August 07, 2015
"to elevate the condition of men--to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance, in the race of life."
--Abraham Lincoln
“I haven’t actually looked at them,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told CNN’s Jake Tapper this Monday before the Center for Medical Progress released their fifth of twelve undercover videos exposing Planned Parenthood’s sale of fetal issue.
“Well, somebody at the White House should maybe watch the videos in full,” Tapper shot back.
Tapper shouldn’t hold his breath. Earnest is never going to watch these videos. And no one in the White House is ever going to acknowledge watching them either. Because to watch even one of the videos, would be to come face to face with the violence and barbarism that is America’s largest abortion provider: Planned Parenthood.
It is much easier, as Earnest and other White House officials have repeatedly done, to just repeat the scripted Planned Parenthood talking points.
The videos “were selectively edited.” Planned Parenthood is “the health care backbone for American women.” Only three percent of the services Planned Parenthood provides are for abortion.
Each of these claims is an expertly crafted falsehood. A statement purposefully designed to redirect from the grisly truth that abortion is murder. As Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn noted it in his Nobel Lecture in 1974, violence and lies are always inexorably linked:
“[L]et us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE.”
This is why the Center for Medical Progress videos are so important. They are an opportunity for conservatives to cut through the lies of the abortion industry. They can help more Americans see what Planned Parenthood really does. They can help spread the truth.
Unfortunately, very few Americans have actually seen the videos. According to a recent YouGov poll, 70 percent of Americans have either heard nothing at all or very little about them. And Planned Parenthood wants to keep it that way.
They hope that after the Senate failed to defund Planned Parenthood this past Monday, that Republicans will just drop the issue. They hope members of Congress will go home for their August recess to talk about trade deals and highway bills and come back in September considering the problem solved.
As conservatives, we can’t let that happen. In 2011, the last time conservatives tried to defund Planned Parenthood, we got only 42 votes. This year we got 53 (55 if you count Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) who was campaigning in New Hampshire and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) who had to vote against cloture so he could bring up the bill again later).
That is a gain of 13 votes in just four years.
We didn’t gain those votes by sitting quietly on the sidelines. We gained them by pressing the issue at every opportunity. And by not letting people avert their eyes from the truth.
This is why we cannot let Monday’s vote be the end of this story. We must demand hearings. We must demand investigations. And we must demand that none of our tax dollars go to America’s largest abortion provider.
As conservatives, we can’t let that happen. In 2011, the last time conservatives tried to defund Planned Parenthood, we got only 42 votes. This year we got 53 (55 if you count Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) who was campaigning in New Hampshire and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) who had to vote against cloture so he could bring up the bill again later).
That is a gain of 13 votes in just four years.
We didn’t gain those votes by sitting quietly on the sidelines. We gained them by pressing the issue at every opportunity. And by not letting people avert their eyes from the truth.
This is why we cannot let Monday’s vote be the end of this story. We must demand hearings. We must demand investigations. And we must demand that none of our tax dollars go to America’s largest abortion provider.
