February 2007

On The Wire... Let us stop pretending all is well. --"joe"

 The modern day abortion rights movement began as the American Birth Control League in 1921. Among its founding board members were Margaret Sanger, Lothrup Stoddard, and C. C. Little. The latter two people were  known for their racist views, but Margaret Sanger continually shows up  in the company of other racists. In fact, she was the guest speaker at  a Ku Klux Klan rally in Silver Lake, N. J. in 1926.1 Not only did she not disassociate herself from these racist views, her own writings leave little doubt as to her sympathies. In implementing a plan called the "Negro Project," that was designed to sterilize Blacks and reduce the number of Black children being born in the south, Sanger wrote: "(we propose to) hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. And we do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." 2

   Sanger also viewed welfare as a detriment to society because it increased the number of poor blacks and foreigners. "Organized charity (modern welfare) is the symptom of a malignant social disease… increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the 'failure' of philanthropy, but rather at its success."3 The urban poor, and their increasing numbers, she called, "an ever widening margin of biological waste."4 Welfare, she believed, encouraged the breeding of the poor, or "human waste," as she called them. She feared that welfare would encourage the urban poor to give birth to those "stocks that are the most detrimental to the future of the race…"5 Therefore, she believed the government should actively encourage the sterilization of those who are unfit to propagate the race, using as her motto: "More (children) from the fit, less from the unfit."6

   Margaret Sanger also continued to advocate for her racial prejudices in her magazine, Birth Control Review. In six successive issues of that magazine, she advocated limiting the racial quotas of immigration of "Slavs, Hebrews, and Latins,"7 because of their lower intelligence! Although Ms. Sanger was the editor of the magazine, she shared its pages with the racist co-founders of the American Birth Control League. Board member Lothrup Stoddard wrote the racist book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World- Supremacy  8, which was reviewed favorably in Birth Control Review.9 Co- founder and board member, C. C. Little, was president of the Third Race Betterment Conference. He advocated preserving the purity of "Yankee stock" through limiting the births of non-Whites.10

  Margaret Sanger was also strongly anti-Semitic. She started a similar birth control organization with a man named Henry Pratt Fairchild, who wrote The Melting Pot Mistake, in which he accused "the Jews" of diluting the true American stock.11 In his book, Race and Nationality, (1947), Fairchild blamed anti-Semitism and the holocaust in part on "the Jews."12

   Finally, Margaret Sanger and her organization began to be primary sponsors of eugenics during her lifetime. But because she had associated herself with Adolph Hitler, praising him for his racial politics of eugenics, she changed the name of American Birth Control League to Planned Parenthood during WWII in order to disguise her racist past.13 Today, her organization, Planned Parenthood, is still  in the forefront of advocating abortion as a means of eliminating the unwanted and "unfit." Not only does the organization perform thousands abortions each year, it also receives 100's of millions of tax dollars each year through Federal and State Governments.14 And rather than being in the forefront of a woman's right to choose,  International Planned Parenthood is a primary advocate for the Chinese Government's policy of forcing women to have abortions against their will, and it also advocates for the sterilization of Third World non-Whites across the globe.15 It seems that PP is "pro-choice" when trying to impress the U.S. media, but anti-choice in the actual implementation of its world-wide agenda.

   But has Planned Parenthood changed? It is significant to note that Planned Parenthood has never distanced itself from the vision and ideology of its founder. Successive presidents of the organization have praised her work, including Faye Wattleton, who said, "As we celebrate the 100th birthday of Margaret Sanger, our courageous  leader… we should be very proud of what we are and what our mission is. It is a very grand mission… abortion is only the tip of the iceberg."16 (Editor's note: Remember the director of Waco's Planned Parenthood, Pam Smallwood's statement, "Margaret Sanger was a courageous woman who was passionate about ensuring all people have access to quality healthcare - especially people with limited means.")

   Planned Parenthood painted abortion as a compassionate and caring alternative to childbirth. Their motivation however may be altogether different. It seems that abortion still today, rather than being seen as a way of helping the poor and minorities, is considered the easiest solution for our economic problems: Don't help the poor - just eliminate them.

Footnotes:

1          Emily Taft Douglas, Margaret Sanger; Pioneer of the Future, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, N.Y., 1970, p. 192.

2         Margaret Sanger, letter to Clarence Gamble, Oct. 19,1939. - Sanger manuscripts, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.

3         Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, Brentano's, N.Y., 1922, p. 108.

       4       Ibid. p.134.

       5       Ibid. pp. 116-117.

6         Ibid. p.104 & 179.

7         Birth Control Review article "Racial Quotas in Immigration," Margaret Sanger, editor, Aug. 1920, pp. 9-10. Article continues in next 5 issues.

8        Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, Grossman, N.Y., 1976, p. 283.

9        Birth Control Review, Margaret Sanger, editor, Oct. 1920.

10    Gordon, Woman's Body, p. 283.

11     Fairchild, The Melting Pot Mistake, 1926, pp. 212 ff.

12     Fairchild, Race and Nationality, 1947, pp. 137-161, esp. p. 147. 1

13     Gordon, Woman's Body, p. 347.

14     Based on 1984 figures compiled by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, Issues in Brief, 4:1 (March 1984).

15     Planned Parenthood Review, 5:1 (winter 1984/85) & 2:4 (winter 1982), p. 16. Report of the Working Group on the Promotion of Family Planning as a Basic Human Right, International  Planned Parenthood Federation, London, 1984, pp. 21-23.

16     Faye Wattleton, president Planned Parenthood Federation of America, speech, February 5, 1979.

The room was dark,

The room was drear,

And all I could feel

Was a rush of fear.

The shades were down,

And it was hard to see,

But I could hear her heart beat,

And it comforted me.

In The Mailbag… A shout-out from a “joe” in Florida. This is his "letter to the Editor"  –“joe”

Their world is this closed, self-contained and defenseless universe, away from the cattle cars escorted by uniformed soldiers, guard dogs, barbed wire, and glaring search lights.  There is no head shaving, tattooed numbers or a comprehensible hierarchy of discrimination, for all are welcome. The machine went into action in 1973.  New arrivals come every day, not knowing the fate before them, to a factory giving the illusion of hope, but offering the reality of death.  I can only show you the outer shell, the surface, of this killing factory where dreams are lost forever, for most don't want to hear about the gruesome details.  The messages of "choice" and "private family health care decisions" are make believe, because behind the facade is a tally up to the days victims.  What hope do I have in truly capturing this reality, even though 50 million dead haunt our countryside, yet few among us keeps watch from the non or partially born watchtower. Most turn a blind eye to what happens around us, as it has become "old news," not worthy of reporting.  No less deranged than that of their slogan "choice is freedom," the killing factories have their sacrificial ground protected not by machine guns, but by a narrow Supreme Court decision and the mockers of God's glory and absolute truth.   --Barry Willoughby

On The Wire...  The answer is yes. We must continue to work so that laws will make more of a difference. --"joe"

Do pro-life laws make a difference?

From Rebecca Hagelin    WorldNet Daily

For 34 years, it's been legal in America for mothers to kill their pre-born babies. It's difficult to imagine that the culture my teenagers and so many young adults have grown up in has been this culture of death – they simply have no other frame of reference. Yet, even at the tender age of 14, knowing no other America but one in which abortion is legal, my daughter doesn't understand why our nation allows such a heinous act to be inflicted on the innocent and voiceless. Common sense tells her it's wrong. How can it be, she wonders? I have no answers.

It seems we don't hear much about this national disgrace anymore – no visual protests (other than the March for Life) or rescues grab headlines as they did in the late '80s. But many brave warriors for the innocent are gaining ground – small victories you don't really hear about. For instance, pro-life legislators in South Dakota have again introduced a bill that would protect the pre-born from almost all "excuses" for abortion. Last year a similar bill passed the Legislature but was narrowly defeated in a voter referendum.

There also is good news on the national front: We're close to having a Supreme Court composed of a majority of justices who may see fit to overturn Roe v. Wade, should the right case appear before them. Also heartening is the great work being done on the state level to protect young women from the horror of abortion wherever possible. We can take hope in knowing that parental notification, informed consent and other such laws are effective in saving lives and in saving unsuspecting women from committing the unthinkable on their own babies.

According to a just-published Heritage Foundation paper by Michael New, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama, four types of pro-life laws have reduced the number of abortions. Laws dealing with parental involvement, informed consent, Medicaid funding restrictions and partial-birth abortion bans work.

The number of legal abortions declined by 18.4 percent during the 1990s. What effect did these laws have? The number of such laws rose dramatically in the '90s. In 1992, for example, 20 states enforced parental-involvement statutes; by 2000, 32 did. In 1992, virtually no states had informed-consent laws (which stipulate that women are to be given medical facts about their unborn children and told about alternatives to abortion); by 2000, 27 states had such laws. And no state in 1992 prohibited partial-birth abortions; a dozen had done so by 2000.

Dr. New's research reveals that Medicaid funding restrictions and parental-involvement laws made the biggest difference in curtailing abortions among minors. Laws mandating that parents be notified reduced the minor abortion rate by an average of 1.67 abortions per 1,000 females between the ages of 13 and 17. States with Medicaid funding restrictions in place saw 2.34 fewer abortions per 1,000. Doesn't sound like a lot? To me, those numbers mean little girls my daughter's age were spared the life-long trauma of having killed their own babies. Those numbers represent toddlers and grade-school children who otherwise would be dead.

Professor New's conclusion may seem obvious. Pro-life laws were passed, the number of abortions dropped, so there must be a connection. But like any analyst worth his salt, New knows that correlation isn't the same as causation. We need proof. After all, one could just as easily say that the abortion drop occurred because public opinion began shifting against abortion. Such a shift would prompt voters to elect pro-life politicians who would, in turn, pass pro-life laws. Ultimately, the theory goes, we can credit the shift in opinion, not the laws.

New compared the abortion rate among minors to the overall abortion rate in each category and found that the laws deserve much of the credit. Take informed-consent laws. If the drop in abortions came from a general change in values, we could expect to see roughly equal reductions in the abortion rate for adults and for minors. Instead, we find states with informed-consent laws experiencing a drop in the overall abortion rates twice as large as the reduction among minors. As New explains:

If minors seek abortions because they do not want to reveal their pregnancy or sexual activity to their parents, informed-consent laws that give them information about the development of their unborn children and private and public sources of support may have little impact on their decisions. Yet if adults seek abortions for reasons that are different from those of minors, such as financial hardship, informed-consent laws could have a larger impact on them. This provides further evidence that legislation is influencing decisions.

New doesn't completely dismiss the effect of public opinion, which has generally moved in a pro-life direction over the last 20 years. In the social sciences, you can't conduct perfect, lab-quality experiments. But New demonstrates that pro-life laws have helped reduce the number of abortions. And that offers some small ray of hope to those of us who work and pray for the day when abortion again is declared illegal – not only because it destroys life, but because it victimizes the women who turn to it in desperation and fear.

"We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life – the unborn – without diminishing the value of all human life," Ronald Reagan once said. Let's remember that as we continue our efforts to protect the lives of the most helpless Americans among us.

 On The Wire... These men are standing up and speaking out for their faith. They are working hard to keep God in the picture. --"joe"

Colts' coach more proud of Christ than 'blackness' When asked about social significance of Dungy's victory, Jesus is answer By Joe Kovacs © 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

Super Bowl XLI had been hyped as a major social milestone in U.S. history, since for the time, the head coaches of both teams were black. But when the game was over and the Indianapolis Colts had defeated the Chicago Bears 29-17, the winning coach said Jesus Christ was more important than any racial moment.

During the nationally televised post-game show on CBS, coach Tony Dungy was asked specifically about the "social significance."

Jim Nantz of CBS Sports: "This is one of those moments, Tony, where there is also social significance in this victory, and to have your hands on the Vince Lombardi Trophy. Tell me what this means to you right now."

Tony Dungy: "I'll tell you what. I'm proud to be representing African-American coaches, to be the first African-American to win this. It means an awful lot to our country. But again, more than anything, I've said it before, Lovie Smith and I, not only the first two African-Americans, but Christian coaches showing that you can win doing it the Lord's way. And we're more proud of that."

The Associated Press reported Dungy's comments about God in stories it moved on its wire service, but the Bloomberg News Service only published the portion regarding African-Americans, and edited out the mention of Christian coaches.

Colts' owner Jim Irsay credited God with the victory as he held the sparkling Vince Lombardi trophy in his hands.  "Now there's an awful lot of shining glory, even more than last time up here," Irsay said. "But we're giving it all to God again because that's what got us here... sticking together and believing that we could, and I know God has looked after us on this journey and bonded us into such a tight family."

Dungy has had a close relationship with Bears' head coach Lovie Smith since 1996, when Dungy hired Smith to coach linebackers for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. "My relationship, first, is with Jesus Christ, and he is the center of my life," said Smith when asked about his faith earlier this week. "I try to live a Christian life. I would like for players to know my faith based on what they see on a day-to-day basis."

CBS anchor James Brown, himself a strong believer in Jesus Christ, told the Baptist Press this year's Super Bowl could be a welcome change in a sport that hasn't had that many Christian players and announcers in the past. "Personally, I'm gratified to see that change," Brown said. "I think their faith is a wonderful example to see and I think both men are sterling examples of what character coaches should be. That's what we should be promoting."

  In The Mail Bag... This "joe" is looking for answers. What I am trying to tell him is that healing comes from within. --"joe" 

  In answer to your question, “truth seeker joe”: you will never forget about the role you played in your abortion crisis.  Simply stated we never completely forget our past. This is impossible as long as there are people, places,  things and un-folding events which serve to remind you of your loss daily. A playground, the sight of a child,  smells, children’s laughter.. all these and many more may serve to trigger emotional responses, even if only on a sub-conscious level. What can happen, what you can do, is that you can learn to cope with your past.

Learn through your mistakes. Anger, bitterness and hopelessness are not the tools which you need or must utilize now to heal. A couple of key words in the process are accept... and forgive. You must first accept responsibility for your actions or in-actions. Second, you must know that you are already forgiven, and so you must forgive.

Life can and will come at one hard and fast, but if one looks to God, and meets his or her life on honest, even terms, one can survive. –“joe”

For help in finding answers, start here: Fatherhood Forever

In The Air...   There has been a lot of activity in the "Average Joe" Schriner Presidential Campaign. Get informed and get aboard!

Joe and his family have been busy touring America in the hopes of bringing awareness to his grassroots presidential campaign. In Arizona and Colorado, North Dakota... there is a positive air everywhere the road tours take him because Joe Schriner is what America needs and has been waiting for even if we do not know it. Domestic policy; the economy; taxes; foreign policy... Joe Schriner has something to say about the things you need to know, and he comes to you with a fresh perspective that can only come from a real stand-up American.

Check out his current Road Tours at: Joe on The Road .  

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--"joe"

In The Mailbag... From our friend in the land Down-Under. Peter Erbacher is a staunch supporter of life, who firmly believes there exists not a bridge that cannot be taken. --"Joe"