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New Hampshire Votes to Defund Planned Parenthood Abortion Business

State  |  Micaiah Bilger  |   Sep 15, 2021   |   4:06PM   |  Concord, New Hampshire

New Hampshire leaders rejected a series of contracts with Planned Parenthood and other abortion groups Wednesday, choosing instead to give taxpayer-funded family planning money to groups that do not abort unborn babies.

In Depth NH reports the state Executive Council voted 4-1 along party lines to reject the contracts with the abortion groups.

Facilities with Planned Parenthood of Northern New England and two independent abortion facilities in Concord and Greenland were defunded, according to The Union Leader.

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The council did approve contracts funding four other clinics that do not do abortions, New Hampshire Public Radio reports.

The funding is used to provide family planning services such as birth control, STD and cancer screenings for low-income residents. Though the contracts do not allow tax dollars to be used for abortions, Republican leaders said they indirectly supported the groups’ abortion practices.

“You can’t pay a secretary half out of one pot of money and half out of another pot of money,” said council member David Wheeler, R-Milford. “These are the rules now and they have to be followed.”

Students for Life Action praised the council for taking bold action to defund the billion-dollar abortion chain Planned Parenthood and support real health care.

“Our state laws should have the goal of preserving life, not ending it,” said Students for Life New England regional coordinator Mariah McCarron. “Abortion has taken the lives of one quarter of my generation, and with nine student groups in the state, we are standing up for those who may be lost to abortion.”

New Hampshire voters elected a Republican-majority legislature last year that has been passing pro-life legislation. Earlier this year, lawmakers included an item in the state budget requiring an audit of family planning funds to ensure that no tax dollars are being used for abortion. They also passed a late-term abortion ban.

Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican with a mixed record on abortion, criticized the council for rejecting the contracts, according to In Depth NH.

“I brought these contracts forward because I support them, just as I have every year as governor, because they protect women’s health and it is the right thing to do,” Sununu said. “Today’s action to vote down funding like cancer screenings and other women’s health services is incredibly disappointing and not something I agree with.”

But Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life Action, said the council was listening to New Hampshire voters.

“After SFLA engaged in New Hampshire, the State Executive Council has voted NOT to fund Planned Parenthood with tax dollars,” her organization said in a statement. “Thank you, Councilor Dave Wheeler for his bold action. Elections matter and so does grassroots engagement. Way to go, NH!”

Planned Parenthood has aborted more than 8 million unborn babies since abortion became legal nation-wide in 1973. Its most recent annual report showed a record number of abortions in 2020: 354,871, which is about 40 percent of all abortions in the U.S.

Meanwhile, the same report showed that many of Planned Parenthood’s actual health services continue to decline. It provided less contraception, sterilizations, cancer screenings, adoption referrals and other women’s health services than the previous year, mirroring a continued downward trend.

Its patient numbers also have been dropping steadily over the past decade amid numerous reports of alleged unethical and illegal activities by Planned Parenthood, including selling aborted baby body parts, botching abortions that killed women, covering up the sexual abuse of minors, discriminating against pregnant and racial minority employees, exploiting young girls by selling cross-sex hormones and more.

Carl Sagan pictured below:

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Recently I have been revisiting my correspondence in 1995 with the famous astronomer Carl Sagan who I had the privilege to correspond with in 1994, 1995 and 1996. In 1996 I had a chance to respond to his December 5, 1995letter on January 10, 1996 and I never heard back from him again since his cancer returned and he passed away later in 1996. Below is what Carl Sagan wrote to me in his December 5, 1995 letter:

Thanks for your recent letter about evolution and abortion. The correlation is hardly one to one; there are evolutionists who are anti-abortion and anti-evolutionists who are pro-abortion.You argue that God exists because otherwise we could not understand the world in our consciousness. But if you think God is necessary to understand the world, then why do you not ask the next question of where God came from? And if you say “God was always here,” why not say that the universe was always here? On abortion, my views are contained in the enclosed article (Sagan, Carl and Ann Druyan {1990}, “The Question of Abortion,” Parade Magazine, April 22.)

I was introduced to when reading a book by Francis Schaeffer called HE IS THERE AND HE IS NOT SILENT written in 1968. 

https://youtu.be/VfqBN9iW0_Qhttps://youtu.be/1VWGBkmdPOE

Francis Schaeffer

I was blessed with the opportunity to correspond with Dr. Sagan, and in his December 5, 1995 letter Dr. Sagan went on to tell me that he was enclosing his article “The Question of Abortion: A Search for Answers”by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. I am going to respond to several points made in that article. Here is a portion of Sagan’s article (here is a link to the whole article):

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Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan pictured above

 “The Question of Abortion: A Search for Answers”

by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan

For the complete text, including illustrations, introductory quote, footnotes, and commentary on the reaction to the originally published article see Billions and Billions.

The issue had been decided years ago. The court had chosen the middle ground. You’d think the fight was over. Instead, there are mass rallies, bombings and intimidation, murders of workers at abortion clinics, arrests, intense lobbying, legislative drama, Congressional hearings, Supreme Court decisions, major political parties almost defining themselves on the issue, and clerics threatening politicians with perdition. Partisans fling accusations of hypocrisy and murder. The intent of the Constitution and the will of God are equally invoked. Doubtful arguments are trotted out as certitudes. The contending factions call on science to bolster their positions. Families are divided, husbands and wives agree not to discuss it, old friends are no longer speaking. Politicians check the latest polls to discover the dictates of their consciences. Amid all the shouting, it is hard for the adversaries to hear one another. Opinions are polarized. Minds are closed.

 

Is it wrong to abort a pregnancy? Always? Sometimes? Never? How do we decide? We wrote this article to understand better what the contending views are and to see if we ourselves could find a position that would satisfy us both. Is there no middle ground? We had to weigh the arguments of both sides for consistency and to pose test cases, some of which are purely hypothetical. If in some of these tests we seem to go too far, we ask the reader to be patient with us–we’re trying to stress the various positions to the breaking point to see their weaknesses and where they fail.

In contemplative moments, nearly everyone recognizes that the issue is not wholly one-sided. Many partisans of differing views, we find, feel some disquiet, some unease when confronting what’s behind the opposing arguments. (This is partly why such confrontations are avoided.) And the issue surely touches on deep questions: What are our responses to one another? Should we permit the state to intrude into the most intimate and personal aspects of our lives? Where are the boundaries of freedom? What does it mean to be human?

Of the many actual points of view, it is widely held–especially in the media, which rarely have the time or the inclination to make fine distinctions–that there are only two: “pro-choice” and “pro-life.” This is what the two principal warring camps like to call themselves, and that’s what we’ll call them here. In the simplest characterization, a pro-choicer would hold that the decision to abort a pregnancy is to be made only by the woman; the state has no right to interfere. And a pro-lifer would hold that, from the moment of conception, the embryo or fetus is alive; that this life imposes on us a moral obligation to preserve it; and that abortion is tantamount to murder. Both names–pro-choice and pro-life–were picked with an eye toward influencing those whose minds are not yet made up: Few people wish to be counted either as being against freedom of choice or as opposed to life. Indeed, freedom and life are two of our most cherished values, and here they seem to be in fundamental conflict.

Let’s consider these two absolutist positions in turn. A newborn baby is surely the same being it was just before birth. There ‘s good evidence that a late-term fetus responds to sound–including music, but especially its mother’s voice. It can suck its thumb or do a somersault. Occasionally, it generates adult brain-wave patterns. Some people claim to remember being born, or even the uterine environment. Perhaps there is thought in the womb. It’s hard to maintain that a transformation to full personhood happens abruptly at the moment of birth. Why, then, should it be murder to kill an infant the day after it was born but not the day before?

As a practical matter, this isn’t very important: Less than 1 percent of all tabulated abortions in the United States are listed in the last three months of pregnancy (and, on closer investigation, most such reports turn out to be due to miscarriage or miscalculation). But third-trimester abortions provide a test of the limits of the pro-choice point of view. Does a woman’s “innate right to control her own body” encompass the right to kill a near-term fetus who is, for all intents and purposes, identical to a newborn child?

We believe that many supporters of reproductive freedom are troubled at least occasionally by this question. But they are reluctant to raise it because it is the beginning of a slippery slope. If it is impermissible to abort a pregnancy in the ninth month, what about the eighth, seventh, sixth … ? Once we acknowledge that the state can interfere at any time in the pregnancy, doesn’t it follow that the state can interfere at all times?

Abortion and the slippery slope argument above

This conjures up the specter of predominantly male, predominantly affluent legislators telling poor women they must bear and raise alone children they cannot afford to bring up; forcing teenagers to bear children they are not emotionally prepared to deal with; saying to women who wish for a career that they must give up their dreams, stay home, and bring up babies; and, worst of all, condemning victims of rape and incest to carry and nurture the offspring of their assailants. Legislative prohibitions on abortion arouse the suspicion that their real intent is to control the independence and sexuality of women…

And yet, by consensus, all of us think it proper that there be prohibitions against, and penalties exacted for, murder. It would be a flimsy defense if the murderer pleads that this is just between him and his victim and none of the government’s business. If killing a fetus is truly killing a human being, is it not the duty of the state to prevent it? Indeed, one of the chief functions of government is to protect the weak from the strong.

If we do not oppose abortion at some stage of pregnancy, is there not a danger of dismissing an entire category of human beings as unworthy of our protection and respect? And isn’t that dismissal the hallmark of sexism, racism, nationalism, and religious fanaticism? Shouldn’t those dedicated to fighting such injustices be scrupulously careful not to embrace another?

Why do we set humans above animals?

There is no right to life in any society on Earth today, nor has there been at any former time… : We raise farm animals for slaughter; destroy forests; pollute rivers and lakes until no fish can live there; kill deer and elk for sport, leopards for the pelts, and whales for fertilizer; entrap dolphins, gasping and writhing, in great tuna nets; club seal pups to death; and render a species extinct every day. All these beasts and vegetables are as alive as we. What is (allegedly) protected is not life, but human life.

Adrian Rogers sermon on the Bible and Animal Rights is a perfect answer to Sagan!!

And even with that protection, casual murder is an urban commonplace, and we wage “conventional” wars with tolls so terrible that we are, most of us, afraid to consider them very deeply… That protection, that right to life, eludes the 40,000 children under five who die on our planet each day from preventable starvation, dehydration, disease, and neglect.

Those who assert a “right to life” are for (at most) not just any kind of life, but for–particularly and uniquely—human life. So they too, like pro-choicers, must decide what distinguishes a human being from other animals and when, during gestation, the uniquely human qualities–whatever they are–emerge.

The Bible talks about the differences between humans and animals

Despite many claims to the contrary, life does not begin at conception: It is an unbroken chain that stretches back nearly to the origin of the Earth, 4.6 billion years ago. Nor does human life begin at conception: It is an unbroken chain dating back to the origin of our species, hundreds of thousands of years ago. Every human sperm and egg is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, alive. They are not human beings, of course. However, it could be argued that neither is a fertilized egg.

In some animals, an egg develops into a healthy adult without benefit of a sperm cell. But not, so far as we know, among humans. A sperm and an unfertilized egg jointly comprise the full genetic blueprint for a human being. Under certain circumstances, after fertilization, they can develop into a baby. But most fertilized eggs are spontaneously miscarried. Development into a baby is by no means guaranteed. Neither a sperm and egg separately, nor a fertilized egg, is more than a potential baby or a potential adult. So if a sperm and egg are as human as the fertilized egg produced by their union, and if it is murder to destroy a fertilized egg–despite the fact that it’s only potentially a baby–why isn’t it murder to destroy a sperm or an egg?

Hundreds of millions of sperm cells (top speed with tails lashing: five inches per hour) are produced in an average human ejaculation. A healthy young man can produce in a week or two enough spermatozoa to double the human population of the Earth. So is masturbation mass murder? How about nocturnal emissions or just plain sex? When the unfertilized egg is expelled each month, has someone died? Should we mourn all those spontaneous miscarriages? Many lower animals can be grown in a laboratory from a single body cell. Human cells can be cloned… In light of such cloning technology, would we be committing mass murder by destroying any potentially clonable cells? By shedding a drop of blood?

For the complete text, including illustrations, introductory quote, footnotes, and commentary on the reaction to the originally published article see Billions and Billions.

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Adrian Rogers (1931-2005) I shared my correspondence with Carl Sagan with Dr Rogers and the fact that many of my letters to Sagan contained material from Rogers.

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Carl Sagan asserted, “ We raise farm animals for slaughter; destroy forests; pollute rivers and lakes until no fish can live there; kill deer and elk for sport, leopards for the pelts, and whales for fertilizer; entrap dolphins, gasping and writhing, in great tuna nets; club seal pups to death.” Sagan goes on to question why society places the value of humans over animals. Francis Schaeffer answers that question followed by a similar answer from Adrian Rogers. Schaeffer notes:

Certainly every Christian ought to be praying and working to nullify the abominable abortion law. But as we work and pray, we should have in mind not only this important issue as though it stood alone. Rather, we should be struggling and praying that this whole other total entity “(this godless) worldview” can be rolled back with all its results across all of life.

Christianity provides a unified answer for the whole of life.

But the dignity of human life is unbreakably linked to the existence of the personal-infinite God. It is because there is a personal-infinite God who has made men and women in His own image that they have a unique dignity of life as human beings. Human life then is filled with dignity, and the state and humanistically oriented law have no right and no authority to take human life arbitrarily in the way it is being taken.

State officials must know that we are serious about stopping abortion, which is a matter of clear principle concerning the babies themselves and concerning a high view of human life.

Adrian Rogers:

_ Francis Schaeffer

Ronald Reagan meeting with Adrian Rogers at White House

When I was growing up two Christian leaders had a major impact on my life. Adrian Rogers and Francis Schaeffer through their audio messages and books talked a lot about issues in the modern culture and how the Bible related to that culture. I found that they discussed many of the same thinkers that shaped the 20th century such as George Wald, Bertrand Russell, Hugh Hefner, Antony Flew, Peter Singer, and Edward O. Wilson. Below is a lengthy message on Animal Rights.  Adrian Rogers rightly notes that Eastern Religion and Secular Humanism have both aided the Animal Rights movement. However, the Bible clearly teaches that man is created by God.

Hugh Hefner pictured below and Edward O. Wilson above

Nobel Prize Winner George Wald

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Peter Singer is an animal rights activist and he is discussed by both Rogers and Schaeffer several times. Furthermore, Rogers and Schaeffer spent even more time looking at the work of another animal rights sympathizer  named Carl Sagan. I actually had the chance to correspond with Sagan and in my January 10, 1996 letter (which was in response to Sagan’s December 5, 1995 letter to me). In that letter I started off my letter with two paragraphs under the subtitle, “Are we so different from Animals? Or are we?”

I pointed out to Sagan that I had read his book SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS and in that book Sagan had asserted, “Why are we so different from animals? Or are we? Most of the philosophers conventionally judged great thought that humans are fundamentally different from other animals because of an immaterial ‘something’ for which no scientific evidence has been produced, that resides somewhere in the body of humans and in one else on earth. Only a few argue, as Charles Darwin did, that the differences between our species and others are only difference of degree.”

Basically I made some of the same type of points that Rogers makes in his sermon below:

Adrian Rogers: The Bible and Animal Rights [#1513] (Audio)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjIcbJglhwE

The Bible And Animal Rights

Adrian Rogers

Genesis 1: 26

WOULD YOU TAKE GOD’S WORD AND OPEN, PLEASE, TO THE VERY FIRST BOOK OF THE BIBLE, AND THE VERY FIRST CHAPTER. GENESIS, CHAPTER 1, AND VERSE 26, WE’RE GOING TO READ IN JUST A MOMENT. BUT AS SOON AS YOU’VE FOUND IT, AND IT OUGHT TO BE VERY EASY FOR YOU TO FIND, AS SOON AS YOU’VE FOUND IT, WOULD YOU JUST PAUSE FOR A MOMENT AND LOOK UP HERE AND LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING? LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE DECEPTIONS OF THE NEW AGE ARE UPON US. WE’RE LIVING IN A TIME THAT MANY ARE CALLING “THE NEW AGE.” SOME ARE CALLING IT “THE AGE OF AQUARIUS.” OTHERS ARE CALLING IT “GLOBALISM,” OR, “NEW GLOBALISM.” SOME ARE CALLING IT “COSMIC HUMANISM.” AND THEY’RE ALL KINDS OF NAMES FOR THIS ESOTERIC MOVEMENT. IT’S A SYNCHRONISM OF SO MANY THINGS; IT’S LIKE A SPONGE, THAT SOAKS IN MANY KINDS OF WEIRD OCCULT, OFF BEAT, SOMETIMES SEEMINGLY NONSENSICAL IDEAS. AND YET IT IS INCREDIBLE HOW MANY ARE BUYING INTO IT. NOW, MAY I SAY TO YOU THAT THE NEW AGE IS NOT NEW. IT GOES ALL THE WAY BACK TO ANCIENT BABYLON. IT’S ONE OF THE MUSTIEST THINGS AROUND. AND IT IS ROOTED PRIMARILY, HOWEVER, IN EASTERN RELIGIONS, AND WHAT WE WOULD CALL TODAY HINDUISM. AND, UH, GOD, IN THE NEW AGE, IS IMPERSONAL. THEY BELIEVE IN GOD, BUT NOT THE GOD THAT YOU BELIEVE IN, NOT THE GOD THAT 1 BELIEVE IN, NOT JEHOVAH GOD, ELOHIM, THE LORD AND GOD AND FATHER OF OUR SAVIOR JESUS CHRIST. THAT’S NOT THE GOD THAT THEY BELIEVE IN. THEIR GOD IS AN IMPERSONAL GOD, KNOWN AS THE, “THE FORCE,” OR THEY THINK OF GOD AS ENERGY, OR THE ALL-PERVADING REALITY.

IT’S A FORM OF PANTHEISM. EVERYTHING IS GOD. AND GOD IS EVERYTHING. AS A MATTER OF FACT, YOU ARE GOD. BUT NOT ONLY DO THEY BELIEVE THAT YOU ARE GOD, THEY ALSO BELIEVE THAT THE ANIMALS ARE GOD. EVERYTHING IS GOD! IT DOESN’T ELEVATE, UH, MAN ABOVE THE ANIMALS; IT BRINGS MAN DOWN TO THE LEVEL OF THE ANIMALS. I’VE SAID ALL THAT TO SAY THIS. I WANNA SPEAK TO YOU TODAY ON A SUBJECT I NEVER IN MY WILDEST DREAMS, AS A YOUNG PREACHER, BELIEVE THAT I WOULD BE PREACHING ON. AND IT IS THIS: “THE BIBLE AND ANIMAL RIGHTS.” I NEVER THOUGHT I’D EVER BE PREACHING ON THAT. NEVER IN MY LIFE! AND WHEN I FIRST HEARD ABOUT ANIMAL RIGHTS, AND SAW A FEW PEOPLE WITH PLACARDS, AND SO FORTH, I DISMISSED IT LIGHTLY, AS SOME PEOPLE FROM SOMEWHERE, SOME FRIEND SOMEHOW, AND SOMETHING SILLY, AND SOMETHING ABSURD.

BUT I CHANGED MY MIND. AND I SEE NOW THAT WHAT WE ARE UP AGAINST IS A PART OF A TOTAL CONSPIRACY AGAINST OUR LORD AND HIS CHRIST, AND HIS WORD. NOW, I SAY THAT A LOT OF THIS IS ROOTED IN EASTERN RELIGION-HINDUISM- WHICH HAS AS IT’S BACKBONE PANTHEISM AND REINCARNATION. REINCARNATION IS THAT, UH, MAN AND THE ANIMALS ARE INTERRELATED, AND AT ONE TIME, YOU MAY HAVE BEEN AN ANIMAL. AND NOW YOU’RE A HUMAN BEING. AHHHH! BUT IF YOU’RE KARMA IS BAD, YOU MAY AGAIN BE AN ANIMAL, YOU MAY WAKE UP IN THE NEXT WORLD AS A TOAD OR A SPIDER. UH, THEY LITERALLY BELIEVE THIS! I WAS AMAZED HOW MANY THAT WE MET OVERSEAS IN OUR LAST MISSION TRIP–BELIEVED IN AND ESPOUSED THE IDEA OF REINCARNATION. THAT IS, AS YOU GO THROUGH LIFE, YOU MAY PROGRESS, OR YOU MAY REGRESS. AND YOU SAY, “WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH ANIMAL RIGHTS?” WELL, BE CAREFUL WHEN YOU GO TO MCDONALD’S, YOU MAY BE EATING YOUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHER! HUH, HUH, IT SOUNDS SILLY. BUT, DEAR FRIEND, THESE PEOPLE ARE DEADLY SERIOUS ABOUT THIS ENTIRE MATTER! IT’S INCREDIBLE, NOT THAT PEOPLE WILL NOT BELIEVE THE BIBLE. WHAT IS REALLY INCREDIBLE IS WHAT PEOPLE WILL BELIEVE! WHAT THEY WILL BELIEVE! NOW, REMEMBER THAT IF YOU ARE PANTHEIST, THAT IS PAN, MEANING ALL, AND THEIST, MEANING GOD, THAT MEANS THAT ALL IS GOD AND GOD IS ALL. THAT DOESN’T ELEVATE YOU. YOU SAY, “WELL, IF GOD IS EVERYTHING, THEN I AM GOD!” YES, BUT DIRT IS GOD, ALSO, AND YOU’RE EQUAL WITH DIRT. IT DOESN’T ELEVATE YOU. WHAT IT DOES IS TO BRING YOU DOWN TO THE LEVEL OF THE ANIMALS AND THINGS. NOW, THE ANIMAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IS A SYNTHESIS, OF A NUMBER OF THINGS: SECULAR HUMANISM, HINDUISM, NEW AGEISM, EVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT–ALL OF THESE THINGS ARE TOGETHER. AND SO, UH, WHAT, WHAT ARE THE GOALS OF THOSE WHO ARE CAMPAIGNING FOR ANIMAL RIGHTS? WELL, NUMBER ONE, THEY REJECT–LISTEN TO ME–THEY REJECT THE IDEA THAT MAN IS ESSENTIALLY, INTRINSICALLY, BASICALLY DIFFERENT FROM THE ANIMALS. AND THEIR GOALS, THEREFORE, ARE TO SET THE ANIMALS FREE. NOT JUST SIMPLY FROM INHUMANE TREATMENT, NOT A ONE OF US, I HOPE, WOULD ARGUE AGAINST INHUMANE TREATMENT FOR ANY ANIMAL. BUT THEY’RE NOT WANTING TO SET THE ANIMALS FREE FROM INHUMANE TREATMENT. THEY ARE WANTING TO SET THE ANIMALS FREE FROM THE DOMINION OF MANKIND. WHAT THEY’RE TRYING TO SAY IS THIS: THAT THERE IS BASICALLY NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MAN AND ANIMAL YOU SAY, “WELL, WHAT, WHAT IS THE IMPACT?” HUH, WELL, THE IMPACT, MY DEAR FRIEND, IS INCREDIBLE. NOW, LET ME JUST READ, UH, SOME OF WHAT THESE ARE SAYING. FOR EXAMPLE, UH, WE SAY, “WELL, LET’S BE HUMANE TO THE ANIMALS.”

BUT, MICHAEL, UH, FOX, A VETERINARIAN, WHO DIRECTS THE CENTER FOR THE RESPECT OF LIFE AND ENVIRONMENT AT THE HUMANE SOCIETY OF THE UNITED STATES SAYS, QUOTE, “HUMANE TREATMENT IS SIMPLY SENTIMENTAL, SYMPATHETIC PATRONAGE.” THAT IS, “WE’RE NOT JUST LOOKING FOR HUMANE TREATMENT.”

Gary L. Francione

GARY FRANCIONE, A LAW PROFESSOR, WHO LITIGATES ANIMAL RIGHTS CASES, SAID HE “WOULD NOT ALLOW AN ANIMAL TO SUFFER, EVEN IF THE RESEARCH WOULD PRODUCE A CURE FOR CANCER.” HE SAID, AND I QUOTE, “I DON’T BELIEVE IT IS MORALLY PERMISSIBLE TO EXPLOIT WEAKER BEINGS, EVEN IF WE DERIVE BENEFITS.” AND IN A SYMPOSIUM WITH THESE ANIMAL RIGHTS PEOPLE, ONE PERSON ASKED A QUESTION LIKE THIS: “IF A PIG COULD GIVE ITS LIFE TO SAVE THE LIFE OF A BABY, WOULD YOU BE FOR IT?” AND THIS ANIMAL RIGHTIST SAID, “ABSOLUTELY NOT!” HE SAID, HE WARNED STERNLY AGAINST THAT, AND SAID THAT THE BABIES PARENTS SHOULD BE MADE TO CARE ABOUT THE PIG. NOW, WE HEAR ABOUT RACISM AND SEXISM. GET READY! THERE IS A NEW WORD COMING: SPECIES-ISM. THAT IS, IF YOU’RE, UH, FOR HUMAN BEINGS, THINK THAT HUMAN BEINGS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANIMALS, YOU ARE A, “SPECICIST.” HARD TO SAY, SO MAYBE IT WON’T GO FOR VERY WELL. BUT IT’S HARD TO SAY. NOW, NOW LISTEN. YOU SAY, “THIS IS ALL SILLY!”

(Peter Singer below)

BUT PETER SINGER’S FOUNDATIONAL TEXT, ANIMAL LIBERATION, IS, UH, IS, UH, THE TEXTBOOK THAT MANY OF THESE -GO BY. AND LET ME QUOTE FROM THAT. QUOTE, “IT CAN NO LONGER BE MAINTAINED BY ANYONE BUT A RELIGIOUS FANATIC THAT MAN IS THE SPECIAL DARLING OF THE UNIVERSE.” AND, BY THE WAY, MOST OF YOU HERE ARE WHAT HE WOULD CONSIDER RELIGIOUS FANATICS. AND HE GOES ON TO WRITE, “OR THAT OTHER ANIMALS WERE CREATED TO PROVIDE US WITH FOOD, OR THAT WE HAVE DIVINE AUTHORITY OVER THEM, AND DIVINE PERMISSION TO KILL THEM.” AND

THEN, AGAIN, MICHAEL FOX IS QUOTED IN THE WASHINGTONIAN. HE PUT IT SUCCINCTLY, AND THIS IS WHAT HE SAID, LISTEN, “THERE ARE NO CLEAR DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN US AND ANIMALS. ANIMALS COMMUNICATE. ANIMALS HAVE EMOTIONS. ANIMALS CAN THINK. SOME THINKERS BELIEVE THAT THE HUMAN SOUL IS DIFFERENT BECAUSE WE ARE IMMORTAL! AND THAT JUST BECOMES COMPLETELY ABSURD!” THEY’RE SAYING, “THERE… IS…NO…DIFFERENCE!” NOW YOU CAN UNDERSTAND WHY THEY’RE SOME WHO WANT TO TREAT ANIMALS AS HUMANS, AND WHY SOME HUMAN BEINGS ARE LIVING AS ANIMALS. THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE. AND, OF COURSE, IF MAN IS THE PRODUCT OF EVOLUTION, THEY’RE RIGHT! AND ANY STRAIGHT THINKING PERSON WOULD SAY, “THAT IS RIGHT.” I MEAN, IF MAN IS INDEED JUST ANOTHER ANIMAL WHO HAS COME UP THROUGH THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS, THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MAN AND ANIMALS IS THAT MAN IS PROBABLY A LITTLE MORE CLEVER. NOW, LET’S SEE WHAT GOD’S WORD HAS TO SAY ABOUT IT. AND, BY THE WAY, DEAR FRIEND, AREN’T YOU GLAD FOR THE BIBLE? THIS IS THE ONE BOOK, AND THE ONE BOOK ALONE, THAT HAS TRUTH, EH, THAT WE CAN GO TO AND FIND WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT. AND HERE THE KEY IS ON THE FRONT DOOR OF THE BIBLE. GENESIS, CHAPTER ONE, VERSE 26, “AND GOD SAID, LET US MAKE MAN IN OUR IMAGE, AND AFTER OUR LIKENESS….” WHY DOES IT SAY “OUR”? GOD THE FATHER, GOD THE SON, AND GOD THE HOLY SPIRIT. YOU HAVE THE TRINITY HERE ON THE FIRST CHAPTER, IN THE FIRST CHAPTER OF THE BIBLE: GOD THE FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT. GOD, SINGULAR, SAID, “LET US,” PLURAL, “MAKE MAN IN OUR IMAGE.” AND THEN READ, “AND LET THEM HAVE DOMINION OVER THE FISH OF THE SEA, AND OVER THE FOUL OF THE AIR, AND OVER THE CATTLE, AND OVER ALL THE EARTH, AND OVER EVERY CREEPING THING THAT CREEPETH UPON THE EARTH.” NOW, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, IN ALL PHILOSOPHY THERE IS ONE, ONE, ONE OVERRIDING QUESTION. LET ME TELL YOU WHAT IT IS.

HERE’S THE QUESTION: DID GOD MAKE MAN, OR DID MAN MAKE GOD? THAT IS, IS MAN IN THE IMAGE OF GOD? OR IS GOD IN THE IMAGINATION OF MAN? THAT’S THE QUESTION. DID GOD MAKE MAN, OR DID MAN SIMPLY CONJURE UP THE IDEA OF GOD? AND YOUR WHOLE PHILOSOPHY WILL GO FROM ONE SIDE TO THE OTHER,

ACCORDING TO HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT THAT. NOW, THEY’RE THOSE WHO JUST SIMPLY FEEL THAT WE ARE THE PRODUCT OF BLIND CHANCE. HUH, HUH, THAT THE WHOLE UNIVERSE SOMEHOW JUST, IT’S JUST HERE! IT NEVER HAD A BEGINNING! AND IF IT DID HAVE A BEGINNING, OUT OF NOTHING, SOMETHING CAME. YOU HAVE SOME PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS WITH THAT I HOPE. HUH, HUH. THAT NOTHING TIMES NOBODY EQUALS EVERYTHING. BUT THAT’S WHAT THEY BELIEVE. AND THEN, SOMEHOW, OUT OF THIS, UH, PRIMORDIAL OOZE, THIS CHAOTIC MASS, SOMEHOW THE MOST COMPLICATED FORMS OF LIFE, WITHOUT ANY GUIDANCE, JUST CAME INTO BEING. FIRST OF ALL, OUT OF THIS OOZE, OUT OF THIS PRIMORDIAL SOUP, THERE CAME PRIMITIVE PROTOZOA, EARLY LIFE. HUH-AND THEN, MILLIONS OF YEARS, BILLIONS OF YEARS, COMPOUNDED BY CHANCE, TURNED THAT PRIMITIVE LIFE INTO UNSEGMENTED WORMS. AH-AND THEN, DUMP IN SOME MORE MILLIONS OF YEARS, AND THOSE UNSEGMENTED WORMS BECAME FISH. AND THEN MIX IN SOME MORE YEARS AND SOME MC)RE CHANCE, AND THOSE FISH BECAME REPTILES. AND THEN SOME MORE YEARS AND SOME MORE CHANCE, AND THOSE REPTILES, THESE FIRST AMPHIBIANS, AND THEN REPTILES. AND THEN THOSE REPTILES BECAME MAMMALS….OR BIRDS, AND THEN MAMMALS, AND THEN MAN. HUH, HUH, HUH! NOW, IN THE, IN THE NURSERY SCHOOL, WHEN WE TELL ABOUT A PRINCE THAT WAS A FROG, AND IS KISSED BY A PRINCESS, AND THE FROG TURNS INTO A, A PRINCE, WE CALL THAT A NURSERY RHYME. BUT IN THE CLASSROOM, WHEN FROGS BECOME PRINCES, WE CALL THAT “SCIENCE.” BUT THEY BELIEVE THAT. I MEAN, THEY, THEY BELIEVE THAT! AND IF THEY BELIEVE THAT, I SAY, “THEY’RE RIGHT!” THERE IS BASICALLY NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MAN AND THE ANIMALS, EXCEPT THAT MAN IS A HIGHER FORM OF THE ANIMALS.

BUT THAT ISN’T WHAT GOD’S WORD SAYS! LOOK AT WHAT GOD’S WORD SAYS I N VERSE 26, “AND GOD SAID, LET US MAKE MAN IN OUR IMAGE, AFTER OUR LIKENESS: AND LET THEM HAVE DOMINION…” NOW, LET ME TALK TO YOU ABOUT THREE THINGS. FIRST OF ALL, “THE CREATION OF MAN AND THE ANIMALS,” “THE CREATION OF MAN AND THE ANIMALS.” MAN AND THE ANIMALS WERE CREATED BY ALMIGHTY GOD. AND THEY WERE CREATED AT, BASICALLY, THE SAME TIME. THE BIBLE DOES NOT TEACH EVOLUTION. “WELL,” YOU SAY, “PASTOR, WHAT ABOUT ALL THESE PRIMITIVE HALF-HUMANS, AND HALF-MEN THAT WE’VE SEEN IN THE TEXTBOOKS WHAT ABOUT ALL OF THAT–THESE, THESE CREATURES IN THE MUSEUMS, THESE, THESE MEN ON THEIR WAY UP. WELL, DEAR FRIEND THAT IS WHAT IS IN SOMEBODY’S IMAGINATION. THESE ARE NOT PICTURES OF ACTUAL BEINGS. THESE ARE THE CREATION OF SOMEBODY’S IMAGINATION! FOR EXAMPLE, UHM, THE SCOPES TRIAL WAS HELD HERE IN TENNESSEE, THE FAMOUS MONKEY TRIAL, BACK IN NINETEEN AND TWENTY-FIVE. AND PEOPLE ARE STILL LAUGHING ABOUT ‘BOUT THAT BECAUSE, UH, THEY SAY THAT,

UH, WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN, WHO WAS THE GREAT, UH, BELIEVER IN THE WORD OF GOD, ARGUED WITH CLARENCE DARROW ABOUT EVOLUTION, AND SO FORTH. AND DARROW, WHO WAS A VERY CUNNING, AND A VERY SHREWD, AND A VERY BRILLIANT LAWYER, ARGUED WITH THE GREAT, UH, CHRISTIAN, WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN.

AND ONE OF THE THINGS THAT DARROW DID WAS TO BRING IN FOR EVIDENCE FOR EVOLUTION A, A, UH, REPLICA OF A PREHISTORIC MAN, PAINTINGS AND ALL. HIS NAME WAS “NEBRASKA MAN.” AND “NEBRASKA MAN” WAS THOUGHT TO BE ONE MILLION YEARS OLD. AND HE SAID, “WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO, BRYAN, ABOUT ‘NEBRASKA MAN’?” “WELL,’? HE SAID, “I, I JUST THINK WE NEED MORE EVIDENCE. I DON’T THINK YOU HAVE ENOUGH EVIDENCE TO PROVE THAT ‘NEBRASKA MAN’, THIS HALF MAN, HALF APE EVER EXISTED.” WELL, UH, THE SCIENTISTS, THEMSELVES, DID SOME MORE WORK ON “NEBRASKA MAN”, AND DO YOU KNOW WHAT THEY FOUND OUT? HUH, HUH. THEY FOUND OUT THAT THE MAN WHO, UH, WHO DISCOVERED “NEBRASKA MAN”, A MAN NAMED MR. COOK, HAD REALLY DISCOVERED A TOOTH. I DIDN’T SAY “TEETH”, I SAID “TOOTH.” AND OUT OF ONE TOOTH, THEY CREATED AN ENTIRE RACE OF PEOPLE–MALE AND FEMALE–DREW PICTURES OF THEM, AND THERE THEY WERE. AND, GAVE AN AGE AND A DATE. BUT, FRIEND, YOU HAVEN’ HEARD THE PUNCH LINE. LATER ON THEY FOUND THE ENTIRE SKELETON, AND IT WAS THE PIG, THE TOOTH OF A PIG. AND OUT OF THE TOOTH OF A PIG,

CLARENCE DARROW, THE GREAT, BRILLIANT LAWYER CAME INTO THE COURTROOM AND HELD UP A WHOLE RACE OF MEN. AND SAID, “THIS IS PROOF OF EVOLUTION.” “WELL,” YOU SAY, “YES, UH, THIS THAT’S, THAT DOESN’T DISPROVE THAT EVOLUTION IS TRUE. IT JUST PROVES THEY MADE A MISTAKE IN THAT PARTICULAR AREA.” WHEN I WAS IN SCHOOL, WE STUDIED, IN MY BIOLOGY CLASSES, “THE PILTDOWN MAN.”

UH, HE WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED BY CHARLES DAWSON. AND WHAT CHARLES DAWSON REALLY HAD IN THIS SUPPOSED APE-MAN, HE HAD, UH, UH, A JAW THAT HAD TWO MOLARS IN IT, AND PART OF A SKULL. HE FOUND IT IN A GRAVEL PIT IN PILTDOWN, ENGLAND. AND HE PRESENTED THAT. THEY, THEY, THEY HAD A WHOLE RACE OF MEN THAT THEY DESCRIBED AFTER THAT. LATER ON IT WAS SHOWN TO BE A HOAX. AND IN 1956, THE READERS DIGEST HAD AN ARTICLE–I HAVE IT SOMEWHERE IN MY FILES–CALLED “THE GREAT PILTDOWN HOAX!” WHAT HAD HAPPENED IS THIS: THAT UHW, IT, THE, THE JAWBONE THAT THEY FOUND WAS THE JAWBONE OF AN APE. HE WAS ONLY FIFTY YEARS OLD. SOMEONE HAD FILED HIS TEETH DOWN, AND DISCOLORED THEM WITH CHEMICALS. AND HID THEM THERE IN PILTDOWN, HOPING THAT IT WOULD BE DISCOVERED. IT WAS A JOKE, A COLOSSAL JOKE! BUT, MY DEAR FRIEND, THE POINT I WANT TO MAKE IS THIS: THAT THE SCIENTISTS BOUGHT INTO IT LOCK, STOCK, AND BARREL, AND DEVELOPED A WHOLE RACE OUT OF IT! NOW, THESE ARE ONLY TWO EXAMPLES. BUT I JUST USED THEM AS EXAMPLES TO SHOW HOW EAGER MEN ARE TO MAKE MONKEYS OF THEMSELVES. HOW EAGER!

WELL, YOU SAY, “PASTOR, WHAT ABOUT ALL THE DINOSAURS? NOW I’M THIS, FORGET THE, THE CAVE MEN AND THE HALF-APES. WHAT ABOUT ALL THE DINOSAURS? DON’T YOU BELIEVE THE DINOSAURS EXISTED?” OF COURSE I DO! THE BIBLE TELLS ABOUT THE CREATION OF THE DINOSAURS, RIGHT HERE. THE BIBLE SAYS HERE, IN VERSE 24, “AND GOD SAID, LET THE EARTH BRING FORTH THE LIVING CREATURE AFTER HIS KIND, CATTLE, AND CREEPING THINGS, THE BEAST OF THE EARTH AFTER HIS KIND: AND IT WAS SO.” AND WHEN GOD MADE THESE ANIMALS, GOD MADE THE DINOSAURS. YOU SAY, “WELL, WHY DON’T WE HAVE ANY MORE DINOSAURS?” BECAUSE, MY DEAR FRIEND, THE DINOSAURS ARE EXTINCT. BUT THE BIBLE TEACHES THAT THE DINOSAURS WERE CREATED THE SIXTH DAY WITH MAN! MEN AND DINOSAURS WERE ON THE EARTH TOGETHER! AS A MATTER OF FACT, IF YOU’LL TURN TO THE BOOK OF JOB, YOU’LL FIND THE DINOSAUR DESCRIBED. JOB, CHAPTER 40, VERSE 15, “AND NOW, BEHOLD BEHEMOTH, WHICH I MADE WITH THEE….” THAT IS, “I MADE BEHEMOTH THE SAME TIME I MADE MANKIND, JOB.” “HE EATETH GRASS LIKE AN OX. (16) LO, HIS STRENGTH IS IN HIS LOINS, HIS FORCE IS IN THE NAVEL OF HIS BELLY. (17) HE MOVETH HIS TAIL LIKE A CEDAR….” SOME HAVE TRIED TO SAY “BEHEMOTH” HERE IS AN, IS AN ELEPHANT. HAVE YOU EVER SEEN AN ELEPHANTS TAIL? “HE MOVETH HIS TAIL LIKE A CEDAR: THE SINEWS OF HIS STONES ARE WRAPPED TOGETHER. (18) HIS BONES ARE AS STRONG PIECES OF BRASS; HIS BONES ARE LIKE BARS OF IRON. (19) HE IS THE CHIEF OF THE WAYS OF GOD…” IN OTHER WORDS, HE’S A BIG DUDE. “AND HE THAT MADE HIM CAN MAKE HIS SWORD TO APPROACH UNTO HIM.” HE’S NOT STRONGER THAN GOD. “(20) SURELY THE MOUNTAINS BRING HIM FORTH FOOD, WHERE ALL THE BEASTS OF THE FIELD PLAY. (21) HE LIETH UNDER THE SHADY TREES,(AN’) IN THE COVERT OF THE REED, AND THE FENS. (22) THE SHADY TREES COVER HIM WITH THEIR SHADOW; THE WILLOWS OF THE BROOK COMPASS HIM ABOUT. (23) AND BEHOLD, HE DRINKETH UP A RIVER, AND HASTETH NOT… 11 THAT IS, HE JUST LUMBERS ALONG. “HE TRUSTETH THAT HE CAN DRAW UP JORDAN INTO HIS MOUTH. (24) HE TAKETH IT WITH HIS EYES: HIS NOSE PIERCETH THROUGH SNARES.” AGAIN, THAT CAN’T BE AN ELEPHANT. HAVE YOU EVER SEEN AN ELEPHANT’S NOSE? NO, THAT’S THE HORN ……

ON A DINOSAUR! IF YOU WERE TO GO DOWN TO GLENROSE, TEXAS, NEAR GLENROSE, TEXAS, AT THE PILUXI RIVER, THERE YOU WOULD SEE IN A RIVER BED THE FOOTPRINTS OF DINOSAURS AND HUMAN FOOTPRINTS INSIDE THOSE DINOSAUR FOOTPRINTS. DID YOU KNOW THAT? TO PROVE BEYOND THE SHADOW OF ANY DOUBT THAT HUMAN BEINGS AND DINOSAURS EXISTED TOGETHER–JUST AS THE BOOK OF JOB TELLS US, AND JUST AS GENESIS, CHAPTER ONE, VERSE 24 TELLS US, THAT GOD MADE MAN AND THE ANIMALS ON THE SIXTH DAY! GOD CREATED THESE CREATURES. AND SO, I WANNA SAY THIS, FIRST OF ALL, ABOUT MAN, AND THE ANIMALS. THE CREATION OF MAN AND THE ANIMALS: THEY WERE BOTH CREATED BY GOD. THEY’RE NOT THE PRODUCT OF EVOLUTION. I HOPE YOU WILL NOT BUY INTO THAT MONKEY-MYTHOLOGY. NUMBER TWO, I WANT YOU TO SEE “THE COMPARISON OF MAN AND THE ANIMALS.”

IF YOU WERE TO COMPARE A MAN AND THE ANIMALS, YOU’D SEE, IN MANY WAYS, THEY’RE VERY SIMILAR. FOR EXAMPLE, MEN AND ANIMALS ARE SIMILAR IN DESIGN. WHEN I TOOK HUMAN ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY IN COLLEGE, ONE OF THE THINGS WE HAD TO DO WAS TO WORK ON ONE OF THOSE PIGS THAT HAD BEEN SOAKED IN FORMALDEHYDE. I HAVE YOU EVER DONE THAT? I MEAN, I, WELL, YOU’RE LOOKING AT SOMEBODY WHO’S DONE SURGERY. I MEAN, TO LOOK IN THERE AND TO FIND THE STRUCTURE OF THE DIGESTIVE SYSTEM AND THE, AND, UH, ALL OF THE SYSTEMS THAT ARE IN THAT PIG! WHY? BECAUSE WE CAN LEARN SOMETHING ABOUT HOW WE WORK BY STUDYING HOW THE DIGESTIVE SYSTEM AND OTHER SYSTEMS OF ANIMALS WORK. DOES THAT MEAN, THEREFORE, BECAUSE MAN AND ANIMALS ARE SIMILAR IN DESIGN THAT MAN HAS EVOLVED FROM THE ANIMALS? OF COURSE NOT! UH, I MEAN IF, IF YOU WERE TO LOOK AT A DOG HOUSE, AND THEN LOOK AT A COTTAGE, THEN LOOK AT A FINE HOUSE, AND THEN LOOK AT A MANSION, THEY WOULD ALL BE VERY SIMILAR IN SOME WAYS. ALL HAVE FLOORS, ALL HAVE, UH, WALLS, AND ALL HAVE ROOFS. WOULD YOU SAY, THEREFORE, THAT, UH, THAT THE UHM, THE COTTAGE EVOLVED OUT OF THE DOG HOUSE AND THE MANSION EVOLVED OUT OF THE COTTAGE? OF COURSE NOT. WHEN WE BUILT THESE BUILDINGS, WE WANTED TO REMEMBER, UH, OUR HERITAGE, SO WE HAVE A BEAUTIFUL WATERCOLOR. ONE SHOWS THE LITTLE STONE CHURCH. THE NEXT SHOWS, THE BELLEVUE AUDITORIUM, THE LEE AUDITORIUM. THE NEXT ONE SHOWS THAT GRACIOUS AND BEAUTIFUL AUDITORIUM THAT WAS DEDICATED IN 1952. AND THE NEXT SHOWS THIS ONE. NOW, IF YOU GIVE THAT TO SOME SCIENTIST TODAY, THEY’D SAY, “SEE, THAT PROVES THE EVOLUTION OF A BUILDING.” NO, IT DIDN’T’ PROVE ANY EVOLUTION. IT JUST SIMPLY PROVES THAT WHOEVER DESIGNS BUILDINGS SAYS BASICALLY BUILDINGS HAVE CERTAIN THINGS IN COMMON. IN THAT IS ‘ THEY HAVE FLOORS, WALLS, AND CEILINGS BECAUSE THEY SERVE A COMMON PURPOSE. AND SO, MEN AND ANIMALS LIVE IN THE SAME ENVIRONMENT. SO, IN MANY WAYS, THEY HAVE A “SIMILARITY IN DESIGN.”

THEY ALSO HAVE A “SIMILARITY IN DIET.” LOOK HERE, IN GENESIS, CHAPTER ONE, AND VERSES 29 AND FOLLOWING, “AND GOD SAID, BEHOLD, I HAVE GIVEN YOU EVERY HERB BEARING SEED, WHICH IS UPON THE FACE OF ALL OF THE EARTH, AND EVERY TREE, IN WHICH IS THE FRUIT OF A TREE YIELDING SEED; TO YOU IT SHALL BE FOR MEAT. (30) AND TO EVERY BEAST OF THE EARTH, AND TO EVERY FOWL OF THE AIR, AND TO EVERY THING THAT CREEPETH UPON THE EARTH, WHEREIN THERE IS LIFE, I HAVE GIVEN EVERY GREEN HERB FOR MEAT: AND IT WAS SO.” MEN AND ANIMALS HAVE, NOT ONLY A “SIMILARITY IN DESIGN,” BUT A -‘SIMILARITY IN DIET,” BECAUSE WE HAVE THE SAME KIND OF ORGANS. WE HAVE STOMACHS, ESOPHAGUS. WE HAVE GASTRIC JUICES. AND SO, THEREFORE, WE CAN EAT THE SAME THING. DOES THAT MEAN THAT MAN, THEREFORE, HAS EVOLVED FROM AN ANIMAL? WELL, IF YOUR AUTOMOBILE BURNS GASOLINE AND YOUR MOTORCYCLE BURNS GASOLINE, DOES THAT MEAN THAT YOUR AUTOMOBILE EVOLVED FROM YOUR MOTORCYCLE? NO. THEY BOTH BURN THE SAME FUEL. MEN AND ANIMALS HAVE A “SIMILARITY IN DIET.” THEY HAVE ANOTHER SIMILARITY.

THEY HAVE A “SIMILARITY IN DEATH.'[ I MEAN, MEN AND ANIMALS DIE. LOOK, IF YOU WILL, IN CHAPTER 2 AND VERSE 17. GOD SAID, “BUT OF THE TREE OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL, THOU SHALT NOT EAT OF IT: FOR IN THE DAY THAT THOU EATEST THEREOF THOU SHALT SURELY DIE.” MEN DIE, AND ANIMALS DIE. ECCLESIASTES, CHAPTER 3, VERSES 19 AND 20 SAYS, “FOR THAT WHICH BEFALLETH THE SONS OF MEN BEFALLETH BEASTS; EVEN ONE THING BEFALLETH THEM: AS THE ONE DIETH, SO (DIETH) THE OTHER ….. 11

A “SIMILARITY IN DESIGN,” A “SIMILARITY IN DIET,” A “SIMILARITY IN DEATH.” WHY DO MEN DIE, AND WHY DO ANIMALS DIE? BECAUSE ALL CREATION IS UNDER A CURSE. AND DEATH IS AN IRRESISTIBLE FACT FOR BOTH MAN AND ANIMALS. SO, I’VE TALKED TO YOU ABOUT “THE CREATION OF MAN AND THE ANIMALS.”

“THE CONTRASTS OF MAN AND THE ANIMALS.” 

BUT NOW LET ME TALK TO YOU ABOUT “THE CONTRASTS OF MAN AND THE ANIMALS.” WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MAN AND AN ANIMAL? OR ARE THESE RIGHT WHEN THEY SAY THAT THERE IS BASICALLY NO INTRINSIC DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A MAN AND AN ANIMAL? LET ME SHOW YOU THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MEN AND ANIMALS.

“Craving for Deity”

NUMBER ONE, MAN HAS A LONGING IN HIS HEART TO KNOW GOD. HE HAS A CRAVING FOR DEITY. NOTICE VERSE 26, (GENESIS 1:26), “AND GOD SAID, LET US MAKE MAN IN OUR IMAGE, (AND) AFTER OUR LIKENESS…” NOW, MY DEAR FRIEND, WHEN GOD MADE YOU, GOD MADE YOU IN HIS IMAGE. NOT IN HIS PHYSICAL IMAGE, GOD DOESN’T HAVE HANDS, AND FEET, AND EYES, AND EARS. GOD IS A SPIRIT! WHEN GOD MADE YOU IN HIS IMAGE, HE MADE YOU IN HIS MORAL AND SPIRITUAL IMAGE. IT’S A SPIRITUAL IMAGE! PUT THIS VERSE DOWN,

COLOSSIANS 3, VERSE 10. THE BIBLE SAYS, “…PUT ON THE NEW MAN, WHICH IS RENEWED IN KNOWLEDGE AFTER THE IMAGE OF HIM THAT CREATED HIM.” SO, YOUR NEWNESS HAS TO DO WITH YOUR KNOWLEDGE. IT IS A, IT IS A MORAL, A MENTAL, A SPIRITUAL CAPACITY. THAT’S WHAT IT MEANS TO BE IN THE IMAGE OF GOD. AND THIS ONE, EPHESIANS, CHAPTER 4, AND VERSE 24, “THAT YE PUT ON THE NEW MAN, WHICH AFTER GOD IS CREATED IN RIGHTEOUSNESS AND TRUE HOLINESS.” LISTEN TO IT AGAIN, “…WHICH 15 CREATED AFTER GOD, WHICH AFTER GOD IS CREATED IN RIGHTEOUSNESS AND TRUE HOLINESS.”

YOU SEE, BECAUSE WE ARE IN THE IMAGE OF GOD, WE HAVE A MORAL AND A SPIRITUAL NATURE. HINDUISM, NEW-AGEISM HAS BASICALLY NO MORALS. AND YOU CAN UNDERSTAND IT. YOU SEE, IF GOD IS EVERYTHING, AND EVERY-THING IS GOD, THEN EVIL IS GOD, AS WELL AS GOOD IS GOD. BAD IS GOD, AS WELL AS GOOD. AND SO THERE ARE NO REAL MORAL DISTINCTIONS. AND THAT’S THE REASON ANYTHING GOES IN THE NEW-AGE MOVEMENT, BECAUSE THERE IS NO MORAL, SPIRITUAL BACKBONE. THAT’S THE REASON THE NEW AGE HAS A MENACING DANGER TO ALL OF US. YOU SEE, MAN MADE IN THE IMAGE OF GOD HAS A MORAL, MENTAL, SPIRITUAL PROCLIVITY TO REFLECT HIS CREATOR. HAS A “CRAVING FOR DEITY.”

“CAPABILITY FOR DOMINION.”

HE ALSO HAS A “CAPABILITY FOR DOMINION.” LOOK IN VERSE 26 (GENESIS 1). GOD SAYS, “….AND LET THEM HAVE DOMINION….” MAN, MY DEAR FRIEND, IS MEANT TO RULE. PSALM 8, VERSES 6 THROUGH 8, GOD SAYS, “THOU MADEST HIM (MAN) TO HAVE DOMINION OVER THE WORKS OF THY HANDS; THOU HAST PUT ALL THINGS UNDER HIS FEET: (7) ALL SHEEP AND OXEN, YEA, AND THE BEASTS OF THE FIELD; (8) THE FOWL OF THE AIR, (AND) THE FISH OF THE SEA, AND WHATSOEVER PASSETH THROUGH THE PATHS OF THE SEA(S).” GOD MADE MAN TO HAVE DOMINION OVER THE ANIMALS. AND WHEN JESUS CHRIST WAS HERE ON EARTH, HE DEMONSTRATED THAT DOMINION. JESUS RODE A WILD DONKEY INTO JERUSALEM, ‘UPON WHICH NEVER A MAN SAT. I WANNA SEE ONE OF YOU TRY THAT! JESUS HAD DOMINION! JESUS HAD A, ROOSTER TO CROW AT THE EXACT, PRECISE MOMENT HE WANTED THAT ROOSTER TO CROW, AFTER PETER HAD DENIED HIM. REMEMBER THAT? MAN, I WANNA SEE YOU MAKE ONE CROW, MUCH LESS, I WANNA SEE KEEP ONE FROM CROWING. YOU KNOW, THE ROOSTER THINKS BECAUSE HE CROWS THE SUN COMES UP. BUT JESUS HAD DOMINION OVER THE FOWLS OF THE AIR. JESUS HAD DOMINION OVER THE FISH OF THE SEA. WHEN IT WAS TIME FOR JESUS TO PAY HIS TAXES, HE SAID, “YOU GO CAST, A HOOK INTO THE SEA.” AND THERE WAS ONE PARTICULAR FISH, OUT OF ALL OF THOSE FISH, THAT OUR LORD HAD GUIDED TO A CO I N LY I NG ON THE BOTTOM OF THAT, UH, GALILEAN SEA, AND THEN GUIDED TO THAT HOOK. NOW, FRIEND, LISTEN, HOW MANY TIMES HAVE YOU GONE FISHING AND NOT CAUGHT ANYTHING? BECAUSE, YOU SEE, MAN, TO SOME DEGREE, HAS LOST HIS DOMINION. BUT GOD GAVE MAN DOMINION OVER THE ANIMALS. THERE’S NO IF AND’S, AND BUT’S ABOUT IT. YOU SEE, MAN HAS SOMETHING THAT ANIMALS DON’T HAVE, BECAUSE ANIMALS HAVE SOMETHING THAT MEN DON’T HAVE. DO YOU KNOW WHAT ANIMALS HAVE?

ANIMALS HAVE INSTINCT. MEN DON’T HAVE INSTINCT. GOD, IN MERCY, GAVE THE ANIMALS INSTINCT. I SOMETIMES GO OUT IN THE MORNING, AND I MARVEL WHEN I SEE A SPIDER’S WEB, WITH THE DEW IN IT. HAVE YOU EVER DONE THAT? LOOKED AT THAT ENGINEERING MARVEL! NOW, DEAR FRIEND, A SPIDER CANNOT HAVE A VERY BIG BRAIN, ‘CAUSE I HAVE LOOKED. I MEAN, YOU KNOW. AND YET, OVERNIGHT, THAT’S INCREDIBLE THAT HE CAN DO THAT! AND THE BEEHIVE, AS THEY BUILD THOSE LITTLE EIGHT-SIDED THINGS. UH, IT, IT’S INCREDIBLE WHAT GOES ON IN THE BEEHIVE. AND THE BEAVER AS HE BUILDS H I S BEAVER DAM, LIKE WE HAD SOME UP HERE ON OUR LAKE. MY DEAR FRIEND, YOU’LL NEVER SEE A BEAVER BUILD AN EIGHT-SIDED CELL, OR YOU’LL NEVER SEE A BEE BUILD A DAM. ALL THEY HAVE IS INSTINCT THAT GOD HAS GIVEN TO THE CREATURES. BUT GOD DIDN’T GIVE MAN INSTINCT. GOD MADE MAN IN HIS OWN IMAGE! AND GOD GAVE MAN THE HOLY SPIRIT! THE HOLY SPIRIT IS TO MAN .. WHAT INSTINCT IS TO THE ANIMALS. NOW, IF YOU WERE TO TAKE THE INSTINCT OUT OF THE BEEHIVE, WHAT WOULD HAPPEN? IT’D BE VERY MUCH LIKE OUR WORLD TODAY MEN WITHOUT THE HOLY SPIRIT. MEN WITHOUT THE HOLY SPIRIT. YOU SEE, WHAT HAS HAPPENED, WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE WORLD TODAY IS THAT MAN IS NOT OPERATING AT FULL FUNCTION. YOU SEE, MAN HAS A, A CAPACITY FOR DOMINION, A “CAPABILITY FOR DOMINION.” AND THEN HE HAS, I WANNA SAY, A “CAPACITY FOR DEPRAVITY.” ANIMALS DON’T HAVE, ANIMALS CAN’T SIN, ‘CAUSE ANIMALS DON’T HAVE ANY CHOICE. THE REASON THEY DON’T HAVE ANY CHOICE IS THEY DON’T HAVE ANY MORAL BASIS. BUT MEN DO! AND THE SAD THING IS THIS, THAT MAN CREATED A LITTLE LOWER THAN THE ANGELS HAS MORALLY BECOME A LITTLE LOWER THAN THE ANIMALS. I MEAN, MEN CAN DO THINGS THAT ANIMALS CAN’T DO. MEN HAVE A CAPACITY FOR SIN THAT ANIMALS DON’T HAVE. SOMEBODY WROTE A POEM ABOUT MONKEYS SITTING IN A TREE, DISCUSSING EVOLUTION. I DON’T HAVE THE WHOLE POEM, BUT THE KICKER, THE LINE IN THIS, SAID ONE MONKEY SAID TO ANOTHER, AS HE WAS SO ASHAMED OF THE DRUGS AND EVERYTHING. HE SAID: “MAN DESCENDED, THE ORNERY CUSS, BUT, BROTHER, HE DIDN’T DESCEND FROM US.” I HEARD ABOUT SOME MONKEYS HAD A NEW LITTLE BABY MONKEY. AN’ THE FATHER MONKEY AN” UH, THE MOTHER MONKEY WERE LOOKING DOWN AT THAT LITTLE BABY MONKEY. AND ONE OF THEM SAID, “AH, THANK GOD IT’S NORMAL. I WAS AFRAID OF EVOLUTION.” I MEAN, DEAR FRIEND, LET ME TELL YOU, THAT MEN WILL DO THINGS THAT ANIMALS WOULDN’T DO! YOU DON’T HAVE SEXUAL PERVERSION AMONG THE ANIMALS, LIKE WE HAVE AMONG MEN. IT’S INCREDIBLE! SEE, LISTEN, MAN HAS A “CRAVING FOR DEITY. MAN, MY DEAR FRIEND, HAS A “CAPABILITY OF DOMINION.”

“CAPACITY FOR DEPRAVITY!” 

BUT HE HAS A “CAPACITY FOR DEPRAVITY!” I ‘LL TELL YOU SOMETHING ELSE ABOUT MAN THAT MAKES MAN DIFFERENT FROM THE ANIMALS.

MY DEAR FRIEND, MAN HAS A “CONCERN FOR HIS DESTINY.” MAN IS THE ONLY CREATURE WHO KNOWS HE’S GOING TO DIE. NO ELEPHANT KNOWS HE’S GOING TO DIE. HE MAY, BY INSTINCT, GO TO THE BURIAL GROUNDS. UH-HUH, THE SALMON MAY SWIM UPSTREAM AND SPAWN AND THEN DIE. BUT THEY NEVER THINK ABOUT DEATH. THEY NEVER SAY, “I ID BETTER PREPARE FOR ETERNITY.” BUT THE BIBLE SAYS THAT GOD, CONCERNING MAN, GOD HAS PUT ETERNITY IN OUR HEARTS!”(ECCL 3:11)  A GALLOP POLL HAS SI SHOWN THAT 67% OF AMERICANS BELIEVE IN LIFE AFTER DEATH. DEAR FRIEND, WE DON’T BELIEVE IT BECAUSE WE’VE PROVED IT. WE MOVE HEAVEN AND EARTH TO PROVE IT BECAUSE WE BELIEVE IT! WHY DO WE BELIEVE IT?! BECAUSE WE’RE MADE IN THE IMAGE OF ALMIGHTY GOD! THERE IS A DIFFERENCE! PLANTS HAVE A BODY, BUT THEY DON’T HAVE A SOUL. ANIMALS HAVE A BODY AND A SOUL. YOUR SOUL IS YOUR MIND, YOUR EMOTION, AND YOUR WILL. BUT ONLY MAN HAS A SPIRIT. AND THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE HUMAN SPIRIT IS WHAT MAKES US WHAT WE’RE TO BE. GOD GAVE MAN A SPIRIT. WITH YOUR BODY YOU KNOW THE WORLD BENEATH YOU. WITH YOUR SOUL YOU KNOW THE WORLD AROUND YOU. BUT WITH YOUR SPIRIT, YOU KNOW THE WORLD ABOVE YOU! AND GOD MADE MAN WITH A SPIRITUAL CAPACITY TO KNOW HIM, TO LOVE HIM, AND TO SERVE HIM! NOW LISTEN TO ME,

DEAR FRIEND, YOU’RE NO ANIMAL. YOU’RE THE DISTINCT CREATION OF ALMIGHTY GOD. AND WHAT DID GOD MAKE A FISH TO DO? GOD MADE A FISH TO SWIM IN THE SEA. AND WHAT DID GOD MAKE A BIRD TO DO? GOD MADE A BIRD TO FLY IN THE SKY. AND WHAT DID GOD MAKE YOU TO DO? GOD CREATED YOU TO KNOW HIM, TO LOVE HIM, AND TO SERVE HIM. THE BIBLE SAYS, “IT IS IN HIM THAT WE LIVE, AND MOVE, AND HAVE OUR BEING.” NOW LISTEN VERY CAREFULLY, IF YOU DON’T KNOW GOD AND IF YOU DON’T SERVE GOD, YOU HAVE MISSED THE PURPOSE FOR WHICH YOU WERE CREATED. AND YOU WILL BE LIKE A FISH OUT OF THE SEA. TAKE A FISH OUT OF THE SEA AND PUT IT IN A TREE AND HE’S AN UNHAPPY FISH. TAKE A BIRD OUT OF THE AIR AND PUT THAT BIRD IN THE WATER, AND TO SAY THE LEAST, HE’S AN UNHAPPY FISH. DEAR FRIEND, IF YOU ARE NOT SERVING GOD.

IF YOU DON’T KNOW GOD, YOU HAVE MISSED IT ALL. AND HOW CAN YOU KNOW GOD? BY RECEIVING JESUS CHRIST AS YOUR PERSONAL SAVIOR AND LORD. GOD LOVES YOU SO MUCH. JESUS CHRIST DIED FOR YOU IN AGONY AND BLOOD. YOU ARE NO ACCIDENT AND YOU ARE NO ANIMAL. YOU ARE MADE IN THE IMAGE OF GOD. YOU ARE MADE FOR HIS GLORY. HEADS ARE BOWED AND EYES ARE CLOSED.

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Review of Carl Sagan book (Part 4 of series on Evolution)

May 24, 2012 – 1:47 am

Review of Carl Sagan book (Part 4 of series on Evolution) The Long War against God-Henry Morris, part 5 of 6 Uploaded by FLIPWORLDUPSIDEDOWN3 on Aug 30, 2010 http://www.icr.org/ http://store.icr.org/prodinfo.asp?number=BLOWA2http://store.icr.org/prodinfo.asp?number=BLOWASGhttp://www.fliptheworldupsidedown.com/blog _______________________ I got this from a blogger in April of 2008 concerning candidate Obama’s view on evolution: Q: York County was recently in the news […] By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Atheists Confronted, Current Events, President Obama | Edit| Comments (0)

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Other States Need to Ban Abortions and Protect Unborn Children Like Texas Has

Opinion  |  Marjorie Dannenfelser  |   Sep 15, 2021   |   6:19PM   |  Washington, DC

The pro-life cause has just secured a major victory for the unborn and their mothers, with further protections possible soon — if its champions stay courageous and don’t flinch. The Supreme Court’s decision to leave the Texas Heartbeat Act standing was an unexpected blessing and has resulted in an estimated hundreds of abortions prevented thus far. The goal of the pro-life movement has always been to make abortion illegal and unthinkable. Texans are doing just that, in defiance of the undemocratic stifling of debate wrought by the Supreme Court years ago . . . and we should celebrate it and support them. Political leaders need to speak up — this law has the potential to save a hundred or more unborn children with beating hearts from the brutality of abortion each day it is in effect.

The Heartbeat Act was co-authored by eleven pro-life women legislators, debated and voted on by the 181 members of the state legislature, approved with a bipartisan majority, and signed into law by Governor Greg Abbott. It is both the result of and a response to 50 years of undemocratic rule by unelected judges imposing their own policy views and calling it constitutional law — taking the fundamentally political questions surrounding this primal issue out of the hands of legislatures, making it impossible for states to enforce their legitimate interest in protecting unborn life in any substantial way.

Instead of resolving conflict over abortion policy, the Court’s prior actions have provoked it — as former justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once observed — and left our politics profoundly unsettled. After five decades, states are more eager than ever to challenge the status quo. Some 500 pro-life bills have advanced at the state level this year alone, more than at any point since Roe v. Wade, with approximately one in five being enacted into law.

This fall, the Supreme Court will hear a case that could give states the flexibility they deserve. The central question in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is whether state legislatures have a role, before viability, in making their own laws that reflect the deeply held values of the people who live there. Because of decades of work by pro-life advocates to elect leaders who would appoint constitutionalists to the bench, finally we have a Court willing to face that question head-on.

HELP LIFENEWS SAVE BABIES FROM ABORTION! Please help LifeNews.com with a donation!

The pro-life movement goes into this momentous opportunity standing firmly on the pillars of science, public consensus, and moral justice.

Advances in technology over the past five decades reveal the humanity of the unborn child and the breathtaking complexity of life in the womb. We know that by six weeks, the child’s heart is beating about 98 times a minute. Even Planned Parenthood’s website concedes that human beings at this young age have a heart, at the same time they stop more than 354,000 hearts a year and counting.

Six-week-old unborn babies have a developing spinal cord and brain — which has divided into three primary sections responsible for sensing and decision-making, moving and tracking objects, and vital body functions. By ten weeks they have arms, legs, fingers, and toes, and they can kick and jump. By 15 weeks, they have fully formed noses, lips, eyelids, and eyebrows — and by that point if not earlier, they can feel pain, exhibiting hormonal stress responses to painful procedures. They are treated as patients by fetal surgeons, who administer anesthesia as standard care in order to treat conditions such as spina bifida right in the womb.

But thanks to the Supreme Court’s radical and hopelessly convoluted precedents, the United States is one of only seven countries in the world — including China and North Korea — that permit abortion on demand, for any reason, up to the point of birth. The strong majority of Americans agree this is too extreme, something they share with 47 out of 50 European nationsthat limit elective abortion prior to 15 weeks.

Mississippians set their limit at 15 weeks. In the future, other states might come up with widely different laws — but that’s how democracy works, and the chance to protect unborn children and mothers the way many states desire would be a welcome improvement.

This case presents us with a clarion call to love both mother and child. Unsurprisingly, Texas is leading the way in compassionate care for women facing unplanned pregnancies, with state and private programs providing real assistance to meet their material and emotional needs. “Alternatives to Abortion” began in 2006 and provides support services to pregnant women. Last session, the Texas legislature expanded funds for this program to $100 million. In addition, the Healthy Texas Women program helps low-income women with family-planning resources and health-care needs.

And if that isn’t enough, approximately 200 pregnancy center locations across Texas — nearly ten times the number of abortion centers — offer support and resources, typically at no cost, that profit-driven abortion businesses won’t deign to provide. In contrast to pregnancy centers that love and serve women even after a choice to abort, “abortion funds” facilitate one choice only — ending the life of a child.

The American people are not missing this crucial moment. Victory is within reach, but not inevitable — it’s ours to lose, if we fail to find our voice. I urge pro-life leaders everywhere to have courage, speak up, and be bold in defending the vulnerable ones who depend on them so much.

LifeNews Note: Marjorie Dannenfelser is president of the national pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List and author of “Life is Winning: Inside the Fight for Unborn Children and Their Mothers.”

Carl Sagan asserted:

Of the many actual points of view, it is widely held–especially in the media, which rarely have the time or the inclination to make fine distinctions–that there are only two: “pro-choice” and “pro-life.” This is what the two principal warring camps like to call themselves, and that’s what we’ll call them here. In the simplest characterization, a pro-choicer would hold that the decision to abort a pregnancy is to be made only by the woman; the state has no right to interfere.

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Is it a choice or a child? Adrian Rogers notes:

In one of the most poignant verses in the Bible, Isaiah describes the day we now live in.

 “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” Isaiah 5:20

Some people like to say they’re for “a right to choose,” but then don’t complete the sentence. Choose what? What do you choose? They can’t say, “I’m for the choice to kill a baby in the mother’s womb,” because it doesn’t sound so good.

The decision to take an innocent life in the mother’s womb really is a choice between life and death. God’s Word says clearly in Deuteronomy 30:19

Therefore choose life, that both you and your children may live.

Understand that you are free to choose. You are not free not to choose. And you are not free to choose the consequences of your choice. God has told us we are to choose life.

This is an exchange I had several years ago on a blog:

Steven E you need to listen to your own words and then weigh them. This is what you said:
“I lean towards giving the woman the choice, even up to birth, just do not lie to me when you say a fetus is not a baby, or a living person. There is that time, if a woman doesn’t get on the stick and take her MorningAfter pill when she is killing a baby. I don’t believe in taking the choice away from her, I just don’t want to perpetuate a lie, either. Admit that things like parital birth abortions are abominations, and the doctors that do it, do it for money, not some high calling.”
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Most liberals argue that the unborn baby is not a human deserving the protection of our laws. It seems that you are saying that even if the unborn baby “a living person” at some point during the 9 months leading up to birth but you “don’t believe in taking the choice away from her” concerning abortion and then you flip back and say “that things like partial birth abortions are abominations.”

Let me try and get you to clarify this a little bit so I don’t go away misunderstanding you.

Are advocating abortion rights over human rights? Prochoice advocate Elizabeth Williams came out and said that on 1-23-13 in her article on Salon. Maybe you agree with her? DO YOU AGREE WITH HER? I AM GOING TO DO SOMETHING THAT I HAVE DONE BEFORE AND THAT IS I AM GOING TO PUT A LONG PASSAGE FROM A PRO-CHOICE ADVOCATE:

The “life” conversation is often too thorny to even broach. Yet I know that throughout my own pregnancies, I never wavered for a moment in the belief that I was carrying a human life inside of me. I believe that’s what a fetus is: a human life. And that doesn’t make me one iota less solidly pro-choice….

Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always.

When we on the pro-choice side get cagey around the life question, it makes us illogically contradictory. I have friends who have referred to their abortions in terms of “scraping out a bunch of cells” and then a few years later were exultant over the pregnancies that they unhesitatingly described in terms of “the baby” and “this kid.” I know women who have been relieved at their abortions and grieved over their miscarriages. Why can’t we agree that how they felt about their pregnancies was vastly different, but that it’s pretty silly to pretend that what was growing inside of them wasn’t the same? Fetuses aren’t selective like that. They don’t qualify as human life only if they’re intended to be born.

When we try to act like a pregnancy doesn’t involve human life, we wind up drawing stupid semantic lines in the sand: first trimester abortion vs. second trimester vs. late term, dancing around the issue trying to decide if there’s a single magic moment when a fetus becomes a person. Are you human only when you’re born? Only when you’re viable outside of the womb? Are you less of a human life when you look like a tadpole than when you can suck on your thumb?

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I am tempted to give the whole pro-choice article but I will stop and just give you the link:
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/23/so_what_if…

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I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the video below. It is very valuable information for Christians to have.  Actually I have included a video below that includes comments from him on this subject.

In the film series “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?” the arguments are presented  against abortion (Episode 1),  infanticide (Episode 2),   euthenasia (Episode 3), and then there is a discussion of the Christian versus Humanist worldview concerning the issue of “the basis for human dignity” in Episode 4 and then in the last episode a close look at the truth claims of the Bible.

Many liberals actually truly do argue for abortion rights over human rights. Prochoice advocate Elizabeth Williams came out and said that on 1-23-13 in her article on Salon. We hear reasons for abortion such as poverty,and  child abuse,  but why not consider adoption? Instead, the political left will stop at nothing to push the pro-abortion agenda. Why not stop and take an honest look at when life begins for the unborn child and when she begins to feel pain?

Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race?)

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March for Life: I Am the Pro-Life Generation (VIDEO)

Amy Payne

January 25, 2013 at 3:43 pm

For the past 40 years, pro-life advocates from all over the country annually march in solidarity to raise awareness for the most vulnerable in society—the unborn. Without fail, the 40th anniversary March for Life brought large crowds to the National Mall today in the hope of securing the right to life for all.

Heritage’s president-elect, Jim DeMint, understands the importance of the right to life and has always been a strong advocate for the pro-life movement.

“Over the past four decades we have seen countless victories upholding respect for human life and dignity,” he says in Heritage’s new video. “Courageous pro-life policymakers and compassionate ministries such as pregnancy care centers together made great strides to protect unborn life. They moved the hearts and minds of an entire generation.”

The rally brought thousands of people—especially many from the millennial generation. From grade schools to universities all over the country, hundreds of students took a stand on this human rights threat. Kristan Hawkins, the executive director of Students for Life in America, was handing out signs to all the youth that stated, “I AM THE PRO-LIFE GENERATION.” Students and young people held those signs proudly as they faced the bitter cold.

What does this mean for the future? As Heritage’s Sarah Torre wrote, “Today, roughly half of Americans now identify themselves as ‘pro-life,’ including many of the millennial generation who will make up the crowds at today’s march. More than 100 pro-life laws have been passed in states across the country since 2010, including parental notification, informed consent, and abortion clinic regulation legislation.”

These strides and the dedication of rising generations point to a hopeful future for America’s most vulnerable.

Great prolife poster:

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Recently I have been revisiting my correspondence in 1995 with the famous astronomer Carl Sagan who I had the privilege to correspond with in 1994, 1995 and 1996. In 1996 I had a chance to respond to his December 5, 1995letter on January 10, 1996 and I never heard back from him again since his cancer returned and he passed away later in 1996. Below is what Carl Sagan wrote to me in his December 5, 1995 letter:

Thanks for your recent letter about evolution and abortion. The correlation is hardly one to one; there are evolutionists who are anti-abortion and anti-evolutionists who are pro-abortion.You argue that God exists because otherwise we could not understand the world in our consciousness. But if you think God is necessary to understand the world, then why do you not ask the next question of where God came from? And if you say “God was always here,” why not say that the universe was always here? On abortion, my views are contained in the enclosed article (Sagan, Carl and Ann Druyan {1990}, “The Question of Abortion,” Parade Magazine, April 22.)

I was introduced to when reading a book by Francis Schaeffer called HE IS THERE AND HE IS NOT SILENT written in 1968. 

Francis Schaeffer when he was a young pastor in St. Louis pictured above.

Francis Schaeffer and Adrian Rogers

(both Adrian Rogers and Francis Schaeffer mentioned Carl Sagan in their books and that prompted me to write Sagan and expose him to their views.

Carl Sagan pictured below:

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Francis Schaeffer

I mentioned earlier that I was blessed with the opportunity to correspond with Dr. Sagan. In his December 5, 1995 letter Dr. Sagan went on to tell me that he was enclosing his article “The Question of Abortion: A Search for Answers”by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. I am going to respond to several points made in that article. Here is a portion of Sagan’s article (here is a link to the whole article):

Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan pictured above

 “The Question of Abortion: A Search for Answers”

by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan

For the complete text, including illustrations, introductory quote, footnotes, and commentary on the reaction to the originally published article see Billions and Billions.

The issue had been decided years ago. The court had chosen the middle ground. You’d think the fight was over. Instead, there are mass rallies, bombings and intimidation, murders of workers at abortion clinics, arrests, intense lobbying, legislative drama, Congressional hearings, Supreme Court decisions, major political parties almost defining themselves on the issue, and clerics threatening politicians with perdition. Partisans fling accusations of hypocrisy and murder. The intent of the Constitution and the will of God are equally invoked. Doubtful arguments are trotted out as certitudes. The contending factions call on science to bolster their positions. Families are divided, husbands and wives agree not to discuss it, old friends are no longer speaking. Politicians check the latest polls to discover the dictates of their consciences. Amid all the shouting, it is hard for the adversaries to hear one another. Opinions are polarized. Minds are closed.

 

Is it wrong to abort a pregnancy? Always? Sometimes? Never? How do we decide? We wrote this article to understand better what the contending views are and to see if we ourselves could find a position that would satisfy us both. Is there no middle ground? We had to weigh the arguments of both sides for consistency and to pose test cases, some of which are purely hypothetical. If in some of these tests we seem to go too far, we ask the reader to be patient with us–we’re trying to stress the various positions to the breaking point to see their weaknesses and where they fail.

In contemplative moments, nearly everyone recognizes that the issue is not wholly one-sided. Many partisans of differing views, we find, feel some disquiet, some unease when confronting what’s behind the opposing arguments. (This is partly why such confrontations are avoided.) And the issue surely touches on deep questions: What are our responses to one another? Should we permit the state to intrude into the most intimate and personal aspects of our lives? Where are the boundaries of freedom? What does it mean to be human?

Of the many actual points of view, it is widely held–especially in the media, which rarely have the time or the inclination to make fine distinctions–that there are only two: “pro-choice” and “pro-life.” This is what the two principal warring camps like to call themselves, and that’s what we’ll call them here. In the simplest characterization, a pro-choicer would hold that the decision to abort a pregnancy is to be made only by the woman; the state has no right to interfere. And a pro-lifer would hold that, from the moment of conception, the embryo or fetus is alive; that this life imposes on us a moral obligation to preserve it; and that abortion is tantamount to murder. Both names–pro-choice and pro-life–were picked with an eye toward influencing those whose minds are not yet made up: Few people wish to be counted either as being against freedom of choice or as opposed to life. Indeed, freedom and life are two of our most cherished values, and here they seem to be in fundamental conflict.

Let’s consider these two absolutist positions in turn. A newborn baby is surely the same being it was just before birth. There ‘s good evidence that a late-term fetus responds to sound–including music, but especially its mother’s voice. It can suck its thumb or do a somersault. Occasionally, it generates adult brain-wave patterns. Some people claim to remember being born, or even the uterine environment. Perhaps there is thought in the womb. It’s hard to maintain that a transformation to full personhood happens abruptly at the moment of birth. Why, then, should it be murder to kill an infant the day after it was born but not the day before?

As a practical matter, this isn’t very important: Less than 1 percent of all tabulated abortions in the United States are listed in the last three months of pregnancy (and, on closer investigation, most such reports turn out to be due to miscarriage or miscalculation). But third-trimester abortions provide a test of the limits of the pro-choice point of view. Does a woman’s “innate right to control her own body” encompass the right to kill a near-term fetus who is, for all intents and purposes, identical to a newborn child?

We believe that many supporters of reproductive freedom are troubled at least occasionally by this question. But they are reluctant to raise it because it is the beginning of a slippery slope. If it is impermissible to abort a pregnancy in the ninth month, what about the eighth, seventh, sixth … ? Once we acknowledge that the state can interfere at any time in the pregnancy, doesn’t it follow that the state can interfere at all times?

Abortion and the slippery slope argument above

This conjures up the specter of predominantly male, predominantly affluent legislators telling poor women they must bear and raise alone children they cannot afford to bring up; forcing teenagers to bear children they are not emotionally prepared to deal with; saying to women who wish for a career that they must give up their dreams, stay home, and bring up babies; and, worst of all, condemning victims of rape and incest to carry and nurture the offspring of their assailants. Legislative prohibitions on abortion arouse the suspicion that their real intent is to control the independence and sexuality of women…

And yet, by consensus, all of us think it proper that there be prohibitions against, and penalties exacted for, murder. It would be a flimsy defense if the murderer pleads that this is just between him and his victim and none of the government’s business. If killing a fetus is truly killing a human being, is it not the duty of the state to prevent it? Indeed, one of the chief functions of government is to protect the weak from the strong.

If we do not oppose abortion at some stage of pregnancy, is there not a danger of dismissing an entire category of human beings as unworthy of our protection and respect? And isn’t that dismissal the hallmark of sexism, racism, nationalism, and religious fanaticism? Shouldn’t those dedicated to fighting such injustices be scrupulously careful not to embrace another?

Adrian Rogers’ sermon on animal rights refutes Sagan here

There is no right to life in any society on Earth today, nor has there been at any former time… : We raise farm animals for slaughter; destroy forests; pollute rivers and lakes until no fish can live there; kill deer and elk for sport, leopards for the pelts, and whales for fertilizer; entrap dolphins, gasping and writhing, in great tuna nets; club seal pups to death; and render a species extinct every day. All these beasts and vegetables are as alive as we. What is (allegedly) protected is not life, but human life.

Genesis 3 defines being human

And even with that protection, casual murder is an urban commonplace, and we wage “conventional” wars with tolls so terrible that we are, most of us, afraid to consider them very deeply… That protection, that right to life, eludes the 40,000 children under five who die on our planet each day from preventable starvation, dehydration, disease, and neglect.

Those who assert a “right to life” are for (at most) not just any kind of life, but for–particularly and uniquely—human life. So they too, like pro-choicers, must decide what distinguishes a human being from other animals and when, during gestation, the uniquely human qualities–whatever they are–emerge.

The Bible talks about the differences between humans and animals

Despite many claims to the contrary, life does not begin at conception: It is an unbroken chain that stretches back nearly to the origin of the Earth, 4.6 billion years ago. Nor does human life begin at conception: It is an unbroken chain dating back to the origin of our species, hundreds of thousands of years ago. Every human sperm and egg is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, alive. They are not human beings, of course. However, it could be argued that neither is a fertilized egg.

In some animals, an egg develops into a healthy adult without benefit of a sperm cell. But not, so far as we know, among humans. A sperm and an unfertilized egg jointly comprise the full genetic blueprint for a human being. Under certain circumstances, after fertilization, they can develop into a baby. But most fertilized eggs are spontaneously miscarried. Development into a baby is by no means guaranteed. Neither a sperm and egg separately, nor a fertilized egg, is more than a potential baby or a potential adult. So if a sperm and egg are as human as the fertilized egg produced by their union, and if it is murder to destroy a fertilized egg–despite the fact that it’s only potentially a baby–why isn’t it murder to destroy a sperm or an egg?

Hundreds of millions of sperm cells (top speed with tails lashing: five inches per hour) are produced in an average human ejaculation. A healthy young man can produce in a week or two enough spermatozoa to double the human population of the Earth. So is masturbation mass murder? How about nocturnal emissions or just plain sex? When the unfertilized egg is expelled each month, has someone died? Should we mourn all those spontaneous miscarriages? Many lower animals can be grown in a laboratory from a single body cell. Human cells can be cloned… In light of such cloning technology, would we be committing mass murder by destroying any potentially clonable cells? By shedding a drop of blood?

 

All human sperm and eggs are genetic halves of “potential” human beings. Should heroic efforts be made to save and preserve all of them, everywhere, because of this “potential”? Is failure to do so immoral or criminal? Of course, there’s a difference between taking a life and failing to save it. And there’s a big difference between the probability of survival of a sperm cell and that of a fertilized egg. But the absurdity of a corps of high-minded semen-preservers moves us to wonder whether a fertilized egg’s mere “potential” to become a baby really does make destroying it murder.

Opponents of abortion worry that, once abortion is permissible immediately after conception, no argument will restrict it at any later time in the pregnancy. Then, they fear, one day it will be permissible to murder a fetus that is unambiguously a human being. Both pro-choicers and pro-lifers (at least some of them) are pushed toward absolutist positions by parallel fears of the slippery slope.

 

Another slippery slope is reached by those pro-lifers who are willing to make an exception in the agonizing case of a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest. But why should the right to live depend on the circumstances of conception? If the same child were to result, can the state ordain life for the offspring of a lawful union but death for one conceived by force or coercion? How can this be just? And if exceptions are extended to such a fetus, why should they be withheld from any other fetus? This is part of the reason some pro-lifers adopt what many others consider the outrageous posture of opposing abortions under any and all circumstances–only excepting, perhaps, when the life of the mother is in danger.

By far the most common reason for abortion worldwide is birth control. So shouldn’t opponents of abortion be handing out contraceptives and teaching school children how to use them? That would be an effective way to reduce the number of abortions. Instead, the United States is far behind other nations in the development of safe and effective methods of birth control–and, in many cases, opposition to such research (and to sex education) has come from the same people who oppose abortions.continue on to Part 3

For the complete text, including illustrations, introductory quote, footnotes, and commentary on the reaction to the originally published article see Billions and Billions.

The attempt to find an ethically sound and unambiguous judgment on when, if ever, abortion is permissible has deep historical roots. Often, especially in Christian tradition, such attempts were connected with the question of when the soul enters the body–a matter not readily amenable to scientific investigation and an issue of controversy even among learned theologians. Ensoulment has been asserted to occur in the sperm before conception, at conception, at the time of “quickening” (when the mother is first able to feel the fetus stirring within her), and at birth. Or even later.

Different religions have different teachings. Among hunter-gatherers, there are usually no prohibitions against abortion, and it was common in ancient Greece and Rome. In contrast, the more severe Assyrians impaled women on stakes for attempting abortion. The Jewish Talmud teaches that the fetus is not a person and has no rights. The Old and New Testaments–rich in astonishingly detailed prohibitions on dress, diet, and permissible words–contain not a word specifically prohibiting abortion. The only passage that’s remotely relevant (Exodus 21:22) decrees that if there’s a fight and a woman bystander should accidentally be injured and made to miscarry, the assailant must pay a fine.

Neither St. Augustine nor St. Thomas Aquinas considered early-term abortion to be homicide (the latter on the grounds that the embryo doesn’t look human). This view was embraced by the Church in the Council of Vienne in 1312, and has never been repudiated. The Catholic Church’s first and long-standing collection of canon law (according to the leading historian of the Church’s teaching on abortion, John Connery, S.J.) held that abortion was homicide only after the fetus was already “formed”–roughly, the end of the first trimester.

But when sperm cells were examined in the seventeenth century by the first microscopes, they were thought to show a fully formed human being. An old idea of the homunculus was resuscitated–in which within each sperm cell was a fully formed tiny human, within whose testes were innumerable other homunculi, etc., ad infinitum. In part through this misinterpretation of scientific data, in 1869 abortion at any time for any reason became grounds for excommunication. It is surprising to most Catholics and others to discover that the date was not much earlier.

From colonial times to the nineteenth century, the choice in the United States was the woman’s until “quickening.” An abortion in the first or even second trimester was at worst a misdemeanor. Convictions were rarely sought and almost impossible to obtain, because they depended entirely on the woman’s own testimony of whether she had felt quickening, and because of the jury’s distaste for prosecuting a woman for exercising her right to choose. In 1800 there was not, so far as is known, a single statute in the United States concerning abortion. Advertisements for drugs to induce abortion could be found in virtually every newspaper and even in many church publications–although the language used was suitably euphemistic, if widely understood.

But by 1900, abortion had been banned at any time in pregnancy by every state in the Union, except when necessary to save the woman’s life. What happened to bring about so striking a reversal? Religion had little to do with it.Drastic economic and social conversions were turning this country from an agrarian to an urban-industrial society. America was in the process of changing from having one of the highest birthrates in the world to one of the lowest. Abortion certainly played a role and stimulated forces to suppress it.

 

One of the most significant of these forces was the medical profession. Up to the mid-nineteenth century, medicine was an uncertified, unsupervised business. Anyone could hang up a shingle and call himself (or herself) a doctor. With the rise of a new, university-educated medical elite, anxious to enhance the status and influence of physicians, the American Medical Association was formed. In its first decade, the AMA began lobbying against abortions performed by anyone except licensed physicians. New knowledge of embryology, the physicians said, had shown the fetus to be human even before quickening.

Their assault on abortion was motivated not by concern for the health of the woman but, they claimed, for the welfare of the fetus. You had to be a physician to know when abortion was morally justified, because the question depended on scientific and medical facts understood only by physicians. At the same time, women were effectively excluded from the medical schools, where such arcane knowledge could be acquired. So, as things worked out, women had almost nothing to say about terminating their own pregnancies. It was also up to the physician to decide if the pregnancy posed a threat to the woman, and it was entirely at his discretion to determine what was and was not a threat. For the rich woman, the threat might be a threat to her emotional tranquillity or even to her lifestyle. The poor woman was often forced to resort to the back alley or the coat hanger.

This was the law until the 1960s, when a coalition of individuals and organizations, the AMA now among them, sought to overturn it and to reinstate the more traditional values that were to be embodied in Roe v. Wade.continue on to Part 4

If you deliberately kill a human being, it’s called murder. If you deliberately kill a chimpanzee–biologically, our closest relative, sharing 99.6 percent of our active genes–whatever else it is, it’s not murder. To date, murder uniquely applies to killing human beings. Therefore, the question of when personhood (or, if we like, ensoulment) arises is key to the abortion debate. When does the fetus become human? When do distinct and characteristic human qualities emerge?

Section 8 Sperm journey to becoming Human 

We recognize that specifying a precise moment will overlook individual differences. Therefore, if we must draw a line, it ought to be drawn conservatively–that is, on the early side. There are people who object to having to set some numerical limit, and we share their disquiet; but if there is to be a law on this matter, and it is to effect some useful compromise between the two absolutist positions, it must specify, at least roughly, a time of transition to personhood.

Every one of us began from a dot. A fertilized egg is roughly the size of the period at the end of this sentence. The momentous meeting of sperm and egg generally occurs in one of the two fallopian tubes. One cell becomes two, two become four, and so on—an exponentiation of base-2 arithmetic. By the tenth day the fertilized egg has become a kind of hollow sphere wandering off to another realm: the womb. It destroys tissue in its path. It sucks blood from capillaries. It bathes itself in maternal blood, from which it extracts oxygen and nutrients. It establishes itself as a kind of parasite on the walls of the uterus.By the third week, around the time of the first missed menstrual period, the forming embryo is about 2 millimeters long and is developing various body parts. Only at this stage does it begin to be dependent on a rudimentary placenta. It looks a little like a segmented worm.By the end of the fourth week, it’s about 5 millimeters (about 1/5 inch) long. It’s recognizable now as a vertebrate, its tube-shaped heart is beginning to beat, something like the gill arches of a fish or an amphibian become conspicuous, and there is a pronounced tail. It looks rather like a newt or a tadpole. This is the end of the first month after conception.By the fifth week, the gross divisions of the brain can be distinguished. What will later develop into eyes are apparent, and little buds appear—on their way to becoming arms and legs.By the sixth week, the embryo is 13 millimeteres (about ½ inch) long. The eyes are still on the side of the head, as in most animals, and the reptilian face has connected slits where the mouth and nose eventually will be.By the end of the seventh week, the tail is almost gone, and sexual characteristics can be discerned (although both sexes look female). The face is mammalian but somewhat piglike.By the end of the eighth week, the face resembles that of a primate but is still not quite human. Most of the human body parts are present in their essentials. Some lower brain anatomy is well-developed. The fetus shows some reflex response to delicate stimulation.By the tenth week, the face has an unmistakably human cast. It is beginning to be possible to distinguish males from females. Nails and major bone structures are not apparent until the third month.By the fourth month, you can tell the face of one fetus from that of another. Quickening is most commonly felt in the fifth month. The bronchioles of the lungs do not begin developing until approximately the sixth month, the alveoli still later.

So, if only a person can be murdered, when does the fetus attain personhood? When its face becomes distinctly human, near the end of the first trimester? When the fetus becomes responsive to stimuli–again, at the end of the first trimester? When it becomes active enough to be felt as quickening, typically in the middle of the second trimester? When the lungs have reached a stage of development sufficient that the fetus might, just conceivably, be able to breathe on its own in the outside air?

The trouble with these particular developmental milestones is not just that they’re arbitrary. More troubling is the fact that none of them involves uniquely humancharacteristics–apart from the superficial matter of facial appearance. All animals respond to stimuli and move of their own volition. Large numbers are able to breathe. But that doesn’t stop us from slaughtering them by the billions. Reflexes and motion are not what make us human.

Sagan’s conclusion based on arbitrary choice of the presence of thought by unborn baby

Other animals have advantages over us–in speed, strength, endurance, climbing or burrowing skills, camouflage, sight or smell or hearing, mastery of the air or water. Our one great advantage, the secret of our success, is thought–characteristically human thought. We are able to think things through, imagine events yet to occur, figure things out. That’s how we invented agriculture and civilization. Thought is our blessing and our curse, and it makes us who we are.

Thinking occurs, of course, in the brain–principally in the top layers of the convoluted “gray matter” called the cerebral cortex. The roughly 100 billion neurons in the brain constitute the material basis of thought. The neurons are connected to each other, and their linkups play a major role in what we experience as thinking. But large-scale linking up of neurons doesn’t begin until the 24th to 27th week of pregnancy–the sixth month.

By placing harmless electrodes on a subject’s head, scientists can measure the electrical activity produced by the network of neurons inside the skull. Different kinds of mental activity show different kinds of brain waves. But brain waves with regular patterns typical of adult human brains do not appear in the fetus until about the 30th week of pregnancy–near the beginning of the third trimester. Fetuses younger than this–however alive and active they may be–lack the necessary brain architecture. They cannot yet think.

Acquiescing in the killing of any living creature, especially one that might later become a baby, is troublesome and painful. But we’ve rejected the extremes of “always” and “never,” and this puts us–like it or not–on the slippery slope. If we are forced to choose a developmental criterion, then this is where we draw the line: when the beginning of characteristically human thinking becomes barely possible.

It is, in fact, a very conservative definition: Regular brain waves are rarely found in fetuses. More research would help… If we wanted to make the criterion still more stringent, to allow for occasional precocious fetal brain development, we might draw the line at six months. This, it so happens, is where the Supreme Court drew it in 1973–although for completely different reasons.

Its decision in the case of Roe v. Wade changed American law on abortion. It permits abortion at the request of the woman without restriction in the first trimester and, with some restrictions intended to protect her health, in the second trimester. It allows states to forbid abortion in the third trimester, except when there’s a serious threat to the life or health of the woman. In the 1989 Webster decision, the Supreme Court declined explicitly to overturn Roe v. Wade but in effect invited the 50 state legislatures to decide for themselves.

What was the reasoning in Roe v. Wade? There was no legal weight given to what happens to the children once they are born, or to the family. Instead, a woman’s right to reproductive freedom is protected, the court ruled, by constitutional guarantees of privacy. But that right is not unqualified. The woman’s guarantee of privacy and the fetus’s right to life must be weighed–and when the court did the weighing’ priority was given to privacy in the first trimester and to life in the third. The transition was decided not from any of the considerations we have been dealing with so far…–not when “ensoulment” occurs, not when the fetus takes on sufficient human characteristics to be protected by laws against murder. Instead, the criterion adopted was whether the fetus could live outside the mother. This is called “viability” and depends in part on the ability to breathe. The lungs are simply not developed, and the fetus cannot breathe–no matter how advanced an artificial lung it might be placed in—until about the 24th week, near the start of the sixth month. This is why Roe v. Wade permits the states to prohibit abortions in the last trimester. It’s a very pragmatic criterion.

If the fetus at a certain stage of gestation would be viable outside the womb, the argument goes, then the right of the fetus to life overrides the right of the woman to privacy. But just what does “viable” mean? Even a full-term newborn is not viable without a great deal of care and love. There was a time before incubators, only a few decades ago, when babies in their seventh month were unlikely to be viable. Would aborting in the seventh month have been permissible then? After the invention of incubators, did aborting pregnancies in the seventh month suddenly become immoral? What happens if, in the future, a new technology develops so that an artificial womb can sustain a fetus even before the sixth month by delivering oxygen and nutrients through the blood–as the mother does through the placenta and into the fetal blood system? We grant that this technology is unlikely to be developed soon or become available to many. But if it were available, does it then become immoral to abort earlier than the sixth month, when previously it was moral? A morality that depends on, and changes with, technology is a fragile morality; for some, it is also an unacceptable morality.

And why, exactly, should breathing (or kidney function, or the ability to resist disease) justify legal protection? If a fetus can be shown to think and feel but not be able to breathe, would it be all right to kill it? Do we value breathing more than thinking and feeling? Viability arguments cannot, it seems to us, coherently determine when abortions are permissible. Some other criterion is needed. Again, we offer for consideration the earliest onset of human thinking as that criterion.

Since, on average, fetal thinking occurs even later than fetal lung development, we find Roe v. Wade to be a good and prudent decision addressing a complex and difficult issue. With prohibitions on abortion in the last trimester–except in cases of grave medical necessity–it strikes a fair balance between the conflicting claims of freedom and life.What do you think? What have others said about Carl Sagan’s thoughts on 

END OF SAGAN’S ARTICLE

Xxxxxxxxxxxxx 

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POLITICSCOMMENTARY

‘Comedians’ Curse and Spit at Pro-Life Activists

Tim Graham  / @TimJGraham / September 15, 2021

The abortion industry can always count on TV entertainers to rally to its side with all the anger and profanity they can muster. Pictured: NBC’s Seth Meyers attends the 25th annual Critics’ Choice Awards at Barker Hangar on Jan. 12, 2020, in Santa Monica, California. (Photo: Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Champagne Collet)

COMMENTARY BY

Tim Graham@TimJGraham

Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org.

The “progressives” among us who fervently argue for abortion do not argue calmly or rationally when they are losing. As state legislators in Austin debated the Texas Heartbeat Act outlawing abortions after a baby’s heartbeat can be detected at six weeks, Planned Parenthood boss Alexis McGill Johnson accused the bill’s backers of cruelty.

“The cruelty is the point,” she proclaimed, “and we will not let it stand.”

So the abortion conglomerate that dismembers and murders over 300,000 unborn babies for money every year is accusing someone else of engaging in cruelty. It’s cruelty to object to its cruelty.

The abortion industry can always count on TV entertainers to rally to its side with all the anger and profanity they can muster. Our so-called comedians erupted in foam-flecked attacks on the conservative legislators of Texas after the Supreme Court declined to overturn this new law.

On NBC’s “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” the host bitterly complained that anti-abortion advocates don’t have a majority on the Supreme Court and said justices “don’t give a s— because they’re there for life.”

“I mean, if that’s how our government is going to work, then why not just have a f—ing monarchy?” Meyers asked.

That wasn’t the only obscene outburst on that program.

Meyers also introduced a “Minute of Fury” commentary from Amber Ruffin in which she “satirically” demanded federally funded pedicures if the government owned her body. She lectured: “So don’t take charge of the biggest decision I’ll ever make in my whole life when you can’t even get me a g–d— pedicure.”

On TBS, “Full Frontal” host and feminist Samantha Bee shook her fists at the Supreme Court. 

“If you’re taking away our reproductive rights, at least own that you’re gutless monsters,” Bee said. She called the Supreme Court’s conservatives an “anti-p—y posse.” 

The cultural elite gravitate seamlessly from being “sex positive” to negating pregnancies. Bee wants America to be just like her native Canada, where you can get an abortion at any moment over nine months and government will pay for it, too. 

On HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” British import John Oliver not only raged at American legislators and judges but at his own employers at AT&T. The left is so domineering that it now insists every corporation must threaten politicians who oppose abortion. Every company is supposed to wage cultural war, and if the casualties are all under the age of birth, then so be it.

Oliver told his audience that he demanded answers from the people who pay him an estimated $8 million a year. They said they haven’t taken a public position on abortion. How dare they! 

“Listen, not taking a stance on this issue right now is taking a stance,” Oliver lamented. “And both-siding abortion isn’t really the PR slam dunk that they seem to think it is. Although it is certainly on brand for them. AT&T clearly likes their public statements the same way that they like their cell signal: Hilariously f—ing weak.”

Moments like these make you wonder why on Earth the liberals at the Peabody Awards gave Oliver’s show a “rare second” award “for crafting a form that pushes both comedy and journalism in new, fresh, and publicly important directions.”

This is not new or fresh. This is not comedy. This is not journalism. It’s just lobbying. It’s in-your-face liberalism, which the Peabody folks have applauded repetitively as a “publicly important direction.” 

It’s so “publicly important” that you’re not allowed to be neutral about it. The babies have to be sacrificed on the altar of “anti-cruelty.”

Below is an excerpt from a paper by Carl Sagan on abortion followed by an excerpt from a sermon by Adrian Rogers.

Carl Sagan noted: “If killing a fetus is truly killing a human being, is it not the duty of the state to prevent it? Government [should] protect the weak from the strong…”

Sagan said this only to attempt to poke holes in this argument.

Adrian Rogers answers back with some logical points:

• 
  “I can do whatever I want with my body. A woman’s body is hers to do with as she wishes. She has freedom of choice.” 

No, you don’t have complete control over your own body. You don’t have a right to ingest crack cocaine or be a prostitute. You can’t even ride a motorcycle in this state without a helmet on. We don’t have an absolute right to our own bodies.

And the child is not merely “part of the mother’s body.” He or she is a new life, altogether different, with their own unique DNA, circulatory system, often a different blood type than the mother, and certainly their own unique fingerprints. The nucleus of a human cell has 46 chromosomes, 23 from the father and 23 from the mother. The child is is as much a part of the father as the mother. It is life, and it is life from God. The mother is carrying a completely different person. She does not have freedom of choice in God’s sight to kill another person, even if that person is living inside her body. The baby is in her body; the baby is not her body. I have no right to kill an unwanted guest in my home. They may cause me inconvenience, but I have no right to put them to death. 

• “Without abortion, the poor will be overburdened.”

We’re told having a child overburdens the poor. But 53% of those getting abortions have no other children. Over 33% are going back for the second, third, and fourth abortion. In many instances they are professional women who do not want their profession interrupted, or have conceived through illicit sex, or just don’t want to be bothered with a child. 

• “Life begins when the child begins to breathe.” The baby is already receiving oxygen through the umbilical cord.
• “Abortion is sometimes necessary to save the mother’s life.” Only in the rarest instances. In fact, former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Coup said that with medical advances, abortion is never needed today to save the mother’s life: “With all that modern medicine has to offer, partial birth abortions are not needed to save the life of a mother.” Dr. Jerome LeJune, world famous geneticist, said he would set out to save the life of a mother, and if in the process the child dies, it would be tragic. “I would do everything I could to save the life of the mother, but I would never attack and kill an unborn child.” With today’s medicine, the need for an abortion to save a mother’s life is extremely rare. 
• “What if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest?” Only one-tenth of 1% of today’s abortions are performed on babies conceived because of rape. This argument does not hold water. Of course, rape is a terrible, horrible, heinous crime, but the baby didn’t commit the crime. Ethel Waters, who is now in heaven, sang many times in the Billy Graham crusades. A great Gospel singer, she was born out of a pregnancy due to rape. Who would say Ethel Waters should not have been born to bless the world? Ruth, an ancestress of the Lord Jesus Christ, was a descendent of Moab, born out of an incestuous relationship. You can’t play God in cases like that. 

Let me ask a question. If there is a one month old baby in the crib, born to a victim of rape, would you kill the one month old baby? If you wouldn’t, don’t kill the baby when it is one month before being born. 

• “There may be a danger of deformity.” There may be. Are we going to eliminate everyone we feel is defective or deformed? To be allowed to live, how perfect do you need to be? If we eliminate the deformed in the womb, why don’t we eliminate the deformed after birth? An eminent professor at Yale University now advocates just that: keep the baby for a while to decide whether or not you want the child to live (infanticide). If we are going to eliminate the deformed, who draws the line where we stop? 
• “I’m personally against abortion myself, but I don’t want to take away someone’s right to choose.”You hear politicians use this as an “out” all the time. Let’s suppose we had been alive back in the days of Nazi Germany. Suppose people were saying Hitler ought not to be killing the Jews in the Holocaust. But suppose one of our politicians were to stand and say, “I am personally against killing Jews, but what somebody does in his own private gas chamber is his business.” Do you see the parallel with “I’m personally against abortion, but what somebody does with their own body is their business”? 
• “I choose not to have this baby.” No, you already have a baby. Your choice is, are you going to choose a live baby or a dead one? You already have a baby; that’s the point.
• “Unwanted babies are victims of child abuse.” Statistics prove children who were unplanned or unwanted when conceived are no more apt to be abused than others. And there are many loving couples standing in line saying, “Give us that baby. We will love and take care of it.” 
• “We need to be concerned about the population explosion.” The old “population bomb” myth was put to rest years ago. In fact, many countries are below zero population growth now. There are childless couples wanting babies, begging for babies, wanting to adopt babies, and can’t get them. We may be eliminating the person who has the cure for cancer because we put them to death.

What Should Christians Be Doing?

1. Be informed. Do not continue with your head in the sand. 
2. Find out where the candidates stand on the issue of life.
3. Vote for pro-life senators and representatives. 
4. Work for a constitutional amendment banning abortion. 
5. Teach sexual morality at home and in the church. Parents and the Church—the voices who need to be speaking the most—are often the most silent.
6. Forget our self-righteousness and have compassion for the unwed mother so she is not afraid to come to us. Be filled with love, not a hypercritical spirit. 
7. Show the love and forgiveness of the Lord Jesus Christ for those who’ve had an abortion. There is mercy, forgiveness and grace with Almighty God. He removes the guilt. He may not remove the pain, but He will remove the guilt. 
8. Speak out clearly. Remember,
“Cry aloud, and spare not...” Isaiah 58:1
“If thou forbear…” Proverbs 24:11-12 
Speak up in the office, on the street, at the ball game, in the Sunday School class. Refuse to be swayed by high-sounding arguments of liberals, humanists, or social planners. They haven’t got a clue. 
9. Pray that God will give us time as a nation to repent! We are on the threshold of disaster. We need to bring this nation to God in repentance saying, “God have mercy on us for the shedding of innocent blood.” 

I believe we are making progress. The abortion rate is dropping. People are finally getting their eyes opened. But the battle is raging.

I’m not nearly so much afraid of what terrorists are going to do to us as I am what God is going to do to us in this country of ours. We’d better get right with God. But I thank God that the Bible still teaches in 2 Chronicles 7:14:

“If My people who are called by My name shall humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked way, then will I hear from Heaven and will forgive their sin and” [hallelujah] “heal their land.” 

Do you know who’s failed, primarily? We preachers of the gospel have failed. The churches in America have failed. We once had a biblically based morality in the United States, but that is fast receding over the horizon, and today we’re living in a different society where it is “morality by majority,” and expedience rather than a fixed face of right or wrong. And I believe that there’s little wrong in America today that could not be changed radically, dramatically, and swiftly if we had a generation of preachers who would stand up in pulpits across America and say, “Thus saith the Lord. Thus saith the Lord.”

I’m living for that day when we have a revival of righteousness in America and I want to believe it’s coming, that God—not any preacher, not any president, but God—is going to do something in America. Oh, for God to do something! Lord, haste that day. Don’t you long for a burning, sweeping, glorious revival to blow across America?

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Carl Sagan pictured below:

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Recently I have been revisiting my correspondence in 1995 with the famous astronomer Carl Sagan who I was introduced to when reading a book by Francis Schaeffer called HE IS THERE AND HE IS NOT SILENT written in 1968. 

Francis Schaeffer

I was blessed with the opportunity to correspond with Dr. Sagan, and in his December 5, 1995 letter Dr. Sagan went on to tell me that he was enclosing his article “The Question of Abortion: A Search for Answers”by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. I am going to respond to several points made in that article. Here is a portion of Sagan’s article (here is a link to the whole article):

Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan pictured above

 “The Question of Abortion: A Search for Answers”

by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan

For the complete text, including illustrations, introductory quote, footnotes, and commentary on the reaction to the originally published article see Billions and Billions.

Adrian Rogers (1931-2005) I shared my correspondence with Carl Sagan with Dr Rogers and the fact that many of my letters to Sagan contained material from Rogers.

The issue had been decided years ago. The court had chosen the middle ground. You’d think the fight was over. Instead, there are mass rallies, bombings and intimidation, murders of workers at abortion clinics, arrests, intense lobbying, legislative drama, Congressional hearings, Supreme Court decisions, major political parties almost defining themselves on the issue, and clerics threatening politicians with perdition. Partisans fling accusations of hypocrisy and murder. The intent of the Constitution and the will of God are equally invoked. Doubtful arguments are trotted out as certitudes. The contending factions call on science to bolster their positions. Families are divided, husbands and wives agree not to discuss it, old friends are no longer speaking. Politicians check the latest polls to discover the dictates of their consciences. Amid all the shouting, it is hard for the adversaries to hear one another. Opinions are polarized. Minds are closed.

 

Is it wrong to abort a pregnancy? Always? Sometimes? Never? How do we decide? We wrote this article to understand better what the contending views are and to see if we ourselves could find a position that would satisfy us both. Is there no middle ground? We had to weigh the arguments of both sides for consistency and to pose test cases, some of which are purely hypothetical. If in some of these tests we seem to go too far, we ask the reader to be patient with us–we’re trying to stress the various positions to the breaking point to see their weaknesses and where they fail.

In contemplative moments, nearly everyone recognizes that the issue is not wholly one-sided. Many partisans of differing views, we find, feel some disquiet, some unease when confronting what’s behind the opposing arguments. (This is partly why such confrontations are avoided.) And the issue surely touches on deep questions: What are our responses to one another? Should we permit the state to intrude into the most intimate and personal aspects of our lives? Where are the boundaries of freedom? What does it mean to be human?

Of the many actual points of view, it is widely held–especially in the media, which rarely have the time or the inclination to make fine distinctions–that there are only two: “pro-choice” and “pro-life.” This is what the two principal warring camps like to call themselves, and that’s what we’ll call them here. In the simplest characterization, a pro-choicer would hold that the decision to abort a pregnancy is to be made only by the woman; the state has no right to interfere. And a pro-lifer would hold that, from the moment of conception, the embryo or fetus is alive; that this life imposes on us a moral obligation to preserve it; and that abortion is tantamount to murder. Both names–pro-choice and pro-life–were picked with an eye toward influencing those whose minds are not yet made up: Few people wish to be counted either as being against freedom of choice or as opposed to life. Indeed, freedom and life are two of our most cherished values, and here they seem to be in fundamental conflict.

Let’s consider these two absolutist positions in turn. A newborn baby is surely the same being it was just before birth. There ‘s good evidence that a late-term fetus responds to sound–including music, but especially its mother’s voice. It can suck its thumb or do a somersault. Occasionally, it generates adult brain-wave patterns. Some people claim to remember being born, or even the uterine environment. Perhaps there is thought in the womb. It’s hard to maintain that a transformation to full personhood happens abruptly at the moment of birth. Why, then, should it be murder to kill an infant the day after it was born but not the day before?

As a practical matter, this isn’t very important: Less than 1 percent of all tabulated abortions in the United States are listed in the last three months of pregnancy (and, on closer investigation, most such reports turn out to be due to miscarriage or miscalculation). But third-trimester abortions provide a test of the limits of the pro-choice point of view. Does a woman’s “innate right to control her own body” encompass the right to kill a near-term fetus who is, for all intents and purposes, identical to a newborn child?

We believe that many supporters of reproductive freedom are troubled at least occasionally by this question. But they are reluctant to raise it because it is the beginning of a slippery slope. If it is impermissible to abort a pregnancy in the ninth month, what about the eighth, seventh, sixth … ? Once we acknowledge that the state can interfere at any time in the pregnancy, doesn’t it follow that the state can interfere at all times?

Abortion and the slippery slope argument above

This conjures up the specter of predominantly male, predominantly affluent legislators telling poor women they must bear and raise alone children they cannot afford to bring up; forcing teenagers to bear children they are not emotionally prepared to deal with; saying to women who wish for a career that they must give up their dreams, stay home, and bring up babies; and, worst of all, condemning victims of rape and incest to carry and nurture the offspring of their assailants. Legislative prohibitions on abortion arouse the suspicion that their real intent is to control the independence and sexuality of women…

And yet, by consensus, all of us think it proper that there be prohibitions against, and penalties exacted for, murder. It would be a flimsy defense if the murderer pleads that this is just between him and his victim and none of the government’s business. If killing a fetus is truly killing a human being, is it not the duty of the state to prevent it? Indeed, one of the chief functions of government is to protect the weak from the strong.

If we do not oppose abortion at some stage of pregnancy, is there not a danger of dismissing an entire category of human beings as unworthy of our protection and respect? And isn’t that dismissal the hallmark of sexism, racism, nationalism, and religious fanaticism? Shouldn’t those dedicated to fighting such injustices be scrupulously careful not to embrace another?

https://content.swncdn.com/zcast/oneplace/host-images/love-worth-finding/640×480.jpg?v=181220-090

For the complete text, including illustrations, introductory quote, footnotes, and commentary on the reaction to the originally published article see Billions and Billions.

Here is an excerpt of a message from Adrian Rogers on DOES CHARACTER COUNT?

Here’s a final trait of leadership that God requires. A leader must protect the weak and the helpless.

In Proverbs 31:8-9, God says to King Lemuel, “Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction. Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.”

A president, or any leader, must speak up for those who can’t speak up for themselves, those who are about to be destroyed. When a president is inaugurated, he takes a pledge to defend the nation. There are many defenseless people in America today, and they’re depending on the government to defend them. The President should be standing up for the unborn, the most defenseless of all those who cannot speak for themselves.

I once testified in Washington before a Senate committee dealing with abortion. After I left the room there at the Capitol, a female lawyer met me in the hall. “You don’t understand,” she said. “You’re a man, so you don’t understand what a trauma it is to have an unwanted pregnancy.”

I said to her, “Do I understand you to say that if somebody traumatizes you, you can eliminate them? Because you’re traumatizing me right now. What if I were to put both my thumbs on your windpipe and strangle you right now? At least you could scream or run. But a baby in its mother’s womb can’t do either.”

She just turned and walked off. I’m sure she told someone, “That Baptist preacher said he was going to strangle me!” But I only said, “What if?”

It’s the job of a ruler to speak up for the unborn! “Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction,” God commands the one in authority. Someone may say, “But Pastor Rogers, abortion is legal.” Then hear these verses: “Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with thee, which frameth mischief by a law? They gather themselves together against the soul of the righteous, and condemn the innocent blood” (Ps. 94:20-21).

If a throne of iniquity is one that uses the law to commit evil, then what we have in America today is a throne of iniquity! Laws are passed to shed innocent blood. But NOTHING IS POLITICALLY RIGHT THAT IS MORALLY WRONG.

Jeremiah said concerning evil King Jehoiakim, “Thine eyes and thine heart are not but for thy covetousness, and for to shed innocent blood, and for oppression, and for violence, to do it” (22:17). The prophet Habakkuk warned, “Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood, and stablisheth a city by iniquity!” (2:12).

The king, the prince, the president, must be the protector of the helpless. This is the character that God requires.

Related posts:

Taking on Ark Times Bloggers on various issues Part F “Carl Sagan’s views on how God should try and contact us” includes film “The Basis for Human Dignity”

April 8, 2013 – 7:07 am

I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control  and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […] By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)

Carl Sagan v. Nancy Pearcey

March 18, 2013 – 9:11 am

On March 17, 2013 at our worship service at Fellowship Bible Church, Ben Parkinson who is one of our teaching pastors spoke on Genesis 1. He spoke about an issue that I was very interested in. Ben started the sermon by reading the following scripture: Genesis 1-2:3 English Standard Version (ESV) The Creation of the […] By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Atheists Confronted, Current Events | TaggedBen Parkinson, Carl Sagan | Edit | Comments (0)

Review of Carl Sagan book (Part 4 of series on Evolution)

May 24, 2012 – 1:47 am

Review of Carl Sagan book (Part 4 of series on Evolution) The Long War against God-Henry Morris, part 5 of 6 Uploaded by FLIPWORLDUPSIDEDOWN3 on Aug 30, 2010 http://www.icr.org/ http://store.icr.org/prodinfo.asp?number=BLOWA2http://store.icr.org/prodinfo.asp?number=BLOWASGhttp://www.fliptheworldupsidedown.com/blog _______________________ I got this from a blogger in April of 2008 concerning candidate Obama’s view on evolution: Q: York County was recently in the news […] By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Atheists Confronted, Current Events, President Obama | Edit| Comments (0)

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MSNBC Claims Joe Biden is Following the Bible

Liberals will go to great lengths to defend “devout Catholic” President Biden from criticism for his pro-abortion beliefs. On MSNBC’s PoliticsNation, host Al Sharpton brought on Dr. Obery Hendricks, a Professor of Religion at Columbia University, to go beyond the typical defense of the president the media usually gives, and actually claim that Biden was on “firm moral ground” because supporting abortion was consistent with Christianity.

Sharpton set up the discussion referencing the Texas abortion law condemned by the president: “Many Catholic leaders are cheering the new anti-abortion law. They face criticism, though, from a fellow Catholic, President Biden. The second president in U.S. History to be of the same faith,” he noted before turning to his guest, the author of “Christians against Christianity, How Right Wing Evangelicals are Destroying our Nation and our Faith.”

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Worrying about the “religious bind that President Biden may feel that he is in,” Sharpton asked his equally left-wing guest to explain how Biden can “navigate” this tension between his pro-choice politics and his Catholic faith.

Even Professor Hendricks admitted that Biden had contradicted his Catholic teaching. But not the Bible, apparently. He actually put forward the ridiculous argument that because the word “abortion” isn’t mentioned in Scripture, it must be okay to God. In fact, the president was on “firm ground:”

First, Catholic moral teaching teaches that abortion is a sin, and therefore is murder. But that’s their doctrinal and ideology. Biblically the Bible doesn’t say anything about abortion is a sin or murder. Anyone who teaches differently isn’t telling the truth.

Even though he is contradicting the teaching of his faith, Biblically, which is supposed to be the most important thing, he is on firm ground.

Not only was abortion approved by God, but it was also allowed in the Constitution, according to the radically left professor, who equated not killing babies to enslaving women. Again, he hailed Biden for being on “strong moral ground” by supporting abortion:

But on top of that he has taken an oath of defending the Constitution and the Constitution particularly with the 13th Amendment says no one has the right to enslave anyone else’s body, to lord over them, to transgress their sovereignty over their own body. So when we get down to it, Biden is on strong moral ground.

Afterward, Sharpton cited some polls from the Pew Research Center showing that Democrat voters were less religious than Republicans and Republicans had more Evangelical Christian voters. He asked his guest to explain the differences between the two parties’ religious makeup. This time, Hendricks attacked pro-life Evangelicals and Catholics as not real Christians because they didn’t necessarily support government-funded liberal “social justice” ideology and policies:

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, the question is, what Christianity are these people talking about? Because right-wing Evangelicals, they seem to — like Paul says in his letters in the Bible, they seem to cleave to another Gospel. You know, the right wing is not concerned about looking out for the least of these. They are not concerned with taking care of poor people. They are not concerned about fighting for justice. They are not evening mentioning justice. So many people, particularly young people are becoming disenchanted with it, with Christianity. They don’t want anything to do with the religion that is presented to them as so mean-spirited. And the right wing has allowed its voices in the public sphere right now. So the hatred that they spew the divisiveness, the xenophobia that they spew and the support that they support a walking melange of the seven deadly sins in Trump turns these young people off. I think that’s the reason why we are seeing people turn away. Now, people are not turning away from the Gospel itself, they’re not turning away from love and justice, they’re turning away from the hatred of the right-wing.

While Hendricks argued Biden was following the Bible, he bashed anyone who supported the former president as supporting hate. “But those who are leaving him, Catholics and Jews, are leaving him because they’re seeing through him. They’re seeing he is anti-Catholic. The smart folks are the ones who left. The ones who aren’t as smart are the ones still following his lies and foolishness and divisiveness and hatefulness,” he added.

PoliticsNation is sponsored by Jeep, contact them at the Conservatives Fight Back Page here.

LifeNews Note: Kristine Marsh is Staff Writer for MRC Culture at the Media Research Center where this originally appeared.

90 years ago today on September 12, 1931, Adrian Rogers was born and I wanted to celebrate today by repeating one of my favorite posts from Adrian Rogers messages! In the 1970’s and 1980’s I was a member of Bellevue Baptist in Memphis where Adrian Rogers was pastor and was a student at ECS from the 5th grade to the 12th grade where I was introduced to the books and films of Francis Schaeffer. During this time I was amazed at how many prominent figures in the world found their way into the works of both Adrian Rogers and Francis Schaeffer and I wondered what it would be like if these individuals were exposed to the Bible and the gospel. Therefore, over 20 years ago I began sending the messages of Adrian Rogers and portions of the works of Francis Schaeffer to many of the secular figures that they mentioned in their works.

After being elected President of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979, Adrian Rogers met with President Ronald Reagan.

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Earlier I wrote the post On 3-16-15 I found the first link between my spiritual heroes: Adrian Rogers and Francis Schaeffer!!!!!

Francis and Edith Schaeffer pictured below:

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Below my good friend Byron Tyler from my old days in the Bellevue Baptist Youth Group interviews our former music director Jim Whitmire. I respect both of these gentlemen tremendously.

This was the average sanctuary crowd when I was growing up at Bellevue Baptist in Memphis.  Now take what you see and multiply it by three, because they had three morning services.  This photo was taken sometime in the early 1980’s

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Adrian Rogers was my pastor from 1975 to 1983. I was amazed at he would teach the Bible and relate it to current events such as abortion. For instance, he stated, “Secular Humanism and so-called abortion rights are inseparably linked together.”

I took what he said and sent it to Carl Sagan and Sagan responded on December 5, 1995:

Thanks for your recent letter about evolution and abortion. The correlation is hardly one to one; there are evolutionists who are anti-abortion and anti-evolutionists who are pro-abortion.

(Carl Sagan and his third wife Ann Druyan pictured above)

Earlier I wrote a post entitled THE SERMON ON EVOLUTION BY ADRIAN ROGERS THAT I SENT TO OVER 250 ATHEIST SCIENTISTS FROM 1992 TO 2015! That sermon was on evolution and it generated quite a robust response from skeptics in academia.

In fact, I took excerpts from Dr. Rogers’ sermons and sent them out to many skeptics, and received responses back from Nobel prize winners such as Milton Friedman, George Wald, James D. Watson, and Nicolaas Bloembergen. Other scholars who took time to respond were Ernest Mayr (1904-2005), Robert Shapiro (1935-2011), Brian Charlesworth (1945-), Francisco J. Ayala (1934-) Elliott Sober (1948-), Kevin Padian (1951-), Matt Cartmill (1943-) , Milton Fingerman (1928-), John J. Shea (1969-), , Michael A. Crawford (1938-), Paul Kurtz (1925-2012), Sol Gordon (1923-2008), Albert Ellis (1913-2007), Barbara Marie Tabler (1915-1996), Renate Vambery (1916-2005), Archie J. Bahm (1907-1996), Aron S “Gil” Martin ( 1910-1997), Matthew I. Spetter (1921-2012), H. J. Eysenck (1916-1997), Robert L. Erdmann (1929-2006), Mary Morain (1911-1999), Lloyd Morain (1917-2010), Warren Allen Smith (1921-), Bette Chambers (1930-), Gordon Stein (1941-1996) , John Hospers (1918-2011), and Michael Martin (1932-).

I remember the first time I went to a Operation Mobilization (OM) conference in 1979. We first drove from Memphis to Toronto with Rev. Earl Stevens and his wife of First Evangelical Church for the North American OM Conference.

Then we attended the European conference in Belgium  and we first flew to Paris and rode in the back of a truck across France to Belgium. My good friend David Rogers and I were the only ones from the Bellevue Baptist youth group to go with OM that summer to go on missions in Europe. David went to Austria and I went to Manchester, England. David later served several years with OM.

Also during our trip David’s father was elected President of the Southern Baptist Convention. I was sitting next to David when he took the call from his father that he had decided to place his name into the election. 

Adrian Rogers stood up for the inerrancy of the Bible and he did that during his time as President of the Southern Baptist Convention. This story below discusses that key part of Southern Baptist history.

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This Memphis pastor helped chart the conservative course of the Southern Baptist Convention

KATHERINE BURGESS | MEMPHIS COMMERCIAL APPEAL | 6:00 am CDT July 9, 2019

Joyce Rogers speaks about her husband, Memphis pastor Adrian Rogers, an influential Southern Baptist conservative.KATHERINE BURGESS, THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL

Forty years ago, a pastor from Memphis was elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

He didn’t know it at the time, his wife said, but the election of Adrian Rogers would launch the “Conservative Resurgence” — called the “Fundamentalist Takeover” by its opponents — that solidified conservative control of the largest Protestant denomination in the country. 

For Rogers, the debate centered around how the Bible was viewed, said his wife Joyce Rogers, who recently spoke with The Commercial Appeal about her late husband. 

“He would like to be remembered as a man of God, one who stood for the Bible,” she said. “He would have died for his belief about the Bible.”

Adrian Rogers speaks at the 1988 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.SOUTHERN BAPTIST HISTORICAL LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES

By 1979, Southern Baptists had been fiercely divided for years, with particularly heated debates occurring in the seminaries, where many professors were accused of holding liberal views of the Bible.

Southern Baptists were divided among two camps called “conservatives” and “moderates.” The conservatives believed in the doctrine of inerrancy, which Baptist Press, the news arm of the convention, describes as “the doctrine that the Bible is completely free from error regarding theology, history, science and every other matter to which it speaks.”

Many of the moderates, according to Baptist Press, also believed in inerrancy but were comfortable with a variety of beliefs within the Southern Baptist Convention. 

Bill Leonard, professor emeritus at Wake Forest University who used to chair Baptist Studies, said it’s “academically impossible” to disengage politics from theology.

Memphis pastor Adrian Rogers was a three-term president of the Southern Baptist Convention.SOUTHERN BAPTIST HISTORICAL LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES

For example, many leaders in the conservative resurgence were closely allied with the Republican Party, Leonard said.

“Many of them were Southern Baptist in ways that would move the denomination as much as possible into becoming a consistent Republican base, a consistent voting block,” Leonard said. “We know now that 40 years later, that was also successful.”

Moderates in the convention had also advocated in favor of abortion access and the ordination of women.

Rogers was a reluctant candidate, seen as a ‘rising star’

Even as Southern Baptists began to gather in Houston for the 1979 annual meeting, Rogers hadn’t agreed to run.

That didn’t stop well-known pastor W. A. Criswell from telling pastors days before the election that, “We will have a great time here if for no other reason than to elect Adrian Rogers as our president.” 

The statement caught Joyce Rogers off guard.

“At first I was so mad at him, because I thought he (hadn’t) got permission to say that or anything,” she said. “But it became obvious that God was in it.”

Memphis pastor Adrian Rogers was a three-term president of the Southern Baptist Convention and a leader in the denomination’s conservative resurgence.BAPTIST PRESS

Some moderates were also watching Rogers.

According to Baptist Press, moderate C.R. Daley later said, “Some of us saw the rising star out of Memphis named Adrian Rogers — in my mind the most brilliant of his group, the one who poses the gravest threat to the Southern Baptist Convention. It was obvious that he was to be the king. It was obvious to some of us that he wasn’t the kind of king we wanted.”

Southern Baptist leaders Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler developed a strategy of how to take control of the Southern Baptist Convention.They determined that if conservatives won the presidency for 10 consecutive years, they could use the president’s appointive power to gain majorities on all Southern Baptist boards and agencies. That included the six seminaries and the two mission boards, said Barry Hankins, professor of history and department chair at Baylor University.

Patterson, who was later president of the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, has recently been discredited and removed as seminary head for his handling of sex abuse claims. Last year, Pressler was accused of rape and other sexual misconduct. He has denied the allegations, according to Baptist News Global.

But in 1979, Patterson and Pressler were influential and respected leaders. Pressler was a former state representative and a judge in Houston while Patterson was president of Criswell College in Dallas.

“What they needed was a good candidate, so they recruited Adrian Rogers to be the candidate they would run in 1979 to try and win,” Hankins said. “He was a winsome personality with a great preaching voice. He was staunchly conservative in his theology, in favor of conservatives having a sort of test for leadership in the convention, but he was not in any way a hard-edged personality type.”

If Rogers hadn’t been a pastor, he would have had to become some kind of orator, Hankins said, with his “golden voice.” In 1987, Rogers would go on to found “Love Worth Finding,” a television ministry that extended to 194 countries. 

At the time, Rogers was also pastor of one of the largest churches in the convention, Memphis’ Bellevue Baptist Church. The church was located in downtown Memphis, and rapidly growing.

By Rogers’ retirement in 2005, the church had grown from 9,000 members to more than 29,000 members and relocated to its campus in Cordova.

Hankins said his sense is that Rogers was able to “stay above the fray” during much of the division. He didn’t take on leadership because of politics, Hankins said, but because he believed the inerrancy of the Bible was necessary to furthering evangelism.

On the day of the election, Rogers was chosen with 51% of the vote.

Rogers was a pastor first

Raised in West Palm Beach, Florida, Rogers met his wife in the fourth grade. He liked to joke that they didn’t get serious until the sixth grade.

Joyce Rogers, who still lives in the Memphis area, said she isn’t sure how her husband developed his views about biblical inerrancy.

“I always say he was a man of conviction and courage,” she said. “He’d just sit with his Bible in his hand and see that (something) didn’t agree with what the Bible would say.” 

Adrian Rogers stands with his wife Joyce Rogers in a photo from before they were married. The couple were childhood sweethearts.SUBMITTED

Rogers became pastor of a small church during his freshman year of college at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida. The couple married at the beginning of their second year of college.

Later, Rogers pastored a church in Merritt Island, Florida, but agreed to visit Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis when they said they wanted him as pastor. He told his church in Florida that he didn’t think he’d take on the job in Memphis, Joyce Rogers said, but when they arrived, “there was almost electricity in the air.”

Surprising the couple, leadership at Bellevue voted to approve Rogers then and there — before he said yes to accepting the position. The couple ended up agreeing and moving to Memphis, where Rogers remained until his death in 2005.

“His great desire in life was to be a pastor,” said the Rev. Bob Sorrell, who was associate pastor at Bellevue for many of Rogers’ years there. “That took first place in his life after his family. I think the service, as far as the convention was concerned, was an opportunity that was provided to him and for him, but his greatest desire was to be the pastor of the church.”

Even with speaking duties and other requirements as president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Rogers made sure to almost always be in the pulpit at Bellevue on Sundays, Sorrell said.

A plan with no compromise

Joyce Rogers holds a photo of her late husband Adrian Rogers, who was a key leader in the Southern Baptist Convention’s conservative resurgence.KATHERINE BURGESS

Ultimately, Pressler and Patterson’s plan for the convention worked.

Rogers was the first in a long line of conservative presidents — culminating in a mid-1980s meeting in which 45,000 Southern Baptists showed up in Dallas to try to elect either a conservative or moderate candidate.

“By that time everyone realized what was at stake and both sides were recruiting, putting the word out, (saying to) go to the convention and vote,” Hankins said.

By the early 1990s, the convention was “fully in conservative hands,” Hankins said. Some moderate congregations left and formed the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

Rogers later held two more terms as president in the 1980s.

There’s a quotation from her husband that was placed on a plaque and gifted to Joyce Rogers that now hangs on the wall outside her Memphis area home.

It’s known as the “no-compromise” statement that he made at the height of the struggle over the future of the Southern Baptist Convention.

“We don’t have to get together. The Southern Baptist Convention doesn’t have to survive,” Adrian Rogers said. “I don’t have to be the pastor of Bellevue. I don’t have to live. But I’m not going to compromise the word of God.” 

Katherine Burgess covers county government, religion and the suburbs. She can be reached at katherine.burgess@commercialappeal.com, 901-529-2799 or followed on Twitter @kathsburgess.

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The Remarkable Story of Professor Antony Flew —
The World’s Most Notorious Atheist Who Changed His Mind

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Antony Flew (photo by John Lawrence

 Twenty years I had the opportunity to correspond with two individuals that were regarded as two of the most famous atheists of the 20th Century, Antony Flew and Carl Sagan.  I had read the books and seen the films of the Christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer and he had discussed the works of both of these men. I sent both of these gentlemen philosophical arguments from Schaeffer in these letters and in the first letter I sent a cassette tape of my pastor’s sermon IS THE BIBLE TRUE? You may have noticed in the news a few years that Antony Flew actually became a theist in 2004 and remained one until his death in 2010. Carl Sagan remained a skeptic until his dying day in 1996.Antony Flew wrote me back several times and in the  June 1, 1994 letter he  commented, “Thank you for sending me the IS THE BIBLE TRUE? tape to which I have just listened with great interest and, I trust, profit.” I later sent him Adrian Rogers’ sermon on evolution too. 

 The ironic thing is back in 2008 I visited the Bellevue Baptist Book Store and bought the book There Is A God – How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, by Antony Flew, and it is in this same store that I bought the message by Adrian Rogers in 1994 that I sent to Antony Flew. Although Antony Flew did not make a public profession of faith he did admit that the evidence for God’s existence was overwhelming to him in the last decade of his life. His experience has been used in a powerful way to tell  others about Christ. Let me point out that while on airplane when I was reading this book a gentleman asked me about the book. I was glad to tell him the whole story about Adrian Rogers’ two messages that I sent to Dr. Flew and I gave him CD’s of the messages which I carry with me always. Then at McDonald’s at the Airport, a worker at McDonald’s asked me about the book and I gave him the same two messages from Adrian Rogers too.

Dr. Rogers on Evolution

With the steadfast support of friends like you, Love Worth Finding will continue to hold high the banner of Jesus Christ.

THREE TELLING ARGUMENTS AGAINST EVOLUTION

1. The fossil record. Not only is the so-called missing link still missing, all of the transitional life forms so crucial to evolutionary theory are missing from the fossil record. There are thousands of missing links, not one!
2. The second law of thermodynamics. This law states that energy is winding down and that matter left to itself tends toward chaos and randomness, not greater organization and complexity. Evolution demands exactly the opposite process, which is observed nowhere in nature.

Dr. George Wald of Harvard:

“When it comes to the origin of life, we have only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility…Spontaneous generation was scientifically disproved one hundred years ago by Louis Pasteur, Spellanzani, Reddy and others. That leads us scientifically to only one possible conclusion — that life arose as a supernatural creative act of God…I will not accept that philosophically because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation arising to evolution.” – Scientific American, August, 1954.

3. The origin of life. Evolution offers no answers to the origin of life. It simply pushes the question farther back in time, back to some primordial event in space or an act of spontaneous generation in which life simply sprang from nothing.

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I actually had the chance to correspond with George Wald twice before his death. He wrote me two letters and in the first one he suggested that he was just using hyperbole when he made the assertion that is quoted by Dr. Rogers. He also suggested the religion of Buddhism although he said he was not a Buddhist himself, but he thought that would be closest to the truth which he thought was atheism.

My correspondence with the famous evolutionist Ernst Mayr!!!

My correspondence with Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol about the rebirth of Israel!!!!

Corresponding with Nobel Prize Winner Nicolaas Bloembergen

Related posts:

My correspondence with George Wald and Antony Flew!!!

May 12, 2014 – 1:14 am

During the 1990′s I actually made it a practice to write famous atheists and scientists that were mentioned by Adrian Rogers and Francis Schaeffer and challenge them with the evidence for the Bible’s historicity and the claims of the gospel. Usually I would send them a cassette tape of Adrian Rogers’ messages “6 reasons I know […]

Antony Flew in his book THERE IS A GOD talks about his “notoriety” as an atheist! ( also 7 News : Web Extra: Ricky Gervais on God)

May 9, 2014 – 1:24 am

  7News : Web Extra: Ricky Gervais on God Published on Mar 23, 2014 He’s not shy about sharing his opinion with 5 million social media followers so Ricky Gervais was happy to clear a few things up for us too. __________________________________ Discussion (2 of 3): Antony Flew, N.T. Wright, and Gary Habermas ___________ The Bible and Science […]

Antony Flew tells what the book THERE IS A GOD is all about (Ricky Gervais talks about atheim on Piers Morgan Tonight)

May 8, 2014 – 1:07 am

Piers Morgan Tonight : CNN Official Interview: Ricky Gervais says atheism shouldn’t offend Uploaded on Jan 20, 2011 Ricky Gervais tells CNN’s Piers Morgan why he’s an atheist, and why his jokes about God shouldn’t offend believers. The Bible and Science (Part 01) __________________________________ Antony Flew tells what the book THERE IS A GOD: “How the world’s most […]

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Climate Change Is Not a Crisis

David Harsanyi  / @davidharsanyi / September 14, 2021

President Joe Biden speaks to the press upon his return to the White House on Sept. 7 after visiting New York and New Jersey to survey damage from Hurricane Ida. (Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)

President Joe Biden contends that the recent hurricanes that hit the United States prove we’re in a “climate crisis.” 

It’s a “code red” for the world, the president warns. White House national climate adviser Gina McCarthy added that climate is now a “health emergency.” 

It is, no doubt, quite convenient for politicians to treat every hurricane, tornado, and flood as an apocalyptic sign from Gaea—and then blame political apostates for the existence of nature. 

But it’s an irrational way to think about the world, because our situation is, in most ways—including our ability to adapt to the vagaries of climate—quantifiably better than before on nearly every front. 

This reality is probably difficult for a generation subjected to decades of fear-mongering to accept, but climate anomalies are nothing new. 

When a freak snowstorm hit Texas earlier this year, the administration used it to push draconian policy ideas. But the Texas storm was no different than the rare 1973 blizzard that hit the South. It happens. And there’s nothing we can do about it.

While victims of Ida will take no solace in this fact, historically speaking, hurricanes aren’t touching land at higher frequencies either. Nor is there evidence that storms that make landfall do so with more intensity than in previous years. Certainly, they aren’t any more dangerous. 

Back in 1900, the Great Galveston hurricane likely killed somewhere around 10,000 people in Texas. In 1926, the Great Miami hurricane killed 372 people, causing an estimated, inflation-adjusted $157 billion in damage. Only about 150,000 people lived in all of Dade County in those days. 

When Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, it was a Category 3. Most of the damage had to do with how ill-prepared the city was for any storm. As Biden has pointed out, hurricanes are less destructive because governments and the private sector adapt and prepare. Acclimatizing to the realities of climate change—whatever they may be—are far cheaper and more moral than the state-compelled dismantling of modernity.

Indeed, climate has always been bad for our health. We’ve spent most of human existence attempting to mitigate its destructive power. Today, people still tragically die from, say, extreme heat. (Air conditioners save far more lives.) But overall, deaths due to nature have dramatically plummeted during the past century—falling over 98% since 1900, and over 70% since Joe Biden showed up in Washington. 

Weather accounts for somewhere around 0.07% of worldwide deaths, and 0.01% in the United States. We’re safer, even though far more people live in areas with extreme heat and freezing cold and in the paths of both hurricanes and tornadoes. 

And the notion that places such as Central America and the Middle East are experiencing conflicts and migration because of some unique climate changes ignores the entirety of history. By claiming we are in an unprecedented “crisis,” we distort not only a proper understanding of our technological abilities, but our moral outlook as well. 

Ponder this rhetorical question of a columnist at The Hill: “Could climate change finally expose China as a global outlaw?” So, it wasn’t the concentration camps that did it. Or the ethnic cleansing. Or the slave labor. Or the decades of collectivist-induced economic misery and authoritarian control. Or the state censorship. It was the Chinese government’s refusal to live by the precepts of the Paris Accord.

Indeed, certain pundits have been openly envious of the ability of Chinese communists to compel their citizens to adopt carbon-mitigation policies. The commissars must be such a disappointment to them. The problem, though, is that today’s progressives often embrace illiberal ideas as a means of solving the climate “crisis.” 

As a recent Nature journal piece notes, COVID-19 lockdowns have prepared people for “personal carbon allowances.” Restrictions on individual freedoms “that were unthinkable only one year before” have us “more prepared to accept the tracking and limitations” to “achieve a safer climate,” the piece notes.

And many self-professed defenders of our “democracy” have been clamoring for the Department of Health and Human Services to take unilateral action and treat climate as a “public health issue” or to declare a “climate emergency.” 

The White House has given the issue a required identity-based twist, noting that global warming’s risks “disproportionately affect poor and minority communities.” (That reminds me of P.J. O’Rourke’s old joke about NPR coverage: “World to end—poor and minorities hardest hit.”)

Americans experienced the authoritarian reach of government during the pandemic. We see what normalizing those ideas can look like in Australia. 

Carbon emissions are embedded into nearly everything in our economy. If Democrats believe that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should be empowered to declare an eviction moratorium, retroactively tear up private contracts, and unilaterally discard property rights, you can imagine what sort of things await this nation if they can declare climate change an “emergency.”

Fact-Checking 7 of Biden’s Claims in His Address to Congress

Rachel del Guidice  / @LRacheldG / Fred Lucas  /@FredLucasWH / April 29, 2021

President Joe Biden, flanked by Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, addresses about 200 lawmakers Wednesday night in a streamlined joint session of Congress at the Capitol. (Photo: Melina Mara/Pool/AFP /Getty Images)

President Joe Biden delivered his first address to a joint session of a downsized Congress on Wednesday night, nearly 100 days into his presidency. 

Biden spoke to only 200 masked lawmakers in the spacious House chamber, even though most, if not all, members of Congress have been vaccinated for COVID-19 and federal health guidelines don’t require such masking and distancing precautions.

The president fist-bumped senators and representatives on his way to the podium, where he delivered his address as Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sat behind him, keeping their masks on. 

“One hundred days ago, America’s house was on fire,” Biden said early on. “We had to act.”

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Speaking for just over an hour, Biden talked about numerous issues on his agenda—but wasn’t always truthful. 

Here’s a look at seven instances where setting the record straight may help those evaluating the speech.

 1. ‘Protect the Sacred Right to Vote’

“And if we are to truly restore the soul of America, we need to protect the sacred right to vote. More people voted in the last presidential election than ever before in our history—in the middle of one of the worst pandemics ever. That should be celebrated. Instead it’s being attacked.” 

About 160 million Americans voted in the presidential election in November, a record number, USA Today reported. 

But conservatives say the left is out to nationalize elections by giving the federal government control over local and state elections, what the president apparently meant when he said voter turnout is “being attacked.”

Congressional Democrats’ legislation, which they call the For the People Act, would override states’ authority to conduct their elections, mandate “no fault” absentee ballots, and make it easier “to commit fraud and promote chaos at the polls through same-day registration,” according to a backgrounder from The Heritage Foundation. 

Democrats’ legislation, known in the House as HR 1 and in the Senate as S 1, also would mandate that states allow 16- and 17-year-olds to register to vote. This move, “when combined with a ban on voter ID and restrictions on the ability to challenge the eligibility of a voter … would effectively ensure that underage individuals could vote with impunity,” Heritage’s paper says.

The Daily Signal is the multimedia news organization of The Heritage Foundation.

The legislation also would provide taxpayer money for candidates for federal office, require nonprofits to disclose donors, mandate that states allow voter registration on Election Day, allow felons to vote, and allow ballots to be counted outside voters’ home precincts.

“Congress should pass HR 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and send them to my desk right away,” Biden said. “The country supports it. Congress should act.” 

Biden is partly correct on this point. An Associated Press poll in April found that about half of those surveyed said they support expanding access to early and mail-in voting, which HR 1 and S 1 would do. 

However, the legislation also would eliminate most state voter ID laws, which require anyone who wants to vote to first show a recognized form of identification.

A Fox News poll this week found that 77% of Americans say “a valid form of state or federally issued photo identification to prove U.S. citizenship” should be required for voting.  

2. Tax Cuts ‘Added $2 Trillion to Deficit’

“Look at the big tax cut in 2017. It was supposed to pay for itself and generate vast economic growth. Instead it added $2 trillion to the deficit.” 

In his speech, Biden pushed for tax increases for high earners and corporations, and took a shot at the tax reform law passed by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump just before Christmas 2017.

As noted in an analysis last month published by The Daily Signal, the Trump tax cuts did not pay for themselves. But the tax cuts were not the cause of the budget deficit. 

The tax cuts helped to grow the economy, but not enough to shrink the deficit—which is caused by spending, former Heritage tax expert Adam Michel noted in the analysis. 

Annual budget deficits primarily are the result of a systemic gap between revenues and expenditures resulting from sustained growth in mandatory spending programs since the 1970s. 

If Congress undoes the 2017 tax cuts, the deficit would continue to grow. The tax cuts represent only about 16% of the pre-pandemic budget deficit.

The projected annual deficit in 2030 is bigger than the entire 10-year cost of the Trump tax cuts from 2017. 

After the tax cuts, the economy grew, the labor market improved, and wages increased by more than a percentage point in the two subsequent years, resulting in annual wages of more than $1,400 above trend for production and nonsupervisory workers. 

New job openings increased in 2018, and about 83,000 more Americans voluntarily left their jobs for better opportunities at the end of 2019 and before the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020. 

According to data from the Internal Revenue Service, Americans in every income group benefited from lower effective tax rates, which dropped 1.4 percentage points in 2018. 

The tax cuts that took effect in 2018, as a percentage of taxes paid in 2017, were largest for the lowest-income Americans and smallest for the top 1% of earners. This means high-income Americans now pay a larger share of income taxes than they did before the Trump tax cuts.

3. Corporations Must ‘Pay Fair Share’

“I will not impose any tax increases on people making less than $400,000 a year. … We’re going to reform corporate taxes so they [corporations] pay their fair share—and help pay for the public investments their businesses will benefit from.” 

Between 75% and 100% of corporate tax increases are passed onto workers through lower wages and less investment, according to past analysis from Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Tax Analysis, and the Congressional Budget Office. 

These estimates indicate that, even without tax hikes for “people making less than $400,000 a year,” they would be affected by higher taxes on other Americans.

4. ‘Epidemic of Gun Violence’

“[So-called ghost guns] are homemade guns built from a kit that includes the directions on how to finish the firearm. The parts have no serial numbers, so when they show up at a crime scene, they can’t be traced.” 

Biden, noting that he already has called for a ban on “ghost guns,” asked Senate Republicans to close loopholes on background checks to purchase a gun and again ban high-capacity magazines. 

“I will do everything in my power to protect the American people from this epidemic of gun violence,” the president said. “But it’s time for Congress to act as well.”

Gun crimes actually are down from the early 1990s, when Congress passed several gun control laws, according to the Pew Research Center. 

Amy Swearer, a legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, wrote: 

Neither regulating ‘ghost guns’ nor making gun owners pay a $200 tax for pistol arm braces meaningfully addresses root causes of gun violence. These actions are, in fact, far more likely to turn responsible gun owners into felons than to prevent a single gun death.

5. ‘Add Millions of Jobs’

“[The American Jobs Plan] creates jobs to upgrade our transportation infrastructure. Jobs modernizing roads, bridges, and highways. Jobs building ports and airports, rail corridors and transit lines.” 

Despite Biden’s calling his proposal an infrastructure bill, less than 6% of the spending in it would go to building or repairing roads, bridges, and other projects typically associated with infrastructure, according to a Fox News analysis. 

Referring to a White House summary, the Fox News analysis said the proposed American Jobs Plan, with a price tag of over $2 trillion, would spend only $115 billion to modernize bridges, highways, and roads. 

A more broad definition, allowing for “infrastructure resilience,” Amtrak, broadband, airports, and road safety, stretches infrastructure spending to $750 billion. 

The proposal includes hundreds of billions in other spending, such as $400 billion for home-based elder care; $35 billion for climate change research; $50 billion for “research infrastructure” at the National Science Foundation; and $213 billion for “home sustainability” and public housing.

6. ‘Vaccinating the Nation’

“We’re vaccinating the nation … After I promised 100 million COVID-19 vaccine shots in 100 days, we will have provided over 220 million COVID shots in 100 days.”

Biden did surpass his initially stated goal of a million vaccine doses given per day. However, according to a Washington Post analysispublished two days after Biden’s inauguration, the Trump administration already was closing in on that target with nearly 1 million vaccinations administered per day. 

The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed spurred drug companies and agencies to develop and approve two different COVID-19 vaccines by the time Biden took over.

The Post analysis noted “greater manufacturing certainty and the increased pace of inoculations in the final days of the Trump administration.” 

The Post added:

Even with vaccine shortages and bottlenecks in delivery, the pace needed to meet the new administration’s goal—1 million doses administered per day—was already achieved [Jan. 22] and four other days of the previous eight, according to Washington Post data. The accelerating speed of the program undercuts assertions by some Biden advisers that they were left no plan by the Trump administration and suggests they need only to keep their feet on the pedal to clear the bar they set for themselves.

7.  ‘American Families Plan’

“We add two years of universal, high-quality preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old in America. … And then we add two years of free community college.” 

Studies cast doubt on the effectiveness of government-funded prekindergarten programs. 

In 2012, for example, a Department of Health and Human Services study of Head Start tracked 5,000 3- and 4-year-old children through the end of third grade. The study found the program had little to no impact on parenting practices. 

Researchers at Vanderbilt University evaluated Tennessee’s voluntary pre-K program. They reported no significant differences in achievement by the end of kindergarten.

Regarding “free” community college, England tried and discarded the idea of taxpayer-funded college after three decades encompassing the 1960s through the 1980s. Officials there determined that the program hurt low-income students when colleges capped enrollment.

Ken McIntyre contributed to this report. 

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

The Political Consequences of Tax Migration

When I ask my left-leaning friends what they think about the flight of investors, entrepreneurs, and business owners from high-tax states, I tend to get three responses.

1. It isn’t actually happening (these are my friends who apparently don’t know how to read).
2. It’s happening, but it doesn’t matter (data from the IRS suggests it actually is significant).
3. It’s happening, but high-tax states will be better off without these selfish and greedy people.

The folks making the third point actually have a decent argument, at least in terms of short-run political outcomes. Democrats rarely have to worry about retaining control of states like California, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey now that many Republican-leaning voters have moved away.

But sometimes short-run benefits are exceeded by long-run costs, and the recent data on congressional redistricting from the Census Bureau is a good example.

As you can see, there’s a continuing shift of political power – as measured by seats in Congress – from blue states to red states.

Patrick Gleason of Americans for Tax Reform explains what this means in a column for Forbes.

Over the past decade Americans have been voting with their feet in favor of states with lower overall tax burdens… As a result, high tax states…are set to lose congressional clout for the next decade, to the benefit of low tax states… the seven states that will lose congressional seats due to stagnant population growth have higher top income tax rates and greater overall tax burdens, on average, than do the six states gaining seats. In fact, the average top personal income tax rate for states losing seats in congress is 6.5%, which is 46% greater than the 4.45% average top income tax rate for states gaining seats.

Some people may want to dismiss Mr. Gleason’s column since he works for a group that supports smaller government.

But you can find the same analysis in this column in the Washington Post by Aaron Blake.

…what does the new breakdown mean from a partisan perspective? All told, five seats will migrate from blue states to red ones — owing to population shifts from the Rust Belt, the Northeast and California to the South and other portions of the West. Five of the seven seats being added also go to states under complete GOP control of redistricting, with three of seven being taken away coming from states in which Democrats have some measure of control over the maps. …That should help Republicans… The Cook Political Report estimates the shifts are worth about 3.5 seats… As for the electoral college in future presidential elections, …Michigan and Pennsylvania…are states Democrats probably need to win in the near future, meaning it’s probably a bigger loss for them. …If we reran the 2020 electoral college with the new electoral votes by state, Biden’s margin would shrink from 306-232 to 303-235. That seems negligible. But if you overlay the 2000 presidential results — three reapportionments ago — on the current electoral vote totals, George W. Bush’s narrow win with 271 electoral votes becomes a much more decisive win with 290. That gives you a sense where things have trended.

Let’s now return to the hypothesis that tax-motivated migration is playing a role.

Here’s an instructive tweet from Andrew Wilford of the National Taxpayers Union.https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1386785330020356103&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fdanieljmitchell.wordpress.com%2F2021%2F04%2F27%2Fthe-political-consequences-of-tax-migration%2F&sessionId=fbae0e0c1efd7628dbdc1ee1673d407a81777661&siteScreenName=wordpressdotcom&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ff2e7cf%3A1618526400629&width=550px

I’ll wrap up today’s column by augmenting the data in Mr. Wilford’s tweet.

Because not only are there, on average, lower tax burdens in the states gaining congressional seats, but every one of them has some very desirable feature of its tax code.

To be sure, not all of the state-to-state migration is due to tax policy. There are all sorts of other policies that determine whether a state is an attractive place for people looking to relocate.

And there are other factors (family, climate, etc) that have nothing to do with public policy.

All things considered, however, being a low-tax state means more jobs, growth, and people, at least when compared with being a high-tax state.

P.S. If you’re interested in seeing how states rank in various indices, click here, here, and here.

The Suddenly Real Threat of a Higher Corporate Income Tax Rate

After November’s election, I figured we would have gridlock. Biden would propose some statist ideas, but they would be blocked by Republicans in the Senate.

All things considered, not a bad outcome.

But Democrats won the run-off elections yesterday for both Georgia Senate seats, which means they now have total control of Washington.

And that means, as I recently warned, a much bigger threat that Biden’s proposed tax increases may get enacted.

That won’t be good news for America’s economy or American competitiveness.

Today, let’s focus on the biggest tax increase that the President Elect is proposing.

In an article for National Review, Joseph Sullivan writes about the adverse impact of Biden’s increase in the corporate tax rate.

Biden’s corporate-tax proposal is remarkable. …If the U.S. adopted Biden’s proposed federal tax rate, its overall corporate-tax rate would not be “in line” with the rest of the G7. Assuming U.S. state and local corporate taxes stayed the same, Biden’s proposal would result in nearly the highest overall corporate-tax rate in the G7, according to data from the OECD. The U.S. would be tied with France. …The average overall corporate rate among the G7 has fallen to 25 percent… With the G7 average trending in one direction, Biden would move the U.S. in the opposite direction.

In other words, while the Biden team claims that a higher corporate tax won’t be too damaging because it will be similar to the rate in other major nations, the U.S. actually will be tied with France once you include the impact of state corporate tax burdens.

Here’s the chart included with the article.

And don’t forget that there are many other economies where the corporate tax rate is well below the G7 average.

The bottom line is that the United States currently ranks only #19out of 35 nations in the Tax Foundation’s competitiveness ranking for OECD nations.

The good news is that being #19 is much better than being #31, which is where the U.S. was in 2016.

The bad news is that Biden wants to undo much of the 2017 reform, as well as impose other tax increases. And that means a much lower competitiveness score in the future.

Which ultimately means lower wages for American workers.

P.S. Although the proposed increase in the corporate rate is theoretically the biggest revenue raiser in Biden’s tax plan, I will safely predict that it won’t raise nearly as much revenue as projected by static revenue estimates. I wasn’t able to educate Obama on this issue, and I’m even less hopeful of getting through to Biden.

—-

Three Economics Risks for 2021 and Beyond

In an interview with Fox Business last week, I touched on three policies (easy money from the Fed, Biden’s class-warfare tax agenda, and the ever-increasing burden of federal spending) that create risks for the economy in 2021.

—

I didn’t have a chance to elaborate in the interview, but it’s worth noting that Biden will inherit two of the aforementioned problems.

Trump has been profligate with our money, and he was that way even before the coronavirus became an excuse to open the budgetary spigot. Moreover, he was just like Obama in pressuring the Federal Reserve for Keynesian-style monetary policy.

Unfortunately, there’s no reason to think Biden will try to reverse those mistakes.

Indeed, he wants expand the burden of federal spending. And, regarding monetary policy, appointing Janet Yellen as Secretary of Treasury certainly suggests he is comfortable with the current approach.

And to make matters worse, he definitely wants a more punitive tax system. We will shortly learn whether Democratstake control of the Senate, which presumably would give Biden more leeway to enact his class-warfare tax agenda.

As I said in the interview, that would create economic headwinds.

P.S. I mentioned in the interview that we have “three Americas” with regards to coronavirus. I’m not sure I was completely clear, so here’s what I was trying to get across.

1. Tourism-reliant states – They are going to be in bad shape until coronavirus is in the rear-view mirror and people feel comfortable with traveling and socializing.
2. Lock-down states – They have higher unemployment rates because more businesses are shut down.
3. Laissez-faire states – These are the states that generally allow businesses to remain open and have lower unemployment rates.

For what it’s worth, I think it’s best to let businesses stay open and to allow them and their customers to assess safety risks. It will be interesting to see whether any link is discovered between state policy and coronavirus rates.

P.P.S. At the risk of over-simplification, bad fiscal policy erodes the economy’s long-run growth rate. Bad monetary policy, by contrast, is what causes economic volatility and downturns.

Another Leftist Has an Epiphany on Guns

I’m (unfortunately) not a rich person, but that doesn’t stop me from opposing punitive taxes on successful entrepreneurs, investors, and small business owners.

Likewise, I’m not a gun aficionado, but that doesn’t stop me from opposing efforts to restrict the rights of law-abiding people to own and bear arms.

In part, my views on guns are driven by cost-benefit analysis. Simply stated, the evidence is fairly clear that there is less crime when bad people have to worry that potential victims have the ability to defend themselves.

But I also very much agree with the constitutional argument for gun ownership, as well as the “societal disarray” argument.

Interestingly, it seems that more folks on the left are coming to their senses on the issue of gun control, generally for practical reasons rather than philosophical reasons.

• In 2012, I shared some important observations from Jeffrey Goldberg, a left-leaning writer for The Atlantic. In his column, he basically admitted his side was wrong about gun control.
• Then, in 2013, I wrote about a column by Justin Cronin in the New York Times. He self-identified as a liberal, but explained how real-world events have led him to become a supporter of private gun ownership.
• In 2015, I shared a column by Jamelle Bouie in Slate, who addressed the left’s fixation on trying to ban so-called assault weapons and explains that such policies are meaningless.
• More recently, in 2017, Leah Libresco wrote in the Washington Post that advocates of gun control are driven by emotion rather empirical research and evidence.
• Last but not least, Alex Kingsbury in 2019 acknowledged the futility of gun control in a column for the New York Times.

Today, we’re going to add to the collection.

Charles Blow of the New York Times recently wrote about how he has become more understanding of why fellow blacks want to own guns.

Growing up in rural northern Louisiana, everyone I knew, at least every household, seemed to have guns. …Gun ownership was the norm in those parts, including in the Black community. It was not associated with danger but with safety. …Indeed, one could argue that the right to bear arms in this country has never been so brazenly and openly abridged as it has against Black people. Many state codes prohibited Black gun ownership before the Civil War and allowed for the disarmament of Black people after. …When I moved north, first to Detroit and then to New York, I moved into a mental space of more stringent gun control. …city dwellers simply didn’t have the same need for weapons as the people in the rural community where I was raised… I, like many, were convinced that fewer guns in the Black community would make it safer. But, for many Black people, that sentiment has turned. …gun sales to Black people are surging. …I, as much as anyone, would like to live in a society in which all citizens felt safe without the need of personal firearms. America could have created such a society. However, it chose not to. …many Black people feel the need to defend themselves from their own country.

To be sure, Mr. Blow can’t be considered a full convert to the 2nd Amendment. That being said, I think it’s nonetheless remarkable that even a committed, hard-core leftist has (partially) seen the light.

Though I can’t resist quibbling with one point in his column.He wrote, “America could have created” a society where gun control would be desirable because no guns would be needed, but “it chose not to.”

I would replace “it chose not to” with “our government is not sufficiently competent.”

Heck, I would probably add “or trustworthy” as well. Given the unsavory history of gun control, Mr. Blow should be among the first to appreciate that argument.

P.S. In 2018, I shared the story of Ryan Moore, another leftist who changed his mind on gun control. But since he also evolved away from being a leftist, I don’t include him

—-

President Barack Obama announces the creation of an interagency task force for guns as as Vice President Joseph Biden listens on.Getty Images

Is Gun Control Dead?

In recent months, governments released prisoners and announced that some laws wouldn’t be enforced because of the coronavirus. Now, with protests against police misbehavior, we’re seeing governments fail to maintain law and order.

As suggested by this excellent Reason video, these developments bolster the case against gun control.

But does this mean politicians will be more supportive of the 2nd Amendment?

The answer (at least for anyone with an IQ above room temperature)should be yes.

From an economic perspective, one major goal is to change the cost-benefit analysis for criminals. If bad guys have to worry that good guys may be armed, that significantly increases the potential cost of illegal behavior.

A well-functioning system of law enforcement can help, of course, but that’s not a description of how things work in some communities – even in normal times, much less when there’s civil unrest.

But all this evidence and analysis doesn’t seem to matter for Joe Biden. A look at his campaign website shows support for a wide range of gun-control laws from the soon-to-be Democratic nominee.

…gun violence is a public health epidemic. …In 1994, Biden – along with Senator Dianne Feinstein – secured the passage of 10-year bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. As president, Joe Biden will defeat the NRA again. …As president, Biden will: …Ban the manufacture and sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. …Regulate possession of existing assault weapons under the National Firearms Act. …Biden supports legislation restricting the number of firearms an individual may purchase per month to one. …End the online sale of firearms and ammunitions. …Give states incentives to set up gun licensing programs.

What’s especially discouraging is that Biden apparently hasn’t learned anything about so-called assault weapons since 1994.

In a 2019 column for Reason, Jacob Sullum dissected Biden’s incoherent views on the topic.

Joe Biden…is still proud of the ban on “assault weapons”… Biden argues that it made mass shootings less common…, citing a study reported in The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery last January. But that is not what the researchers, led by New York University epidemiologist Charles DiMaggio, actually found.…The study…looked not at the number of mass shootings, as Biden claims, but the number of mass-shooting deaths as a share of all firearm homicides. The difference in total fatalities during the period when the ban was in effect amounted to 15 fewer deaths over a decade, or 1.5 a year on average, including mass shootings that did not involve weapons covered by the ban. …The causal mechanism imagined by Biden is even harder to figure out. He describes “assault weapons” as “military-style firearms designed to fire rapidly.” But they do not fire any faster than any other semi-automatic. …Under the 1994 ban, removing “military-style” features such as folding stocks, flash suppressors, or bayonet mounts transformed forbidden “assault weapons” into legal firearms, even though the compliant models fired the same ammunition at the same rate with the same muzzle velocity as the ones targeted by the law.

I wonder if Biden understands the policy he’s advocating.

Does he think that “assault weapons” are actual machine guns, capable of firing multiple rounds with one pull on the trigger (a remarkably common misconception among gun-control advocates)?

Or, if he understands that a so-called assault weapon is just like any other gun (firing one round each time the trigger is pulled), then why would he think anything would be achieved by banning some guns and leaving others (that work the same way) legal?

Perhaps most relevant, does he even care what the evidence shows?

The bottom line is that people are “voting with their dollars” for gun ownership for the simple reason that they know it’s unwise to trust government (either to protect them from crime or to respect their rights).

But that doesn’t mean their constitutional freedoms will be secure if Biden wins the 2020 election.

P.S. The good news is that there will be widespread civil disobedience if politicians push for new gun bans.

P.P.S. Another silver lining is that we’ll get more and more clever humor mocking gun control.

The Case Against Biden’s Class-Warfare Tax Policy, Part II

In Part I of this series, I expressed some optimism that Joe Biden would not aggressively push his class-warfare tax plan, particularly since Republicans almost certainly will wind up controlling the Senate.

But the main goal of that column was to explain that the internal revenue code already is heavily weighted against investors, entrepreneurs, business owners and other upper-income taxpayers.

And to underscore that point, I shared two charts from Brian Riedl’s chartbook to show that the “rich” are now paying a much larger share of the tax burden – notwithstanding the Reagan tax cuts, Bush tax cuts, and Trump tax cuts – than they were 40 years ago.

Not only that, but the United States has a tax system that is more “progressive” than all other developed nations (all of whom also impose heavy tax burdens on upper-income taxpayers, but differ from the United States in that they also pillage lower-income and middle-class residents).

In other words, Biden’s class-warfare tax plan is bad policy.

Today’s column, by contrast, will point out that his tax increases are impractical. Simply stated, they won’t collect much revenue because people change their behavior when incentives to earn and report income are altered.

This is especially true when looking at upper-income taxpayers who – compared to the rest of us – have much greater ability to change the timing, level, and composition of their income.

This helps to explain why rich people paid five times as much tax to the IRS during the 1980s when Reagan slashed the top tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent.

When writing about this topic, I normally use the Laffer Curve to help people understand why simplistic assumptions about tax policy are wrong (that you can double tax revenue by doubling tax rates, for instance). And I point out that even folks way on the left, such as Paul Krugman, agree with this common-sense view (though it’s also worth noting that some people on the right discredit the concept by making silly assertions that “all tax cuts pay for themselves”).

But instead of showing the curve again, I want to go back to Brian Riedl’s chartbook and review his data on of revenue changes during the eight years of the Obama Administration.

It shows that Obama technically cut taxes by $822 billion (as further explained in the postscript, most of that occurred when some of the Bush tax cuts were made permanent by the “fiscal cliff” deal in 2012) and raised taxes by $1.32 trillion (most of that occurred as a result of the Obamacare legislation).

If we do the math, that means Obama imposed a cumulative net tax increase of about $510 billion during his eight years in office

But, if you look at the red bar on the chart, you’ll see that the government didn’t wind up with more money because of what the number crunchers refer to as “economic and technical reestimates.”

Indeed, those reestimates resulted in more than $3.1 trillion of lost revenue during the Obama years.

I don’t want the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington to have more tax revenue, but I obviously don’t like it when tax revenues shrink simply because the economy is stagnant and people have less taxable income.

Yet that’s precisely what we got during the Obama years.

To be sure, it would be inaccurate to assert that revenues declined solely because of Obama’s tax increase. There were many other bad policies that also contributed to taxable income falling short of projections.

Heck, maybe there was simply some bad luck as well.

But even if we add lots of caveats, the inescapable conclusion is that it’s not a good idea to adopt policies – such as class-warfare tax rates – that discourage people from earning and reporting taxable income.

The bottom line is that we should hope Biden’s proposed tax increases die a quick death.

P.S. The “fiscal cliff” was the term used to describe the scheduled expiration of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts. According to the way budget data is measured in Washington, extending some of those provisions counted as a tax cut even though the practical impact was to protect people from a tax increase.

P.P.S. Even though Biden absurdly asserted that paying higher taxes is “patriotic,” it’s worth pointing out that he engaged in very aggressive tax avoidance to protect his family’s money.

President Joe Biden Will Be Bad, but a President Kamala Harris Would Be Worse

Joe Biden has a very misguided economic agenda. I’m especially disturbed by his class-warfare tax agenda, which will be bad news for American workers and American competitiveness.

The good news, as I wrote earlier this year, is that he probably isn’t serious about some of his worst ideas.

Biden is a statist, but not overly ideological. His support for bigger government is largely a strategy of catering to the various interest groups that dominate the Democratic Party. The good news is that he’s an incrementalist and won’t aggressively push for a horrifying FDR-style agenda if he gets to the White House.

But what if Joe Biden’s health deteriorates and Kamala Harris – sooner or later – winds up in charge?

That’s rather troubling since her agenda was far to the left of Biden’s when they were competing for the Democratic nomination.

And it doesn’t appear that being Biden’s choice for Vice President has led her to moderate her views. Consider this campaign ad, where she openly asserted that “equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.”

The notion that we should strive for equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity is horrifying.

For all intents and purposes,Harris has embraced a harsh version of redistributionism where everyone above average is punished and everyone below average is rewarded.

This goes way beyond a safety net and it’s definitely a recipe for economic misery since people on both sides of the equationhave less incentive to be productive.

I’m not the only one to be taken aback by Harris’ dogmatic leftism.

Robby Soave, writing for Reason, is very critical of her radical outlook.

Harris gives voice to a leftist-progressive narrative about the importance of equity—equal outcomes—rather than mere equality before the law. …Harris contrasted equal treatment—all people getting the same thing—with equitable treatment,which means “we all end up at the same place.” …This may seem like a trivial difference, but when it comes to public policy, the difference matters. A government shouldbe obligated to treat all citizens equally, giving them the same access to civil rights and liberties like voting, marriage, religious freedom, and gun ownership. …A mandate to foster equity, though, would give the government power to violate these rights in order to achieve identical social results for all people. 

And, in a column for National Review, Brad Polumbo expresses similar reservations about her views.

Whether she embraces the label “socialist” or not, Harris’s stated agenda and Senate record both reveal her to be positioned a long way to the left on matters of economic policy. From health care to the environment to housing, Harris thinks the answer to almost every problem we face is simply more government and more taxpayer money — raising taxes and further indebting future generations in the process.…Harris…supports an astounding $40 trillion in new spending over the next decade. In a sign of just how far left the Democratic Party has shifted on economics, Harris backs more than 20 times as much spending as Hillary Clinton proposed in 2016. …And this is not just a matter of spending. During her failed presidential campaign, Harris supported a federal-government takeover of health care… The senator jumped on the “Green New Deal” bandwagon as well. She co-sponsored the Green New Deal resolution in the Senate that called for a “new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal era.” …she supports enacting price controls on housing across the country. …The left-wing group Progressive Punch analyzed Harris’s voting record and found that she is the fourth-most liberal senator, more liberal even than Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren. Similarly, the nonpartisan organization GovTrack.us deemed Harris the furthest-left member of the Senate for the 2019 legislative year. (Spoiler alert: If your voting record is to the left of Bernie Sanders, you might be a socialist.)

To be fair, Harris is simply a politician, so we have no idea what she really believes. Her hard-left agenda might simply be her way of appealing to Democratic voters, much as Republicans who run for president suddenly decide they support big tax cuts and sweeping tax reform.

But whether she’s sincere or insincere, it’s troubling that she actually says it’s the role of government to make sure we all “end up at the same place.”

Let’s close with a video clip from Milton Friedman. At the risk of understatement, he has a different perspective than Ms. Harris.

Since we highlighted Harris’ key quote, let’s also highlight the key quote from Friedman.

Amen.

P.S. It appears Republicans will hold the Senate, which presumably (hopefully?) means that any radical proposals would be dead on arrival, regardless of whether they’re proposed by Biden or Harris.

P.P.S. Harris may win the prize for the most economically illiterate proposal of the 2020 campaign.

——

Will Biden’s Class-Warfare Tax Plan Lead to an Exodus of Job Creators?

After Barack Obama took office (and especially after he was reelected), there was a big uptick in the number of rich people who chose to emigrate from the United States. 

There are many reasons wealthy people choose to move from one nation to another, but Obama’s embrace of class-warfare tax policy (including FATCA) was seen as a big factor.

Joe Biden’s tax agenda is significantly more punitive than Obama’s, so we may see something similar happen if he wins the 2020 election.

Given the economic importance of innovators, entrepreneurs, and inventors, this would be not be good news for the American economy.

The New York Times reported late last year that the United States could be shooting itself in the foot by discouraging wealthy residents.

…a different group of Americans say they are considering leaving — people of both parties who would be hit by the wealth tax… Wealthy Americans often leave high-tax states like New York and California for lower-tax ones like Florida and Texas. But renouncing citizenship is a far more permanent, costly and complicated proposition. …“America’s the most attractive destination for capital, entrepreneurs and people wanting to get a great education,” said Reaz H. Jafri, a partner and head of the immigration practice at Withers, an international law firm. “But in today’s world, when you have other economic centers of excellence — like Singapore, Switzerland and London — people don’t view the U.S. as the only place to be.” …now, the price may be right to leave. While the cost of expatriating varies depending on a person’s assets, the wealthiest are betting that if a Democrat wins…, leaving now means a lower exit tax. …The wealthy who are considering renouncing their citizenship fear a wealth tax less than the possibility that the tax on capital gains could be raised to the ordinary income tax rate, effectively doubling what a wealthy person would pay… When Eduardo Saverin, a founder of Facebook…renounced his United States citizenship shortly before the social network went public, …several estimates said that renouncing his citizenship…saved him $700 million in taxes.

The migratory habits of rich people make a difference in the global economy.

Here are some excerpts from a 2017 Bloomberg story.

Australia is luring increasing numbers of global millionaires, helping make it one of the fastest growing wealthy nations in the world… Over the past decade, total wealth held in Australia has risen by 85 percent compared to 30 percent in the U.S. and 28 percent in the U.K… As a result, the average Australian is now significantly wealthier than the average American or Briton. …Given its relatively small population, Australia also makes an appearance on a list of average wealth per person. This one is, however, dominated by small tax havens.

Here’s one of the charts from the story.

As you can see, Australia is doing very well, though the small tax havens like Monaco are world leaders.

I’m mystified, however, that the Cayman Islands isn’t listed.

But I’m digressing.

Let’s get back to our main topic. It’s worth noting that even Greece is seeking to attract rich foreigners.

The new tax law is aimed at attracting fresh revenues into the country’s state coffers – mainly from foreigners as well as Greeks who are taxed abroad – by relocating their tax domicile to Greece, as it tries to woo “high-net-worth individuals” to the Greek tax register.The non-dom model provides for revenues obtained abroad to be taxed at a flat amount… Having these foreigners stay in Greece for at least 183 days a year, as the law requires, will also entail expenditure on accommodation and everyday costs that will be added to the Greek economy. …most eligible foreigners will be able to considerably lighten their tax burden if they relocate to Greece…nevertheless, the amount of 500,000 euros’ worth of investment in Greece required of foreigners and the annual flat tax of 100,000 euros demanded (plus 20,000 euros per family member) may keep many of them away.

The system is too restrictive, but it will make the beleaguered nation an attractive destination for some rich people. After all, they don’t even have to pay a flat tax, just a flat fee.

Italy has enjoyed some success with a similar regime to entice millionaires.

Last but not least, an article published last year has some fascinating details on the where rich people move and why they move.

The world’s wealthiest people are also the most mobile. High net worth individuals (HNWIs) – persons with wealth over US$1 million – may decide to pick up and move for a number of reasons. In some cases they are attracted by jurisdictions with more favorable tax laws… Unlike the middle class, wealthy citizens have the means to pick up and leave when things start to sideways in their home country. An uptick in HNWI migration from a country can often be a signal of negative economic or societal factors influencing a country. …Time-honored locations – such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands – continue to attract the world’s wealthy, but no country is experiencing HNWI inflows quite like Australia. …The country has a robust economy, and is perceived as being a safe place to raise a family. Even better, Australia has no inheritance tax

Here’s a map from the article.

The good news is that the United States is attracting more millionaires than it’s losing (perhaps because of the EB-5 program).

The bad news is that this ratio could flip after the election. Indeed, it may already be happening even though recent data on expatriation paints a rosy picture.

The bottom line is that the United States should be competing to attract millionaires, not repel them. Assuming, of course, politicians care about jobs and prosperity for the rest of the population.

P.S. American politicians, copying laws normally imposed by the world’s most loathsome regimes, have imposed an “exit tax” so they can grab extra cash from rich people who choose to become citizens elsewhere.

P.P.S. I’ve argued that Australia is a good place to emigrate even for those of us who aren’t rich.

—-

Question of the Week: Which Department of the Federal Government Should Be the First to Be Abolished?

I was asked last week which entitlement program is most deserving of reform.

While acknowledging that Social Security and Medicare also are in desperate need of modernization, I wrote that Medicaid reformshould be the first priority.

But I’d be happy if we made progress on any type of entitlement reform, so I don’t think there are right or wrong answers to this kind of question.

We have the same type of question this week. A reader sent an email to ask “Which federal department should be abolished first?”

I guess this is what is meant when people talk about a target-rich environment. We have an abundance of candidates:

• Department of Education
• Department of Agriculture
• Department of Energy
• Department of Veterans Affairs
• Department of Transportation

But if I have to choose, I think the Department of Housing and Urban Development should be first on the chopping block.

Raze the building and put a layer of salt over the earth to make sure it can never spring back to life

I’ve already argued that there should be no federal government involvement in the housing sector and made the same argument on TV. And I’ve also shared some horror stories about HUD waste and incompetence.

• HUD engages in racism and social engineering.
• Urban renewal projects destroy neighborhoods and foment corruption.
• HUD subsidies are grotesquely wasteful.
• There are epidemic levels of waste, fraud, and abuse at HUD.

Heck, I even made HUD the background image for my video on the bloated and overpaid bureaucracy in Washington.

It’s also worth noting that there’s nothing about housing in Article I, Section VIII, of the Constitution. For those of us who have old-fashioned values about playing by the rules, that means much of what takes place in Washington – including housing handouts – is unconstitutional.

Simply stated, there is no legitimate argument for HUD. And I think there would be the least political resistance.

As with the answer to the question about entitlements, this is a judgment call. I’d be happy to be proven wrong if it meant that politicians were aggressively going after another department. Anything that reduces the burden of government spending is a step in the right direction

Milton Friedman on Spending

October 3, 2020 by Dan Mitchell

I identified four heroes from the “Battle of Ideas” video I shared in late August – Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher. Here’s one of those heroes, Milton Friedman, explaining what’s needed to control big government.

—

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx6-PHKzHvMu0026t=1024s

Why Milton Friedman Saw School Choice as a First Step, Not a Final One

On his birthday, let’s celebrate Milton Friedman’s vision of enabling parents, not government, to be in control of a child’s education.

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Kerry McDonald

EducationMilton FriedmanSchool ChoiceSchooling

Libertarians and others are often torn about school choice. They may wish to see the government schooling monopoly weakened, but they may resist supporting choice mechanisms, like vouchers and education savings accounts, because they don’t go far enough. Indeed, most current choice programs continue to rely on taxpayer funding of education and don’t address the underlying compulsory nature of elementary and secondary schooling.

Skeptics may also have legitimate fears that taxpayer-funded education choice programs will lead to over-regulation of previously independent and parochial schooling options, making all schooling mirror compulsory mass schooling, with no substantive variation.

Friedman Challenged Compulsory Schooling Laws

Milton Friedman had these same concerns. The Nobel prize-winning economist is widely considered to be the one to popularize the idea of vouchers and school choice beginning with his 1955 paper, “The Role of Government in Education.” His vision continues to be realized through the important work of EdChoice, formerly the Friedman Foundation for Education Choice, that Friedman and his economist wife, Rose, founded in 1996.

July 31 is Milton Friedman’s birthday. He died in 2006 at the age of 94, but his ideas continue to have an impact, particularly in education policy.

Friedman saw vouchers and other choice programs as half-measures. He recognized the larger problems of taxpayer funding and compulsion, but saw vouchers as an important starting point in allowing parents to regain control of their children’s education. In their popular book, Free To Choose, first published in 1980, the Friedmans wrote:

We regard the voucher plan as a partial solution because it affects neither the financing of schooling nor the compulsory attendance laws. We favor going much farther. (p.161)

They continued:

The compulsory attendance laws are the justification for government control over the standards of private schools. But it is far from clear that there is any justification for the compulsory attendance laws themselves. (p. 162)

The Friedmans admitted that their “own views on this have changed over time,” as they realized that “compulsory attendance at schools is not necessary to achieve that minimum standard of literacy and knowledge,” and that “schooling was well-nigh universal in the United States before either compulsory attendance or government financing of schooling existed. Like most laws, compulsory attendance laws have costs as well as benefits. We no longer believe the benefits justify the costs.” (pp. 162-3)

Still, they felt that vouchers would be the essential starting point toward chipping away at monopoly mass schooling by putting parents back in charge. School choice, in other words, would be a necessary but not sufficient policy approach toward addressing the underlying issue of government control of education.

Vouchers as a First Step

In their book, the Friedmans presented the potential outcomes of their proposed voucher plan, which would give parents access to some or all of the average per-pupil expenditures of a child enrolled in public school. They believed that vouchers would help create a more competitive education market, encouraging education entrepreneurship. They felt that parents would be more empowered with greater control over their children’s education and have a stronger desire to contribute some of their own money toward education. They asserted that in many places “the public school has fostered residential stratification, by tying the kind and cost of schooling to residential location” and suggested that voucher programs would lead to increased integration and heterogeneity. (pp. 166-7)

To the critics who said, and still say, that school choice programs would destroy the public schools, the Friedmans replied that these critics fail to

explain why, if the public school system is doing such a splendid job, it needs to fear competition from nongovernmental, competitive schools or, if it isn’t, why anyone should object to its “destruction.” (p. 170)

What I appreciate most about the Friedmans discussion of vouchers and the promise of school choice is their unrelenting support of parents. They believed that parents, not government bureaucrats and intellectuals, know what is best for their children’s education and well-being and are fully capable of choosing wisely for their children—when they have the opportunity to do so.

They wrote:

Parents generally have both greater interest in their children’s schooling and more intimate knowledge of their capacities and needs than anyone else. Social reformers, and educational reformers in particular, often self-righteously take for granted that parents, especially those who are poor and have little education themselves, have little interest in their children’s education and no competence to choose for them. That is a gratuitous insult. Such parents have frequently had limited opportunity to choose. However, U.S. history has demonstrated that, given the opportunity, they have often been willing to sacrifice a great deal, and have done so wisely, for their children’s welfare. (p. 160).

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Voucher Programs Today

Today, school voucher programs exist in 15 states plus the District of Columbia. These programs have consistently shown that when parents are given the choice to opt-out of an assigned district school, many will take advantage of the opportunity. In Washington, D.C., low-income parents who win a voucher lottery send their children to private schools.

The most recent three-year federal evaluationof voucher program participants found that while student academic achievement was comparable to achievement for non-voucher students remaining in public schools, there were statistically significant improvements in other important areas. For instance, voucher participants had lower rates of chronic absenteeism than the control groups, as well as higher student satisfaction scores. There were also tremendous cost-savings.

In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has served over 28,000 low-income students attending 129 participating private schools.

According to Corey DeAngelis, Director of School Choice at the Reason Foundation and a prolific researcher on the topic, the recent analysis of the D.C. voucher program “reveals that private schools produce the same academic outcomes for only a third of the cost of the public schools. In other words, school choice is a great investment.”

In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program was created in 1990 and is the nation’s oldest voucher program. It currently serves over 28,000 low-income students attending 129 participating private schools. Like the D.C. voucher program, data on test scores of Milwaukee voucher students show similar results to public school students, but non-academic results are promising.

Increased Access and Decreased Crime

Recent research found voucher recipients had lower crime rates and lower incidences of unplanned pregnancies in young adulthood. On his birthday, let’s celebrate Milton Friedman’s vision of enabling parents, not government, to be in control of a child’s education.

According to Howard Fuller, an education professor at Marquette University, founder of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, and one of the developers of the Milwaukee voucher program, the key is parent empowerment—particularly for low-income minority families.

In an interview with NPR, Fuller said: “What I’m saying to you is that there are thousands of black children whose lives are much better today because of the Milwaukee parental choice program,” he says. 
“They were able to access better schools than they would have without a voucher.”

Putting parents back in charge of their child’s education through school choice measures was Milton Friedman’s goal. It was not his ultimate goal, as it would not fully address the funding and compulsion components of government schooling; but it was, and remains, an important first step. As the Friedmans wrote in Free To Choose:

The strong American tradition of voluntary action has provided many excellent examples that demonstrate what can be done when parents have greater choice. (p. 159).

On his birthday, let’s celebrate Milton Friedman’s vision of enabling parents, not government, to be in control of a child’s education.

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