In response to George Washington’s Farewell Address to the nation of which he was Founding Father, James Madison affirmed the first President’s claim that morality was essential to liberty: “If individuals be not influenced by moral principles, it is in vain to look for public virtue.”

Put another way, if virtue is not the companion of our private doings, it will be absent from our public lives, and the larger cultural life of our country.  This is logical deduction, of course, and leads to inevitable consequences for our society at large.

Consider former Senator John Edwards (D-NC), who had an adulterous affair with filmmaker Reille Hunter.  It occurred while he was a credible candidate for the presidency of the United States and married to a woman suffering from an incurable recurrence of cancer.  Yet Ms. Hunter now effuses about their torrid relationship as if it were a thing of rare beauty:

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Today the Grey Lady carries an op-ed titled, “A Chance for the Bluefin.”  It begins with this sentence: “There finally might be a reprieve for the bluefin tuna of the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, which are spiraling rapidly downward toward commercial extinction.”  The piece waxes eloquent about the need to protect the bluefin, an important food resource for the U.S. and much of the world.

That’s good news.  But given the Times’ addictive advocacy of unrestricted access to abortion on demand (federally funded, at that), I could not help but being impressed by the unintended irony of the op-ed’s title.  This year, somewhere between 1.2 and 1.4 million unborn children will be aborted in the United States. 1 This does not count the many who will die due to abortafacient contraceptives.

It is estimated that more than 70 percent of the abortion facilities in the United States are located in or near minority population centers. 2 The “black genocide” is real, as the abortion industry targets little ones of color long the targets of eugenicists like Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.  Even the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, formerly the research arm of Planned Parenthood, notes, “[T]he abortion rate for black women is almost five times that for white women.”  3

Worldwide, approximately 42 million unborn children will be killed in utero this year, many of them due to the largesse of the United States (the Obama Administration’s funding of international “family planning” groups that provide abortions to women in the developing world). 4 Although the Times warns against “waking up one day and discovering there are no tuna left to fish,” protecting those little lives far outweighs protecting tuna.  As Jesus said to His disciples, “You are far more valuable than many sparrows” (Matthew 10:31).  He might have added, “and than many fish.”

I’m glad the bluefin might be saved.  I like a good tuna salad sandwich as much as the next guy.  But I long for the day when as much moral urgency will be given the preservation of the unborn as the New York Times has today given to the continued sustenance of a fish.

1 http://www.guttmacher.org/media/presskits/2005/06/28/abortionoverview.html

2 http://blackgenocide.org/planned.html

3 http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/gpr/11/3/gpr110302.html

4 http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/gpr/12/4/gpr120402.html

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Lt. Dan Choi is back training with his National Guard unit.

Conventionally, this would be about as newsworthy as saying that paint dries: officers serve with their units all the time. But Lt. Choi is, by his own definition, different – he is openly homosexual. He has been appearing in the media, actively calling for a reversal of the 1993 “don’t ask, don’t tell” military policy concerning homosexuality.

According to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, homosexuality is incompatible with military service. This is not a statement of preference, but a law. All members of the Armed Forces are required to take an oath to uphold it. Yet here we have a situation where an openly gay man, in violation of the law and, according to news accounts, with the support of his commanding officer, is wearing the uniform of our nation.

Let us say for the sake of argument that homosexuality is a moral good and that those who practice homosexual conduct should actively be recruited to serve in the country’s military (of course, Family Research Council and I personally disavow these arguments). I would still be calling for Lt. Choi’s dismissal from the service and his superior’s discipline. The military code is not a set of arcane rules that can be followed at the personal discretion of those serving. It is the ironclad law of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard. It is enacted by the United States Congress and signed into effect by the Commander in Chief.

Lt. Choi is flaunting the law, showing contempt for it for the sake of his personal philosophical agenda. In doing so, he is demonstrating his unfitnes as “an officer and gentleman.” What if his peers choose to obey only those orders they want? “Well, sir – and by the way, I don’t like calling you sir – taking that hill right now seems like a bad idea to me. Think I’ll go take a nap.” Order, discipline, duty, respect, achievement of mission: all are, by virtue of Dan Choi’s continued role in the Army, placed at grave risk.

Men and women in uniform do not serve at their pleasure or under the human resources regulations of civilian life. Of necessity, for the sake of the life and death circumstances intrinsic to being part of the Armed Forces, they operate under a different, particularly crafted set of rules – rules that are the law.

No American, whether in the military or not, has the right to obey only those laws he or she wishes. This is the path to moral chaos and political anarchy. It is the road to collapse.

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In the late 1990s, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote a book called Lost in the Cabinet about his admitted misadventures as head of a major federal agency.

Now comes his latest missive, an article in the left-leaning American Prospect Magazine called “What Happened to Democracy.” In it, he decries industry lobbyists and back-room negotiations – pretty standard fare for a liberal who is as yet un-mugged by reality.

No one wants “closed door” deals or unfair benefits for any company or group.  But then Mr. Reich takes us into the intellectual thin air with this statement: He calls for “adequate public financing for congressional and presidential candidates who refuse private funding, more constraints on lobbyists, tighter rules for who must register as a lobbyist, fuller disclosure, and tougher rules on the revolving door between public service and private gain.”

Let me see if I understand: The federal government will pick and choose what candidates are viable for public office (that’s the basis of public financing) but people representing private corporations and business associations (that would be lobbyists) merit “more constraints.”

Then Mr. Reich leaps beyond the ether into stratospheric terra incognita and gets thoroughly lost in political space: “Yet nobody seems to be talking about these sorts of reforms. They don’t appear on Obama’s agenda. True, they don’t generate lots of public excitement, and they’re murderously difficult to enact. But without them our democracy doesn’t stand a chance.”

Conservatives have, for decades, been calling for full and immediate disclosure of campaign contributions.  No argument there.  But does Mr. Reich honestly believe that without federal financing of elections and tighter rules about lobbying – it’s already illegal for lobbyists even to buy a Congressman a cheeseburger; how much more “constrained” can the rules get? – “democracy doesn’t stand a chance?”

We live in a republic, not a democracy, a political sphere in which people govern themselves through elected representatives at the local, state and national levels.  Our Founders were terrified of democracies, considering direct self-rule an invitation to mobocracy and social dissolution.  They believed that representative self-government is the only sure way for honorable, or as they put it, “virtuous,” citizens to maintain ordered liberty.

My good friend and former colleague Bill Wichterman will be addressing this theme at the Family Research Council in a speech titled, “Did the Founding Fathers Establish a Democracy?” this coming Thursday, February 4 at 11 a.m. ET.  The speech will be Webcast and can be viewed at frc.org.

I hope Mr. Reich will join us.  Perhaps together we can learn a thing or two about representative republican democracy.

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There were times during last night’s speech when reality seemed suspended: The President’s evident sincerity and earnestness were undermined by the caustic laughter that occasionally greeted his comments.  At other times, silence met his words.  And, in media theory courses across the land, analyses will be done of the number of times he looked to the Republican side of the aisle – he seemed far more concerned with the GOP responses to his remarks than those of his own party.  Maybe the spectre of another Joe Wilson moment (“You lie!”) had him jumpy.

More seriously, I wonder if his desperation to be liked is compelling him to try to woo his skeptics.  Of course, he won’t succeed.

It is hard not to like President Obama, at least the persona he projects in such settings as the State of the Union Address.  He seems so reasonable.

Yet his policies are those of a man of the Left.  It is as though he believes empathy is a substitute for substantive compromise, or that by virtue of patiently listening he can lull his opponents into political somnolence.

The speech, like the Obama presidency, was interwoven with unintended ironies:

** Mr. Obama calls for unity and patriotic oneness but simultaneously calls for open homosexuality in the military in a time of war.  He knows this will go nowhere, but throws the political bone to the homosexual lobby anyway.  Why?  Because he can say he tried (placating a key part of his base) while bearing no real consequence (the measure lifting the ban on gays in the military won’t succeed and so, given the relative inattention of the American people to this issue in a time of economic
crisis, there will little political price to pay for Democrats in November).

** He insists on taxpayer-subsidized abortion, resists litigation limits against health care providers and persists on wanting to micro-manage Americans’ medical care but urges Republicans to share with him their ideas about health reform – as though they have not already done so myriad times!

** He is all over the map on taxes, calls for yet another commission on entitlement reform (as if the several essential steps were not obvious, especially after many other such reform bills, panels, studies, commissions, select committees, etc.) and rewrites the economic history of the past decade — and does so with such seeming intensity that one wants to join him in the land of political make-believe.

The President needs to come to terms with some basic realities: People aren’t stupid.  Politicians aren’t children.  Civility doesn’t mean acquiescence.  And facts are stubborn things.

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In June 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama gave a moving speech on fatherhood in his hometown of Chicago. Here, in part, is what he said:

We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child — it’s the courage to raise one. We need to help all the mothers out there who are raising these kids by themselves; the mothers who drop them off at school, go to work, pick up them up in the afternoon, work another shift, get dinner, make lunches, pay the bills, fix the house, and all the other things it takes both parents to do. So many of these women are doing a heroic job, but they need support. They need another parent. Their children need another parent. That’s what keeps their foundation strong. It’s what keeps the foundation of our country strong.

All true. So why is a man who acknowledges the central importance of fathers and mothers seeking to corrode marriage? Consider the President’s remarks made in October 2009 to the 30th anniversary dinner of the Human Rights Campaign — America’s leading pro-homosexual organization. In his speech, Mr. Obama said he looked forward to the day when:

..we as a nation finally recognize relationships between two men or two women as just as real and admirable as relationships between a man and a woman. You will see a nation that’s valuing and cherishing these families as we build a more perfect union — a union in which gay Americans are an important part. I am committed to these goals. And my administration will continue fighting to achieve them.

Huh? I thought children need moms and dads, not just two mommies or “spouses.”

This is more relevant now than ever, as in 2010 the President and his allies are committed to repealing the military’s ban on homosexuals serving in the ranks and passing the so-called “Employment Non-Discrimination Act,” which would impose homosexuality in faith-based and other private activities.

Either fathers and mothers are needed in a marriage or they are not. And either an unborn child is a human person from conception (as Mr. Obama suggests in his remarks above) until natural death, or it is merely a complex of disparate cells (as Mr. Obama has suggested elsewhere).

You’re in the White House now, Mr. President. The time for ponderous ambivalence is long past. Gotta make your mind up. Please do so in favor of real marriage and human life.

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Franklin Roosevelt is not a hero of mine. Arguably the father of today’s big government and a president who never let the Constitution get in the way of his political agenda, FDR summoned a weird confection of Leftists, liberals and disaffected, vulnerable citizens to obtain election to the presidency no less than four times.

His legacy has led to serious problems in the courts, the economy and the way Americans understand their federal government. Yet there is still much to admire about the Democratic Roosevelt – the way he heartened Americans with his optimism, the masterful manner in which he spoke to the hopes and fears of ordinary people, and even his unabashed invocation of the God of the Bible in times of national need.

FDR was also nothing if not decisive. He did not dawdle in times of crisis. For better or ill, he acted. People knew that they had a leader in the White House.

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The Incarnation was the single most unique event in both global and universal history.

With good reason: The Second Person of the Trinity being born of a virgin, then living a sinless life, dying an atoning death and experiencing a bodily resurrection, are events so astounding as to stagger the imagination.  Since they really happened, being humbled and awed by them is altogether fitting.

There are a number of profound and probing stories associated with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.  The annunciation to Mary, the attendance of shepherds, the arrival of gift-bearing Eastern “wise men,” the birth in a manger and so many other incidents provide illumination to the Savior’s coming that more fully explain its unique meaning.

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The steel-cold eyes of Vladimir Putin have a way of unnerving his opponents.  When one of those happens to be the President of the United States, the latter might well feel a bit shaken.

Following their meeting, Mr. Obama reported, “On areas where we disagree … I don’t anticipate a meeting of the minds anytime soon.”  Welcome, Mr. President, to the real world.

This must be jarring for the former community organizer, whose utopianism was his presidential campaign’s stock-in-trade.  Shortly before his election in November 2008, he told a Missouri audience that “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

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Yes, the Nobel Committee gave its Peace Prize Barack Obama as a slam at George W. Bush and as a message to the United States that they like us best when we act more like a hand-wringing Uriah Heep (“I’m a very “humble man”) than a confident Ronald Reagan.

Yes, President Obama should have declined the award. A person with more humility and moral courage would have done so, although the temptation to accept it would be high for anyone.

Yes, he omitted any mention of our engagement in Iraq other than to say that our efforts there are “winding down,” and hypocritically mentioned that “the world recognized the need to confront Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait — a consensus that sent a clear message to all about the cost of aggression” without mentioning that the same consensus existed to remove Saddam in 2003-2004.

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The National Cancer Institute today issued it’s “Annual Report to the Nation” on cancer, and it has some good news for all Americans this Christmas season: “Rates of new diagnoses and rates of death from all cancers combined declined significantly in the most recent time period for men and women overall and for most racial and ethnic populations in the United States, according to a report from leading health and cancer organizations.”

The report goes on to state that “Cancer deaths decreased 1.6 percent per year from 2001 to 2006.”

It’s a pretty safe bet that just about everyone reading this has lost someone to cancer or knows someone fighting the disease. In its many varieties – from adenocarcinoma (cancer of the glandular system) to colorectal cancer – the disease is indiscriminate in when and whom it strikes. Cancer is one of pain’s best friends, and death’s greatest allies.

So, today’s report should encourage all of us. You can read it at the link above to learn more about why the decline has occurred. But that’s not why I’m writing about it.

If the Democratic health care plan becomes law, it is safe to assume that the sheer weight of its costs will prohibit further private-sector health research and development. Many medical firms undertake cancer research projects and seek to develop treatments to arrest and even cure the various forms of cancer.

How many of these, and how many federally-funded anti-cancer programs, will collapse as health care research dollars become scarcer?

Consider the words of former Clinton Labor Secretary and leading Democratic intellectual Robert Reich in a speech he gave at UC-Berkeley in 2007:

“This is what the truth is and a candidate will never say, but what a candidate should say … We’re going to have to, if you’re very old, we’re not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It’s too expensive…so we’re going to let you die.” (“Robert Reich Reveals Brutal Health Care Truths; MSM Snores,” Wall Street Journal blog, by P.J. Gladnick, Media Research Center, Oct. 13, 2009)

Without continued market-driven research and adequate federal funding, today’s good news about cancer will become little more than a cherished memory. And such funding and research will, as Robert Reich suggests, decline if Uncle Sam manages and rations health care.

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The fact that President Obama will hold a “jobs summit” to figure out how jobs are created is perhaps the saddest commentary of all on the farce that is about to begin. It seems like good timing as our unemployment rate is over 10 percent, and well into the double-digits in some parts of the country.

Yet having a job creation debate at the White House is disheartening. Shouldn’t an American President have some sense of how our market-based, competitive economy works?

More pointedly, the “summit” will produce no noticeable change in the policies of an Administration woefully and aggressively against the essential principles of the greatest jobs engine every designed or implemented, a free enterprise system based on property rights and capital formation.

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So: the people of Switzerland, by a roughly three-to-two margin, have decided to prevent the erection of any more minarets (not mosques, mind you, just minarets) in their traditionally Christian country.

Switzerland, whose national flag features a cross (odd – the Saudi flag features a scimitar), is weary of having minarets popping up in their quiet towns and suburbs. A European country with a unique culture and thousand-year old architectural tradition disliking the insinuation of Islamic structures into its neighborhoods – go figure …

Now, that amorphous entity, the “international community,” is up in arms. The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, is condemning “the anti-foreigner scare mongering which has characterized political campaigns in a number of countries including Switzerland.” Anti-foreigner? Or cultural self-protection?

Of course, any true religious or ethnic bigotry is morally wrong. All persons are made in the image and likeness of God and should be free to worship as they wish. But no group has the right to enter a host culture and demand conformity to its traditions. That’s aggressive, insulting and insensitive.

Why is it unacceptable for Europeans not to want their countries Islamicized? Muslims are now in Europe in significant numbers, but they are almost entirely unharrassed. Yet not a single Christian church exists in Saudi Arabia. Christians in Islamic countries often are attacked, discriminated against (Christians and Jews are often paid only half of their Muslim counterparts, per the command of the Quran) and prevented from free and open worship. Go to Voice of the Martyrs and see for yourself.

Count the crosses in the Islamic world. Read about the anti-Semitic rhetoric of many Islamic groups in Europe. Consider the repression of, and frequent violence against, Christians in Muslim-dominant nations. Add up the “fatwas” against Muslims who dare convert to faith in Jesus.

Then ask me to worry about the Swiss vote on minarets. Just don’t hold your breath.

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Official Washington is all atwitter about the state dinner to be given tonight to India’s Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh.  There have been newspaper articles filled with stories of guest lists, menus and the anecdotes of past dinner attendees.

India is a large nation, in geography and population.  Its friendship with the United States benefits both countries, and all Americans should welcome its respected PM to our shores.

India is also a nation rife with problems that dwarf those in our own: Massive corruption that stultifies economic growth and robs the poor of needed resources; endemic poverty affecting tens of millions; a weak educational system, fraught with caste-system bias; nearly 300 million Dalits, or “untouchables,” viewed in Hindu theology as sub-human and treated with contempt by their own society.  Sexual slavery and human trafficking also present profound and enduring challenges to all conscientious Indian political leaders.

Religious persecution in India is also on the rise.  Such Web sites as Open Doors, Catholic Online and Voice of the Martyrs provide chilling descriptions of what happens to Christians who stand for their faith in areas where devout Hindu and Muslim activists are determined to squash Christian faith violently.

Consider just one example, this one detailed in the UK’s Guardian newspaper:

“We cannot now return to the village as the murderers would be on the streets with more hatred and anger for us.” So said a witness after testifying last month in a courtroom in Kandhamal district in India’s eastern state of Orissa, which was the scene last year of ferocious violence against Christians carried out by mobs incited by extremist Hindu nationalists. The case saw three men acquitted of hacking to death a non-Christian tribal leader who tried to stand up to the mobs, and burning to death an elderly widow. They were convicted for destroying evidence, but sent home on bail, pending appeal. (“Orissa’s Forgotten Victims,” November 23, 2009).

Family Research Council hopes that President Obama will raise the issue of anti-Christian persecution with Prime Minister Singh.  To PM Singh’s credit, he has made strong statements against anti-Christian violence, noting that “Christianity is part of India’s national heritage” (www.oikumen.org/gr/news, October 20, 2008) and condemned the anti-Christian assaults in the province of Orissa (www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, August 29, 2008).

But as events of recent days indicate, much more must be done.  It is in America’s interest for us to press our friends to live to the principles of human dignity and religious liberty to which they are sworn.  By doing so, we are standing true to our own principles, and standing with those suffering for owning the Name of Jesus.

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“This shouldn’t be a debate about abortion,”‘ says the President’s Senior Advisor David Axelrod. The President himself argues that he and his allies in Congress are not “in some way sneaking in funding for abortions, but on the other hand that we’re not restricting women’s insurance choices.”

This is sort of like saying that when eating a four-scoop sundae, the dessert really isn’t about ice cream. Abortion is essential to the Democratic approach to health care. Why? Because if, as the great majority of national Democrats believe, abortion is a matter of public moral neutrality, a procedure not unlike the removal of a nasty tumor, it should be funded (or, as an interim step, subsidized) as part of any federal health insurance regime.

After the vote on the Stupak pro-life amendment on November 7, pro-abortion Members of Congress and their allies in the so-called “progressive” movement became apoplectic. “Abortion is healthcare. That’s the whole point,” wrote ultra-feminist and the Left-wing magazine Nation writer Katha Pollitt. Pollitt has made a career as a Left-liberal who actually speaks her mind (example: after 9/11, she wrote that the American “flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war”). Of course, her perspective is warped, but at least she says what she thinks.

And what she thinks seems to be what’s in the heart of the current Administration. Mr. Obama has built a career by stating two opposing views and pretending to find common ground between them. Of course, there is – as he admitted in his speech earlier this year at Notre Dame – no real common ground between the culture of life and the culture of death.

By subsidizing health insurance plans that provide abortion, the US government would be providing funds to companies that would thereby have greater financial freedom to pay for abortion and related services.

Mr. President, we either “restrict women’s choices” by refusing to allow the federal government to subsidize abortion providers, or we subsidize insurance companies that pay for abortion. There is no way around it. Your key allies know it. And, in the integrity of your mind, so do you.

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According to ABC News, President Obama is now “calling for a summit meeting of experts to find ways to jump-start job creation. And a jump-start is needed.”

This comes on the heels of a new report that the federal deficit “hit a record for October as the new budget year began where the old one ended: with the government awash in red ink,” as the Department of the Treasury warned that “the deficit for October totaled $176.4 billion, even higher than the $150 billion imbalance that economists expected.” Note: this is the deficit for a single month – not a calendar year.

Mr. President, here are some ideas distilled from leading economist dating from Adam Smith through the current day: If you want to create jobs,

(a) Quit spending the country into economic oblivion, farming out our debt to foreign creditors who will someday soon call in their loans and damage our nation’s economy. If you stop overspending, you will also ameliorate the growing fear of many investors that we are on the verge of monetizing the debt, simply printing worthless bills that will hyper-inflate our currency. Fiscal discipline, if dramatic and real, will energize the markets.

(b) Cut taxes – on individuals and families, on major firms and S-corporations. Cut the dividend tax. Cut the income tax. Cut capital gains taxes. Cut, and cut some more.

(c) Reduce and simplify a vast federal regulatory apparatus that confuses and cripples business growth.

(d) End the government-mandated “health care reform” madness, which will further impose on our companies and employees growing fiscal, legal and regulatory burdens. Target those things in our system that don’t work and offer market-based incentives and tax reforms that will enable insurance providers to better serve the underserved.

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Sen. Daniel Akaka is probably the quietest person in the U.S. Senate. He is known as a kindly man who votes faithfully but is not a vocal or activist member of the “upper body.” But this week, when asked if there is a constitutional basis for the Democratic health care bill, he candidly said, “I’m not aware of that, let me put it that way.”

Good way to put it, Senator, because your lack of awareness indicates that at least you know your Constitution well enough to recognize that it contains no basis for this latest exercise in federal elbow-throwing.

Sen. Akaka’s colleague Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) could learn from him. Sen. Reed was asked by a reporter “where in the Constitution does Congress get its authority to mandate that individuals purchase health insurance?”

Reed responded, “I would have to check the specific sections, so I’ll have to get back to you on the specific section. But it is not unusual that the Congress has required individuals to do things, like sign up for the draft and do many other things too, which I don’t think are explicitly contained (in the Constitution).”

Sen. Reed is an undoubted patriot, a former Marine who served honorably in Vietnam. So it is disappointing that someone of his political stature would equate the draft with an individual federal mandate of citizens for non-military purposes. To what “many other things” is Reed referring?

In the 1918 Arver v. United States case, the Supreme Court ruled that the draft is constitutional because it is essence an implementation of the Constitution’s provision for the federal government to create a standing army (Article I, Section 8). Men (and women) are needed to defend the nation, and during times of national crisis conscription might be needed.

The Democratic health plan (H.R. 3962), passed last weekend in the House, goes well beyond any authority conferred on the federal government, through our written Constitution, by “We, the People.” In fact, the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) wrote to the House Ways and Means Committee that “failure to comply with the terms of the law that the Democrats passed last weekend could put people in jail. The JCT told the committee that anyone who decides not to maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” or, absent that, pay the individual health insurance mandate tax of about 2.5 percent of income, would be liable to large fines or prison sentences” (The Washington Times, “Tax Penalties and Prison,” by Donald Lambro, November 12, 2009).

The JCT went on to write that “H.R. 3962 provides that an individual (or a husband and wife in the case of a joint return) who does not, at anytime during the taxable year, maintain acceptable health insurance coverage for himself or herself and each of his or her qualifying children is subject to an additional tax.”

This mandate is unconstitutional in its own right and also poses a serious threat to the fundamental liberty of ordinary Americans: When the federal government requires specific economic activity (in this case, the purchase or acceptance of a health insurance plan) and threatens to impose “fines or prison sentences” for non-compliance, our essential freedom as citizens is eroded and our path into coerced political subjection all the more obvious – and dangerous.

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Family Research Council has several critical concerns with the Democratic health care legislation under consideration on Capitol Hill.  The sanctity of human life, although safeguarded in the House version of the measure passed on Saturday, remains a live issue as the bill goes to the Senate.  Rationing, costs, patient control of medical decisions, an increase in the size and scope of Washington’s power: These and other matters animate FRC’s active opposition to the Democratic approach to revising our system of medical care.

But there is another issue that we have raised and will keep raising as the debate goes forward: The constitutionality of the Democratic plans.

When Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked recently at the introduction of her mammoth health care “reform” bill if the measure was constitutional, the usually glib Californian was caught off-guard.  “Are you serious?” she asked.  And, a second time, “Are you serious?”  She then turned to another reporter without answering further.

At least House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer gives the Constitution a guilty nod.  He says that the “general welfare” clause gives Congress the right to pass a massive health care bill full of mandates on businesses and individuals and higher taxes for all.

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Democrats are going out of their way to argue that the Stupak-Pitts amendment prohibiting federal funding of abortion is an effort to enact new restrictions on abortion itself. Julie Rovner of NPR, a journalist no less, argued today that the pro-life Members of Congress seeking to prevent Uncle Sam from paying for abortions are trying to impose new limits on access to abortion. Ms. Rovner seems to be taking a line from Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, who in today’s NY Times is quoted as saying, with reference to her colleague Bart Stupak’s amendment, “There’s no way at the end of the day we’re going to support these kinds of further restrictions on abortion.”

This is a desperate misrepresentation of the facts. The bipartisan pro-life effort to maintain existing federal restrictions on federal funding of abortion is nothing more than an attempt to sustain existing policy. It does nothing to “further restrict” abortion.

Those who advocate for unrestricted access to federally financed abortion on demand are getting more outraged by the minute. By affirming the sanctity of life, the Members of Congress who are standing their ground against federal financing of abortion are saying “yes” to the Creator of natal personhood. For this, they deserve our enduring thanks. And let’s pray for Ms. Schakowsky and her fellow advocates of the culture of death, that the God Who made and loves them will draw them into the light of life itself.

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Today in Utah, a 21 year-old man was sentenced to five years in prison for, according to the Associated Press, “beating a pregnant (17 year-old) girl to try to cause a miscarriage” after she paid him $150 to do so.

The girl was seven months pregnant. Aaron Harrison, the criminal convicted of assaulting her, beat her stomach and, bizarrely, even bit her on the neck to induce a miscarriage. And although Harrison had pled guilty to “second-degree felony attempted murder, which is punishable by up to 15 years in prison .. District Judge A. Lynn Payne instead sentenced him under Utah’s anti-abortion statute, saying a charge of third-degree ‘attempted killing of an unborn child’ better fit the facts of the case.”

“I don’t think words can describe the kind of depraved conduct you entered into in trying to take the life of a child,” Judge Payne said to Harrison from the bench.

The mother of the baby, born healthy in August, is now seeking custody of the child she tried to have killed.

Judge Payne’s words ring like a bell: “The life of a child.” At seven months, the child is almost fully developed; it’s eyelids are opening and closing at this stage, with its brain functioning and its heart beating. All that really needs to happen prior birth is weight increase.

The potency of medical knowledge has pushed proponents of abortion on demand out of the realms of reason and science. The humanness and personhood of the unborn child are indisputable by any measurable, objective standard.

It was President Obama who said, during his one-on-one with Rick Warren last summer, that determining when human life begins is “above my paygrade.” Perhaps the President could read Judge Payne’s remarks and the facts of this wrenching case and let us know if his current salary is sufficient for him to decide.

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