UPDATE: Kermit Gosnell Found Guilty of Murder

Thankfully the author of the NY Times article below gets the point:

“Put simply, [pro-lifers] asked why a procedure done to a living baby outside the womb is murder, but destroying a fetus of similar gestation before delivery can be legal.”

To be fair, pro-abortionists would likely maintain that the difference is that the one in the mother’s womb isn’t a human being, but the one 8″ past the birth canal is. If the Kermit Gosnell trial has taught us anything it is that it’s fine to suction the limbs off an unborn child inside the mother’s womb, heck, snip a spine if you’ve got to, but don’t dare do any of those things a mere 8″ more south. Then, and only then, are you guilty of murder.

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NY Times: Philadelphia Abortion Doctor Guilty of Murder in Late-Term Procedures

BBC: Kermit Gosnell guilty of three murders in late-term abortions

IB Times: Abortionist Kermit Gosnell Found Guilty Of Three Murder Counts

An Allegory of an Aggressive Agenda

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Qwerky Quotes for the Inquisitive: Brendan O’Neill on the Gay Marriage Movement

In light of the manufactured excitement over the non-event that was the “coming out” of NBA player Jason Collins and the instantaneous attack on ESPN commentator and Christian Chris Broussard for daring to have a different opinion (on TV no less), this fantastic quote deserves to be considered…

“In truth, the extraordinary rise of gay marriage speaks, not to a new spirit of liberty or equality on a par with the civil-rights movements of the 1960s, but rather to the political and moral conformism of our age; to the weirdly judgmental non-judgmentalism of our PC times; to the way in which, in an uncritical era such as ours, ideas can become dogma with alarming ease and speed; to the difficulty of speaking one’s mind or sticking with one’s beliefs at a time when doubt and disagreement are pathologised. Gay marriage brilliantly shows how political narratives are forged these days, and how people are made to accept them. This is a campaign that is elitist in nature, in the sense that, in direct contrast to those civil-rights agitators of old, it came from the top of society down; and it is a campaign which is extremely unforgiving of dissent or disagreement, implicitly, softly demanding acquiescence to its agenda.”

- Brendan O’Neill, excerpt from his article Gay marriage: a case study in conformism

New dating methods result in a 2000 year old date for the Shroud of Turin

Reblogged from Theo-sophical Ruminations:

The Shroud of Turin – the purported burial cloth of Jesus which contains the faint image of a crucified man – was the subject of intense scientific examination in the mid 1980s.  Based on a carbon-14 dating of the fibers, scientists dated the shroud to A.D. 1260-1390.  For most, this was all the proof they needed to conclude that the shroud was a medieval forgery.

Read more… 210 more words

The Shroud has been a point of personal interest to me, as a piece of history, art, and religion. New tests have come to some interesting conclusions... FYI Joshua / NAA

The Pro-Abortion Rhetoric Primer Poster

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US President Barack Obama’s address to Planned Parenthood on the subject of “women’s health” was a masterpiece… of deceptive rhetoric. Not once in during the entire speech did he mention abortion.

Why?

This question is especially important since Planned Parenthood performed a record number of abortions (333,964) and profits ($87.4 million in excess revenue and $1.265 billion in net assets [!]) in the 2011-2012 fiscal year (2011-2012 Annual Report here).

It’s simple to understand. This is merely a rhetorical game to blind the public to the reality of what on-demand abortion actually is. Even pro-abortion advocates from the ’70s admit this:

“The process of eroding the old ethic and substituting the new has already begun. It may be seen most clearly in changing attitudes toward human abortion. In defiance of the long held Western ethic of intrinsic and equal value for every human life regardless of its stage, condition, or status, abortion is becoming acceptable by society as moral, right, and even necessary… since the old ethic has not been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra- or extra-uterine until death. The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices. It is suggested that this schizophrenic sort of subterfuge is necessary because while a new ethic is being accepted the old one has not yet been rejected.”

- California Medicine 113, no.3 (1970), reprinted in The Human Life Review 1, no.1 (1975): 103-4.

How odd that an organization would perform hundreds of thousands of abortions a year when its founder would have called it “a disgrace to civilization”…

Magic Microbes-to-Microbiologists Mix

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Carelessly and aimlessly mixed by the cold, withered hand of Mother Nature herself. Just add water and wait a few billion years. Those microbes will magically become microbiologists! No information or other external input needed.

Qwerky Quotes for the Inquisitive: Masha Gessen

“It’s a no-brainer that [homosexual] should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist.

…

[F]ighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there — because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie.”

- Masha Gessen, lesbian journalist, 2012 Sydney Writers’ Festival

Note:

I recommend that readers take the time to listen to the panel discussion linked above. In it, you will hear monogamy ridiculed — even laughed at — and candid admissions from nearly all the panelists that they don’t want marriage of the future to mean what it is today (which is, essentially, life-long monogamy). One panelist, Dennis Altman, a gay man and gay rights activist himself, says that monogamous homosexual relationships don’t really exist.

Qwerky Quotes for the Inquisitive: Scott Klusendorf

“Men and women, I am here to concede today that my opponent has won this debate. She’s right! We shouldn’t restrict abortion for any reason. There should be no laws passed against it. Abortion should remain legal through all nine months of pregnancy as is currently allowable. In addition to that, even partial birth abortion ought to be allowed. Even a procedure that ends the life of a human fetus in the process of being born ought to be allowed legally and morally. Furthermore, I wish to concede that I have lost this debate before it has begun. In other words, I’m standing up in front of all of you to concede that my opponent has won… if the unborn are not human. And if [my debate opponent] can demonstrate that the unborn are not human using scientific and philosophic reasoning, I will concede that this debate is won by her side of the issue and I’ll be the first to join her in her adventure to keep abortion legal.

…

If [my debate opponent] can show us that the unborn are, in fact, not human, she wins this debate. And I can’t wait to see what scientific evidence she’s going to present to make her case. Let’s wait to see what she has to say.”

- Scott Klusendorf Pro-Life Ethics lecture [10:32]

Klusendorf highlights in his short lecture that abortion is not about “choice”, but about correctly identifying the unborn. Simply put: “What are the unborn?”

A View on the Silent Screams and Cruel Casualties of Modern-Day Genocide

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The trial of Kermit Gosnell has brought to light the true face of the victims of abortion. It is also a fine time for us to read and share a horrific description of what happens during a legal abortion procedure as recalled by former director of a Planned Parenthood office in Texas Abby Johnson in her book “Unplanned”:

At first, the baby didn’t seem aware of the cannula. It gently probed the baby’s side, and for a quick second I felt relief. Of course, I thought. The fetus doesn’t feel pain. I had reassured countless women of this as I’d been taught by Planned Parenthood. The fetal tissue feels nothing as it is removed. Get a grip, Abby. This is a simple, quick medical procedure. My head was working hard to control my responses, but I couldn’t shake an inner disquiet that was quickly mounting to horror as I watched the screen.

The next movement was the sudden jerk of a tiny foot as the baby started kicking, as if it were trying to move away from the probing invader. As the cannula pressed its side, the baby began struggling to turn and twist away. It seemed clear to me that it could feel the cannula, and it did not like what it was feeling. …

My eyes shot back to the screen again. The cannula was already being rotated by the doctor, and now I could see the tiny body violently twisting with it. For the briefest moment the baby looked as if it were being wrung like a dishcloth, twirled and squeezed. And then it crumpled and began disappearing into the cannula before my eyes. The last thing I saw was the tiny, perfectly formed backbone sucked into the tube, and then it was gone.

All the training she went through merely blinded her to the reality of what she was a part of. Then there on that gray scale screen she literally came face to face with the disturbing truth. Thank God that it was the first and last time she was actually involved in an abortion herself.

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Notes:

genocide – the deliberate and systematic destruction of a national, racial, religious, political, cultural, ethnic, or other group defined by the exterminators as undesirable

Gosnell worker testifies: Baby being ‘aborted’ ‘screamed… like a little alien’ (In fact, the illegal worker commented that she identified the babies as “specimens” to make it “easier to deal with mentally”.)

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Two great articles about the impact this case is having on even pro-choice people:

From Roe to Gosnell by James Taranto (Wonderfully points out the Orwellian doublespeak that fills so-called “pro-choice” rhetoric. You can also read of the sadistic, experimental device Kermit Gosnell was responsible for inserting into the wombs of 15 women nearly 40 years ago.)

14 Theories for Why Kermit Gosnell’s Case Didn’t Get More Media Attention by Conor Friedersdorf (Very thoughtful article.)

Qwerky Quotes for the Inquisitive: Doug Mainwaring on Same-Sex Marriage

“Same-sex marriage will undefine marriage and unravel it, and in so doing, it will undefine children. It will ultimately lead to undefining humanity. This is neither ‘progressive’ nor ‘conservative’ legislation. It is ‘regressive’ legislation.”

- Doug Mainwaring, Same-Sex Marriage: We’re Playing Chess, Not Checkers