UT Austin Anscombe Society

Saturday, 4 May 2013

Gosnell's abortion atrocities no 'aberration': Column

Closing arguments leave questions about clinics elsewhere in America.

"If I talk, maybe people will make sure it won't happen again."

That's what 20-year-old Desiree Hawkins told me last week as she recounted the horror of visiting abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell in December 2009. The jury in Gosnell's trial for the alleged murders of multiple babies and one woman heard closing arguments Monday afternoon, but they won't hear from Hawkins.

COLUMN: Philadelphia abortion clinic horror

Hawkins was forced to relive the nightmare of Gosnell's house of horrors when she was contacted by a Drug Enforcement Administration agent this year. The agent told her that one of the severed feet found in jars at the clinic belonged to her aborted baby. She was set to testify as a rebuttal witness against Gosnell until he chose to not take the stand.

When she was 16, Hawkins sought an abortion at a National Abortion Federation-certified abortion clinic, Hagerstown (Md.) Reproductive Health Services. The clinic told her she was 19 weeks pregnant and referred her to Gosnell. When she recently retrieved her file in anticipation of testifying, she was shocked that her sonogram showed she had in fact been at 21 weeks, which meant she would have been 23 weeks pregnant by the time Gosnell performed the abortion. "I was so overwhelmed and hurt," said Hawkins. "If I had known I was 23 weeks, I would have (chosen) adoption."

She also would have avoided the trauma visited upon her by Gosnell. Hawkins described the licensed medical professional as laughing at her during the procedure as she cried and begged him to stop because of the pain. "Stop being a baby," he said.

Hawkins experienced betrayal anew when she read the grand jury report replete with testimony of government officials admitting they ignored repeated complaints about Gosnell because they didn't want to limit access to abortion.

Human Rights Campaign: Largest LGBT Donors Are Drone Manufacturers

Human Rights Campaign Largest LGBT Donors Are Drone Manufacturers

In the 1960s and 1970s, queer liberation (what we now call “LGBT equality”) was seen by its advocates as an all-inclusive movement intrinsically bound to other social justice movements: there could be no justice for queer people without justice for people of color, women, workers, those in other nations, etc. Accordingly, queer activists worked hard to build coalitions with all those determined to fight for justice.

Nowadays, the LGBT movement does more branding than coalition building.

Steven W. Thrasher, who has been nationally recognized for his LGBT journalism, called out national LGBT nonprofits and advocates, colloquially referred to by some as the glitter industrial complex, in a Gawker article, contending that the LGBT activists and nonprofits “have been bought, paid-for and sold to the highest bidder.”

It’s true: corporate America runs the LGBT movement, or at least the part of the LGBT movement that gets press time and donors. Their sponsorship keeps the LGBT movement from addressing the issues that matter most for the LGBT community and beyond.

Thrasher highlights that many of the biggest donors to the Human Rights Campaign, the multi-million dollar nonprofit that receives the bulk of donations for LGBT issues, are drone manufacturers. These donors profit off of the United States’ use of drones to kill civilians,including children, with little oversight or accountability. Drone manufacturers are far from the only ethically dark gray to black donors to LGBT advocacy organizations: a brief perusal of any major LGBT organization’s list of donors reveals that corporate black hats like Bank of America,BP, Coke, and Nike all provide major cash to LGBT nonprofits.

The ‘saturation process’: hooking kids on sex

April 17, 2013 (Breakpoint.org) - These days, those of us seeking to speak up for biblical values in the culture are being told to tone down our rhetoric. And I agree that often we do ourselves and the cause of Christ few favors when we use overheated language, when we exaggerate, or verbally beat up our opponents. Speaking the truth in love is always a good policy, especially in our highly polarized times.

But I can’t help but feel enraged—righteously, I hope—when children are made the guinea pigs in social experiments. And unfortunately that’s just what’s happening every day through groups such as Planned Parenthood. And it’s happening with federal tax dollars adding to not just the budget deficit, but to a kind of moral deficit.

For example, the Affordable Care Act includes the provision of $75 million annually to fund so-called comprehensive sex-education programs. These programs are designed to indoctrinate young people in the kind of relativistic morality that creates so many problems in families, businesses, and schools.

Take just one example. The federal Personal Responsibility Education Program, or PREP, has given $20 million to a coalition of six Planned Parenthood affiliates in Montana, Oregon, Idaho, Washington, and Alaska. While the program claims that it teaches abstinence, it defines “abstinence” as avoiding activities that carry the risk of pregnancy or STDs. That is, abstinence has been redefined, at taxpayer expense, to mean something completely different from actual abstinence. And students are provided with cash incentives to encourage them to attend.

Read more at Life Site News.

Cohabitation Nation: Sliding v. Deciding for Marriage

One of the most common concerns young people encounter as they begin to pursue adult relationships is the question of cohabitation.

Living together before, or instead of, marriage has not only become acceptable in the last 30 years, it has become the norm. According to the US Census bureau, there was a 72% increase in unmarried couples living together between the years from 1990 to 2000. Further, about 54% of women have, or will have, lived together with a boyfriend at some point in their lives. One recent survey of high school seniors found that 64% of young men and 57% of young women agreed with the statement, “It is usually a good idea for a couple to live together before getting married in order to find out whether they really get along.”

All of this is to say that young adults are experiencing more pressure than ever to experiment with alternatives to marriage. This, despite the wide body of research that says that cohabiting relationships are less stable and less satisfying than marriage, and actually increase the risk of divorce significantly if the cohabiting couple ever decides to pursue marriage.

This last point presents the best opportunity for parents and chastity educators to convince young people that remaining chaste until marriage is a better option. New research from the University of Denver has discovered some of the reasons that cohabitation offers a poor preparation for marriage.

The bile being spat at the people of North Carolina exposes the ugly elitism of the gay-marriage lobby

Gay marriage: only opposed by bigots and hicks, apparently

Apparently if you oppose gay marriage you are a dumb, ill-informed, brainwashed, knuckle-dragging hick and bigot. At least that’s the message coming out of liberal circles in America this week, as supporters of gay marriage look with disgust upon the people of North Carolina forvoting in favour of Amendment 1. A majority of North Carolina’s voters – 61 per cent – voted for the amendment to the state’s constitution, which says: “Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognised in this state.” For doing this, for having the temerity to say that marriage should stay as it is, they have been subjected to extraordinary levels of abuse and ridicule.

The media says they’re all “bigots”. Apparently they were driven by a typically Southern hatefulness. In fact, according to the LA Times, “even by Southern standards, [this was a] remarkably mean-spirited initiative”. The LA Times went so far as to argue that President Obama’s newly stated support for gay marriage is “similar” to Abraham Lincoln’s support for the emancipation of slaves, the implication being that it is massively disappointing that modern-day blacks in North Carolina, those ungrateful beneficiaries of Lincoln’s stance, did not vote to “liberate” gays today. Maybe they’ve been brainwashed into hating homos. According to theNew Civil Rights Movement, one of the main pro-gay marriage groups in America, in North Carolina “ignorance and hate has enveloped ordinary citizens”, and the support for Amendment 1 shows how “ill-informed, mis-informed and just plain ignorant the citizenry… truly are”.

The idea that hatred and ignorance have “enveloped” the people of North Carolina is widespread. The gay advocacy group Faith in America said voters had been “duped” by religious leaders; they were“uninformed or deceived”. The only reason Amendment 1 passed, says Faith in America, is because of “the populace’s misunderstanding about sexual orientation”. Of course it isn’t possible that voters simply had a considered moral objection to gay marriage – no, they were clearly all brainwashed by religious crazies. The passing of Amendment 1 shows that voters should not be trusted to rule on sensitive moral matters, says the LA Times. Apparently these kind of “anti-gay” votes will continue until“people of conscience put a stop to it by asserting that tyranny of the majority is wrong”. In short, let’s leave the creation of morality to those good people who act on “conscience” rather than to those “ordinary citizens” who have been enveloped by “hate and ignorance”.

UK Schools Advised to Add Porn into Sex Education

The Sex Education Forum (SEF) in the UK has been reported this week as advising that sex education is currently at a poor standard. It believes that while more time should be given to the subject, it is also important to introduce porn into the curriculum, along with the understanding that it is not all bad.

I find it interesting that the SEF has been careful with its language, saying that porn “can” be a positive thing. Note this hesitant way of putting it. But I guess they should cover themselves, since the material they’re promoting is undeniably degrading to women.

Some might say that kids are bound to stumble across porn early on anyway, so why not educate them on it? I can’t disagree with the early part. But showing it in schools is bound to condone it in the eyes of kids, and confuse their natural aversion.

Dormitory Darlings

The 2012-13 school year marks the first time UT dorms have officially allowed members of the opposite sex to stay in each other’s rooms overnight—a far cry from the way things used to be.

Back then female students had curfews and had to sign out if they left the dorm to go anywhere other than class. Men could visit the women’s dorms, but were confined to the living areas downstairs and had to leave at a certain time.

When guys arrived to pick up their dates, they used a phone bank near the front desk to call the ladies upstairs. Women did not typically visit the men’s dorms. To keep it that way, the gender-specific buildings were intentionally sequestered geographically. The “Woman’s Campus,” as it was called, was the area north of the original Forty Acres (north of 24th Street), while the men’s domain was the area southeast of the Tower. All the men’s dorms save B Hall, which stood where “The West” sculpture now sits, were clustered around 21st Street.

Jester broke the mold when it opened as the first coed dorm in 1969. Initially it separated the sexes by tower, then floor, and eventually by room. Jester’s evolution mirrored the gradual disappearance of the idea that women needed more amenities and protections than men. “The amenities for men and women were more the same in Jester than they had been in the past,” says Richard Cleary, an architecture professor at UT, “and that was a big change.”

Even after Jester, most men on campus had it pretty rough for years to come. The majority of male-only dorms didn’t get air conditioning until the mid-’90s—and they only had it installed after the dorms became coed.