News

Bobby Jindal to counter pro-Planned Parenthood protest by showing sting videos on loop

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Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal

This is real leadership from a real social conservative.

Life News reports:

If you’re the pro-life governor of one of the states that has been at the forefront of stopping the abortion industry, how do you counter a rally to support the Planned Parenthood abortion business at a time when it’s been exposed selling aborted babies and their body parts? If you’re Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, you screen the shocking expose’ videos outside the governor’s mansion for the public to see.

Jindal’s office said Tuesday that the pro-life Republican presidential candidate will set up a huge screen outside the governor’s mansion and run each of the seven shocking expose videos of Planned Parenthood on a loop. The move will generate further publicity for the videos that the mainstream media have either defended or virtually ignored.

Assuming the shorter versions of each of the videos is shown, that’s approximately an hour of footage Jindal’s office will show the public over and over again. If Jindal shows the full unedited versions of the videos, that would consume even more time.

ns into Planned Parenthood in light of undercover video footage from an anti-abortion-rights group that scrutinizes the health provider’s fetal tissue donation program.

The group says the footage shows Planned Parenthood illegally profiting from fetal tissue donations, among other claims.

Make no mistake, the showing of these videos is being done specifically to target the pro-Planned Parenthood demonstrators. Most people who are still defending Planned Parenthood have not watched the videos. In that sense, they are similar to Western journalists who defended Stalin because they refused to learn the truth about what Stalin was doing, for example, by starving millions of Ukrainians to death. But Governor Jindal has a cure for that: show them the videos. Confront them with exactly what it is they support. They are lining up to be impacted, and he is not going to miss his chance to attack the ringleaders of the pro-abortion movement.

UPDATE: Governor Jindal has posted a video about the Planned Parenthood protest:

They ran away from the videos to a far corner of the lawn, where they wouldn’t have to watch them. Ran away from the truth.

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley
South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley

Meanwhile, other Republican governors have also been busy. Another Indian-American Republican governor, Nikki Haley, has launched an investigation against Planned Parenthood in South Carolina:

Following shocking videos showing the Planned Parenthood abortion business selling aborted babies and their body parts, pro-life South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley has launched an official investigation. The state is one of 12 that have officially launched investigations while other states have de-funded Planned Parenthood.

[…]Haley asked the South Carolina health department to look into the practices at the state’s abortion clinics, according to a local news report, and complained that the state health department has been lax about inspecting abortion clinics…

South Carolina is number 12, and Florida was number 11:

Florida officials are today reiterating to the Planned Parenthood abortion business that it may not do 2nd-trimester abortions on unborn babies in the state in violation of state laws. Planned Parenthood abortion clinics in Florida are not happy they were caught illegally doing 2nd-trimester abortions, so they sued the state to keep doing them and the state is once again saying no.

The state of Florida launched an investigation into the Planned Parenthood abortion business aftermultiple expose’ videos have caught the abortion business selling the body parts of aborted babies. State health department inspectors found Planned Parenthood illegally doing the kind of later abortions that allow Planned Parenthood to gather the body parts of aborted babies for sale.

Florida became the 11th state to launch a investigation into Planned Parenthood after the abortion company was exposed selling the body parts of aborted babies. Florida Governor Rick Scott, who is pro-life, ordered an investigation of 16 statewide Planned Parenthood offices.

Scott asked the Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) to immediately begin investigating the 16 Planned Parenthood offices in Florida that perform abortion procedures to ensure they are in full compliance with the law.

They found three have performed procedures outside the scope of their licenses and one has not kept proper records on disposing fetal remains.

There are lots of protests against Planned Parenthood going on nationwide, this Saturday. You might want to consider attending one, if what Planned Parenthood is doing upsets you.

Videos

Peter J. Williams lectures on the historical reliability of the gospel narratives

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Peter J. Williams
Peter J. Williams

Here’s the main lecture: (54 minutes)

And here’s the Q&A: (9 minutes)

About Peter Williams:

Peter J. Williams is the Warden (CEO) of Tyndale House and a member of the Faculty of Divinity in the University of Cambridge. He received his MA, MPhil and PhD, in the study of ancient languages related to the Bible from Cambridge University. After his PhD, he was on staff in the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge University (1997–1998), and thereafter taught Hebrew and Old Testament there as Affiliated Lecturer in Hebrew and Aramaic and as Research Fellow in Old Testament at Tyndale House, Cambridge (1998–2003). From 2003 to 2007 he was on the faculty of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, where he became a Senior Lecturer in New Testament and Deputy Head of the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy. In July 2007 he became the youngest Warden in the history of Tyndale House. He also retains his position as an honorary Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies at the University of Aberdeen.

Summary of the lecture:

  • What if the stories about Jesus are legendary?
  • were the gospels transmitted accurately?
  • were the gospels written in the same place as where the events happened?
  • do the gospel authors know the customs and locations where the events happened?
  • do the gospels use the right names for the time and place where the events took place?
  • do the gospels disambiguate people’s names depending on how common those names were?
  • how do the New Testament gospels compare to the later gnostic gospels?
  • how do the gospels refer to the main character? How non-Biblical sources refer to Jesus?
  • how does Jesus refer to himself in the gospels? do the later Christians refer to him that way?
  • how does Jesus teach? do later Christians teach the same way?
  • why didn’t Jesus say anything about early conflicts in the church (the Gentiles, church services)?
  • did the writers of the gospels know the places where the events took place?
  • how many places are named in the gospels? how about in the later gnostic gospels?
  • are the botanical details mentioned in the gospels accurate? how about the later gnostic gospels?

And here are the questions from the audience:

  • how what about the discrepancies in the resurrection narratives that Bart Ehrman is obsessed with?
  • what do you think of the new 2011 NIV translation (Peter is on the ESV translation committee)?
  • how did untrained, ordinary men produce complex, sophisticated documents like the gospels?
  • is oral tradition a strong enough bridge between the events and the writers who interviewed the eyewitnesses?
  • what does the name John mean?
  • why did the gospel writers wait so long before writing their gospels?
  • do you think that Matthew and Luke used a hypothetical source which historians call “Q”?
  • which gospel do critical historians trust the least and why?

I really enjoyed watching this lecture. He’s getting some of this material from Richard Bauckham’s awesome book “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses”, so if you aren’t familiar with it, you can get an idea of what’s in it. Peter Williams is a lot of fun to listen to – an excellent speaker.

 

Events

Advice for organizing a protest against Planned Parenthood on Saturday, August 22nd

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Young pro-life women defending unborn children's right to life
Young pro-life women defending unborn children’s right to life

This Saturday, protests are being held at Planned Parenthood abortion clinics across the nation. One of the people I mentor wanted to organize an event in her home state. So, I arranged a conversation between her and an expert pro-life debater, who has a lot of experience with these things. I listened in and contributed to the discussion, and I took notes, as well. They gave me permission to type up the notes on this blog. I think it makes for an interesting post.

So the first thing the expert said was that it’s a good idea to contact someone at City Hall, in order to get the permit to hold a protest. If you have a protest with more than X people, you need a permit. X depends on where you are doing the protest. The permit normally takes a week or so to get.  Permits cost money, and you have to say the time period during which you will be protesting. Expert also said that it was a good idea to get the name and number of the person at City Hall, in case the police arrive and ask questions. Expert also recommended talking to the police and asking about what the law says, and then getting the officer’s name, phone number and badge number. Expert said that the person at the station will likely outrank any police officer who shows up, which is good because it really shows that the demonstrators have done their homework.

Expert said it was a useful thing to know whether there was going to be a counter-protest. The way these things work is that you have to stand on the sidewalk, and you can’t block access to anything, and you have to not use wood handles on your signs. If you run out of space, you can stand on the other side of the street, on the sidewalk. Expert said it was a good idea to have a coffee / snack event after the protest is over and debrief.

Expert recommended that Organizer have many copies of a press release from a national organization like Created Equal in case anyone from the media asked what the protest was about. Expert suggested that copies of the press release be sent to the local media – newspapers, radio and local TV news. Expert wanted to spend the rest of the time doing mock interviews with Organizer, where he would be the journalist and she would answer his mock questions.

Basically, Expert said that the media would show up and ask the following questions:

  1. Who are you? Organizer would reply with name
  2. Why are you here? Organizer would explain that because of the Center for Medical Progress videos, there were allegations that Planned Parenthood was breaking the law, that she wanted to raise awareness about the videos, that she wanted Planned Parenthood investigated, and then if the investigations found evidence of misconduct, then she wanted Planned Parenthood to be de-funded.
  3. Where do these allegations come from? Organizer will mention where the videos can be found online, and urge the journalists and the people hearing / seeing this on the news to watch the videos. Expert recommended mentioning the place where the videos can be see in all answers from now on in the interview, since that is the main point to make and that we did not want it to be cut out during the editing process.
  4. What did you see in the videos? Organizer says that she saw attempts to maximize how money is being charged to buyers rather than just recovering costs, abortion procedures being altered to maximize revenue, partial-borth abortions being performed, and mother’s refusal to consent being disregarded.
  5. Respond to critics’ charge that videos are highly-edited. Organizer should reply that the full videos for many of the clips are posted online at the CMP web site, and that people should go and watch the videos.
  6. What do you want people to do about this? Organizer wanted to urge people to watch the videos, and then contact their local legislators and governor to get the investigation and possible de-funding started.

There is a good Newsbusters article that I tweeted earlier that has all the videos in one place, so if you haven’t watched them, do it. And if you want to organize or attend a protest this Saturday, hope this post helps you.

Resources for the #ProtestPP event are here, including a sample press release.

And here is a quick primer on debating the abortion issue:

It’s actually not as scary as you think to debate it, you just have to stay calm, and be used to hearing different points of view. Reading “The Case for Life” by Scott Klusendorf is more than enough background to debate this issue.