How To Get Away With Murder (By Holding The Poor Hostage)

Today I would like to briefly address one of the worst defenses of abortion that is given, and of Planned Parenthood more specifically. It is a common talking point by celebrities and lay-persons alike, but it is one with virtually no substance. In fact, it is really a barbaric statement when it is reasoned to it's logical implications.

                                                     (Photo Credit: Dank Pro-life Memes)

The claim goes like this: "Planned Parenthood should continue to get federal funding, since they provide a lot of services for poor Americans, especially women and minorities, that they wouldn't get elsewhere. Plus, abortion is only three percent of what they do!"

I had this stated to me repeatedly(and quite loudly) by a student during a pro-life outreach with Students for Life of America in the San Diego area late last year. She was outraged at the material on the display, which quoted the statistics found in the Planned Parenthood annual report.

Now, aside from the dispute over where lower-income Americans can go to get quality healthcare(It's a flat out lie that PP is the only organization in the nation that does provide these services, or will provide them in the future. A quick google search of local health care centers will prove that), the assertion also makes a fatal flaw: It "begs the question"; that is, it simply assumes that abortion is not the intentional killing of an innocent human being.

To show how this mistake happens, let's pretend for a moment that a local hospital purposely killed a certain percentage of it's patients in the pediatrics ward. If parents decide that their toddler is too much of a burden for them to take care of, they can have their toddler killed by the hospital staff, with no risk to the parents, whether medically, financially, or legally. To take this thought experiment a step further, suppose the hospital staff is caught dismembering the toddlers, and selling their body parts for profit to medical and research firms.

Would there be outrage? You'd better hope there would be.

Now imagine that after all of this outrage, the hospital's PR department states that since the facility provides free, life-saving healthcare for the poor members of the community, then the state health department would essentially be "killing the poor" by shutting down the hospital in order to end the killing of toddlers(Which seems to be the hospital's primary mission.)

In this case, the hospital PR department has essentially tried to get away with murder by holding the poor hostage. It's like a criminal telling a victim of his crime, "Don't go to the police, or else your loved ones will die." Should any reasonable person go on to defend such an action? Not if they were committed to protecting the most vulnerable among us.

It should be obvious that Planned Parenthood doesn't even care about the poor, no matter how emotional they are in the media. Especially when President Donald Trump offered to continue federal funding to them if they stopped their abortion "services", they refused.(This is not a post to defend President Trump; it is merely to make a point). It should be plainly obvious to anyone who values truth over easy to get sex: An organization that supposedly cares for the "poor and downtrodden" will only do so if it gives them leverage in the public square. No one committed to justice should support such a behavior.

In conclusion, the arguments given in favor of Planned Parenthood can only be morally justified if the unborn are not human. Because if the unborn are in fact human(And the evidence shows they are), then we have a literal case of an organization that is getting away with murder, by attempting to hold large numbers of the population hostage. It's amazing that anyone who is firmly committed to justice would be even remotely open to the idea that the poor and underserved could be used as a bargaining tool for political gain.

So Joss Whedon Made a Planned Parenthood Propaganda Film... [Clinton Wilcox]

There's no doubt Joss Whedon is a great director. I have the entire Firefly series on DVD and I'm a huge fan of the Avengers movies (and I have friends who sing the praises of his other shows, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dollhouse). However, in a bizarre turnaround, Whedon has set his sights on promoting Planned Parenthood by filming a three-minute short film called Unlocked. The film, of course, is well-made, but it doesn't make any sense.

The film essentially opens displaying three situations, a woman suffering with cancer, a couple who contracted an STD, and a girl who finds herself pregnant but was recently accepted to college. These three people were unable to go into Planned Parenthood because it was closed. The film essentially plays in reverse, so you see the outcomes of these three situations before you see them start. It's a creative way to film the project, but again, the project, itself, is divorced from reality. Then the video starts playing forward and these people can suddenly enter Planned Parenthood because it opens, where smiling clinic workers give information, cancer screenings, and birth control pills to anyone who wants it. Of course what the film doesn't show is that even if Planned Parenthood is closed, there are other health centers that serve low-income women who can pick up the slack. As of 2015, there are 20 community health clinics for every Planned Parenthood in the United States.

Of course, the film doesn't focus on the abortions, the film just focuses on the other services that they provide. No one likes to focus on the abortions, despite the fact that abortions are more important to Planned Parenthood than providing health to women. When Trump offered Planned Parenthood an ultimatum, they opted to continue providing abortions, even if it meant losing federal funding. Not to mention that whenever the government has threatened to stop funds going to Planned Parenthood in their bills, they redirect that funding to other health centers. No woman would need to stop being seen if Planned Parenthood were to close up its doors.

On the page where you can view the video (and sign a petition to stand with Planned Parenthood), their words are apt: "...it's our responsibility to use our superpowers to slay." Of course, Planned Parenthood's "superpower" is for stronger people to exercise power over weaker people and slay them because those weaker people are in the way of something they want, namely unrestricted sex, financial freedom, etc.

In Whedon's own words, "UNLOCKED is about what a world without Planned Parenthood would look like, which is truly dire." All it does is show how duped he is by Planned Parenthood's talking points. It doesn't make any sort of argument, it just assumes that without them no one is going to be able to find the healthcare that they need, never mind the fact that our government has now given us socialized healthcare, so what excuse is there now for not having healthcare? It also assumes that people will never be able to get sex education, despite the fact that all public schools have a sex education program.

This is an abortion-choice propaganda piece, nothing more. Unfortunately neither Joss Whedon, nor Planned Parenthood, believe women are capable of succeeding without killing their children. How degrading to women to be told that you can't succeed if you are doing exactly what sets women apart from men, getting pregnant and bearing a child. It's disguised misogyny. The question posed at the end is "what world do you want?" My answer is I want the world where Planned Parenthood isn't killing hundreds of thousands of unborn babies every year.

The Relevant Study of Evangelicals and Premarital Sex is Flawed [Scott]

Kevin Deyoung explains why we shouldn't buy the claim that 80 percent of Evangelicals are having premarital sex:

1. The study was conducted by the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute which has deep and historic ties to Planned Parenthood. There is every incentive, then, for this study to find that almost everyone is having sex and is in need of contraceptives (or abortion rights).

2. The survey's methodology is flawed. The study intentionally over-represented African Americans and Hispanics. In the 2010 census whites made up 63.7% of the U.S. population, blacks 12.2%, and Hispanics 16.3%. Yet, in the study cited by Relevant (and others) whites account for 50% of the sample, blacks 20%, and Hispanics 22%. Given the fact that 24% of white children are in single-parent homes, compared to 67% for African American children and 40% for Hispanic children, the disproportionate sampling in the National Survey likely has the effect of skewing the numbers toward indicating greater promiscuity.

3. We should also take into account the large number of persons who refused to take the survey. According to page 10 of this report over 100,000 phone calls were made to get a sample size of 1800. At least 12-15% of those “missed” surveys were refusals. Could it be that many sexually inactive young singles were uninterested in taking a survey almost entirely about contraceptives?

Kevin concludes as follows:

Statistics like the 80% need to be taken with a generous grain of salt. I don’t doubt that fornication is a big problem, bigger than most pastors realize. But when figures like 80% get thrown around we are led to believe (or flat out told) that Christians behave no different than anyone else.

And yet, consider two points.

1. Even using the numbers quoted in Relevant, it’s still the case that the percentage of celibate singles is almost twice as high for evangelicals and for everyone else. But that will not make headlines.

2. The National Survey, like most surveys, simply measures those who self-identify as evangelical. As you can see here, Question 80 of the study asks, “Do you consider yourself to be a born-again Christian, evangelical, or fundamentalist?” Only 476 of the 1800 said yes. Of these 476 unmarried 18-29 year-olds, apparently 80% have had sex before (although only 42% say they are currently in a sexual relationship). But we do not know what sort of “evangelicals” these 476 persons are. The next question in the survey (Q81) asks about frequency in attending religious services. It would be interesting to see the percentages of fornication among weekly churchgoers. Still too high no doubt, but probably much lower. As Bradley Wright argues in his book, there is a strong correlation between church attendance and more faithful sexual behavior across the board (Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites, 138-142). There are lots of nominal Christians in this country whose commitment consists of putting on a religious label for a survey. Looking at what people actually believe and examining their actual engagement with the church is a better mechanism for making claims about the rights and wrongs of Christian behavior.

Here’s the bottom line: don’t believe every stat you read. They are sometimes false and often kind of true, but the real shocking figures are rarely quite as much as meets the eye.

Why I'm Not Supporting Delta Airlines on Breast Cancer Research [Scott]

LTI's Bob Perry explains why.