Kansas Governor Sam Brownback today signed a bill that would ensure that no taxpayer dollars are going to fund the abortion industry.
Kansas Senate Bill 436 would prioritize Title X grants, which are taxpayer-funded, by awarding them to full-service public health clinics and hospitals first. Planned Parenthood, which often receives these grants from various states, would be pushed to the end of the list because it does not provide comprehensive health care and, essentially, defunded.
Here’s more:
Gov. Sam Brownback vowed in his State of the State speech in January to make sure that “not a single dollar of taxpayer money goes to Planned Parenthood” through the Kansas Medicaid program.
But reimbursements continued. In early March, the state Department of Health and Environment said it was continuing to work on the termination of Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid funding “in accordance with the law.”
The termination letter came Tuesday from the department, Planned Parenthood officials said.
The letter from the state informing Planned Parenthood that it could no longer serve as provider under the state’s Medicaid program cited several reasons, including “noncompliance with applicable state laws” and “unethical or unprofessional conduct.” The organization has about a month to request a review of the decision.
The bill would make permanent a statute in the annual Kanasas budget that gives higher priority to comprehensive health care providers, according to Kansans for Life.
That’s good news for a Friday, but if the Obama administration’s response to states like Louisiana (school choice) or Tennessee (bathroom privacy) is any indicator, then they will go after Kansas as well. Because that’s what Democrats believe in: top-down control of states by an intrusive federal government. Still, Kansas can fight that.
Surprise, Trump cultists! You’ve been had by a con man.
Let’s get right to the details, thanks to this article from the Daily Wire:
So, you’re suckers.
Yes, you conservatives who keep waiting for Donald Trump to turn into Ronald Reagan, who hope to unify behind him thinking that he’ll surround himself with good people and that they will guide him to all the best decisions. Yes, you conservatives who bought into the Trumpian nonsense that he would blow up the system and change things in politics. In the last 24 hours Trump has indeed pivoted – directly against all of his supposedly conservative positions. Here are four examples:
[…]Trump Won’t Be Self-Funding. Remember that time Trump said he’d self-fund, unlike his rivals? Even as donors signal that they won’t be opening their pocketbooks for Trump, Trump announced that he won’t self-fund his campaign. “I’ll be putting up money,” he said, “but won’t be completely self-funding.” Instead, Trump said he would build a “world-class finance organization.” So all that talk about how people who take donations are being bribed to shill for donors – yeah, all that was patented Trump garbage.
Trump Hires A Former Goldman Sachs Fundraiser Who Managed Money For George Soros.Remember that time Donald Trump suggested that Ted Cruz was in the pocket of Goldman Sachs (“I know the guys at Goldman Sachs, they have total, total control over him”)? Remember Snaggletooth The Trumper™ who told Ted Cruz that Cruz should be wearing his “Goldman jacket”? Now Trump has hired Steve Mnuchin, chairman and CEO of Dune Capital Management LP and former Goldman Sachs partner, to head up his fundraising team. Mnuchin also worked at Soros Fund Management LLC. Yes, that Soros. George Soros. Mnuchin also donated thousands of dollars to Hillary Clinton, among other Democrats; since 1998, he’s donated twice as much money to Democrats as Republicans.
[…]So this is the new general election Trump. He looks just as dishonest and scheming as the old Trump, just with a fresh leftist taste sure to please the most ardent Bernie Sanders supporters. Conservative Trump voters – this is your Great Hope.
The article also mentions that Trump is open to raising the minimum wage, and that his tax plan and border security plan are just an opening statement, subject to negotiations. Two more minor things that don’t matter, right?
The media picks our nominee – whether it’s for president, Senate, or governor. That lucky individual has never fought a single battle for conservatives on a single issue in his entire life and has even carried water for the other side on some critically important issues. Yet, he ran as a conservative in the primary and railed against the Democrats. The media, whether local or national, anointed this individual and helped him run a dehumanization campaign against his opponent. Not surprisingly, that man wins the primary and the other man – irrespective of his lifelong reputation – is left with the image of a dirt bag in the minds of most voters by the end of the election.
[…]Just within the first 24 hours of becoming the presumptive nominee, Trump has floated Portman and Kasich as potential VP candidates, echoed the worst of the liberal talking points on minimum wage, and walked back his promise to self-fund his campaign – one of his most appealing taking points of the campaign.
Portman and Kasich are leftist establishment Republicans. You might remember that Portman embraced gay marriage and Kasich is opposed to protecting religious liberty from lawsuits and punishments by gay activists. Surprise! That’s who Trump is, too. A New York liberal pretending to be a Republican for his gullible TV-watching followers.
Trump supporters have never looked into Trump’s past positions, his political contributions, his bankruptcies, etc. They learned about Trump by watching him laugh and joke on their televisions. And their hatred for other candidates like Walker and Cruz isn’t based on any knowledge of Walker and Cruz – it’s just repeating the sound bites about Walker and Cruz uttered by Trump, and dutifully played over and over again by the mainstream media.
Here is what Trump would say if he were honest: “Believe me! I’m a liberal Democrat pretending to be a Republican! I can tell you that!” Just imagine that line spoken in Trump’s charismatic voice, over and over, Trump supporters. Maybe then you’ll realize what your laziness and ignorance cost us.
Here’s a post from Christian apologist Terrell Clemmons about efforts by gay activists to redefine Christianity so that it is consistent with homosexual behavior. This particular post is focused on Matthew Vines.
She writes:
In March 2012, two years after having set out to confront homophobia in the church, Matthew presented the results of his “thousands of hours of research” in an hour-long talk titled “The Gay Debate.” The upshot of it was this: “The Bible does not condemn loving gay relationships. It never addresses the issues of same-sex orientation or loving same-sex relationships, and the few verses that some cite to support homophobia have nothing to do with LGBT people.” The video went viral (more than three quarter million views to date) and Matthew has been disseminating the content of it ever since.
In 2013, he launched “The Reformation Project,” “a Bible-based, non-profit organization … to train, connect, and empower gay Christians and their allies to reform church teaching on homosexuality from the ground up.” At the inaugural conference, paid for by a $104,000 crowd-funding campaign, fifty LGBT advocates, all professing Christians, gathered for four days in suburban Kansas City for teaching and training, At twenty-three years of age, Matthew Vines was already becoming a formidable cause célèbre.
Terrell summarizes the case he makes, and here is the part I am interested in:
Reason #1: Non-affirming views inflict pain on LGBT people. This argument is undoubtedly the most persuasive emotionally, but Matthew has produced a Scriptural case for it. Jesus, in his well-known Sermon on the Mount, warned his listeners against false prophets, likening them to wolves in sheep’s clothing. Then switching metaphors he asked, “Do people pick grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles?” The obvious answer is no, and Jesus’s point was, you can recognize a good or bad tree – and a true or false prophet – by its good or bad fruit. From this, Matthew concludes that, since non-affirming beliefs on the part of some Christians cause the bad fruit of emotional pain forother Christians, the non-affirming stance must not be good.
Terrell’s response to this is spot on, and I recommend you read her post to get the full response.
She writes:
Matthew Vines in particular, and LGBTs in general, appear to be drivingly fixated on changing other people’s moral outlook. But why? Why are they distressed over the shrinking subset of Christianity that holds to the traditional ethic of sex? Note that Matthew found an affirming church in his hometown, as can most any LGBT-identifying Christian. Affirming churches abound. Gaychurch.org lists forty-four affirming denominations – denominations, not just individual churches – in North America and will help you find a congregation in your area. Why, then, given all these choices for church accommodation, are Matthew and the Reformers specifically targeting churches whose teachings differ from their own?
One gets the sense that LGBTs really, really need other people to affirm their sexual behavior. Certainly it’s human to want the approval of others, but this goes beyond an emotionally healthy desire for relational comity. Recall Matthew’s plea that non-affirming views on the part of some Christians cause emotional pain for others. He, and all like-minded LGBTs, are holding other people responsible for their emotional pain. This is the very essence of codependency.
The term came out of Alcoholics Anonymous. It originally referred to spouses of alcoholics who enabled the alcoholism to continue unchallenged, but it has since been broadened to encompass several forms of dysfunctional relationships involving pathological behaviors, low self-esteem, and poor emotional boundaries. Codependents “believe their happiness depends upon another person,” says Darlene Lancer, an attorney, family therapist, and author of Codependency for Dummies. “In a codependent relationship, both individuals are codependent,” says clinical psychologist Seth Meyers. “They try to control their partner and they aren’t comfortable on their own.”
Which leads to an even more troubling aspect of this Vinesian “Reformation.” Not only are LGBT Reformers not content to find an affirming church for themselves and peacefully coexist with everyone else, everyone else must change in order to be correct in their Christian expression.
This is the classic progression of codependency, and efforts to change everyone else become increasingly coercive. We must affirm same-sex orientation, Matthew says. If we don’t, we are “tarnishing the image of God [in gay Christians]. Instead of making gay Christians more like God … embracing a non-affirming position makes them less like God.” “[W]hen we reject the desires of gay Christians to express their sexuality within a lifelong covenant, we separate them from our covenantal God.”
Do you hear what he’s saying? LGBTs’ relationships with God are dependent on Christians approving their sexual proclivities. But he’s still not finished. “In the final analysis, then, it is not gay Christians who are sinning against God by entering into monogamous, loving relationships. It is we who are sinning against them by rejecting their intimate relationships.” In other words, non-affirming beliefs stand between LGBTs and God. Thus sayeth Matthew Vines.
The rest of her article deals with Vines’ attempt to twist Scripture to validate sexual behavior that is not permissible in Christianity.
Vines seems to want a lot of people to agree that the Bible somehow doesn’t forbid this sexual behavior so that the people who are doing it won’t feel bad about doing it. If he can just silence those who disagree and get a majority of people to agree, then the people who are doing these things will feel better.
Well. I am a chaste man now in my late 30s. I have not so much as kissed a woman on the lips. There is no societal celebration for what I am doing, not even in the church. But you don’t see me complaining that people need to validate my choice to be chaste. And the reason is, that even if the entire world were against me, the morality of chastity is self-authenticating. It doesn’t matter how many people make me feel bad about what I am doing, I have the direct experience of doing the right thing. Being chaste allows me to love women upward by treating them like equal partners in the gospel, and expecting them to work for the gospel like any man would.
Matthew Vines is annoyed that we expect homosexuals to work through their same-sex attractions, abstain from premarital sex, and then either remain chaste like me, or marry one person of the opposite sex and then confine his/her sexual behavior to his/her marriage. But how is that different than what is asked of me? I have opposite sex-attractions (boy, do I!), but I am also expected to abstain from premarital sex, and either remain chaste, or marry one woman for life, and confine my sexual behavior to that marriage. If I have to exercise a little self-control to show God that what he wants from me is important to me, then I am willing to do that. I’m really at a loss to understand why so many people take sexual gratification as a given, rather than as an opportunity for self-denial and self-control. I am especially puzzled by sinful people demanding that other celebrate their sin – and using the power of the government now to compel others to celebrate their sin.
Believe me, I understand what it is like to be without a woman’s love and support. I started out with a cold, distant, selfish, career-oriented mother. I dreamed about marriage since I was in high school – I remember praying about my future wife, even then. No one that I know has a stronger need for validation and encouragement from a woman than I do. Yet if I have to let that go in order to let God know that what he wants matters to me, then I will do it.
My service to God is not conditional on me getting my needs met. And my needs and desires are no less strong than the needs of people who engage in sex outside the boundaries of Christian teaching. We just make different decisions about what/who comes first. For me, Jesus is first, because I have sympathy with Jesus for loving me enough to die in my place, for my sins. I am obligated to Jesus, and that means that my responsibility to meet expectations in our relationship comes above my desire to be happy and fulfilled. For Matthew, the sexual desires come first, and Scripture has to be reinterpreted in light of a desire to be happy. I just don’t see anything in the New Testament that leads me to believe that we should expect God to fulfill our desires. The message of Jesus is about self-denial, self-control and putting God the Father first – even when it results in suffering. I take that seriously. That willingness to be second and let Jesus lead me is what makes me an authentic Christian.
There is a good debate featuring Robert Gagnon and a gay activist in this post, so you can hear both sides.
