News

Pro-lifers need to vote wisely, or they may strengthen abortion

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Canada Election 2015: Socialists in red, Communists in Orange, Conservatives in blue
Canada Election 2015: Socialists in red, Communists in Orange, Conservatives in blue

Here is an article written by a Canadian named Mike Schouten in Life News.

He wrote this prior to the Canadian federal election:

The de facto position of Thomas Mulcair and Stephen Harper is, in principle, no different. When questioned directly by Trudeau last Friday, Harper said the same as he has been saying for years, “My position for 10 years has been I don’t intend to re-open this debate.”

As yet, all three leaders have a realistic shot at making 24 Sussex their home after the October 19 election. And all three continue to treat pre-born children as a political liability.

Messrs. Harper, Mulcair and Trudeau are without excuse. If elected, it is their duty to enact laws for the benefit of all Canadians. Their complete disregard for the human rights of any children in the womb effectually means that they are complicit in the deaths of 100,000 members of the human family every year.

In effect Stephen Harper, Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau all support sex-selective abortion. They care less about the fact that girls are targeted for abortion much more frequently than boys. Their refusal to act is a sign that they endorse this misogynistic practice in Canada.

All three leaders also support late-term abortion. They show no regard for the reality that every year thousands of babies lose their lives by being aborted in the latter stages of pregnancy, after the stage when children of the same age are born, survive outside of the womb, and live productive lives as Canadian citizens.

Now, I can understand why Schouten is frustrated. But what he is saying above is going to have one of two effects on pro-life voters. Either pro-lifers will stay home and not vote, since there are no differences between the parties on the abortion issue, or they will waste their vote on a third-party candidate who cannot win.

During Harper’s tenure as prime minister, abortion was never expanded, because Harper never made pushing leftward on social issues a priority. In fact, one could argue that his tax credits for married couples encouraged people to marry, which tends to push down the number of abortions. Married couples are better equipped to welcome into the world an unborn child, because there are two people, not just one. But Schouten did not  foresee that things could actually get worse under a Liberal or NDP prime minister. He just didn’t understand how radical the pro-abortion left really is compared to the center-right.

Then what happened?

Here is an article from Life Site News explaining what happened when Harper lost to the Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau, who also happens to be an extremist on abortion:

Canada’s new health minister promises to “equalize” access to abortion, especially for women living in rural areas, but won’t give specifics. However, the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada has supplied LifeSiteNews a long shopping list for addressing the “problem.”

The ARCC wants more surgical time for abortions in rural hospitals, elimination of conscientious objection by pro-life doctors, screening out of pro-life ob-gyns at medical school, full funding for pharmaceutical abortion through so-called “emergency contraceptives,” and withholding of  federal funding to New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island if these provinces don’t remove remaining restrictions on abortions.

Canada’s new health minister, Jane Philpott, made her comments in a written response to a query from the CBC, stating, “We know that abortion services remain patchy in parts of the country, and that rural women in particular face barriers to access. Our government will examine ways to better equalize access for all Canadian women.”

Responded the WeNeedALaw organization: “We could translate Minister Philpott’s statement like this: ‘It is completely unacceptable that pre-born children are killed with greater ease in Canada’s urban centres than in rural communities.’”

“Seriously? Of all the problems an aging demographic poses for our top-notch health care system the first thing the Liberals want to do is make it easier for pre-born babies to be dismembered, decapitated and disembowelled?” they asked.

The CBC identified the what they deemed the most obvious culprit in limiting access: successive Prince Edward Island governments who have tried to balance pro-life and pro-abortion interests by funding abortions while sending the women out-of-province to have them.

But P.E.I. pro-lifer Randy Anchikoski also told LifeSiteNews the abortion issue is a distraction from the province’s real problems. “We have a big debt and aging population with all sorts of medical problems they face such as heart ailments and cancer. We have fewer women of childbearing age every year. From which part of our health budget is the money for an abortion clinic supposed to come?”

New Brunswick also restricts abortions, still insisting that they be done in hospitals, but it dropped a second regulation that they be approved by two doctors as medically necessary late last year.

Joyce Arthur, the executive director of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, has put the two recalcitrant provinces at the top of her list of measures to “equalize” abortion access across Canada, calling on the federal government to, “arbitrate to resolve access/funding issues, and if the provinces still don’t comply, withhold federal transfer payments.”

As far as the problems allegedly facing rural women wanting abortions, pro-life leaders say this a familiar theme the pro-abortion forces use to push for measures such as pharmaceutical abortions and so-called “web cam” abortions.

[…]As well, the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada wants medical schools to “screen out anti-choice medical students before they enter the Family Planning program or Obstetrics/Gynecology specialty” because their “inability to fulfill job requirements should make them ineligible.”

[…]Arthur’s wish list also includes a bonus system to attract abortion-doing doctors to rural areas, and the elimination of conscientious objection by pro-life doctors and nurses, requiring doctors at least to refer patients requiring abortions.

You might remember that I blogged about a Canadian pro-lifer a month ago who predicted that ALL of this was going to happen if Trudeau won. I told her how her predictions had come true, and in response she told me about the words of an American pro-lifer who we often feature on this blog who says this about Schouten’s problem:

Let me state it plainly: If you are pro-life and intend on casting a “conscience vote” for a third party candidate, you might as well be voting for the “pro-choice party.” It will have the same ultimate impact on the safety of the unborn. Voting pro-life principles isn’t always voting for a pro-life candidate; a principled vote might mean voting for the viable option that will either advance the pro-life cause better or hurt it the least.

If you sleep more comfortably at night because you’ve voted your principles, then I believe your conscience is well-intended, though misinformed. You’ve chosen to make a moral statement instead of choosing to have a moral impact.

As one pundit put it, it’s better to have a second class fireman than a first class arsonist. There is no victory or honor in voting for the first-class fireman who had no chance of winning when, in the end, your “conscience vote” actually allowed the arsonist get elected.

American pro-lifers know that Democrats are always looking to overturn the many state-level restrictions on abortion… there is always a reason to keep the left out of power, even if the right drags their feet on social issues. The left can always make things worse than they are. It’s never a good idea to tell pro-life voters anything that will cause them to stay home on election day. They need to get out there and vote for the most pro-life party – no two parties are exactly equal on the abortion issue.

If you want to read more about how pro-lifers ought to vote, you can read this article by Scott Klusendorf of the Life Training Institute. And you can read about the pro-life strategy of the clever Canadian pro-lifer who predicted all of these things here. It’s called “Save the Storks”.

News

Earth-like planet hyped by science-fiction-crazed atheists likely uninhabitable

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Apologetics and the progress of science
Apologetics and the progress of science

I found this story on the Facebook page of my good friend William, who supplies so many of the stories I blog about.

This story is from the University of Warwick.

It says:

The most Earth-like planet could have been made uninhabitable by vast quantities of radiation, new research led by the University of Warwick has found.

The atmosphere of the planet, Kepler-438b, is thought to have been stripped away as a result of radiation emitted from a superflaring Red Dwarf star, Kepler-438.

Regularly occurring every few hundred days, the superflares are approximately ten times more powerful than those ever recorded on the Sun and equivalent to the same energy as 100 billion megatons of TNT.

While superflares themselves are unlikely to have a significant impact on Kepler-438b’s atmosphere, a dangerous phenomenon associated with powerful flares, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), has the potential to strip away any atmosphere and render it uninhabitable.

The planet Kepler-438b, to date the exoplanet with the highest recorded Earth Similarity Index, is both similar in size and temperature to the Earth but is in closer proximity to the Red Dwarf than the Earth is to the Sun.

Lead researcher, Dr David Armstrong of the University of Warwick’s Astrophysics Group, explains:

“Unlike the Earth’s relatively quiet sun, Kepler-438 emits strong flares every few hundred days, each one stronger than the most powerful recorded flare on the Sun. It is likely that these flares are associated with coronal mass ejections, which could have serious damaging effects on the habitability of the planet.

“If the planet, Kepler-438b, has a magnetic field like the Earth, it may be shielded from some of the effects. However, if it does not, or the flares are strong enough, it could have lost its atmosphere, be irradiated by extra dangerous radiation and be a much harsher place for life to exist”.

Discussing the impact of the superflares and radiation on the atmosphere of Kepler-438b, Chloe Pugh, of the University of Warwick’s Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics, says:

“The presence of an atmosphere is essential for the development of life. While flares themselves are unlikely to have a significant impact on an atmosphere as a whole, there is another more dangerous phenomenon associated with powerful flares, known as a coronal mass ejection.

“Coronal mass ejections are where a huge amount of plasma is hurled outwards from the Sun, and there is no reason why they should not occur on other active stars as well. The likelihood of a coronal mass ejection occurring increases with the occurrence of powerful flares, and large coronal mass ejections have the potential to strip away any atmosphere that a close-in planet like Kepler-438b might have, rendering it uninhabitable. With little atmosphere, the planet would also be subject to harsh UV and X-ray radiation from the superflares, along with charged particle radiation, all of which are damaging to life”.

The research, The Host Stars of Kepler’s Habitable Exoplanets: Superflares, Rotation and Activity, is published by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

I would send this along to my atheist friends, but they will just wag their fingers at me and tell me that Star Trek and Star Wars have disproved all that experimental science “superstition”.

It’s Friday night, so it might be a good time for everyone to get up to speed with the habitability argument. And look, you can do that for free by watching the 90-minute documentary entitled “The Privileged Planet”. It’s free and it’s awesome!

Have fun!

News

Are Christians who use other people’s money to help others “generous”?

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Gross public debt, Democrats control spending in 2007
Gross public debt, Democrats control spending in 2007

Normal Americans who work for a living know that you cannot be generous with someone else’s money – you have to earn your own money and give your own money away if you want to be “generous”. And this is actually what the Bible says – be generous to others with your own money. There is no support in the Bible for discharging your obligations to people in need by having a secular leftist government subsidize their abortions, etc. But many Christians escape the need to be generous with their own money by voting for the secular government to take someone else’s money. This way, they can have the feelings of being generous without having to make the sacrifice themselves.

So here are my points in response to this “stolen valor” view of generosity, which seems to be so popular with dependent professors and dependent pastors who do not work in the private sector.

First, illegal immigration and refugee asylum typically costs us money, since unskilled immigrants and asylum’d refugees do not typically pay as much in taxes as they using in taxpayer-funded benefits.

Evidence:

  • Under current law, all unlawful immigrant households together have an aggregate annual deficit of around $54.5 billion.
  • In the interim phase (roughly the first 13 years after amnesty), the aggregate annual deficit would fall to $43.4 billion.
  • At the end of the interim phase, former unlawful immigrant households would become fully eligible for means-tested welfare and health care benefits under the Affordable Care Act. The aggregate annual deficit would soar to around $106 billion.
  • In the retirement phase, the annual aggregate deficit would be around $160 billion. It would slowly decline as former unlawful immigrants gradually expire.

These costs would have to be borne by already overburdened U.S. taxpayers. (All figures are in 2010 dollars.)

Meanwhile, the same people who want big government to help the poor probably do not even realize that the national debt has doubled under Obama to $20 trillion, as of January 2017. Now do the people who want to give away all these benefits via big government intend to pay for it with their own money as the Bible says? No, they intend to pass the costs onto generations yet unborn via the national debt. They want to feel generous themselves, but with someone else’s money. There is a word for that – we call that slavery. It turns out that big government Christians really are in favor of slavery. They want to force the next generation to work tomorrow, so that they can feel generous today.

Government not serious about protecting the public

Second, we know that big government cannot be trusted to deport criminals, because we saw that on display in the Kate Steinle affair, where an illegal immigrant who had many prior convictions was released to commit worse crimes. If you think that illegal immgrants get deported after committing serious crimes, you really need to reconsider how trustworthy government is about border security.

For example, Senate Democrats blocked a bill to crack down on sanctuary cities.  Although amnesty and asylum for refugees sounds good, it relies on big government being serious about enforcing the law, and protecting the public. During the Obama administration, we have seen the Snowden leak, the Clinton private e-mail server which was hacked by foreign governments, the Benghazi coverup, the arms smuggling to drug cartels by the ATF, the China hack, the wikileaks leak by gay private Bradley Manning who got a taxpayer funded sex change, etc.

Previously, we saw how the parents of the Boston bombers were granted asylum as Chechen refugees. That was a failure of national security. And the FBI has already explained that our procedures for vetting refugees is inadequate. The refugees, by the way, are selected by the United Nations and a Muslim organization affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. So it’s just wishful thinking to think that this is a priority for the government. And recall that about 5 seconds after Obama bragged about how he had “contained” ISIS (Islamic State), the Paris attack happened. Democrats do not care about national security, so we cannot trust them to vet refugees. The people who want Syrian refugees to come in are depending on big government to take national security seriously. But we have zero evidence that they can do that.

Here’s Hillary Clinton:

Hillary Clinton focused on her real enemy – Americans who disagree with her – in a campaign speech on Thursday.
In a statement her own campaign Tweeted out as her marquee comment, Clinton declared: “Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.”

The UK Daily Mail describes Clinton as “reading her speech at a brisk clip from a teleprompter at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City,” but slowing down to mock Republicans over the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” which “Republicans often accuse President Barack Obama of purposefully avoiding.”

The Daily Mail cheekily notes that Clinton “referred repeatedly to ‘radical jihadism’ as a global scourge, but didn’t explain how the concept of jihadism is consistent with the notion that adherents of the world’s second largest religion are wholly uninvolved.”

Remember, this is the person who sent and received classified e-mails on a private unsecure email server, and blamed a terrorist attack on a YouTube video – for political gain. And it’s people like her who are promising us that they are serious about deporting illegal immigrants who commit crimes, and vetting refugees who are coming from Muslim countries.

What I have found in asking people who want amnesty and asylum for refugees is that they are incredibly uninformed about things like the national debt, the costs, the risks, etc. I don’t see why people trust the government to enforce border security law, deport lawbreakers, and vet refugees carefully. I think people who clown around advocating for policies based on their feelings and a misreading of the Bible need to be more cautious and humble. You don’t know how the world works, so shut your ignorant mouths before you get more people killed, and pass more debt onto the next generation. If you want to do something for refugees, do it yourself. If you want to do something for the poor in other countries, do it with your own money.