Abortion and promiscuity. Planned Parenthood and “slut shaming.” I was reminded on this, the 43rd anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s disgraceful Roe v. Wade abortion-on-demand opinion, how inexorably linked are America’s abortion death culture and her ongoing sexual revolution.

As the story goes, Winston Churchill was talking with a socialite: “Madam, would you sleep with me for 5 million pounds?” he asked. “My goodness, Mr. Churchill,” she replied. “Well, I suppose we would have to discuss terms, of course.” Churchill: “Would you sleep with me for 5 pounds?” Socialite: “Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!” Churchill: “Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.”

Today’s “progressives” would accuse Churchill of “slut shaming.” That’s a relatively new euphemism wherein liberals paradoxically try to shame into silence those who call a spade a spade.

While she would certainly frame the demonstrable connection between abortion and promiscuity in different terms, feminist author and psychologist Valerie Tarico is well aware of the correlation. She boasts of it, in fact. In an October opinion piece at the Huffington Post, Tarico, who also served on Planned Parenthood’s Board of Advocates, writes:

“The most lasting effect of the smear campaign against Planned Parenthood may be this: Young women are done – beyond done – with being shamed for the fact that they are sexual beings, with sexual bodies that have t*ts and as*es and tw*ts and vaginas and uteruses … and they are done being forced to have babies when they choose to have sex.”

Pure class.

The “smear campaign” to which Tarico refers ostensibly denotes the groundbreaking investigative journalism of The Center for Medical Progress (CMP), which exposed smoking-gun proof that Planned Parenthood intentionally and illegally profits, in the millions, by “crushing,” dismembering alive and otherwise torturing to death our most innocent fellow human beings, and then selling their body parts for Mengelesque “medical research.”

“I remember sitting in my psychotherapy office a few years back, listening to a mother complain about her teen daughter’s attire,” Tarico continues. “‘She looks like a prostitute,’ the mother said.

“‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Like a prostitute – or a teenager.’”

Tarico and many pro-abort feminists like her encourage young women to look like prostitutes, or “sluts.” These days “slut walks,” wherein scantily clad, topless or fully nude gals march together in courageous, slutty unity, are all the rage – and Planned Parenthood has a revolving door through which they stream. It goes “ka-ching!” with every spin. Indeed, the abortion/STD giant manipulates young girls into “values neutral,” “consequence free sex” – something that does not exist – and then, when they get knocked up, takes their money, slaughters their babies and coldly sends them on their way.

Mix and repeat.

In an article on her own website titled, “Thirty Signs You’re a Slut,” Tarico brags of inspiring her own middle school-aged daughter into “sluthood” (the URL ends with “proud-mom-of-two-teenage-sluts”). “These days, it’s getting rather hard to hold your head high as a female if you aren’t willing to be seen as part of the slut sisterhood,” she opines.

That’s right. In the upside-down world of secular-leftism, sexual promiscuity is a badge of honor – and abortion, a rite of passage – for the upwardly mobile babe. Tarico hammers this home with a score-based inventory of benchmarks needed to “hold your head high as a female.” Among them:

• I have condoms in my purse – or bra.
• I like sex.
• I am unmarried, and I’m not a virgin.
• I wasn’t a virgin on my wedding night.
• I stand with Planned Parenthood.
• My cat is a person; a fertilized egg isn’t.
• You can count me among the 1 in 3 women who have had an abortion.
• I told my abortion story at the 1 in 3 Campaign.
• I believe sex can be rich and intimate without marriage.
• I find people of my own gender sexy.
• Submission (except, maybe, in bed) is not my thing.

Only a dying culture lionizes women who publicly impugn – with pride – their own honor and virtue, and brag about killing their own flesh and blood. Yet, to the left, Valerie Tarico represents “progress.” She’s a hero – a bold voice for “women’s rights.”

This is by design. Secular-progressives have worked hard to deconstruct traditional sexual morality for generations. The goal is to impose – under penalty of law – their own moral relativist, sexual anarchist worldview. (Hence, the unconstitutional Obamacare mandate requiring that Christian groups cast aside millennia-old church doctrine, get with the postmodern program and capitulate to funding abortion homicide.)

Indeed, like other feminist radicals, Tarico demands that the rest of us underwrite her stated immoral practices by paying for her and other women’s birth control and child sacrifice. Fornication and abortion, of course, are considered “mortal sins” in Christianity. Catholic doctrine further bars the church from providing contraception, but to anti-Christian liberals like Tarico, religious liberty and freedom of conscience are things of the past, and the First Amendment represents an obstacle to their dystopian future.

Seriously. Can someone please explain to me how and why a woman’s “right” to be promiscuous and snuff-out her resulting offspring is my financial responsibility? If you refuse to buy your own “preventative medicine,” gals, why not hit up the fellas? Last I heard it takes two to do the fornication Fandango. It seems to me that public groveling for free contraception, abortifacients and surgical abortion reinforces the sexist stereotype that women can’t survive without welfare – without men. Women’s empowerment? More like patriarchal governmental dependency.

In another column last week on the “social stigma” surrounding abortion and female promiscuity, Tarico writes, “If the wall of shame and stigma ruptures, abortion foes may find themselves up against something even more powerful: Love.”

Yep, nothing says “I love you” like ripping your baby limb-from-limb.

“Slut shame” indeed.

For those of us so very blessed to have raised our personal white flag in mankind’s inherently fruitless struggle against the Creator, there can be no joy in watching God-deniers continue to labor under the grandest of all deceptions. Regardless of how nasty they may be as individuals, there can be only sadness, genuine pity and prayer.

Still, it is instructive.

When the atheist gives voice to his or her God-denial, it provides those in Truth a small glimpse into the same dark spirit – old as Adam – that prompted the psalmist to observe: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good” (Psalm 14:1).

Valerie Tarico is one such God-denier. She’s on a fool’s errand. A steadfast disciple to the unholy trinity of “LGBTQ,” atheist and pro-abortion activism, Ms. Tarico proudly sits on the Board of Advocates for Planned Parenthood – America’s premier one-stop-death-shop.

For “progressives” like Tarico, the term “religious fundamentalism” is a euphemism for orthodox Christianity. In a tedious, though unintentionally funny screed recently published at Salon.com under the headline: “10 signs that religious fundamentalism is going down,” Ms. Tarico gives empty hope to her fellow hopeless with a word salad steeped in anti-Christian bigotry and wishful thinking. I share excerpts only because they so clearly encapsulate the broader secular-”progressive” mindset. Ms. Tarico’s reflections are so hyperbolic – so far removed from reality – that they require little additional commentary.

“[T]hings are looking bright for those who would like to see humanity more grounded in science and reason,” she begins. “If you are a nonbeliever in the mood for a party, here are 10 reasons to celebrate.”

She then rattles off a litany of tired claims the pagan left has repeated annually since the year 0001.

The nutshell? Atheism is on the rise, while Christianity is in decline. “Queer sexuality” is winning, while “biblical sexuality” is losing, yada, yada and so forth. (Total truth, of course, can be ignored, disobeyed, denied, temporarily repressed or masked, but it can never lose.)

“From Hollywood celebs like Cameron Diaz and Angelina Jolie to high school students, skeptics are opening up,” she caws, going on to sing the praises of fellow atheists like Alain de Botton, who “simply posits the nonexistence of God and then goes on to discuss what humanity can glean from the rubble of religious traditions.” (You know, Christian “rubble” like charity, hospitals, nursing, the Red Cross, the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, et. al.)

Ms. Tarico then throws out a few earthshaking discoveries – scriptural “dog whistles,” I guess – that, heretofore, have somehow eluded every biblical scholar since the Apostle Paul: “Perhaps the most consistent sexual theme in the Bible,” she declares, “is that a woman’s consent is not needed or even preferred before sex.”

Say what?

“By demanding an end to rape culture,” she adds (whatever that is), “today’s young women and men are making the Bible writers look as if they were members of a tribal, Iron Age culture in which women were property like livestock and children – to be traded, sold and won in battle. Small wonder the culture warriors have ramped up their fight against contraception and abortion. Imagine if, on top of everything else, all women got access to expensive top-tier contraceptives and the power to end ill-conceived childbearing.”

Zing. Ouch. Busted. Small wonder, indeed, Valerie. (See why I said little additional commentary is required? OK, I admit it: I have considered selling my children. Don’t judge. You haven’t driven cross-country with them.)

In perfect keeping with the instinctive habits of the indigenous North American “progressive,” Ms. Tarico then goes on to make up a bunch more crap.

Of “believers in recovery” she waxes worried, while sounding the alarm over some really scary sounding pretend thingy called “Religious Trauma Syndrome,” followed with analysis most scholarly on the imaginary “relationship between religion and mental illnesses like depression, anxiety disorders and panic.”

Finally, Ms. Tarico offers hope beyond hope that “religious fundamentalism itself may one day be treatable.”

Shazam! Electrodes, anyone?

Oy vey.

While “a mind is a terrible thing to waste,” how much more a soul? The secular-”progressive” mind is a curious thing – a waste of God’s purpose for the very soul, the very life to whom it was gifted.

What is the meaning of life? It’s not complicated. The meaning of life is to “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Luke 10:27).

This is true freedom. “It is for Freedom that Christ has set us free” (Galatians 5:5).

From the freedom of Christ stems “the fruit of the Spirit,” which is “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23).

Without Christ, there is no freedom.

There is only death.

Those who live by the Spirit of Christ “will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want (Galatians 5:16-17).

This is at odds with man’s fleshly desire – which began in the garden – for autonomy from God. The God-denier seeks to fill the void where Christ belongs with “acts of the flesh.”

Warned Paul: “The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God” (Galatians 5:19-21).

“Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Galatians 5:24).

Those who do not – have not.

When God-deniers like Ms. Tarico dig in their heels, a pitiable paradox occurs. While they think they’ve achieved intellectual enlightenment and freedom, they have, instead, been played for the fool. They have become slaves to the flesh, and playthings to the enemy.

Ultimately, there is no autonomy. In the end we each belong to one Master or the other.

Ms. Tarico, the end is just the beginning.

And eternity is a very long time.