Welcome to Monday.
Who’s your pick for tonight’s NCAA National Championship basketball game? Virginia or Texas Tech?
If Virginia can win, it’ll be the first time a team won it all after losing in the first round the year before.
Here are some headlines we’re following today:
1. Colorado Abortion Clinic Murders 33-Week-Old Baby, Nearly Kills Mother
The 18 year-old female suffered a medical emergency after her abortion, leading to heavy bleeding. Instead of calling 911, the clinic opted for a slower, private ambulance. Why? Because 911 calls are part of the public record.
From LifeNews:
It is believed that the teen who suffered the emergency on April 2 experienced the onset of pre-eclampsia somewhere near the beginning of her abortion process. If her pre-eclampsia was serious enough, it may have required an emergency C-Section delivery.
The Boulder Abortion Clinic is one of six abortion facilities in the U.S. that openly conduct abortions throughout all nine months of pregnancy. Warren Hern, 81, has conducted abortions there continuously since 1975.
2. More Details Emerge About Southern Poverty Law Center Turmoil
Last summer, Maureen Costello, a senior leader at the Southern Poverty Law Center, decided that she had had enough. Several interactions over the years with the organization’s co-founder, Morris Dees, had left her uncomfortable, she said.
To people outside the organization, Dees had built a reputation over more than a half-century as a leader in the fight for equality — from suing the segregated YMCA in Montgomery, Ala., to providing legal help to defendants on death row across the Deep South to pursuing the Ku Klux Klan and White Aryan Resistance.
But inside the organization, Costello and others said, his reputation was more complicated.
3. USA Today Suggests Conservative Supreme Court Majority Being Stymied by Roberts-Kavanaugh Bromance
Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s newest member, Brett Kavanaugh, have voted in tandem on nearly every case that’s come before them since Kavanaugh joined the court in October. They’ve been more likely to side with the court’s liberal justices than its other conservatives.
The two justices, both alumni of the same District of Columbia-based federal appeals court, have split publicly only once in 25 official decisions. Their partnership has extended, though less reliably, to orders the court has issued on abortion funding, immigration and the death penalty in the six months since Kavanaugh’s bitter Senate confirmation battle ended in a 50-48 vote.
Roberts and Kavanaugh have obvious reasons for their reluctance to join the court’s three other conservatives in ideological harmony. The chief justice has voiced concern about the court being viewed as just another political branch of government. Kavanaugh, a former top White House official under President George W. Bush who was accused of a 1980s sexual assault during his confirmation, may just be laying low.
4. Will Abortion be Considered Unthinkable 50 Years from Now?
There’s an obvious moral case against abortion, one which future generations will be appalled we failed to see. More from Karen Swallow Prior in Vox:
Our modern-day willingness to settle for sex apart from commitment, to accept the dereliction of duty by men who impregnate women (for men are the primary beneficiaries of liberal abortion laws), and to uphold the systematic suppression of sex’s creative energy and function are practices that people of other ages would have considered bizarre. As we enter late modernity and recognize the limits of the radical autonomy and individualism which have defined it, the pendulum will correct itself with a swing toward more communitarian and humane values that recognize the interdependency of all humans.
When we do, we will look back at elective abortion and wonder — as we do now with polluting and smoking — why we so wholeheartedly embraced it. We will look at those ultrasound images of 11-week old fetuses somersaulting in the waters of the womb and lack words to explain to our grandchildren why we ever defended their willful destruction in the name of personal choice and why we harmed so many women to do so.
5. Unplanned Finishes in Top Ten in Week Two
$3.2 million more to finish at number 8 (Box Office Mojo). From John Fund: One reason why people don’t want Unplanned to reach an audience may be its unvarnished take on the economics behind the procedure. “It breaks through the poll-tested gobbledygook and shows exactly what motivates the abortion industry — profit above all else,” says Terry Schilling, executive director of the conservative American Principles Project (National Review).
6. Ohio City Hassles Catholic School Using Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law
South Euclid City Council decided against including religious exemption from their SOGI law. The Alliance Defense Fund suggests the city ordinance was a “solution in search of a problem”:
Walking into the small building that houses The Lyceum, a Catholic classical school located in Ohio, instills a sense of reverence. The school is dedicated to teaching young men and women using classical education methods that are intertwined with the school’s strong Catholic beliefs. Students go from Thursday morning Mass to learn using the Socratic method to participating in choir—all of it centered on the Catholic faith of students, teachers, and parents.
All Americans should agree that parents and students are free to pursue a faith-based education without fear of government intervention. Unfortunately, the city council of South Euclid, Ohio, passed a city ordinance that would severely punish The Lyceum for operating according to its Catholic beliefs.
7. A Plea for a Return to Civility in American Life
Focus on the Family’s Chief of Staff Joel Vaughan writes in the Christian Post:
My generation, all before it, and several after it, were taught in middle school civics class that one person’s rights stop where another’s rights begin. The common example we all heard was that the right to free speech does not mean one can yell “fire!” in a crowded theatre. But don’t mention others’ rights to those maneuvering their carts through Costco samples lane on a Saturday afternoon. Likewise, don’t try to convince a driver who is so enthralled with his brand new music album that he wants all the world to enjoy it with him through open windows, profanity-laced or not. And definitely don’t tell legislators who write decency laws here in Colorado — they are in the drive-though lane getting coffee anyway.
In 1939, American movie goers gasped when Rhett Buttler used a four-letter word during a discourse with Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind.” Now, that outburst would seem as welcome as a robin chirping in its nest in comparison to other encroachments on young minds.
While not advocating a return to hoop skirts and twin beds for sitcom married couples, society must return to some form of civility and propriety, of considering the rights of others equal to our own. It might end in the media or in the halls of government, but it starts in the home. Until we parents teach our children – by word and by example – that swearing in public is not okay, that traffic rules must be observed, and that most body parts are meant to be concealed, they will continue to act out more and more as they grow older. I will if you will. Actually, I will regardless, but won’t you join me? Our kids will one day thank us for it.
8. Fined $55,000 for Calling a Man a Man
The Christian Post recently reported the story of a Canadian man who is facing legal repercussions for calling a male, a male.
“Canadian tribunal fines Bill Whatcott $55,000 for expressing Christian views on ‘transgenderism.’” In other words, Whatcott called a biological male (who identifies as a female) a “biological male.” That was his crime.
John Carpay, president of the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedom, which defended Whatcott, noted in protest that, “The Supreme Court of Canada has long held that freedom of expression is the lifeblood of democracy.” But not when it crosses the lines of transgender activism. Freedom halts there.
Mass Resistance notes, “Whatcott’s ‘offence’ is still considered perfectly legal in the United States. But for how long? (We are already seeing private censorship regarding transgenderism on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo!) Passage of the pending federal ‘Equality Act’ (H.R. 5) will insert ‘gender identity protections’ throughout federal law.”
In reality, some of these laws are already on the books in America, with New York City calling for fines up to $250,000 for “misgendering” someone in the workplace. (This was put in place in 2015.) And in 2016, “A transgender schoolteacher in Oregon won a $60,000 settlement from a school district after co-workers allegedly failed to address the teacher by the proper gender pronouns.”
9. Top Websites: FOXNEWS.COM over CNN; Drudge Tops Google News, Porn Dominates
- Youtube
- Amazon
- Yahoo
- Porn Site
- Porn Site
- Porn Site
- FOXNEWS.COM
- CNN.COM
10. Do You Like Hymns or Praise Songs? Or Both?
Focus on the Family’s Paul Batura writes for FOX News:
Science suggests that listening to music results in the release of dopamine, the natural chemical that elicits emotional pleasure and feelings of satisfaction. So, the more the music satisfies, the more of it we want to hear.
Yet, it has to be more than the pleasure derived from a chemical bath of the brain that draws and feeds the $51.5 billion music industry in the U.S.
Why were all my friends drawn to Van Halen and Depeche Mode, while I gravitated to several hundred-year-old hymns?
To me, hymns have always cut the fog and confusion and provided answers to life’s most important questions. They tell a grand story, not only of what has been and what is – but what is coming someday soon. It’s the Bible set to music, often elegantly, creatively and in rhyme. I challenge anyone to top the lyrical heights of Matthew Bridges and Godfrey Thring, when they penned the words in the 1851 classic, ‘Crown Him With Many Crowns’: “Crown Him the Lord of years, the Potentate of time. Creator of the rolling spheres, Ineffably sublime.”
Like the words of both the Old and New Testaments, hymns remind me of what is possible today, despite all the seeming impossibilities of this very imperfect world.
