President Obama: Why Don't You Ask Every Dead Baby Who's the Extremist?

I don’t think I have made any significant comments about President Obama since starting this blog in early 2014.  Now, I must.

President Obama has rolled out the “extremist” label for the people who took the video of Planned Non-Parenthood employees discussing the sale of HUMAN body parts.  Human body parts, Mr. President, like livers, and hearts.  These weren’t frog, pig, or chicken livers and hearts.  Sure, you can call these things “fetal tissue” to make it sound less horrific and less disturbing.  But these were human CHILDREN, Mr. President, that are being “crushed” after which Planned Non-Parenthood then harvests their organs for sale.

I have only in private, to my wife, said the things I now choose to say in public.  This president is the most self-obsessed, degenerate, immoral, vile, irrational, human being who has ever led our country.  He doesn’t understand the idea of being presidential and is utterly unable to shed his sadistic hubris for even a moment to actually ponder whether there is anything beyond politics and wielding power.  I was not a big fan of George W. Bush, but at least he had an understanding of the simplicity of decency.  President Obama simply cannot or will not understand that there are times when, despite his own personal views, it is not only appropriate, but demanded, the president act in a dignified manner.  This episode was one of those times and, as usual, our president took the low road.

It would have been very easy for President Obama to simply say . . . nothing.  It would have been right for President Obama to say . . . nothing.  Even Planned Non-Parenthood has not attempted to disclaim the people on the videos are its employees.  No instead Planned Non-Parenthood has done what any schoolyard child would do: when you can’t defeat the other person’s argument, just call them a liar (or in this case “extremists”).  My wife pointed out that killing babies then selling their body parts seems a bit extreme, doesn’t it? 

You see, rationality is irrelevant in this discussion and both Planned Non-Parenthood and President Obama know it.  They simply cannot win the argument based on any reasoned or rational theory.  So, they resort to the oldest and lowest kind of argumentation: call your opponent names.  What bothers me so much is that President Obama (or his press secretary or other minion) will talk as if it is self-evident that these "hoodlums" who did the videos are the worst kind of human trash and then act stunned when people suggest, even meekly, that maybe killing babies isn’t such a grand idea, either.

Moreover, what this tells us about President Obama is that, his pretentions to the contrary, he cannot possibly be a Christian.  His shameless and callous disregard of the real story here (Planned Non-Parenthood killing babies then selling their body parts) in order to whip up some faked outrage at so-called extremists proves this.  And what did these "extremists do?  Made video of Planned Non-Parenthood employees simply telling it like it is.

This tells me what I already long ago knew about President Obama: he is a liar.  Of course, his true world view is that of the purely secular, so lying is no problem in a world where there are no moral absolutes. 

This is where our loss of absolute morals leads: to a president who will shamelessly distort reality in order to make political points and wield power as he will.  You see, once you untether yourself from moral absolutes, there is nothing stopping raw power from dominating human affairs.  The “worker’s paradise” in the former Soviet Union is evidence of this truth.  Stalin ruthlessly crushed all opposition because those in power had given away the notion that any moral absolute dictated  their actions.  As a result, when Stalin did awful things, no one could really say his actions were wrong.  Am I comparing President Obama to Stalin? Absolutely.  This man knows no moral limits and will say anything he wants about anything he wants any time he wants.  He behaves now as if his word is law.  Frankly, January 2017 cannot come fast enough.

So President Obama will attempt to use the power of the presidency to create a false notion that the people who made these videos are some kind of villains, while portraying baby killing, body part selling, Lamborghini coveting Planned Non-Parenthood employees as bastions of moral decency.  I was going to ask: Has he no shame?  But I think the answer is obvious.

We must stop living based on moral relativism, which is an irrational notion, anyway (the claim that all truth is relative, including moral truth, is a self-defeating statement – one cannot claim that it is absolutely true that there is no absolute truth – it just doesn’t work – think about it).  It is a false view of reality, which our President touts at every turn.  His “change of heart” on gay marriage is another instance of his willingness to simply lie (candidate Obama proclaimed marriage was between a man and a woman) and then call it something else.  But you have to understand that to those without a moral compass, lying to gain or use power is acceptable behavior.  After all, there are no true limits.  As then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested when questioned about dead State Department employees in Benghazi, what difference does it make?

Ask every dead baby Planned Non-Parenthood ever killed.

Jimmy Carter: Speaking for Jesus on Gay Marriage?

“I believe Jesus would. I don’t have any verse in scripture. … I believe Jesus would approve gay marriage, but that’s just my own personal belief. I think Jesus would encourage any love affair if it was honest and sincere and was not damaging to anyone else, and I don’t see that gay marriage damages anyone else.”  So says former President Jimmy Carter.

My mouth dropped when I read this the first time. 

No “verse in Scripture.”  “I believe.”  “That’s just my personal belief.”  “I think.”  In other words, Jimmy Carter claims to know the mind of the God of the universe based on his own musings.  This goes well beyond argumentation about whether Romans 1 really says homosexual behavior is sinful, or whether it’s referring to some other form of sexual deviance.  This is an audacious (and mendacious) claim of personal, extra-biblical knowledge regarding what the God of the universe actually believes about gay marriage. 

So we are now learning the truth behind President Carter’s much publicized split with the Southern Baptist Convention.  It wasn’t over theology, but over ideology.  President Carter had a pre-commitment to “equality” for women and simply wasn’t going to stand for the SBC’s position that only men should pastor churches.  This was, as one family I know called it, “subjugation” of women.  No, this was a simple reading of the ordinary words of Scripture, which reasonably clearly set out the qualifications for pastor, one of which is that the pastor should be a male.  (1 Timothy 3).  One of the mandates in reading the law, at least as I learned it in law school, is that you read words in their ordinary sense unless there is some very clear context which suggests otherwise.  If we can recognize this in reading the law, does not the same idea make sense when reading Scripture?  The passage in 1 Timothy requires significant mental gymnastics to conclude that a woman fits the bill to act as a pastor.  We now know, however, that Jimmy Carter didn’t need to even resort to the mental mechanizations ordinarily used by evangelical feminists; no, he just needed to think about it and develop his own belief.

The disturbing feature of this so-called Christianity is that it bypasses the Bible altogether in favor of a personalized determination about what God wants.  Typically this ends with some sort of notion that God “wants me to be happy.”  Unfortunately, too many people have been sucked in by such Carteristic thinking.  This kind of belief system implies God comes to me on my terms at my discretion in a way of my choosing.  I define God, not God defines me.  It’s like Oprah, who “took God out of the box” by which I think she intended to mean she was not limiting God.  Of course, what it really means is she took God out of the Bible (that awful misogynistic, sexist, homophobic book) and put God into the Oprah box.  Then she drank some chai tea while listening to some new age music with her buddy Eckhart Tolle.   Apparently President Carter has put God into the Jimmy Carter box, which is every bit as dangerous as the Oprah box, perhaps even more so, since he has much greater credibility than Oprah, given his many years as a Sunday school teacher.

Frankly, I don’t have any problem with President Carter making clear he’s fine with gay marriage.  However, one of the main arguments leveled against conservative evangelicals is their claim to know anything about what God says.  It’s ironic, isn’t it?  It’s much like Rachel Held Evans, the “Christian” millennial blogger, demanding that older evangelicals recognize that she and her fellow millennials are oh-so-right about gay marriage and at the same time blaming older evangelicals for making too much of sexual issues, all the while explaining why her take on sexual issues is the utterly correct one.

I’m all for a good argument.  That’s what I did for many years as a litigator.  But let’s have some honesty here.  Jimmy Carter doesn’t get to bash conservative evangelicals for their views, if “I believe,”  “That’s just my personal belief,”  and “I think”  are the relevant standards for determining what God really says about something.  Based on Carter’s statements, anything goes, which means Oprah is right, and so is anyone else who believes something.  So how does he ever make a rational argument that he’s correct and those nasty conservative evangelicals are just plain wrong?  Upon what reasoned basis does he make the claim, when the standard to which he holds himself is merely his own personal belief?  Is Jimmy Carter claiming that somehow his personal beliefs should be weighed more heavily than the next person’s?  Wouldn’t that kind of, sort of, maybe, just ever so slightly, mean that he’s being . . . dare I say it . . . arrogant?  This is one of the arguments so often leveled at bible-believing Christians who say things like homosexuality is sin – they’re being arrogant for suggesting what they believe is right. 

But isn’t that precisely what Jimmy Carter and others like him are saying and doing?

The whole thing is diabolical.  Frankly, Jimmy Carter is doing Satan’s work while Satan laughs in his face.  Never mind that there is no verse, not one, not even a part of a verse in the Bible that condones homosexuality, let alone gay marriage, Jesus is okay with it because Jimmy Carter says so, because Oprah says so, because Rachel Held Evans says so.

Of course, the bottom line here is that not playing “nice” by whatever definition society currently demands, won’t do.  Christians are supposed to be “nice.”  It’s not “nice” to say ugly things like homosexuality is sin.  It’s not nice to oppose “equality.”  It’s not “nice” to tell people the Bible says something if that something offends their sensibilities.  So Jimmy Carter can’t handle not being “nice” and doesn’t want anyone suggesting he’s offended them.  You know: if you can’t say something . . . let’s all say it together . . . nice, don’t say anything at all.

There’s only one problem with this idea when it comes to gay marriage.  Since when is it nice to let people believe something that contradicts the Bible?  Since when is it nice to allow people to continue wallowing in unrepentant, sinful behavior that will land them in the fiery pits of hell for eternity?  Since when is it nice to just let people believe anything, even if it will harm them severely?

Jimmy Carter better start asking himself these questions.  The Bible makes clear that Jesus will, in the end, say to many “I never knew you” despite their claims they know him.  Is Jimmy Carter really sure he knows Jesus?  What about you?  Your eternity depends on it.

Call it Planned Non-Parenthood

So Planned Parenthood sells baby parts.  You are surprised because (a) Planned Parenthood is a  paragon of virtue as organizations go (b) Planned Parenthood loves babies (c) Planned Parenthood only wants what’s best for babies (d) Planned Parenthood wants to make sure ALL babies have an equal chance in life . . . as if.

People: get a grip, Planned Parenthood is one of the most disgusting, grotesquely inhumane organizations that has ever existed.  Hitler couldn’t, in his wildest dreams, imagine creating such an organization that has state funding and has the capacity to wipe out whole generations, all in the name of acting “humanely.”  It is truly bizarre that we have accepted the idea that killing babies is a humane thing to do, when we say it’s “inhumane” for people to hunt wild animals or eat chickens.   Up is down, right is left, evil is good.

What is profoundly disturbing about the recent video that surfaced isn’t that Planned Parenthood sells "harvested tissue" from dead babies, or even that Planned Parenthood is in the dead baby business, but that someone in the higher echelons of the organization could casually discuss these things over dinner, as if talking about the latest episode of their favorite television show or what the kids are doing over the summer.  You know, you just crush this part above and crush this part below and you can still harvest the tissue in between.  Oh, by the way, do you mind if I take the last roll?

We have taken the last step towards moral oblivion.  I know people who are otherwise concerned about what’s going on, but take a blind eye approach to abortion.  They would still argue the “woman’s body argument” or some other such unnecessary nonsense (I have already discussed this at length here).  What we have learned from this video isn’t that we should be disgusted that Planned Parenthood is selling baby parts; no, what we have learned is that Planned Parenthood has an utterly callous view of babies altogether.  The name of the organization is ironic.  It should be called Planned Non-Parenthood.

You see what this tells us is it’s all about definitions.  Planned Parenthood and its supporters say that a baby in the womb is a clump of tissue, a fetus, a sub-human, a non-human.  Frankly, we have defined babies in the womb this way for almost 50 years.  I read one person recently who argued that a fetus simply doesn’t deserve to be called a human because it doesn’t meet some preconceived standard this person had defined as a requirement for humanness.  Isn’t it safer for us to err on the side of caution when defining what it means to be a human being, rather than creating artificial standards which allow us to soothe our consciences when we strike one dead?  We vilify serial killers for doing so, but abortionists are treated as heroes in some quarters.

Look, I understand that in a pluralistic society like the United States not everyone will agree with me that life beings at conception.  But I also understand that we should be worried when we slip into the kind of intellectual coma that we’ve slipped into when it comes to abortion.  The kinds of definitions we offer up today to permit abortion could be used against the very people who created them as they age.  I have watched my father slip into dementia over the past 10 years to the point where he truly recognizes only two people: my mom and my sister.  Everyone else is a faint shadow that struts and frets their hour upon his brain and are heard no more.  Should we define him as less than human because he is no longer an autonomous being, capable of existing on his own?  My dad is every bit as helpless as a baby in the womb right now.  Should someone have a right to terminate his life because he doesn’t fit some arbitrary definition of what it means to be human?  His DNA still says human on it.  By my understanding, he remains in the imago dei – in the image of God.  So are children in the womb.

We have to be careful when we start adding definitions beyond human DNA as characteristic of what it means to be human.  After all, isn’t that what so many racists did when trying to justify treating blacks as less human than whites?  By defining human beings as we have been doing for the past half-century, we are denigrating what it means to be human.  Once we start defining dementia devastated elderly as non-human, who is next?  People with Down’s Syndrome?  Severely autistic people?  What about someone who has severe physical handicaps but has a fully functioning mind?  Where does the definition begin and end?  More importantly, who gets to make such definitions?

Planned Parenthood, and those who are in concert with its goals, have to find a way to salve their consciences because they know, they know full well, that what they are doing is wrong and evil.  The callousness of this doctor talking over a meal as if dead children are nothing more than a commodity speaks of a cold-heartedness that ought to terrify all of us.