My name is Everette Hatcher III. I am a businessman in Little Rock and have been living in Bryant since 1993. My wife Jill and I have four kids (Rett 24, Hunter 22, Murphey 16, and Wilson 14).
A heavy heart is the beginning of misery, and we were never meant to carry the load.
A burdened soul breaks the spirit. A broken spirit thins the immunity of the body. The body then begins to wither, and we get ill. In fact, studies have shown that emotions largely contribute to one’s overall state of health. Doctors call it Emotionally Induced Illness (E.I.I.), and it is the idea that physical sickness can be a result of emotional illness.
The entire body is affected by a heavy heart. But God has given us a remedy for the soul, the spirit, and the body. And it is good medicine…Joy!
Not mere laughter, not mere joking, not mere fun and games, but deep, abiding joy is our strongest medicine and greatest weapon. Joy doesn’t depend upon material things or circumstances. It doesn’t depend upon thrills. It comes straight from the heart.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus spoke of the joy in His own heart, and He promised to give us a dose of it; not just some cheap imitation… He wants to give us the real thing. “My joy have I given unto you.” Jesus said, “I want that joy to remain in you.”
We don’t root our happiness in circumstances, because those can change in an instant and leave us emotionally stranded. We root our joy in Christ alone, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. (Hebrews 13:8)
“Without joy, life is meaningless!” Acclaimed pastor and teacher, Adrian Rogers says, “That joy is found only in Jesus. And we ought to share the secret, the source of our joy —the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Apply it to your life
Joy is something freely given, but it must be received, day by day. Today, seek it out through prayer and in Scripture. Let it be seen in your countenance as you go about your day, and share it with someone else.
Adrian Rogers: God’s Miracle Medicine #1027 Proverbs 12:25;15:13-15;17:22
Proverbs 12 New Living Translation
Proverbs 12New Living Translation
12 To learn, you must love discipline; it is stupid to hate correction.
2 The Lord approves of those who are good, but he condemns those who plan wickedness.
3 Wickedness never brings stability, but the godly have deep roots.
4 A worthy wife is a crown for her husband, but a disgraceful woman is like cancer in his bones.
5 The plans of the godly are just; the advice of the wicked is treacherous.
6 The words of the wicked are like a murderous ambush, but the words of the godly save lives.
7 The wicked die and disappear, but the family of the godly stands firm.
8 A sensible person wins admiration, but a warped mind is despised.
9 Better to be an ordinary person with a servant than to be self-important but have no food.
10 The godly care for their animals, but the wicked are always cruel.
11 A hard worker has plenty of food, but a person who chases fantasies has no sense.
12 Thieves are jealous of each other’s loot, but the godly are well rooted and bear their own fruit.
13 The wicked are trapped by their own words, but the godly escape such trouble.
14 Wise words bring many benefits, and hard work brings rewards.
15 Fools think their own way is right, but the wise listen to others.
16 A fool is quick-tempered, but a wise person stays calm when insulted.
17 An honest witness tells the truth; a false witness tells lies.
18 Some people make cutting remarks, but the words of the wise bring healing.
19 Truthful words stand the test of time, but lies are soon exposed.
20 Deceit fills hearts that are plotting evil; joy fills hearts that are planning peace!
21 No harm comes to the godly, but the wicked have their fill of trouble.
22 The Lord detests lying lips, but he delights in those who tell the truth.
23 The wise don’t make a show of their knowledge, but fools broadcast their foolishness.
24 Work hard and become a leader; be lazy and become a slave.
25 Worry weighs a person down; an encouraging word cheers a person up.
26 The godly give good advice to their friends;[a] the wicked lead them astray.
27 Lazy people don’t even cook the game they catch, but the diligent make use of everything they find.
28 The way of the godly leads to life; that path does not lead to death.
There are certain things when your in a foreign country that you can’t bring back into the United States. Adrian Rogers tells of a time when he was coming back into this country and he was going thru security. Their was a man in front of Adrian Rogers who had some gourmet cheese. The inspector said, “I’m sorry sir, you cannot bring this cheese into this country.” The man and the inspector argued for a few minutes, until finally the man said, ‘oh yes, I am going to bring it into this country you just watch.” Walked to the back of the line and ate the cheese then walked right on thru. They may say we can’t take Jesus into the public schools but as long as He is in us we’re taking Him everywhere we go. (Source Unknown, Lou Nicholes – Missionary/Author).
Pro-abortion demonstrators protest outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in Chevy Chase, Maryland, on Saturday. Even The Washington Post’s liberal editorial page, which agrees with them on abortion generally, called them out: “To picket a judge’s home is especially problematic.” (Photo: Craig Hudson/ Washington Post/Getty Images)
Regardless, you are certainly exhibiting poor judgment by trying to intimidate and influence Supreme Court justices and their families at their homes.
You don’t have to take our word for it. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, said, “I think it’s reprehensible. Stay away fromthe homes and families of elected officials and members of the court.”
Even The Washington Post’s editorial board opined, “Leave the Justices Alone at Home.” It wrote: “The right to assemble and speak freely is essential to democracy. Erasing any distinction between the public square and private life is essential to totalitarianism.”
In no uncertain terms, the editorialist wrote, “The protests are part of a disturbing trend in which groups descend on the homes of people they disagree with and attempt to influence their public conduct by making their private lives—and, often, those of their families and neighbors—miserable.”
And lest the message be lost, the editorial writer added, “To picket a judge’s home is especially problematic. It tries to bring direct public pressure to bear on a decision-making process that must be controlled, evidence-based, and rational if there is to be any hope of an independent judiciary.”
We agree. So, what can be done?
While there are state or local laws that mightprohibit these protesters’ intimidating conduct, a federal law—18 U.S.C. §1507—seems to be directly on point.
It says:
Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge … in the discharge of his duty, pickets or parades … in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge … or with such intent uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year or both.
The statute is clear. Numerous other legal experts who have reviewed the statute think it likely applies to the protests at the justices’ homes and would likely survive a legal challenge.
The Washington Post said these are “limited and justifiable restraints on where and how people exercise the right to assembly.” It added: “Citizens should voluntarily abide by them, in letter and spirit.”
If not, the editorialist wrote, the relevant government “should take appropriate action.”
So, where is the Justice Department? And why is Attorney General Merrick Garland missing in action?
He was quick to condemn parents who showed up at school board meetings, the appropriate forum, to protest the radical policies being pushed by some board members.
But the best he can do here is a milquetoast statement that he “continues to be briefed on security matters related to the Supreme Court and Supreme Court justices,” and that he directed the U.S. Marshals Service to help ensure the justices’ safety.
In the words of President Joe Biden: “C’mon, man!” That’s not nearly enough.
Garland needs to issue a statement that those breaking the law will be prosecuted and held accountable for their actions—and then follow through.
The rule of law depends on it.
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1 Of 5 / The Bible’s Influence In America / American Heritage Series / David Barton
2 Of 5 / The Bible’s Influence In America / American Heritage Series / David Barton
3 Of 5 / The Bible’s Influence In America / American
Heritage Series / David Barton
4 Of 5 / The Bible’s Influence In America / American Heritage Series / David Barton
5 Of 5 / The Bible’s Influence In America / American Heritage Series / David Barton
__________________________________________
3 Of 3 / Faith Of The Founding Fathers / American Heritage Series / David Barton
________________Many inauthentic quotes attributed to the Founding Fathers have been in circulation for much of the 20th century. These are still being used frequently, especially by those in the religious right.
Fortunately we have many of the letters, diaries, and notes written by the Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson wrote many letters daily. John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary every day for 18 years straight. During the 1787 Constitutional Convention, James Madison wrote notes in shorthand which he converted into longhand every night. Newspapers of the day are also a good source. Actually, George Washington’s farewell Presidential Address in 1796 was only a newspaper article. In sum, our prolific Founders left us with many sources of material.
Misquotes
If one quotes the actual words of a Founding Father but does not give the context, then he is guilty of misquoting.
Adams did indeed make the statement, but only to repudiate it. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson about religion on April 19, 1817, he mentioned reading some polemical books that reminded him of the way his boyhood minister, Lemuel Bryant, and his Latin schoolmaster, Joseph Cleverly, used to argue ad nausea about religion, and he told Jefferson: “Twenty times, in the course of my late reading, have I been on the point of breaking out, ‘this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!!’ But in this exclamation, I should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in public company–I mean hell.”
This is exactly what Franklin said at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. However, many in the religious right ignore that fact that his motion was tabled and never voted on. For instance, Tal Brooke comments, “It was Benjamin Franklin who called the Constitutional Convention to prayer with a powerful statement of their debt to God. As mere men, they could not presume to undertake so great a task without petitioning Him for guidance. America abounds with Christian evidences from its earliest days.”
Actually this version of the Franklin prayer motion originated with a letter written in September of 1825 from William Steele to his son, Jonathan. The letter told about William’s recollection of a conversation with General Jonathan Dayton, a member of the Constitutional Convention. This incorrect account later appeared in the National Intelligencer, and other sources as well. According to Steele, Dayton recalled that “the motion for appointing a chaplain was instantly seconded and carried.” However, James Madison in a letter to Thomas S. Grimke (January 6, 1834) stated that Franklin’s “proposition was received and treated with the respect due to it; but the lapse of time which had preceded, with consternations growing out of it, had the effect of limiting what was done, to a reference of the proposition to a highly respectable Committee… That the communication [Steele’s account of Dayton testimony] was erroneous is certain; whether from misapprehension or misrecollection, uncertain.”
We should learn a lesson from James Madison. It is one thing to correct a person who is mistaken about historical details, but it is quite another to accuse someone of intentionally fabricating a story. Note that Madison stopped short of doing the latter.
Fake Quotes
A fake quote is an inauthentic quote attributed to a Founding Father. The late Robert S. Alley, former professor at the University of Richmond has rightly stated that “proving that a quotation does not exist is a daunting task…” However, evidence exists that proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the following quote is not authentic.
This fake quote is taken from Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance. The subject in this sentence is not “Religion,” but actually the “Declaration of those rights ‘which pertain to the good people of Virginia.'” Nevertheless, this inauthentic quote has been circulated for many years.
Disputed Quotes
A disputed quote may actually be authentic, but no primary source has been found. Some scholars would put the following two quotes in the previous category of “Fake Quotes” while other scholars may hold out hope that a primary source will be found.
Possibly this quote was originally given by Bishop James Madison (a cousin) or from James Madison’s father, James Madison, Sr., but this is pure speculation. There is always a distant chance that a quote could turn up from a primary source that was found in someone’s attic. In fact, a primary document from James Madison surfaced as late as 1946, but don’t hold your breath till that happens again. The fact remains that there is not a shred of evidence that links James Madison to this quote. Moreover, Paul F. Boller, Jr. in a personal letter to me stated, “The Madison quote about the Ten Commandments sounds un-Madisonian. I’ve read a lot of Madison, and I know he didn’t express himself that way…Sometimes the questionable quote can’t be found in any of the writings that have survived of the person who is supposed to have made the statement. The Madison quote doesn’t appear in any of Madison’s writings.”
Christian apologist Gary DeMar wrote concerning his research concerning the quote:
I credited this quotation to Madison in the first edition of the first volume of God and Government. Nearly every book written by a Christian author to support the Christian America thesis claims Madison as the quotation’s author. I have searched in vain for the quotation’s original source. American Vision even contacted a Madison scholar for help. He was not familiar with the quotation. Further study led me to the January 1958 calendar published by Spiritual Mobilization. What was Spiritual Mobilization’s source for the quotation? None was listed. Additional detective work led me to another James Madison, a cousin of President Madison. Madison served as president of William and Mary College and was the first Protestant Episcopal bishop of Virginia. Is he the source of the quotation? Very possibly. Christians should stop attributing of the quotation to President James Madison until we find out.
It is my opinion that this disputed quote attributed to Madison has been the one used more than any other by the religious right. This is probably due to the fact that the Supreme Court banned the display of the Ten Commandments in the public school rooms in the case Stone v. Graham in 1980.
Several years ago, I was guilty of using this disputed quote, and the late Professor John George of the University of Central Oklahoma, Political Science Department, told me that there is not a shred of evidence to link Washington to this quote. Professor George was a leading expert on this subject, and he co-authored They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions with Paul F. Boller, Jr. of Texas Christian University.
I had copied this disputed quote off of a bumper sticker that my friend from church had on his truck. However, I was surprised at my friend’s reaction when I told him he should remove his sticker. He said, “Is Professor George a Christian? If not then he probably has an axe to grind.” I later discovered that Professor George had corrected many atheists too. Nevertheless, I tried to find someone in the religious right who also had some knowledge on the subject.
So I called up the company that specialized at putting out bumper stickers with quotes from the Founding Fathers dealing with God. The owner of the company actually spent a whole year researching the Washington quote and he said he concluded that Washington did not say it. He commented, “Washington did not talk that way. He did not use the word ‘Bible’ any that I can remember, and I believe, I have read everything available that Washington wrote.”
This fellow was a Christian lawyer, and he said he could no longer sell the Washington bumper sticker even though it made up 90% of his sales. Again I went back to my friend, but he replied, “That fellow is not a historian. David Barton has studied the history of the founding fathers for over 20 years. I have a lot of respect for Barton.”
Then I contacted Barton’s organization, Wallbuilders Inc of Aledo, Texas. They mailed me the “Unconfirmed or Questionable Quote” list and it featured the Washington quote. Furthermore, it recommended not using this quote until it is authenticated.
When confronted with this opinion from Barton my friend responded, “I am not going to take my bumper sticker off until I have an explanation of how the quote could have possibly been mistakenly attributed to Washington in the first place.”
Then I received a few weeks later an updated “Unconfirmed Quote” list from Wallbuilders, and under the Washington disputed quote is this explanation:
There is a very real possibility that the quotation has its origin in an 1835 biography by James K. Paulding. In a description of Washington’s character, with supporting quotations, Paulding declares Washington to have said, “It is impossible to account for the creation of the universe without the agency of a Supreme Being. It is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a Supreme Being.” The similarities are obvious; a paraphrase of these quotes could have easily generated the words in question. However, we have not been able to trace Paulding’s cite to a more scholarly reference. He offers no footnotes.
I thought my friend would finally back down when I showed him this evidence, but I was about to learn something about human nature. I explained to him that this quote originated around 1835 when someone read Paulding’s book A Life of Washington. This is because it contained another unconfirmed quote of Washington which also had the words “impossible” and “govern.” Obviously a paraphrase took place at that time. My friend replied, “Are you 100% sure it is a bad quote? If not then I am going to continue to use it!”
Needless to say I have learned a lot about people’s tendency to ignore evidence when it goes against their presuppositions. Furthermore, I have quit trying to convince my friend that a disputed quote should be shelved until it is authenticated. He truly believes if Washington were here today he would say it now even if he didn’t say it the first time.
Later I got several board members of Americans United to contact Boston on my behalf and voice their opinion of how unfair Boston had been to Barton in his article “Consumer Alert”. On March 7, 1997, I spoke with Barry Lynn the executive director of Americans United. Lynn was very gracious on the phone and promised to consider an article from me in response to the slanted “Consumer Alert” article Boston had written earlier. Americans United board member Dr. Paul Simmons of Louisville helped me write the aritcle, but ultimately it was never published until today.)
George Washington (Lansdowne portrait) by Gilbert Stuart, oil on canvas, 1796
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Acquired as a gift to the nation through the generosity of the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation.
James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas—seen here at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 28, 2020, in National Harbor, Maryland—was the target of a raid by the FBI. (Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
House Republicans are calling for a congressional investigation into the FBI’s raid on and seizure of information from Project Veritas’ James O’Keefeand potentially other government actions against a free press.
“I have called for a specific investigation into how some of those tools were used against Project Veritas,” Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., told The Daily Signal in a brief interview after a House GOP forum on press freedom.
Project Veritas is a conservative nonprofit investigative journalism website known for its undercover video exposes.
“So, I want to be a little more specific than just a general review of the law and subject area. I want to see if, in this particular case, the standards that the Department [of Justice] sets and that are set in law may have been violated,” Gaetz said.
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The FBI raided O’Keefe’s home and the office of Project Veritas in November seeking information about the allegedly stolen diary of Ashley Biden, the daughter of President Joe Biden, that a source had given to him.
After opting against reporting on the contents of the diary, O’Keefe brought it to police and did not have possession of it when federal authorities raided his home.
O’Keefe told members of Congress at the forum about how FBI agents took a battering ram to the door of his home and handcuffed him.
“Our objective here is to vindicate a free press,” Gaetz said. “I don’t think the specific substance of Ashley Biden’s diary is as important as these broader principles that seem to be implicated by the government’s control.”
During the forum, the Florida Republican told the witnesses testifying at the hearing and fellow members of Congress, “As we prepare for our time in the majority, it is not enough to pass laws and believe those laws will have their own fiat.”
“It has to be done on the front end, and then there has to be rigorous and aggressive oversight on the back end. Based on my review of the facts in Mr. O’Keefe’s case, we ought to launch an investigation, immediately upon taking the majority, not just of this policy area, but of this particular circumstance regarding Project Veritas, because it unlocks so many things,” he said.
Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., who chaired the hearing-style forum held at the FreedomWorks headquarters in Washington, concurred with Gaetz about the need for a congressional investigation.
“One thing that should frighten every American is when the freedom of the press is threatened by the weaponization of the state police apparatus,” Biggs told The Daily Signal shortly before the forum, which focused on testimony from O’Keefe and Sharyl Attkisson, host of TV’s “Full Measure” newsmagazine program and a former CBS News reporter.
“Neither side of the partisan aisle should tolerate any kind of aggressive attempt to silence or censor speech, and particularly of a free press,” Biggs said.
While the mainstream media frequently reacted to former President Donald Trump’s verbal attacks on certain journalists and news outlets, Biggs said that’s not comparable to turning law enforcement against unfavored media outlets, which has been done in the Biden administration and previously in the Obama presidency.
“On one hand, you have a president actually exercising his First Amendment speech being critical of the Fourth Estate,” Biggs told The Daily Signal. “On the other hand, you had administrations weaponizing and using the police apparatus to go against people that they wanted to stifle. I think that’s a huge difference.”
The event was not a formal House hearing or associated with a committee. It’s a common practice for the both parties when they’re in the minority to hold hearing-style forums with witnesses taking questions from members of Congress.
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the liberal American Civil Liberties Union both objected to the raid and the secret warrants that preceded it. For that reason, O’Keefe said, there should be bipartisan support to ensure that what happened to him won’t happen to other journalists.
O’Keefe urged lawmakers to enact requirements that, before subpoenas, warrants, or orders seeking to seize journalists’ information, the government must first give notice, provide a hearing to the journalist, and place the burden of proof on the government to provide clear and convincing evidence for the need to seize information.
He also called for Congress to codify the right of any journalist to challenge any subpoenas, warrants, or orders to seize information.
O’Keefe said he also would like to see a congressional investigation, and “If I’m wrong, and there isn’t bipartisanship on this issue, then we’re doomed.”
He noted that Attorney General Merrick Garlandhas stated the burden of proof should be higher in obtaining information from a news outlet.
“What is their answer to the question on why they didn’t follow the law and the procedures outlined by the attorney general, United States, and all? It’s as simple as that,” O’Keefe told The Daily Signal. “Now, we need to make sure that the legislative branch of government prevents this from ever happening to anybody else.”
“When it involves a journalist, you have to have the clear and convincing standard prior to the execution of the search warrant,” O’Keefe continued. “In other words, you have to see what the allegation is, because it’s circular reasoning to say that we need to see your source material for you to prove that you didn’t do anything wrong.”
O’Keefe noted that Josh Gerstein—one of the Politico reporters who broke the story about the leaking of a draft Supreme Court opinion reversing the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling—rightly isn’t facing any legal consequences. But he noted the irony that his trouble came after opting against publishing any content from the diary he obtained.
“Gerstein publishes the Roe v. Wade opinion, and it’s right that he sleeps in his bed comfortably at 5:30 in the morning, not being woken up by federal agents. I don’t think he should be,” O’Keefe told The Daily Signal. “It’s ironic that in this case, we did not publish the document. We attempted to corroborate the allegations in the document. Yes, we endeavored to do that. And they’re punishing us for attempting to. They’re punishing us for calling the Biden campaign for comment.”
Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, noted at the hearing that in some cases, government bureaucrats might realize they can’t ultimately win the case against journalists, but use their power as a chilling effect on reporting.
“The process is the punishment, in the sense that you could end up going through this entire process and proving you’re innocent, but the process ends up being the punishment because of what you are doing to have to defend yourself,” Cloud said.
Attkisson has been in litigation after first learning in 2011 that the Justice Department had spied on her during the Obama administration. She said the conduct is part of a long-standing culture at the FBI and intelligence agencies.
“Our intelligence agencies, including the FBI, are made up of public servants paid with public money. They operate largely in the dark,” Attkisson told the panel of lawmakers. “Many of them we know do a great job. Unfortunately, even the little evidence that has become public reveals disturbing facts. There are agents and officials who are capable of great abuses, and it’s not rare.
“Too often, the whistleblowers in these cases—when we find out about them—get punished, while the abusers and criminals get a pass. The implicit message is lost on no one,” she added.
She noted the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the FBI targeted members of Congress, and later journalists, including reporters from Fox News and The Associated Press.
“They secretly intruded upon and monitored my computers and devices and those of my family while I worked at CBS News,” Attkisson told the members of Congress.
She later added, “After CBS News officially announced the spy operation against me, I attended an investigative journalism conference where one executive from each major network pulled me aside and told me they felt certain the government was surveilling them, too. Imagine how this impacts what we report and what our bosses allow us to report.”
This is part of a bigger censorship push, said Biggs, the Arizona congressman. He said there is also a significant problem with politicians pushing Big Tech companies to censor content.
“One of our biggest threats to our society is the marriage of Big Government to Big Business and particularly Big Tech business,” Biggs said. “And if that’s happening, that really becomes something that should be treated as fascism.”
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited 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.
Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race? Co-authored by Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop)
Edith Schaeffer with her husband, Francis Schaeffer, in 1970 in Switzerland, where they founded L’Abri, a Christian commune.
________________
______________________
September 7, 2021
President Biden c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. I know that you don’t agree with my pro-life views but I wanted to challenge you as a fellow Christian to re-examine your pro-choice view.
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 WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? which can be found on You Tube. It is very valuable information for Christians to have.
Today I want to respond to your letter to me on July 9, 2021. Here it is below:
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
July 9, 2021
Mr. Everette Hatcher III
Alexander, AR
Dear Mr. Hatcher,
Thank you for taking your time to share your thoughts on abortion. Hearing from passionate individuals like me inspires me every day, and I welcome the opportunity to respond to your letter
Our country faces many challenges, and the road we will travel together will be one of the most difficult in our history. Despite these tough times, I have never been more optimistic for the future of America. I believe we are better positioned than any country in the world to lead in the 21st century not just by the example of our power but by the power of our example.
As we move forward to address the complex issues of our time, I encourage you to remain an active participant in helping write the next great chapter of the American story. We need your courage and dedication at this critical time, and we must meet this moment together as the United States of America. If we do that, I believe that our best days still lie ahead.
Sincerely
Joe Biden
___________________
President Biden, you asserted:
I welcome the opportunity to respond to your letter.
DID YOU ACTUALLY MEAN THAT? President Biden, your Buddy the Governor of California has attacked the freedoms of churches and specifically GRACE COMMUNITY CHURCH!!!
HOW ABOUT TODAY AND THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT ATTITUDE TO OUR CHURCHES? Francis Schaeffer comments in CHRISTIAN MANIFESTO in 1981 after the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan:
I hope the window does not close. I hope those with a humanistic world view who have increasingly controlled our culture for the last twenty, thirty, forty years, something like this, cannot close the open window with all their efforts. But if they do, if they take over with increased power and control, will we be so foolish as to think that religion and religious institutions will not be even further affected than they have been so far?
I wanted to reach out to because of some of the troubling moral issues coming out of your administration.
Your liberal buddy the Governor of California tried to shut churches down and had some success back in 2020, but now churches like GRACE COMMUNITY CHURCH are open. Below is a story from last summer when religious freedom was being suppressed:
How 5 Justices Botched the California Church Case on COVID-19 Restrictions
Chief Justice John Roberts, pictured at the State of the Union, sided with the court’s four liberal members, and said that although “California’s guidelines place restrictions on places of worship, those restrictions appear consistent with the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.” (Photo: Leah Mills/Reuters/Pool/Getty Images)
Zack Smith is a legal fellow in the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
Today’s news reads like it’s ripped straight from the pages of the Old Testament. Plagues and protests dominate the headlines.
But unlike Moses, who received his law directly from God, ours today derives from mere mortals. It’s mostly good, but still fallible.
As a result, sometimes an individual’s views of God’s law and man’s law are in tension, and a debate has been simmering about how much protection the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause provides when these situations arise.
>>> When can America reopen? The National Coronavirus Recovery Commission, a project of The Heritage Foundation, is gathering America’s top thinkers together to figure that out. Learn more here.
The recent rash of coronavirus-related restrictionson churches and other religious communities has brought this simmering tension to the surface.
Late on the evening of May 29, the Supreme Court released an important, but easily overlooked, order in South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom denying a California church’s request for an injunction against the state’s phased reopening plan.
The church alleged that the plan violated its First Amendment free exercise rights by treating similarly situated, nonreligious businesses and activities more favorably than religious ones.
That prompted a debate among the justices.
Is going to church more like going to the movies or going to the office? Is it more like going to a play or going to a restaurant? Attending a ballgame or shopping at the mall?
Unfortunately, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court’s four liberal members, and said that although California’s guidelines “place restrictions on places of worship, those restrictions appear consistent with the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Similar or more severe restrictions apply to comparable secular gatherings … .”
The court’s four conservative members disagreed. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a dissent that Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch joined. (For some unknown reason, Justice Samuel Alito didn’t join Kavanaugh’s dissent. We can only speculate as to why).
Kavanaugh wrote, “I would grant the Church’s requested temporary injunction because California’s latest safety guidelines discriminate against places of worship and in favor of comparable secular businesses. Such discrimination violates the First Amendment.”
On its face, the order appears to turn simply on a disagreement among the justices about which activities are most like going to church. If it’s more like going to a movie or a play, or attending a ballgame, no problem. California had restricted those activities in a similar way to church gatherings.
If it’s more like going to the office, a restaurant, or shopping, there’s a problem. California would have been treating similarly situated, nonreligious activities more favorably than religious ones.
But the disagreement among the justices and its implications might run deeper and highlight an important issue left unaddressed by—but at the heart of—the ruling: What’s the proper level of scrutiny to apply when deciding free exercise claims?
It’s true that this case came to the court from a unique procedural posture—requesting immediate and preliminary relief—so it might be difficult to read too much into it.
The chief justice asserted that such a request “demands a significantly higher justification” than others and that the “legal rights at issue [must be] indisputably clear,” and even then, the relief requested must be used “sparingly and only in the most critical and exigent circumstances.”
It’s also true that the case came up to the court during a pandemic, something that clearly weighed heavily on the mind of the chief justice, who wrote that the Constitution “principally entrusts” elected officials to deal with health crises and other “areas fraught with medical and scientific uncertainties.”
As is common in these types of orders, the other four justices in the majority didn’t make their reasoning or rationales known. But given Roberts’ statements and rationale, it’s also probable that the same decision would have been reached had the majority explicitly applied rational basisreview to this matter.
In other words, so long as California’s government had a rational reason for adopting the rules it did and the rules treated everyone equally—even equally badly or restrictively—those rules would survive constitutional scrutiny, even if other less restrictive means for accomplishing those same goals had been available.
After all, the chief justice wrote, “The precise question of when restrictions on particular social activities should be lifted during the pandemic is a dynamic and fact-intensive matter subject to reasonable disagreement.”
The minority disagreed. In his dissent, Kavanaugh explicitly applied strict scrutiny to resolve the matter. He would have required California to show a “compelling government interest” in its rules and to show that it had “narrowly tailored” those rules “to advance that interest.”
Who cares? This sounds like an esoteric argument among nine justices far removed from the humdrum of everyday life. But it’s far from it.
This distinction is fundamentally important. Why? Under rational basis review, the church lost. Under strict scrutiny, the church would have won.
Currently, the court’s precedent, specifically Employment Division v. Smith (1990), requires courts to apply only rational basis review for many—if not most—free exercise claims under the First Amendment. It applies only when courts are reviewing neutral laws (or rules) of general applicability.
If churches are targeted for discriminatory treatment, a different analysis, one applying strict scrutiny, applies. The Supreme Court clarified that in its Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. Hialeah (1993) decision. Still, Employment Division v. Smith upended the court’s precedent and practice of applying strict scrutiny—even if it didn’t explicitly call it that—in most prior free exercise cases, such as Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), Sherbert v. Verner (1963), and Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940).
Because Congress was rightly unhappy with the court’s decision in Employment Division v. Smith, it passed (with broad bipartisan support)—and President Bill Clinton signed into law—the Religious Freedom Restoration Act requiring courts to once again apply strict scrutiny to religious freedom claims.
The court struck down significant portions of that statute, too, limiting its application only to claims against the federal government and not to those against the states.
That’s where we stand now: Rational basis review rules the day.
Fortunately, the tides may be turning. In January 2019, Alito wrote a concurrence in a denial of certiorari in which he lamented that the court in Employment Division v. Smith had “drastically cut back on the protection provided by the Free Exercise Clause.” Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh joined that concurrence.
It’s worth noting that these are the same four justices who dissented in the current case.
More importantly, in February, the court agreed to hear a case that explicitly asks it to revisit its decision in Employment Division v. Smith and to replace it with “a standard that is true to the text, history, and tradition of the Free Exercise Clause.” Who wouldn’t want that?
As John Yoo and James Phillips have pointed out, the court in Employment Division v. Smith went wrong in part because “its author, [then-Justice Antonin] Scalia, failed to engage with the original meaning of the free-exercise clause. While normally persuaded by historical arguments, Scalia instead worried about cabining judicial discretion.”
This same concern comes through in Roberts’ concurrence denying relief to the California church.
Scalia was a legal lion, but he got Employment Division v. Smith wrong. With the hindsight of history, Roberts would do well to avoid making the same mistake, by seizing an opportunity, perhaps during a calmer time, to correct Scalia’s rare misstep and restore religious freedom to its proper place in our constitutional order.
John MacArthur gave a sermon in June of 2021 entitled “When Government Rewards Evil and Punishes Good” and in that sermon he makes the following points:
INTRODUCTION AND DISCUSSION OF ROMANS 13
GOVERNMENT CAN FORFEIT ITS AUTHORITY
THE WORLD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GOSPEL
ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY IS PROGRESSING TOWARD A GLOBAL KINGDOM UNDER THE POWER OF SATAN
ONE FALSE WORLD RELIGION IS FINAL PLAY BY SATAN
REAL PERSECUTION CAN ONLY BE DONE BY GOVERNMENT
PERSECUTION IN BOOK OF DANIEL
THE LAW IS KING AND NOT THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA
GOVERNMENT HAS BECOME PURVEYOR OF WICKEDNESS
THERE IS A PLACE FOR CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
DOES GOVERNMENT WIN?
Let me just share a portion of that sermon with you and you can watch it on You Tube:
REAL PERSECUTION CAN ONLY BE DONE BY GOVERNMENT
“Woe”—verse 19—“the great city, in which all who had ships at sea became rich by her wealth, for in one hour she had been laid waste!” Verse 20, “Rejoice over her, O heaven, and you saints and apostles and prophets, because God has pronounced judgment for you against her.” This is where Satan is taking the world. Again, Satan has many strategies; but he has one goal, and that is to collect the world around one final Antichrist, empower him to defeat God. In the process, he persecutes the saints; he seeks to kill them.
Now let me remind you of something. We talk about persecution and we sometimes experience it in the sense that somebody doesn’t like us because of our Christian testimony. You might have trouble with a professor in a university class because of your testimony; you might get a bad grade. You might lose your job because of your convictions and your testimony. And that’s a measure of persecution. But mark this: Real persecution, which means imprisonment or execution, can only be done by government, right? Only government does that. There can’t be a group of atheists who go out and imprison Christians; only government can do that. God has given government the sword, the power; and when they prostitute that power and they begin to punish those who do good and protect those who do evil, they wield that power against the people of God.
Satan knows that in order to kill the saints he has to have the one legitimate earthly power, and that’s the power of the government. So government is, and always has been, and always will be the ultimate persecutor of the church. It is government—authority, power constituted in rulers and leaders—that has essentially done all the damage to the church through its history. And so I say what I said at the beginning: The greatest threat to truth and virtue in this country is the government because they have totally prostituted their God-ordained design. All through history, government is the ultimate persecutor of people. Satan has to get ahold of government; and that’s where he operates—always work through government.
Go back to Isaiah 14. Isaiah 14, the prophecy of Isaiah spoken to the king of Babylon, the king of Babylon. It’s a judgment against the king of Babylon—chapter 14, verse 4, a “taunt against the king of Babylon,” judgment against the king of Babylon. But notice how interesting it is. This judgment, down in verse 12—something more than just the king of Babylon appears to happen here: “How are you fallen from heaven, O star of the morning, son of the dawn!”
Has the king of Babylon fallen from heaven? No, but who is fallen from heaven? Lucifer. So who is behind the king of Babylon? Lucifer. He goes from talking about judgment on the king of Babylon to going behind the king of Babylon to the “star of the morning, the son of the dawn”: “You’ve been cut down to the earth, you have weakened the nations! But you said in your heart”—this is what Satan said when he was in heaven—“‘I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God’”—the angels of God—“‘I will sit on the mount of assembly in the recesses of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’” “‘I will, I will, I will, I will.’” This is Satan’s rebellion. And so Isaiah shows us that it is Satan himself, the fallen one, who is energizing the king of Babylon, controlling the king of Babylon.
There is a similar section of Scripture, Ezekiel 28; I want you to turn to it. Ezekiel 28, verse 11, “And the word of the Lord came to me saying, ‘Son of man’”—that was God’s name for Ezekiel—“‘take up a lamentation over the king of Tyre.’” Now we’re talking about the king of Tyre; Tyre was another pagan kingdom, persecuted the people of God. But notice how this seems to be something more than just the king of Tyre: “Thus says the Lord God, ‘You had the seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God’”—wait a minute, the king of Tyre? He wasn’t in Eden. Who was in Eden? Who was prowling in Eden? Satan.
“You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was your covering: the ruby, the topaz, the diamond; the beryl, the onyx, the jasper; lapis lazuli”—which is a beautiful blue stone—“the turquoise, the emerald; and the gold, the workmanship of your settings and sockets, was in you. On the day you were created they were prepared. You were the anointed”—what?—“cherub who covers.” Now you can see, Satan in Isaiah is working behind the king of Babylon; here in Ezekiel he’s working behind the king of Tyre. This is because Satan does his great work against the people of God using political leaders—kings and rulers.
“You were the anointed cherub who covers, and I placed you there. You were on the holy mountain of God and walked in the midst of the stones of fire. You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created until unrighteousness was found in you. By the abundance of your trade you were internally filled with violence, and you sinned; therefore I have cast you as profane from the mountain of God, and destroyed you, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire. Your heart was lifted up because of your beauty; you corrupted your wisdom by reason of your splendor. I cast you to the ground; I put you before kings, that they may see you, the multitude of your iniquities.” He goes back to talking about the king of Tyre with almost not missing a beat. The judgment on the king of Tyre is also a declaration of the judgment on the one who is behind the king of Tyre.
Satan always works through evil rulers to persecute the people of God. In the book of Exodus it was Pharaoh. When the children of God left Egypt, it was the Canaanites, it was the powers of the Philistines. It was the rulers of Assyria then, and then it was the rulers of Babylon. And you come into the New Testament, and the persecutors of the people of God were the official leaders of Israel, the Sanhedrin. And then it was the Roman Empire. Destroying the people of God is always a government enterprise.
—-
HOW ABOUT TODAY AND THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT ATTITUDE TO OUR CHURCHES? Francis Schaeffer comments in CHRISTIAN MANIFESTO in 1981 after the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan:
I hope the window does not close. I hope those with a humanistic world view who have increasingly controlled our culture for the last twenty, thirty, forty years, something like this, cannot close the open window with all their efforts. But if they do, if they take over with increased power and control, will we be so foolish as to think that religion and religious institutions will not be even further affected than they have been so far? I wonder how many of us are aware of the cases that the churches have faced in the last ten years in various places. The things that have been brought into courts of law should make our hair stand on end. Do you think that in such a case as I have portrayed (and may it not happen!) that the Christians and the Christian institutions will not be even further affected?
Robert L. Toms, an attorney-at-law, lists the issues pending this year and which are up for final adjudication during the coming decade before the United States’ courts, administrative bodies, executive departments, and legislatures:
1. Is a minister of the gospel liable for malpractice to a counselee for using spiritual guidance rather than psychological or medical techniques?
2. Can a Christian residence house in a college have the same standing as a fraternity and sorority house for purposes of off-campus residency rules?
3. Can Christian high school students assemble on the public school campus for religious discussion?
4. Can Christian teachers in public schools meet before class for prayer?
5. Can Christian college students meet in groups on the state university campus?
6. Can HEW require a Bible college to admit drug addicts and alcoholics as “handicapped persons”? …
7. Can a church build a religious school or a daycare center in an area zoned residential?
8. Can parents who send their children to religious schools not approved by a state board of education be prosecuted under the truancy laws?
9. Is an independent, wholly religious school entitled to an exemption from unemployment taxes as are church-owned schools?
10. Will the State enforce antiemployment discrimination laws against a church which in accordance with its stated religious beliefs fires a practicing homosexual staff member?
11. Can seminary trustees refuse to graduate a practicing homosexual?
12. Can a city continue its forty-year practice of having a nativity scene in front of the city hall?
13. Can zoning laws be used to prevent small group Bible studies from meeting in homes?
14. Can a court decide which doctrinal group in a church split gets the sanctuary?
15. Must a religious school accept as a teacher an otherwise qualified practicing homosexual?
16. Can a church be fined by a court for exuberant noise in worship?
17. Can a state department of health close a church-run juvenile home for policies that include spanking?
18. Can religious solicitation in public places be confined to official booths?
19. Is an unborn fetus a “person” and entitled to Constitutional protection?
20. Can the Ten Commandments be posted in a public classroom?
21. Can students in public education have a period of silent meditation and prayer?
22. Can Christmas carols be sung in public schools?
23. Must an employee who believes he should worship on Saturday be permitted a work holiday on that day in order to worship?
24. Can the graduation ceremony of a public high school be held in a church?
25. Can a State official seize a church on allegations of misconduct by dissident members and run the church through a court-appointed receiver?
26. Can the State set minimum standards for private religious school curricula?
27. Is religious tax exemption a right or privilege, and, if it is a privilege, are the exemptions an unwarranted support of religion by the State?
28. Should churches be taxed like any other part of society?
29. Can Federal labor laws be used to enforce collective bargaining rights and unionization in religious enterprises?
30. Can the State require a license before a religious ministry may solicit funds for its work?
31. Are hospitals, schools, counseling groups, halfway houses, famine-relief organizations, youth organizations, homes for unwed mothers, orphanages, etc., run with religious motivations or are they secular and subject to all controls secular organizations are subject to?
He [attorney Robert L. Toms] further says:
… two U.S. trial courts have recently ruled that a group of college students who wish to discuss religion could not meet in the context of a public state university, that religious speech must go on elsewhere since it might “establish religion” on the campus….The State must screen out religious speech from the otherwise free speech practiced on a university campus.
We might differ as to what the ruling should be in some of these cases, but that does not change the weight of the whole. It should be said that it is not only Protestants who are facing the implications of the above list, but Roman Catholics and Jews as well.
And for Christians who are in the habit of drifting complacently, a case presently before the courts should be a loud-sounding alarm bell. As I write, Samuel E. Ericsson, an attorney-at-law, is defending Grace Community Church, the largest Protestant church in Los Angeles County, in a clergyman malpractice suit. This suit was brought by parents because the pastors of that church cared for their son (who had later committed suicide) instead of turning him over to professional psychiatric and psychological care. Obviously if the church lost this case, all religions would be greatly affected. In fact, anyone who tried to help someone with questions or fears could be sued if he or she did not fall under the category of professional psychiatric and psychological competence. And to make matters more complicated, no one has thought how to set standards acceptably for professional psychiatric and psychological competence!
Samuel Ericsson has put the case in the proper perspective when in a letter to me dated May 1, 1981, he wrote: “I believe that clergyman malpractice, or more accurately spiritual counseling malpractice, is going to present the secular courts with a head-on clash between the two competing world views, secularism and Christianity.”
______________________________________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband. Now after presenting the secular approach of Nat Hentoff I wanted to make some comments concerning our shared Christian faith. I respect you for putting your faith in Christ for your eternal life. I am pleading to you on the basis of the Bible to please review your religious views concerning abortion. It was the Bible that caused the abolition movement of the 1800’s and it also was the basis for Martin Luther King’s movement for civil rights and it also is the basis for recognizing the unborn children.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 1) ABORTION OF THE HUMAN RACE Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ________________ Picture of Francis Schaeffer and his wife Edith from the 1930′s above. I was sad to read about Edith passing away on Easter weekend in 2013. I wanted to pass along this fine […]
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It is truly sad to me that liberals will lie in order to attack good Christian people like state senator Jason Rapert of Conway, Arkansas because he headed a group of pro-life senators that got a pro-life bill through the Arkansas State Senate the last week of January in 2013. I have gone back and […]
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 […]
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 […]
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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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), pictured on May 10 in a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, has drafted the most extreme abortion bill in U.S. history. (Photo: Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)
Suzanne Bowdey is a senior writer for the Family Research Council.
If it was a “show vote,” then it did its job.
When Democrats decided to put the most extreme abortion bill ever drafted on the Senate floor, it showed people plenty. If anyone was under the illusion that President Joe Biden’s party was remotely reasonable on the issue of life, they learned pretty quickly that those days are over.
Today’s Democrats don’t want to keep Roe v. Wade. They want to go beyond Roe—to federal tyranny and coercion to unlimited, taxpayer-funded abortion right up until the moment of birth. And this vote proves it.
When Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said, “The vote will shine light on every single one of us,” he was right. For the second time in four months, the American people got a real look at the Democratic Party’s extremism Wednesday—and what they saw should have terrified them. All but one of their senators (Joe Manchin, D-W.Va) voted to burn the pro-life culture in America to the ground.
This wasn’t about making Roe permanent law, like Democrats want voters to believe. This was about crushing state laws, partial-birth abortion bans, safety regulations, abortion limits, conscience rights, parents’ rights, and faith-based hospitals.
“This is not maintaining status quo,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins warned. “This is about taking a huge eraser and [wiping out] all of the pro-life legislation that’s become law in the last 49 years and removing it from the books…” Every state would be stuck accepting this radical abortion ideology that Democrats have attached themselves to.
It’s such an enormous leap from where the country is now that even liberal Republicans drew the line. In a country where only 8% of voters think abortion should be legal in the third trimester, even Planned Parenthood sympathizers like Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, agree the language is too “extreme.”
Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., who’s delivered more than 5,000 babies in his practice, said he’d be out of business under the law.
“A person like myself, a pro-lifer, would have had to quit medical school,” he explained. Because one of the things the bill would do is force people to participate in abortions. “It’s way, way beyond anything we could have ever dreamed up,” Marshall shook his head.
And as far as Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., is concerned, Congress doesn’t even have the power to force this on the nation unilaterally.
“I’m not sure that they could do it constitutionally, even if they had the votes,” he explained on “Washington Watch,” “because the Supreme Court has been clear: Congress doesn’t get to make up constitutional rights. Congress can’t say, ‘Oh, you know, actually, [we] think there’s a constitutional right to abortion that we’re going to impose on the entire country.’ And that’s what they’re trying to do here. [They don’t want to] let anybody else speak. [They don’t want to] let anybody else have a view—or certainly don’t [want to let] the unborn have any voice in this process.”
At the end of the day, Hawley insisted, this is just another attempt to pressure the Supreme Court to change their decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case.
Schumer knows the bill “is going nowhere,” Hawley said. “But what he wants to do is he wants to continue to gin up public pressure, which we’ve seen erupt into violence, we’ve seen erupt into harassment, into threats against the justices. And he’s trying to foster that. He’s trying to feed it. And it’s very wrong.”
Biden’s party is so focused treating parents like domestic terrorists for showing up at a school board meeting that they apparently can’t be bothered to deal with the left’s firebombing of pro-life organizations, church attacks, harassment, vandalism, and property destruction taking place across the country. The president “is going to own a lot of responsibility here,” Hawley insists.
As for his party, they’re about to own something else: the fiercest attack on the unborn since Roe was decided. And any far-left leaders who think this barbaric crusade is a winning strategy are kidding themselves. Even two out of every three “pro-choicers” are appalled at the idea of destroying a baby in the womb after the fifth month. Even so, the Democrats (with one exception) seem intent on chasing this truly fringe agenda, political suicide or no.
“I can’t underscore enough how much the American people are on the side of life,” Family Research Council’s Connor Semelsberger explained. And now, with no middle ground in the Democratic Party, “you’ve got one choice: abortion on demand. That’s it. They’ve had to drift so far to the left that any other deviation from that—even a restriction at viability, which is what Roe allowed—is far out of step with where Democrats are.” When the polling questions are framed correctly, and people understand what the 1973 ruling did, “they don’t want what Roe v. Wade says.”
If there is a bright side to Wednesday’s vote, it’s that Republicans are just as determined to protect life as Democrats are to destroy it. And that’s significant.
In the meantime, we wait for the justices’ decision on Dobbs with a hopeful eye, praying the Court will recognize the basic humanity that Biden’s party does not.
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 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):
(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.
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?
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End of Sagan Excerpt
When I was in high school the book and film series named WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? came out and it featured Doctor C. Everett Koop and Francis Schaeffer and they looked at the issues of abortion, infanticide, and youth euthanasia and they looked at comments from such scholars as Peter Singer and James D. Watson.
C. Everett Koop pictured above and Peter Singer below
Peter Singer, an endowed chair at Princeton’s Center for Human Values, said, “Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all.”
James D.Watson
In May 1973, James D. Watson, the Nobel Prize laureate who discovered the double helix of DNA, granted an interview to Prism magazine, then a publication of the American Medical Association. Time later reported the interview to the general public, quoting Watson as having said, “If a child were not declared alive until three days after birth, then all parents could be allowed the choice only a few are given under the present system. The doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so choose and save a lot of misery and suffering. I believe this view is the only rational, compassionate attitude to have.”
Carl Sagan
On August 30, 1995 I mailed a letter to Carl Sagan that probably prompted this discussion on abortion and it enclosed a lengthy story from Adrian Rogers about an abortion case in Pine Bluff, Arkansas that almost became an infanticide case:
An excerpt from the Sunday morning message (11-6-83) by Adrian Rogers in Memphis, TN.
I want to tell you that secular humanism and so-called abortion rights are inseparably linked together. We have been taught that our bodies and our children are the products of the evolutionary process, and so therefore human life may not be all that valuable to begin with. We have come today to where it is legal and even considered to be a good thing to put little babies to death…15 million little babies put to death since 1973 because of this philosophy of Secular Humanism.
How did the court make that type of decision? You would think it would be so obvious. You can’t do that! You can’t kill little babies! Why? Because the Bible says! Friend, they don’t give a hoot what the Bible says! There used to be a time when they talked about what the Bible says because there was a time that we as a nation had a constitution that was based in the Judeo-Christian ethic, but today if we say “The Bible says” or “God says “Separation of Church and State. Don’t tell us what the Bible says or what God says. We will tell you what we think!” Therefore, they look at the situation and they decide if it is right or wrong purely on the humanistic philosophy that right and wrong are relative and the situation says what is right or what is wrong.
This little girl just 19 years old went into the doctor’s office and he examined her. He said, “We can take take of you.” He gave her an injection in her arm that was to cause her to go into labor and to get rid of that protoplasm, that feud, that little mass that was in her, but she wasn’t prepared for the sound she was about to hear. It was a little baby crying. That little baby weighed 13 ounces. His hand the size of my thumbnail. You know what the doctor did. The doctor put that little baby in a grocery sack and gave it to Maria’s two friends who were with her in that doctor office and Said, “It will stop making those noises after a while.”
(Adrian Rogers pictured above)
Pine Bluff, Arkansas
They took that grocery sack and Maria home and one hour passed and two hours passed and that baby was still crying and panting for his life in that grocery sack. They took that little baby down to the hospital there in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and they called an obstetrician and he called a pediatrician and they called nurses and they began to work on that little baby. Today that baby is alive and well and healthy, that little mass of protoplasm. That little thing that wasn’t a human being is alive and well. I want to tell you they spent $150,000 to save the life of that baby. NOW CAN YOU EXPLAIN TO ME HOW THEY CAN SPEND $150,000 TO SAVE THE LIFE OF SOMETHING THAT SOMEBODY WAS PAYING ANOTHER DOCTOR TO TAKE THE LIFE OF? The same life!!! Are you going to tell me that is not a baby? Are you going to tell me that if that baby had been put to death it would not have been murder? You will never convince me of that. What has happened to us in America? We have been sold a bill of goods by the Secular Humanists!
Carl Sagan was elected the HUMANIST OF THE YEAR in 1982 by the AMERICAN HUMANIST ASSOCIATION
Carl Sagan asked, “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?”
____________
Pt 1 of 2 Listen to this Important Message by Francis Schaeffer
Published on Sep 30, 2013
This message “A Christian Manifesto” was given in 1982 by the late Christian Philosopher Francis Schaeffer when he was age 70 at D. James Kennedy’s Corral Ridge Presbyterian Church. Listen to this important message where Dr. Schaeffer says it is the duty of Christians to disobey the government when it comes in conflict with God’s laws. So many have misinterpreted Romans 13 to mean unconditional obedience to the state. When the state promotes an evil agenda and anti-Christian statues we must obey God rather than men. Acts I use to watch James Kennedy preach from his TV pulpit with great delight in the 1980’s. Both of these men are gone to be with the Lord now. We need new Christian leaders to rise up in their stead. To view Part 2 See Francis Schaeffer Lecture- Christian Manifesto Pt 2 of 2 video The religious and political freedom’s we enjoy as Americans was based on the Bible and the legacy of the Reformation according to Francis Schaeffer. These freedoms will continue to diminish as we cast off the authority of Holy Scripture. In public schools there is no other view of reality but that final reality is shaped by chance. Likewise, public television gives us many things that we like culturally but so much of it is mere propaganda shaped by a humanistic world and life view.
_____________________________
I was able to watch Francis Schaeffer deliver a speech on a book he wrote called “A Christian Manifesto” and I heard him in several interviews on it in 1981 and 1982. I listened with great interest since I also read that book over and over again. Below is a portion of one of Schaeffer’s talks on a crucial subject that is very important today too.
A great talk by Francis Schaeffer:A Christian Manifesto by Dr. Francis A. SchaefferThis address was delivered by the late Dr. Schaeffer in 1982 at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It is based on one of his books, which bears the same title._________
Infanticide and youth enthansia ———So what we find then, is that the medical profession has largely changed — not all doctors. I’m sure there are doctors here in the audience who feel very, very differently, who feel indeed that human life is important and you wouldn’t take it, easily, wantonly. But, in general, we must say (and all you have to do is look at the TV programs), all you have to do is hear about the increased talk about allowing the Mongoloid child — the child with Down’s Syndrome — to starve to death if it’s born this way. Increasingly, we find on every side the medical profession has changed its views.
The view now is, “Is this life worth saving?”I look at you… You’re an older congregation than I am usually used to speaking to. You’d better think, because — this — means — you! It does not stop with abortion and infanticide. It stops at the question, “What about the old person? Is he worth hanging on to?” Should we, as they are doing in England in this awful organization, EXIT, teach older people to commit suicide? Should we help them get rid of them because they are an economic burden, a nuisance? I want to tell you, once you begin chipping away the medical profession…
The intrinsic value of the human life is founded upon the Judeo-Christian concept that man is unique because he is made in the image of God, and not because he is well, strong, a consumer, a sex object or any other thing. That is where whatever compassion this country has is, and certainly it is far from perfect and has never been perfect. Nor out of the Reformation has there been a Golden Age, but whatever compassion there has ever been, it is rooted in the fact that our culture knows that man is unique, is made in the image of God. Take it away, and I just say gently, the stopper is out of the bathtub for all human life.
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 1) ABORTION OF THE HUMAN RACE Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This book really helped develop my political views […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (1)
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 3 “The Renaissance” Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 3) THE RENAISSANCE I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer really shows why we have so […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 1) THE ROMAN AGE Today I am starting a series that really had a big impact on my life back in the 1970′s when I first saw it. There are ten parts and today is the first. Francis Schaeffer takes a look at Rome and why […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 5) TRUTH AND HISTORY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis This crucial series is narrated by the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer and former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop. Today, choices are being made that undermine human rights at their most basic level. Practices once […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
The opening song at the beginning of this episode is very insightful. Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis This crucial series is narrated by the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer and former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop. Today, choices […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 3) DEATH BY SOMEONE’S CHOICE Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis This crucial series is narrated by the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer and former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop. Today, choices are being made that undermine human rights at their most basic level. Practices […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” (Episode 2) SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis This crucial series is narrated by the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer and former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop. Today, choices are being made that undermine human rights at their most basic level. Practices […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
It is not possible to know where the pro-life evangelicals are coming from unless you look at the work of the person who inspired them the most. That person was Francis Schaeffer. I do care about economic issues but the pro-life issue is the most important to me. Several years ago Adrian Rogers (past president of […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
This essay below is worth the read. Schaeffer, Francis – “Francis Schaeffer and the Pro-Life Movement” [How Should We Then Live?, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, A Christian Manifesto] Editor note: <p> </p> [The following essay explores the role that Francis Schaeffer played in the rise of the pro-life movement. It examines the place of […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
Great article on Schaeffer. Who was Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer? By Francis Schaeffer The unique contribution of Dr. Francis Schaeffer on a whole generation was the ability to communicate the truth of historic Biblical Christianity in a way that combined intellectual integrity with practical, loving care. This grew out of his extensive understanding of the Bible […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
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)
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)
In today’s news you will read about Kirk Cameron taking on the
atheist Stephen Hawking over some recent assertions he made concerning
the existence of heaven. Back in December of 1995 I had the opportunity
to correspond with Carl Sagan about a year before his untimely death.
Sarah Anne Hughes in her article,”Kirk Cameron criticizes […]
By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Atheists Confronted | Edit | Comments (2)
In this post we are going to see that through the years humanist
thought has encouraged artists like Michelangelo to think that the
future was extremely bright versus the place today where many artist who
hold the humanist and secular worldview are very pessimistic. In
contrast to Michelangelo’s DAVID when humanist man thought he […]
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen claimed that overturning Roe v. Wade “would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades” at a Senate Banking Committee hearing on May 10. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc./Getty Images)
Life should never be reduced to economics.
Yet, in the wake of the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion that could overturn Roe v. Wade, abortion supporters have resorted to shocking claims that limiting abortions will hurt the economy.
During a Senate Banking Committee hearing on May 10, Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., asked Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen about the “real-world economic consequences” for American women if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. Yellen said this “would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades.”
She went on to argue that “abortion helped lead to increased labor force participation. It enabled many women to finish school, that increased their earning potential.”
In his question, Menendez cited analysis from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research to set up Yellen’s answer. The moment was clearly scripted, and not just a spontaneous exchange. Either way, it’s a bad look.
More precisely, it’s bad ethics and bad economics.
On the ethical side: It ignores the life and inherent value of the unborn child. Federal law (the Unborn Victims of Violence Act) and dozens of state laws recognize unborn children as human beings. But abortion advocates presume unborn children only deserve protections if their lives were planned and desired.
But even if we reduce the matter to economics, Yellen’s analysis focuses on a tiny speck of a much larger picture. Her claim lacks what Henry Hazlitt called the “art of economics” in his classic “Economics in One Lesson.” “The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy,” he wrote. “It consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”
In the case at hand, Yellen fixated on the short-term labor force participation of mothers. Yes, having a child can easily lead to hundreds fewer hours spent in the formal labor force. But is the value of the time parents spend raising children of no value? Are children’s future contributions to society over many decades of life worth nothing?
It’s almost painful to spell this out since people are more than economic actors. But abortion activists may try to make Yellen’s claim a talking point. So, it needs to be answered.
Our economy is essentially the total of all the goods and services that the people in it produce. More producing people means more economic output—at least over the medium-to-long run. More abortions, however, means fewer people and so, ultimately, less output.
It’s bizarre that Yellen would say that limiting abortions would “have very damaging effects” on the economy. She can only say this by restricting the time horizon in question. She knows better. Her statement is counter to then-Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen’s assertion in 2017 that slow labor force growth was contributing to slow economic growth. Moreover, in our heavily indebted nation, every economic model shows lower birth rates harming America’s fiscal health and sustainability.
Since Roe v. Wade, an estimated 63 million babies have been aborted in the U.S. Over 35 million of them would now be old enough to participate in the labor force. We can’t assume a one-for-one increase in the population and labor force. Still, there would surely be more people alive and working today if it weren’t for Roe v. Wade.
Some abortion advocates have argued that children who are aborted would likely have faced greater adversity than those who are not. As a result, such people, as adults, would be of lower value to society, or even a net drag on it.
But the beauty of the American dream is that our fate is not sealed at birth. Millions of people who started life in a hard spot still grew up to do great things. Sadly, tens of millions of babies have had their fates sealed before they had the chance to pursue that dream.
We will never know the lifesaving health advancements those unborn Americans would have created. We will never enjoy the infrastructure they would have built. The world will never benefit from the humanitarian organizations they would have founded, or the loving relationships they would have formed.
These are just some of the real costs of abortionon demand. Mere economics shouldn’t figure in our laws protecting life. But to the extent they are, no sound economic analysis would reduce human life to a cost.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited 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.
Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race? Co-authored by Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop)
Edith Schaeffer with her husband, Francis Schaeffer, in 1970 in Switzerland, where they founded L’Abri, a Christian commune.
________________
______________________
September 25, 2021
President Biden c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. I know that you don’t agree with my pro-life views but I wanted to challenge you as a fellow Christian to re-examine your pro-choice view.
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 WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? which can be found on You Tube. It is very valuable information for Christians to have.
Today I want to respond to your letter to me on July 9, 2021. Here it is below:
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
July 9, 2021
Mr. Everette Hatcher III
Alexander, AR
Dear Mr. Hatcher,
Thank you for taking your time to share your thoughts on abortion. Hearing from passionate individuals like me inspires me every day, and I welcome the opportunity to respond to your letter
Our country faces many challenges, and the road we will travel together will be one of the most difficult in our history. Despite these tough times, I have never been more optimistic for the future of America. I believe we are better positioned than any country in the world to lead in the 21st century not just by the example of our power but by the power of our example.
As we move forward to address the complex issues of our time, I encourage you to remain an active participant in helping write the next great chapter of the American story. We need your courage and dedication at this critical time, and we must meet this moment together as the United States of America. If we do that, I believe that our best days still lie ahead.
Sincerely
Joe Biden
Mr. President, my wife was born in JEFFERSON MEMORIAL HOSPITAL in Pine Bluff, Arkansas and Adrian Rogers tells a story about another lady that was born in that same hospital: “They took that grocery sack and Maria home and one hour passed and two hours passed and that baby was still crying and panting for his life in that grocery sack. They took that little baby down to the hospital there in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and they called an obstetrician and he called a pediatrician and they called nurses and they began to work on that little baby. Today that baby is alive and well and healthy, that little mass of protoplasm. That little thing that wasn’t a human being is alive and well. I want to tell you they spent $150,000 to save the life of that baby. NOW CAN YOU EXPLAIN TO ME HOW THEY CAN SPEND $150,000 TO SAVE THE LIFE OF SOMETHING THAT SOMEBODY WAS PAYING ANOTHER DOCTOR TO TAKE THE LIFE OF?”
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 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):
(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.
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?
——-
End of Sagan Excerpt
When I was in high school the book and film series named WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? came out and it featured Doctor C. Everett Koop and Francis Schaeffer and they looked at the issues of abortion, infanticide, and youth euthanasia and they looked at comments from such scholars as Peter Singer and James D. Watson.
C. Everett Koop pictured above and Peter Singer below
Peter Singer, an endowed chair at Princeton’s Center for Human Values, said, “Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all.”
James D.Watson
In May 1973, James D. Watson, the Nobel Prize laureate who discovered the double helix of DNA, granted an interview to Prism magazine, then a publication of the American Medical Association. Time later reported the interview to the general public, quoting Watson as having said, “If a child were not declared alive until three days after birth, then all parents could be allowed the choice only a few are given under the present system. The doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so choose and save a lot of misery and suffering. I believe this view is the only rational, compassionate attitude to have.”
Carl Sagan
On August 30, 1995 I mailed a letter to Carl Sagan that probably prompted this discussion on abortion and it enclosed a lengthy story from Adrian Rogers about an abortion case in Pine Bluff, Arkansas that almost became an infanticide case:
An excerpt from the Sunday morning message (11-6-83) by Adrian Rogers in Memphis, TN.
I want to tell you that secular humanism and so-called abortion rights are inseparably linked together. We have been taught that our bodies and our children are the products of the evolutionary process, and so therefore human life may not be all that valuable to begin with. We have come today to where it is legal and even considered to be a good thing to put little babies to death…15 million little babies put to death since 1973 because of this philosophy of Secular Humanism.
How did the court make that type of decision? You would think it would be so obvious. You can’t do that! You can’t kill little babies! Why? Because the Bible says! Friend, they don’t give a hoot what the Bible says! There used to be a time when they talked about what the Bible says because there was a time that we as a nation had a constitution that was based in the Judeo-Christian ethic, but today if we say “The Bible says” or “God says “Separation of Church and State. Don’t tell us what the Bible says or what God says. We will tell you what we think!” Therefore, they look at the situation and they decide if it is right or wrong purely on the humanistic philosophy that right and wrong are relative and the situation says what is right or what is wrong.
This little girl just 19 years old went into the doctor’s office and he examined her. He said, “We can take take of you.” He gave her an injection in her arm that was to cause her to go into labor and to get rid of that protoplasm, that feud, that little mass that was in her, but she wasn’t prepared for the sound she was about to hear. It was a little baby crying. That little baby weighed 13 ounces. His hand the size of my thumbnail. You know what the doctor did. The doctor put that little baby in a grocery sack and gave it to Maria’s two friends who were with her in that doctor office and Said, “It will stop making those noises after a while.”
(Adrian Rogers pictured above)
Pine Bluff, ArkansasMy wife was born in main hospital in Pine Bluff, Arkansas
They took that grocery sack and Maria home and one hour passed and two hours passed and that baby was still crying and panting for his life in that grocery sack. They took that little baby down to the hospital there in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and they called an obstetrician and he called a pediatrician and they called nurses and they began to work on that little baby. Today that baby is alive and well and healthy, that little mass of protoplasm. That little thing that wasn’t a human being is alive and well. I want to tell you they spent $150,000 to save the life of that baby. NOW CAN YOU EXPLAIN TO ME HOW THEY CAN SPEND $150,000 TO SAVE THE LIFE OF SOMETHING THAT SOMEBODY WAS PAYING ANOTHER DOCTOR TO TAKE THE LIFE OF? The same life!!! Are you going to tell me that is not a baby? Are you going to tell me that if that baby had been put to death it would not have been murder? You will never convince me of that. What has happened to us in America? We have been sold a bill of goods by the Secular Humanists!
Carl Sagan was elected the HUMANIST OF THE YEAR in 1982 by the AMERICAN HUMANIST ASSOCIATION
Carl Sagan asked, “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?”
This message “A Christian Manifesto” was given in 1982 by the late Christian Philosopher Francis Schaeffer when he was age 70 at D. James Kennedy’s Corral Ridge Presbyterian Church.
Listen to this important message where Dr. Schaeffer says it is the duty of Christians to disobey the government when it comes in conflict with God’s laws. So many have misinterpreted Romans 13 to mean unconditional obedience to the state. When the state promotes an evil agenda and anti-Christian statues we must obey God rather than men. Acts
I use to watch James Kennedy preach from his TV pulpit with great delight in the 1980’s. Both of these men are gone to be with the Lord now. We need new Christian leaders to rise up in their stead.
To view Part 2 See Francis Schaeffer Lecture- Christian Manifesto Pt 2 of 2 video
The religious and political freedom’s we enjoy as Americans was based on the Bible and the legacy of the Reformation according to Francis Schaeffer. These freedoms will continue to diminish as we cast off the authority of Holy Scripture.
In public schools there is no other view of reality but that final reality is shaped by chance.
Likewise, public television gives us many things that we like culturally but so much of it is mere propaganda shaped by a humanistic world and life view.
_____________________________
I was able to watch Francis Schaeffer deliver a speech on a book he wrote called “A Christian Manifesto” and I heard him in several interviews on it in 1981 and 1982. I listened with great interest since I also read that book over and over again. Below is a portion of one of Schaeffer’s talks on a crucial subject that is very important today too.
A great talk by Francis Schaeffer:A Christian Manifesto by Dr. Francis A. SchaefferThis address was delivered by the late Dr. Schaeffer in 1982 at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It is based on one of his books, which bears the same title._________
Infanticide and youth enthansia ———So what we find then, is that the medical profession has largely changed — not all doctors. I’m sure there are doctors here in the audience who feel very, very differently, who feel indeed that human life is important and you wouldn’t take it, easily, wantonly. But, in general, we must say (and all you have to do is look at the TV programs), all you have to do is hear about the increased talk about allowing the Mongoloid child — the child with Down’s Syndrome — to starve to death if it’s born this way. Increasingly, we find on every side the medical profession has changed its views.
The view now is, “Is this life worth saving?”I look at you… You’re an older congregation than I am usually used to speaking to. You’d better think, because — this — means — you! It does not stop with abortion and infanticide. It stops at the question, “What about the old person? Is he worth hanging on to?” Should we, as they are doing in England in this awful organization, EXIT, teach older people to commit suicide? Should we help them get rid of them because they are an economic burden, a nuisance? I want to tell you, once you begin chipping away the medical profession…
The intrinsic value of the human life is founded upon the Judeo-Christian concept that man is unique because he is made in the image of God, and not because he is well, strong, a consumer, a sex object or any other thing. That is where whatever compassion this country has is, and certainly it is far from perfect and has never been perfect. Nor out of the Reformation has there been a Golden Age, but whatever compassion there has ever been, it is rooted in the fact that our culture knows that man is unique, is made in the image of God. Take it away, and I just say gently, the stopper is out of the bathtub for all human life.
______________________________________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband. Now I wanted to make some comments concerning our shared Christian faith. I respect you for putting your faith in Christ for your eternal life. I am pleading to you on the basis of the Bible to please review your religious views concerning abortion. It was the Bible that caused the abolition movement of the 1800’s and it also was the basis for Martin Luther King’s movement for civil rights and it also is the basis for recognizing the unborn children.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 1) ABORTION OF THE HUMAN RACE Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ________________ Picture of Francis Schaeffer and his wife Edith from the 1930′s above. I was sad to read about Edith passing away on Easter weekend in 2013. I wanted to pass along this fine […]
ABORTION – THE SILENT SCREAM 1 / Extended, High-Resolution Version (with permission from APF). Republished with Permission from Roy Tidwell of American Portrait Films as long as the following credits are shown: VHS/DVDs Available American Portrait Films Call 1-800-736-4567 http://www.amport.com The Hand of God-Selected Quotes from Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D., Unjust laws exist. Shall we […]
I have been writing President Obama letters and have not received a personal response yet. (He reads 10 letters a day personally and responds to each of them.) However, I did receive a form letter in the form of an email on April 16, 2011. First you will see my letter to him which was mailed around April 9th(although […]
ABORTION – THE SILENT SCREAM 1 / Extended, High-Resolution Version (with permission from APF). Republished with Permission from Roy Tidwell of American Portrait Films as long as the following credits are shown: VHS/DVDs Available American Portrait Films Call 1-800-736-4567 http://www.amport.com The Hand of God-Selected Quotes from Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D., Unjust laws exist. Shall we […]
When I think of the things that make me sad concerning this country, the first thing that pops into my mind is our treatment of unborn children. Donald Trump is probably going to run for president of the United States. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council recently had a conversation with him concerning the […]
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 […]
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 […]
It is truly sad to me that liberals will lie in order to attack good Christian people like state senator Jason Rapert of Conway, Arkansas because he headed a group of pro-life senators that got a pro-life bill through the Arkansas State Senate the last week of January in 2013. I have gone back and […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Sometimes you can see evidences in someone’s life of how content they really are. I saw something like that on 2-8-13 when I confronted a blogger that goes by the name “AngryOldWoman” on the Arkansas Times Blog. See below. Leadership Crisis in America Published on Jul 11, 2012 Picture of Adrian Rogers above from 1970′s […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
E P I S O D E 1 0 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode X – Final Choices 27 min FINAL CHOICES I. Authoritarianism the Only Humanistic Social Option One man or an elite giving authoritative arbitrary absolutes. A. Society is sole absolute in absence of other absolutes. B. But society has to be […]
E P I S O D E 9 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IX – The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence 27 min T h e Age of Personal Peace and Afflunce I. By the Early 1960s People Were Bombarded From Every Side by Modern Man’s Humanistic Thought II. Modern Form of Humanistic Thought Leads […]
E P I S O D E 8 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VIII – The Age of Fragmentation 27 min I saw this film series in 1979 and it had a major impact on me. T h e Age of FRAGMENTATION I. Art As a Vehicle Of Modern Thought A. Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, […]
E P I S O D E 7 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VII – The Age of Non Reason I am thrilled to get this film series with you. I saw it first in 1979 and it had such a big impact on me. Today’s episode is where we see modern humanist man act […]
E P I S O D E 6 How Should We Then Live 6#1 Uploaded by NoMirrorHDDHrorriMoN on Oct 3, 2011 How Should We Then Live? Episode 6 of 12 ________ I am sharing with you a film series that I saw in 1979. In this film Francis Schaeffer asserted that was a shift in […]
E P I S O D E 5 How Should We Then Live? Episode 5: The Revolutionary Age I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Francis Schaeffer noted, “Reformation Did Not Bring Perfection. But gradually on basis of biblical teaching there […]
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IV – The Reformation 27 min I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer makes three key points concerning the Reformation: “1. Erasmian Christian humanism rejected by Farel. 2. Bible gives needed answers not only as to […]
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 3 “The Renaissance” Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 3) THE RENAISSANCE I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer really shows why we have so […]
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 2) THE MIDDLE AGES I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer points out that during this time period unfortunately we have the “Church’s deviation from early church’s teaching in regard […]
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 1) THE ROMAN AGE Today I am starting a series that really had a big impact on my life back in the 1970′s when I first saw it. There are ten parts and today is the first. Francis Schaeffer takes a look at Rome and why […]
The left’s protests at Supreme Court justices’ homes to intimidate them into changing their votes on overturning Roe v. Wade are potentially illegal. Pictured: Abortion activists protest outside the house of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in Chevy Chase, Maryland, Sept. 13, 2021, following the court’s decision to uphold a Texas abortion law. Protesters showed up again this past weekend over the leaked draft decision in a Mississippi case. (Photo: Nicholas Kamm, AFP/Getty Images)
Cal Thomas is a syndicated columnist, author, and broadcaster. He has authored several books, including “America’s Expiration Date: The Fall of Empires and Superpowers and the Future of the United States.” Readers can email him at tcaeditors@tribpub.com.
Irony doesn’t begin to explain why pro-choice activists chose Mother’s Day weekend to picket the homes of Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts, who appear ready to overturn Roe v. Wade.
In an age when there appear to be fewer consequences for violating moral or statutory laws, demonstrators and protesters outside the Supreme Court building seem to have violated at least two federal laws. In the abortion-at-anytime Biden administration, which refuses to enforce immigration laws, it seems unlikely these laws will be enforced.
Here are excerpts from two federal laws, should the Justice Department need to be reminded of them. The first, 18 U.S. Code 1507 “Picketing or Parading,” states:
Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty, pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.
That seems clear, doesn’t it? Does language mean anything, or as liberals think about the Constitution, does the law say what judges intend it to say, or wish it had said, or would have said if they had written it?
A related law, 18 U.S. Code 1503, is titled “Influencing or injuring officer or juror generally.” It says in part, “Whoever corruptly, or by threats, or by any threatening letter or communication, endeavors to influence, intimidate, or impede any grand or petit juror, or office in or of any court of the United States … ” can potentially be found guilty and face “imprisonment for not more than 10 years, a fine under this title, or both.”
How would the Justice Department characterize demonstrations and picketing outside the homes of justices? What label under existing law would it apply to picketers and shouters outside the Supreme Court building? If protesters were not trying to intimidate and influence conservative justices, why were they there?
Shouldn’t the public expect laws to be enforced? They are for most average people who can be convicted by a court, spend time in prison, and be forced to pay fines for violating those laws. Why is the debate about abortion and illegal immigration placed in a separate category in a government now dominated by Democrats?
The refusal to enforce laws equally has contributed to a decline in the public’s trust in our institutions.
A Gallup poll showed that between 2019 and 2020, when the pandemic took hold, faith in every institution surveyed—including public schools, the presidency, and Congress—dropped. Only the police showed an increase in confidence, and remarkably, that was when the left’s “defund the police” movement was at its height.
Today’s left is concerned only with outcomes that conform to its worldview. It was fine with striking down all state laws prohibiting abortion. It cheered when prayer and Bible reading were removed from public schools. Now that the shoe is on the right foot and not the left, the court has become a pariah.
They can’t have it both ways, though they are trying.
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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 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):
(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.
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?
——-
End of Sagan Excerpt
When I was in high school the book and film series named WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? came out and it featured Doctor C. Everett Koop and Francis Schaeffer and they looked at the issues of abortion, infanticide, and youth euthanasia and they looked at comments from such scholars as Peter Singer and James D. Watson.
C. Everett Koop pictured above and Peter Singer below
Peter Singer, an endowed chair at Princeton’s Center for Human Values, said, “Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all.”
James D.Watson
In May 1973, James D. Watson, the Nobel Prize laureate who discovered the double helix of DNA, granted an interview to Prism magazine, then a publication of the American Medical Association. Time later reported the interview to the general public, quoting Watson as having said, “If a child were not declared alive until three days after birth, then all parents could be allowed the choice only a few are given under the present system. The doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so choose and save a lot of misery and suffering. I believe this view is the only rational, compassionate attitude to have.”
Carl Sagan
On August 30, 1995 I mailed a letter to Carl Sagan that probably prompted this discussion on abortion and it enclosed a lengthy story from Adrian Rogers about an abortion case in Pine Bluff, Arkansas that almost became an infanticide case:
An excerpt from the Sunday morning message (11-6-83) by Adrian Rogers in Memphis, TN.
I want to tell you that secular humanism and so-called abortion rights are inseparably linked together. We have been taught that our bodies and our children are the products of the evolutionary process, and so therefore human life may not be all that valuable to begin with. We have come today to where it is legal and even considered to be a good thing to put little babies to death…15 million little babies put to death since 1973 because of this philosophy of Secular Humanism.
How did the court make that type of decision? You would think it would be so obvious. You can’t do that! You can’t kill little babies! Why? Because the Bible says! Friend, they don’t give a hoot what the Bible says! There used to be a time when they talked about what the Bible says because there was a time that we as a nation had a constitution that was based in the Judeo-Christian ethic, but today if we say “The Bible says” or “God says “Separation of Church and State. Don’t tell us what the Bible says or what God says. We will tell you what we think!” Therefore, they look at the situation and they decide if it is right or wrong purely on the humanistic philosophy that right and wrong are relative and the situation says what is right or what is wrong.
This little girl just 19 years old went into the doctor’s office and he examined her. He said, “We can take take of you.” He gave her an injection in her arm that was to cause her to go into labor and to get rid of that protoplasm, that feud, that little mass that was in her, but she wasn’t prepared for the sound she was about to hear. It was a little baby crying. That little baby weighed 13 ounces. His hand the size of my thumbnail. You know what the doctor did. The doctor put that little baby in a grocery sack and gave it to Maria’s two friends who were with her in that doctor office and Said, “It will stop making those noises after a while.”
(Adrian Rogers pictured above)
Pine Bluff, Arkansas
They took that grocery sack and Maria home and one hour passed and two hours passed and that baby was still crying and panting for his life in that grocery sack. They took that little baby down to the hospital there in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and they called an obstetrician and he called a pediatrician and they called nurses and they began to work on that little baby. Today that baby is alive and well and healthy, that little mass of protoplasm. That little thing that wasn’t a human being is alive and well. I want to tell you they spent $150,000 to save the life of that baby. NOW CAN YOU EXPLAIN TO ME HOW THEY CAN SPEND $150,000 TO SAVE THE LIFE OF SOMETHING THAT SOMEBODY WAS PAYING ANOTHER DOCTOR TO TAKE THE LIFE OF? The same life!!! Are you going to tell me that is not a baby? Are you going to tell me that if that baby had been put to death it would not have been murder? You will never convince me of that. What has happened to us in America? We have been sold a bill of goods by the Secular Humanists!
Carl Sagan was elected the HUMANIST OF THE YEAR in 1982 by the AMERICAN HUMANIST ASSOCIATION
Carl Sagan asked, “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?”
____________
Pt 1 of 2 Listen to this Important Message by Francis Schaeffer
Published on Sep 30, 2013
This message “A Christian Manifesto” was given in 1982 by the late Christian Philosopher Francis Schaeffer when he was age 70 at D. James Kennedy’s Corral Ridge Presbyterian Church. Listen to this important message where Dr. Schaeffer says it is the duty of Christians to disobey the government when it comes in conflict with God’s laws. So many have misinterpreted Romans 13 to mean unconditional obedience to the state. When the state promotes an evil agenda and anti-Christian statues we must obey God rather than men. Acts I use to watch James Kennedy preach from his TV pulpit with great delight in the 1980’s. Both of these men are gone to be with the Lord now. We need new Christian leaders to rise up in their stead. To view Part 2 See Francis Schaeffer Lecture- Christian Manifesto Pt 2 of 2 video The religious and political freedom’s we enjoy as Americans was based on the Bible and the legacy of the Reformation according to Francis Schaeffer. These freedoms will continue to diminish as we cast off the authority of Holy Scripture. In public schools there is no other view of reality but that final reality is shaped by chance. Likewise, public television gives us many things that we like culturally but so much of it is mere propaganda shaped by a humanistic world and life view.
_____________________________
I was able to watch Francis Schaeffer deliver a speech on a book he wrote called “A Christian Manifesto” and I heard him in several interviews on it in 1981 and 1982. I listened with great interest since I also read that book over and over again. Below is a portion of one of Schaeffer’s talks on a crucial subject that is very important today too.
A great talk by Francis Schaeffer:A Christian Manifesto by Dr. Francis A. SchaefferThis address was delivered by the late Dr. Schaeffer in 1982 at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It is based on one of his books, which bears the same title._________
Infanticide and youth enthansia ———So what we find then, is that the medical profession has largely changed — not all doctors. I’m sure there are doctors here in the audience who feel very, very differently, who feel indeed that human life is important and you wouldn’t take it, easily, wantonly. But, in general, we must say (and all you have to do is look at the TV programs), all you have to do is hear about the increased talk about allowing the Mongoloid child — the child with Down’s Syndrome — to starve to death if it’s born this way. Increasingly, we find on every side the medical profession has changed its views.
The view now is, “Is this life worth saving?”I look at you… You’re an older congregation than I am usually used to speaking to. You’d better think, because — this — means — you! It does not stop with abortion and infanticide. It stops at the question, “What about the old person? Is he worth hanging on to?” Should we, as they are doing in England in this awful organization, EXIT, teach older people to commit suicide? Should we help them get rid of them because they are an economic burden, a nuisance? I want to tell you, once you begin chipping away the medical profession…
The intrinsic value of the human life is founded upon the Judeo-Christian concept that man is unique because he is made in the image of God, and not because he is well, strong, a consumer, a sex object or any other thing. That is where whatever compassion this country has is, and certainly it is far from perfect and has never been perfect. Nor out of the Reformation has there been a Golden Age, but whatever compassion there has ever been, it is rooted in the fact that our culture knows that man is unique, is made in the image of God. Take it away, and I just say gently, the stopper is out of the bathtub for all human life.
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 1) ABORTION OF THE HUMAN RACE Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This book really helped develop my political views […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (1)
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 3 “The Renaissance” Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 3) THE RENAISSANCE I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer really shows why we have so […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 1) THE ROMAN AGE Today I am starting a series that really had a big impact on my life back in the 1970′s when I first saw it. There are ten parts and today is the first. Francis Schaeffer takes a look at Rome and why […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 5) TRUTH AND HISTORY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis This crucial series is narrated by the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer and former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop. Today, choices are being made that undermine human rights at their most basic level. Practices once […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
The opening song at the beginning of this episode is very insightful. Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis This crucial series is narrated by the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer and former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop. Today, choices […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 3) DEATH BY SOMEONE’S CHOICE Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis This crucial series is narrated by the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer and former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop. Today, choices are being made that undermine human rights at their most basic level. Practices […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” (Episode 2) SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis This crucial series is narrated by the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer and former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop. Today, choices are being made that undermine human rights at their most basic level. Practices […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
It is not possible to know where the pro-life evangelicals are coming from unless you look at the work of the person who inspired them the most. That person was Francis Schaeffer. I do care about economic issues but the pro-life issue is the most important to me. Several years ago Adrian Rogers (past president of […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
This essay below is worth the read. Schaeffer, Francis – “Francis Schaeffer and the Pro-Life Movement” [How Should We Then Live?, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, A Christian Manifesto] Editor note: <p> </p> [The following essay explores the role that Francis Schaeffer played in the rise of the pro-life movement. It examines the place of […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
Great article on Schaeffer. Who was Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer? By Francis Schaeffer The unique contribution of Dr. Francis Schaeffer on a whole generation was the ability to communicate the truth of historic Biblical Christianity in a way that combined intellectual integrity with practical, loving care. This grew out of his extensive understanding of the Bible […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
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)
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)
In today’s news you will read about Kirk Cameron taking on the
atheist Stephen Hawking over some recent assertions he made concerning
the existence of heaven. Back in December of 1995 I had the opportunity
to correspond with Carl Sagan about a year before his untimely death.
Sarah Anne Hughes in her article,”Kirk Cameron criticizes […]
By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Atheists Confronted | Edit | Comments (2)
In this post we are going to see that through the years humanist
thought has encouraged artists like Michelangelo to think that the
future was extremely bright versus the place today where many artist who
hold the humanist and secular worldview are very pessimistic. In
contrast to Michelangelo’s DAVID when humanist man thought he […]
Democrats’ latest abortion legislation, while eschewing the words “woman” or “women,” states that its purpose is to “protect a person’s ability to determine whether to continue or end a pregnancy.” Pictured: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., talks with a staffer Sunday during a press conference on Capitol Hill. (Photo: Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)
Democrats’ latest abortion bill does not include the words “woman,” “women,” or “female.” Instead, the bill uses the word “person” to refer to those who bear and give birth to children.
The Senate is scheduled to vote Wednesday on legislation called the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2022. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is bringing the bill back to the floor for another vote, despite its failure in February.
The new effort follows the leak last week of a draft opinion in the abortion case Dobbs v. Jackson, which suggests the Supreme Court is set to overturn its 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade legalizing abortion across the nation.
“Choice should not be up to a handful of right-wing justices,” Schumer told reporters Sunday as he discussed a new vote on the bill. “Choice should not be up to a handful of right-wing politicians. It’s a woman’s right. Plain and simple.”
Although Schumer insisted abortion is a “woman’s right,” the legislation states that its purpose is to “protect a person’s ability to determine whether to continue or end a pregnancy.”
“Nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize any government to interfere with a person’s ability to terminate a pregnancy,” the bill explains, “to diminish or in any way negatively affect a person’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy, or to displace any other remedy for violations of the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy.”
A 2021 version of the bill used the word “women” in the text 13 times. But it also clarified that the “terms ‘woman’ and ‘women’ are used in this bill to reflect the identity of the majority of people targeted and affected by restrictions on abortion services.”
“However,” the 2021 bill continued, “access to abortion services is critical to the health of every person capable of becoming pregnant.”
Melanie Israel, a policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, said Tuesday that the legislation “doesn’t protect anyone’s health and contorts itself to, ironically, avoid mentioning the very term ‘women’ within the bill text.”
In an email to The Daily Signal, Heritage’s multimedia news organization, Israel said:
Allowing radical gender ideology to erase women isn’t new on the left. Seeing it on full display during consideration of a bill that would decimate health and safety protections for women and unborn children is yet another example on a long list of the left’s extremism when it comes to abortion.
The Biden administration has made a concerted effort to use the term “birthing person” when referring to those who bear children, rather than “woman” or “mother.”
Democrats say the Women’s Health Protection Actwould codify Roe v. Wade into law, but the bill actually would go further to remove all limits on abortion across all 50 states, even laws that have been in place for decades.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, called the act “Orwellian” during a teleconference with reporters Tuesday, adding that Democrats are “setting themselves up as the party of abortion absolutism.”
America already has some of the most liberal abortion laws in the word, but the Women’s Health Protection Act would go beyond nations such as China in allowing a woman to choose to have an abortion at any time during her pregnancy and for any reason.
The Senate bill is expected to fail for lack of bipartisan support.
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Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race? Co-authored by Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop)
Edith Schaeffer with her husband, Francis Schaeffer, in 1970 in Switzerland, where they founded L’Abri, a Christian commune.
________________
______________________
September 25, 2021
President Biden c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. I know that you don’t agree with my pro-life views but I wanted to challenge you as a fellow Christian to re-examine your pro-choice view.
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 WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? which can be found on You Tube. It is very valuable information for Christians to have.
Today I want to respond to your letter to me on July 9, 2021. Here it is below:
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
July 9, 2021
Mr. Everette Hatcher III
Alexander, AR
Dear Mr. Hatcher,
Thank you for taking your time to share your thoughts on abortion. Hearing from passionate individuals like me inspires me every day, and I welcome the opportunity to respond to your letter
Our country faces many challenges, and the road we will travel together will be one of the most difficult in our history. Despite these tough times, I have never been more optimistic for the future of America. I believe we are better positioned than any country in the world to lead in the 21st century not just by the example of our power but by the power of our example.
As we move forward to address the complex issues of our time, I encourage you to remain an active participant in helping write the next great chapter of the American story. We need your courage and dedication at this critical time, and we must meet this moment together as the United States of America. If we do that, I believe that our best days still lie ahead.
Sincerely
Joe Biden
Mr. President, my wife was born in JEFFERSON MEMORIAL HOSPITAL in Pine Bluff, Arkansas and Adrian Rogers tells a story about another lady that was born in that same hospital: “They took that grocery sack and Maria home and one hour passed and two hours passed and that baby was still crying and panting for his life in that grocery sack. They took that little baby down to the hospital there in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and they called an obstetrician and he called a pediatrician and they called nurses and they began to work on that little baby. Today that baby is alive and well and healthy, that little mass of protoplasm. That little thing that wasn’t a human being is alive and well. I want to tell you they spent $150,000 to save the life of that baby. NOW CAN YOU EXPLAIN TO ME HOW THEY CAN SPEND $150,000 TO SAVE THE LIFE OF SOMETHING THAT SOMEBODY WAS PAYING ANOTHER DOCTOR TO TAKE THE LIFE OF?”
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 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):
(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.
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?
——-
End of Sagan Excerpt
When I was in high school the book and film series named WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? came out and it featured Doctor C. Everett Koop and Francis Schaeffer and they looked at the issues of abortion, infanticide, and youth euthanasia and they looked at comments from such scholars as Peter Singer and James D. Watson.
C. Everett Koop pictured above and Peter Singer below
Peter Singer, an endowed chair at Princeton’s Center for Human Values, said, “Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all.”
James D.Watson
In May 1973, James D. Watson, the Nobel Prize laureate who discovered the double helix of DNA, granted an interview to Prism magazine, then a publication of the American Medical Association. Time later reported the interview to the general public, quoting Watson as having said, “If a child were not declared alive until three days after birth, then all parents could be allowed the choice only a few are given under the present system. The doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so choose and save a lot of misery and suffering. I believe this view is the only rational, compassionate attitude to have.”
Carl Sagan
On August 30, 1995 I mailed a letter to Carl Sagan that probably prompted this discussion on abortion and it enclosed a lengthy story from Adrian Rogers about an abortion case in Pine Bluff, Arkansas that almost became an infanticide case:
An excerpt from the Sunday morning message (11-6-83) by Adrian Rogers in Memphis, TN.
I want to tell you that secular humanism and so-called abortion rights are inseparably linked together. We have been taught that our bodies and our children are the products of the evolutionary process, and so therefore human life may not be all that valuable to begin with. We have come today to where it is legal and even considered to be a good thing to put little babies to death…15 million little babies put to death since 1973 because of this philosophy of Secular Humanism.
How did the court make that type of decision? You would think it would be so obvious. You can’t do that! You can’t kill little babies! Why? Because the Bible says! Friend, they don’t give a hoot what the Bible says! There used to be a time when they talked about what the Bible says because there was a time that we as a nation had a constitution that was based in the Judeo-Christian ethic, but today if we say “The Bible says” or “God says “Separation of Church and State. Don’t tell us what the Bible says or what God says. We will tell you what we think!” Therefore, they look at the situation and they decide if it is right or wrong purely on the humanistic philosophy that right and wrong are relative and the situation says what is right or what is wrong.
This little girl just 19 years old went into the doctor’s office and he examined her. He said, “We can take take of you.” He gave her an injection in her arm that was to cause her to go into labor and to get rid of that protoplasm, that feud, that little mass that was in her, but she wasn’t prepared for the sound she was about to hear. It was a little baby crying. That little baby weighed 13 ounces. His hand the size of my thumbnail. You know what the doctor did. The doctor put that little baby in a grocery sack and gave it to Maria’s two friends who were with her in that doctor office and Said, “It will stop making those noises after a while.”
(Adrian Rogers pictured above)
Pine Bluff, ArkansasMy wife was born in main hospital in Pine Bluff, Arkansas
They took that grocery sack and Maria home and one hour passed and two hours passed and that baby was still crying and panting for his life in that grocery sack. They took that little baby down to the hospital there in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and they called an obstetrician and he called a pediatrician and they called nurses and they began to work on that little baby. Today that baby is alive and well and healthy, that little mass of protoplasm. That little thing that wasn’t a human being is alive and well. I want to tell you they spent $150,000 to save the life of that baby. NOW CAN YOU EXPLAIN TO ME HOW THEY CAN SPEND $150,000 TO SAVE THE LIFE OF SOMETHING THAT SOMEBODY WAS PAYING ANOTHER DOCTOR TO TAKE THE LIFE OF? The same life!!! Are you going to tell me that is not a baby? Are you going to tell me that if that baby had been put to death it would not have been murder? You will never convince me of that. What has happened to us in America? We have been sold a bill of goods by the Secular Humanists!
Carl Sagan was elected the HUMANIST OF THE YEAR in 1982 by the AMERICAN HUMANIST ASSOCIATION
Carl Sagan asked, “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?”
This message “A Christian Manifesto” was given in 1982 by the late Christian Philosopher Francis Schaeffer when he was age 70 at D. James Kennedy’s Corral Ridge Presbyterian Church.
Listen to this important message where Dr. Schaeffer says it is the duty of Christians to disobey the government when it comes in conflict with God’s laws. So many have misinterpreted Romans 13 to mean unconditional obedience to the state. When the state promotes an evil agenda and anti-Christian statues we must obey God rather than men. Acts
I use to watch James Kennedy preach from his TV pulpit with great delight in the 1980’s. Both of these men are gone to be with the Lord now. We need new Christian leaders to rise up in their stead.
To view Part 2 See Francis Schaeffer Lecture- Christian Manifesto Pt 2 of 2 video
The religious and political freedom’s we enjoy as Americans was based on the Bible and the legacy of the Reformation according to Francis Schaeffer. These freedoms will continue to diminish as we cast off the authority of Holy Scripture.
In public schools there is no other view of reality but that final reality is shaped by chance.
Likewise, public television gives us many things that we like culturally but so much of it is mere propaganda shaped by a humanistic world and life view.
_____________________________
I was able to watch Francis Schaeffer deliver a speech on a book he wrote called “A Christian Manifesto” and I heard him in several interviews on it in 1981 and 1982. I listened with great interest since I also read that book over and over again. Below is a portion of one of Schaeffer’s talks on a crucial subject that is very important today too.
A great talk by Francis Schaeffer:A Christian Manifesto by Dr. Francis A. SchaefferThis address was delivered by the late Dr. Schaeffer in 1982 at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It is based on one of his books, which bears the same title._________
Infanticide and youth enthansia ———So what we find then, is that the medical profession has largely changed — not all doctors. I’m sure there are doctors here in the audience who feel very, very differently, who feel indeed that human life is important and you wouldn’t take it, easily, wantonly. But, in general, we must say (and all you have to do is look at the TV programs), all you have to do is hear about the increased talk about allowing the Mongoloid child — the child with Down’s Syndrome — to starve to death if it’s born this way. Increasingly, we find on every side the medical profession has changed its views.
The view now is, “Is this life worth saving?”I look at you… You’re an older congregation than I am usually used to speaking to. You’d better think, because — this — means — you! It does not stop with abortion and infanticide. It stops at the question, “What about the old person? Is he worth hanging on to?” Should we, as they are doing in England in this awful organization, EXIT, teach older people to commit suicide? Should we help them get rid of them because they are an economic burden, a nuisance? I want to tell you, once you begin chipping away the medical profession…
The intrinsic value of the human life is founded upon the Judeo-Christian concept that man is unique because he is made in the image of God, and not because he is well, strong, a consumer, a sex object or any other thing. That is where whatever compassion this country has is, and certainly it is far from perfect and has never been perfect. Nor out of the Reformation has there been a Golden Age, but whatever compassion there has ever been, it is rooted in the fact that our culture knows that man is unique, is made in the image of God. Take it away, and I just say gently, the stopper is out of the bathtub for all human life.
______________________________________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband. Now I wanted to make some comments concerning our shared Christian faith. I respect you for putting your faith in Christ for your eternal life. I am pleading to you on the basis of the Bible to please review your religious views concerning abortion. It was the Bible that caused the abolition movement of the 1800’s and it also was the basis for Martin Luther King’s movement for civil rights and it also is the basis for recognizing the unborn children.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 1) ABORTION OF THE HUMAN RACE Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ________________ Picture of Francis Schaeffer and his wife Edith from the 1930′s above. I was sad to read about Edith passing away on Easter weekend in 2013. I wanted to pass along this fine […]
ABORTION – THE SILENT SCREAM 1 / Extended, High-Resolution Version (with permission from APF). Republished with Permission from Roy Tidwell of American Portrait Films as long as the following credits are shown: VHS/DVDs Available American Portrait Films Call 1-800-736-4567 http://www.amport.com The Hand of God-Selected Quotes from Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D., Unjust laws exist. Shall we […]
I have been writing President Obama letters and have not received a personal response yet. (He reads 10 letters a day personally and responds to each of them.) However, I did receive a form letter in the form of an email on April 16, 2011. First you will see my letter to him which was mailed around April 9th(although […]
ABORTION – THE SILENT SCREAM 1 / Extended, High-Resolution Version (with permission from APF). Republished with Permission from Roy Tidwell of American Portrait Films as long as the following credits are shown: VHS/DVDs Available American Portrait Films Call 1-800-736-4567 http://www.amport.com The Hand of God-Selected Quotes from Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D., Unjust laws exist. Shall we […]
When I think of the things that make me sad concerning this country, the first thing that pops into my mind is our treatment of unborn children. Donald Trump is probably going to run for president of the United States. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council recently had a conversation with him concerning the […]
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 […]
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 […]
It is truly sad to me that liberals will lie in order to attack good Christian people like state senator Jason Rapert of Conway, Arkansas because he headed a group of pro-life senators that got a pro-life bill through the Arkansas State Senate the last week of January in 2013. I have gone back and […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Sometimes you can see evidences in someone’s life of how content they really are. I saw something like that on 2-8-13 when I confronted a blogger that goes by the name “AngryOldWoman” on the Arkansas Times Blog. See below. Leadership Crisis in America Published on Jul 11, 2012 Picture of Adrian Rogers above from 1970′s […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
E P I S O D E 1 0 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode X – Final Choices 27 min FINAL CHOICES I. Authoritarianism the Only Humanistic Social Option One man or an elite giving authoritative arbitrary absolutes. A. Society is sole absolute in absence of other absolutes. B. But society has to be […]
E P I S O D E 9 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IX – The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence 27 min T h e Age of Personal Peace and Afflunce I. By the Early 1960s People Were Bombarded From Every Side by Modern Man’s Humanistic Thought II. Modern Form of Humanistic Thought Leads […]
E P I S O D E 8 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VIII – The Age of Fragmentation 27 min I saw this film series in 1979 and it had a major impact on me. T h e Age of FRAGMENTATION I. Art As a Vehicle Of Modern Thought A. Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, […]
E P I S O D E 7 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VII – The Age of Non Reason I am thrilled to get this film series with you. I saw it first in 1979 and it had such a big impact on me. Today’s episode is where we see modern humanist man act […]
E P I S O D E 6 How Should We Then Live 6#1 Uploaded by NoMirrorHDDHrorriMoN on Oct 3, 2011 How Should We Then Live? Episode 6 of 12 ________ I am sharing with you a film series that I saw in 1979. In this film Francis Schaeffer asserted that was a shift in […]
E P I S O D E 5 How Should We Then Live? Episode 5: The Revolutionary Age I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Francis Schaeffer noted, “Reformation Did Not Bring Perfection. But gradually on basis of biblical teaching there […]
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IV – The Reformation 27 min I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer makes three key points concerning the Reformation: “1. Erasmian Christian humanism rejected by Farel. 2. Bible gives needed answers not only as to […]
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 3 “The Renaissance” Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 3) THE RENAISSANCE I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer really shows why we have so […]
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 2) THE MIDDLE AGES I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer points out that during this time period unfortunately we have the “Church’s deviation from early church’s teaching in regard […]
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 1) THE ROMAN AGE Today I am starting a series that really had a big impact on my life back in the 1970′s when I first saw it. There are ten parts and today is the first. Francis Schaeffer takes a look at Rome and why […]
Federalism is very desirable because it allows different parts of the country to make different decisions, and this helps to teach us about what works. And what doesn’t.
It also means Americans can “vote with their feet” by migrating across local borders and state borders.
This happens a lot, as illustrated by this map from the Census Bureau.
While this map is fascinating, it also can be deceiving because some counties have very few people and others have millions of people.
It appears that internal migration might be a wash for states such as California and New York, for instance, since parts of both states are both green and purple.
Why? Because big losses in some heavily populated cities (circled in red above) easily outweighed population gains in rural counties.
So why are people leaving some places? Are there lessons to be learned?
One obvious takeaway is that Americans are fleeing states governed by the left, as Kerry McDonald explains for the Foundation for Economic Education.
US Census Bureau data released in December showed that restrictive states such as California, Illinois, New York, and Massachusettslost population between July 2020 and July 2021, while states with less-restrictive virus policies like Texas, Arizona, and Florida gained population during that time. …Fight or flight is a tough choice for families, but at least it’s a choice that Americans can enjoy thanks to federalism and the ability to vote with our feet.
And Americans are fleeing localities governed by the left, as Michael Barone explains in the Washington Examiner.
…the biggest losses, in both population and percentage loss, came in four of the nation’s six largest metropolitan areas: San Francisco/San Jose (-2.6 percent), New York (-1.8 percent), Chicago (-1.1 percent) and Los Angeles/Riverside (-0.8 percent).Each of the first three, in just 15 months from April 2020 to July 2021, lost a population that equaled 20 percent of their total population gain in the 20 years between 2000 and 2020. …it’s also noteworthy, and probably more permanent, that people with modest educations and incomes have fled far beyond the exurbs. …the nation’s population growth and its economic dynamism had been concentrated disproportionately in the exurbs, which typically have reasonable tax rates and development-friendly regulations. …the self-harm that liberal and progressive politicians have inflicted…voters even in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are recoiling.
The moral of the story is that voters sometimes make the mistake of voting for tax-and-spend politicians, but at least they have enough sense to then escape the places being harmed by statist policies.
During the debate about the Trump tax plan, proponents made three main arguments in favor of reducing the federal corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.
The last item involves the “Laffer Curve,” which is a graphical representation of the non-linear relationship between tax rates and tax revenue.
Put in simple terms, entrepreneurs, investors, and business owners have more incentive to earn moneywhen tax rates are modest.
High tax rates, by contrast, discourage productive behavior while also giving people a bigger incentive to find loopholes and other ways of avoiding tax.
This does not mean that lower tax rates produce more revenue, though that sometimes happens.
The main takeaway is the most modest observation that lower tax rates will lead to more taxable income, which means some revenue feedback.
In other words, tax cuts don’t lose as much revenue as predicted by simplistic models (and tax increases don’t generate as much revenue as predicted).
And here’s another. Look at how corporate tax revenues in the United States are increasing at a faster rate than projected.
The chart comes from Chris Edwards, and he helpfully explains what has happened.
The revenue surge came as a surprise to government economists. The chart…compares the new Office of Management and Budget March 2022 baseline projections to prior baseline projections from the OMB in May 2021 and the Congressional Budget Office in July 2021.…congressional estimators figured that the government would lose an average $76 billion a year the first four years… Corporate tax revenues were down from 2018 to 2020, but then soared in 2021. Revenues in 2021 of $372 billion (with a 21 percent tax rate) are 25 percent higher than revenues in 2017 of $297 billion (with a 35 percent tax rate). …we’re learning that a lower corporate tax rate is consistent with strong corporate tax revenues. …lower rates…broaden bases automatically through reduced tax avoidance and higher economic activity. Other nations have learned the same lesson. Keeping the corporate tax rate low is a winner for businesses and workers, but it can also be a winner for government budgets.
The Wall Street Journal has a new editorial on this topic. Here are some relevant excerpts.
…the 2017 tax reform that cut corporate tax rates…has been a winner for the economy and federal tax coffers. …Corporate revenue was supposed to fall to historic lowsas a share of the economy. Big business supposedly got a windfall and government was robbed. It hasn’t turned out that way. …the big news now is that more corporate tax revenue is flowing into the Treasury at record levels even with the lower rate. …In June 2017, before tax reform passed, CBO predicted corporate tax revenue of $383 billion in fiscal 2021. But in April 2018, after reform passed, CBO lowered its estimate to $327 billion.
So what happened in the real world?
Actual corporate income tax revenue in 2021 was $372 billion—nearly as much at a 21% rate as CBO expected at the 35% rate that was among the highest in the world.Fiscal 2022 is turning out to be even better for the Treasury. Corporate tax revenue for the first six months was up 22% from a year earlier to $127 billion. …What accounts for this windfall for Uncle Sam…? …the Occam’s razor policy answer is that corporate tax reform worked as its sponsors predicted: Lowering the rates while broadening the base by eliminating loopholes created incentives for more efficient investment decisions that paid off for shareholders, workers and the government.
Notice, by the way, that corporate tax revenues have increased faster than projected in both the 2017 forecast and the 2021 forecast.
All of which shows that I may have been insufficiently optimistic when I wrote about this issuelast year.
P.S. The goal of tax policy (either in general or when looking at business taxation) is not to maximize revenue for politicians, but rather to maximize prosperity for people. Indeed, if better tax policy leads to a lot of revenue feedback, that’s an argument for further reductions in tax rates.
P.P.S. Both the IMF and OECD have research showing that lower corporate tax rates do not necessarily lead to lower corporate tax revenues.
March 3, 2021
President Biden c/o The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
______________________________
Dan Mitchell shows how ignoring the Laffer Curve is like running a stop sign!!!!
I’m thinking of inventing a game, sort of a fiscal version of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.
Only the way it will work is that there will be a map of the world and the winner will be the blindfolded person who puts their pin closest to a nation such asAustralia or Switzerland that has a relatively low risk of long-run fiscal collapse.
That won’t be an easy game to win since we have data from the BIS, OECD, and IMF showing that government is growing far too fast in the vast majority of nations.
We also know that many states and cities suffer from the same problems.
A handful of local governments already have hit the fiscal brick wall, with many of them (gee, what a surprise) from California.
The most spectacular mess, though, is about to happen in Michigan.
After decades of sad and spectacular decline, it has come to this for Detroit: The city is $19 billion in debt and on the edge of becoming the nation’s largest municipal bankruptcy. An emergency manager says the city can make good on only a sliver of what it owes — in many cases just pennies on the dollar.
I could continue with a long list of profligate governments, but you get the idea. Some of these governments are collapsing at a quicker pace and some at a slower pace. But all of them are in deep trouble because they don’t follow my Golden Rule about restraining the burden of government spending so that it grows slower than the private sector.
Detroit obviously is an example of a government that is collapsing sooner rather than later.
Why? Simply stated, as the size and scope of the public sector increased, that created very destructive economic and political dynamics.
More and more people got lured into the wagon of government dependency, which puts an ever-increasing burden on a shrinking pool of producers.
Meanwhile, organized interest groups such as government bureaucrats used their political muscle to extract absurdly excessive compensation packages, putting an even larger burden of the dwindling supply of taxpayers.
But that’s not the main focus of this post. Instead, I want to highlight a particular excerpt from the article and make a point about how too many people are blindly – perhaps willfully – ignorant of the Laffer Curve.
Check out this sentence.
Property tax collections are down 20 percent and income tax collections are down by more than a third in just the past five years — despite some of the highest tax rates in the state.
This is a classic “Fox Butterfield mistake,” which occurs when someone fails to recognize a cause-effect relationship. In this case, the reporter should have recognized that tax collections are down because Detroit has very high tax rates.
The city has a lot more problems than just high tax rates, of course, but can there be any doubt that productive people have very little incentive to earn and report taxable income in Detroit?
And that’s the essential insight of the Laffer Curve. Politicians can’t – or at least shouldn’t – assume that a 20 percent increase in tax rates will lead to a 20 percent increase in tax revenue. They also have to consider the degree to which a higher tax rate will cause a change in taxable income.
In some cases, higher tax rates will discourage people from earning more taxable income.
In some cases, higher tax rates will discourage people from reporting all the income they earn.
In some cases, higher tax rates will encourage people to utilize tax loopholes to shrink their taxable income.
In some cases, higher tax rates will encourage migration, thus causing taxable income to disappear.
The Laffer Curve charts a relationship between tax rates and tax revenue. While the theory behind the Laffer Curve is widely accepted, the concept has become very controversial because politicians on both sides of the debate exaggerate. This video shows the middle ground between those who claim “all tax cuts pay for themselves” and those who claim tax policy has no impact on economic performance. This video, focusing on the theory of the Laffer Curve, is Part I of a three-part series. Part II reviews evidence of Laffer-Curve responses. Part III discusses how the revenue-estimating process in Washington can be improved. For more information please visit the Center for Freedom and Prosperity’s web site: http://www.freedomandprosperity.org
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,
We got to cut spending or we will be in a fiscal crisis like Greece!!! Question of the Week: Has the European Fiscal Crisis Ended? January 12, 2013 by Dan Mitchell I’ve frequently commented on Europe’s fiscal mess and argued that excessive government spending is responsible for both the sovereign debt crisis and the economic stagnation […]
The Flat Tax: How it Works and Why it is Good for America Uploaded by afq2007 on Mar 29, 2010 This Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation video shows how the flat tax would benefit families and businesses, and also explains how this simple and fair system would boost economic growth and eliminate the special-interest […]
I have put up lots of cartoons from Dan Mitchell’s blog before and they have got lots of hits before. Many of them have dealt with the economy, eternal unemployment benefits, socialism, Greece, welfare state or on gun control. President Obama really does think that all his answers lie in raising taxes on the rich when the […]
__________ President Reagan, Nancy Reagan, Tom Selleck, Dudley Moore, Lucille Ball at a Tribute to Bob Hope’s 80th birthday at the Kennedy Center. 5/20/83. __________________________ Dan Mitchell is very good at giving speeches and making it very simple to understand economic policy and how it affects a nation. Mitchell also talks about slowing the growth […]
The Laffer Curve – Explained Uploaded by Eddie Stannard on Nov 14, 2011 This video explains the relationship between tax rates, taxable income, and tax revenue. The key lesson is that the Laffer Curve is not an all-or-nothing proposition, where we have to choose between the exaggerated claim that “all tax cuts pay for themselves” […]
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. The way […]
Dan Mitchell does a great job explaining the Laffer Curve President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a […]
I have put up lots of cartoons from Dan Mitchell’s blog before and they have got lots of hits before. Many of them have dealt with the economy, eternal unemployment benefits, socialism, Greece, welfare state or on gun control. Today’s cartoon deals with the Laffer curve. Revenge of the Laffer Curve…Again and Again and Again March 27, 2013 […]
I have put up lots of cartoons from Dan Mitchell’s blog before and they have got lots of hits before. Many of them have dealt with the sequester, economy, eternal unemployment benefits, socialism, minimum wage laws, tax increases, social security, high taxes in California, Obamacare, Greece, welfare state or on gun control. President Obama’s favorite state must be California because […]
Class Warfare just don’t pay it seems. Why can’t we learn from other countries’ mistakes? Class Warfare Tax Policy Causes Portugal to Crash on the Laffer Curve, but Will Obama Learn from this Mistake? December 31, 2012 by Dan Mitchell Back in mid-2010, I wrote that Portugal was going to exacerbate its fiscal problems by raising […]
Republicans would be stupid to raise taxes. Don’t Get Bamboozled by the Fiscal Cliff: Five Policy Reasons and Five Political Reasons Why Republicans Should Keep their No-Tax-Hike Promises December 6, 2012 by Dan Mitchell The politicians claim that they are negotiating about how best to reduce the deficit. That irks me because our fiscal problem is […]
The Laffer Curve – Explained Uploaded by Eddie Stannard on Nov 14, 2011 This video explains the relationship between tax rates, taxable income, and tax revenue. The key lesson is that the Laffer Curve is not an all-or-nothing proposition, where we have to choose between the exaggerated claim that “all tax cuts pay for themselves” […]
Dan Mitchell’s article and the video from his organization takes a hard look at President Obama’s tax record. Dissecting Obama’s Record on Tax Policy October 30, 2012 by Dan Mitchell The folks at the Center for Freedom and Prosperity have been on a roll in the past few months, putting out an excellent series of videos […]
The Laffer Curve, Part I: Understanding the Theory Uploaded by afq2007 on Jan 28, 2008 The Laffer Curve charts a relationship between tax rates and tax revenue. While the theory behind the Laffer Curve is widely accepted, the concept has become very controversial because politicians on both sides of the debate exaggerate. This video shows […]
I got to hear Arthur Laffer speak back in 1981 and he predicted what would happen in the next few years with the Reagan tax cuts and he was right with every prediction. The Laffer Curve Wreaks Havoc in the United Kingdom July 1, 2012 by Dan Mitchell Back in 2010, I excoriated the new […]
You can’t blame someone for leaving one state for another if they have a better an opportunity to make money. Maryland to Texas, but Not Okay to Move from the United States to Singapore? July 12, 2012 by Dan Mitchell I’ve commented before about entrepreneurs, investors, and small business owners migrating from high tax states such […]
Raising taxes will not work. Liberals act like the Laffer Curve does not exist. The Laffer Curve Shows that Tax Increases Are a Very Bad Idea – even if They Generate More Tax Revenue April 10, 2012 by Dan Mitchell The Laffer Curve is a graphical representation of the relationship between tax rates, tax revenue, and […]
Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute shows why Obama’s plan to tax the rich will not solve our deficit problem. Explaining in the New York Post Why Obama’s Soak-the-Rich Tax Policy Is Doomed to Failure April 17, 2012 by Dan Mitchell I think high tax rates on certain classes of citizens are immoral and discriminatory. If the […]
You want the rich to pay more? Dan Mitchell observed:I explained that “rich” taxpayers declared much more income and paid much higher taxes after Reagan reduced the top tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent. Liberals don’t understand good tax policies. Against 3-1 Odds, Promoting Good Tax Policy on Government TV April 12, 2012 by […]
Class warfare again from President Obama. Rejecting the Buffett Rule and Fighting Obama’s Class Warfare on CNBC April 10, 2012 by Dan Mitchell I’ve already explained why Warren Buffett is either dishonest or clueless about tax policy. Today, on CNBC, I got to debate the tax scheme that President Obama has named after the Omaha investor. […]
Getting the comedic beat right | Midnight in Paris: through its pauses |…
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I am moving the WOODY WEDNESDAY to a monthly feature on http://www.thedailyhatch.org. My passion has been in recent years to emphasize the works of Francis Schaeffer in my apologetic efforts and most of those posts are either on Tuesdays or Thursdays. If you would like to visit some of my past blog posts on WOODY ALLEN then click on some of the links below.
I have spent alot of time talking about Woody Allen films on this blog and looking at his worldview. He has a hopeless, meaningless, nihilistic worldview that believes we are going to turn to dust and there is no afterlife. Even though he has this view he has taken the opportunity to look at the weaknesses of his own secular view. I salute him for doing that. That is why I have returned to his work over and over and presented my own Christian worldview as an alternative.
During the last 30 days here are the posts that have got the most hits on my blog on this subject on the historical characters mentioned in the movie “Midnight in Paris”:
I love the movie “Midnight in Paris” by Woody Allen and I have done over 30 posts on the historical characters mentioned in the film. Take a look below:
The movie MIDNIGHT IN PARISoffers many of the same themes we see in Ecclesiastes. The second postlooked at the question: WAS THERE EVER A GOLDEN AGE AND DID THE MOST TALENTED UNIVERSAL MEN OF THAT TIME FIND TRUE SATISFACTION DURING IT?
In the third post in this series we discover in Ecclesiastes that man UNDER THE SUN finds himself caught in the never ending cycle of birth and death. The SURREALISTS make a leap into the area of nonreason in order to get out of this cycle and that is why the scene in MIDNIGHT IN PARIS with Salvador Dali, Man Ray, and Luis Bunuel works so well!!!! These surrealists look to the area of their dreams to find a meaning for their lives and their break with reality is only because they know that they can’t find a rational meaning in life without God in the picture.
The fourth post looks at the solution of WINE, WOMEN AND SONG and the fifthandsixth posts look at the solution T.S.Eliot found in the Christian Faith and how he left his fragmented message of pessimism behind. In theseventh post the SURREALISTS say that time and chance is all we have but how can that explain love or art and the hunger for God? The eighth post looks at the subject of DEATH both in Ecclesiastes and MIDNIGHT IN PARIS. In the ninth post we look at the nihilistic worldview of Woody Allen and why he keeps putting suicides into his films.
In the tenth post I show how Woody Allen pokes fun at the brilliant thinkers of this world and how King Solomon did the same thing 3000 years ago. In theeleventh postI point out how many of Woody Allen’s liberal political views come a lack of understanding of the sinful nature of man and where it originated. In thetwelfth post I look at the mannishness of man and vacuum in his heart that can only be satisfied by a relationship with God.
In the thirteenth postwe look at the life of Ernest Hemingway as pictured in MIDNIGHT AND PARIS and relate it to the change of outlook he had on life as the years passed. In the fourteenth post we look at Hemingway’s idea of Paris being a movable feast. The fifteenth andsixteenth posts both compare Hemingway’s statement, “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know…” with Ecclesiastes 2:18 “For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” The seventeenth post looks at these words Woody Allen put into Hemingway’s mouth, “We fear death because we feel that we haven’t loved well enough or loved at all.”
In MIDNIGHT IN PARIS Hemingway and Gil Pender talk about their literary idol Mark Twain and the eighteenth post is summed up nicely by Kris Hemphill‘swords, “Both Twain and [King Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes] voice questions our souls long to have answered: Where does one find enduring meaning, life purpose, and sustainable joy, and why do so few seem to find it? The nineteenth postlooks at the tension felt both in the life of Gil Pender (written by Woody Allen) in the movie MIDNIGHT IN PARIS and in Mark Twain’s life and that is when an atheist says he wants to scoff at the idea THAT WE WERE PUT HERE FOR A PURPOSE but he must stay face the reality of Ecclesiastes 3:11 that says “God has planted eternity in the heart of men…” and THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING! Therefore, the secular view that there is no such thing as love or purpose looks implausible. The twentieth post examines how Mark Twain discovered just like King Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes that there is no explanation for the suffering and injustice that occurs in life UNDER THE SUN. Solomon actually brought God back into the picture in the last chapter and he looked ABOVE THE SUN for the books to be balanced and for the tears to be wiped away.
The twenty-first post looks at the words of King Solomon, Woody Allen and Mark Twain that without God in the picture our lives UNDER THE SUN will accomplish nothing that lasts. The twenty-second postlooks at King Solomon’s experiment 3000 years that proved that luxuries can’t bring satisfaction to one’s life but we have seen this proven over and over through the ages. Mark Twain lampooned the rich in his book “The Gilded Age” and he discussed get rich quick fever, but Sam Clemens loved money and the comfort and luxuries it could buy. Likewise Scott Fitzgerald was very successful in the 1920’s after his publication of THE GREAT GATSBY and lived a lavish lifestyle until his death in 1940 as a result of alcoholism.
In the twenty-third postwe look at Mark Twain’s statement that people should either commit suicide or stay drunk if they are “demonstrably wise” and want to “keep their reasoning faculties.” We actually see this play out in the film MIDNIGHT IN PARIS with the character Zelda Fitzgerald. In the twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth posts I look at Mark Twain and the issue of racism. In MIDNIGHT IN PARIS we see the difference between the attitudes concerning race in 1925 Paris and the rest of the world.
The twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth posts are summing up Mark Twain. In the 29th post we ask did MIDNIGHT IN PARIS accurately portray Hemingway’s personality and outlook on life? and in the 30th postthe life and views of Hemingway are summed up.
In the 31st post we will observe that just like Solomon Picasso slept with many women. Solomon actually slept with over 1000 women ( Eccl 2:8, I Kings 11:3), and both men ended their lives bitter against all women and in the 32nd post we look at what happened to these former lovers of Picasso. In the 33rd post we see that Picasso deliberately painted his secular worldview of fragmentation on his canvas but he could not live with the loss of humanness and he reverted back at crucial points and painted those he loved with all his genius and with all their humanness!!! In the 34th post we notice that both Solomon in Ecclesiastes and Picasso in his painting had an obsession with the issue of their impending death!!!
Woody Allen believes that we live in a cold, violent and meaningless universe and it seems that his main character (Gil Pender, played by Owen Wilson) in the movie MIDNIGHT IN PARIS shares that view. Pender’s meeting with the Surrealists is by far the best scene in the movie because they are ones who can […]
In the last post I pointed out how King Solomon in Ecclesiastes painted a dismal situation for modern man in life UNDER THE SUN and that Bertrand Russell, and T.S. Eliot and other modern writers had agreed with Solomon’s view. However, T.S. Eliot had found a solution to this problem and put his faith in […]
In MIDNIGHT IN PARIS Gil Pender ponders the advice he gets from his literary heroes from the 1920’s. King Solomon in Ecclesiastes painted a dismal situation for modern man in life UNDER THE SUN and many modern artists, poets, and philosophers have agreed. In the 1920’s T.S.Eliot and his house guest Bertrand Russell were two of […]
Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald left the prohibitionist America for wet Paris in the 1920’s and they both drank a lot. WINE, WOMEN AND SONG was their motto and I am afraid ultimately wine got the best of Fitzgerald and shortened his career. Woody Allen pictures this culture in the first few clips in the […]
In the film MIDNIGHT IN PARIS Woody Allen the best scene of the movie is when Gil Pender encounters the SURREALISTS!!! This series deals with the Book of Ecclesiastes and Woody Allen films. The first post dealt with MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT and it dealt with the fact that in the Book of Ecclesiastes Solomon does contend […]
In the film MIDNIGHT IN PARIS Woody Allen is really looking at one main question through the pursuits of his main character GIL PENDER. That question is WAS THERE EVER A GOLDEN AGE AND DID THE MOST TALENTED UNIVERSAL MEN OF THAT TIME FIND TRUE SATISFACTION DURING IT? This is the second post I have […]
I am starting a series of posts called ECCLESIASTES AND WOODY ALLEN’S FILMS: SOLOMON “WOULD GOT ALONG WELL WITH WOODY!” The quote from the title is actually taken from the film MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT where Stanley derides the belief that life has meaning, saying it’s instead “nasty, brutish, and short. Is that Hobbes? I would have […]
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