Monday July 11, 2022
Good Morning!
Imagine declaring the taking of pre-born lives an “emergency” and the death of children a “necessity”?
It was Charles Dickens who once wrote, “There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.”
The simple truth is that abortion is the public health emergency, not a post Roe America:
1. Biden weighs authority to declare abortion-related public health emergency
From Reuters:
U.S. President Joe Biden on Sunday said he has asked his administration to consider whether he has authority to declare an abortion-related public health emergency after the Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
The comments come after Biden on Friday signed an executive order to ease access to services to terminate pregnancies.
Biden was on his way to a bike ride near his residence in Delaware when he stopped to speak to reporters, who asked if he was considering declaring a public health emergency regarding abortion access. The president responded that he was asking his staff to see “whether I have the authority” and what the impacts would be.
Biden, a Democrat, has been under pressure from his own party to take action after the landmark decision last month to overturn Roe v. Wade, which upended roughly 50 years of protections for women’s reproductive rights.
RELATED: (DAILY CITIZEN) President Biden Signs Executive Order to Expand Access to Abortions
2. Floating abortion clinic proposed in Gulf to bypass bans
From the Associated Press:
A California doctor is proposing a floating abortion clinic in the Gulf of Mexico as a way to maintain access for people in southern states where abortion bans have been enacted.
The idea is to provide a clinic aboard a ship in federal waters, and out of reach of state laws, that would offer first trimester surgical abortions, contraception and other care, said Dr. Meg Autry, an obstetrician and gynecologist and a professor at the University of California San Francisco.
3. Teen Vogue Updates Abortion Guide
From Fox News:
Although Teen Vogue originally pushed a column on how minors can get abortions back in 2019, contributor Lauren Rankin penned an “update” after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month “on how to navigate abortion restrictions as a teenager.”
“While Roe v. Wade has been overturned and some states have banned abortion, abortion is still legal in most states. [emphasis in original] It is legal for minors to seek information about abortion care, and it is legal for you to travel to another state to have an abortion. Some states may criminalize providing abortion, but having an abortion does not inherently make you a criminal. This article can help you navigate how to get an abortion as a minor in a post-Roe world,” Rankin wrote.
4. The Religious Liberty Winning Streak
From the American Spectator:
This clearly is a Supreme Court interested in protecting Americans’ religious freedom. The difference between it and previous Courts is stark. A study, conducted by Lee Epstein and Eric A. Posner and published in the Supreme Court Review, analyzed every Free Exercise and Establishment Clause case argued before the high bench from 1953 to 2020. That’s 95 cases, or about 1.4 per term. The authors found that the court overseen by Justice Earl Warren, from 1953 to 1969, voted in favor of religion but 46 percent of the time. That number rose steadily through subsequent iterations of the Court, to 51 percent during the Burger Court (1969–1986), to 58 percent when William H. Rehnquist was chief justice (1986–2005), to now 81 percent under Chief Justice John Roberts (2005–).
The sorts of religious cases have also changed over the years. In the Warren Court, most of the rulings in favor of religion benefited minority or non-mainstream practitioners, especially dissenting Christian groups — Seventh-Day Adventists, Amish — while the Roberts Court has heard mostly religious claims brought by mainstream Christians. In explanation, Epstein and Posner write, “One way to think about this pattern is that the Roberts Court extended the Warren Court’s protections for minority religions so as to encompass majority religions as well. The Roberts Court is pro-mainstream religion, and more pro-mainstream Christian than the Warren Court, but not exclusively pro-mainstream.”
Another way to think about it is, the Roberts Court is merely fixing judicial overreach against mainstream Christians in decisions handed down in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, in which prayer was banned from schools, religious displays on public land were ruled unconstitutional, and religious citizens were denied government benefits that were made available to secular parties.
This shift in attitude toward religious freedom can clearly be credited to Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Roberts. The survey, written before Barrett had been long on the bench, called those five “clearly the most pro-religion justices on the Supreme Court going back at least to World War II.” Three of the six justices commonly considered conservative were appointed by Donald Trump.
Having taken a break from wedding vendor cases this past term, the Court will once again venture onto that troubled terrain next term when it listens to the pleas of a Colorado custom web designer who is prohibited, by state statute, from limiting her business to practitioners of traditional marriage. The Court will consider her case only on free-speech grounds, however, and not on religious liberty grounds.
5. Vaccines, Religious Freedom and the Military
From the Wall Street Journal:
Military regulations guarantee religious freedom, but the Pentagon is defying them. More than 24,000 members across the branches have submitted religious-accommodation requests following Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s August 2021 vaccination order. Almost all have been rejected. These troops now face punishment and discharge.
Many religious personnel are Christians who object to using abortion-derived cell lines to develop or test medical products. That precludes them from taking any of the four Covid-19 vaccines the Food and Drug Administration has authorized so far.
Many of these troops survived Covid-19. Before the 2021 mandate, military regulations made prior infection grounds for exemption. The Pentagon is now ignoring this provision, citing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance that discounts natural immunity. Yet commanders haven’t ordered booster shots, which the CDC recommends. Requests for alternatives such as telework, masking and regular testing have also been rejected. The military says these once-common measures are “unavailable.”
The Pentagon’s antireligious animus is obvious in the data on secular exemption requests. The Air Force has approved 1,608 requests based on nonreligious reasons, although it hasn’t disclosed the total number of applications. At the same time, the service approved fewer than 130 of more than 9,000 religious requests submitted by airmen—and these approvals only went to troops voluntarily leaving anyway. As of May 4, 2022, the Marines had approved almost 900 administrative or medical exemptions but only seven religious-accommodation requests out of more than 3,700 applications.
6. ShutDownDC Promises To Pay Tipsters For SCOTUS Whereabouts
From the Daily Wire:
ShutDownDC announced on Friday that organizers would pay anyone who could tip protesters off to the locations of the conservative Supreme Court justices — and the price increased if they were still at the named location 30 minutes later.
The call for tips went out after news broke that Justice Brett Kavanaugh had been forced to leave Morton’s Steak House in Washington, D.C., through a rear exit in order to avoid a crowd of protesters gathered outside the restaurant.
“DC Service Industry Workers… If you see Kavanaugh, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Coney Barrett or Roberts DM us with the details! We’ll venmo you $50 for a confirmed sighting and $200 if they’re still there 30 mins after your message,” @ShutDown_DC’s tweet read.
Politico’s Daniel Lippman reported on Kavanaugh’s disrupted dinner departure, noting, “Justice Brett Kavanaugh had to exit through the rear of Morton’s on Wednesday night after DC protestors showed up out front.”
RELATED: AOC Slammed for Mocking Kavanaugh after he was chased out of restaurant
From the Washington Examiner:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) received major pushback on social media for a post she made mocking Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Kavanaugh was dining at Morton’s The Steakhouse in downtown Washington on Wednesday night when a group of abortion rights protesters was tipped off on his location, forcing him to exit the restaurant through a back door. Ocasio-Cortez joked that the least the protesters could do was “let him eat cake,” a reference to Marie-Antoinette, the queen of France during the French Revolution.
“Poor guy,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “He left before his soufflé because he decided half the country should risk death if they have an ectopic pregnancy within the wrong state lines. It’s all very unfair to him.”
RELATED:
Portlanders: Send Your Little Leftist to Anarchy Camp!
From the Daily Citizen:
Budding Roses Summer Camp is a free two-week program, in Portland, Oregon, where 4th through 8th grade students can explore “social justice issues, youth leadership, arts activist, games and more!”
Due to the COVID-19 shutdowns, Budding Roses did not offer camps the past two years. Parents were forced to teach their children radical anarchism on their own.
But the organization did provide free, online resources, and these demonstrate what children and adolescents will learn this year, when Budding Roses runs its summer camp.
There’s the “Budding Roses Protest and Chant Book.” This isn’t filled with traditional camp songs like “Kumbayah” or “On Top of Spaghetti.” Little anarchists can learn songs like “Solidarity Forever,” the labor rights song from the International Workers of the World,” or there’s Woody Guthrie’s lovely little ditty “All You Fascists Bound to Lose.”
7. Our Sexy Life
From First Things:
Our impulse to decouple sex from its aftermath is one of the deeply inhuman distortions caused by the abortion regime and the contraceptive mentality that infuses it. Technology and readily-available “solutions” bewitch us into believing we can engage in the most intimately personal human act without having to complete the act in an ongoing personal relation. We’ve convinced ourselves we can perform the act that keeps the human species alive without having to worry about keeping the human species alive—even while deliberately intending not to keep the human species alive. Sex has become abortive even when it doesn’t end with an abortion.
We’ve forgotten what sex is for. Yes, it’s for pleasure, and the pleasure is a good gift from our Father. Yes, it’s the most complete expression of the self-gift for which our spousal bodies were designed. But we’ve forgotten that, as Audrey Pollnow has recently argued, the possibility of conception is part of the “pleasure, as well as the excitement” of sex. Sex acts that evade this fuller pleasure “are illusory, sentimental, and warping: They involve the experience of doing the babymaking act without actually doing it.” To shore up its collapsing legal clout, the abortion establishment has found it necessary to demonize the babymaking potential of sex. Kat Rosenfield recently reported at UnHerd that abortion activists, doctors, and the media have conspired to give us “wall-to-wall coverage of the danger of pregnancy and childbirth.” The message is that “no woman in her right mind would ever carry a pregnancy to term unless she had some sort of death wish.” The abortion establishment rubbishes the sacrifices of giving life, while it mourns the lost freedom to take it.
Forty years ago, it was only my wife and me. Now there are an additional thirty-one human beings who would not exist but for us. The proliferation goes beyond mere numbers. It’s a proliferation of projects, plans, aspirations, achievements, gifts, and talents; of dinners, parties, songs; of teaching and learning, jokes and laughter, conversations and debates, worship and prayers, losses and tears. My wife and I have given the world an attorney, a couple of teachers, more than one writer, a game designer, a musician and a couple of filmmakers, an executive assistant who runs a nonprofit, a social worker, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, boys and girls with plans and aspirations that will come to fruition long after my wife and I are gone. Lord willing, Leitharts will keep proliferating for a thousand generations.
This is what the Bible means by “blessing,” and it all began with my wife and me keeping our promise to be “only for you.” We’ve lived the sexy life God created sex for.
8. Chicago Pastor: “I want to be the change instead of expecting someone else to be the change for me.”
From the Daily Citizen:
Pastors are often criticized (sometimes fairly, often not), for burying their head in the sand when it comes to engaging the real problems and people all around them.
It’s called being in the “holy huddle” – the term used to describe the tendency for Christians to only surround themselves with other believers.
But that’s not the case with TJ Grooms, an assistant pastor in Chicago who serves alongside Senior Pastor Corey Brooks at New Beginnings Church on the city’s notoriously violent South side.
You’ll recall Pastor Brooks launched a 100-day “Rooftop Vigil” back in 2021 to raise awareness regarding the senseless killings plaguing the church’s neighborhood and surrounding areas. He is also the founder and CEO of the community anti-violence organization Project H.O.O.D.
But in an interview on national television this morning, Pastor Grooms made clear he’s not waiting for a government agency to step in and solve the escalating crisis. In fact, he even called out the liberal do-nothing politicians who say one thing and yet actually do nothing.
“I’ve gotten to a place to where I no longer expect from them,” he told Fox News’ Bill Hemmer.
He then said you can look out the window at all the carnage and catastrophe and blame others and cry for help – or look in the mirror.
“I want to be the change instead of expecting someone else to be the change for me,” he said.
9. Should I Let My Kids Watch This? 10 Tips for Discerning Parents
From the Gospel Coalition:
How do parents navigate the tension of wanting to protect their kids from harmful content while also avoiding legalism that can backfire? As you disciple your kids through the mind-boggling amount of options they have at their fingertips, what considerations can guide your approach? Though certainly not exhaustive, here are 10 things that might help.
1. Vet the values, not just the rating.
2. Listen to parents, leaders, and critics you trust.
3. Distinguish between ‘not safe, but good’ and ‘safe, but not good.’
4. ‘Educational’ content is not automatically good for your kid.
5. Steer your kid toward content that sparks curiosity.
6. Steer your kids towards content that sparks love for God and people.
7. Don’t let the algorithm pick for your kid.
8. Assess your child’s age and maturity.
9. Find content you can enjoy together.
10. Limit screen time.
10. A Second Grader Used the Heimlich to Save a Classmate – How He Learned It Reminds Us of Media’s Impact
From Plugged In:
When many children are young, their parents will tell them a rendition of “TV is a waste of time and will rot your brain.” While the validity of that claim is yet to be tested, second-grade student David Diaz Jr. will always have a response to it: watching TV helped him save a classmate’s life.
According to Fox News, when David saw another student choking during lunch, he quickly initiated the Heimlich maneuver, saving his classmate’s life. Where did the 7-year-old learn the Heimlich? From watching ABC’s “The Good Doctor,” a show following Shaun, an adept surgeon on the autism spectrum. According to David’s father, he wasn’t even aware David knew how to do the Heimlich.
We’re well aware that Plugged In has a rap of being that website that prevented thousands of kids from getting to see the movies and TV shows they’ve been dying to see. We list the positives and negatives we find in entertainment—movies, TV, you name it—so that parents can make an informed decision about whether the content is right for their family. But while Plugged In helps inform readers what is in their potential entertainment choices, it’s why Plugged In does it that really matters.
Photo from Shutterstock
