The Problem With Cat Ladies Is Not the Cats-Part ll thumbnail

The Problem With Cat Ladies Is Not the Cats-Part ll

By Neland Nobel

Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

Continuation from Part I:

Attitudes toward abortion of course play a role. A child, by definition, will not be born if aborted.

Again, using states as our laboratory, what five states have the most liberal policies regarding abortion versus those with the most restrictions?

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States with the Most Liberal Abortion Policies

  1. California: California has strong protections for abortion rights, with state laws enshrining the right to access abortion services.
  2. New York: New York state law protects the right to abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy and allows it beyond that if the woman’s health is at risk or the fetus is not viable.
  3. Vermont: Vermont has robust abortion protections, including a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion.
  4. Connecticut: Connecticut has laws ensuring access to abortion services and provides protections for healthcare providers.
  5. Illinois: Illinois state law protects the right to abortion and has removed many barriers to access, including waiting periods and mandatory counseling.

States with the Most Restrictive Abortion Policies

  1. Texas: Texas has one of the most restrictive abortion laws, banning most abortions after six weeks with private enforcement through civil lawsuits.
  2. Mississippi: Mississippi has a near-total ban on abortions, only allowing exceptions if the woman’s life is in danger or in cases of rape.
  3. Alabama: Alabama has a near-total abortion ban with very limited exceptions, making it one of the most restrictive states.
  4. Oklahoma: Oklahoma has enacted several laws that heavily restrict abortion access, including a near-total ban after six weeks.
  5. Arkansas: Arkansas has a total abortion ban with exceptions only for cases where the woman’s life is in danger.

These rankings are based on the current legal landscape and how state laws either protect or restrict access to abortion services​ (The Fuller Project)​​ (Center for Reproductive Rights)​​ (Abortion Travel Distance)​​ (POLITICO)​.

Again, we see a pattern. The most Left-wing Democrat states promote abortion, while more conservative states have more restrictive policies. Isn’t Bernie Sanders from Vermont?

Democrat states have lower population growth and more abortions, which seems perfectly logical.

But the general attitude about life makes a difference. If you want life to come into the world, and if you value families, then Democrat policies don’t seem to favor either of those things.

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Secularism seems to favor lower birth rates, while religious communities (Orthodox Jews, Mormons in Utah) tend to sacrifice material things for children.

But attitudes about life extend beyond birth rates. What about those already born? Again, we see some stark differences among states regarding euthanasia, the voluntary ending of life.

States with the Most Liberal Euthanasia Laws

  1. Oregon: Oregon was the first state to legalize physician-assisted dying with its Death with Dignity Act in 1994. The law allows terminally ill patients with six months or fewer to live to request lethal medication.
  2. California: The End of Life Option Act, effective since 2016, permits terminally ill adults to request and receive prescription medication to end their life.
  3. Washington: Similar to Oregon, Washington passed its Death with Dignity Act in 2008, allowing physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients.
  4. Vermont: Vermont’s Patient Choice and Control at the End of Life Act has been in place since 2013, providing terminally ill patients the option to end their life with prescribed medication.
  5. Hawaii: The Our Care, Our Choice Act, enacted in 2018, allows terminally ill adults to obtain a prescription for medication to end their life under strict conditions.

States with the Most Restrictive Euthanasia Laws

  1. Alabama: Euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are entirely illegal, with no exceptions.
  2. Arkansas: Both active and passive euthanasia are prohibited, and there are no laws allowing physician-assisted suicide.
  3. South Dakota: The state has stringent laws against euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, without any legal framework supporting these practices.
  4. Oklahoma: The state completely bans euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, maintaining strict legal restrictions against them.
  5. Texas: Texas prohibits euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, with the law enforcing severe penalties for those involved in these practices.

These classifications are based on current laws and policies regulating euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide in these states​ (Death With Dignity)​​ (World Population Review)​​ (World Population Review)​​ (World Population Review)​​ (World Population Review)​.

Isn’t Bernie Sanders from Vermont?

We would be remiss if we did not mention that many young couples now feel having children will destroy the environment.

Progressives are the folks pushing the apocalyptic version of “climate change”, “sustainability”, “overpopulation” and similar concepts. They see a newborn only as a drain on resources, as a destroyer of habitat, and as a consumer of things. They see a new mouth to be fed as opposed to seeing a new brain and hands that will produce more than they will consume over a lifetime and yet be aware of human impact on other species.

The environmental agenda is pounded into our children’s heads from grade school through graduate school.

According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 26% of adults under 50 who say they are unlikely to have children cite environmental concerns as a major reason for their decision​ (Pew Research Center)​​ (Pew Research Center)​.

Many ancillary issues stop people from having children, and one is fear of loss of control.  When schools become hostile to the values of the parents, when states threaten to take their children because they may not endorse the latest transgender fads, this also makes would-be parents hesitant.  A hostile school environment and a hostile popular culture have many thinking, “Why would I want to raise a child in this kind of world.”

Besides the institution of the family, the other important institution that once worked with families was the public school system.  This has changed with teacher’s unions and universities cranking out teachers hostile to families.   Increasingly, it looks like they are producing teachers hostile to children.

It is now estimated that one in ten children will be molested by public school teachers.

In terms of maintaining parental rights, nothing can be more important than the school choice movement. Again this is opposed by Democrats and their auxiliary arm,  the teacher’s unions.

Taking away parental rights has advanced a long way in states like California and Minnesota. Democrats are the party that promotes the devaluation of family powers and the elevation of the power of the state.

Finally, we must say a little about the role of the sexes. Most men would dive off a cliff to have sex with an attractive woman.  Speaking as a man, we often don’t think of the consequences, such as a lifelong responsibility for children. That often comes later as the child appears. Sadly, many men today never embrace responsibility.

Society needs to teach men to be responsible for their sexuality and their lives in general. Do you think our popular culture, which is dominated by liberal Democrats, helps? Do you think the hatred of maleness by liberal feminists helps?

Women for millennia have understood their sexual power and usually used it with discretion to find mates that could be relied upon to support them and their children. As women have adopted more male-like casual attitudes about sex, they have lost leverage.

Modern feminism, especially third-wave feminism, seems to have destroyed much of this female control of the situation, all while promoting the “power” of women.

An uncomfortable number of women now receive payments from the government and have a string of live-in relationships that produce children, but not family stability.  The government is replacing the man in the relationship.  The man becomes an inseminator, not a father, husband, and provider.

We urge you to read our article Is It White Privilege To Be Married Part I and II.

Feminists have argued that men and women are essentially the same, in all regards, including sex drives and familial feelings.  They have promoted the demotion of women to “chest feeders”, basically caving into the demands of the radical transgenders.

In short, liberalism teaches the sexes are the same and promotes hatred of maleness, and promiscuity among women. How is that helpful to forming families and child-rearing?

The society promotes pornography, which suggests that sex is now completely separated from child-rearing and family functions.

It is surprising the number of young men whose views of women have been warped by pornography and are disappointed that women are not like those portrayed on the internet.

We recently conversed with a Catholic priest who serves a large Arizona university. We asked him what the biggest issues he was dealing with regarding the young men on campus. We thought it would be drug addiction and depression.

We were sickened but not surprised when he said porn addiction. This is a redirection of sexual energy into something that is not productive or even reproductive.

Who is it that has promoted pornography and casual sex and denigrated the role of mother and father, turning them into “birthing persons”? Who in our society erases the whole concept of womanhood so it can’t even be defined?  Who is even changing the language about sexual differences and allowing fake men with serious mental issues to push women out of their spaces?

It is exclusively liberal Democrats.  As the Presidential race stands today, the parties completely differ, with many Democrats unable to even define what a woman is.

How can women’s rights, women’s programs, and women’s spaces be preserved, if institutions can’t even define what a woman is?

One of the few advantages of advanced age is that you have not only observed but lived through societal change and its consequences over the past half-century. The nation’s view of life and family has changed quite a bit over the past 50 years, and not for the better.

Do you not think this is connected to the decline in birth rates?

From this observer’s perspective, all these movements: feminism, environmentalism, transgenderism, and secularism; have been promoted by the universities, the political Left, and, of course, the Democrat Party. The capture of our public schools, and the corruption of our entertainment industry, are all a Left-wing project.

Not surprisingly, today’s Democrat Party embraces all of these Left-wing opinions and attitudes. They reside in the Republican Party as well, but not to the extent we see with the Democrats.

Our laboratory of the states shows this pretty clearly.

At this point, we should also be clear that socialism has never liked the nuclear family. Marx and Engels both taught that the family is part of the capitalist structure and that traditional family forms should be abolished to liberate children and women. They favored communal arrangements and it is not surprising that communes in the US and kibbutzes in Israel reflected this left-wing view and this common socialist origin. And it is not surprising, that in the US, they all failed.  Kibbutzes survive today in Israel with state subsidies and most people stay in them for only a period of their lives.

Marxian analysis highlights how the family can be a site of oppression, particularly for women and children. Engels, in “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,” elaborates on how the patriarchal family structure subjugates women, relegating them to the private sphere and limiting their economic and social freedom. This gendered division of labor ensures the reproduction of the labor force at minimal cost to the capitalist system, as women provide unpaid domestic labor.

Sounds a lot like a contemporary class in women’s studies, doesn’t it?

However, while wishing to abolish the traditional family, early Marxists were not against children. They saw them as workers and soldiers for the revolution and wanted them raised by the state.

National Socialists like the Nazis had similar views, although they took on more racial lines.

However, when the “state” no longer sees its interests in people, but rather adheres to an abstraction like the “environment”, then modern socialists do not like children.  They are pollution.

They also did not like the family because they felt it was capitalistic and created familial loyalty that competed with the demands of the state. In a sense, they wanted to state to own the children.

You can hear this analysis ringing through our current politics. Bernie Sanders is from Vermont for a reason.

Finally, biology plays a role in smaller families. Women who delay childbearing for careers are making a trade-off, and most of them know that. By her mid-30s, a woman loses fertility at a rapid rate. There may be only time to have a child or two before fertility falls off a cliff.

A society is not a “going concern” without children. Pro-natal policies in many countries have been tried, but to date, they have shown little success in increasing the number of children per family.

A secular, Marxist material view of life and family does not seem supportive of children, even with state subsidies.

Government policy cannot change attitudes and spirituality, but it could be less hostile to those who still want to have children and families.  Beliefs that support life need to come voluntarily to people and a change in the culture would certainly be needed to support child-rearing.

Thus, if you want pro-family, pro-women, pro-Judeo-Christian morality, and pro-baby policies; you must reject Leftism as a philosophy and must reject its political manifestation…the Democrat Party.

You will have a chance to do that this election cycle.

Culture may indeed be downstream for politics, a reversal of the Breitbart axiom. If so, a wholesale rejection of Democrats is a good start to rebuilding the family.

However, the desire to have a family has been degraded in our society largely because of a collapse in Western religion and culture.  Politics and economics may play an important role but the religious/spiritual contribution may be more important.

Having children is a sacrifice and a joy at the same time. Career and children can be balanced, but it is difficult and many just don’t want the “stress”. They want an easy life, for themselves. It is material life.

To experience the full spectrum of life includes career, friends, family, and pets.  A full life of parent and career, and then being a grandparent, is difficult but rewarding.  Having religion or spirituality may not be required on an individual basis but it may be required on a societal basis.  Many today survive as “cut flowers”,  following the behavior of ancestors who did have serious belief systems that nurtured family and children.  But without new flowers, what do you cut?

It’s not the cats. It is the substitution of pets for a relationship with people. Pets don’t talk back, and they don’t hurt your feelings. Living alone with a pet and having friends is not a full-spectrum life.  Moreover, it does not support the existence of a people or nation.

Ideas and attitudes, after all, have consequences.

The consequence is our extinction by our own hands.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

America’s Conflicts Are Not Primarily Political Or Ideological, But Religious thumbnail

America’s Conflicts Are Not Primarily Political Or Ideological, But Religious

By John Daniel Davidson

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Without a civic life shaped by Christianity, there can be no American republic.

The conflicts roiling American society today are not primarily political or even ideological, but religious.

America is supposedly a secular country, with separation of church and state, free exercise of religion, and so on. Yet we find ourselves in the middle of what amounts to a religious war. How could this be?

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Because America, like all nations, is founded on religious claims, and relies on those claims for its coherence. We’ve long been accustomed to talking about America as a “propositional nation,” a phrase taken from Abraham Lincoln’s famous line in the Gettysburg Address that America was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

The idea is that America is fundamentally different from the ethnic nation-states of Europe, which were based on blood and soil and religion. America supposedly transcended all that. It was based instead on an idea — a proposition. Anyone could become an American if he agreed to the proposition.

And this is true. But nearly everyone who says America is a propositional nation is wrong about what the proposition is. America is not a collection of Enlightenment tropes at the intersection of Locke and Rousseau, a grab bag of philosophical sentiments about the rights of man. America is the creation of Christian civilization.

The proposition at the heart of America, undergirding our nation’s existence, is not just “all men are created,” but Christianity and all that comes with it. Without Christianity, you don’t get free speech, liberty, equality, freedom of conscience. All of it relies on the claims of the Christian faith, none of it stands on its own.

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Some will acknowledge the Christian inheritance of America but insist that it’s a point of departure, that once the American experiment was launched, it could be safely separated from the religion that launched it. They think it’s possible to take the “best” parts of the Christian faith without the need to continually affirm Christ. “Christless Christianity,” you might call it.

But it doesn’t work like that. A few months ago the famous atheist Richard Dawkins wondered aloud in an interview why his own country, England, could not just go on having “cultural Christianity” without actual, believing Christians. He said he liked the cathedrals and the Christmas carols, and would like to enjoy them without the bother of actual Christianity. He wants fewer believing Christians and more cultural Christians.

It never occurred to Dawkins that you don’t get to keep the culture without the cult. The sad spectacle of modern England should suffice to prove the point. If there is no one to worship in the cathedrals, they will become concert halls or, in England’s case, mosques. If no one really believes what the Christmas carols proclaim, eventually people will stop singing them.

The same goes for us here in America. The American proposition that all men are created equal is a religious claim, specifically a Christian one. Not to belabor the point, but the American founders only ever believed that all men are created equal because they believed that we are God’s children, created in His image. Our entire system of government flows from that belief; without it the whole system collapses.

The idea that every person is in some way sacred, created in the image and likeness of Almighty God, is “self-evident” only to a moral conscience formed and awakened by the teachings of Christianity down through the millennia — teachings that came from Christ Himself.

The American founding is therefore not comprehensible in strictly secular, rationalist terms. Our nation begins with a proposition about the nature of God and man. If that proposition is discarded or denied, whatever comes after that isn’t America. It might call itself America, it might even deploy the familiar vocabulary of rights and liberties, but it is not America.

So when I say we are engaged now in a religious war, this is what I mean. We are either going to be a nation based on Christian claims about what man is and how society should be ordered in light of that, or we are going to revert to a societal state that existed before Christianity, one that is based on pagan claims about man and that posits a very different vision of how a nation should be ordered in light of those claims.

To be clear, the contest is not between secularism or “wokeism” and Christianity. If we reject Christianity, the future of America will not be a secular liberal utopia, where we go on living off the capital of our Christian inheritance without replenishing it. It’s going to be a new version of paganism, and you’re not going to like it.

This post-Christian paganism might not outwardly look like the paganism of the past, but it is no less hostile to and incompatible with Christianity. Its tenets, then and now, constitute an inversion of Christian claims and commitments: a rejection of transcendent truth, moral absolutes, and even objective reality. These are all at the root a rejection of God.

Above all, the new paganism rejects the claim at the heart of the American nation: that all men are created equal. It posits a different claim, from an older, pre-Christian order: men are not equal; by nature some are slaves and some are masters. Inequality is inherent in our nature, and should be reflected in our government and laws.

So the Christian retreat in the West heralds something both new and old: a de-Christianized political order emerging from the ruin of Christendom. What comes at the sunset of the Christian era rises up from the distant past, appearing in new guises and names but nevertheless heralding the return of a pagan order, one based not on the reality of Christ but on the raw power of His fallen angels. Under its banners march the old gods, the lesser deities and principalities that were original enemies of Christ’s church since the beginning of time.

To fight this new paganism, Christians in America will have to shed the false notion that their religion is a purely private matter, that there must be a “wall of separation” between our religion and our politics. We have to argue, without apology, that public life in this country should be shaped by Christian morality and ordered by its dictates, as it was for most of our civilization’s history.

Most of all, we have to accept that our American culture of self-government and liberty under law cannot long survive cut off from its source, which is and always was the Christian faith.

Without that faith, alive and active among the people, there can be no American republic. If we want to save the republic, we’ll have to become a Christian people once again. And that means we’ll have to fight — and win — a religious war for America.

The stakes for the nation are as high as they can be. We see now that there is more than one way for a nation to fall. There is the Roman way: a centuries-long decline eventually succumbing to wave upon wave of invaders. There is the British way: a dwindling to irrelevance and impotence, passive in the face of an assertive Muslim immigrant population.

And then there is the American way: not to decline and fall, not to dwindle into irrelevance, but to become evil.

*****

A version of this article was delivered at the NatCon conference in Washington, D.C., this week.

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

An Argument Against the Arizona Right to Abortion Initiative

By Ellie Fromm

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

We the people of the State of Arizona, grateful to Almighty God for our liberties, do ordain this Constitution.

Above is the entirety of the preamble to the Constitution of the State of Arizona. Similarly to the Constitution of the United States of America, these Arizonans thank the Lord their God for the liberties later listed in the document. It then follows that these liberties must align with general traditional Christian principles, as these writers recognized their liberties originally flow from Him. As acknowledged by philosophers and theologians throughout time, rights flow from God Himself.

The Arizona Right to Abortion Initiative, a recent potential amendment to the Arizona Constitution, is currently collecting signatures so it may be placed on the Arizona ballot for the November 2024 election. This Initiative would fundamentally change the Arizona Constitution and make reversing it almost impossible. Not only would it codify abortion into law, but it would grant each and every Arizonan the supposed “right” to murder their offspring in the womb.

This Initiative begins by stating the following:

“Every individual has a fundamental right to abortion, and the state shall not enact, adopt or enforce any law, regulation, policy or practice that does any of the following…”

The document then lists the amendment’s definitions of “fetal viability,” the instances when the State may interfere, and defines “compelling state interest.” Essentially, this amendment intends to set the “right” of all Arizonans to abortion until “there is a significant likelihood of the fetus’s sustained survival outside the uterus without the application of extraordinary medical measures.” In other words, abortion would be legal in Arizona almost up until the moment of birth.

I will proceed by laying out two arguments against the Arizona Right to Abortion Initiative.

Firstly, abortion is unethical and inhumane, causing death to the child and trauma, injury, and, in some cases, death to the mother. Forcibly removing a child, for whatever reason, is wrong, but so is confusing pregnant women who may think their only option is abortion due to their circumstances. These babies have committed no crime and, therefore, deserve no punishment.

The Guttmacher Institute estimates that, from 1973-2017, 63,459,781 abortions occurred in the United States. This number is roughly 16 times larger than the population of Maricopa County, 8.5 times the population of the state of Arizona, and 1.6 times the population of California. All those people were lost through abortion.

Writing abortion into the state constitution will not slow these numbers, but rather encourage and increase them in the State of Arizona.

Second, this initiative goes against the preamble to the Arizona Constitution. In no way does this initiative affirm or uphold the preamble, that citizens are “grateful to Almighty God”. Instead, it violates this belief by violating the God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness addressed by the Constitution of the United States if America. Gratefulness to God means using the law to protect those who cannot protect themselves, not enabling violence against them.

For the sake of the young, and in recognition of the state and national preambles, vote “no” on the Arizona Right to Abortion Initiative this November. Continue to grant your fellow Arizonans the right you yourself enjoy, the right to life.

*****

Ellie Fromm is a student at Hillsdale College and has worked as an intern with The Prickly Pear since 2022. Her published articles in The Prickly Pear can be accessed here.

Follow Ellie Fromm on X (@elliefromm23). 

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

DOJ Attorney Expressed Concerns About Conservative Media Coverage of Biden Admin Persecuting Christians, Pro-Lifers thumbnail

DOJ Attorney Expressed Concerns About Conservative Media Coverage of Biden Admin Persecuting Christians, Pro-Lifers

By Mary Margaret Olohan

A federal Justice Department attorney expressed concerns to a Michigan judge about conservative media coverage suggesting that President Joe Biden’s administration is persecuting Christians and pro-lifers for their beliefs.

The discussion took place during a March pre-trial conference in USA v. Zastrow, in which the federal government brought Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act charges against eight pro-life individuals who tried to stop abortions of unborn babies from taking place at Michigan abortion clinics.

Those pro-life activists are Calvin Zastrow, Eva Zastrow, Chester Gallagher, Heather Idoni, Caroline Davis, Joel Curry, Justin Phillips, and Eva Edl (a communist death camp survivor who recently spoke with The Daily Signal).

The FACE Act is a 1994 law that prohibits individuals from obstructing the entrances of both abortion clinics and pregnancy resource centers, although it has been heavily enforced by Biden’s DOJ against pro-lifers since the June 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade.

During the pre-trial motion hearing, according to a transcript obtained by The Daily Signal, DOJ attorney Laura-Kate Bernstein raised concerns that “there’s a great deal of press about this case and the case in Nashville recently.” Bernstein was referring to a case in Tennessee where six pro-lifers were praying outside of an abortion clinic in 2021 and were charged with FACE Act violations.

Bernstein did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Where?” questioned Judge Matthew Leitman. “I haven’t seen any.”

Bernstein explained that she was referring to online media “like Mike Huckabee’s show or Laura Ingraham’s show, and those sorts of sources, and some written sources, too, in which at least one of the defense attorneys is making very acerbic statements about the government’s case and the legitimacy of the laws at stake, and that the Biden regime is persecuting Christians.”

WATCH:

“My concern is one of the jury pool,” she continued. “My concern is that as these national media reach more and more people, including people in the district, that they may be tainted with a preconceived notion of the Biden regime’s persecution of Christians and be unable to try the case as neutral jurors.”

The DOJ attorney said that she was not asking the court to do “something in particular,” but then told the judge that it is the court’s “affirmative, constitutional duty to minimize the effects of prejudicial pretrial publicity.”

Leitman, after asking for clarification on her question, noted that he could ask the jurors whether they had read anything about the case. But he said that Bernstein’s question seemed to be rooted in “important political speech.”

“It seems to me that your first statement, the Biden administration is persecuting Christians … that’s pretty core, important political speech, whether you agree with it or not,” the judge said. “I mean, I’d be hard pressed to tell somebody not to say that.”

The DOJ attorney then pushed back, saying she was referring to interviews in which the pro-lifer’s attorney said that “this case is a war on pro-lifers, that the Department of Justices is using the FACE Act as a weapon against pro-lifers,” or that “the clients are victims of political persecution.”

She also pushed back against the idea that “there’s a two-tier justice system, one for friends of the administration who go free and one for people who are on the wrong spiritual side of the administration.”

“There’s also extremely inflammatory language undermining the legitimacy of the laws to be implied in this case, that you’ve already ruled on—the constitutionality of it—whether reproductive health care includes abortion, as the statue defines it,” she continued. “And because the court has this affirmative, constitutional duty, we wanted to bring it to your attention.”

Bernstein then asked the judge to admonish Thomas More Society attorney Steve Crampton “about speaking about this case in inflammatory and acerbic ways that might taint the jury pool.”

“This isn’t about trying to, you know, interfere with any of his First Amendment rights,” she followed up, noting that Crampton is “of course” free to speak about his clients. “It’s about trying to protect the due process rights in this trial and the government’s right and the public’s right to a fair trial.”

Crampton clarified to the court that Bernstein was referring to Tennessee pro-life activist Paul Vaughn’s interview on the “Mike Huckabee Show,” in which Vaughn made such comments “only after the jury verdict” was entered in his case.

In January, a federal jury convicted Vaughn and five other defendants of a felony conspiracy against rights and a FACE Act offense for trying to stop abortions from taking place at a Mount Juliet, Tennessee, abortion clinic in March 2021.

“Any reference to United States against Zastrow and this case were, at best, minimal to nonexistent,” the Thomas More Society attorney said. “So I think the government, perhaps, is overreacting to the press coverage of the Nashville case. Nobody’s called any press conference regarding this case, and we certainly have no intention of doing so.”

This week, seven pro-life defendants have been sentenced to prison time on DOJ FACE Act charges related to their attempts to stop abortions from taking place at a Washington, D.C., abortion clinic. That abortion clinic is run by Cesare Santangelo, an abortionist who has been accused of allowing babies to die if they survive his botched abortions.

The District of Columbia does not have laws restricting abortion.

The DOJ said in a release Wednesday: “Lauren Handy was sentenced to 57 months in prison, John Hinshaw was sentenced to 21 months in prison, and William Goodman was sentenced to 27 months in prison,” adding that “Jonathan Darnel was sentenced to 34 months in prison, Herb Geraghty was sentenced to 27 months in prison, Jean Marshall was sentenced to 24 months in prison, and Joan Bell was sentenced to 27 months in prison.”

Those efforts are led by Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, who just admittedfollowing a report from The Daily Signal, that she hid an arrest and its subsequent expungement from investigators when she was confirmed by the Senate to her Justice Department post.

“Violence has no place in our national discourse on reproductive health. Using force, threatening to use force, or physically obstructing access to reproductive health care is unlawful,” said Clarke in a statement accompanying this week’s DOJ release.

“As we mark the 30th anniversary of the FACE Act, it’s important that we not lose sight of the history of violence against reproductive health care providers, including the murder of Dr. David Gunn in Florida—tragic and horrific events that led to passage of the law,” she added. “The Justice Department will continue to protect both patients seeking reproductive health services and providers of those services. We will hold accountable those who seek to interfere with access to reproductive health services in our country.”

*****

This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

IVF Modernizes Ancient Eugenic Practices Of ‘Selective Breeding’ thumbnail

IVF Modernizes Ancient Eugenic Practices Of ‘Selective Breeding’

By Katie Breckenridge

If states enforced restrictions on IVF, embryos would no longer be commodities that society can do with as it pleases.

The Alabama Supreme Court’s recent and right decision to deem embryos created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) as people sparked concern from fertility facilities regarding the future of IVF. This concern resulted in Alabama rushing to pass legislation to preserve IVF, with a push from President Trump urging Alabama to “act quickly to find an immediate solution.” This bill, signed by Republican Gov. Kay Ivey, grants immunity from legal consequences to those providing and receiving services if embryos are damaged or destroyed during the procedure. Despite this legislation, there are still fears surrounding the future of IVF.

Since Alabama claimed that the accidental death of three couples’ frozen embryos qualified under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, physicians have been “…worried that officials might cap the number of embryos that can be created in each treatment cycle, which often entails the fertilization of several eggs, [and that] lawmakers could also ban the freezing of backup embryos, which … would result in less efficient and more expensive treatments.” There are also concerns about further limitations on embryonic research.

Eliminating ‘Defective’ Children

What these concerns have in common is that this ruling forces society to rise above past eugenic practices that we are, apparently, not ready to abandon. If states further enforced restrictions on IVF, embryos would no longer be non-person, commodifiable objects society can do with as it pleases, as was prevalent in Greek and Roman cultures long before the term “eugenics” was invented and widely practiced across the globe.

The IVF process often involves the preimplantation screening of blastocysts (early embryos) to determine the likelihood of implantation success and test for genetic defects. Those considered “non-viable” are discarded. This eugenic practice opens the door to the elimination of “defective” children, as those utilizing preimplantation screenings with the hope of producing only perfectly healthy children may be more inclined to choose selective reduction as well.

Selective reduction (abortion) commences with the injection of potassium chloride into the heart of the unlucky fetus, which stops the small heart from beating. In instances where babies share the same amniotic sac, more inhumane techniques are used such as bipolar cord coagulation and radiofrequency ablation, which cut off umbilical cord supply, thus starving the baby of oxygen and nutrients. In ancient Rome, this dehumanization of children can be described by a quote from the philosopher Seneca in the first century CE: “…unnatural progeny we destroy; we drown even children who at birth are weakly and abnormal.”

Similarly, in ancient Greece, abortion was encouraged to limit the number of children in families, as was infanticide for babies born with deformities. The Spartan society highly valued marriages that would strengthen the genetic excellence of the population, and therefore partners were selected based on traits such as physical fitness. The government would even intervene and arrange marriages or force divorces if the couples were judged unfit for each other and thereby incapable of producing strong offspring.

The Build-a-Child Mindset

How does the IVF process encourage this type of “selective breeding”? Well, besides selective reduction, reproductive technologies such as IVF often include gamete donation. With gamete donation, people can choose from a catalog of donors and pick certain physical and intellectual characteristics. Gamete donors must meet certain requirements, such as certain physical and intellectual characteristics, a certain ethnicity, a certain height, “good genes,” physical attractiveness, and good health to weed out any “undesirable” traits.

The IVF process often involves the eugenic practice of creating designer babies based on intelligence, hair color, eye color, etc., through gamete donation. Dave Rubin compared the process of picking an egg donor to being “like Tinder,” and went through the site searching for a physically healthy donor who didn’t have major genetic issues and “sort of looked like the type of girl they might be with,” showing the build-a-child manufacturing mindset involved in the gamete donor process that diminishes children to mere products.

Further, since unique human beings come into existence upon fertilization, the sex of the persons fashioned through IVF can also be determined before implantation. This allows those pursuing the IVF process to choose the sex they want to be transferred and, therefore, choose which of their children gets to be transferred based on their sex. What could better demonstrate that you consider all of your children potentially disposable than saying that one of them isn’t the “right” sex?

When IVF facilities can no longer create multiple embryonic persons with which to experiment and play trial and error through the transfer process, or can no longer indefinitely freeze as human icicles, or donate to scientific research where they will be destroyed, they are forced to face the reality that embryos are persons. These humans should not be destroyed for being “weakly and abnormal” or for being “leftovers” after a couple has reached their desired number of children.

While President Trump and society as a whole view IVF as a procedure that makes it easier for infertile couples to have children and “support[s] the creation of strong, thriving, healthy American families,” the actual procedure illustrates an alternative reality.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

After a Male Caused Her Partial Paralysis, Female Volleyball Player Payton McNabb Now Fights to Protect Women’s Sports thumbnail

After a Male Caused Her Partial Paralysis, Female Volleyball Player Payton McNabb Now Fights to Protect Women’s Sports

By Ashley McClure

Editors’ Note: Biden and the Democrats make a big deal about supporting “women’s rights”, deliberately conflating abortion with a right. No one has a right to kill another being to advance their goals, male or female, and clearly, a baby is being killed during an abortion. Only in the defense of life is taking another life justified. That would include the physical health of the mother, of course. Having said that, Democrats and Biden are pushing the extreme transgender movement through an administrative interpretation of Title IX, which erases the entire concept of womanhood. Without recognizing a woman as distinct from a man, how can one have a concept of women’s rights? Conservatives need to make it clear to confused suburban women just which party is truly supporting women’s rights, and it’s not Democrats. As for men, real men want to protect females: our wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, and friends.

On September 1, 2022, during a volleyball game against a rival North Carolina high school, 17-year-old Payton McNabb received a devastating head and neck injury as the result of a spike by a male athlete who identified as transgender.

“Neither I nor anyone else on the team agreed with it [the transgender athlete being allowed to play] and were against it from the beginning. We were all just so confused by how it could be allowed, and I guess we just had no idea what to do,” McNabb said.

The male athlete’s superior height and strength, McNabb said, forced her and her teammates to play “defensively.”

“We had to adjust our whole lineup and put our biggest hitter in the front row, and even with that, we couldn’t pass the ball back because he was hitting it so hard,” she said. “No one could even get a hand on it.”

It was one of his powerful spikes that knocked McNabb unconscious for over 30 seconds toward the end of a game her junior year. While McNabb was lying on the floor, she was later told by onlookers that her body had twisted into a “fencing position,” which is indicative of extreme trauma to the brain. 

“My coach’s wife kept trying to push my arms and legs down, but they kept coming back up. She had no idea what was happening,” McNabb said. Meanwhile, “the boy who hit me and the girls on his team were standing on the other side of the net laughing at me,” she said.

According to McNabb, few people took her injury seriously at first. Her trainer even told her to get back in the game right after the injury happened.

However, a later medical evaluation revealed that the ball’s impact caused neurological impairments including a concussion, vision problems, and partial paralysis to the right side of her body. The year following her traumatic brain injury, McNabb said, was full of “blank spaces” that she’ll never remember. 

Now an undergraduate student pursuing a degree in communications at Western Carolina University, McNabb is focused on her future. She still struggles with neurological issues that make schoolwork much more difficult than before her injury, but as part of her healing process, she explained that she found a purpose in her suffering.

“NC Values reached out to me and said, ‘we’re trying to pass a bill in North Carolina to protect women’s sports—could you come and speak?’” McNabb recalled. “I said I would, but I had no idea what I was getting into.”

McNabb’s testimony in front of the North Carolina State Legislature, on behalf of the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, immediately went viral and put her on the map as an advocate for fairness in girls’ and women’s sports, along with fellow IW Ambassadors Riley Gaines and Paula Scanlan.

Since then, she’s become an ambassador for Independent Women’s Forum, advocating to protect girls’ and women’s sports while pursuing her bachelor’s degree. As an IW ambassador, McNabb is giving a voice to the women whose stories are ignored and whose injuries are dismissed by activists pushing gender ideology in sports.

Without her injury to demonstrate the dangers of allowing men to compete in girls’ sports, McNabb doesn’t think the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act would have passed in North Carolina. Because of that, McNabb said, “I feel like I’m helping people, and working for good, and I’m going to keep on doing that.”

*****

This article was published by the Independent Women’s Forum and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: The Independent Women’s Forum

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Female Volleyball Player Payton McNabb Now Fights to Protect Women’s Sports thumbnail

Female Volleyball Player Payton McNabb Now Fights to Protect Women’s Sports

By Ashley McClure

Editors’ Note: Biden and the Democrats make a big deal about supporting “women’s rights”, deliberately conflating abortion with a right. No one has a right to kill another being to advance their goals, male or female, and clearly, a baby is being killed during an abortion. Only in the defense of life is taking another life justified. That would include the physical health of the mother, of course. Having said that, Democrats and Biden are pushing the extreme transgender movement through an administrative interpretation of Title IX, which erases the entire concept of womanhood. Without recognizing a woman as distinct from a man, how can one have a concept of women’s rights? Conservatives need to make it clear to confused suburban women just which party is truly supporting women’s rights, and it’s not Democrats. As for men, real men want to protect females: our wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, and friends.

On September 1, 2022, during a volleyball game against a rival North Carolina high school, 17-year-old Payton McNabb received a devastating head and neck injury as the result of a spike by a male athlete who identified as transgender.

“Neither I nor anyone else on the team agreed with it [the transgender athlete being allowed to play] and were against it from the beginning. We were all just so confused by how it could be allowed, and I guess we just had no idea what to do,” McNabb said.

The male athlete’s superior height and strength, McNabb said, forced her and her teammates to play “defensively.”

“We had to adjust our whole lineup and put our biggest hitter in the front row, and even with that, we couldn’t pass the ball back because he was hitting it so hard,” she said. “No one could even get a hand on it.”

It was one of his powerful spikes that knocked McNabb unconscious for over 30 seconds toward the end of a game her junior year. While McNabb was lying on the floor, she was later told by onlookers that her body had twisted into a “fencing position,” which is indicative of extreme trauma to the brain. 

“My coach’s wife kept trying to push my arms and legs down, but they kept coming back up. She had no idea what was happening,” McNabb said. Meanwhile, “the boy who hit me and the girls on his team were standing on the other side of the net laughing at me,” she said.

According to McNabb, few people took her injury seriously at first. Her trainer even told her to get back in the game right after the injury happened.

However, a later medical evaluation revealed that the ball’s impact caused neurological impairments including a concussion, vision problems, and partial paralysis to the right side of her body. The year following her traumatic brain injury, McNabb said, was full of “blank spaces” that she’ll never remember. 

Now an undergraduate student pursuing a degree in communications at Western Carolina University, McNabb is focused on her future. She still struggles with neurological issues that make schoolwork much more difficult than before her injury, but as part of her healing process, she explained that she found a purpose in her suffering.

“NC Values reached out to me and said, ‘we’re trying to pass a bill in North Carolina to protect women’s sports—could you come and speak?’” McNabb recalled. “I said I would, but I had no idea what I was getting into.”

McNabb’s testimony in front of the North Carolina State Legislature, on behalf of the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, immediately went viral and put her on the map as an advocate for fairness in girls’ and women’s sports, along with fellow IW Ambassadors Riley Gaines and Paula Scanlan.

Since then, she’s become an ambassador for Independent Women’s Forum, advocating to protect girls’ and women’s sports while pursuing her bachelor’s degree. As an IW ambassador, McNabb is giving a voice to the women whose stories are ignored and whose injuries are dismissed by activists pushing gender ideology in sports.

Without her injury to demonstrate the dangers of allowing men to compete in girls’ sports, McNabb doesn’t think the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act would have passed in North Carolina. Because of that, McNabb said, “I feel like I’m helping people, and working for good, and I’m going to keep on doing that.”

*****

This article was published by the Independent Women’s Forum and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: The Independent Women’s Forum

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Endorses Democrats’ Unpopular Abortion Until Birth Agenda thumbnail

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Endorses Democrats’ Unpopular Abortion Until Birth Agenda

By Jordan Boyd

Editors’ Note:  RFK, Jr. has said some interesting things. His views seem to integrate with Conservatives on issues of free speech, the collusion of government and media to influence election outcomes, the Administrative State, and the abuses of the medical establishment. Because of this, some “conservatives” who are not in love with Trump, have seen him as a possible alternative.  But when it comes to environmental policy, abortion, and the overall size and role of government, he is very much a Democrat.  His choice of Vice Presidential running mate has also raised eyebrows. We admire his courage and appreciate his views on many topics. However, Trump with all his faults, remains the best chance to advance the conservative agenda on a broad front. He also has a mostly united party behind him. The latter will be required to have a successful second term. Thus, he has by far the higher odds of being elected. It will likely be another close race with election skullduggery on full display. Conservatives must marshal their resources, unite disparate factions within the Republican Party, and not waste their votes. We prefer a less extreme position that at least recognizes the separate humanity of a baby and its ability to feel pain. Public polling strongly agrees.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made headlines for his ability to entice Republican voters fed up with establishment politicians, but his endorsement of Democrats’ unlimited abortion agenda proves his loyalty lies with the left.

In a no-shoes sitdown with former ESPN SportsCenter Host Sage Steele, Kennedy said he believes a woman should be allowed to kill her baby through all nine months of gestation.

“Should there be a limit? Are you saying all the way up through full term a woman has a right to have an abortion?” Steele asked.

“Yeah,” Kennedy replied.

Kennedy said he doesn’t believe any woman gets pregnant with the intention of obtaining a late-term abortion, but as Steele noted, that scenario has happened “too many times to count.”

The Democrat, undeterred by Steele’s pushback, doubled down and framed unlimited, on-demand abortion as a personal issue instead of the moral issue most voters see it as.

“Ultimately, I don’t trust government to have jurisdiction over people’s bodies,” Kennedy said. “I think we need to leave it to the woman, her pastor, and to, you know, her spiritual advisors or advisor or physician, whatever, to make those decisions.”

Only 7 percent of U.S. adults believe abortion is “morally acceptable in all cases.” In fact, most Americans support limiting the barbaric practice to the first trimester. Yet Kennedy expressed support for the legalized butchering of full-term babies as long as it’s desired by the woman carrying the child.

“In my belief, we should leave it to the woman. We shouldn’t have government involved,” Kennedy said.

“Even if it’s full term?” Steele questioned.

“Even if it’s full term,” Kennedy confirmed.

The candidate acknowledged that every abortion is a “tragedy” and “many of them leave permanent trauma.” He even went so far as to suggest that the state has “a[n] interest in protecting a fully formed fetus,” but repeatedly claimed women should get the final say over whether a child lives or dies.

“I absolutely think that that argument is very convincing. And again, I come down to the fact that I don’t trust the state, and I think we need to trust the woman,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy’s position is not foreign to the Democratic Party, which has made abortion through all nine months of pregnancy a hallmark of its campaigns and legislative schemes. Even if they refuse to directly state how they feel about late-term abortions, Democrats often vote for bills that permit women to abort at any time “regardless of their circumstances and without interference and discrimination.”

Babies who are born alive and breathing also risk execution by abortionists outside of the womb because Democrats refuse to support protections for unborn and newborn children consistent with their right to life.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: YouTube screenshot

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Our Daughters Will Reap The Consequences Of Feminists Killing Boy Scouts thumbnail

Our Daughters Will Reap The Consequences Of Feminists Killing Boy Scouts

By Mary Rooke

Editors’ Note: The author makes an excellent point. The arguments made by feminists that there should be no differences between men and women and that they should be “equal” in all regards has led to the transgender movement, which is erasing the very concept of womanhood. In addition, if there can be no places for men to be with men, and boys to be with boys, then why should there be special places for women?  We think there should be special places for both. In addition, the constant man-hating of some feminists undermines the role of fatherhood with severe attendant problems for the formation of two-parent families. Women often complain about the lack of decent and competent men. We agree it is a problem. But how do they think decent men are formed?

While women are demanding the respect of “female-only spaces” free from the transgender cult, little is talked about how feminism opened the door to this harmful ideology by attacking men.

The Boy Scouts changed their name to Scouting America, signaling the latest step in their decline from what was once a premier club for young boys before feminism dug its claws in. The cracks in the Boy Scout armor started in 1991 when the parents of Margot Goldstein, then Margo Mankes, sued the club for sex-based discrimination when their daughter was denied access to an all-boys sleep-away camp and kicked out of her pack.

The Mankes were longtime members of the Boy Scouts. Both parents were leaders, and their two older sons were scouts. One even rose to the prestigious rank of Eagle Scout. Despite apparently knowing the group’s bylaws, they signed their daughter up for their local Cub Scout Pack.

This move went unnoticed by the national organization until Goldstein was set to join other troops at a Boy Scout summer overnight camp. She was denied entry because it was a boys-only event. Her parents then sued the organization to allow her to join the camp, which would have made her the first girl to be admitted to the event. (ROOKE: Tom Brady’s Haters Expose One Of Feminism’s Worst Tropes)

“Keeping girls out of the Boy Scouts deprives them of the opportunity to get the companionship and the competition that they need in order to be able to prepare themselves for the future,” Mark Rubin, the family’s attorney, argued.

Goldstein was already a member of the Girl Scouts. However, she told the media that she felt “kind of bored” while at the girls-only club and wanted to be a part of an organization that her brothers had thrived in.

When the Boy Scouts decided in 2017 to open their doors to girls, Goldstein told TIME magazine it wasn’t enough. “It’s nice to see them making steps and progressing in a good direction,” she told the outlet. ” … but it’s still not the same as what I was fighting for.” Goldstein didn’t just want to be allowed to be part of a single-gender pack; she wanted to be allowed into the boys’ space.

“Our feeling is that the Cub Scouts and the Boy Scouts were specifically designed to meet the needs for young boys. And the needs for young boys are very different from young girls,” said Blake Lewis, a Dallas-based Boy Scouts spokesman, while defending the organization in 1991. (ROOKE: We Have One Shot To Save Female Sports, Or It’s All Over)

Englishman Sir Robert Baden-Powell ignited the Boy Scout movement in 1908 to instill morality and good citizenship among the younger generation. The organization was meant to foster Christian Western culture in young boys by teaching them to “First: Love and serve God. Second: Love and serve your neighbor,” as Baden-Powell wrote in “Scouting for Boys.”

“There is a vast reserve of loyal patriotism and Christian spirit lying dormant in our nation today, mainly because it sees no direct opportunity for expressing itself … In this joyous brotherhood, there is vast opportunity open to all … It gives every man his chance of service for his fellow-men and for God,” Baden-Powell wrote.

Feminism is the straight line from “shattering glass ceilings” of boys’ clubs to seeing a biological male in a dress in a female locker room.

Women should have opportunities that allow them to learn important skills and how to thrive via competition without being forced to include biological men in their organizations. And men deserve the same opportunities without being forced to include women. Both can be true at the same time.

However, liberal women capitalizing on the so-called female rights gained from the sexual revolution ruined this for everyone with their attack on masculinity.

There was already a space for girls with the wide availability of the Girl Scouts, but like Goldstein said, most girls found the curriculum boring. Still, the move was not to neuter a club meant to turn boys into capable men but to create an equal version of that for girls.

If they wanted to have a wilderness survival club, they should’ve remade the Girl Scouts into something other than the cookie-selling MLM it is today. But feminism isn’t a builder of cultures. It is designed to destroy tradition. (ROOKE: The Boys Will Be Alright, But What About Our Young Women?)

Men have experienced the destruction of their spaces, and the direct consequences are felt in the everyday attack on their inherent masculinity, which liberal women classify as toxic. Now, women are shocked that the march of feminism has taken them along, largely because they never thought a movement that supposedly supported women would pave the way for actual male toxicity to harm them.

But where were women when men’s spaces came under attack? In the cheering section, pushing to end them.

It seems very obvious to anyone who enjoys the freedom and safety of tradition that if men are attacked and told they aren’t allowed to acknowledge unique qualities, women will eventually feel the repercussions. America’s daughters are fighting for their right to change their clothes and compete in sports without the inclusion of biological males, and yet that same freedom was stripped from boys decades before with the praise and adoration of women.

In the end, the battle of the sexes became the greatest destroyer of our culture. The transgender cult has thrived in the absence of strong men. If we have any hope of fixing this travesty, it simply starts with allowing men the freedom to learn how to be keepers of society.

*****

This article was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Weekend Read: Is Marriage A White Priviledge ? Part II thumbnail

Weekend Read: Is Marriage A White Priviledge ? Part II

By Neland Nobel

In part I, we discussed that a traditional family of mother and father produces the best results overall for children. And since children are our future, better results for them translate into a better future for the country.

It also means less income disparity and a better life for minority children.

To be clear, we recognize that not all families function well and that not all marriages work.  But the statistical work done by Professor Kearney accounts for that. Large swaths of families are part of the database. There was no cherry-picking of ‘happy families. That said, the data clearly shows that the traditional family, with all of its frailties, provides better outcomes than ‘new families’ that attempt to substitute the state for the father or the state for the entire family.  It is clear that ‘new families’ have even more problems than traditional families.

The bottom line is, ‘new families’ just don’t work as well and they enlarge the power and interference of the government, which is as bad for the polity as it is for children.

Marriage should not be an institution just for upper-class white people and Asians. All minority groups would be helped by strong marriages. The lack of family structure likely is far more influential in producing ‘disparate outcomes’ than whatever marginal racism is still left in America.

The rise of single-parent households is particularly acute in black families with over 70% of children born out of wedlock. But it is rising now in Hispanic families, and lower economic-class white families as well.

This has been known since the 1960s when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his critical work on the black family.  Even with all that time that has passed, authorities don’t seem to know what has caused it or what to do about it.

Kearney does not delve much into the why but rather chronicles the breakdown of the family and its effect on children. She appears to bend over backward not to be judgmental and regards single motherhood and its travails as “heroic”, a word we often see used in this context.  But what word do we use when people put themselves into such a position that requires heroism just to survive and thrive?  How many people are capable of such heroism?

The reason we say that is because whether it is the availability of welfare checks or the force of the popular culture (or both) degrading marriage and its importance, Asian families have shown almost no deterioration in marriage rates and their kids are blowing the doors off at school. How come?

Chinese Americans were very discriminated against at one time, and so were the Japanese, who were interned in camps by President Roosevelt. The Vietnamese were refugees who landed here with nothing. How come they can get married, stay married, and climb to the top of the income heap? How come very dark-skinned Asians from India and elsewhere succeed in marriage and now are the highest income earners in America? How come “white supremacy” does not keep them down?

The good professor is an economist so she only gently treads on this subject. We are not so implicit.

Gee, do you think it might have something to do with culture? Are there habits and attitudes that are more helpful to success than others? If so, in a world where “all cultures are equal (except white culture which is racist)”, it is hard to explain why different cultural traits among people of the same race create different results.

Is one permitted to be judgemental about culture for just a moment? For example, do the lyrics of rap music extoll the virtues of hard work, respect for women and children, and fidelity in marriage? If internalized by the listener, will the cultural messages of rap music lead to better social outcomes? What is your answer?

What about attitudes toward work, sobriety, duty, courage, grit, and determination? Are not the internalization of these virtues canceled out by the constant messaging that all the problems of black people have been caused by white men? Blaming others for one’s shortcomings is natural enough without our entire media and political establishment piling on.

So, we are treading on shaky ground. Today, one dare not suggest that poverty may be related to cultural attitudes. But then, how do we explain that some people get out of poverty and have stable marriages even when they were raised in poverty and a broken family? How do we explain Clarence Thomas or Louis Armstrong? Why are some people harmed by a bad environment while others emerge bruised but successful?

Maybe instead of studying poverty, we should study success. After all, poverty has been the default position throughout history. Success is rare, especially when it emerges from bad circumstances.

Why do blacks from the Caribbean do so much better than native-born American blacks? If the bigoted whites are holding blacks down, why the special dispensation from white bigots for Caribbean blacks?

This goes to our central point. The subject is a lot more complicated than just blaming white people.

Blaming white men for everything keeps us from having a more meaningful discussion about culture, doesn’t it?

You see today, we are no longer judgmental about other people and the way they choose to live. All family arrangements are just a matter of taste and are equally “good” even though we know the outcome for children can be devastating.

A strong family unit is still vastly superior to massive Federal programs.

As an institution, families are not perfect, but then again neither are government programs.

Families are imperfect because people are imperfect. In that sense, all families are dysfunctional to some degree. But the data shows that just a reasonably stable marriage with two parents creates better outcomes and other arrangements do not do as well. We don’t need to let the perfect get in the way of the good.

Why then are families denigrated in the popular culture? We have gone from Father Knows Best to Father Hasn’t a Clue. In numerous movies and situation comedies, Dad is portrayed as a large child and a moronic one to boot. Yet we know fathers are very important to raising both sons and daughters and sharing burdens with a wife.

Why is it the fault of white men that black families are in such disarray?  Absent the malign influence of government subsidy, exactly what is the process by which white men cause black people not to marry? Why have economic and social changes, and supposed “white supremacy” not affected Asian families or blacks from the Caribbean?

Finally, we find it both amusing and tragic that those who constantly tell us to be non-judgmental are severely judgmental. They, in fact, project virulent hate toward white men.

All this hatred may assist in dividing the nation for evil purposes, but how exactly does it help the black community?

Let’s see if we have this right. The supposed anti-racists are now the most racist, and the most non-judgmental are now the most judgmental.  How is any of this helpful to the very people you want to assist?

We believe Melissa Kearney’s well documented analysis is helpful. For those who don’t have time to read this important book, we present this short video to explore these critical themes about the two-parent family.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Weekend Read: Is Marriage A White Privilege ? Part II thumbnail

Weekend Read: Is Marriage A White Privilege ? Part II

By Neland Nobel

In part I, we discussed that a traditional family of mother and father produces the best results overall for children. And since children are our future, better results for them translate into a better future for the country.

It also means less income disparity and a better life for minority children.

To be clear, we recognize that not all families function well and that not all marriages work.  But the statistical work done by Professor Kearney accounts for that. Large swaths of families are part of the database. There was no cherry-picking of ‘happy families. That said, the data clearly shows that the traditional family, with all of its frailties, provides better outcomes than ‘new families’ that attempt to substitute the state for the father or the state for the entire family.  It is clear that ‘new families’ have even more problems than traditional families.

The bottom line is, ‘new families’ just don’t work as well and they enlarge the power and interference of the government, which is as bad for the polity as it is for children.

Marriage should not be an institution just for upper-class white people and Asians. All minority groups would be helped by strong marriages. The lack of family structure likely is far more influential in producing ‘disparate outcomes’ than whatever marginal racism is still left in America.

The rise of single-parent households is particularly acute in black families with over 70% of children born out of wedlock. But it is rising now in Hispanic families, and lower economic-class white families as well.

This has been known since the 1960s when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his critical work on the black family.  Even with all that time that has passed, authorities don’t seem to know what has caused it or what to do about it.

Kearney does not delve much into the why but rather chronicles the breakdown of the family and its effect on children. She appears to bend over backward not to be judgmental and regards single motherhood and its travails as “heroic”, a word we often see used in this context.  But what word do we use when people put themselves into such a position that requires heroism just to survive and thrive?  How many people are capable of such heroism?

The reason we say that is because whether it is the availability of welfare checks or the force of the popular culture (or both) degrading marriage and its importance, Asian families have shown almost no deterioration in marriage rates and their kids are blowing the doors off at school. How come?

Chinese Americans were very discriminated against at one time, and so were the Japanese, who were interned in camps by President Roosevelt. The Vietnamese were refugees who landed here with nothing. How come they can get married, stay married, and climb to the top of the income heap? How come very dark-skinned Asians from India and elsewhere succeed in marriage and now are the highest income earners in America? How come “white supremacy” does not keep them down?

The good professor is an economist so she only gently treads on this subject. We are not so implicit.

Gee, do you think it might have something to do with culture? Are there habits and attitudes that are more helpful to success than others? If so, in a world where “all cultures are equal (except white culture which is racist)”, it is hard to explain why different cultural traits among people of the same race create different results.

Is one permitted to be judgemental about culture for just a moment? For example, do the lyrics of rap music extoll the virtues of hard work, respect for women and children, and fidelity in marriage? If internalized by the listener, will the cultural messages of rap music lead to better social outcomes? What is your answer?

What about attitudes toward work, sobriety, duty, courage, grit, and determination? Are not the internalization of these virtues canceled out by the constant messaging that all the problems of black people have been caused by white men? Blaming others for one’s shortcomings is natural enough without our entire media and political establishment piling on.

So, we are treading on shaky ground. Today, one dare not suggest that poverty may be related to cultural attitudes. But then, how do we explain that some people get out of poverty and have stable marriages even when they were raised in poverty and a broken family? How do we explain Clarence Thomas or Louis Armstrong? Why are some people harmed by a bad environment while others emerge bruised but successful?

Maybe instead of studying poverty, we should study success. After all, poverty has been the default position throughout history. Success is rare, especially when it emerges from bad circumstances.

Why do blacks from the Caribbean do so much better than native-born American blacks? If the bigoted whites are holding blacks down, why the special dispensation from white bigots for Caribbean blacks?

This goes to our central point. The subject is a lot more complicated than just blaming white people.

Blaming white men for everything keeps us from having a more meaningful discussion about culture, doesn’t it?

You see today, we are no longer judgmental about other people and the way they choose to live. All family arrangements are just a matter of taste and are equally “good” even though we know the outcome for children can be devastating.

A strong family unit is still vastly superior to massive Federal programs.

As an institution, families are not perfect, but then again neither are government programs.

Families are imperfect because people are imperfect. In that sense, all families are dysfunctional to some degree. But the data shows that just a reasonably stable marriage with two parents creates better outcomes and other arrangements do not do as well. We don’t need to let the perfect get in the way of the good.

Why then are families denigrated in the popular culture? We have gone from Father Knows Best to Father Hasn’t a Clue. In numerous movies and situation comedies, Dad is portrayed as a large child and a moronic one to boot. Yet we know fathers are very important to raising both sons and daughters and sharing burdens with a wife.

Why is it the fault of white men that black families are in such disarray?  Absent the malign influence of government subsidy, exactly what is the process by which white men cause black people not to marry? Why have economic and social changes, and supposed “white supremacy” not affected Asian families or blacks from the Caribbean?

Finally, we find it both amusing and tragic that those who constantly tell us to be non-judgmental are severely judgmental. They, in fact, project virulent hate toward white men.

All this hatred may assist in dividing the nation for evil purposes, but how exactly does it help the black community?

Let’s see if we have this right. The supposed anti-racists are now the most racist, and the most non-judgmental are now the most judgmental.  How is any of this helpful to the very people you want to assist?

We believe Melissa Kearney’s well documented analysis is helpful. For those who don’t have time to read this important book, we present this short video to explore these critical themes about the two-parent family.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Every State Facing Deceptive, Unlimited Abortion Ballot Measures This November thumbnail

Every State Facing Deceptive, Unlimited Abortion Ballot Measures This November

By Jordan Boyd

Democrats and their abortion giant allies want to legalize killing unborn babies throughout all nine months of gestation in every state. A majority of U.S. adults reject that position, but that fact hasn’t stopped the ballot measure battle that plagued Ohio last year from infiltrating several other states, including those controlled by Republicans, during the 2024 election cycle.

On the Ballot

Florida

Florida voters will be asked come November 5 to weigh in on a state constitutional amendment declaring, “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”

As with other abortion measures led by out-of-state activists, the path to the Sunshine State’s ballot measure involved deception and, in this case, fraudulent signatures. The amendment itself is laced with loose terms like “viability,” which can easily be exploited to ensure abortion at any point in gestation and includes language that does away with parental consent.

If the proposed amendment passes this fall, medical professionals in Florida could deem abortion at any stage of pregnancy necessary for a woman’s “health,” physical, emotional, or mental. If it fails, Florida’s heartbeat law will stand.

Maryland

Maryland is already one of the most pro-abortion states in the U.S., but a ballot measure up for vote on Election Day 2024 could make the state’s sweeping abortion provisions more permanent and prevent any limits from being enacted in the future.

The amendment in question seeks to enshrine an undefined “right to reproductive freedom” in the Declaration of Rights portion of the state constitution because it claims abortion is “a central component of an individual’s rights to liberty and equality.”

The proposal, which is strongly supported by abortion giant Planned Parenthood, also says the state “may not, directly or indirectly, deny, burden, or abridge the right unless justified by a compelling state interest achieved by the least restrictive means.”

New York

New York, similar to Maryland, already has unlimited abortion as long as a medical professional deems the life or health — physical or mental — of the mother at risk. Abortion activists are asking New Yorkers to further enshrine abortion in the state by ratifying an Equal Rights Amendment that would effectively prevent the government from enacting limits on baby-killing in the future.

The proposed amendment also includes broad language that could stop the state from banning transgender mutilation and chemical castration for children and would infringe on parents’ rights.

“Whether through Albany sloppiness — or pernicious ideological intent — Proposition One would strip the legal rights of parents with school-age children to know about crucially important things happening with their kids, including controversial gender transformation procedures,” the Coalition to Protect Kids told Fox News Digital.

Could Be on the Ballot

Arizona

Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris and outside abortion groups such as ACLU and Planned Parenthood, flocked to the Grand Canyon State this year to promote a measure that, if added to the 2024 ballot and passed, adds a “fundamental right to abortion” to the state constitution.

The sweeping language not only leaves the definition of “viability” up to the subjective judgment of a health care professional but also prevents the state from passing or enforcing laws punishing abortionists for killing babies.

Organizers have until July 3 to collect 383,923 valid signatures but already claim they hit the threshold necessary to add the amendment to the November ballot.

Arkansas

A majority of Americans say they believe abortion should be limited to 15 weeks. Abortion activists in Arkansas, however, are scrambling before July 5 to collect signatures for a ballot measure that would prohibit the state from regulating abortion until after 18 weeks gestation.

The proposed constitutional amendment also carves out exceptions, regardless of state statute, for abortion beyond 18 weeks for fatal fetal anomalies and the undefined “health” of the woman.

Colorado

Colorado currently offers unlimited abortion through all nine months of pregnancy to anyone who wants it, but that isn’t good enough for the activists leading the national constitutional amendment abortion campaign.

Organizers say they have enough verified signatures to add a constitutional amendment to the 2024 ballot that would not only hamper future efforts to limit abortion but also permit “abortion to be a covered service under health insurance plans.”

Missouri

Abortion in Missouri is banned except in cases of medical emergencies. A ballot measure introduced by the ill-named Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, however, seeks to enshrine abortion in the state constitution by adding a “right to reproductive freedom” that permits anyone to “make and carry out decisions about all matters relating to reproductive health care.”

Activists have until May 5 to collect the 171,500 valid signatures required to add the proposed amendment to the November 2024 ballot.

Montana

To retaliate against Montana’s Republican-controlled legislature for trying to pass pro-life protections, abortion activists introduced a ballot measure that seeks to amend the state constitution to “expressly provide a right to make and carry out decisions about one’s own pregnancy, including the right to abortion.”

Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen tried to invalidate the measure under Article XIV, Section 11 of the Montana constitution because he said it “logrolls multiple distinct political choices into a single initiative.” The state Supreme Court, however, overruled his findings and rewrote the language.

Abortion activists have until the June 21 deadline to collect signatures.

Nebraska

Abortion activists in Nebraska want a constitutional amendment that would “provide all persons the fundamental right to abortion without interference from the state” to be added to the 2024 ballot. The campaign, however, faces challenges from two other ballot measures that seek to protect unborn babies and mothers from the harms of abortion throughout pregnancy.

Organizers of all petitions must turn in their collected signatures for certification by July 5.

Nevada

Nevadans will know in July whether an effort to enshrine a “fundamental right to abortion” in the state constitution will make it on the November 2024 ballot.

Currently, abortion in Nevada is permitted at any gestation as long as “the physician has reasonable cause to believe an abortion is necessary to preserve the life or health of the pregnant person.” The proposed amendment would further shield abortion in the state from regulation or limit.

Even if the amendment makes the 2024 ballot and passes, it must undergo another vote in a subsequent general election to achieve full ratification.

South Dakota

Pro-life protections in South Dakota ban abortion except to save the life of the mother. A ballot measure that activists say has met the state’s May 7 threshold for signatures, however, hopes to change that.

The proposed amendment language declares the state should not have any say over abortions in the first trimester. Instead, it claims South Dakota should only be allowed to enforce abortion limits that “are reasonably related to the physical health of the pregnant woman” in the second trimester and “to preserve the life and health of the pregnant woman” in the third trimester.

*****

This article was produced by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

The Cherry-Picking of History on College Campuses thumbnail

The Cherry-Picking of History on College Campuses

By Craig J. Cantoni

Editors’ Note: The author is spot on about the genocide in Darfur and selection bias in the outrage of campus leftists. We could also add the Islamic slaughter of their own as in Syria, the oppression by Hamas of all opposition in Gaza, and the killing of Black Christians throughout sub-Saharan Africa. If it does not fit the white settler colonialism mold into which they pour history, our wonderful college students don’t see a thing.  What is most strange, is the female student-dominated union between transgender ideology and Islamic radicalism. What seems lost on these demonstrators is they likely would not survive a week if they actually had to live among Islamic radicals.

The group-think and mob mentality are both anti-intellectual and dangerous.

Demonstrations are taking place on college campuses and elsewhere against Jews and Israel and in support of Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere. Meanwhile, there is silence about the continuation of horrific and indisputable war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and, yes, genocide in another place.

That other place is Darfur.

Why the silence? Is it because the perpetrators are Arabs and the victims are Blacks?

Maybe Black lives in Darfur don’t matter to college students at Columbia and Yale.

Incidentally, until evil British colonialists put an end to it in the nineteenth century, Darfur was the center of a slave trade run by Arabs. Perhaps that’s why in Darfur today, Arabs refer to their Black victims as slaves, as they rape, slaughter, and burn them alive in their huts.

Fire damage in 11 Darfur villages has been confirmed through satellite images analyzed by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab. Ironically, that is the same Yale where anti-Israel demonstrations have taken place.

The current mass killings in Darfur continue the genocide that occurred between 2003 and 2007, when an estimated 300,000 Darfuris died.

Farther west is the Sahel, the semi-arid area of Africa south of the Sahara Desert. Atrocities are taking place there, especially in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. The religious fanatics of the Islamic State are trying to turn it into a medieval paradise, where ignorant men rule and keep women subservient, uneducated, and dressed in sack cloth.

As with Darfur, there aren’t demonstrations about the Sahel on college campuses and elsewhere.

Naturally, as with other atrocities taking place in other parts of Africa and the Middle East, the fault doesn’t lie with the killers and rapists, according to the dominant narrative on campuses. It lies with Western colonialism and imperialism.

As the narrative goes, if Europeans hadn’t carved up the regions into artificial countries that obliterated traditional ethnocultural boundaries, the various tribes, sects and races would be as peaceful and harmonious as the scenes shown in American TV commercials of diverse Americans of every possible skin shade, facial feature and gender, loving each other and driving to a mountaintop together in their Subaru.

Given that I’ve been a history buff since elementary school, my personal library is pretty extensive. But it’s a grain of sand on a beach compared to the size of the libraries at Columbia, Yale, and other universities. Still, my library is diverse enough to not only include books that detail the evils committed by European and American colonialists, imperialists, and enslavers, but also books that detail the evils committed by other races and nationalities throughout history, as well as the evils committed by indigenous peoples throughout both history and pre-history.

Certainly, university libraries cover the full panoply of human history. It’s not certain, though, that students have gotten past the history of what White Europeans and Americans have inflicted on Blacks, indigene, and people of color (BIPOC). Judging by their words and actions, and their apparent hatred of their own country and Western civilization, they have no idea what BIPOCs have inflicted on each other.

Like brains pickled in a jar of formaldehyde, their brains have been steeped in the sophomoric, nay, juvenile, notion that all Whites are oppressors and all non-Whites are the oppressed. For some, the notion serves as a convenient excuse for their own failures.

Depending on one’s biases and what slice of history is selected to make a point—and what book is selected from my library or a university library—the history of Jews, Zionism, Israel, and Palestine cam be either simple or complex, or black-and-white or gray, or good guys versus bad guys, or oppressors versus the oppressed.

My biases match my Judeo-Christian beliefs and upbringing, as well as my experience as a kid in eighth grade when the nuns at my parochial school showed a film of the Nazi concentration camps being liberated. The ghastly scenes led me to wonder how humans could do that to each other. That question in turn led me to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when it came out in paperback. I’ve been reading history and moral philosophy ever since.

That doesn’t make me particularly insightful or erudite, but it does make me realize that the group-think and mob mentality on college campuses is both anti-intellectual and dangerous.

*****

Image Credit: YouTube screenshot Global News in Darfur

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

DARFUR GENOCIDE: Cherry-Picking History on College Campuses thumbnail

DARFUR GENOCIDE: Cherry-Picking History on College Campuses

By Craig J. Cantoni

Editors’ Note: The author is spot on about the genocide in Darfur and selection bias in the outrage of campus leftists. We could also add the Islamic slaughter of their own as in Syria, the oppression by Hamas of all opposition in Gaza, and the killing of Black Christians throughout sub-Saharan Africa. If it does not fit the white settler colonialism mold into which they pour history, our wonderful college students don’t see a thing.  What is most strange, is the female student-dominated union between transgender ideology and Islamic radicalism. What seems lost on these demonstrators is they likely would not survive a week if they actually had to live among Islamic radicals.

The group-think and mob mentality are both anti-intellectual and dangerous.

Demonstrations are taking place on college campuses and elsewhere against Jews and Israel and in support of Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere. Meanwhile, there is silence about the continuation of horrific and indisputable war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and, yes, genocide in another place.

That other place is Darfur.

Why the silence? Is it because the perpetrators are Arabs and the victims are Blacks?

Maybe Black lives in Darfur don’t matter to college students at Columbia and Yale.

Incidentally, until evil British colonialists put an end to it in the nineteenth century, Darfur was the center of a slave trade run by Arabs. Perhaps that’s why in Darfur today, Arabs refer to their Black victims as slaves, as they rape, slaughter, and burn them alive in their huts.

Fire damage in 11 Darfur villages has been confirmed through satellite images analyzed by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab. Ironically, that is the same Yale where anti-Israel demonstrations have taken place.

The current mass killings in Darfur continue the genocide that occurred between 2003 and 2007, when an estimated 300,000 Darfuris died.

Farther west is the Sahel, the semi-arid area of Africa south of the Sahara Desert. Atrocities are taking place there, especially in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. The religious fanatics of the Islamic State are trying to turn it into a medieval paradise, where ignorant men rule and keep women subservient, uneducated, and dressed in sack cloth.

As with Darfur, there aren’t demonstrations about the Sahel on college campuses and elsewhere.

Naturally, as with other atrocities taking place in other parts of Africa and the Middle East, the fault doesn’t lie with the killers and rapists, according to the dominant narrative on campuses. It lies with Western colonialism and imperialism.

As the narrative goes, if Europeans hadn’t carved up the regions into artificial countries that obliterated traditional ethnocultural boundaries, the various tribes, sects and races would be as peaceful and harmonious as the scenes shown in American TV commercials of diverse Americans of every possible skin shade, facial feature and gender, loving each other and driving to a mountaintop together in their Subaru.

Given that I’ve been a history buff since elementary school, my personal library is pretty extensive. But it’s a grain of sand on a beach compared to the size of the libraries at Columbia, Yale, and other universities. Still, my library is diverse enough to not only include books that detail the evils committed by European and American colonialists, imperialists, and enslavers, but also books that detail the evils committed by other races and nationalities throughout history, as well as the evils committed by indigenous peoples throughout both history and pre-history.

Certainly, university libraries cover the full panoply of human history. It’s not certain, though, that students have gotten past the history of what White Europeans and Americans have inflicted on Blacks, indigene, and people of color (BIPOC). Judging by their words and actions, and their apparent hatred of their own country and Western civilization, they have no idea what BIPOCs have inflicted on each other.

Like brains pickled in a jar of formaldehyde, their brains have been steeped in the sophomoric, nay, juvenile, notion that all Whites are oppressors and all non-Whites are the oppressed. For some, the notion serves as a convenient excuse for their own failures.

Depending on one’s biases and what slice of history is selected to make a point—and what book is selected from my library or a university library—the history of Jews, Zionism, Israel, and Palestine cam be either simple or complex, or black-and-white or gray, or good guys versus bad guys, or oppressors versus the oppressed.

My biases match my Judeo-Christian beliefs and upbringing, as well as my experience as a kid in eighth grade when the nuns at my parochial school showed a film of the Nazi concentration camps being liberated. The ghastly scenes led me to wonder how humans could do that to each other. That question in turn led me to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when it came out in paperback. I’ve been reading history and moral philosophy ever since.

That doesn’t make me particularly insightful or erudite, but it does make me realize that the group-think and mob mentality on college campuses is both anti-intellectual and dangerous.

*****

Photo credit: EU/ECHO

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

The Pro-Life Movement Has A Storytelling Problem thumbnail

The Pro-Life Movement Has A Storytelling Problem

By Carrie Gress

Women are drawn toward what is aspirational and beautiful, not scary stories of grueling and unfamiliar situations.

Many years ago, a friend visiting an Eastern European country diligently wrote several postcards, stamped them, and then dropped them in what he thought was a mailbox. It turned out to be a very elegant trash can. Of course, his postcards never made it to their intended recipients.

In the pro-life movement, messaging can often be like my friend’s simple mistake where we think we are doing one thing, but with unintended results. For decades, pro-lifers have tried to communicate rich and important truths about babies, motherhood, and the family, yet the polls and the culture continually show these efforts are falling upon deaf ears. We make impassioned and intellectually rigorous arguments, and then they dissolve in the red robes and bonnets of “The Handmaid’s Tale” activists. That one image instantly conveys more than words can say.

What, then, do the red-robed, bonneted handmaids communicate? They say wordlessly, albeit untruthfully, that this is what the pro-life movement wants for women: forced pregnancy and fertility cults. Pro-lifers want to take away the very life most women live and supplant it with something unimaginably bad. They want your freedom.

As I explain at length in my book, The End of Woman, the left has successfully placed in the minds of most women a false binary: We either stick with the savvy, attractive, ambitious, and career-oriented women held up by the culture, or we are handmaids, doormats, silently enslaved as our bodies pump out more babies. It is one or the other. A healthy, engaging, compassionate, and compelling woman is nowhere to be found.

The left, through strong visuals, has masterfully undermined our most reasoned arguments and best compassionate pleas. Rather than finding a different way to communicate, we can often be like my father decades ago speaking to our Japanese exchange student: We just speak louder. Higher volume, as the blank face of our exchange student made clear, doesn’t mean anyone understands any better. We need a new approach.

Speaking Women’s Language

The issues we face are related to women’s opinions. This is not to say that there aren’t men out there who buy deeply into the leftist agenda. When it comes to abortion, it is still women who are encouraged to exhibit risky behavior, and they are the ones walking into abortion facilities, even if pressured by others (often other women). Men, especially young men, lean more toward conservative values, while women across the country seem immovable on the issue of life. We must learn to speak women’s language.

About a decade ago, LEGO researched why more girls were not playing with their products. They discovered “that girls wanted more reality-based toys that let them see themselves as the characters, whereas boys liked more escapist, fantasy stuff like ninjas and wizards.” Girls, when playing, saw themselves in the toys, projecting their own lives into the game. This tendency doesn’t go away as women mature.

In a positive way, it becomes the avenue through which women feel compassion for others. Many women can easily envision themselves in the place of other women. This envisioning is also behind the frequent comparisons women do with other people, particularly with other women, that can easily result in jealousy or envy, instead of compassion.

Pro-lifers know the power of stories but often are not telling the right ones. The stories we tell usually center around success stories of women who have been in very tight and gritty situations that somehow come out much better for not having had an abortion. These are great stories for fundraising. What potential pro-life donor doesn’t love to hear how his dollars could be spent to help women and babies?

But if we consider this kind of story from the viewpoint of the women we hope to target, it suddenly isn’t such a great story to tell. Women don’t want to think of themselves in an awful situation. It feels scary, unfamiliar, and enervating, instead of empowering, exciting, or inspiring. It stirs up fear instead of hope for women not in that direct situation.

What, then, could be more effective? Look around. Women are drawn toward what is aspirational and interesting, the personal and personalized, that which is fun and beautiful. Look at any glossy magazine, social media influencer, or Hollywood starlet. For better or worse, they convey the elements women want in their lives. This is the key for the Handmaids; women in a flash can envision themselves in that situation and know instantaneously that it would be just awful — no matter how silly or fictional it may be.

New Stories of Beauty and High Achievement

Not only do we need positive images to convey our message that combats the Handmaid idea, but we also need something that women want to see happen in their lives. This is also why presenting upper-class or high-status women would be much more effective than using lower-status women as models. The aspirational is powerful.

Perhaps part of our problem is that donors, who are predominantly male and therefore more abstract, want to donate to that which appeals to them instead of what appeals to intended female recipients. A simple way to move forward is to figure out the right language to connect the interested donors with messaging that resonates with women. The key is to find new visuals, new stories, and new narratives that speak to women’s minds and hearts.

For example, instead of bland images of women cuddling a child, what about images of a woman in the world with her child/children? Instead of creating yet another academic journal, why not a glossy and compelling magazine?

Instead of another well-reasoned master class on faith or family values, why not a visually beautiful home show that features healthy women and children, with a script that conveys our message?

Instead of another film related to a rough life redeemed, what about a storyline with compelling women living an attractive life that includes humor and wit, kindness, and beauty? But that can also communicate that having children is a matter of self-interest, not self-destruction.

Instead of another book arguing for pro-life principles, why not a novel with rich maternal characters in the plot?

There have been limited forays into these fields, but it is vital to convince people, particularly those who generally fund such programming, of the need. The conversation needs to be bigger than just talking about abortion. We have said precious little about the goodness of motherhood (biologically, psychologically, and spiritually) for five decades. There is plenty to say. These kinds of themes also have the advantage of filling the vacuum in our culture for the good, the true, and the beautiful.

It has been a hard season to be pro-life. If we are serious about restoring our country to a place where babies are treasured and women are provided for in the vulnerability that comes with bearing and raising children, then we must find new ways to communicate our ideas without the expectation that it can happen overnight.

The left has mastered the art of visual optics largely because that is all they have. Their ideology has to be wrapped in something compelling because it can’t stand on its own. This is why the left avoids debates and why when conservatives are admitted, like on “The View,” they are always outnumbered.

Conservatives have largely depended on the truth about women and children to be the message, while continually cycling through the debate in a kind of crisis mode. But imagine what could happen if we coupled truth with beautiful imagery and powerful messaging with a long-term view? If we had the confidence to proactively form the culture instead of just reacting to it? It’s then that the hearts and minds of women could finally be transformed and restored into something that is both beautiful and life-giving.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Dems Smell Blood In The Water After Arizona Abortion Ruling. Republicans Are Scrambling To Respond thumbnail

Dems Smell Blood In The Water After Arizona Abortion Ruling. Republicans Are Scrambling To Respond

By Mary Lou Masters

Editors’ Note:  We think the authors are spot on. Abortion is a big issue for Arizona and we have offered our own take that we think is helpful in thinking about the matter. We don’t think the compromise we suggest will satisfy all, but that is the difference between the political realm and the spiritual realm. What is clear to us is that those who support life have a lot more to lose if there is a thundering Democrat victory. Not only will it set back the immediate cause for life, but it will allow the radical Democrats to re-define the family, sex, and impose the transgender agenda on our school children. For those urban women moved by the abortion issue, we have to make it clear how threatening the Democrats are to women. What after all, do women’s rights mean if you define women out of existence? A Democrat victory will attack school choice and parental rights, as well as bankrupt the nation’s finances. A Democrat victory will shred women’s competitiveness in sports and make Title IX advances an historical footnote. All women should be concerned about those issues. We should offer a reasonable compromise, similar to that offered by Governor Ducey, and make the other side look like the unyielding extremists that they are.

On April 9, the Arizona Supreme Court allowed an 1864 law to be enforced that effectively restricted abortion in all cases except when the life of the mother is in danger. The decision has supercharged the issue of abortion amid an already-contentious election year, forcing Republicans running in the battleground state to address not only the ruling, but the legal status of abortion itself.

Conversations with strategists and campaigns reveal that many Republicans are acutely aware of the impact the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling could have on races up and down the ballot. However, there is no consensus on how to approach the issue.

Meanwhile, with a constitutional amendment to establish a right to abortion likely to be on the ballot, Arizona has become a focal point for Democrats.

President Joe Biden’s campaign launched a seven-figure Arizona ad buy just two days after the decision, targeting young, female, and Hispanic voters; House Democrats’ campaign arm fired off attacks on incumbent Republican members of Congress; and Rep. Ruben Gallego, the Democratic Senate candidate, debuted a digital ad hitting Republican candidate Kari Lake for past abortion comments.

The ruling and abortion ballot measure are also expected to boost Democratic voter turnout; nonpartisan elections analyst Sabato’s Crystal Ball shifted key races in Arizona to more competitive categories, explaining that “we can’t imagine a major ballot fight over abortion rights would hurt Democratic turnout efforts in the state, and it very well could help.”

“I really think that the Supreme Court’s decision upends Arizona’s elections, and you have to almost re-evaluate every race up and down the ballot,” Barrett Marson, an Arizona-based Republican strategist, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Yet Republicans so far have been mixed in their responses.

The DCNF reached out to all major Republican campaigns in the state, as well as the House and Senate GOP campaign arms and major fundraising vehicles, to gauge Republicans’ strategy.

Some groups and campaigns have acknowledged that the ruling could potentially galvanize Democratic turnout and attract donor funding, stressing the need to spend funds accordingly.

“We are fighting back, and we will be running an aggressive, grassroots campaign to protect our state from the radical left,” a spokesperson for the Arizona Republican Party told the DCNF.

Others, meanwhile, are less concerned, arguing that the ruling does little to change the ballot’s dynamic.

“Democrats are already going to turn out; like, Donald Trump’s on the ballot,” one national Republican strategist told the DCNF.

Trump’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, re-emphasized Trump’s recent abortion stance, in which the former president came out against a national ban and argued in favor of leaving the issues to the states, in a statement to the DCNF, but didn’t answer specific questions related to actions the campaign might take.

“President Trump could not have been more clear. These are decisions for people of each state to make,” Leavitt said.

Trump also came out against the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision for going “too far” in a Truth Social post on April 12, and called on the state legislature and Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs to quickly “remedy what has happened.”

Nevertheless, Biden’s ad blitz took aim at Trump’s abortion stance. “Because of Donald Trump, millions of women lost the fundamental freedom to control their own bodies,” Biden says in the video, referencing the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 with the help of Trump-appointed justices. “Women’s lives are in danger because of that.”

Gallego has also sought to bring attention to the abortion issue since the ruling, running an ad that calls Lake “wrong on abortion,” “wrong for the Senate” and “wrong for Arizona.”

For her part, Lake has come out against the state Supreme Court’s decision, calling for a “common sense solution.” She also announced her support for Trump’s abortion position on April 8, and subsequently released a policy video on the issue.

“I chose life, but I’m not every woman. I want to make sure that every woman who finds herself pregnant has more choices so that she can make that choice that I made,” Lake said in the video. “I never would ever assume that any woman had the same exact feelings I had or situation I had. We know that some women are economically in a horrible situation, they might be in an abusive relationship, they might be the victim of rape.”

“Republicans need to talk about what they believe on the abortion issue. Like, they have to. And I think Kari Lake’s doing a pretty good job of that,” the national Republican strategist said.

Lake’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Tate Mitchell, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), told the DCNF that “Arizona is one of our top pick-up opportunities this year, and we will continue working to elect Kari Lake and defeat open-borders, far-left radical Ruben Gallego.”

The Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), a super PAC boosting Senate Republicans, emphasized to the DCNF that the only spending decisions they’ve made are in Montana and Ohio. SLF pointed the DCNF toward a June 2023 polling memo released by its affiliated nonprofit, One Nation, encouraging Republicans to make their position on abortion clear.

Another national GOP strategist told the DCNF that “national Republicans are still planning to invest heavily in television ads and ground game in Arizona.”

Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee (RNC) referred the DCNF toward Trump’s Truth Social post criticizing the state Supreme Court’s decision, as well as an April 10 campaign press release calling Biden’s attacks on the former president over abortion “dishonest.” The RNC did not provide further details on its efforts to combat Democrats’ spending in the state.

On the House front, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) is targeting the districts of Reps. David Schweikert and Juan Ciscomani.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball also moved Ciscomani’s seat from “Leans Republican” to “Toss-Up” on Wednesday.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP’s campaign arm, did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment; neither did the campaigns for Schweikert and Ciscomani.

The Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), a super PAC boosting House Republicans, said it spent nearly $1 million for Schweikert’s race in the 2022 midterms, as well as over $3 million for Ciscomani.

“CLF was proud to support Schweikert and Ciscomani last cycle, and we are prepared to do what it takes to help these talented Members win again this fall,” Courtney Parella, communications director for CLF, told the DCNF in a statement.

‘Decided By Arizonans’

Arizona Republicans are similarly divided on what should be the legal status of abortion itself.

For instance, Republicans in the Arizona state legislature have twice blocked efforts to repeal the 1864 law after the state Supreme Court’s ruling.

“From a messaging standpoint, [the ruling] makes it a lot more difficult on Republicans, and I think in some of the swing congressional races and legislative races, it’s just gonna make this an issue for the foreseeable future unless the legislature can figure a way out,” Brian Murray, former Arizona Republican Party executive director, told the DCNF.

Lawmakers who blocked the law’s repeal, as well as the state Freedom Caucus, have expressed support for the decision, while Schweikert and Ciscomani, like Lake, have opposed it.

“This issue should be decided by Arizonans, not legislated from the bench,” Schweikert wrote on April 9. “I encourage the state legislature to address this issue immediately.”

“The territorial law is archaic,” Ciscomani said the same day. “We must do better for women and I call on our state policymakers to immediately address this in a bipartisan manner.”

The opposition from prominent Republicans to the Arizona Supreme Court’s abortion ruling could mitigate Democrats’ turnout boost, according to polling analyst Jon McHenry.

“Typically where there’s been something on the ballot, it has helped Democrats — there’s kind of no way around it. The Arizona situation is going to be an interesting case, because you have so many high profile Republicans saying that this really went too far,” said McHenry. “It’ll be interesting to see what happens with turnout when you have Republicans, essentially on the same side, saying, ‘we need to repeal this.’”

Nevertheless, the congressmen’s Democratic opponents have launched salvos against them over abortion, while the House Democratic campaign arm charged that Schweikert and Ciscomani are “backpedaling on their stance on abortion,” adding that “Arizona voters will remember that they remain hell-bent on controlling women and dragging this country backwards.”

The DCCC launched a mobile billboard in Schweikert’s district targeting the Republican over his voting record on in-vitro fertilization, The Copper Courier reported on April 11.

The Arizona GOP has yet to release a statement on the ruling, while the state Democratic Party has launched numerous attacks against Lake, Ciscomani and Schweikert over the issue.

‘Tough Year For Republicans’

Arizona’s importance in the presidential election between Trump and Biden, as well as the relatively narrow margins of victory in past Senate races, make correct handling of the abortion issue all the more important to the GOP. The state’s presidential, Senate and congressional races may be decided by just a few thousand votes this cycle, meaning that potentially increased Democratic turnout is particularly significant.

“This is going to be a tough year for Republicans in Arizona in a year that should be good. I mean, Joe Biden has a lot of headwinds here in Arizona,” Marson said. “[Before the ruling], I would have said that Arizona is a lean-Trump state … And today? I would say that Arizona is a lean-Biden state.” (RELATED: Elections Analysis Delivers Bad News For Arizona Republicans Following Landmark Abortion Ruling)

Trump narrowly won Arizona in 2016, but lost the state to Biden in 2020 by fewer than 11,000 votes.

Yet Trump has led Biden in the RealClearPolitics average for Arizona all cycle, and is currently up by 4.5 points, with Democrats hoping the abortion issue will help cut into Trump’s lead as election day approaches.

Abortion played a significant role in motivating Democratic voters during the 2022 midterms following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, according to a KFF/AP VoteCast analysis.

However, in a presidential election year, this effect may not be as strong.

“A presidential race is going to have literally armies of get-out-the-vote workers,” Murray told the DCNF. “If you don’t vote this time, or didn’t the last time, it’s because you really didn’t want to. So I don’t think you can get turnout much higher than it’s gonna be.”

Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster for Biden’s 2020 campaign, told the DCNF that the state Supreme Court’s ruling “keeps the issue alive not just in Arizona, but everywhere.”

“It helps the Senate race, it helps the presidential, it helps with turnout, it helps with persuasion of suburban women in Phoenix and Tucson. So it’s very, very positive for winning the state, as well as the initiative in the state,” said Lake. “This is the big difference post-Dobbs — where the pro-abortion side is more energized than the anti-abortion side, and they’re bigger.”

*****

This article was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Biden’s Title IX Rewrite Strips Away Protections For Women, Denies Women Equal Opportunity thumbnail

Biden’s Title IX Rewrite Strips Away Protections For Women, Denies Women Equal Opportunity

By Editors of The Independent Women’s Forum

Editors’ Note: Democrats cast themselves as the party of “women’s rights”, while they actually are the party of unrestricted abortion to be paid for with public money.  We hope the knowledge of this most recent decision will change the minds of not only Arizona women, but women across the nation. By using school lunch money for extortion, they impose by bureaucratic non-democratic means the whole of the transgender agenda. No elected representative accountable to the people even got to vote on this. This is pure bureaucratic fiat, showing the grotesque nature of the Administrative State in action. They would rather take the food out of children’s mouths than listen to the public will, which overwhelmingly rejects this action. It defines women as nonexistent. And they will be doing this from the college level down to kindergarten. Wherever schools use Federal money, they will by the nature of the incentives adopt the program of the radical transgenders. This action by the Biden Administration will do great damage to the cause of female advancement, will harm and confuse our children, curtail the rights and prerogatives of parents, and severely damage the public school system. It needs to be fought aggressively and tenaciously. 

”Taking opportunities from women and giving them to men doesn’t enforce Title IX, it violates it. That was true before the Administration dropped this rule, and it is still true today.” – Jennifer C. Braceras

Today, the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), the nation’s most impactful policy organization for women, condemned the Biden administration’s unlawful Title IX regulation, which unilaterally rewrites the landmark sex equality law and undermines women’s rights, and free speech, and due process. This new Omnibus Rule, which governs all aspects of the educational experience, turns Title IX on its head through extra-statutory regulations that require schools to allow males to self-identify into women’s spaces, opportunities, and athletics.

Independent Women’s Forum and Independent Women’s Law Center (IWLC) are preparing to sue the Biden administration to enjoin this unlawful action.

Announcing IWF’s lawsuits against the administration, May Mailman, director of Independent Women’s Law Center said, “Title IX was designed to give women equal opportunities in academic settings. It forbids discrimination on the basis of “sex,” which it affirms throughout the statute is binary and biological. The unlawful Omnibus Regulation re-imagines Title IX to permit the invasion of women’s spaces and the reduction of women’s rights in the name of elevating protections for “gender identity,” which is contrary to the text and purpose of Title IX. This is illegal, and we plan to sue.”

”Taking opportunities from women and giving them to men doesn’t enforce Title IX, it violates it. That was true before the Administration dropped this rule, and it is still true today,” added Jennifer C. Braceras, vice president for legal affairs at IWF and founder of IWLC. “The Department of Education can’t just rewrite the statute by administrative fiat. We are confident the courts will remind the Department of this basic principle and strike down this unlawful rule.”

By claiming that Title IX prohibits discrimination on the basis of “gender identity,” a term never mentioned in the original statute, the Biden administration’s rewrite forces schools to let male who identify as women take women’s scholarships and invade women’s private spaces — including women’s athletic teams.

Polling reflects that 69% of Americans believe athletes should play on teams that correspond with their biological sex.

In an election year, the Biden administration’s lie that this Title IX rewrite does not impact women’s sports is a dishonest attempt to hide their woke agenda from to the American people.

In addition to its impact on sports, the Title IX Omnibus Rule also redefines “sexual harassment” to encompass a single instance of speech, which will, in effect:

1. force students and teachers to use “preferred pronouns” or face discipline;
2. require schools to eliminate all sexual misconduct, even such conduct of which they are unaware, pressuring schools to create woke bureaucracies to police speech; and
3. dissolve protections for accused students (again, whose action may be failure to use the “correct” pronouns), including the right to see evidence against them.

The administration’s draft rules, released on June 23, 2022, “in celebration” of the 50th anniversary of Title IX, generated overwhelming public opposition, with citizens filing a record number of comments with the Department of Education.

Independent Women’s Voice, IWF’s 501(c)(4) sister organization, drove more than 20,000 public comments to the Department of Education opposing the Biden administration’s plan to gut Title IX. The legal and policy objections filed by IWF and Independent Women’s Law Center can be read below:

Female athletes and IWF ambassadors react to the Biden administration’s Title IX Omnibus Rule:

Coach Kim Russell, former Head Women’s Lacrosse Coach at Oberlin College and Independent Women’s Forum ambassador, said: “Make no mistake, this rule will be used by schools as justification for unlawfully punishing anyone who dares to dissent from the orthodoxy of gender ideology. I experienced first hand the desire of woke bureaucrats to punish people who speak out on behalf of women. For now, the Biden administration has provided those bureaucrats cover. But I am confident that this rule will not stand and will be struck down as a flagrant violation of the First Amendment.”

Paula Scanlan, former University of Pennsylvania swimmer and Independent Women’s Forum ambassador said: “If allowed to stand, the Biden administration’s new rule will set women back decades, eroding the impressive gains that Title IX ushered in.”

Riley Gaines, former 12-time All-American swimmer at the University of Kentucky and Independent Women’s Forum ambassador, said: “With its new Title IX rewrite, the Biden administration is unilaterally erasing fifty years of equal opportunity law for women. The president and his administration can’t act like they care about women or our opportunities and then go and wipe out women’s protections under the country’s landmark sex equality law.”

Independent Women’s Forum has been leading the fight to Take Back Title IX and save women’s sports. Learn more below:

Independent Women’s Forum ambassadors recently joined the “Take Back Title IX” roundtable, hosted by U.S. Senators on Capitol Hill, to advocate fairness in women’s sports. Read their written testimonies here.

IWF and IWLC have produced a first-of-its-kind report entitled, “Competition Report: Title IX, Male-Bodied Athletes, and the Threat To Women’s Sports,” to help athletic associations, policymakers, and courts understand the growing threat to female athletes.

IWF’s Female Athlete Storytelling drive featuring real stories from real women athletes can be found here.

IWF organized the first Our Bodies, Our Sports Rally in Washington DC on June 23, 2022 to take back Title IX. The rally, held across the street from the White House, featured female athletes, coaches, parents, and advocates and 17 organizations across the political spectrum to celebrate 50 years of Title IX and urge policymakers to help keep women’s sports female.

*****

This article was produced by the Independent Women’s Forum and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Medical Groups Silent After Review Finds ‘Weak Evidence’ for Recommending Puberty Blockers to Kids thumbnail

Medical Groups Silent After Review Finds ‘Weak Evidence’ for Recommending Puberty Blockers to Kids

By Katelynn Richardson

Editors’ Note: It is appalling that American medical organizations either remain opposed or silent on this latest study. Already Scotland is looking at banning puberty blockers and several other European countries now severely restrict their use. Among these are Norway, U.K. Sweden, Denmark, France, and Finland. In addition, 22 American states have banned the use of puberty blockers. Between the abuses of COVID-19 vaccines and jumping on the transgender bandwagon, the American medical establishment looks less scientific and less medical every day. Maybe they should drop the pretense and just become left-wing political lobbyists. 

Major medical associations remain silent after the results of a four-year review commissioned by the National Health Service England undermined their recommendations for giving puberty blockers to children with gender dysphoria.

The Cass Report, conducted by Dr. Hilary Cass, a pediatrician and former president of the U.K.’s Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, found only “weak evidence” for offering puberty blockers to children.

Cass concluded that her findings, released April 10, “raise questions about the quality of currently available guidelines” offered by associations such as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and the Endocrine Society, yet neither organization has committed to reviewing their guidelines.

The review recommends against treating children with puberty blockers outside of a research setting. It also urged “extreme caution” for providing cross-sex hormones to minors under 18 and stressed the need for a “clear clinical rationale.”

The review further suggested a “full programme of research be established” to “look at the characteristics, interventions, and outcomes of every young person presenting to the NHS [National Health Service] gender services.”

“Although a diagnosis of gender dysphoria has been seen as necessary for initiating medical treatment, it is not reliably predictive of whether that young person will have longstanding gender incongruence in the future, or whether medical intervention will be the best option for them,” The Cass Report noted.

The American Medical Association, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Endocrine Society did not respond to multiple inquiries over the past week from the Daily Caller News Foundation asking whether they had concerns with the report’s findings or intended to conduct their own review.

Aside from WPATH, these organizations largely have failed to address the report publicly. In a written statement, the transgender health organization said it “supports policies that increase access to high-quality ethical care for transgender youth” and claimed that the report is rooted in a “false premise.”

The organization’s standards of care, eighth version, states that waiting several years to start a young adolescent on puberty blockers “is not always practical nor necessary given the premise of the treatment as a means to buy time while avoiding distress from irreversible pubertal changes.” However, it acknowledges that establishing a “sustained experience of gender incongruence” can be important before starting.

“The foundation of The Cass Report is rooted in the false premise that non-medical alternatives to care will result in less adolescent distress for most adolescents and is based on a lack of knowledge of and experience working with this patient population,” the World Professional Association for Transgender Health said in a press release. “It is harmful to perpetuate this notion and does not acknowledge the very real fact that medical pathways are an important treatment option for many young people.”

The Endocrine Society characterizes puberty blockers as a “reversible pause to puberty” and “a first step in treatment to allow the adolescent to explore their gender identity and/or to provide relief from distress.” WPATH’s guidelines likewise recommend putting adolescents on “puberty-suppressing hormones” to “alleviate gender dysphoria.”

Physicians at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health acknowledged puberty blockers can cause irreversible consequences in minors such as infertility, bone loss, and disrupted brain development in educational sessions from September 2022 previously obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Both the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry recommend WPATH’s guidance for handling gender dysphoria in children. The AMA often opposes red state laws that ban sex-change procedures for minors, including puberty blockers.

The Cass Report notes that “there is no evidence that puberty blockers buy time to think, and some concern that they may change the trajectory of psychosexual and gender identity development.”

The report also questions WPATH and the Endocrine Society on the “circularity” of their citations, which make support for their positions appear stronger than they are.

Early versions of the two organizations’ guidelines influenced “nearly all” guidelines set by other organizations, the report notes. Their guidelines are also “closely interlinked” because WPATH provided input on the Endocrine Society’s recommendations, it says.

“The circularity of this approach may explain why there has been an apparent consensus on key areas of practice despite the evidence being poor,” the report states.

*****

This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

The Sex Education of Our Nation’s Children: Since the Sexual Revolution thumbnail

The Sex Education of Our Nation’s Children: Since the Sexual Revolution

By Kali Fontanilla

Since the Sexual Revolution

Then came the 1960s and the Sexual Revolution. Many attribute the Sexual Revolution to the birth control pill approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1960. Some states banned the pill entirely or made it illegal for single women to purchase, but by 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that prohibiting the sale of contraceptives to unmarried women was unconstitutional. At the same time, attitudes about sex changed. Sex was no longer culturally tied to marriage and children.

With this change, a new organization was formed to tackle sexual health and education in America.Mary S. Calderone, the medical director of Planned Parenthood of America, co-founded the Sex Information and Education Council (SEICUS) in 1964. SEICUS had a mission of moving America away from the Family Life focus of sex education of the past. They asserted that “sex is not just something you do in marriage, in a bed, in the dark, in one position. Sex is what it means to be a man or woman.” This was the first time the nation had been introduced to comprehensive sex education programs in our public high schools. The type of sex education promoted by SEICUS included content on gays, lesbians, and masturbation.

Another proponent of comprehensive sex education during the time was Lester A Kendell, who wanted the nation’s sex education programs to move away from the idea that premarital sex was harmful to society or individuals. He explained, “The purpose of sex education is not primarily to control and suppress sex expression, as in the past, but to indicate the immense possibilities for human fulfillment that human sexuality offers.” You can see how this mindset would lead to a focus on pleasure-based sex education, perhaps something fine for classes given to adults but wholly inappropriate for instruction to children.

SEICUS produced study guides on sex education, masturbation, and homosexuality with funding from the Office of Education at the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. With the wide distribution of its guides, SIECUS received requests from schools to help with their sex education programs. The Family Life Education programs, as proclaimed by the sexual progressives, were deemed insufficient to meet the educational needs of the rapidly changing sex lives of the American people. Or were the times really changing as quickly as we have been told?

If you look at the statistics from the time of the Sexual Revolution, the mindset of Americans was still pretty tame. It turns out not everyone was a free-love hippie. Of married women, 21 percent had no premarital sex, and 43 percent of women had only one premarital sex partner—their future husband. Even as late as the 1980s, over half of women had only one partner before walking down the aisle. Compare this to 2010, where only 5 percent of new brides are virgins. It’s all relative. At the time, the Sexual Revolution seemed wild, but in comparison, today, it was PG. Regardless, sex education organizations like SEICUS found their angle to get into the schools and promote their loose view of sex to those under 18.

Source: Nicholas H. Wolfinger, “Counterintuitive Trends in the Link Between Premarital Sex and Marital Stability,” Institute for Family Studies, June 6, 2016, https://ifstudies.org/blog/counterintuitive-trends-in-the-link-between-premarital-sex-and-marital-stability.

By the 1980s, around half the states in America adopted comprehensive sex education curricula, while the rest continued to teach Family Life Education classes emphasizing abstinence before marriage. But in the mid-1980s, the deadly AIDS epidemic fundamentally changed how America viewed sex. With an almost 100 percent fatal rate at the time, both sides of the sex education debates blamed each other. Those in favor of more abstinence-centered programs believed that the AIDS epidemic was caused by the overall moral decline of society and the sanctioning of permissive attitudes toward sex by those favoring comprehensive sex education programs. Organizations like SEICUS used the AIDS epidemic to justify the need for more information on homosexual relationships to be taught in our schools. In 1986, U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop pushed for comprehensive sex education in our nation’s public schools. “There is no doubt that we need sex education in our schools, and it includes information on heterosexual and homosexual relationships,” Koop wrote in his report. “The need is critical, and the price of neglect is high.”

But was the need critical? Yes, the AIDS epidemic was scary and certainly made the headlines, but the realistic chance for an American to contract and then die from AIDS in the 1980s was around 0.0002 percent. Nevertheless, AIDS deaths were the tragic excuse needed to get more instruction in our sex education programs about homosexual sex and a general push toward comprehensive sex ed.

Fast forwarding to today, some organizations are pushing for more pleasure-based sex education, completely obliterating the lines of what most sane people would consider appropriate to talk about with children. Consider that the National Education Association’s LGBTQ caucus recommends the Queering Sex Education Teen Guide. The guide asserts:

We recognize the need for an alternative sex education resource. It’s not okay that gaps are being left and our sexual experiences are being ignored: there’s so much opportunity in the queer world, and that includes queer sex. Penis and vagina is one kind of sex, but it’s not the only kind of sex! This information should not only be available but celebrated. We want to re-frame the sex that we have and the sex that we want to have as something positive. We want to see the kind of sex we have and want to have reflected in the curriculum. It’s needed.

The guide recommends that students be taught about fisting, rimming, bondage, and sadomasochism. They also have a resource video produced by Planned Parenthood of Toronto to teach students about all those acts. This is just one example of the push for pleasure-based sex education in our schools. The point is that putting a condom on a banana was PG-13, but now they want sex education to be NC-17. America, this is not a joke. This is really happening.

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This article was published by Capital Research and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Thinking About Abortion and Arizona Elections thumbnail

Thinking About Abortion and Arizona Elections

By Neland Nobel

There seems to be no issue that stirs up people as the issue of abortion. It likely is because the thinking and narrative around the subject have been so distorted over the past 40 years or so. It would appear that the issue will be critical in multiple elections this cycle, including the state of Arizona. If that is so, we need to be clear-headed about what is going on.

In part, the controversy is because abortion is both a moral and a political issue. One can take a moral point of view, and also a political point of view that may differ or may coincide. Is that hypocrisy or just because some things are in the moral realm and some in the political realm?  There has always been tension between complying with the civil government and Biblical law as in Mark 12:17. “Render unto  Ceasar…”

The fundamental purpose of government is to protect life and property, and clearly, a life is not only affected, but terminated in the abortion decision. So, the state and the law do have a role to play, do they not?

The standard thinking of the left has been that it is all about a woman being able to control “her body.” A “right” conjured out of a penumbra of the Constitution relating to privacy. More recent Supreme Court decisions have found otherwise. However, a baby is not part of her body. She is carrying the baby to be sure, she helped create the baby, but the baby is not part of her body.

As an aside, it was striking how easily the left disposed of the “right to control our bodies” when it came to COVID-19 vaccinations.

Now your spleen is part of your body and if it has to be removed, that is a choice a person of either sex should be able to make in consultation with medical experts.

However, a spleen does not have a heart and brain, and it will not grow into an independent human, depart from your body, and then lead a totally separate existence. So, we can dispense with the “it is a woman’s right to control her body argument.” It is not logical and never has been.

Abortion should not be part of the women’s rights movement but has been conflated as such. It is not about being able to vote, own property, or pursue a career. The baby is not part of her body although it obviously can affect her body for about nine months and beyond.

What are “reproductive rights” we hear so much about?  It would seem that would entail the right to not have sex, the right to have sex with whom you choose when you choose, and whether that is within a lasting relationship or not. It would include the right to choose any appropriate device, procedure, or medication to either avoid or enhance pregnancy. You can see there is a lot of freedom there to make decisions about sex and childbearing.

When you think about it, it is odd that such angst is vented on this subject when today women have more choices to determine when and if they will become pregnant than they ever had in history.  And for the most part, they are legal, available, easy to use, and inexpensive.

Planned Parenthood was founded as a birth control movement to reduce the number of those believed inferior before most contraceptives. Margaret Sanger was an outspoken racist and bigot who was part of the broader Progressive goal of eugenics. But technology makes birth control possible without killing babies, regardless of the motivations.

In this sense, abortion is not “birth control” but rather the product of the failure of “birth control”.

But for the period women are fertile, do “reproductive rights” allow for the killing of another being, a human baby for reasons of family planning or convenience? As previously noted, this killing would seem less “necessary” today given technological and pharmacological advances.

It would also appear that once conception has occurred, and a baby is growing, something fundamental has changed. The rights of the baby should have some consideration in the matter. Indeed, the rights of the father, which are often completely ignored, should also be considered.

Today, the argument is made that only the “rights” of the mother should be considered. Generally speaking, outside of war, most advanced societies believe the right to kill another human is moral only in defense of the assaulted person or another innocent human being. The baby is not “assaulting” anyone with the intent to cause harm or injury and is entirely innocent.

Many try to circumvent this obvious truth by contending that abortion is not killing a baby.  Clearly, whether by pharmaceutical means or being dismembered inside the mother by devices, the baby is being killed. The counter argument then is made that is it “not a baby” but rather a “clump of cells.”

What is a “clump of cells”?  Well, a clump of cells could be asparagus growing or toe fungus.  If that were the case, then there is no question that you can destroy this clump of cells.  However, the “clump of cells” in question is quite particular.  It contains the DNA of at least two people, but actually many more people that had created their own clump of cells.  This clump of cells will become only one thing, a new human being. 

To avoid the reality of this logic, the next typical step is to suggest as long as this clump of cells is not developed enough “to be human”, the baby has no rights whatsoever and thus it is OK to kill the clump.

But then there is the tricky issue of determining when precisely is that?  When the baby is “viable” or when the baby can “feel pain”?  How do we know when a baby feels pain?  Modern science seems to be constantly proving that viability is possible at remarkably early ages.  Neither the viability nor the feeling of pain can be precisely calculated.

It is extremely difficult to know exactly at what point a zygote becomes a baby and hence the argument that it is at the point of conception that it becomes human makes logical sense. As noted before, regardless of age or development, the zygote will only become a human baby and not asparagus.

The stage of human development does not obviate your rights.  A two-year-old has few rights, but with growth, he or she will obtain them.  But we would not kill the child even though they have not obtained all legal rights.  The baby in or out of the womb has a right to live, once created.

The right to live is the most fundamental of all rights. Without life, other rights make no sense.  It is rare to hear anyone suggest non-living objects have rights.

Either a woman has an absolute right to kill her baby or she does not.That is the question and your thought exercise for the day. And if it is not an absolute right, when and under what circumstances does she have a limited right? This recent exchange with liberal Bill Maher is revealing.

The compromise that has been sought for years has been if the pregnancy is a physical danger ( as opposed to mental anguish) to the mother’s life, or if the baby is old enough to feel pain (a slippery concept to be sure), there should be some limitations on “abortion rights.”

We never liked the term “reproductive rights” because those rights were exercised before conception while the goal of abortion itself is NOT to be reproductive.  The exercise of “reproductive rights” was exercised prior to the baby coming into existence.  Most reproductive “rights” are exercised without the intention of becoming pregnant. 

Some people suggest that as a man, I have no right to speak on these matters. That’s baloney. It is a contentious political issue and a matter of law and morality.  As such, all citizens have a right to voice an opinion. Don’t be made to cower by this argument.

The abortion movement was born as part of the eugenics movement.  Much like the argument over the stage of development when a baby becomes “human”, this argument can be extended to adults who function at a very low level and do not appear fully aware or competent to enjoy life.  That is a dangerous slope to try to walk.  Not surprisingly, the internal logic of judging the worthiness of life has led to the killing of those with retardation and mental illness in NAZI Germany and the wholesale extermination of those regarded as inferior people. It has also led to a movement in Western countries towards very liberal policies regarding euthanasia.  A general disregard and respect for life is spreading.

Further, we are warning you that your emotions are about to be manipulated cynically for political reasons.  Democrats want to paint all Republicans as unfeeling retrogrades who don’t appreciate the gains women have made in our society. They believe they have found a wedge issue to exploit. They want to push initiatives and legislation that are extreme and only consider the mother’s wishes. Further, beyond abortion, they want to redefine the family unit and the idea of sex itself.

Our moral sense is to protect a woman’s choice up to the point of pregnancy, and then recognize the rights of the baby are now involved. If the mother does not wish to keep the baby, many couples are looking to adopt.

That might cause the mother emotional trauma. Yes, it might, but that is preferred to killing the baby who suffers damage that can never be reversed.  The exercise of all rights involves corresponding responsibilities.

Former President Trump is catching lots of flak because he has taken a position that irritates the purists on both sides of the debate.

As a political question, he has made the correct decision.  This is a question for states to decide. That is what appointing originalists for the bench was all about. Alabama may decide differently from California.  That is the wonder of federalism, which is our system of government.

So, the battle for public opinion will have to be conducted on a state-by-state basis.

As for Arizona, a reasonable compromise would be to limit abortion to very early in the term of pregnancy, before the baby is “viable” and “likely to feel pain.”  We don’t know the exact time that would be and we humans at this juncture can’t really know.  However, it is the best that can be done at this time to try to resolve a contentious issue. It will not be acceptable completely to either side.  That is the very nature of compromise.

There is no unlimited right to abortion and it is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution. Women have the right to determine their destiny, but not by killing others to achieve it.

On the other hand, our right-to-life friends have not succeeded in convincing a large majority of their position.  Some key states have already passed very expansive abortion legislation. That is the political reality we must contend with.

Politically speaking, it would be unwise to sacrifice all other important issues, just to this single issue.  Our country is going bankrupt, our elections are rigged, the government is imprisoning right to life demonstrators, the 1st, 2nd, and 4th Amendments of the Bill of Rights are under assault, we are being invaded by illegal immigrants, Democrats favor criminals over the innocent, and we are abandoning the rule of law to a giant administrative state.  The next President will likely appoint several more Supreme Court Justices.

If Democrats win big and take the White House and House and Senate, the right-to-life movement will be in even worse shape than it is now.  It is far better for conservatives to win, not just for this issue, but for many of those aforementioned.

Therefore, it would be best to push a moderate line of compromise that avoids Democrat victory.  Make the other side sound extremist and radical while we should sound sensible.

Morally, I can’t support abortion, but politically it is clear the Democrats are going to use this in Arizona and other key states and exploit this difficult moral and personal issue for their own ends.

A reasonable political compromise, and we admit it is an uncomfortable compromise, is to allow abortion under certain limited circumstances that involve the safety of the mother and require that the procedure occur very early in the term of pregnancy.

For our right-to-life friends, compromise may be insufficient.  We appreciate why. If it is human life, killing is not justified at any stage of development, except to save the mother.  Why would the murder of babies be OK in one state and not another? That is logically and morally consistent. But a worse outcome would be an unlimited “right” to taxpayer-funded abortion enshrined, including late-term abortions, in our Constitution or law; plus a Democrat victory that allows them to overturn every aspect of our society and economy.

Politics isn’t bean bag and we must try to advance what we can and get the vote in Arizona of a large contingent of independent voters. This may be the best we can get even if it is not all that we may want.

Compromise in the political realm does not substitute for the need to continue the moral conversation. Abortion is a poor substitute for self-control or contraception.

Ultimately we have to convince suburban women, and many men,  that killing babies should not be part of the “women’s rights movement.”

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.