Danger is Nancy Pelosi’s Middle Name

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) spoke on abstinence programs at the uber-liberal “Netroots Nation” blogger conference. The Speaker called abstinence-only programs “dangerous” to America’s youth and said that the only solution is to elect more pro-abortion politicians.

She went on to criticize the proposed federal regulations on conscience protections as also being “dangerous” and said that if “you don’t like abortion you should love contraception.” Amazingly, she goes on to say she is speaking as both a mother of five and a “devout Catholic,” despite the fact that her beliefs on abortion and contraception directly contradict the teachings of the Catholic Church.

As a politician, Rep. Pelosi has every right to disagree with the Church’s teachings on abortion and contraception, just as doctors, nurses and pharmacists should have every right to live by their respective church teachings and not be forced to perform abortions or distribute drugs that would violate their beliefs.

America does not need more pro-abortion politicians. It needs leaders who respect freedom of conscience.

Homeschooling Gestapo Strikes Again

What do homeschooling and drunk driving have in common? A lot, according to a German judge who made the comparison when he sentenced parents to three months in jail for educating their children at home. Juergen and Rosemarie Dudek, both Christians, are one of the estimated 400 couples in Germany who secretly homeschool their kids despite an antiquated ban on the practice instituted by Adolf Hitler 70 years ago. The decision, which smacks of Nazi-era oppression, will be appealed to a higher court, where the ruling will likely stand. German courts have repeatedly upheld homeschooling as a form of “child abuse,” a conclusion echoing that of a California court last February when a three-judge panel struck down the rights of homeschooling parents in that state. While the California ruling was later vacated, both have something in common–the desire to use public education as a vehicle for indoctrinating children in the liberal views of the state.

Philly Rocks the Cradle of Liberty

Eight days shy of the eviction deadline imposed by the city of Philadelphia, the Cradle of Liberty Boy Scout Council is striking back. On Friday, Scout officials filed suit in federal court to end a longstanding struggle with the city over a building that the council built and has occupied since 1928 for $1 a year. In a public war over the Scouts’ membership policy which bars homosexuals from joining, Philadelphia’s leaders have threatened to pull the rug out from under the Cradle’s headquarters.

City officials say their demands are entirely justifiable under a 26-year-old city ordinance that bans discrimination based on sexual orientation. As Philly’s mayor sees it, the Scouts have three choices. They can vacate the premises by May 31, open their doors to gay members and staff, or pay $200,000 in annual rent.

Cradle of Liberty elected the fourth option–suing for their right to privately assemble on public property as other organizations have done without reproach. The city’s demands would be somewhat understandable in a politically correct environment had it not welcomed other religious and civic groups to use Philly facilities at minimal charge. The Scouts will argue–and rightly so–that have been unfairly targeted for eviction.

Considering that the Cradle of Liberty spent $1.5 million renovating the space in the mid-’90s and pays about $60,000 a year in upkeep, it would be in the city’s best interest to maintain the tenancy. Philadelphia has also benefited from 80 years of the Scouts’ influence on young boys in a city where gangs and violence rates soar. It’s incredibly ironic that the city is begging for million of state dollars to combat urban problems, while at the same time trying to force out one of the greatest crime deterrents in all of Philadelphia–a character-building youth program that serves 70,000 boys.

The focus may rest squarely on the City of Brotherly Love now, but the case has national implications for religious freedom. If the city is successful in bringing the Scouts to their knees, other towns will be emboldened to do the same. But if the Cradle of Liberty prevails, fewer people will be willing to challenge the Scouts’ rights to adhere to a traditional moral code.

Senate Democrats Continue to Obstruct Appointments to the Federal Judiciary

The clock is ticking on the deal that Democrats and Republicans have struck over the President’s judicial nominees, which calls for three appeals courts nominees to be approved by Memorial Day.

For the past 16 months Senate Democrats have been on a course of approving a record-low number of nominees in the final two years of a President’s term. Now they appear to have maneuvered the White House into agreeing to a compromise where two of the three nominees in the deal would, in fact, be the Democrats’ own picks. One of them, Helene White, is Sen. Carl Levin’s (D-Mich.) “cousin-in-law,” whose nomination to the bench was blocked by Republicans more than a decade ago. Determined to move her forward, Levin blocked four nominees for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals until the President agreed to nominate White.

Now Sen. Levin wishes to count White toward the three-judge target by Memorial Day. Because the Sixth Circuit would still have a small Republican-nominated majority even with the addition of White and another nominee President Bush actually wants, Levin can posture, as he did to the New York Times yesterday, that it would “not be appropriate” to take the political balance of the Sixth Circuit into consideration. GOP senators on the Judiciary Committee respond that the Memorial Day compromise lets the obstructing Senate majority approve two Democratic choices and leave a long list of Presidential nominees waiting in a limbo that has lingered for years.

The whole process is a spectacle unworthy of the Senate. Judicial choices will always matter, but that they matter so much is a result of the fact that judges now routinely legislate from the bench. Our founders did not want a partisan judiciary. We have one, and it’s high time our timorous politicians emerge from behind the black robes of policy-making judges and reclaim their legislative authority, even if that means having to vote on tough issues they would rather kick over to the unelected branch.

An article by Newt Gingrich
March 25, 2008 

Parents “do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children.”

So wrote a California judge in a case that has ominous potential for the estimated one million-plus American families who have opted out of the public education monopoly and choose to educate their children at home.

Although the ruling is being appealed to the California Supreme Court, as it now stands, the 166,000 California children who are home schooled are truant, and their parents are criminals. Welcome, as the Wall Street Journal editorialized, to a “strange new chapter” in the “annals of judicial imperialism.”

No Teaching Credentials? No Home Schooling.

For background, you should know that although California’s compulsory education law requires that all children between the ages of six and 18 attend a full-time day school, the state law also contains provisions for parents to legally teach their children at home. Under these provisions, homeschooling by unlicensed moms and dads has flourished in California, as it has across the nation.

But all this began to change when the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services recently investigated a claim of abuse by a homeschooled child. Lawyers representing the child invoked the California compulsory education statute to send the child to a public school and a judge eventually agreed, ruling that homeschooling by an unlicensed parent teacher is illegal. Thus, writes the Journal, “a single case of parental abuse is being used to promote the registration of all parents who crack a book for their kids.”

The long and short of it: A California court has ruled that if you haven’t spent four years attending a teaching college and getting the proper licenses from the state, you can’t homeschool your children.

Another Case of a Special Interest Using the Courts to Do What It Can’t at the Voting Booth

The merits of homeschooling speak for themselves. Homeschooled children dominate academic competitions and get superior scores on standardized tests. They excel at all the things compulsory education laws are meant to promote, such as school attendance, academics and civic education.

But the California homeschooling decision is important in another respect — even those of us who don’t homeschool our kids should be outraged and concerned.

The decision represents yet another case of a special interest — in this case, the education unions and bureaucracy — using the courts to get what they can’t get through the popular vote.

This is yet another example of judicial supremacy: Rule by an out-of-control judiciary rather than the will of the people. It joins court rulings such as the removal of “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance on a long list of usurpations of the freedom and self-determination of the American people.

What You Can Do About It

The good news is that citizen activism can be a powerful tool in fighting judicial supremacy.

A good example is the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), a group fighting for the rights of homeschooling parents in California and states across the nation.

They initiated a petition drive in the wake of the California decision that attracted a quarter of a million signatures in 10 days. The effort was so successful that they’ve stopped gathering signatures. But you can still learn more and help their cause by going to HSLDA.org.

And don’t stop there. Homeschool regulations are overwhelmingly developed at the state-government level. Call or write your state representatives and let them know that this is one case of judicial supremacy that will not stand.

Parental Authority No Match for Court’s
from Family Research Council

Last week, a federal appeals court refused to uphold the parental and religious rights of two Massachusetts couples–David and Tonia Parker and Rob and Robin Wirthlin–whose young children were exposed to books that promoted homosexual “marriage” in their elementary school. I met and interviewed the Parkers and the Wirthlins for FRC’s Liberty Sunday broadcast from Boston in October 2006 (and our “Critical Mass” DVD includes their stories). It’s amazing how cavalierly the court’s decision dismisses the evidence that school officials engaged in the deliberate indoctrination of children. The school sought to coerce its students into accepting values that are way outside the mainstream and in direct contradiction to those of their parents. Yet the same courts that are trying to reinvent the family are encouraging the public schools to act as their surrogate. A lawyer for the parents has vowed to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. They could also sue in state court, given the blatant violation of a state law which mandates that parents be notified before any discussion of “human sexuality issues.” Of course, since it was Massachusetts’ Supreme Court that legalized same-sex “marriage,” you can imagine what the families’ chances of winning would be! The federal court recommended the parents “seek recourse” through the legislative process. But that is small comfort considering that when pro-family forces do succeed, as they did in Boyd County, Kentucky, judicial activists simply rewrite the democratic decisions to suit their political agenda. When family values clash with homosexual activism in the public schools, rulings like this one prove that parents’ rights continue to be wronged.

Additional Resources
FRC “Critical Mass” DVD
FRC pamphlet “Homosexuality in Your Child’s School”

California Scheming: Planned Parenthood Accused of $180 Million Fraud

Posted 03/11/08
From Family Research Council

The latest victim of Planned Parenthood’s exploitation appears to be none other than the California government. A former Vice President of Finance for the L.A. affiliate, P. Victor Gonzales, has filed a whistleblower suit in federal court, claiming that Planned Parenthood committed years of fraudulent overbilling against government-funded programs. Gonzales submitted documents spanning the late 1990s to 2004, including a series of audits, which suggest that the nation’s biggest abortion merchant may have swindled upward of $180 million from California taxpayers. Gonzales says he was fired in 2004 after repeated attempts to address the “illegal accounting, billing, and donation practices of Planned Parenthood” with his supervisors. According to Gonzales’s attorney, Planned Parenthood manipulated its status as a charitable organization in order to buy contraceptives at a discounted rate, then billed the state’s Medi-Cal program for 12 times as much as it paid. The Los Angeles Times obtained copies of the 2004 audit, which substantiates over $5.2 million in overbillings at the San Diego branch during fiscal year 2003 alone. In total, the overcharging is said to exceed $10,000,000 a year. In addition to the birth control scam, Gonzales also claims that the Los Angeles branch violated the IRS code that prohibits political advocacy from charitable organizations by forwarding about $12,000 a month to the Sacramento branch for “lobbying” expenses. At least one PPLA executive used a corporate credit card to make Victoria’s Secret and private video purchases on the government’s dime. And the list of alleged abuses goes on. Although the suit was filed in 2005, it was made public on Friday–much to the dismay of the PP spokesmen, who were already facing a public relations nightmare after tape recordings revealed that employees agreed to accept racially-motivated donations. We can only hope that California responds swiftly to investigate this charge of gross exploitation of taxpayer dollars. Regardless of the outcome, we urge the state to move quickly, as Virginia has done, to de-fund Planned Parenthood and end its relentless cycle of exploitation against women, children, and taxpayers!

The United States Must Not Export Death!
February 5, 2008

The House Foreign Affairs Full Committee is scheduled to vote on the PEPFAR/Global AIDS Reauthorization bill this Thursday. The current draft by Chairman Tom Lantos (D-CA) strips out the pro-abstinence and pro-faithfulness values that have made the program successful, especially in Africa. The new bill would change PEPFAR into a massive $10 billion per year giveaway that will be tilted toward abortion merchants and promoters.

Rep. Lantos and the Democratic Leadership have taken a program started by President Bush to protect future generations in Africa and are trying to change it into one that would instead help to eliminate future generations in Africa. Page eleven of the current draft being circulated reveals their true goal by claiming that pregnancy and sex within marriage are serious threats to women’s health!! The Democrats’ solution is to eliminate the successful “ABC” model of promoting abstinence, being faithful and, only when necessary, using condoms. The Lantos approach instead requires full integration of AIDS with abortion traders and could even require the provision of abortion, all paid for by American taxpayers. Furthermore the draft bill removes the Prostitution Pledge, essentially giving the U.S. government’s stamp of approval for prostitution.

Click on the link below for a full list of the offices of the House members on the Foreign Affairs Committee and please take a moment to call and tell them to protect the values written into the current PEFAR legislation: protection of pro-abstinence and anti-prostitution requirements. Tell them that the successful PEPFAR program should not be hijacked to spread U.S. taxpayer-funded abortion around the world.

The United States Must Not Export Death!

Profiles in Cowardice
by Andrew C. McCarthy
Posted: 02/15/2008
from Human Events

On Tuesday, we got a double-winner. First, the Senate voted to approve an overhaul of intelligence law which, though flawed, provides authority for American intelligence agencies to continue monitoring the savages trying to kill us. Second, we got inescapable confirmation that Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the two contenders to be the Democrats’ nominee, are not fit to be president of the United States.

Understand: this was the most important vote on national security in years.

In 2007, a ruling of the court created by the ill-conceived 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) required the intelligence community to seek court permission before monitoring terrorists operating outside our country — that is, outside the jurisdiction of United States courts.

Let’s say al Qaeda operatives in Iraq captured a U.S. marine. In effect, our military and intelligence services, while desperately trying to rescue one of their own, would now have to seek court permission in order to eavesdrop on the foreign terrorists who carried out the capture — alien enemies who have no conceivable privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment. Such was the conclusion of an unidentified federal judge, in a ruling that radically altered three decades of FISA theory and practice, a ruling the American people have not been permitted to read. (Just imagine the hue and cry if George W. Bush had secretly reversed the foundations of surveillance law. Here, where the sea-change benefits al Qaeda rather than the American people, the silence is deafening.)

Democrats, of course, have fought every sensible national-security improvement since 9/11. Yet, so preposterous was the notion that the NSA should need a warrant from a judge in Washington in order to listen as, say, a terrorist in Pakistan gives directions to a terrorist in Afghanistan that even Democrats relented — or at least enough of them to enact last August’s “Protect Act.” This stopgap measure (the Left would not agree to more than six months of common sense) enabled our spies to continue spying outside the U.S. without court interference, just as FISA intended.

Nevertheless, conspicuously absent from the lopsided 60-28 majority were Senators Clinton and Obama. So deep were they in the thrall of the anti-war, anti-security Left that they dared not vote in favor of preserving the intelligence-gathering powers necessary to protect — even for just six months — the nation they are vying to lead.

It is worth pausing to recall why we have FISA. Very simply, its point was to provide a modicum of due process before Americans inside the United States could be subjected to national-security monitoring. It was a reaction (in truth, an overreaction) to Watergate era domestic-spying on the Nixon administration’s political opponents. But even the reckless Congress of the 1970s did not seek to protect foreign spies and terrorists operating beyond our borders. FISA was never intended to bring tens of thousands of foreign communications under judicial supervision. Such a process would compel the Justice Department to file applications for all such surveillance, a burden that could not be met. The consequence would be a breakdown of our capacity to acquire the information most essential to safeguarding Americans against attack — to say nothing of the 200,000 American men and women putting their lives on the line in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The reprieve granted by the Protect Act expires at midnight tonight.. Hence, the intense pressure this week to get a FISA overhaul enacted. In the Senate, the Intelligence Committee proposed a bill which accomplishes three major improvements. It streamlines the arduous FISA application requirements (though not as much as it should). It provides immunity from suit for telecommunications providers which cooperated in the NSA’s warrantless surveillance following the 9/11 attacks. (Though I am a longtime FISA critic, I note in the interest of full disclosure that my wife works for Verizon.) And most importantly, it solidifies the Protect Act’s reaffirmation that the American intelligence community’s foreign operations are beyond court supervision — that is, Osama bin Laden is not protected by FISA or the Fourth Amendment.

It’s difficult to imagine more vital legislation. To be sure, the proposal has many flaws — as any bipartisan legislation is apt to have given a Senate in the grip of the same Democrats who’ve fought intelligence reform for years and tried just as long to derail the Patriot Act. The Intelligence Committee would, for example, expand the role of the FISA court; create a new warrant requirement for overseas monitoring of American citizens working with the enemy; effectively nullify the president’s power, long-recognized by the federal courts, to order national-security surveillance without warrants; and sunset the intelligence overhaul after six years despite the patent need for a permanent fix. Still, with jihadists striving toward more 9/11-style attacks and our forces in urgent need of battlefield intelligence, these tradeoffs are unavoidable. It would be the height of irresponsibility to halt the intelligence flow.

Well, welcome to the height of irresponsibility.

By a quirk of fate, this week’s action in the Senate happened to occur on the same day as the so-called “Potomac Primary” — the presidential nomination contests in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia. Which is to say: right in the shadow of Capitol Hill. The geographical demands of campaigning would be no excuse: Our three principal contenders for the Oval Office, Republican John McCain and Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, all happen to be United States Senators and all happened, on Tuesday, to have business right in the neighborhood. There was no reason they couldn’t do their day jobs.

Senators McCain and Obama did theirs, and in starkly different ways. For McCain, it was an opportunity to show national security conservatives that his preening on coercive interrogation methods does not mean he fails to grasp the primacy of intelligence collection in our current threat environment. He strongly supported the bill.

By contrast, Senator Obama opposed the provision across the board, backing each (unsuccessful) amendment to weaken or scrap it. Exhibiting a Carteresque insouciance about national-security, he would not only vest our enemies with privacy protection while exposing our citizens to heightened peril; he would deny protection to the very telecoms whose cooperation he would sorely need if elected president.

Understand how limited is the immunity we are talking about here: the telecoms would be protected from suit only if they either did not help the government’s warrantless surveillance program at all or helped it only in good faith reliance written assurance from the government of its legality. Denying immunity would not just be counterproductive — creating disincentives for cooperation from the industry whose expertise provides us with a technology edge over the people trying to kill us. It would be grossly unfair and eventually prompt the industry to question all government directives — even court orders — for fear that compliance would lead to ruinous litigation costs. In essence, Obama was laying the groundwork for a catastrophic breakdown in intelligence and law-enforcement that would wound his own presidency.

You have to hand it to Obama, though. Dangerous as his convictions are, he was willing to be accountable for them. The same cannot be said for the junior senator from New York, who proved herself a profile in no courage.

Less than a month ago, at their slugfest of a debate in South Carolina, Senator Clinton pointedly rebuked her rival, snarking, “Senator Obama, it’s hard to have a straight up debate with you because you never take responsibility for any vote.” Homing in on Obama’s record as a state lawmaker in Illinois, Clinton singed him for failing to stand up and be counted on core Democrat issues, such as abortion rights. “On issue after issue,” she inveighed, “you voted ‘present’” — refusing to take an accountable position.

Well, at least he was present. On Tuesday, for the most important national-security vote of her eight-year senate career, Clinton was a no-show. With the eyes of the country watching to see whether she would opt to continue pandering to the hard Left or protect the lives of the American voters at whose presidency she is clawing, Hillary made a calculated decision to sit it out.

So what are we to make of Mrs. Clinton? She is running on the strength of her purported vast experience. In essence, she relies on two things: her eight years as a very active First Lady in her husband’s administration, the supporting records for which Clinton officials refuse to release so we can study them; and her eight years as a U.S. senator, during which, when not repudiating her old positions, she now avoids taking new ones.

Tuesday was a good day. The Senate voted to give the next commander-in-chief the tools necessary to protect our nation, and our nation learned who is fit, and who is not, to be the next commander-in-chief.

Today is a bad day: the House is scheduled to recess without passing the Senate bill. If the Protect Act is allowed to expire, and our intelligence gathering is reduced or stopped, every Democrat responsible should be called to account. It would be an unfathomable dereliction, a lesson we’d inevitably learn with the next attack against Americans.

‘Second Look’ First on Planned Parenthood’s Hit List
from Family Research Council

In San Francisco, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is under attack for its “Second Look” ad campaign now airing on local radio stations. Ironically, Planned Parenthood Golden Gate (PPGG), which is no stranger to controversy, is the organization lashing out at area broadcasters for running the pro-life commercials. As for what is or is not offensive, perhaps PPGG isn’t the best judge. The group most recently made headlines for its outrageous “Mile High Club” television ads, which featured a gay flight attendant named Stephen who cruises the aisles, showering young passengers with contraceptives. With the lights dimmed and party music blaring, he sits on the pilot’s lap and hits on him. Contrast that with USCCB’s ads, which contain nothing but established medical facts. The commercial begins with the sound of a beating heart. “Hear that?” the announcer asks. “It’s the heartbeat of an infant in the womb at six months. His heart’s beating at about 140 beats per minute. If he were born right now, his chance of survival would be greater than 50%. But even today, his mother could choose to have an abortion… Each year more than 18,000 babies who are already in their fifth month of pregnancy are aborted. And it’s legal.” PPGG insists that USCCB is “touting lies” and “gross inaccuracies,” charges that are more appropriately leveled at Planned Parenthood for misleading women about the reality of abortion. While nothing in the Bishops’ campaign is the slightest bit false or objectionable, the pro-abortion lobby is demanding the radio stations drop the ads. We have a better idea. Why not log on to www.frc.org and compare the two commercials? I guarantee that you’ll join us in applauding San Francisco stations KCBS and KFRC for upholding the free speech of pro-lifers. The Catholic Bishops want Americans to take a “second look” at abortion; Planned Parenthood wants no look at all.