Uncommon Sense

politics and society are, unfortunately, much the same thing

So the sun affects climate on this planet. Who knew?

May 26, 2013 by Peter Ferrara



















The German Herald reported on March 31, 2013,















Woman Who Killed Her Baby Has Conviction Overturned, Court Says Six-Day-Old Baby Isn’t a Person

original article: Woman Who Killed Her Baby Has Conviction Overturned, Court Says Six-Day-Old Baby Isn’t a Person
October 30, 2015 by MICAIAH BILGER

A New York court recently ruled that a Long Island woman who killed her baby in a car accident cannot be convicted because her baby was not a person yet.

The Times Union reports Jennifer Jorgensen previously was found guilty of second-degree manslaughter for causing the death of her baby daughter in a car crash. She also was indicted for driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol and endangering the welfare of a child, according to the report.

Jorgensen was in her third trimester when the car accident occurred in May 2008. Her daughter was delivered by C-section after the head-on collision and died six days later, according to the report.

In October, the New York Court of Appeals reversed Jorgensen’s conviction, ruling that she was not guilty because she fatally injured her daughter before she was born.

The court ruling compared Jorgensen’s actions to self-induced abortion and called it an offense that is “no greater than a misdemeanor.”

According to the report:

“… the central question in the case was whether the state Legislature intended ‘to hold pregnant women criminally responsible for engaging in reckless conduct against themselves and their unborn fetuses, such that they should be subject to criminal liability for prenatal conduct that results in postnatal death? Under the current statutory scheme, the answer to this question is no.’”

Not all of the judges agreed on the ruling. In a dissent, Judge Eugene Fahey wrote, “I cannot join in a result that analyzes our statutes to determine that a six-day-old child is not a person.”

Conservative blogger Warner Todd Huston notes that as outrageous as the ruling may seem, the court is right that current state laws do not recognize unborn babies as “persons.” Jorgensen is no longer being held accountable for her baby’s death because, in the eyes of the state, her unborn daughter did not have the rights of personhood when her reckless behavior fatally injured her child.

Huston wrote, “In this case it is clearly the legislature’s fault, not the court’s, and shows how iffy it is to say that a human doesn’t count as human until after they are ‘born.’”

Currently in the U.S., 37 states recognize the unlawful killing of an unborn child as homicide in some circumstances, according to the National Right to Life Committee.

New York has two conflicting statutes about the protection of unborn children from violence, according to National Right to Life. One statute calls the killing of an unborn child after 24 weeks for reasons other than abortion “homicide.” However, a separate statutory provision defines the victim of a homicide as a “human being who has been born and is alive.”


abortion, babies, bureaucracy, government, ideology, legislature, political correctness, public policy, relativism, tragedy

Filed under: abortion, babies, bureaucracy, government, ideology, legislature, political correctness, public policy, relativism, tragedy

Why is Planned Parenthood interested in a local school board election?

original article: Is Planned Parenthood Targeting Schoolchildren?
October 28, 2015 by Jennifer Kerns








Access, for one thing.









Not a bad business model, if you can get it.


And that’s where the really big money comes in.




Think it couldn’t happen?



It certainly appears that way.




abortion, children, corruption, cronyism, culture, government, politics

Filed under: abortion, children, corruption, cronyism, culture, government, politics

Trigger warnings for everything except abortions?

In a culture where “trigger warnings” are becoming increasingly common, and considered justified and necessary, and ever more different aspects of life being subject to such warnings, one should question a few things. For example, why is the word “American” considered a negative term to be avoided so as to not cause offense on a college campus, a place once considered the most free-speech friendly area in America? At the same time there is also a strong resistance to abortion’s equivalent of PTSD.

Study after study shows a post traumatic stress disorder can and often does happen to women after having an abortion. If anything in civilian life is deserving of the widespread attention and sympathy of PTSD shouldn’t women who’ve had an abortion qualify?

But that is not what the purveyors of trigger warnings typically do. The advocates and administrators of trigger warning policies are usually opposed to acknowledging abortion is worthy of such consideration. The push for trigger warnings and the push against “micro-aggressions” is so strong the first amendment is routinely dismissed (and possibly considered pointless) in favor of the politically correct agenda. Yet while we are told abortion is a serious and deeply personal decision for women, we are supposed to dismiss stories of regret or even go to great lengths to distort reason in the defense of abortion.

From a news media conspicuously sympathetic to abortion to partisan politicians struggling to defend it, to propagandists being blatantly dishonest, it’s almost a miracle the issue is controversial at all.

If we truly care about women’s health we should be working to educate people on the unfavorable truths about abortion rather than hide or avoid them. We should be sympathetic to women who’ve had abortions rather than praise abortion in an attempt to remove any social stigma from the act of killing babies. We should be helping women make better choices in the first place rather than trying to retrain them to think like men, pursuing empty sex lives and discarding any consequences that may result from bad decisions.

But, no. Instead, we’re hearing calls for abortion on demand, at any time during pregnancy, and have this service provided for “free”. So not only is killing babies a right but a woman should be able to force everyone else to pay for it. What could possibly go wrong with this approach?

abortion, bias, cover up, culture, hypocrisy, ideology, indoctrination, political correctness, progressive, propaganda, relativism, tragedy


If you think pro-life equals anti-choice you’re an idiot, and worse

A curious attitude among the vast majority of the “pro-choice” crowd is that a woman’s right to choose is typically treated as the only legitimate perspective on the matter. Those opposing the killing of babies are often treated as opposing women’s rights, as if opposing the killing of babies somehow equals opposing all women’s rights.

But that’s what myopia does to people. Having a small, narrow minded view of “rights” in this matter prevents the pro-choice crowd from seeing any possibility that the child in the womb has any rights to violate.

This is precisely the same problem encountered by abolitionists who tried to end slavery in the United States. Abolitionists argued that to demean any person by robbing them of humanity places us all in danger. After all, if the government can play semantic games with personhood with one group it can do the same with another. But the myopic view of slave holders required them to attack abolitionists. Rather than merely disagreeing, slavery supporters accused abolitionists of attacking all property rights, because “property rights” was the excuse championed by slavery’s supporters. Thus, in their mind, claiming it was constitutionally invalid to treat a person as property was tantamount to denying the right to property at all. To defenders of slavery the issue was never about oppression except when their right to enslave other people was at risk.

Such a dishonest tactic was necessary for slavery supporters because it became increasingly difficult to defend slavery as discussion continued, as it should. If discussion was minimized or stopped, slave holders would have no reason to defend the evil they practiced. So the best way to end debate on the matter was to shut up those who wanted to debate it. And the best way to do that was to demonize and marginalize those who opposed slavery. That included accusations of being anti-property rights, anti-self government, and even being on the wrong side of history.

Abraham Lincoln, in his speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, made an argument similar to what the pro-life movement argues today against abortion. In our modern age pro-lifers often argue that to have the “right” to kill your own babies is not freedom, but oppression, among other things. Lincoln argued against slavery in much the same way:


Not only do abortion activists shoehorn the issue into a “women’s rights” perspective, they also fraudulently force abortion into a scientific perspective, as if science was actually equipped to determine when personhood begins. [UPDATE: Science, Embryonic Autonomy, and the Question of When Life Begins]

It does a disservice to us all to ignore science or to treat opinion and fact as the same thing. In the first couple months the argument that the fetus is merely a blob of cells has some merit; but one still must choose to view it as “not a person” in development. It’s just as viable to believe the fetus at this stage is a person in development. Neither of these opinions are purely scientific – they are opinions. In fact, American law never official declared black people were people; and it shouldn’t have to.

But after the first couple months, for the remainder of the pregnancy, the child in the womb is not merely a blob of cells and cannot honestly be called such. A recent video was released showing abortion professionals attempting to train activists in defending abortion. One abortion professional actually suggested activists cease lying about the nature of the “person” in the womb and admit that after a certain period of time, the fetus is indeed a person, and that abortion is killing a person. The point of the training was to move past these vapid denials and teach activists how to divert the discussion to some other matter.

In a daytime TV talk show, which I find unworthy of being mentioned by name here, the show’s hosts recently ridiculed Dr. Ben Carson for his insistence that killing babies is a bad idea. But to those ridiculing him, they thought he was talking about controlling women. He wasn’t. No one fighting for a child’s right to live is fighting against “women’s rights”.

What’s more, abortion supporters are acting as if women have a right that, in fact, no one has. While arguing for a woman’s right to choose the assumption is that women have the absolute right to control their own body. The problem is there is no such right.

Imagine this scenario: a 14 year old girl driving a car in the United States. This alone violates at least three laws: (1) there is an age requirement for driving the automobile (which she has not attained yet) and therefore she is (2) driving an automobile without a drivers license and (3) without auto insurance. In most places in the US these three laws are in effect, thus the 14 year old girl is violating all of them. But let’s add a few more details to this hypothetical. She is driving the car with an open beer bottle which violates at least two more laws: (4) under age drinking and (5) there is an open container of alcohol in the vehicle. Now imagine she is (6) driving without wearing a seat belt, (7) texting while driving, (8) driving faster than allowed on that particular stretch of road, (9) driving on the wrong side of the road, and (10) driving while nude.

I doubt all these things violate the law in all areas of the US, but in some places this fictional character is violating the law in all ten ways. And here’s the catch: if you’re reading this chances are you approve of at least one law alluded to in the hypothetical scenario. And since you support at least one of those laws, you support restricting what a person can or cannot do with their own body. No one has the absolute right to control their own body, and no one believes in such a thing.

So what’s so wrong with laws like these? It depends. Most people support such laws because of how they affect others. Admittedly, seeing a teenage girl driving naked could very well have a similar effect on other drivers as driving a car while texting or while drunk could have on the girl herself. It’s because of the effect on other people that most of us find ourselves willing to accept laws restricting our freedom. And that’s why abortion opponents oppose killing babies: because it’s KILLING PEOPLE!

Another lie abortion supports offer is that opponents want to force women to be mothers, completely ignoring the fact that pro-lifers frequently argue for adoption. No one arguing against abortion is arguing for the enslavement of women.

To the defenders of abortion the issue has never been about babies. The issue has always been about control of women, because being able to kill one’s own child is somehow deemed as empowerment and liberating, and a right. That’s how abortion supporters see it, and they are welcome to their view. But they are not entitled to define other people’s opinions. Their elitist stance drives them to pretend everyone treats abortion as about whatever abortion supporters say it is about. And they have to, because recognizing personhood for the child threatens the entire abortion economy and power structure, just like recognizing personhood for slaves threatened that of slavery.

Opponents of abortion are not interested in controlling women any more than opponents of slavery were opposed to property rights. To abortion opponents the issue has always been about babies. Those who call abortion opponents “anti-choice” are just as small minded and dishonest about abortion as slave owners were about abolitionists. I’m not asking or demanding abortion supporters agree with opponents, I’m merely asking supporters to stop lying about what opponents actually want and fight for. Purposefully misrepresenting your opposition makes you look like a fraud, and it makes you look incapable of tolerating dissenting points of view. And your reputation for being small minded and dishonest has had such a negative effect on your movement that even an abortion professional is suggesting you simply admit you support killing babies.

No one fighting against abortion is trying roll back women’s rights. If you can’t see that, you are either a blithering idiot or a liar. And possibly both. I’m talking to you, Chauncey DeVega.

abortion, babies, bias, elitism, fraud, government, history, hypocrisy, ideology, indoctrination, intolerance, left wing, liberalism, oppression, pandering, political correctness, pro-life, progressive, prolife, propaganda, scandal, victimization


Seattle’s Minimum Wage Hike Is Underway. Hiring Has Slowed Already

October 26, 2015 by PARKER LEE




Image Credit: AEI

Image Credit: AEI










This is how cronyism works

original article: New York’s Taxi King Is Going Down
October 26, 2015 by Jared Meyer





Subprime Taxi Medallions





There’s Not Much Argument for a Monopoly



The credit union argument progresses as follows:







How to Save Taxis Without Squeezing People




Everyone Shouldn’t Pay for Some People’s Bad Bets








original article: Prostitution, porn, and abortion: three sides of the same coin
September 25, 2015 by JONATHON VAN MAREN

Sept. 25, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – Never in human history has there been a time in which the buying and selling of human flesh, in one form or another, has been more prevalent. Human trafficking is the fastest growing criminal industry in the world. Pornography depicting the brutalization of women and girls is among the most popular material on the Internet. And abortion, the financed destruction of tiny human beings developing in the womb, claims the lives of almost 42 million pre-born children each year.

The first time I fully realized how dehumanizing the “sex trade” is was when I was a teenager, walking through the streets of Amsterdam with a student group from my school to visit the Church of Our Lord in the Attic, a hidden house church from the 1600s. What our teachers had not realized when they planned the tour, however, is that we had to cut directly through the infamous Red Light District in order to get there. As they rushed us down the cobblestone streets with more than a little panic, we gaped at an utterly foreign sight: Rows and rows of windows with scantily clad women, their fatigue painted over with thick layers of makeup and mechanical come-hither smiles, standing there. Like meat packages at a butcher shop, I remember thinking. Even the “souvenir” shops sold only human body parts—postcards featuring only breasts or bottoms, nothing else. A human meat market—one brothel owner even compared the tourists viewing the girls to men deciding which pizza to order.

More than 60% of the girls and women who work there report getting sexually assaulted.

The same thing struck me when traveling in Hungary earlier this year. My cousin and I arrived in Budapest from Belgrade at four in the morning and climbed into a taxi to find a hostel. The driver soon took us to a less than reputable area of the city in search of an establishment that still had rooms available. I wondered, stupidly, why there were so many young girls still walking about, even though it was dark and the sun was not even stirring. And then our taxi pulled up to a stop sign, and I made eye contact with one of them. Her blue eyes were flat and emotionless.

She was very young, and very pretty. She wore a light black jacket with a fur fringe, and painted-on pants that must have hurt to walk in. She must have been freezing—it was so ice-cold that every short breath came out in a puff of steam. An older woman, lounging against an abandoned storefront, barked something at her that I didn’t understand, and jerked her head towards me. She started to walk over to the car, gesturing at me and then to herself. And that’s when I realized that she’d been told to find out if I was a potential customer. I felt quite sick as we drove away, although I was naïve to be so surprised. Budapest, after all, is a sex tourist destination, an Eastern European Bangkok. I’d read about it. I’d just never come face to face with the reality—a girl who should have been in school, selling herself to strangers at the orders of others.

Those who defend legalized prostitution—although the differences between legal and illegal prostitution are few—defend it in much the same way that other horrible practices are defended. “Prostitution advocates often use the word ‘choice,’” as Benjamin Nolot of Exodus Cry, an anti-human trafficking organization, noted in his documentary Nefarious: Merchant of Souls.

Choice is a sacred word in a culture that worships individualism, and there is no cap on the number of lives that can be sacrificed to it. Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, herself a former stripper, occasionally takes time off from promoting abortion to advocate for the legalization of prostitution. “I see a lot of similarity between the issues,” she says. “Choice, my body is my own, autonomy, and all those good things.”

It should surprise no one that somebody who trumpets the destruction and misery of abortion should also laud an industry that specializes in the degradation of all those who engage with it. After all, this is the same Joyce Arthur who defended Planned Parenthood’s dealing in baby parts as a good thing, and even said that Canadian mothers, too, could offer to donate the dismembered body parts of their pre-born children to be used for research. With abortion, as with human trafficking, the pattern is the same: Humans are the sum of their parts, and humans are only valuable in so far as the monetary value of their bodies. Human bodies only serve the purpose of being useful to others.

Dr. Mary Anne Layden, who researches the links between pornography and human trafficking, put it this way: “This is a business and I think that a lot of pimps would stop doing this if there wasn’t any money involved, but it’s a business and as soon as you tell somebody it’s a product, as soon as you say this [is] something you buy, then this is something you can steal. Those two things are hooked. If you can buy it, you can steal it, and even better if you steal it because then you don’t pay for it. So the sexual exploitation industry, whether it’s strip clubs or prostitution or pornography, is where you buy it. Sexual violence is where you steal it – rape and child molestation and sexual harassment is where you steal it. So these things are all seamlessly connected. There isn’t a way to draw a bright line of demarcation between rape and prostitution and pornography and child molestation. There are not bright lines of demarcation.”

And when the intentionally sterile sex occasionally results in the production of a child, most pimps and rapists immediately avail themselves of the happy-to-help abortion industry. The mother’s body, in their mind, is only useful to serve the sexual needs of paying customers, not to nurture with love and tenderness the tiny, fragile body of her son or daughter. The sexual exploitation industries sell the bodies of women and girls to men, and the abortion industry waits patiently to destroy the unwanted sons and daughters of victims and rapists. Sometimes, they can sell the body parts of those sons and daughters to research firms. All body parts are put to good use. The market gods are happy.

A culture without morals meets capitalism without ethics, and what we have created is a commodity culture. Pornography dehumanizes women for a mass audience, and human trafficking and prostitution allows men to play out their fantasies in real life. When I interviewed anti-sex trafficking activist and Member of Parliament Joy Smith, she told me that pimps use today’s pornography to groom their victims into accepting assault—and that in studies done of johns, huge numbers of them report using prostitution so that they can live out fantasies they would never try on “real women.” And the abortionists, of course, can take care of any resulting children, since they are not, in the eyes of our culture, “real children.”

Commodity culture, with one trend played out over and over again: Objectification leads to dehumanization. Dehumanization leads to victimization.

It’s because our materialist society no longer believes in the soul. They’ve forgotten that we are not a body, we are a soul that has a body. Indeed, it is the soul that comes up time and time again when those who have been involved in the exploitation industries struggle to explain the depth and brutality of the damage that has been done. “Every time I sold myself, I felt like I was selling my soul,” said one former prostitute.” No one understands “the pain and destruction to a woman’s heart and soul” that is inflicted by the sex trade, explained Annie Lobert, a former sex worker. When I brought young women onto the porn sets, “I watched their souls die,” one former porn producer told me.

Again and again, former victims and former perpetrators struggle to find words to describe the destruction our commodity culture has wrought, and time and time again they find themselves drawn to words that beckon towards the transcendent. They know, because they have felt the pain and the horror, that human beings are not simply two randomly-ordered bodies of flesh coming together for brief pleasure. We are so much more than that. We were not built for abuse and degradation, but for love and dignity.

Many times throughout the history of humanity, we have forgotten these simple truths. And that is why, more than two hundred years after the great Christian abolitionist William Wilberforce triumphed in his battle against the slave trade, we are again fighting the same evils. We tossed out God and truth, and the pimps and flesh-peddlers came creeping back in. We announced that humans were simply animals, and human traffickers and pornographers obligingly treated them as such. We taught everyone that materialism explained everything, and that souls did not exist—and the abortionists nodded and busied their tools to begin the work of dismembering and discarding the soulless clumps of cells we once recognized as our perfectly created sons and daughters.

Things have never been perfect. Prostitution and infanticide are as old as time. But we used to recognize these things as awful practices that preyed on the most vulnerable, and sought to stamp them out. Now, we live in a culture that has abandoned the moral framework necessary to recognize transcendent concepts like the dignity of the human person, the sanctity of human life, and infinite preciousness of the human soul.

It is when we begin to recognize these things that, through the human rubble and sex-driven carnage, we can begin to turn to a place where we realize that the value of a human being cannot be monetized, and that to try such a thing is an evil that spawns unstoppable wickedness.

abortion, abuse, corruption, culture, ideology, philosophy, sex

Filed under: abortion, abuse, corruption, culture, ideology, philosophy, sex


original article: Shock Video: Violent mob of topless pro-abort feminists assaults praying men, tries to burn Cathedral
October 14, 2015 by Gualberto Garcia Jones, J.D.


Mar de Plata, October 13, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – A horrific and surreal scene unfolded Monday night outside the Cathedral of Mar de Plata in Argentina as hordes of women, many of them masked and half naked, violently assaulted a group of young men who stood outside the Cathedral of Mar de Plata praying and standing watch.

Such violence is becoming the norm for the annual March for Women in the Pope’s native land of Argentina, although this year’s violence seemed to be the most extreme yet, with the women turning their violence against the police, and even attempting to set the Cathedral on fire. 




“There were very tense moments and when I arrived I witnessed families with young children crying trapped inside the church. It was a terrible thing,” stated Marcelo Di Pasqua the local chief of police in an interview with local TV.



In a press release “Catholics for a Free Choice” issued a statement repudiating the police for police brutality against the women.




abortion, abuse, culture, extremism, hate crime, ideology, left wing, liberalism, progressive, scandal, terrorism

Filed under: abortion, abuse, culture, extremism, hate crime, ideology, left wing, liberalism, progressive, scandal, terrorism

Will America listen to this baby’s story?

Abortion supporters have produced a book of a 3-year-old defending the abortion of his sister. It’s a work of fiction designed to remove the stigma of abortion.

Listen to the Baby Planned Parenthood Can’t Silence

abortion, pro-life, prolife, video

Filed under: abortion, pro-life, prolife, video



October 2015
« Sep   Nov »