The New York Times takes a firm stance against slavery. The “Gray Lady”—as the authoritative “newspaper of record” was once known–wants everyone to know that she won’t tolerate backsliding on the great moral issue of the nineteenth century.

I take no issue with the Times on slavery or on segregation. The liberal conscience of America—for so the editors see themselves—had an honorable record on those twin evils. In the American Civil War, the Times staunchly defended Lincoln and his Emancipation Proclamation. Similarly, during the modern Civil Rights era, the Gray Lady thundered daily against Jim Crow. It was for many of us the great moral issue of the twentieth century.

In the 1960s and 70s, I was a daily reader of the Times. But recently? Not so much.

And the reason is simply that I cannot abide the Times regularly railing against the defenders of human life. The Times routinely excoriates the Roman Catholic Church. Don’t even ask them about Evangelicals and Lutherans who speak up for the unborn.

Since that grim gray day in 1973 when Roe v. Wade was handed down, the Times has not found a single abortion it could not defend. Of 53,000,000 innocent lives lost, there is not one that should have been welcomed in life and protected by law. At least according to the Gray Lady.

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Tags: Abortion, New York Times

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The New York Times ran a stunning story yesterday “Contraceptive Use May Double Risk of H.I.V.“, about a new study published today in the Lancet showing that hormonal contraceptive use is strongly correlated with an increased vulnerability to contracting HIV/AIDS.

The study was conducted in seven countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the region most impacted by HIV/AIDS in the world. Three thousand, seven hundred and ninety serodiscordant couples (one partner is HIV positive and one is not) participated in the longitudinal study running for six years, from 2004-2010. The bottom line? Women who used hormonal contraception had a “two-times increased risk of acquiring HIV.” Additionally, women who were using hormonal contraceptives were significantly more likely to transmit HIV to their partners.

The NYT reports that the World Health Organization is convening a meeting in January to review the latest research about the relationship between hormonal contraceptives and HIV/AIDS vulnerability and review if/how current recommendations require revisions.

For more information click here.

Tags: AIDS, Contraceptives, HIV, New York Times

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It was a somber Sunday, as we looked back to the events that shattered our sense of security ten years ago yesterday.  In DC and across our nation, people gathered to remember the attacks of 9/11 and the lives lost.   For some, it was a relaxing Sunday and for others a chance to give back to our communities.  We are just as unified, as we were when we learned of these attacks.

However, when I was reading the New York Times this morning, I happened to come across Paul Krugman’s op-ed piece slamming the commemorations of 9/11 and slamming then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani and President George W. Bush for cashing in on the tragedy.  Krugman further accused them of using 9/11, as a cause to fight in Afghanistan and referring to it as “an occasion for shame.”

9/11 is not an “occasion for shame” as Krugman states, rather it is a time to reflect and remember the events that unfolded ten years ago.  Families lost loved ones, our country became more unified and grieved together.  Our leaders did what they believed was right in terms of defending our nation from further attacks.

While Krugman has the right to publish whatever he wishes, he should really be ashamed of saying that 9/11 created opportunity for war.

Tags: 9/11, Afghanistan, George W. Bush, New York Times, Paul Krugman, Rudy Giuliani

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There are no less than eight stories dealing with the religious beliefs of President Obama and his Republican challengers on RealClearReligion today.  By historical standards, this is extraordinary: In no previous election season have the faith-related convictions of presidential candidates been so scrutinized.

The scrutiny comes primarily from a secular media mystified, and in some cases, plain disturbed, by the notion that personal faith might affect public policy decisions.  In a much-discussed op-ed, New York Times Executive editor Bill Keller claims that “Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann are both affiliated with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity — and Rick Santorum comes out of the most conservative wing of Catholicism — which has raised concerns about their respect for the separation of church and state, not to mention the separation of fact and fiction.”

“Fervid subsets?”  Does Keller envision Mrs. Bachmann handling rattlers, or Gov. Perry levitating?  “Raised concerns” where, and who has raised them?  Certain residents of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, whose understanding of the role of faith in American life is defined not by experience but the occasional PBS documentary?  Certainly, if a politician claims to hear audibly the voice of God and asserts divine direction for highly specific policies (e.g., liberal Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s astounding comment that to oppose U.S. entry into the League of Nations was to oppose God), any reasonable person – believer or non-believer – would be justified in feeling uneasy.  Yet to assert, as Keller does, that the faith of a Bachmann, a Perry, or a Santorum might be “a Trojan horse for a sect that believes it has divine instructions on how we should be governed” is both to mis-comprehend orthodox Christian faith and also to disparage the beliefs of most of one’s fellow countrymen.

Perhaps Mr. Keller and his jittery colleagues in the Fourth Estate should reflect on something then-Sen. Barack Obama said in a speech in 2006:

“Americans are a religious people. 90 percent of us believe in God, 70 percent affiliate themselves with an organized religion, 38 percent call themselves committed Christians … the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms. Some of the problem here is rhetorical – if we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice … to say that men and women should not inject their ‘personal morality’ into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

I agree, for the most part; however, the discomfort of liberals with religion goes beyond the scrubbing of language.  It goes to the heart of one’s philosophical basis for life itself: Is there, or is there not, an infinite but personal God who has communicated truth in understandable ways to human beings?  Christians say yes; the irreligious cultural elite would say, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

In 2004, then-Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent – a liberal with an honest conscience – penned these lines about the Gray Lady; they could have been written about much of the “mainstream” press and, much more so, the shrill complainers of Left-wing blog sites and editorial commentary generally:  “Is the New York Times a liberal paper?  Of course it is … These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you’ve been reading the paper with your eyes closed.  But if you’re examining the paper’s coverage of these subjects from a perspective that is neither urban nor Northeastern nor culturally seen-it-all; if you are among the groups The Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn’t wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you’re traveling in a strange and forbidding world. Start with the editorial page, so thoroughly saturated in liberal theology that when it occasionally strays from that point of view the shocked yelps from the left overwhelm even the ceaseless rumble of disapproval from the right.”

In his second inaugural address, which is more of a meditation on the sovereignty and justice of God than a political speech, Abraham Lincoln observed, “if God wills that (the Civil War) continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether’.”

In 1865, the New York Times praised Lincoln’s speech for its “calmness, its modesty, its reserve,” and said, “We have a President who will be faithful to the end.”  What would Mr. Keller say of them, and of Lincoln himself, today?

Tags: Faith, Journalism, liberalism, New York Times

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On July 20^th the New York Times published an editorial “Sound Medical Advice” which despite its name ironically included misinformation about the recent IOM report recommending that contraceptives be covered by all health plans with no co-payment.

The writer states that the report was guided by medical evidence but makes no mention of the dissenting committee member who would not put his name to the recommendations because “evaluation for evidence lacked transparency… The process tended to result in a mix of objective and subjective determination through the lens of advocacy.”

Additionally the writer suggested that “studies show that cost is a major barrier to regular use of contraceptives” when in fact the opposite is the case. The Guttmacher Institute, originally the research arm of Planned Parenthood, a group that stands to benefit enormously from this report, reports that only 12 percent of women not using contraception are doing so because of financial reasons.

Lastly, the writer criticizes groups, such as the FRC, who oppose this mandate but does not delve into the science and rationale behind the opposition: drugs included in this recommendation have modes of action that will not only prevent the creation of life, but also in fact destroy it in its early stages. While this might be an insignificant point to the writer of the editorial, it is of utmost significance to the millions of pro-life Americans who deserve transparency and should not be forced to pay for abortions.

Tags: Contraceptives, IOM report, New York Times, Planned Parenthood, The Guttmacher Institute

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On Saturday, February 26^th, the New York Times ran two pieces on the topic of abortion and women’s health that were misleading and erroneous. “The War on Women” ignored critical facts on the recently released Planned Parenthood videos related to human trafficking. This editorial leaves one with the wrong impression that PPFA had one recent questionable instance related to the sex trafficking of minors and immediately fired this employee.  However, in truth, the problem is deeply systemic: five videos with questions related to the sex trafficking of minors featuring a number of PPFA employees and clinics across the U.S. have been released, leading to serious questions about the ethical and legal conduct of Planned Parenthood.  It is especially noteworthy that PPFA relies heavily on federal funding, having received $363 million in 2009.  This amount composes roughly one-third of PPFA’s budget.

The second piece, “The GOP’s Abandoned Babies,” by columnist Charles Blow, missed an acutely critical point in that one of the physiological consequences for women who choose to have an abortion is that their ensuing pregnancies frequently result in pre-term deliveries, leading to a higher infant mortality rate in the U.S.   Despite the rhetoric of abortion-proponents, scientific fact supports the reality that abortion is not good for women — physiologically or psychologically — much less their developing babies.

Tags: Abortion, New York Times, Planned Parenthood, Women's Health

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On Sunday, the New York Times ran a piece called, “Meet the Twiblings.” It’s an autobiographical account by Melanie Thernstrom about how she and her husband Michael obtained donor eggs from two women and then had them implanted in two different women.  Thus, the article’s striking subtitle: “How four women (and one man) conspired to make two babies.”

The moral and ethical issues involved in this couple’s decisions are genuine.  That two beautiful, God-beloved children resulted from them does not make the path pursued by this couple ethical or wise.

Yet woven into the larger story is one about adoption. Consider just two quotes from the article:

Abortion’s Affect on Adoption

Quote #1: (I)n the 1970s, there was an abundance of babies in the United States in need of homes, but the widespread use of birth control and abortion, among other factors, has caused the supply of infants available for adoption in the subsequent three decades to plummet to a fraction of what it was then.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that about ten percent of women between the ages of 15 and 44 wrestle with infertility.  Adoption would be so much more streamlined, less agonizing, less of a desperate quest, if there were more babies to adopt – something that abortion and abortifacient drugs are efficient in preventing.

There are roughly 7.3 million infertile couples in the United States.  According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, there are about 1.7 million adopted children in our country.

While not every infertile couple wants to adopt, many, perhaps the majority, does, and yet strives to find a child to love, from the county foster care center to nations as obscure as Nepal.

“The paradox of America’s unborn,“ as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has called it, is this: “No life is so desperately sought after, so hungrily desired, so carefully nurtured. And yet no life is so legally unprotected, and so frequently destroyed.”

Honoring Birthmothers

Quote #2: “You won’t have anything in common with the carriers,” a director of a Los Angeles agency (which we decided not to work with) insisted dismissively. The gestational carriers at their agency were mainly white, working-class women, often evangelical Christians — “the kind of girls you went to high school with,” he said, managing to give “high school” an ominous intonation. He waved his hand. “You may think you want to stay in touch now, but trust me, once you have your baby, you’re barely going to remember her name. I call it surrogacy amnesia.”

Were I to meet this man, I might have difficulty being civil. To catalog the offenses laced like cyanide throughout his comments would be almost too onerous (they include religious bigotry, social snobbery, and elitist pomposity).  Yet one phrase – “surrogacy amnesia” – is especially remarkable.

My wife and I remember the biological mothers of our children. We recall their names, their appearance, their stories, the way they sounded. We are grateful to them beyond words or human memory. Our thankfulness to them will remain eternal. This, not some “amnesia,” is the common experience of the adoptive parents we know.

Forgetting about a birthmother might be a form of psychological protection for some adoptive parents who find it too painful to think that their children are not theirs biologically.  I cannot cite statistics about how many such persons there are, but would say pretty confidently it is a small number.

This is not to say adoptive parents are preoccupied with thoughts of their children’s birthmothers.  But we do not forget them and, in an era of abortion-on-demand, the sacrificial love they have shown.

Here is how one writer describes the journey of a woman who decides to give her child to another family:

Why would a woman make this decision? Sometimes it is because of her religious beliefs, sometimes it is because she recognizes that this child is a unique little person who will never exist again in the history of the human race. Although she is not in the position to raise this child herself, she wants him/her to have the best possible life. She is aware that there are many childless couples who would love to give her baby a home and that they are carefully screened before being approved.

About such women there is no amnesia, only gratitude.

***Dr. Pat Fagan, director of Family Research Council’s Marriage and Religion Research Institute, recently authored a new study, “Adoption Works Well,” which documents how effective adoption is and how it transforms, for the better, the lives of both parents and children.  A free download is available here.***

Tags: adoption, New York Times, Ross Douthat, surrogacy

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On July 31st, the New York Times published an article on RU-486, the abortion drug, by Nicholas Kristoff.  Earlier this week my colleague, Chris Gacek, posted an excellent blog refuting many of the erroneous claims made by Kristoff.  In an attempt to properly educate the public on the dangers of the drug, FRC submitted a letter to the editor to the NYT on August 2nd, but to date it hasn’t been published. Below is the letter that was submitted.

Nicholas Kristof’s July 31st column on the abortion drug RU-486 does not acknowledge the facts behind the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of RU-486 and its serious health implications.

In 2000 the FDA approved RU-486 as the first-and only-abortion pill in the U.S. Because it suppresses a woman’s immune system, making her more prone to infection and bleeding, only doctors trained in blood transfusions and located within close proximity to a hospital could distribute it.

By the spring of 2006 the FDA acknowledged six deaths, nine life-threatening incidents, 232 hospitalizations, 116 cases involving the need for blood transfusions, and 88 cases of infections, with a total of 1,070 adverse events reports.

Kristoff writes that the drug is “revolutionizing abortion around the world, especially in poor countries.”  But given results in the medically sophisticated U.S., shipping this to developing countries would be a recipe for disaster.

(1) Letter from David W. Boyer, Assistant Commissioner for Legislation, Food and Drug Administration, to  Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources (May 2, 2006) (on file with Subcommittee).

Tags: Abortion, New York Times, RU-486

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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

Tags: Abortion, New York Times

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I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding.

Those were President Obama’s words in an interview with editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade. The President was explaining his openness to a federal bailout of struggling big-city daily newspapers. For that reason, Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) have introduced S. 673, their so-called “Newspaper Revitalization Act.”

These two very liberal senators should have acted even sooner. They should have sponsored the Manual Typewriter Preservation Act. You see, the computer revolution put great pressure on Royal, Underwood, and Olivetti. Those companies represented thousands of jobs. We can’t just let the free market run rampant. Save typewriter ribbons! Save white-out! Save carbon paper! There’s no telling how much damage these new-fangled computers might do.

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Tags: blogosphere, Fairness Doctrine, media, Media Bailout, New York Times, Obama

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