This Week In Doom: Crunchy Yummy Babies And A New Circle Of Hell
July 25, 2015 / Briggs / 8 Comments
 At a Planned Parenthood auction.
There’s not much to enjoy about this week’s doom, except to note that things are speeding up. Perhaps we need a pseudo-quantified measure of our acceleration into the abyss?
Crunchy Yummy
From the Center for Inquiry’s (the group that used to be CSICOP) Cause & Effect Friday email:
Fighting Back Against the Scheme to Take Down Planned Parenthood
The religious right, in its zeal to take away women’s rights to make their own reproductive decisions, has long sought to bring about the end of Planned Parenthood, a vital organization that provides a wide variety of necessary health services, including HIV and cancer screenings, to millions of women. The latest manifestation of this campaign took the form of heavily doctored “undercover” videos that falsely purported to implicate Planned Parenthood in the selling of fetal body parts for profit. These deceptively edited videos have given religious right allies in Congress the fodder they seek to strike a potentially fatal blow to Planned Parenthood, with threats of legislation that would end all federal funding to this important organization.
As skeptics who believe in the importance of facts, we want to help make it clear that these video “stings” are ideological propaganda, and their claims have no basis in reality. Fetal tissue, freely donated to medical research by fully informed patients, has long provided incredible possibilities for discovering treatments for some of the cruelest diseases that afflict human beings, such as Parkinson’s. Under current law, such tissue cannot be sold, but “reasonable payments associated with the transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, or storage” can be made. That was all these deceptive videos showed. The New York Times editorialized this week, “Lawmakers responding by promoting their own anti-choice agenda are rewarding deception and putting women’s health and their constitutionally protected rights at risk.”
Let’s not let this underhanded scheme undo a great organization that provides such crucial health services to so many women. Tell your Members of Congress to stop the attacks on Planned Parenthood, and to stand up for women’s health and women’s rights.
This rather depressed me. And you have to feel sorry for these folks. So determined are they to hold onto immorality, that any evidence, even that which is false, is sufficient. They eagerly jettison reason, logic, observation, everything. “Heavily doctored” videos forsooth! They create that absurdity—the videos are plain and easily seen to be so—and then use it to imply to themselves that “editing” means “lies.” This gives them excuse not to watch the videos—and thus it removes the need to confront evil.
For the sake of completeness: killing a life inside a mother is not a “health service”, it is the opposite. A “women’s rights to make their own reproductive decisions” cannot be made in isolation of the man who impregnated her, and the “right” to kill her child is the point in dispute. If, as should happen in a just country, Planned Parenthood disappeared, women would still be able to get mammographies etc.
Utilitarianism (a tenet of liberalism and libetarianism) must lead, and has led, to tyranny and evil: the ends cannot justify the means. The law does not and cannot decide what is evil or immoral. Of course, when the law fails to conform to human nature, as ours does, then the end must come. It is only a question of when. If Planned Parenthood gets away with this, which is likely, it will be much sooner than later.
Done With Dante
Dante’s Divine Comedy ‘offensive and should be banned’
The classic work should be removed from school curricula, according to Gherush 92, a human rights organisation which acts as a consultant to UN bodies on racism and discrimination.
Dante’s epic is “offensive and discriminatory” and has no place in a modern classroom, said Valentina Sereni, the group’s president…
“The Prophet Mohammed was subjected to a horrific punishment — his body was split from end to end so that his entrails dangled out, an image that offends Islamic culture,” she said.
Homosexuals are damned by the work as being “against nature” and condemned to an eternal rain of fire in Hell.
I’m offended that thinking Islam might be offended should justify that Dante should be banned. Therefore the UN may not ban. Homosexuals aren’t damned: those who commit homosexual acts, which are obviously against nature, and do not seek forgiveness are damned. As we all are unless we also ask for grace.
The Past Is History
Activist group shovels ground at Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s grave
On July 22 a group of protesters from the Commission on Religion and Racism (CRR) used a shovel and “dug up a patch of grass next to” Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Memphis statue, saying they hope others “follow suit and dig him up.”
NAACP still pushing to sandblast Confederate leaders from Stone Mountain
Once the Confederate Battle Flag came down on the grounds of the South Carolina Capitol complex, the Left had won their great victory and everyone could go home and get on with their lives, right? (I’ll pause for a moment so everyone can finish laughing.) Of course not. Nothing is ever truly going to be enough, and the NAACP has been on a push for more than a week with a larger target in mind. A much, much larger target. They would like the 90 by 190 foot sculpture at Stone Mountain Park in Georgia sandblasted from the face of the mountain. Rising 400 feet above the ground, it’s the largest, highest outdoor relief sculpture in the world and depicts Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
Orwell says, “There was never a Confederacy.” Yet another symptom of believing “truth” is decided by the powerful.
One Party Shall Rule Them All
Ted Cruz on the Senate floor: Mitch McConnell’s a liar and our new majority is a cronyist fraud
Sample quote: “[This majority] does get things done, but it listens to one and only one voice: That is, the voice of the Washington cartel, of the lobbyists on K Street, of the big money and big corporations.” This guy is talking about his own caucus.
Prediction about the effect of this speech: none. There is also thus no reason to discuss the Iran deal.
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