All posts by Wintery Knight

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Arizona Republicans ban race-selection and sex-selection abortions

Rep. Steve Montenegro
Rep. Steve Montenegro

From Life Site News.

Excerpt:

A bill that would ban abortions based on the race or gender of the baby was passed by the Arizona House of Representatives yesterday, and now goes to Gov. Jan Brewer for approval.

Titled the “Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2011,” the bill would make it a Class 3 felony to perform or in any way coerce someone into receiving an abortion based on the race or gender of the unborn child.

Doctors who violate the law could face prison terms and the loss of their medical license. Any medical professional who fails to report a violation would be subject to a $10,000 fine.

Additionally, the law allows the father of an unborn child, if he is married to the mother, to bring a civil action on the child’s behalf. In the case of an abortion performed on the baby of a minor, the baby’s maternal grandparents would be similarly able to take legal action on the baby’s behalf.

In its original form, the penalty for doctors who violated the law was a $10,000 civil fine. After the Senate modified it to make violation a felony, it returned to the House for approval, and is now headed for the governor’s desk.

Those racist, sexist conservatives! Oh, wait…

A little more about Steve Montenegro:

Steve Montenegro is one of two State Representatives from Legislative District 12. He is a Magna Cum Laude graduate of Arizona State University with a B.S. in Political Science.  He also holds an Associate of Arts in Theology from Logos Christian University. Presently, Steve works in the Glendale office of U.S. Congressman Trent Franks, where he represents the office in immigration matters and where he handles constituent casework for residents in the district.

Steve also serves as an Assistant Pastor/Youth Pastor at the Surprise Apostolic Assembly.  As part of his work within his church, he has filled a number of roles including Music Director and Music Teacher.

Steve has made working with young people a real priority in his life.  He spent five years as President of Arizona Messengers of Peace, providing counseling and guidance to youth in need.

He also worked as a Teacher at the Arizona Charter Academy and Superior School, where he focused on excelling students and at-risk high school students.  He understands the importance of allowing parents to be involved in their children’s education: The importance of helping parents decide what kind of education they want for their children.

Steve understands and treasures the gift of freedom, and he shares this message in his daily life.

And of course, he won in 2010, and just look at what he is doing. When I think of what I want my future children to accomplish, I mean things like what Steve Montenegro accomplishes. I want to raise my children to make a difference like Steve did.

If you guys are wondering what I look like, I look a bit like him, but darker skin. My parents are also immigrants. And I hate race-selection and sex-selection abortions. That is one of the reasons why I am a Republican.

We need to pass bills like this in every state. Well, every state where Republicans are in the majority. Democrats favor race-selection and sex-selection abortions. Democrats think that if a woman doesn’t like the race of her unborn child, then she can abort the child. Democrats think that if a woman doesn’t like the sex of her unborn child, then she can abort the child. Democrats are racist. Democrats are sexist. If there were a gay gene, Democrats would support a woman’s right to choose to abort a gay child just because that child was gay. Democrats are homophobic.

What about Florida?

But there’s more good stuff happening in Florida, with Republicans in the legislature introducing a record number of pro-life bills.

Excerpt:

Facing a record number of pro-life bills in the Florida legislature, Governor Rick Scott of Florida has hinted that he will approach the legislation favorably, although he has yet to review them all.

“I’ll review all those bills, but as you know, I’ve been pro-life all my life and I’m going to be a pro-life governor,” said Scott according to local CBS affiliate WCTV.com.

Florida lawmakers have filed at least 18 pro-life bills this year, according to the Miami Herald, part of a nationwide push against abortion on the state level.

One bill prohibiting private insurance plans in state-based health exchanges passed a Senate committee on March 14, alongside another proposing a constitutional amendment prohibiting state tax dollars from being used for any abortions, including in cases of rape or incest.

Last Monday, a measure that would put in place further parental notification requirements was also approved by a House panel.

In June 2010, then-Governor Charlie Crist disappointed pro-life leaders in Florida by vetoing an ultrasound bill widely considered the most significant pro-life measure in Florida’s history. Crist, who initially billed himself as “pro-life,” removed the pro-life section from his campaign website last year and changed party affiliation from Republican to Independent to pit himself against pro-life Republican gubernatorial candidate Marco Rubio.

Among the measures waiting in the wings this year is another measure requiring abortion-bound women to have ultrasounds, which was approved by a House committee Tuesday.

Don’t ever say that elections don’t matter. They do matter, and Christians need to be informed about social issues and policies. We need to vote in a way that restrains evil.

 

 

 

Jennifer Roback Morse on Obama’s rejection of traditional marriage

Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

A new podcast from Issues, Etc. featuring the magnificent Jennifer Roback Morse.

The MP3 file is here.

The first topic is Obama’s refusal to defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act. A lot of people made a mistake when they voted for Obama in 2008. Although  he claimed to be a Christian and said that he believed in traditional marriage. Newsflash! Obama is a radical anti-Christian leftist who is deep in the pocket of the anti-marriage left. Of course he is opposed to traditional marriage! The lesson for 2012 is that Christians need to never believe what politicians say when they are trying to get elected – look at their record and see what they’ve done.

The second myth she punctures is that a secular left government is OK with Christian parents teaching children about Biblical morality. It’s not just that they would want to indoctrinate children to reject Biblical morality. It’s not just that they want to monitor what children say to make sure they don’t express any Biblical moral views in public. Its that they actually think that Christian parents should not be allowed to teach children in their care about Biblical moral views. You don’t own your children – the state owns them. The state decides what your children will believe.

BONUS:

Here’s a new podcast on The New York Times and “modern love”.

Stephen C. Meyer in FOUR John Ankerberg online videos

From Evolution News. (H/T Stephen C. Meyer)

Excerpt:

In four television episodes of the John Ankerberg Show broadcast across the US and over 200 nations worldwide, Dr. John Ankerberg interviewed Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, author of the groundbreaking book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. The series will begin broadcasting on April 3 at 5:30pm EDT on the Daystar Network and on April 10 at 9:30pm EDT on the INSP Network.

In the interviews Dr. Meyer explains how even Charles Darwin, in his book The Origin of Species, admitted he did not know how the first cell came into being, or how life came to be.

Scientists in Darwin’s day thought the cell was a simple glob of plasm, but today we have discovered that the cell is an almost unimaginably complex system of molecular machines and rich in digital code.

Where did this high-tech in low life come from? Ankerberg and Meyer explore the mystery surrounding this question, which Meyer calls the DNA enigma. Click on the links below to watch full episodes of the show online!

  • Week 1: Every person’s body consists of over a trillion cells. Almost every one of these cells includes a DNA molecule. What is DNA? Why is it so special? What does it do? Where did the digital code embedded in DNA originate? Why does the specified information in DNA point to a designing intelligence?
  • Week 2: As scientific technology has progressed, scientists have realized the cell is more and more complex. According to Microsoft’s Bill Gates, the DNA within each cell is far more complex than any computer software ever created. Where did the coded information within DNA come from? What naturalistic theories have been proposed? What is the possibility of the precise genetic information in DNA evolving by chance?
  • Week 3: In addition to chance, scientists have offered other answers to the origin of the precise genetic information found in DNA. Why is it that natural selection, self-organizing natural laws, or some combination of these with chance cannot explain where the information originated? We’ll also see why DNA exhibits signs of a designing intelligence.
  • Week 4: What is the scientific theory of Intelligent Design (ID)? Is ID true science or just religion masquerading as science? We’ll also answer the objections to ID such as, “Is ID just an argument from ignorance?” (“We don’t know what the naturalistic causes are right now for the origin of life.”) We’ll also see why ID is based on scientific reasoning but may have larger religious implications.

And Meyer is not making this up. This is the state of science today.

From Scientific American.

Excerpt:

As recently as the middle of the 20th century, many scientists thought that the first organisms were made of self-replicating proteins. After Francis Crick and James Watson showed that DNA is the basis for genetic transmission in the 1950s, many researchers began to favor nucleic acids over proteins as the ur-molecules. But there was a major hitch in this scenario. DNA can make neither proteins nor copies of itself without the help of catalytic proteins called enzymes. This fact turned the origin of life into a classic chicken-or-egg puzzle: Which came first, proteins or DNA?

RNA, DNA’s helpmate, remains the most popular answer to this conundrum, just as it was when I wrote “In the Beginning…” Certain forms of RNA can act as their own enzymes, snipping themselves in two and splicing themselves back together again. If RNA could act as an enzyme, then it might be able to replicate itself without help from proteins. RNA could serve as gene and catalyst, egg and chicken.

But the “RNA-world” hypothesis remains problematic. RNA and its components are difficult to synthesize under the best of circumstances, in a laboratory, let alone under plausible prebiotic conditions. Once RNA is synthesized, it can make new copies of itself only with a great deal of chemical coaxing from the scientist. Overbye notes that “even if RNA did appear naturally, the odds that it would happen in the right sequence to drive Darwinian evolution seem small.”

The RNA world is so dissatisfying that some frustrated scientists are resorting to much more far out—literally—speculation. The most startling revelation in Overbye’s article is that scientists have resuscitated a proposal once floated by Crick. Dissatisfied with conventional theories of life’s beginning, Crick conjectured that aliens came to Earth in a spaceship and planted the seeds of life here billions of years ago. This notion is called directed panspermia. In less dramatic versions of panspermia, microbes arrived on our planet via asteroids, comets or meteorites, or drifted down like confetti.

John Horgan is not a Christian, nor even a theist. The origin of life is not explainable on the basis on unintelligent causes. But it is perfectly explainable as the result of intelligent causes. Just like the sequence of letters arranged in this blog post to have meaning are best explained as the result of an intelligence.