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Pro-life
@GovernorPerry MSM Loves Abortion and Hates a Texas White House
Every time I convince myself that the MSM hates Governor Rick Perry because they don’t want to spend time a hundred miles from nowhere (or 200 miles from Dallas
), they remind me that the real problem is the Governor’s core values.
The fuss this time is due to Governor Perry’s statement recognizing that the children of rape and incest are human enough to deserve society’s protection from intentional, elective killing. Last night I wrote about Rachel Maddow’s mad rantings concerning abortion and the children of rape or incest. Today, (while breaking with the rest of the media in choosing to use the term, “pro-life,” rather than the usual “anti-choice”) WFAA-TV in Dallas made sure that we understand that the Governor “enjoys deep support among pro-life groups, and signed their favored sonogram bill into law earlier this year.” Not only that, but,
“Pro-choice groups and many Democrats say they will keep fighting the sonogram law.
“”This will probably lead to a law saying that if a 14-year-old victim of incest wants to get an abortion, she would then have to submit to a sonogram, which is one of the most invasive procedures this legislature has come up with,” said Andy Brown, chairman of the Travis County Democratic Party.”
via Perry’s tougher abortion stance: What does it mean for Texas? | wfaa.com Dallas – Fort Worth.
I would like to commend WFAA for using the term, “pro-life.” Thank you, WFAA!
Disclaimer: I’m on the Board of Directors of the Texas Alliance for Life, mentioned in the article. And yes, we’d like to see all children, including those of victims of rape and incest, protected at least as much as the eggs of birds on the Endangered Species List.
Matt Barber: “Ron Paul is dangerous”
I decided in ‘08 that Paul was more dangerous than Clinton. Paul refuses to acknowledge that jet planes and missiles make the world a different place than the one that George Washington knew. I agree with Mr. Barber’s latest essay on TownHall.com and laughed at his description of “Uncle Ronny:”
“He’s that affable – if not a little “zany” – uncle who has the whole family on edge at Thanksgiving. “Oh boy; what’s Uncle Ronny gonna say next?”
“Still, you wouldn’t give Uncle Ronny the carving knife for the turkey, much less less the keys to the Oval Office.”
Ron Paul is not a Conservative. He has run as – and is, still – a (Capital L)ibertarian, with skewed ideas about the world based on tunnel vision. By claiming that he is only following the intent of the Constitution, he seems unaware that the Founders did not have to contend with international travel or laws permitting abortion due to Supreme Court rulings that have the effect of a Constitutional Amendment.
Although he has a great personal testimony about the sanctity of life and did finally vote to ban partial birth abortion, for years he refused to vote against Federal limits on abortion as performed in military hospitals or when minors are transported across State lines without their parents consent. And it seems that he doesn’t understand that defense is so much better when you can take it to the aggressor’s back yard and keep him as far away from our home as possible.
I’m hoping that, beginning with the Iowa Caucus, voters will remember that Governor Rick Perry has always been consistent about securing our Borders, defending our Nation from external attack, and protecting the most defenseless among us.
Just yuck! An evening with MSNBC
I’m tempted to say, “Never again!,” but I try to never say never.
I’m staying in a hotel while volunteering with the Rick Perry Iowa Strike Force, so I don’t know the local TV channels. While clicking through to see what was on, I paused at MSNBC. I’ve never watched at all except for clips on YouTube and assumed that both those clips and the Saturday Night Live parodies of Maddow show were atypical exaggerations. Nope, not if tonight is typical.
Every charge I’ve ever heard or read about Fox News is made concrete on this horrible channel. The Ed (Schultz) Show and Rachel Maddow (look ‘em up yourself, I refuse to link to them) are bitterly clinging to unions, abortion, and the far Left in all its forms.
For instance, Schultz featured a man who claims that Mitt Romney killed American Pad and Paper (AmPad) after Romney’s Bain Capital, purchased AmPad in 1992. The man, who now works for the United Steelworkers in Pennsylvania, also told ABC News in this interview that when the company started losing money, benefits for the “workers” were cut, so the union went on strike. He takes no responsibility for the damage that the strike might have had on a business under stress.
Maddow focused part of her rants on Governor Rick Perry’s recent comments about a change of heart on the ethics of abortion and the exceptions for rape and incest. She repeatedly claimed that Rick Perry would “force” pregnant women to have their rapist’s child. She ignores that the child is also that woman’s baby and seemingly doesn’t understand that government wouldn’t *force* anything on anyone. Instead, government would be preventing action on the part of licensed medical professionals using regulated and licensed material and procedures, not forcing action on anyone.
My two hours watching MSNBC reminded me of the line (variously attributed to Lenin and Sun Tzu), “Call your enemy what you are.”
Spare Parts for Humans: Tissue Engineers Aim for Lab-Grown Limbs, Lungs and More | PBS NewsHour | Dec. 15, 2011 | PBS
“Just because we don’t regenerate doesn’t mean that we can’t regenerate. It just means that we don’t.”
Public Broadcasting System’s PBS NewsHour had a segment on regenerative medicine, reviewing the very impressive progress we’ve made in the last few years. The mere fact that PBS and scientists will state these facts in public is almost as huge, in terms of world view change, as the fact that the matrices plus stem cells work.
I was at a American Bioethics and Humanities annual convention when Yamanaka’s induced pluripotent cells first made the news. The Powers That Be for that group were angry and refused to allow any hopeful conversation that the iPSC’s would replace the need for research on destructive, embryonic stem cells. Damage control included scolding world authority figures *on* the panels for daring to bring up the subject in any serious way.
I’m convinced that the whole embryonic stem cell mess was more about the need to prove that abortion is wonderful and that there is no Creator. In fact, that’s exactly what one of the Clinton/Obama “bioethicists,” Robin Alta Charo, said about cloning in at least one meeting I attended in July, 2006. (More, here.)
Ms. Charo who introduces morality and her anti-religion bias into the conversation, by making it a matter of personal opinion whether or not embryonic humans are humans. The species of human embryos is a matter of taxonomy, since it’s scientifically documented and verifiable that the offspring of a given species are members of that species. Discrimination between the amount of protection given to some members of a species is much more a “religious” or moral decision than whether or not a given individual is a member of that species.
I’ve said it many times before, but: Break the egg of a bird, turtle, or lizard on the Endangered species list and it won’t matter that the animal couldn’t survive or was an embryo or fetus. The Feds know that an embryonic pelican is a pelican. We don’t have the same protection for our own children of tomorrow that we give lesser species, although we are the only species having the conversation in the first place.
CMS overturns Texas’ abortion provider exclusion @GovernorPerry
The Houston Chronicle article (not available when I wrote this earlier post) implies that the ruling from CMS is much more far-reaching than I’d thought. Our laws prohibiting State funds going to anyone who provides abortions may be overturned. This looks like it goes farther than simply disapproving of the priorities we placed on allocating our funds. It appears that Obama has decided that we can’t continue to make recipients of Texas funds sign a contract to not perform or refer for abortions.
If this is true, women can get prenatal care and teen girls can get their vaccinations in the same building where their neighbor is having her unborn baby killed! Or Texas can refuse Medicaid funds.
Texas will no longer be allowed to prohibit Medicaid recipients from receiving care at family planning clinics that perform abortions, the federal government informed the state Monday.
Arguing that the Social Security Act prohibits states from excluding such clinics, the federal agency that runs the program informed Texas that next year it will not approve an agreement like the one now in place in Texas.
“The issue is … whether a state can restrict access to a qualified health provider simply because they provide other services Medicaid doesn’t pay for,” Cindy Mann, director of the Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services, said in a phone interview with reporters. “The law does not permit this.”
Mann stressed that Medicaid “does not pay for abortions and will not pay for abortions.” She said the agency will extend Texas’ current agreement through March while negotiating a new one.
In a statement, Gov. Rick Perry responded that President Barack Obama is making women “pay the price for its pro-abortion agenda.”
“I am concerned the Obama Administration is playing politics by holding women’s health care hostage because of Texas’ pro-life policies, sacrificing the health of millions of Texas women,” said Perry.
Since 2006, Texas has provided low-income women 18 to 44 with family planning exams, related health screenings and birth control through the Medicaid Women’s Health Program. Last year, it provided services to more than 180,000 women, with 90 percent of its funds coming from the federal government and the rest from the state.
via Texas abortion provider exclusion blocked – Houston Chronicle.
Obama to Texas: Fund PP or no Well Woman money
The Obama Administration has told Texas that our State is not allowed to decide who will provide medical care under Title X Family Planning and Well Woman funds. The Administration has recently ruled in a similar manner for other States. (
This in spite of the fact that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) did give Texas a waiver allowing Texas to move all Medicaid and CHIP beneficiaries to doctors in managed care plans. The managed care plans, along with cooperative coalitions between hospital systems and the doctors they will pay for seeing managed care patients, is consistent with the plans laid out in “Obamacare.” Evidently, so is Planned Parenthood’s survival.
CMS claims in this letter to Texas’ Health and Human Services Commission that we’re limiting the choices of the women because the State prioritized where to spend our money and who to pay for healthcare, beginning with county clinics and hospital districts, followed by doctors and clinics that provide comprehensive, continuing care. Since we only have so much money, our Legislature decided to support the most vital care givers. Even though we don’t specifically write in law that “Planned Parenthood, Inc., need not apply,” CMS doesn’t like our plan.
CMS was asked to give a “waiver” to Texas since the funding is outside normal Medicaid rules, because it funds care for adults who are not at the rock-bottom income levels. Texas also has a waiver in order to use funds for prenatal care, justified by counting the unborn child. (The pro-aborts have protested over and over that the mother, not her child, should be the one we count and that she should be allowed to use the money for any “reproductive services,” including abortion, that she wants.)
Texas Alliance for Life and Texas Right to Life have both issued statements opposing the CMS ruling.
From Joe Pojman, Ph.D., TAL’s Executive Director:
“We believe the State of Texas has every right to deny millions of tax dollars to Planned Parenthood, which is what the Texas Legislature and Governor Perry has chosen to do,” he said. “Senate Bill 7, passed last summer during a special legislative session, prohibits Medicaid tax dollars under the Women’s Health Program from going to abortion providers and their affiliated organizations.”
“This bill excludes several dozen Planned Parenthood sites from the Women’s Health Program, but it does not exclude any other hundreds of Women’s Health Program providers in Texas. Many of the other providers offer comprehensive primary and preventative care to low- income women in addition to family planning, which Planned Parenthood is unable or unwilling to provide,” he continued. “By threatening to cancel the Women’s Health Program in Texas, the Obama Administration is showing it would sooner deny tens of millions of dollars of medical services to low-income women rather than allow the State of Texas to cut off tax funding to Planned Parenthood.”
Addendum: this article from the Houston Chronicle (I quoted from it here) which implies that the ruling may go so far as to overturn our long-standing law that requires providers to sign a contract affirming that they don’t perform or refer for abortions.
Conservatives on my mind (Revision of earlier post) @governorperry
Conservatives understand that we shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the good. Personally, I’m reluctant to criticize Republican candidates before even one vote is cast in the Primaries. But Conservatives also know that if we ignore our principles for expediency, we risk losing both. if we learned anything in 2008, that is.
Even Erick Erickson of Red State says he’s ready to go “none of the above.” But “none of the above” won’t cut it this year. We are fighting an incumbent that is almost guaranteed the black, gay and pro-abort vote, not to mention all of the many people who can only survive by the redistribution of tax money!
We have an opportunity to vote our principles in Rick Perry. If you can’t bear Governor Perry or don’t believe his experience in governing Texas is indicative of his ability to govern the United States, Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum are good options. In contrast, Gingrich or Romney would just be the latest version of “it’s his turn.” We need the consistency and the radical DC outsider that is Rick Perry.
I know that many Conservatives have either been divorced and remarried or have loved ones who have been divorced. Others have family members who are homosexuals. We might even have family members who have been convicted of crimes – and I’m not saying that either of the first two are crimes. However, we understand that messy personal lives are not the ideal, and we prefer that our leaders be someone that we can not only admire, but who will demonstrate that they hold – and live – our principles as their own.
The Newt is everything that we have been fighting since McCain was nominated. The ability to debate does not equate to the ability to govern.He has been selling himself as the next in line, ever since Obama’s inauguration, according to the report in the Real Clear Politics’ Election 2012: the Battle Begins. The story is that Gingrich hosted a dinner for Republicans on the night of the inauguration.
Worse, if Newt Gingrich is the Republican nominee, we won’t have the family values and principles that the base of the Conservative Republicans have rallied ’round. I’m not sure his history of serial adultery can stand up to opposition of same sex marriage. If marriage is plastic enough to support Newt’s history, then why not?
I’d like to believe the Catholic conversion that went along with this latest marriage is a good place to reset Newt’s sexual morality and ethical credentials. However, Gingrich can’t even stay on point on when life begins, telling us one thing on Friday and begging Catholics to tell us he meant something else on Sunday.
If Conservative bloggers are willing to go with pretty talk, will Conservative voters follow? I don’t think so. I believe that the TEA Party has proven that we are outside the influence of Party politics. We work from the Republican Party only as long as the Republican Party will honor our principles and at least appear to support *us.*
I am somewhat afraid that the TEA Party is too busy deciding whether personal lives and a true understanding of first principles – life, liberty, “first do no harm” – are important if their property is secured. I’ve watched in disbelief as uncertainty about the flavor of the month’s views on abortion, when life begins, true marriage and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is justified because of some mistaken idea that giving up ideology will give us the White House.
It’s indeed time to make the decision to support principles or not. But few of us will vote in New Hampshire, Iowa or South Carolina. Our choice of which candidate to support is only urgent if we are blogging, writing, advocating and donating money.
Whether your biggest fear is that Obama wins, or that Romney wins, the next 2 or 3 months are the time to support Conservatives. Don’t choose to advocate for or donate to the “electable” candidate long before your own before your primary, for pity’s sake!
Edited at 15:00, 12/8/11 to add last 3 paragraphs, and on December 25 to correct mispelling.
@GovernorPerry to Blitz: “You guys are a bigger pain than the back surgery.”
Governor Rick Perry was grilled by Wolf Blitzer on CNN‘s Situation Room on Wednesday, December 7, with frequent interruptions and repetitious questions. (Full transcript, here.) “Blitz” once again earned the nickname given to him by Herman Cain.
The Houston Chronicle, which leans far to the left, reported on the interview in a blog entry entitled, “Perry talks about pain meds, gay Scouts and the VP job”
[Perry] Asserted that his July spine surgery, which he noted involved the use of his own stem cells, was “incredibly successful.”
Blitzer’s question included the issue of pain medication, and Perry said, “I’m back running again, three to four miles, four to five times a week and I was off for 10 weeks. I probably took pain medication for the first 10 days, two weeks. And after that, the surgery has been awesome. … You guys are a bigger pain than the back surgery.”
But of course, the real problem for both Blitz and the Chronicle’s blogger is the Governor’s statements concerning pro-life, faith-based Catholic hospitals and adoption services, the lawsuits against the Boy Scouts who refuse to admit openly gay scout leaders and the limits on Catholic aide to victims of human trafficking. The Chronicle and Blitz each call these acts of “discrimination.” Blitz even asked Governor Perry whether “separation of church and state, does that mean anything to you?”
Perry pointed out the difference between “freedom *of* religion” and “freedom *from* religion. The question should be whether the First Amendment phrase “and the free exercise thereof” means anything.
Under the Bush Administration, Catholic Charities and hospitals weren’t forced to provide adoption services for homosexual couples or to pay for abortifacients like EllaOne or refer to abortionists in order to provide adoption assistance or prenatal care.
The Obama Administration is doing just the opposite. On top of the policies of the States of Illinois, Massachusetts, and others that are limiting Christian, pro-life adoption agencies, the Obama Administration is moving forward on regulations to severely restrict conscience.
Must every agency that receives tax money provide an absolutly full range of services? Lay aside the fact that adoption and abortion are not compatible with one another. It seems evident that birth mothers and and adoptive parents that go to Catholic charities and adoption agencies would have a pretty good idea about the philosophy of the group based on religious tenets.
That’s probably the fear of the prospective gay adopters: as the Governor says, “People will vote with their feet.” Why would a prolife Catholic girl who finds herself an unplanned pregnancy – who admittedly has most become pregnant by committing what she considers a sin – “choose” to have her baby raised in a home that doesn’t share her values? And why on earth would she ever “choose” to seek care for herself and her baby from a doctor who also kills the babies of other women?
The advocates for choice must, in fact, hate choice – they certainly fight to prevent it, even to demand that we act against our own “choice” and conscience.
@Governor Perry, @Freedom2Care: Abortion Ideology Trumps Aid for Victims of Human Trafficking
Regarding Governor Perry’s comments about the Obama Administration’s war on religion:
A grueling December 1 hearing by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee revealed the disturbing answers to these questions, in the process infuriating Republican committee members and others concerned with aiding victims of human trafficking.
By the end of an over three-hour long grilling of U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS) officials, one message had become clear about the Obama administration’s criteria for receiving the $4.5 million in federal grants for trafficking victims services:
Pro-life groups need not apply.
via Freedom2Care: Abortion Ideology Trumps Aid for Victims of Human Trafficking.
The regulations were written to prevent any pro-life group from receiving grant money:
The funding opportunity announcement for the “competitive” grant stipulated:
Translation: Participate in abortion or forget the grant.
Wentworth: redistricting to be fair to the Dems
Hey, Senator Wentworth! We don’t want a balanced consensus on the maps — we want Republican maps.(And we want Dr. Donna Campbell for Senate District 25.)
We don’t want activist judges, but neither are we willing to give up the right to draw our electoral maps just because it’s hard. We want Conservative Legislators, preferably Conservative, pro-life, pro-family Republican legislators – That’s why we sent 100 to the House this year, and won a 101st when he saw the light.
Earl Jeffrey has a column in the San Antonio Express News on Dec.6 th, begging us to cross the aisle and “all just get along:”
In addition to separating communities of interest, gerrymandering protects incumbents. Protected incumbencies discourage challengers, so voters’ choices are limited to a “token” challenger or to no choice at all.
Since both political parties have proven conclusively that they are unable to resist the gerrymandering urge, Senate Bill 22 would have created an independent, bipartisan citizens’ redistricting commission that I believe would bring more of a sense of balance and a semblance of fairness to redistricting.
via Federal judges redraw Texas redistricting maps – San Antonio Express-News.
Gingrich fails human ethics, human embryology
Even though we are the only species having this conversation, that doesn’t mean that we always get it right.
I was hoping that the recent Catholic conversion of Republican candidate for President Newt Gingrich would ensure that he is pro-life and would act correctly if he is ever elected to an office. Unfortunately, he doesn’t understand the basics of embryology. He fails human ethics and would end up charged with a Federal offense if he tried to make this argument to the Environmental Protection Agency about any animal on the Endangered Species List:
“Well, I think the question of being implanted is a very big question. My friends who have ideological positions that sound good don’t then follow through the logic of: ‘So how many additional potential lives are they talking about? What are they going to do as a practical matter to make this real?’
“I think that if you take a position when a woman has fertilized egg and that’s been successfully implanted that now you’re dealing with life, because otherwise you’re going to open up an extraordinary range of very difficult questions.”
“. . . In addition I would say that I’ve never been for embryonic stem cell research per se. I have been for, there are a lot of different ways to get embryonic stem cells. I think if you can get embryonic stem cells for example from placental blood if you can get it in ways that do not involve the loss of a life that’s a perfectly legitimate avenue of approach.
“What I reject is the idea that we’re going to take one life for the purpose of doing research for other purposes and I think that crosses a threshold of de-humanizing us that’s very very dangerous.”
via Gingrich Breaks from Some in Anti-Abortion Community on When Life Begins – ABC News.
Speaker Gingrich is absolutely wrong to say that we who hold the “ideological” position that human life begins at fertilization have not thought about the implications. If we hadn’t done so on our own, some utilitarian like the Speaker would have forced us to do so.
Just as with any other species, the mammal human embryo is the same species as the mother and father, and the one time when that life begins is at fertilization. What is it that implants? Would the technician in the in vitro lab or even the stem cell lab care what happened to the egg and the sperm if there is no fertilization?
Implantation is another step in that life that began at fertilization of the oocyte by the sperm.
Ectopic pregnancy is an event like cancer or heart attacks or kidney failure: when the normal process doesn’t go the way it should and people die. Because of the immediate and inevitable danger to the life of the mother and the unquestionable inability of human medicine to save the embryonic child, we don’t even count the procedures we do as “abortion.” when documenting abortion and maternal health statistics.
If we did call it abortion, it certainly would not be an “elective” abortion, but a procedure done to remove an eminent and known threat to the life of the mother who could die within minutes due to internal bleeding when the embryo grows too big for the fallopian tube at sometime between 6 and 8 weeks of age.
The sperm is not a life. Some do believe that any sexual act should be directly tied to and open to procreation, but not all Christians who object to abortion or other euthanasia agree agree on this point.
The least educated, lowest technician in the in vitro lab knows the difference between the sperm in the cup, the oocyte and the embryo. Within hours, they know whether the embryo is.
In vitro fertilization is an ethical problem when the embryos are not treated with the respect and care due the human dignity of all our children. The human embryo in the dish is the same species as the embryo in the fallopian tube. (See above.) Several countries have laws limiting in vitro fertilization, the numbers of embryos and some require that any embryo fertilized in the lab be implanted.
First, there is no way to obtain embryonic stem cells other than to destroy or endanger an embryo.The cells obtained from umbilical cord blood and the placenta are technically fetal, not embryonic stem cells. But, as the Speaker notes, no one has to die to obtain them.
And yes, our society has some tough decisions to make. Will we continue to refuse to provide the same protection for our own children that we give to a pelican or a sea turtle?
Truth, Logic, Siri, and PCMag.com
The Lord does work in mysterious ways, but most of the time He just uses the laws of physics and the logic that He invented. Still, I was surprised to find an argument for pro-life versus abortion logic on a technology blog at PCMag.com. And the simple logic of pointing out that abortionists don’t use the word “abortion” when advertising their services is much more telling than I believe the author knew.
“”Siri is doing exactly what it was built to do—provide answers to questions like, “Where can I get an abortion?” using its own algorithms and the online resources it has available to craft answers.
***********
“”Consider the current kerfuffle. This is simplifying things a bit, but the gist of this story is that Siri is getting hung up on a word, “abortion,” because organizations that actually offer abortion services tend not to use the word as much as anti-abortion organizations do. So when Siri goes looking for where to get an “abortion” in the digital wordscape of the Internet, lo and behold, it returns addresses for Crisis Pregnancy Centers rather than Planned Parenthood.””
(via Siri is Dumb. There, We Said It. | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.)
Or, it could be Steve Jobs’ last word from beyond the grave reminding us of all we could have lost if his mother hadn’t chosen life rather than abortion.
For those who don’t use the iPhone: Siri is a voice-activated program that searches for answers to questions. Think of a “Google” that you can talk to.
Okay, I will admit to a lot of bias in favor of protecting the lives of our children of the future. I’m a pro-life advocate and serve on a couple of Boards for Pro-life advocacy: Texas Alliance for Life which lobbies for pro-life laws and regulations in Austin, Texas and even a “Crisis Pregnancy Center,” Options for Women in New Braunfels, Texas. But this irony is too rich.
There is no big conspiracy paid for by “anti-abortion” forces to influence us to “Choose Life.” Steve Jobs most likely didn’t set this up before his death in order to contrast his adoption by loving and nurturing parents with abortion and to remind us of what we lose by the death of every child whose life is intentionally ended before birth.
And this is not a “glitch.”
The Creator of the Universe didn’t have to break a single law of nature to point out the simple fact that abortionists don’t tend to admit what they do. Truth and Logic worked as they should in this case.
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