To take a single example, is incredibly illuminating to see just how Planned Parenthood reacts to a pregnant woman entering their offices.  Here’s an excellent chart from an older Washington Examiner piece (click here for that whole article):

The numbers are distressing.  The simple fact is, Planned Parenthood exists to prevent or destroy babies.  What other conclusion can be reached?  They broadly proclaim their contraceptive efforts, and the above numbers show just what they do for women who are already pregnant.  Read the rest of the Examiner article to understand the numbers games.

When seeking out the successor to Israel’s first king, Saul, Samuel the prophet went to the home of Jesse. As Jesse’s seven older sons passed before Samuel, each was rejected. God then revealed that he had chosen Jesse’s youngest son, David, to lead His people.

David excelled at many things. He was an accomplished musician and authored many of the Psalms. He became a mighty military leader, defeating the likes of the Amalekites, Ammonites, Edomites, Moabites, Philistines, and Syrians. Furthermore, he was a prophet, with many of the Messianic prophecies attributed to him.

The New Testament lists David in the genealogy of Jesus. Jesus is often referred to as the “Son of David” and the “Root of David.” Throughout the New Testament, David is directly mentioned or alluded to as a “father” or “patriarch” of Israel. Truly, David was a blessed and revered man.

On the other hand, David also was an adulterer and a murderer. Early in his reign, while the army was away and David remained in Jerusalem, he slept with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, a soldier in Israel’s army. When she revealed that she was pregnant, David tried to hide his sin by calling Uriah back home in hopes that some time with his wife would conceal the fact that another man was the father of her child.

When Uriah nobly refused to allow himself the comforts of home while his comrades were away at war, David plotted with his generals to have Uriah killed in battle. His planned succeeded. Uriah was killed and David then took Bathsheba for his wife.

All of this, and yet God still called David “a man after My own heart.” Certainly David suffered dire consequences for his sin (including the death of the son Bathsheba bore), but God never abandoned him, and David repented and turned back to God. King David ruled Israel for over three decades.

As America is embroiled in another presidential primary season, we would do well to keep the lessons of King David in mind. Of course, this is not to say that we need to seek out adulterers and murderers as our leaders, but it is a fact that each of us has our shortcomings (“all have sinned”). How many of us would look “electable” if all of our baggage were laid out for all to see?

Newt Gingrich is a man with much baggage. A presidential candidate on his third marriage should give any voter great pause. It is quite noteworthy that, if not for his marital shortcomings, Gingrich would probably be the clear GOP frontrunner. (His critics point to other issues in his personal and political past, but by far the largest millstone around Newt’s neck is the failure of his marriages.) This speaks volumes to the consequences of divorce. I think it also speaks well of many within the republican electorate that such matters are still considered significant when going to the ballot box.

However, Gingrich’s adulteries alone should not disqualify him from being the GOP nominee. I don’t say this lightly. I despise the plague of divorce that has ravaged our nation for decades. As a teacher of teenagers for nearly 20 years, I know all too well the sad consequences that divorce brings.

When a politician’s past indiscretions (sin) are of such nature that it brings into question whether he is fit to lead, there are several things to consider—at least for a Christian voter. The first question to ask: is he currently walking in faith? The second question goes hand-in-hand with the first: is he repentant?

Now, as C.S. Lewis notes, “repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into…it means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death.”

I’m not sure if Mr. Gingrich has gotten to this point, but if he has, he needs to make it clear to us. Many evangelical voters took great comfort when, in the last presidential race, John McCain told Pastor Rick Warren that he took responsibility for the failure of his first marriage and that it was the greatest regret of his life.

Newt is certainly no King David, and this column is not an endorsement of him. In fact, I have issues with him that go beyond his marital past. However, each of the GOP candidates has his “issues.” Nevertheless, ANY of them is a VAST improvement over Obama, and I will eagerly cast my vote for whoever is the GOP nominee.

Trevor Thomas resides in Gainesville, GA with his wife and four small children. He has a bachelor’s degree in physics and two graduate degrees in mathematics education. He has taught high school mathematics in public and private schools for the last 17 years and has written opinion columns for the last nine years. www.trevorgrantthomas.com

The CJS Forum seeks to promote an open exchange of ideas about the relationship between faith, culture, law and public policy. While all the articles are original and written especially for the CJS Forum, they do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for a Just Society.

Picture above from Flickr user Gage Skidmore licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License

• An aversion to rapid change; a belief that tradition and prevailing social norms often contain within them handed down wisdom; and mistrust of attempts to remake society so that it conforms to an abstract account of what would be just or efficient.
• A desire to preserve the political philosophy and rules of government articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
• An embrace of free-market capitalism, and a belief in the legitimacy of market outcomes.
• A belief that America is an exceptional nation, a shining city on a hill, whose rightful role is leader of the free world.
• A belief that America should export its brand of democracy through force of arms.
• An embrace of localism, community and family ties, human scale, and a responsibility to the future.
• A belief that America shouldn’t intervene in the affairs of other nations except to defend ourselves from aggression and enforce contracts and treaties.
• A desire to be left alone by government, often coupled with a belief that being left alone is a natural right.

There are many more – click here to read the whole list.  Friedersdorf goes on to lay out which views each of the Republican Presidential candidates appears to hold.

The list is thought provoking and enlightening.  A conservative can certainly hold to many differing beliefs while still being a conservative, but Friedersdorf brings up a more interesting question: What defines actual conservatism?  Look over the list – which things do you think are specific to conservatism against, say, a progressive perspective?  A belief in tradition and an emphasis on local community seem obvious, but what of the others?  Which things may simply be common Republican beliefs but not be inherently conservative?  And which entries do you hold to?

The startling success of this method seems to refute the idea that “pluripotency” — the ability of stem cells to become nearly any cell in the body — is necessary for a cell to transform from one cell type to another.

It raises the possibility that embryonic stem cell research, as well as a related technique called “induced pluripotency,” could be supplanted by a more direct way of generating cells for therapy or research.

Advances in inducing pluripotency in adult cells were exciting, but the above approach would simplify things and eliminate many of the concerns over cancer and viruses.  Hopefully things continue to go well and this method can be tried with humans soon.  Keep an eye on this technology as it develops – it has huge implications for the future of health and longevity.

The evidence for this charge?  Gingrich asserted that Mr. Obama “was the greatest food-stamp president in American history” and that his cabinet “looked like Mickey Mouse and Goofy.”  Inasmuch as the majority of Americans receiving government entitlements, food stamps and otherwise, are white and the President’s cabinet has a predominantly pale hue, these statements were a bald act of race-baiting.  After all, South Carolina is the home of Fort Sumter and John C. Calhoun, and the Times has never been an organization to let facts get in the way of a good argument.  More than 150 years after the Civil War, the Old Gray Lady is still waving the Bloody Shirt from the sheltered confines of her tony West Side Manhattan headquarters.

It is no secret to the few who actually still read the Times that the organization prides itself on its Progressive views.  It is pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, and favors the use of government as an instrument for the redistribution of wealth.  It believes that global warming and Darwinian evolution are established, indisputable facts.  Anyone who departs from this orthodoxy, i.e. the majority of Republicans, is branded by the Times as an unenlightened, anti-choice, anti-science, homophobic, racist, xenophobic troglodyte.  In addition to serving as ideological fodder for its Liberal fan base, these ad hominem caricatures are designed to have a chilling effect on voters who might be inclined to embrace a candidate upon whom the Times does not look favorably.  

It is any wonder, then, that Gingrich’s attacks on the elite media establishment are resonating with voters in America’s hinterlands and “fly-over” states?  Any surprise that many conservatives have lost confidence in the once-revered bastions of American journalism and now look to other outlets for news and information?

For all of the faults that may be found with the Republican debates (and there are many), at least the candidates’ rhetoric more often than not includes appeals to facts and logic.  Liberals might prefer vague allusions to “hope and change” to the sometimes uncomfortable realities of America’s current political, economic, and social condition, but South Carolina voters and millions like them across these United States are fed up with meaningless, feel-good rhetoric and are ready for action – with or without the blessing of the New York Times.

Ken Connor is an attorney and co-author of “Sinful Silence: When Christians Neglect Their Civic Duty”  He is also Chairman of the Center for a Just Society.

Picture above from Flickr Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic, user Joe Shlabotnik.

Townhall

Renew America

Christian Post

American Clarion

Carroll Standard

Free Republic

“Newt Turns the Tables” was linked by:

Topix

USA Today Topics Page

Page2Rss

In the latest development, Catholics fight back (click here to read the whole article from The Blaze):

Over the weekend, the Catholic Church’s letter went beyond simply issuing oppositional rhetoric to media. Instead, priests read an open note to congregations across the country, dubbing the administration‘s take on women’s health and religious violations as an attack on their faith. In the letter, Bishops highlighted what they called “an alarming and serious matter,“ as their words contended that the federal government has ”dealt a heavy blow” to the Catholic population.

In it, Catholic leaders went on to say that the Church “cannot—we will not—comply with this unjust law,” as it violates the Catholic conscience. Additionally, the church says that it is faced with a difficult decision — either comply and violate its faith or drop coverage for employees and suffer the consequences. The letter urges congregants to take action and to call Congress in an attempt to overturn the regulation.

It will be interesting to watch how this plays out.  Perhaps the one-year delay by the Obama administration is an effort to kick the can down the road until the next term, avoiding the contentious issue during an election year.

Catholics are once again standing strong for their beliefs.  Now it’s up to the Obama administration: What’s more important?  Contraception coverage as a no-exceptions standard or basic, necessary medical coverage for the thousands of people who will be impacted if Catholic institutions drop medical insurance for their employees.

Townhall

Renew America

Catholic Lane

Carroll Standard

CNS News

“How Vulture Capitalism Endangers America’s Elderly” was linked by:

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that.

Roughly six million are currently in our prisons.  Among the many problems with our system:

A growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible.

Adam Gopnik, author of the article, spends time investigating efforts in the 90′s onward that led to a startling decline in crime in New York City:

Instead, small acts of social engineering, designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime. In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened—“hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk”—“designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already.

Gopnik commends small steps that change behaviors – opening doors for good opportunities and blocking easy access to crime.  One example he used was closing down the drug market in Washington Square.  Such actions either eliminate or reduce criminal activity.  Crime stops or it goes into less convenient places.

So what are Gopnik’s conclusions?  Basically, he believes that we need to change our tactics in our approach to crime while also making wiser decisions about precisely which kinds of activities we deem prison-worthy.  Near the conclusion of his piece:

Which leads, further, to one piece of radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five years? It seems likely that anyone for whom those sanctions aren’t sufficient is someone for whom no sanctions are ever going to be sufficient.

I find it difficult to weigh the justice in such a situation.  Do community service and public disgrace balance against the wrong of some of these crimes?  At the same time, surely community service is closer to the ideal of paying recompense for your crime than merely spending time in a cell.  A prisoner does not pay back his community – far from it – he requires thousands of tax dollars to support in prison.

There is much we could do to reduce our prison population, and we should get serious about finding solutions.  Surely many men and women would rather work to atone for their crimes than sit in a jail cell for months or years.

Such adjustments still would not change the reality of prison for violent crime, but they would massively reduce our taxpayer burden.  This is made all the more desirable if prison itself cannot be shown to be a great deterrent to crime.

I’m not sure that I agree with Gopnik’s exact proposals, but we should really reconsider how we deal with petty crime and whether time in a cell is really justice at all in some of these cases.

Click here to read the whole piece.  It’s excellent, fascinating reporting and opinion.

Who will be the winners and losers from this new policy? One thing is clear, retirees and those nearing retirement are sure to be among the losers. The conservative saver will have a hard time finding a safe, short-term, liquid investment that exceeds the 2% inflation target. Accepting a safe, but low-return investment that does not beat inflation means that the saver’s purchasing power slowly withers. The new formal policy of setting the inflation target 2% over the overnight cash rate target is in effect a wealth tax. It is a tax that congressmen neither had a chance to vote on nor debate. Who is the winner from this new stealth tax? It must be the biggest borrower – the Federal Government since it can borrow vast sums of money at negative real interest rates. In essence, in inflation-adjusted terms, investors are willing to pay the U.S. Treasury to borrow money from them. To avoid the implicit wealth tax investors will be tempted to take more risk than they might otherwise be inclined to, merely to have a chance to earn a positive, after-inflation return on their savings. This is exactly what the Federal Reserve is hoping for: that investors will spend their cash and bid up the price of risky assets.

Is it possible that interest rates are too low? The premise has been that low interest rates will fix the housing market and stimulate economic activity. Although this has worked in the past, both housing and the broader economy remain weak. Other factors are at work holding back the economy, such as a raft of new Federal regulations, consumer deleveraging and a hangover of bad mortgages from the last boom. It may even be the case that these ultra-low interest rates are restraining consumption as the growing number of baby-boomer retirees who now live off their savings cut back. After all, the Fed’s announced policy is effectively a wealth tax and tax increases never stimulate the economy.

Most importantly this new wealth tax is just not right. Our Constitution gives Congress the power to levy federal taxes, not the Federal Reserve. This hidden tax falls hardest on seniors and near-retirees who are not rich and can ill afford to take a lot of risk with their investments. Whether the Fed’s policy is good or bad for the economy really is not the point.

The point is that this is a stealth tax on all assets that are expected to earn less than 2%, which includes nearly all of the deposits that Americans hold in banks. Under our Constitution Congress has the power to tax. We need a law that says if the Federal Reserve deliberately sets short-term interest rates below the rate of inflation for a sustained period then Congress and the President need to approve the move, as they would in passing any other tax increase. Citizens could then once again have taxation with representation.

J. Victor Thompson, CFA, is President of Bulwark Capital. Please email your comments to forum@centerforajustsociety.org.

The CJS Forum seeks to promote an open exchange of ideas about the relationship between faith, culture, law and public policy. While all the articles are original and written especially for the CJS Forum, they do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for a Just Society.

Picture above from Wikimedia Creative Commons