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CHRISTIAN
ACTIVISM
Ten
Commandments removed in Ohio
Last year, a federal judge ordered monuments bearing the Ten Commandments
removed from the grounds of four Ohio public schools, prompting
peaceful protests and arrests.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed the lawsuit on behalf
of a resident of the city of Peebles, who objected to the 800-pound
granite tablet located on school property. Last year U.S. Magistrate
Timothy Hogan sided with the ACLU, and ordered the monuments removed.
However, in June, when workers arrived to carry out the judge’s
decree, they were confronted by dozens of protesters who locked
arms, wept and knelt in prayer to hinder the removal. Deputies briefly
took at least 30 protesters into custody, but later released them
without filing charges.
USA Today quoted one protester who said, “We have to make the
decision in America if there’s going to be local control of
what we’re going to teach our children.”
The Adams County school district is challenging the ruling that
the displays violated the separation of church and state.
The issue of the Decalogue and its presence in public places does
not yet appear to be settled constitutionally. In April, the U.S.
Supreme Court let stand a federal appellate court ruling which prohibited
the display of a Ten Commandments monument on the state capitol
grounds in Frankfort, Kentucky. However, in late June, the Third
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allowed a Ten Commandments plaque
to remain on a courthouse in suburban Philadelphia, where it has
hung for 83 years.
USA Today, 6/27/03; AgapePress, 6/12/03;AP,
6/9/03; Reuters, 4/28/03
Aetna
Web site a teen trap
Pay a visit to certain portions of Aetna Insurance’s InteliHealth
Web site (www.intelihealth.com), and you’re likely to learn
more than you bargained for.
What is found there will likely surprise and anger many parents
who are attempting to teach their teens the value of sexual abstinence
before marriage.
An AFA supporter’s phone call led AFA Journal to investigate
InteliHealth’s Pregnancy Guide, which is available both online
and through the mail. The caller indicated she was offended at what
she perceived to be a promotion of abortion to teenage girls.
In the Pregnancy Guide, a section titled “Alternatives to Parenthood”
speaks to unplanned pregnancies (obviously aimed at teens) and offers
the options of abortion and adoption.
Under “Abortion,” an unwed mother-to-be who feels she
“cannot talk with [her] parents” about the pregnancy,
or “just [doesn’t] want to,” is prompted to speak
with a judge, doctor, social worker or other health professional
for advice.
This not only leaves parents completely out of the picture, but
blatantly fails to mention clergy or other family members as additional
sources of help for the pregnant teen. She is directed by the Web
site to contact Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest provider
of abortions.
A deeper search of the Web site revealed what many parents would
deem extremely inappropriate information concerning the subject
of birth control. From the “Birth Control” page, a link
to “Safe Sex” reveals obvious acceptance of oral and anal
sex, which are purported to be 80% to 95% safe with condom use.
Particularly startling are detailed instructions for lesbians concerning
the use of “dental dams,” and exactly where they should
be placed on the genitals for supposed effective protection.
All this is despite the fact that on the same Web page, Aetna reports
an estimated 15.3 million new cases of sexually transmitted diseases
(STDs) each year. Even sadder is the fact that Aetna ignores a two-year-old
study by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), stating that condoms
are useless in preventing some serious STDs.
Although Aetna registers a caveat that their link to Intelihealth
information is for informational purposes only, and that they do
not endorse InteliHealth products or services, the name of the division
is still “Aetna InteliHealth.” In addition, a search of
other online health insurance companies and HMOs reveals no such
obvious and detailed promotion concerning the above subjects.
To register your concerns with Aetna, call 860-273-0123, write them
at 151 Farmington Avenue, Hartford, CT 06156, or visit
www. aetna.com, link to Aetna Navigator, then to InteliHealth
at “More” in the center of the page.
Planned
Parenthood’s abortion business thriving
A recent article written by Ed Szymkowiak of STOPP International,
a pro-life project of American Life League, includes some staggering
statistics on the number of babies aborted by Planned Parenthood
Federation of America (PPFA), and the profits made as a result of
those procedures.
In its 2001-2002 Annual Report, PPFA states that it performed 213,026
abortions in 2001, an 8.1% increase over the previous year. From
1977 through 2001, PPFA has reported 3,019,559 abortions. This figure
does not include pre-implantation abortions sometimes resulting
from IUDs and other devices used for birth control.
Szymkowiak points out that based on the generally accepted figure
of 1.3 million abortions per year in the U.S., it can be estimated
that in 2001, Planned Parenthood performed about 16% of all procedures.
Further, at an estimated average cost of $375 per abortion, PPFA
had a total income of $79.8 million from abortions in 2001 alone.
Over the period of 1977 through 2001, an astonishing $894 million
in abortion income is estimated for the abortion provider.
While PPFA’s abortion procedures are increasing, their adoption
referrals are falling. In 2001, for every one adoption referral
the organization made, it aborted 109 babies.
Pro-Life Infonet, 5/9/03
EDUCATION
Liberals
dominate commencement day
A recent survey revealed there were six liberals to every one conservative
commencement speaker at America’s top colleges and universities
this year.
The annual study by Young America’s Foundation confirms what
many perceive as a strong, left-leaning bias on university campuses.
Young America’s Rick Parsons said liberal media personalities
and politicians, including a handful of former Clinton administration
officials, dominated this spring’s graduation addresses.
“We’ve been doing this for ten years,” Parson explained,
“and every single year we find that there’s a huge disparity
between conservatives speaking at commencements and liberals. Every
year there are many, many liberals – the same liberals –
speaking on campus.”
Parsons said popular Fox News personalities like Tony Snow, Sean
Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly were noticeably absent at this year’s
commencement exercises, while Tim Russert, Jim Lehrer, Chris Matthews,
and other liberal hosts at struggling TV networks appeared on campuses.
Parsons says the disparity is nothing unusual.
“We’re not saying that these liberals shouldn’t be
speaking at commencements,” he said. “What we are saying
is that there needs to be a balance – and administrators, faculty,
and students need to take responsibility” to see that that
happens.
Parsons said schools like Yale and Tulane are perhaps the most notorious
for hosting left-leaning graduation speakers. The annual survey
revealed that only four top schools hosted well-known conservatives.
AgapePress, 6/2/03
ENTERTAINMENT
Violent
video games win in federal court
A federal court recently struck down a Missouri law which prohibited
minors from buying or renting violent video games, or playing them
in arcades, without parental permission.
The St. Louis County law applied to children under age 17, but a
federal appellate panel said the measure was unconstitutional, and
violated the First Amendment.
“The First Amendment says kids can buy violent video games?
I don’t remember seeing that in the Constitution,” said
AFA founder Don Wildmon. “This Missouri law did not restrict
a gaming company’s right to produce violent video games, but
merely sought to protect children from them.”
According to USA Today, the federal court ruled that the lawmakers
did not provide strong proof that violent video games posed enough
of a threat to kids to warrant the legal restrictions.
Two years ago a federal court also overruled an Indianapolis law
which similarly tried to protect children, and the video gaming
industry intends to go after yet another such law in Washington
state.
USA Today, 6/4/03
Miller
drops sexy ads
Miller Brewing Co. apparently underestimated the potential for public
rancor over its highly controversial, sexually-oriented “Catfight”
ad campaign, and has announced that it is discontinuing the series
of spots.
The ads featured women who disagreed about whether Miller beer tasted
great or was less filling, and then proceeded to strip to their
underwear and wrestle to settle their differences. (See
AFA Journal, 4/03.)
A spokesperson for the company said the ads “got attention,
but Miller doesn’t want to be known strictly as the beer for
people who want to watch women wrestling.”
On CNN, Adweek’s advertising critic Barbara Lippert said, “I
think there was a lot of backlash, more than [Miller] expected.
People are tired of getting bombarded in their homes where children
are with this soft-porn stuff.”
Adweek.com, 5/30/03
GOVERNMENT
U.N.
says Sudan okay on human rights
The government of Sudan recently received a favorable report at
the U.N. Human Rights Convention in Geneva. The favorable U.N. report
will benefit Sudan by making the country eligible for more U.N.
aid, and also allow that country to do more business with firms
eager to expand into the oil rich nation.
But the U.N. decision is being questioned by Voice of the Martyrs
(VOM), an organization that assists the persecuted church worldwide.
Todd Nettleton, a spokesman for VOM, said the United States needs
to put pressure on the U.N. to stop rewarding Sudan for human rights
violations.
According to Nettleton, a 20-year civil war has meant there are
virtually no human rights for Christians in Sudan. “The government
there is not a protector of human rights. The Christian people in
[southern] Sudan would tell you they have no human rights,”
Nettleton said. “For any organization, especially one as well
thought of as the United Nations, to suggest that Sudan has made
dramatic improvements in the area of human rights, is really laughable.”
Nettleton said concerned Christians first need to pray for believers
in the Sudan, and then contact their congressman and other government
officials and encourage them to pressure the U.N. to take a second
look at the brutal Sudanese government’s human rights record.
Nettleton emphatically stated that “Sudan hasn’t improved
their human rights [and] . . . is not protecting the rights of Christians
in [southern] Sudan. And nobody should be allowed to stand up and
say that they are.”
AgapePress, 4/11/03
HOMOSEXUAL
AGENDA
‘Gay’
advocacy groups admit 10% fallacy
For decades homosexual pressure groups have claimed that, since
10% of the population is either gay or lesbian, public officials
should give credence to their political demands. Now it seems that
when they absolutely have to tell the truth, activists admit the
10% figure is a myth.
The startling admission was made by a coalition of 31 homosexual
advocacy groups, including the Human Rights Campaign, National Gay
& Lesbian Task Force, and the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against
Defamation. In their brief filed in a recent U.S. Supreme Court
case, Lawrence v. Texas, which dealt with that state’s
sodomy statute, the coalition said that only “2.8% of the male,
and 1.4% of the female, population identify themselves as gay, lesbian,
or bisexual.”
“That 4.2% figure even includes bisexuals, which makes the
percentage of people claiming to be exclusively homosexual even
lower,” said AFA president Tim Wildmon.
The origin of the 10% myth is not difficult to uncover. In 1948,
sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, a professor at Indiana University,
began publishing his material about human sexuality in the U.S.,
work which would lead to the sexual revolution. Kinsey was the first
to say that 10% of the U.S. population was homosexual.
However, in her groundbreaking 1998 book, Kinsey: Crimes &
Consequences, Dr. Judith Reisman demolished Kinsey’s research
as being based on inept science and purposeful deception. Still,
homosexuals continued to use the 10% figure in published materials
and press interviews to bolster their demands.
Culture Facts, 4/4/03
PORNOGRAPHY
AT&T,
PayPal, Visa leave porn behind
Porn vendors nationwide will find it a little more difficult to
sell their wares as a result of three major corporations ceasing
to provide services for them.
For example, AT&T, world-renowned communications giant, has
made recent decisions to distance itself from porn. It spun off
its broadband cable business, through which it operated as one of
the world’s largest distributors of pornography, and removed
its name from AT&T/Comcast, through which the broadband cable
programming was being delivered.
The company also sold Liberty Media, which delivered pay-per-view
to hotels and motels, often including “adult” movies,
and ceased accepting credit cards for 1-900 pornographic phone calls.
The announcement of AT&T’s actions was made in a press
release from the National Coalition for the Protection of Children
& Families, and verified in a letter from Connie Weaver, AT&T
executive vice president of public relations.
The attempt to get AT&T out of the pornography business has
been long and arduous. Across the years, several other organizations,
including Focus on the Family and AFA, have been involved.
Meanwhile, PayPal, the eBay company that allows consumers to send
and receive secure online payments online, ceased processing online
payments for “adult” products in June. PayPal, which has
more than 23 million registered users worldwide, was purchased by
eBay in October 2002.
On a related note, the credit card company Visa has set up a system
to identify Web sites that offer their card as a payment source
to buyers of illegal pornography. They estimate that 80% of the
400 websites they’ve identified in the past year have either
been shut down by law enforcement or had their Visa privileges terminated.
“This [Visa’s system] is a powerful new tool to assist
law enforcement in these crimes to eliminate a resource for individuals
to use, download and purchase pornography,” said Reuben Rodriguez,
director of the Exploited Child Unit at the National Center for
Missing & Exploited Children.
AgapePress, 5/5/03
High
court upholds library filtering law
In a victory for pro-family groups, the U.S. Supreme
Court upheld a congressional law which requires public libraries
to install computer filtering software if they want to receive federal
money.
The high court upheld the Children’s Internet Protection Act
(CIPA) provision, which was designed to stop unlimited viewing of
harmful material in libraries.
Pat Trueman, former chief of the Justice Department’s Child
Exploitation Division and a former attorney with AFA, was instrumental
in drafting the measure’s wording. Originally the bill was
designed to prohibit pornography only when children used library
computers. However, when Trueman was working in Washington, D.C.,
on behalf of AFA, he met with the bill’s chief sponsor in the
House of Representatives, Rep. Chip Pickering (R-MS). Trueman’s
request that the bill be expanded to prohibit adults from accessing
obscene (hardcore) material and child pornography was accepted by
Pickering and adopted in the CIPA provision.
The law “will not only protect children at libraries, but it
also will require libraries to block obscenity – that is, hard-core
pornography and child pornography – even when adults are using
the computer,” Trueman said.
Opposing CIPA were the American Civil Liberties Union and the American
Library Association.
Disney
peddling porn?
A pro-family organization has leveled serious charges against The
Walt Disney Company, claiming that the Mouse House has set up for
itself a sordid side business: pornography.
According to the Florida Family Association (FFA), which has been
monitoring television for 12 years, “Disney-owned [television]
channels account for the overwhelming number of erotic and pornographic
network programs” on air.
Disney owns 37.5% of the A&E Television Networks, which in turn
owns the A&E and History channels. Last December and February,
A&E aired Inside the Playboy Mansion, which FFA said
contained photographs and video showing full, uncensored views of
female breasts and buttocks.
In addition, said FFA, Disney also owns almost 40% of the E! Entertainment
Television channel, which hosts the largest number of sexually explicit
programs of any advertiser-supported television network.
Besides the 10 hours of The Howard Stern Show aired every
week, FFA said the network carries numerous other sexually explicit
series, such as The Anna Nicole Show, Playboy Playmate
specials, the True Hollywood Story series, and the Wild
On series.
“Additionally, E! programming at night is predominantly sponsored
by advertisements for Girls Gone Wild porn videos, Playboy
videos and several dial-a-porn companies,” FFA said in a press
statement.
David Caton, executive director of FFA, said all this was in addition
to the ribald offerings on the ABC network. One of the network’s
longest-running shows is the cop drama NYPD Blue, a prime-time
trendsetter for nudity, profanity and sex.
“Disney has refocused their business plan in recent years to
shake off the wholesome, family entertainment image that once made
them profitable,” Caton said. “Disney has gone so far,
they are now without a doubt the dirtiest television [provider]
around.”
Disney/ABC
promoting homosexuality
In addition to its regular push of homosexuality on ABC and its
other cable networks
(see AFA Journal, 6/03), ABC will be airing a new gay-themed
sitcom this fall, It’s All Relative.
The series focuses on the marriage between Bobby and Liz, and the
friction that arises from the clash between their two families.
In Liz’s case, her “parents” are two homosexual men.
It’s All Relative will be produced by Craig Zadan and
Neil Meron, themselves homosexuals who have produced gay-themed
programming for Disney on a number of occasions.
PRO-LIFE
ISSUES
‘Pampered
chefs’ help end direct abortion funding
New owners of national kitchenware company, The Pampered Chef, have
opted to end their practice of giving money to fund the abortion
industry after many Pampered Chef sales representatives quit their
jobs in protest.
The Pampered Chef is one of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing
kitchenware companies. The company, founded in 1980 by professing
Christian and stay-at-home mother Doris Christopher, has been driven
mostly by stay-at-home moms who sell the products from home. The
company boasts more than 67,000 Kitchen Consultants and sales of
$700 million annually.
But, according to Citizen magazine, many Christian mothers began
walking away from the company because Pampered Chef’s new owner,
billionaire Warren Buffett, is a huge supporter of abortion. His
Buffett Foundation, using company profits, has donated tens of millions
of dollars to abortion-related causes.
Citizen reports that Buffett’s conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway,
Inc. – owners of such well-known names as Dairy Queen, See’s
Candy, and Fruit of the Loom – has funneled millions of dollars
to the Foundation. The Foundation, in turn, last year donated at
least $11 million to pro-abortion and “reproductive-rights”
groups.
Among those recipients are international abortion-provider Planned
Parenthood, the Population Council – chief promoter of RU-486
in the U.S. – and International Projects Assistance Services
(IPAS). That organization, beneficiary of a five-year, $20 million
commitment from the Foundation in 1999, is the principal manufacturer
of the suction pumps used in abortions.
According to Business Week, that financial backing permitted IPAS
to double its capacity to produce and distribute manual vacuum aspirators
used in abortions.
New policy
That practice is changing, though, according to company officials.
In a news release, Berkshire Hathaway said it is ending its shareholder-designated
contributions program, because some of the contributions were hurting
the careers of its Pampered Chef consultants. However, not only
were consultants suffering; the company itself suffered as consultants
quit the organization to keep from funding the abortion industry.
According to Citizen, the exodus of Pampered Chef distributors who
are pro-life had been gaining steam. It says resignations of top-selling
distributors began catching the attention of company officials.
Among those who have decided to quit the company is Tammy Gillespie
of Tupelo, Mississippi.
“I cannot bow before the Lord when I get to heaven and have
Him look me in the eye and say, ‘You knew that your money was
going to fund abortion,’” Gillespie says. “That’s
why I’m quitting The Pampered Chef.”
Gillespie said the policy reversal does not mean she will return
to the company.
“It doesn’t change my mind because Mr. Buffett is known
for personally giving money to population control and to fund abortion.
If I were to make money for Pampered Chef, I would be putting money
in his pocket, money he’d give to fund abortion, and I can’t
knowingly give money to those causes.”
Citizen, 6/15/03; AgapePress, 6/16/03
Pro-life
book presents new insights on issue
Internationally renowned John Willke, MD, and his wife, Barbara
Willke, RN, recently released their third book in a series on the
controversial subject of abortion. Abortion Questions & Answers:
Why Not Love Them Both updates the previous books and brings
new insights to the subject of abortion, while also presenting discussions
ranging from the law that made it legal, to its impact on the mothers
who abort their babies and the societal changes that have caused
them to believe it is their right to do so.
As in previous books in the series, the bulk of Why Not Love
Them Both is presented in an easy, concise question-and-answer
format. Every chapter is valuable, but chapter three, titled, “How
to Teach the Pro-Life Story,” is especially helpful.
One particularly interesting bit of information speaks to the fact
that nearly 50% of the general public has not formed a firm conviction
on the abortion issue. Almost four-fifths of this “conflicted”
group believes that a pregnant woman is carrying a baby (not “tissue”),
that abortion kills the baby, and that it is wrong.
But two-thirds of this same group believe a woman has the right
to choose whether or not she wants the baby. This societal shift
has resulted in the controversy being about the mother’s “rights,”
rather than a question of religious beliefs, or “when life
begins,” or politics.
Unfortunately, say the Willkes, the pro-life movement, in general,
in its zeal to save the baby, has come to be perceived as not having
compassion for the woman. Therein lies the main premise for the
book: “Why not love them both?” The Willkes offer workable
solutions, and encourage pro-lifers to work toward that end.
This excellent 400+ page book is being offered at the low cost of
$6.95 so that multiple copies can be purchased and given to others.
Copies can be ordered from Hayes Publishing Company, Inc. at 513-681-7559
or by E-mail at hayespub@aol.com.
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