An update on the culture wars from around the interwebs.
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Over at First Things, Kenneth Craycraft has a sobering rundown on one of Biden’s top picks in a piece titled “Why Biden Picked Xavier Becerra”:
As California AG, Becerra has been a tool of the abortion industry. Biden has rewarded the pro-choice lobby’s support of his candidacy by appointing Planned Parenthood’s unofficial spokesman and advocate. The Becerra pick has nothing to do with health care policy in the United States, and everything to do with enforcing a radical abortion agenda.
With a BA in economics and a law degree from Stanford University, Becerra has no credentials or expertise in medicine, public health, or any other discipline related to health care services. A career politician in California state and federal government, his sole “qualification” for the head of the federal bureaucracy charged with national health care policy is his aggressive pro-abortion activism. And Becerra’s nomination as head of HHS demonstrates that unfettered access to publicly funded abortion will be at the center of a Biden Administration’s public “health” policy agenda. This will be Becerra’s beat, and if confirmed, he will be ruthless in executing it.
Becerra sued the Little Sisters of the Poor, defended the use of organ-harvesting on aborted babies, and earned perfect scores from every abortion group. The Democrats’ version of unity, as usual, is “shut up and accept our agenda.”
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Another tragic decision on assisted suicide:
Austria’s constitutional court ruled on Friday that the country was violating fundamental rights in ruling assisted suicide illegal and ordered the government to lift the ban in 2021. Several individuals — including two terminally ill people and a doctor — had brought the case before the court, demanding a ruling in the staunchly Catholic EU state.
“The decision consciously to take one’s own life must be respected by the legislator,” court president Christoph Grabenwarter told reporters, while stressing the choice had to be made “freely, without any outside influence”. Currently, assisted dying is punishable by up to five years in prison.
Again, doctors are being give the right to facilitate death. We really do never learn.
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Dr. Charles Camosy of Fordham University—and a eminent scholar on the abortion issue—explains why the Democrats continue to misread the public on abortion in the New York Daily News:
One issue that seems to infect every level of our politics, and lies at the heart of the structural problems Democrats are facing, is abortion. Significantly, the average working-class Hispanic or Black American is significantly more skeptical of abortion than is your average white progressive. This issue has been brought to the fore in 2020 as groups like Planned Parenthood have been forced to reckon with how their racist and eugenic past relates to their contemporary problems with racism.
Enter New Jersey’s Gov. Phil Murphy — a rich, white progressive — who chose this particular cultural moment to champion just about the most extreme piece of pro-abortion (not just pro-choice) legislation one could imagine. Don’t believe me? Read the bill for yourself.
“Abortion care” would be made legal for “pregnant individuals” right “throughout the course of their pregnancy.” The proposed law also insists that the “fetus,” including when she can feel pain, “shall not have independent rights under the laws of this state.”
So no limits on abortion of any kind, and a requirement that private insurance companies cover birth control and abortion with no out-of-pocket costs. Plus the prenatal child is made into a legal non-entity. Her reality — which includes a four-chambered heart beating at seven weeks, pain in the second trimester, and responding to the voices of her parents totally erased from the concerns of New Jersey law. This absurdly anti-science bill would be laughable if it didn’t have a serious chance of passing through the progressive Jersey legislature.
We’re seeing the battle lines on abortion being drawn with increasing starkness, with pro-life states restricting abortion to the greatest extent legally possible, and pro-abortion states responding by making abortion available throughout all nine months of pregnancy and funded by the taxpayer. When it comes to abortion, there really is two Americas.
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More soon.