Six weeks ago, I was privileged to be in the delivery room when my seventh grandchild was born. The only response to the doctor’s words “It’s a boy” were tears of ineffable joy.

This morning I heard those same words when a Planned Parenthood medical assistant plucked casually through the bloody remains of a just-butchered baby and announced in a  jubilant tone, “another boy!” in the newest Center for Medical Progress video:

Last week, another conscience-deformed obstetrician, Dr. Jen Gutner, writing a defense of Planned Parenthood for the New Republic, criticized the use of the phrase “baby parts” when referring to the head, livers, lungs, and limbs of human fetuses:

These are not “baby parts.” Whether a woman has a miscarriage or an abortion, the tissue specimen is called “products of conception.” In utero, i.e. during pregnancy, we use the term “embryo” from fertilization to ten weeks gestation and “fetus” from ten weeks to birth. The term baby is medically incorrect as it doesn’t apply until birth. Calling the tissue “baby parts” is a calculated attempt to anthropomorphize an embryo or fetus. It is a false image—a ten to twelve week fetus looks nothing like a term baby—and is medically incorrect. 

Critical care nurse Easten Niphakis responds to Gutner’s fanciful thinking:

Every human being, alive or dead, is a product of conception, so technically Gutner is correct, but that’s irrelevant when it comes to whether or not we have the right to take life. It’s amusing that she said pro-life people are trying to “anthropomorphize” fetuses. It’s actually not possible to anthropomorphize a human being. To see an unborn baby as human is simply to align your perspective with reality. To de-anthropomorphize a baby in the womb is to detach yourself from reality, probably to make it easier to justify the unspeakable.

Gutner claims that referring to the “product of conception” as a baby creates a “false image” in that a “10-12 week fetus looks nothing like a term baby.” Well, a 10-week-old fetus looks as unlike a full-term baby as an 8-week-old fetus looks like a 36-week-old “fetus,” and yet Gunter likely calls both of them “fetuses” despite how different they look. What’s truly remarkable is how like a human a 12-week-old fetus looks.

Gutner may want to have a conversation with the Denver Planned Parenthood abortionist featured in the fourth video, Dr. Sabita Ginde, because Ginde refers to the “product of conception” as a baby. She also wonders, “do people want brain?…Do people do stuff with eyeballs?” Yes, Gutner, these anthropomorphized products of conception have human brains and human eyeballs.

Gutner also argues that “Hearing medical professionals talk casually about products of conception may seem distasteful to some, but not to doctors. Medical procedures are gory by nature.”

It isn’t the “product of conception” that’s gory. It’s the crushing and dismembering of the “products of conception” that is gory. And though some people wouldn’t have the stomach for performing surgery, no one is offended by descriptions of surgery performed to restore health or function or reduce pain. What offends many Americans are barbarous surgical procedures performed to extinguish life.

“Progressives”—who take umbrage when conservatives cite religious convictions in defense of preborn babies (or true marriage)—often quote Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s paraphrase of a passage from a sermon by abolitionist and minister Thomas Parker who wrote this about the moral universe:

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

Parker goes on to say something at least as applicable to abortion as slavery:

Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble. 

For 41 long years, many Americans have trembled at the thought of the legalized slaughter of babies in the womb. Ere long, it is hoped, all America will tremble. 

In an 800-word CNN article about this most recent video, there is not one word about the jubilant “another boy” comment. Not one word about the Planned Parenthood staff mentioning the liver, brain, and legs of the dead baby. The article did, however, include Planned Parenthood executive vice president Dawn Laguens’ statement of moral indignation:

It is a profoundly offensive violation of privacy and dignity that anti-abortion extremists entered our laboratory under false pretenses and are now broadcasting video of a part of the process for a safe abortion….Publicizing secret video footage of a woman’s abortion process is a grossly offensive act that should be rejected by all regardless of political perspective.

The grossly offensive act that should be rejected by all is the legalized slaughter of human beings. The other grossly offensive act that should be rejected by all is using the hard-earned money of Americans to subsidize the murder of tiny, helpless children in the womb.

Ten weeks ago, my grandson Everett was no less human and no less deserving of legal protection from the death merchants at Planned Parenthood than he is now. It is almost unbearable to write what should be unthinkable:  In this country, my grandson could have been legally killed ten weeks ago—using my money—and his body parts sold donated for research.

My 90-year-old WWII veteran father—great-grandfather to Everett—is right: This is not the country he fought to defend.

National Day of Protest against Planned Parenthood
Saturday, August 22, 9:00 to 11:00 A.M.
Planned Parenthood, 3051 E New York St, Aurora (map)
Lead by the Pro-Life Action League

Chicago Tribune columnist and self-presumptive GOP consultant  Eric Zorn offered to “straighten out state GOP’s gay mess.”  In a nutshell, his nutty recommendation is for the Illinois Republican Party to “appoint someone who supports the legalization of same-sex marriage” to run the party. At least Zorn recognizes the critical importance of that oft-dismissed “social issue” of marriage.

He has joined homosexual activist Log Cabin Republicans in calling for a more inclusive “big tent.”

He has two reasons for this suggestion: 1. It will result in “sputtering, incoherent apologies from cynical Leftists,” and 2. It’s good politics.

Zorn claims conservative fears about the erosion of religious freedoms are unwarranted. Apparently, he hasn’t heard about the florist in Washington who is being sued by the state for her religiously based refusal to provide flowers for a same-sex “wedding.”

And apparently he is unaware that lesbian and former Georgetown University law professor Chai Feldblum has publicly stated that when same-sex marriage is legalized, conservative people of faith will lose religious rights. Surely, Zorn is not so foolish as to believe these kinds of cultural effects happen immediately.

Zorn is either ignorant or disingenuous when he seeks to reassure people of faith by stating that the same-sex “marriage” bill pending in the Illinois House “provides significant protection for religious institutions that don’t wish to formalize same-sex unions.” Why doesn’t Zorn talk about the protections—or lack thereof—for Christian schools in hiring or for Christian owners of businesses, particularly those involved in the wedding industry (e.g., florists, caterers, photographers, videographers, wedding/reception venue-owners).

I give Zorn credit for one surprising admission. He looked at the cultural shift on marriage among younger voters and admitted that “their high schools…have had gay-straight alliance groups and assemblies at which tolerance for homosexuality has been drummed into them” (emphasis added).

Well, I give him partial credit for the “drummed into them” part. What he failed to acknowledge is that it’s not “tolerance” that’s being drummed in, but compulsory approval.

Zorn then makes the risible claim that people are “looking at the evidence and arguments” and concluding that legalization of same-sex “marriage” is a good idea. The vast majority of Americans, especially our youth, have never heard the best arguments from conservative scholars on marriage. They are not carefully examining evidence and arguments. They’re being indoctrinated in schools that censor conservative resources. They’re being  emotionally manipulated by skilled Hollywood myth-makers. And they’re being maligned into silence by liberal bullies who hurl the “hater” epithet at anyone who dares to express moral propositions with which the Left disagrees.

This dearth of intellectual exploration explains why our lawmakers and liberal pundits refuse to answer the following questions:

1. What is marriage? What are the inherent, fundamental constituent features of marriage? 
2. Why should marriage be limited to two people? 
3. Are polyamorists and bisexuals denied their civil rights and are they being treated unequally since they cannot marry the persons they love? 
4. Marriage revisionists claim that the sole defining feature of marriage is love. They claim that marriage is solely about “who loves whom.” If that’s so, why is the government involved? If the government has a vested interest in legally recognizing and affirming love, then why doesn’t it recognize other loving relationships, like close platonic friendships? 
5. Do children have an inherent right to a mother and a father? 
6. Since marriage revisionists assert that the prohibition of “same-sex marriage” is analogous to the prohibition of interracial marriage, could you tell me in what specific ways homosexual unions per se are analogous to interracial unions? 

Liberals accuse the Republican Party of being “non-inclusive” because it seeks to preserve in law the recognition of marriage as an inherently sexually complementary institution. If that’s the case, is the Democratic Party non-inclusive when it seeks to impose its dogmatic view that sexual complementarity is wholly irrelevant to marriage?

If “progressives” think marriage revisionists have been treated poorly in the Republican Party, imagine how “progressives” would treat the ideological enemy in their midst. How about busting wide open the welcoming doors of the Democratic Party to those who believe that marriage is inherently sexually complementary? And I don’t mean just to those Democrats who privately hold those beliefs. I mean open up those inclusive doors to Democrats who hold those views, express them, and lobby for them. Embrace those Democrats who publicly endorse the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and support a constitutional amendment that defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman.  Imagine what would happen if Democrats were to start lobbying for a change in the Democratic platform’s position on marriage or if Speaker Michael Madigan began “privately” urging his colleagues to oppose the redefinition of marriage.

Actually, we don’t have to imagine. The Democratic Party, the bastion of pseudo-tolerance, “monoversity,” and hypocrisy, would go ballistic. Just look at how “progressives” talk about Republicans who believe marriage has a nature, fundamental to which is sexual complementarity.

Common sense and statistics would suggest that surely there are some Democrats who recognize that marriage is inherently sexually complementary. Why don’t we hear about or from them? We don’t hear from them because the “progressive” demand for intellectual and political conformity is too oppressive, too nasty, and too costly for dissent on issues related to homosexuality.

By calling the abandonment of principles “inclusivity,” progressives hope to badger the Republican Party into inviting foxes into the hen-house, something which the Democratic Party would never do—not even in the service of “inclusivity.”

The Left insists on abusing MLK Jr.’s paraphrase of Thomas Parker in the service of normalizing homosexuality: “The arc of the Moral Universe is Long, but it Bends Toward Justice.” Those words have a pithy quotable ring to them, but they’re not absolutely true. Or perhaps it’s the “long” part to which we pay too little attention. Societies move toward and then retreat from justice. For example, ancient societies once embraced the practice of sacrificing children to gods and then later rejected such barbarism. But in 1973, America, arguably the most just and compassionate society in history, once again publicly embraced the sacrifice of children, and in a form even more incomprehensible: Mothers started sacrificing their unborn babies on the altar of their own selfish desires.

Ancient civilizations once embraced homosexuality and then moved away from such a corrosive embrace. And now destructive foolishness is once again embraced.

Currently on this issue, the arc of morality is just bent. 

There are issues on which political pragmatism is warranted and acceptable. The nature of marriage is not one of them—never was, never will be. The nature of marriage is not a peripheral issue of relative insignificance. It is essential to children’s rights, parental rights, speech rights, religious liberty, and the future of any society.  The Left’s continued denial of the ineluctable erosion of these rights through the normalization of homosexuality and the legal recognition of same-sex unions as “marriages” points to either their failure of imagination, their lazy refusal to think through the logical implications of an idea, or their dishonesty. (By the way, the legal recognition of same-sex unions as “marriages” doesn’t signify smaller government. It will increase dramatically the government’s intrusion into marriage.)

The Republican door to those who actively seek to radically redefine marriage or any other homosexuality-affirming legislation should be slammed shut. Log Cabin Republicans can meander over to that wide open, inclusive, welcoming Democratic door and try to change the views of the Democratic Party on guns, immigration, tax policy, or abortion.

Oh, and while we’re celebrating all this Democratic openness, maybe the Democratic supporters of true marriage (i.e., sexually complementary marriage) can pop out of the closet and be celebrated by those diversity-loving Dems.

As to Zorn’s reasons for his presumptuous and foolish suggestions: 1. Only vengeful, small-minded people would sacrifice essential principles and truth for the “sputtering, incoherent apologies of cynical Leftists,” and 2. Only foolish people would sacrifice the single most important cultural institution, the inherent needs and rights of children, and truth for political expediency.

Click HERE to make a donation to the Illinois Family Institute.