Culture Clips - April 5, 2006
The Washington Post isn't very good at hiding its feelings about abortion when it lets its political reporters profile the Washington elite in their Style section. The latest example was a star turn for Cecile Richards, the new leader of Planned Parenthood. By gum, she's a lovable, open, down-to-earth girl, the perfect soccer mom —- who also just happens to run a chain of abortion factories.
A few weeks back, reporter Darragh Johnson began her profile of the new CEO of the nation's leading abortion provider with sympathy for her personal life. Her mother, former Texas Gov. Ann Richards (the one who taunted President Bush in 1988, and then lost to his son in 1994), is undergoing cancer treatment, but she still had advice for her granddaughter's attire for an interview with CBS for a summer internship. She needs a "new spring suit." But Mom said she would just buy her a new shirt. Johnson also makes sure to mention she's following the NCAA basketball tournament so she can talk brackets with her husband.
The puff piece ends with Richards in a Planned Parenthood shelter for teenagers in the poor northeastern section of D.C., talking with girls as they make collages out of magazine pictures, and then "playing a serious game of foosball." The last sentence on Cecile: "'OK,' she said, still leaning intently over the game, 'we'll do one more, then I'm going home to feed my kids.'"
Brent Bozell
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/brentbozell/
2006/04/05/192543.html
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Are Facts Obsolete?
What is more frightening than any particular policy or ideology is the widespread habit of disregarding facts. Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey put it this way: "Demagoguery beats data."
People who urge us to rely on the United Nations, instead of acting "unilaterally," or who urge us to follow other countries in creating a government-run medical care system, often show not the slightest interest in getting facts about the actual track record of either the UN or government-run medical systems.
Those who believe in affirmative action likewise usually see no reason to find out what actually happens under such policies, as distinguished from what they wish, hope, or imagine happens.
The crusade for "a living wage" that will enable a worker to support a family proceeds without the slightest interest in finding out whether most people who are making low wages actually have any family to support — much less seeking out the facts about what actually happens after the government sets wages.
People who have made up their minds and don't want to be confused by the facts are a danger to the whole society. Since the votes of such people count just as much as the votes of people who know what they are talking about, politicians have every incentive to pass laws and create policies that pander to ignorant notions, if those notions are widespread.
Even institutions that are set up to pass on facts — the media, schools, academia — too often treat facts as expendable and use their strategic positions to filter out facts which go against their own preconceptions.
Thomas Sowell
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/thomassowell/
2006/04/04/192338.html
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U.S. Shouldn’t Back New Plan for U.N. Human Rights Council
Franklin D. Roosevelt coined the term "United Nations" in 1942, when an alliance of democracies (with the help of the Soviet Union) was fighting the totalitarian Axis powers. FDR dreamed of a post-war world in which free people would help promote peace and make everyone safer. So how has the actual United Nations measured up to that ideal?
Look no further than its discredited Human Rights Commission.
In 1948, when Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the commission, it drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document she compared to the American Bill of Rights. But in recent years, the commission has shifted gears. It no longer attempts to protect the persecuted and the abused. Instead it serves as a shield for the planet's bloodiest, most repressive regimes.
That's because those regimes often sit as full-fledged members of the commission. Last year, notorious human-rights abusers such as Cuba, Sudan and Zimbabwe were members. Not surprisingly, the commission condemned so-called "atrocities" in Israel (the sole democratic state in the Middle East) while ignoring actual atrocities in Sudan, Myanmar and North Korea.
The commission also has failed to battle against the greatest threat to human rights today: terrorism. And it has done nothing to prevent the political and religious persecution plaguing much of the Muslim world.
Edwin J. Feulner
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/edwinfeulner/
2006/03/30/191793.html
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Religious Freedom at Bay State
Massachusetts became the battleground earlier this month for a principle that's as old as Massachusetts itself: religious freedom. On March 10, Catholic Charities in Boston announced that it would stop all of its adoption-placement work. The reason? They don't want to be in the gay-adoption business, but the government tells them they must be.
According to Catholic Charities, their adoption programs have placed some 720 children in permanent homes over the course of the past two decades. Of those, 13 children were placed with same-sex families.
Not everyone — even on the Catholic Charities' board — agreed with the adoption-pullout announcement. But for the Catholic Church in Boston, which has been hurting badly in the moral-authority department since a wave of scandals hit it in 2001, not brokering adoptions involving same-sex couples makes a good deal of sense. It's consistent with a church that's first priority should be getting back to basics — to practice what it preaches and to actually teach what it believes. Whether leaders run with the opportunity is an open question.
But the issue in the Bay State is much more basic than what the Catholic Church teaches, and is of broad-church concern. When it comes to the politics, it's not even as controversial as the "gay adoption" headlines imply. Because the political issue isn't about adoption. (In fact, if Catholic Charities no longer places any children with any gay couples, more than 50 other state-registered adoption agencies will.) It's bigger than that. It's about religious freedom. It's about the basic conscience rights English settlers arrived at Plymouth Rock in the 17th century in search of.
Mitt Romney, the Mormon governor of Massachusetts, gets that. Here's a case in Massachusetts of the "state interfering with the free practice of religion," as he's put it.
Kathryn Jean Lopez
National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/lopez/lopez200603290742.asp
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