by Hans Johnson

Christians have been at the forefront of civil rights movements over the past two centuries, from the abolition of slavery to the present-day drive to abolish abortion. So does it fall on those of a purportedly pro-life church to hold members, and leaders especially, accountable?

A pro-life group filmed Pastor Louis Chatman of the Elam Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, pull up in his Mercedes at the Reproductive Health Services abortion clinic.

He dropped off his wife Callie (pictured above right), a certified medical technician who admitted to the Christian Post that she does work there  one day a week (as a counselor).

I feel that we have all sinned. None of us are perfect. No sin is greater than any sin. I don’t know why, other than that’s the only decision [abortion] that a woman could make. That’s her right to make that decision because that’s her body.

Chatman, whose son Jerome also works there as a security guard, says her husband has no objections. Chatman also tells women about to abort their children that “God is a forgiving God.” As for those who who disapprove of her job: “You know what? The activists need to get their lives together. When they become sin-free then you call me back.”

Columnist La Shawn Barber is not buying her justification, noting that while we are not to judge, we are also to avoid the appearance of evil (much less cooperate with it).

[youtube]http://youtu.be/68tYj5HW5ao[/youtube]

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[HT: TheBlaze]

by Kelli

The NARAL Men’s Leadership Council was created to encourage pro-choice men to share their stories and show their support for reproductive rights.

We know this isn’t just a women’s issue — this is an issue that affects families and women’s partners and spouses as well.

~ Press release from NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado in which the group appears to contradict the “no uterus, no opinion” and “abortion should be between a woman and her doctor” mantras, as quoted by The Denver Post, March 4

Note: Among the listed hosts of the Men’s Leadership Council is Colorado late-term abortionist Warren Hern.

[Photo via blog.talkingphilosophy.com]

From the Investors.com article, “Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago nears fiscal free fall,” March 2:

In progressive Chicago… Moody’s has cut its credit rating to two grades above “junk.”…

The steady financial decline of the nation’s third-largest city prompted us recently to say that Chicago was well on its way to becoming the next Detroit….

[P]rospects aren’t good, as people - particularly high-income individuals and businesses - flee the city’s high taxes and stiff regulations….

People are leaving in droves, voting the only way they can in a one-party town - with their feet.

From 2000 to 2009, Chicago’s population shrank by 200,000 - the only one of the nation’s 15 largest cities to lose people. The city now has 145,000 fewer school-age children than it had more than a decade ago, according to district data, forcing the closure of about 100 schools since 2001.

Those school closures are playing a part in the embarrassing run-off election Mayor Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s former chief-of-staff, is facing, and which he may lose:

Emanuel recently emerged from the Windy City’s mayoral primary with just 45% of the vote against four opponents, forcing Chicago’s first-ever mayoral runoff. A poll taken.. Feb. 28 showed Emanuel leading second-place primary finisher Jesus “Chuy” Garcia… by a slim 42.9% to 38.5% margin.

About those school closures, from the New York Times, yesterday:

The sky-blue paint has begun to peel on the three-story building that was once Anthony Overton Elementary [pictured below]. Window air-conditioners are speckled with rust. Doors where children used to rush in and out are sealed with plywood.

The empty shell of this school on Chicago’s largely black South Side stands as a reminder of one of Rahm Emanuel’s defining acts as mayor: overseeing the closing of nearly 50 public schools deemed underperforming, underutilized or both. It was the largest closing of schools in memory, with many of them in black or Latino neighborhoods….

“It hurts,” said Earvin Wade, 55, who lives across the street. “You used to have a lot of kids there, families around. It was at the heart of our neighborhood. Now it’s nothing but an eyesore.”…

[I]n the end, it may be the education agenda that [Emanuel] proudly, defiantly and swiftly carried out that threatens his political future.

Population shrinkage and closing schools may in part be blamed on people “flee[ing] the city,” but an equally obvious reason for the decline is abortion.

Between 1995 and 2013, the dates for which Illinois county abortion breakdowns are available, a staggering 486,743 children were aborted in Cook County, accounting for 55.8% of the 872,631 abortions committed in Illinois during those 19 years.

Those are just the past two decades, with the two decades of legalized abortion before that likely the same.

The children aborted in 1973 would have been having their own children during the 1990s, so the number of lost people is compounded beyond what we see.

It is tragic that black and Hispanic neighborhoods in Chicago are blighted by empty schools. But the people themselves killed off the students. Blacks and Hispanics have a much higher rate of abortion than whites. According to Guttmacher, five times as many blacks as whites get abortions, and two times as many Hispanics as whites.

And abortion is just one social ill contributing to Chicago’s demise.

“In Chicago, 51% of children live in single-parent homes,” notes the Chicago Tribune.

Had Democrats in charge of the city since 1931 embraced conservative social values and encouraged premarital abstinence and stronger two-parent married families, the children allowed to live would not be “underperforming” in school to the extent that they are, along with being the victims of other societal plagues.

Such as murder, which unstable homes contribute to. Quoting Pew Research:

In terms of raw number of murders, Chicago has long been at or near the top of U.S. cities, according to FBI crime statistics. In 2012, it had 500 murders, the most of any city in the country; Chicago has been among the top three cities with the most murders since 1985.

Will the people wake up? But politicians aren’t the answer. They’re part of the problem.

Churches with their theological act together are really Chicago’s only hope.

[HT gerfingerpoken on Twitter for Investors.com article; top photo via Politico; bottom photo via New York Times]

by Hans Johnson

Students for Life at Ryerson has lost its last appeal to form a pro-life club at Ryerson University in Toronto. An email after the unanimous rejection said the Ryerson Students’ Union “opposes… groups, meetings, or events that promote misogynist views towards woman (sic) and ideologies that promote gender inequity, challenges women’s right (sic) to bodily autonomy, or justifies (sic) sexual assault.”

But Carter Grant, vice-president of SFLR, answers:

Our club stands for human rights for all human beings, including those at the earliest stages of life. We also want to support pregnant students on campus who want alternatives to abortion. If the student union is going to accuse students of serious things like misogyny, they should be prepared to explain the basis for that. We are still waiting for that explanation.

With the help of counsel, it is hoped the university administration will acknowledge that allowing a pro-choice group while excludeing a pro-life one does not comport with the freedom of expression.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/t3QDOrwPHdw[/youtube]

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[HT: Big Blue Wave]

by Carder

Your wife is experiencing pain beyond belief and you’re complaining that your back hurts from leaning over her bed to hold her hand? Dumb move, dude (I speak from experience here). This is a sure-fire way to earn the death look of the century and a gnarly scolding after the birth. Keep your discomforts to yourself and offer them up for your wife and baby.

My wife nearly broke my hand and dislocated my arm once during an intense contraction. But I learned to keep my mouth shut and offered up the pain.

~ Stay-at-home dad Rich Lamm explaining rule number 1 on his list of do’s and dont’s during labor, Epic Pew, March 2

[Photo via The Bump]

In my post yesterday, “NOLA Planned Parenthood resumes construction; contractor says will walk for payoff,” I wrote that Absolute Concrete Services had not returned my calls requesting comment.

Today, Ronald Backes did.

Ronald is the son of Melvin and Linda Backes, and he clarified that Linda solely owns Absolute Concrete Services (which I said I’d correct), and he works for her. He said his parents are divorced.

Ronald wasn’t present to hear the conversation between his parents and Pastor Shanks, but he denies they made these comments Pastor Shanks attributed to them:

Melvin told him, “This is just business. If you give me $20,000, I’ll tear up the contract.”…

[Linda] told him she supported abortion and Planned Parenthood, adding, “If we let these babies live, they’ll just grow up and kill us.”

Ronald said there is no contract, but the concrete job is worth much more than $20,000, although he wouldn’t say how much.

Our conversation lasted over an hour.

I indicated Ronald was on the wrong side of history and that he would in part be responsible for the the 2,844 preborn children Planned Parenthood says it will kill at the clinic each year.

Ronald said he has no say, that his mother owns the company, but they are both “pro-choice.” I told him he could walk away. He said he wouldn’t.

Ronald kept dwelling on the fact that abortion is legal, even though I pointed out there are plenty of instances in U.S. and global history when something was legal but wrong.

Ronald also said, “A cement job has nothing to do with who is building. It’s just a job. It’s Planned Parenthood’s right.” I responded that he will be a collaborator, and the blood will indeed be on his hands as it will be with any other contractor that helps Planned Parenthood.

Ronald, in turn, blamed pro-lifers.

“Let me tell you something,” said Ronald. “We were on the balance beam, and when the pro-life people jumped the gun, that’s what made me take the job. Pro-life people made me pour this. The blood is going to be on their hands.”

I can’t tell you how pro-lifers found out Absolute Concrete Services was pouring the cement, but it was after the company had agreed.

I appealed to Ronald’s legacy, that his family name would be dirt in New Orleans.

We went round and round. At one point Ronald agreed babies were human before they were born, and at another point he said he didn’t know when they became human. He brought up the war, death penalty, rape, and incest.

I told Ronald there was still time, that four other concrete contractors had turned down the job, and he could still walk away, but he said it was something his mother wanted done, and he was doing it.

“We will pour cement for anyone anyone comes through this door,” he said.

Really? Would he pour concrete for the Nazi gas chambers, slave quarters, or for the KKK, I asked?

Ronald said I was being ridiculous.

I told him it may sound like a cliché, but I would be praying for him. And I really will.

And I ask all of you to as well.

by Susie Allen, host of the blog, Pro-Life in TN, and Kelli

• Live Action News says the new interactive game “Fusion” (on a website that includes writers like the founding editor of pro-abortion, profane Jezebel) in which players pretend to lead a South Dakota woman through several supposedly real-life scenarios – but they all suggest abortion is the correct answer to the dilemma. Hmm, no agenda there:
  

  What if the woman does choose to keep the baby?

  If she chooses to have the woman keep the baby, then she either still ends up having the abortion because of a partial placental abruption, or she has the baby and ends up sick, in premature labor, and with mountains of debt.

• Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life points out that the United Nations – which ignores the “discriminatory killing of female children through sex-selective abortion and infanticide” – has designated March 1st as Zero Discrimination Day. MCCL “implores all nations to… speak out against the denial of health care to the needy and elderly, and to stand up for the disabled who are pushed toward euthanasia and assisted suicide.”
• Kansans for Life responds to abortion supporters’ desperate attempts to link a dismemberment abortion bill to miscarriage management:
  

  On the actual issue of SB 95 – the barbarity of dismemberment – we have heard mostly silence from abortion supporters, with an implicit (or explicit) denial that a baby could feel pain at having his or her body demolished one piece at a time.

  Do abortion supporters expect that the same public that wholeheartedly supports humane treatment for animals will excuse what happens to a human baby in this kind of abortion?

• 40 Days for Life discusses fasting (usually less emphasized than prayer), with suggestions for five different forms of fasting in which Christians can participate.
• Down on the Pharm shows us how the issue of illegal immigration has become a pro-life issue as the Department of Health and Human Services will begin paying for unaccompanied minors’ abortions. This should help to line the pockets of Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers.

• Abstinence Clearinghouse says the person to blame for society’s fascination with things like 50 Shades of Grey is “researcher” Alfred Kinsey:
  

  Kinsey’s distorted and fictional views of human sexuality has had a direct negative impact on the nation’s morality over the past several decades. [Judith] Reisman believes that the releases of this movie is the perfect opportunity for Congress to step in an begin an investigation of Kinsey’s research methods and results. To read Reisman’s full article on her allegations against Kinsey, click here.

• Expose Abortion features an interesting quote from pro-choice feminist Naomi Wolf on the pro-life movement’s use of the images of abortion victims:
  

  So what will it be: Wanted fetuses are charming, complex, REM-dreaming little beings whose profile on the sonogram looks just like Daddy, but unwanted ones are mere ‘uterine material’? How can we charge that it is vile and repulsive for pro-lifers to brandish vile and repulsive images if the images are real? To insist that the truth is in poor taste is the very height of hypocrisy.

[Images via pinterest.com and lifesitenews.com]

by Hans Johnson

Pro-Life Texas has released the first in a planned series of videos centering on the “what ifs” of all the lives lost through abortion. The producer and writer, curiously enough, were rejected by the crowd-sourcing company Kickstarter just like the filmmakers of the upcoming Kermit Gosnell movie:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/hlb1XC4zPMM[/youtube]

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