Give a friend the "gift" of death -- Planned Parenthood gift certificates for abortion

Planned Parenthood chapters in Illinois and Indiana are piggybacking off of the Christmas season, which represents life and the coming of Christ, to promote death. They're promoting their abortion business and other activities through the sale of gift certificates.

According to a Chicago Tribune article:

What do you get the person who has everything—except adequate health insurance? If you live in Indiana, consider this offering from the state's Planned Parenthood affiliate: gift certificates in $25 increments.

The vouchers, available online and at 35 clinics statewide, can be used for health services or contraceptives. And yes, they can be used to pay for abortions.

Betty Cockrum, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Indiana, characterizes the response to the gift certificates as "pretty robust, and generally very favorable."

She estimates that "about a dozen" certificates have sold since they became available Nov. 25. Planned Parenthood of Illinois plans to sell similar gift certificates starting Monday.

This is another example of Planned Parenthood having no shame.

A billion here, a billion there starts to add up.

The state of Minnesota is facing a $5.2 billion budget deficit over the next two and a half years. The previous whopper of a state budget deficit was $4.2 billion in 2003. I've heard a legislator say that in the following two year budget cycle they're looking at another $4.6 billion budget deficit. In other words, there are major structural spending problems facing our state.

The Star Tribune noted Tom Hanson, Finance Commissioner's comment that spending has been growing very rapidly while at the same time tax revenues are dropping.

Tom Hanson, commissioner of state management and budget, said revenues will be $579 million below forecast for the biennium beginning in July, while spending already authorized is expected to grow by 6.1 percent. He said the revenue decline is expected to be greater than during the budget woes of 2003.

The state's economist said things could get worse, making this the worse recession since World War II. I wonder if he should have said the 1930s.

State economist Tom Stinson painted a dire picture of the recession driving the deficit, predicting it would be "similar to that of the worst recession since World War II," referring to a downturn in the 1980s. He described "massive losses of wealth," and an economic terrain that is "just plain ugly."

"This could be the worst economy in 25 years," he said. "It could be the worst since World War II."

Stinson warned against expecting a quick recovery, noting that more people are closer to retirement now than during the downturn of the 1980s, and therefore would likely save new earnings rather than spend it, slowing any recovery.

Stinson stressed that the forecast was not a worst-case projection. "Things could be worse, they could be noticeably worse between now and the end of the biennium," he said.

As with any crisis it may also be an opportunity both personally and corporately. Going through cancer earlier this year forced me to look at what's of first importance in life and death. (You realize life is short however long one lives on this earth.) So too with a financial crisis, we'll need to reexamine personal priorities and make financial cutbacks. At the same time, as a society we'll need to re-examine how we do business. Should government take over responsibility for more and more areas of life or will we realize that we need to start caring for one another in our families, neighborhoods, churches, and communities and not just look to the government.

Unable to walk the talk on abortion.

I came across a commentary by Chuck Colson on a recent Washington Post Magazine story about a pro-abortion medical student, Lesley Wojick.

The Post article chronicles her experiences as a medical student and the interplay of her pro-abortion views and her actual experiences assisting doctors perform abortions.

The article reveals her post-modern thinking on truth (We really can't know it.) and the reality of actually seeing an abortion and her belief she couldn't go through with being an abortionist.

Her mindset -- what's true for you maybe not be true for someone else -- is classic moral relativism; morality is like having a preference for vanilla or chocolate ice cream. And we can't really know what's true is postmodernism.

At the lunchtime discussion, Lesley was surrounded by people opposed to abortion. A pediatrician from Johns Hopkins was discussing her practice of refusing to prescribe birth control pills to adolescents because she is morally opposed to it.

Hearing the doctor made Lesley wince. She herself had spent many hours teaching teens about contraceptives. She had won an Albert Schweitzer fellowship to develop a health education program at Mountain Manor, a residential treatment facility for teens in Baltimore, that addressed sexually transmitted diseases, contraception, abortion and adoption. She'd shown the girls at Mountain Manor how to use a condom and urged them to carry condoms with them.

She couldn't imagine refusing to prescribe birth control pills to girls who were sexually active. "Just keep your mouth shut," Lesley said she told herself. "Don't say anything." She knew she wasn't going to change minds.

But later, before she left, she did ask the doctor one question: "How do you advise patients without appearing judgmental?"

The answer -- that appearing judgmental wasn't the doctor's concern, only doing what she felt was right for patients -- made Lesley realize that "there are people who wholeheartedly believe they are doing their patients good" by not mentioning abortion or prescribing birth control pills. She found that problematic. "You can't assume what is right for you is right for the patient," she decided.

This led her to ask herself another question: When is it appropriate to interject our judgment, and when isn't it? Nobody really knows, she concluded. Not Medical Students for Choice, not the Catholic students, not the medical school. But they were important questions to explore, she told Litty later. Litty agreed.

If we can't know the truth, then how can we say the holocaust was wrong and evil? Or was Stalin's murder of millions wrong if done for the greater "good" of the state? This is why postmodernism and moral relativism are so dangerous to a society and culture.

Another abortion patient she encountered highlights the person who will cavalierly destroy unborn life within her if that life is viewed as an obstacle to getting what she wants in life.

A third patient, a 23-year-old college student wearing red high heels, had become pregnant because the patch she used as birth control kept falling off. She didn't realize she was pregnant at first. Now she needed a second-term abortion. Lesley was struck by how resolute the young woman was. She was earning a degree, and said she couldn't care for a child if she wanted to achieve her goal. She was scheduled for the procedure for the following morning.

Lesley decides she doesn't want to be an abortionist, because she didn't want to be "[v]acuuming out a uterus and counting the parts of the fetus," but she's still glad she did it.

As for obstetrics, the once-perfect mix of medical, surgical and preventive care for women, Lesley hadn't loved very much about it. Even as she'd shadowed the abortion doctor, Lesley knew in her heart that this would not be the right place for her to make a difference. It was a big disappointment, she said. "I really thought I'd love it."

The things she cared about -- taking care of women, seeing them through the process -- hadn't happened. It was the nurse practitioner who cared for the patient. Vacuuming out a uterus and counting the parts of the fetus did not seem like a desirable way to spend her work days. It took a unique person to do that on a daily basis, she said.

Lesley still believed passionately in abortion rights and was proud of what she'd accomplished at Maryland with her activism. She didn't want to let people down. Even so, she had to follow her heart. Somebody else -- maybe Laura Merkel, the new chapter president of Medical Students for Choice -- would become an abortion provider. But it wouldn't be her.

One can see her shutting off her conscience but not completely. Though she's still "proud" of her pro-abortion activism, she doesn't want to perform them.

I think as more and more people understand the reality of abortion the tide will begin to turn in society as a whole. In a sense that's what happened, to a small degree, with Lesley; she can't see her walking the talk and become an abortionist. She did, in some respects, take a step back in her embrace of abortion.

Is Obama a secret centrist?

That's the subtitle of Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes recent article. He speculates on what sort of president will Barack Obama be.

He notes that:

So the scoreboard looks like this: Three of the four cabinet posts that matter most are going to those with views acceptable to the center-right of the Democratic party. That's Geithner, Clinton, and Gates. The fourth, attorney general, will provoke a confirmation fight if Obama chooses his buddy Eric Holder, famous as President Clinton's deputy attorney general for facilitating the pardon of Marc Rich.

Three out of four isn't bad. Conservatives aren't jumping for joy. But imagine how the left wing of the Democratic party-the dominant wing, after all-feels. Let down would be an understatement.

Organized labor must be crazed over the selection of Summers. As a believer in the indispensability of global trade, Summers is bound to advise Obama to reject labor's call for limitations on trade, especially during a world financial breakdown. In fact, I suspect he's already urged Obama to go along with "card check," labor's latest scheme for unionizing workers, but not the protectionist agenda. Tinkering with trade would unsettle financial markets.

And how about the environmental lobby, which totally embraced Obama? Jones will be hard for environmentalists to stomach. And the foreign policy left? The left views Jones, Clinton, and Gates as enemies.

The losers in the Obama administration, as of now, are Joe Biden and Susan Rice, favorites of the left. Biden's role in foreign policy is likely to be minimal with Clinton at the State Department. She'll squash him if he sticks his head up. Rice, an assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration and an Obama campaign adviser, may wind up as United Nations ambassador, a highly visible but inconsequential post. She'll have little influence.

The Washington cliché about appointments is that personnel is policy. It's an exaggeration but essentially true. If Obama wants to pursue economic and national security policies that would thrill MoveOn.org, William Ayers, and the Democratic left, he has a funny way of showing it. The only reasonable conclusion is he's spurning the left.

I suspect where his left leaning tendencies will come out will be on domestic, social issues. Daschle at HHS will push for government-run universal health care. Obama will appoint very liberal judges. And he'll appeal to homosexuals by pushing for repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act. And on abortion, he'll push for FOCA which would codify abortion on demand.

As Barnes notes:

Obama has dozens of lesser posts to fill, and no doubt he'll use some of those jobs to assuage the left. Labor can probably have whomever it wants as secretary of labor. For all Obama's talk about education reform, chances are he'll bow to the teachers' lobby in choosing an education secretary. If former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle becomes health and human services secretary, that will please the single-payer crowd and the champions of more government-managed health care.

Political realities have a way of straight jacketing politicians, including presidents. Especially today when our economy is in a state of crisis, and internationally, storm clouds are building around the world.

High percent of students cheating and stealing. Should we be surprised?

A study of 29,760 students finds that within the last year 30% of high school students stole from a store and 64% cheated on a test.

While we realize some kids will always steal or cheat, we instinctively know these numbers are a problem. A healthy society is based on trust and when a significantly portion of the society can't be trusted to not cheat or steal then trust is broken down and it costs a significant amount of resources to counter thievery and cheating.

Yet upon further reflection should we be surprised? Our public education system has no moral or ethical foundation for declaring what's right and wrong. Our exclusion of God and the Bible from our education system has made them moral free zones which meant it was only a matter of time before our moral and ethical deficits would begin showing up. (In the 1980s the US Supreme Court banned the posting of Ten Commandments in public schools because they were afraid students would read them and be influenced by them! Seriously, that's what the justices said.)

A secular system which excluded mention of God is not morally neutral but really an anti-religious system. The fact is most people derive their morality from religion. Will Durant, the historian, noted this in his review of the French Revolution where for a while they tried to exorcise religion from society. They soon saw the chaos and backed off. The same will happen in our society, hopefully sooner than later.

An interesting parallel is the problem which exists with sexual immorality. Rather than seeing sexual behaviors as right or wrong, we're told whatever the student desires is acceptable. If you want to be sexually active, fine, just make sure you use a condom. The problem is the underlying behavior hasn't changed; it's still morally right or wrong. And the consequences aren't eliminated either. STDs, abortions, emotional danger continue unabated despite the push for contraceptives.

I hope that eventually reality sinks in regarding right and wrong sexual activity. Unfortunately, unlike stealing and cheating, there are powerful interest groups with a vested interest in promoting and encouraging immoral sexual behavior.