Good Morning!
Saul Alinsky once remarked, “True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within.”
Case in point:
- When it Comes to Abortion, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Robert Menendez Embrace Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”
From Focus on the Family president Jim Daly:
It’s been just over two months since the Supreme Court’s 5-4 vote reversing Roe and sending the issue of abortion back to the states – and propelling abortion activists into full-fledged panic mode.
Earlier this summer, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ) introduced a bill that’s ironically called the “Stop Anti-Abortion Disinformation Act” – legislation that’s supposedly going to address false advertising from pregnancy resource centers. The bill calls on the Federal Trade Commission to issue rules “prohibiting disinformation in the advertising of abortion services.”
Only these clinics don’t deceive women at all – they simply educate, inform, and ensure that mothers are aware of the full range of assistance that exists for them and their baby.
If there’s any “deception” it comes from the abortion lobby and abortion mills like Planned Parenthood. Rather than show mothers an ultrasound of their baby, they’ve been known to cover up the screens, lest the women see their child and decide to carry him or her to term. They try and frighten women into thinking having a child is somehow going to ruin them. They refuse to refer them to adoption clinics or organizations that exist to help single women manage an unexpected pregnancy.
My colleague Nicole Hunt, who writes for Focus on the Family’s Daily Citizen, and who has been deeply involved in the pro-life movement for decades, tells me:
“As a helpline volunteer for a pregnancy resource center, I was trained by the center to tell callers who were abortion-minded that while our organization doesn’t provide abortion services, we would be happy to meet with them to discuss all of their options. We were always honest about the services we provided and the ways we could help.”
History is always a good teacher – and watching and analyzing the Left’s hyperbolic reaction to the High Court’s constitutionally sound decision about life seems to be something straight from Saul Alinsky’s playbook, “Rules for Radicals.”
Just prior to his death in 1972, the Chicago-based community organizer put to paper his strategy for upending culture’s norms. It might be 50 years since Alinsky’s treatise first hit the streets, but that hasn’t stopped the Left from embracing and employing his tactics.
Consider some of Alinsky’s classic techniques:
Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have. If your organization is small, hide your numbers in the dark and raise a din that will make everyone think you have many more people than you do.
Planned Parenthood claims “abortion services” comprise only three percent of their efforts. Yet, if that were true, why are clinics closing down where abortion is now illegal? They hide the real numbers – and in some states like California, never report them at all.
Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.
The Left loves to mock and malign those of us who consider all life sacred. We’re accused of being “in love” with the “fetus,” and they claim we care more about the child than the mother. They ridicule – and choose to ignore – all the wonderful work countless volunteers and pro-life champions have done for the last fifty years to help moms live into God’s will for their lives.
Keep the pressure on. Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period for your purpose. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.”
As conservatives committed to preserving God’s design, we’re naturally going to be on the defensive. It’s good to be on the Lord’s side, but the relentless attacks can be wearisome.
The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, “Okay, what would you do?”
Faced with the reality of an ultrasound image dispelling the lie that a baby is nothing more than a blob of tissue, abortion activists change the subject. A pregnant celebrity can refer to their “baby,” and the tabloids will report it – but in the next article decrying an “attack” on “abortion rights” the baby is now called a “fetus.”
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.
This rule is the coup de grace of abortion activists. Senator Warren and Senator Menendez’s attacks on pregnancy resource centers is a perfect illustration of their use of the tactic. In falsely accusing these pro-life champions, they’re attempting to demonize the very people who stand ready to help the women abortion advocates are actually hurting by supporting abortion.
The abortion lobby likes to try and convince women that their only real option is to get an abortion, because that’s their business model. They make hundreds of millions of dollars for abortions – but zero for adoption referrals.
Abortion zealots like to call themselves “pro-choice” – but let’s be perfectly clear – the abortion industry isn’t “pro-choice” at all. If they were, they would encourage women to know all their options and make a decision that is best for them.
- Google revises search results to better facilitate abortions
From the Post Millennial:
Google will now filter search results to indicate which locations identified as providing pregnancy services specifically provide abortions. The search engine had come under fire from pro-abortion activists for including results for pregnancy centers that do not provide abortions.
Prior to this change, crisis pregnancy centers were also included in search results for abortion clinics. These are centers that help women who are unexpectedly pregnant keep their babies. Crisis pregnancy centers are in the business of facilitating birth, motherhood, and families, and encourage women to keep their babies, often providing help not just to the expecting mother, but for her partner as well.
When a user searches for abortion facilities, those facilities that specifically provide abortions will be labeled as “provides abortions.” If the search engine doesn’t know whether or not a facility provides pregnancy termination, that result will be labeled “might not provide abortions.”
Google search results had not been differentiating between pregnancy centers that seek to help women, and those that offer pregnancy termination. As a result, some women seeking abortions were directed to services that would not provide them. This happened, according to Bloomberg, about a quarter of the time.
- Bad Vibes: Baseball Team Cancels Pro-Life Group’s ‘Family Night’ Hours Before Event
From the Daily Citizen:
The Rocky Mountain Vibes, an independent baseball team of the Pioneer League, has landed in hot water after cancelling its Family Night hours before the first pitch, putting the pro-life organization sponsoring its event on ice.
The Vibes were set to host Family Night last Friday, where award-winning Christian artist Matt Hammitt and his son, Bowen, were set to perform after the game.
The pro-life organizations Save the Storks, and Pikes Peak Citizens for Life, were sponsoring the event – at least, until it was cancelled.
Save the Storks equips pregnancy resource centers (PRCs) with mobile medical clinics (Stork Busses) that can provide women with free pregnancy tests, ultrasounds and STI testing. According to the organization, their Stork Busses have helped PRCs save over 8,000 preborn babies.
- American Academy of Pediatrics Captured by Gender Ideology; Mainstream Professionals Are Calling Them Out
From the Daily Citizen:
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), a 92-year-old, 67,000 member organization, prides itself as the paragon of wisdom on all things good and wise concerning the medical health of our children. But facts say otherwise.
It is no secret that the AAP has been captured by radical leftist politics of late, even to the serious detriment of their professional mission. This is particularly true when it comes to their policy statements and actions on gender ideology. In fact, this organization has been utterly captured and controlled by radical gender activists. Fortunately, its positions are being challenged by some important voices in the medical community.
A major article in the online magazine Quillette details much of the AAP’s troubling and unscientific gender activism, demonstrating how it is contrary to the health of children. The author, Stella O’Malley, a parent and psychotherapist living and working in Ireland, has become deeply critical of the ideological capture taking place in too many professional medical and mental health organizations. She believes too many professional medical organizations are being overrun by gender dogmatists pushing dangerous views of what it means to be male and female at the expense of good science. In her Quillette piece, O’Malley explains the foundations of the AAP’s problematic position on children and gender issues.
- This Teen Was Prescribed 10 Psychiatric Drugs. She’s Not Alone.
From The New York Times:
One morning in the fall of 2017, Renae Smith, a high school freshman on Long Island, N.Y., could not get out of bed, overwhelmed at the prospect of going to school. In the following days, her anxiety mounted into despair.
“I should have been happy,” she later wrote. “But I cried, screamed and begged the universe or whatever godly power to take away the pain of a thousand men that was trapped inside my head.”
Intervention for her depression and anxiety came not from the divine but from the pharmaceutical industry. The following spring, a psychiatrist prescribed Prozac. The medication offered a reprieve from her suffering, but the effect dissipated, so she was prescribed an additional antidepressant, Effexor.
Psychiatrists and other clinicians emphasize that psychiatric drugs, properly prescribed, can be vital in stabilizing adolescents and saving the lives of suicidal teens. But, these experts caution, such medications are too readily doled out, often as an easy alternative to therapy that families cannot afford or find, or aren’t interested in.
- Texas megachurch pastor Matt Chandler steps down after DMs with woman ‘crossed a line’
From USA Today:
A Texas megachurch pastor is taking a leave of absence after his church learned of frequent messages between him and a woman who is not his wife.
Matt Chandler, the lead pastor at the Village Church in Flower Mound, about 30 miles northwest of Dallas, told his congregation on Sunday the move was prompted by what the church’s leaders called inappropriate messages between the pair.
In the statement recorded and shared to the church’s website, the pastor explained that a few months back, a woman approached him in the church’s foyer with concerns about “how I was (direct messaging) on Instagram with a friend of hers.”
“I didn’t think I had done anything wrong in that,” Chandler, 48, told the congregation. “My wife knew that, her husband knew that, and yet there were a couple of things that she said that were disorienting to me.”
7. ‘I Don’t Care About My Career’: Rob Schneider Says He’s ‘Absolutely’ Willing To Lose Everything
From the Daily Wire:
Actor and comedian Rob Schneider said that he was “absolutely” willing to lose everything for what he believes in.
Schneider spoke with Glenn Beck for Monday’s episode of “The Glenn Beck Podcast,” and Beck asked Schneider point blank whether he was prepared for his beliefs to get him canceled and cost him everything.
“Are you willing to lose it all for what you believe?” Beck asked.
Schneider did not even take a moment to think before he reacted: “Absolutely. Because if we don’t have it, then we have nothing.”
“I’m not — I don’t care about my career anymore,” Schneider continued. “I care about my children’s — the country they’re going to live in.”
- Drug typically used in cancer therapy emerges as powerful anti-aging remedy
From Study Finds:
A drug that patients normally take during cancer therapy may have the power to increase the human lifespan, a new study reveals. Researchers in Germany say rapamycin can cause side-effects when patients take it as a lifelong anti-aging treatment. However, their new report finds even brief usage can have a dramatic impact on longevity while cutting down on side-effects.
Rapamycin is a cell growth inhibitor and immunosuppressant that people normally take while undergoing cancer treatment or after receiving an organ transplant. A team from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing, however, notes that the drug is also a promising anti-aging formula. Studies involving animals have found that low doses of rapamycin can extend life by preventing age-related changes in the intestines. Until now, however, scientists have looked at this drug as something patients would need to take for the rest of their lives.
“At the doses used clinically, rapamycin can have undesirable side-effects, but for the use of the drug in the prevention of age-related decline, these need to be absent or minimal. Therefore, we wanted to find out when and how long we need to give rapamycin in order to achieve the same effects as lifelong treatment,” explains study lead investigator Dr. Paula Juricic in a university release.
- Mikhail Gorbachev, 1931-2022
Mikhail Gorbachev, who died Tuesday at age 91, was a paradoxical Soviet leader when the world needed one. He had almost total power upon taking office but undertook reforms that undermined that power. He rose through the Communist ranks but presided over the end of the regime. His greatest achievement was allowing the Cold War to end without a war or a worse conflagration that the world feared for decades.
Many Russians, not least Mr. Putin, blame Gorbachev for the fall of their empire. Mr. Putin has tried to restore Greater Russia, playing to Russian nationalism and using military force. But he hasn’t been able to turn Russia into a first-world, developed economy. And he hasn’t been able to subdue Ukraine, despite brutal methods that echo of earlier Soviet leaders.
Gorbachev gave Russians their chance to forge a better future, and the great tragedy is that they haven’t been able to do so.
10. The Ideal Baby [Shoe]
From the Daily Citizen:
There the small box sat unobtrusively, neatly placed in the back corner of the wide, top drawer of my mother’s dresser, where it had been for over 30 years.
Off-white cardboard – 5 ¾” long by 3 ¾” wide by 2 ¾” high. Style # 284. Size 2. Color white.
Inside?
Baby shoes from Mrs. Day’s Ideal Baby Shoe Company, Danvers, Mass.
Mrs. Day’s baby shoe company can be traced back to the early part of the twentieth century and claimed Queen Elizabeth as one of its earliest high-profile customers. Mrs. Day was a real person who pioneered the development of left and right shoes for infants, and eventually succeeded in placing her shop’s products in department stores.
“The shoe of the baby determines the foot of the adult,” Mrs. Day liked to say – perhaps something of an exaggeration – but still a principle that nevertheless extends to a lot more than footwear. Social science continues to affirm and confirm that the vast majority of children eventually grow up to parent just as they themselves were parented. It would be impossible to overstate the importance of all of childhood – but especially the very impressionable and influential early years of a child’s life.
When it comes to running gear, there’s an old adage that there’s no such thing as the perfect shoe – only the perfect shoe for you. With all due respect to Mrs. Day, I think that also applies to baby shoes.
But when it comes to babies?
Every child is ideal.
“Children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward,” wrote the Psalmist. “Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them! He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate” (Psalm 127:3-5).
Whether boy or girl, calm or feisty, blue eyes or brown, small or tall, fat or thin, bald or hairy – whether born with or without any known malady or physical, emotional or mental challenges, each and every child is God’s ideal creation. He doesn’t make mistakes. This is why every child is worth protecting whether born or pre-born.
