll do in more diverse states. That leaves the door wide open, and Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) knows it. Finishing an impressive third on Tuesday, the likeable Minnesotan’s star is rising. But as the media rushes to embrace her as the experienced “moderate” the race has been missing, take a good long look at her record before you buy it. She’s about as much of a centrist as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

Klobuchar was shrewd, though. While the rest of the party was telling pro-lifers to drop dead, she saw a chance. “There are pro-life Democrats, and they are part of our party," she said, "and I think we need to build a big tent. I think we need to bring people in instead of shutting them out.” It was a smart move, politically. Pro-lifers make up as much as 29 percent of the party, Gallup points out. So rudely showing them the door, as Bernie and Pete suggest, never made much sense.

Unfortunately for voters, that’s what Klobuchar’s policies have been doing all along. She may welcome pro-lifers to stay, but for what? A front-row seat to the party’s national campaign for infanticide? Bills, like the one she just co-sponsored, that take away states’ rights to limit abortion — limits that 60 percent of Democrats want? Klobuchar may say pro-lifers are welcome, but her views certainly won’t make them feel that way.

The senator has a 100-percent rating from NARAL, has vowed to “reverse Trump’s abortion policies in [her] first 100 days,” promised to never nominate a person to the bench who isn’t sold-out to Roe v. Wade, and when people suggest that late-term abortion is radical, she fires back, “I’m okay with it.” She wants Planned Parenthood to run our country’s sex ed, force taxpayers to write checks for birth day abortion, and calls any restriction on killing the unborn a “violation of civil rights.”

But if you want to know where Amy Klobuchar really stands, one vote ought to say everything. It happened February 25th of last year. That’s the day this so-called “moderate” walked onto the Senate floor and told Melissa Ohden, Claire Culwell, Josiah Presley, and an entire generation of abortion survivors: you don’t have a right to live. It will be remembered as one of the most shocking votes in the history of Congress: the moment 44 Democrats voted to infanticide the new “choice.”

We’re talking, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) reminded them, “about an infant who has been born, who is alive, who is breathing, who is crying, who is outside the womb… [And] the idea that it would be somehow debatable what to do with that child, that there would be another [option other than treating her],” he said passionately, “is a remarkable statement…” But it’s a statement, Americans need to know, Amy Klobuchar is willing to make.

A woman who won’t welcome a newborn into the world cannot welcome pro-lifers into the party. It’s as simple and as tragic as that.

Originally published here.

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This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.