Written by Paula Ryan

In just a few short months, the U.S. Supreme Court will be handing down their decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, determining the constitutionality of a 2018 Mississippi law prohibiting women from accessing abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. This case is expected to determine the fate of Roe v. Wade, the infamous 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling preventing states from unduly restricting abortions before the point of viability.

It seems likely that the Court will issue a favorable ruling, which would allow for more extensive protections for the unborn at the state level without interference from the federal courts.  This would be good news. However, it would not be the end of the battle to protect all innocent babies from conception until birth. It also would not undo the damage caused over the past 49 years to families, communities, and individuals throughout the nation but particularly in the Black community.

Since 1973, over 63 million babies have been aborted in the United States, 20 million of whom were Black. According to a report published in January 2022 by the Center for Urban Reform and Education (CURE), while Black women made up 15 percent of the childbearing population in 2018, they obtained 33.6 percent of reported abortions. This translates into 335 abortions per 1,000 live births, which was the highest abortion ratio in the United States. In support of these statistics, the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI), using abortion reporting data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reported that for more than 30 years Black women have been experiencing abortions at a rate nearly four times that of white women.

And by the way, this is no accident. According to the aforementioned CURE report, 79 percent of the surgical facilities of Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s (PPFA), which is by far the largest abortion provider in the nation, are within walking distance of Black or Hispanic Communities. The Left claims that these facilities are there to provide health care for the members of these communities.  However, the cold hard truth is that they are taking the life of pre-born black babies for money and their own documents prove it.

In their 2016 Annual Report, PPFA claimed to provide “lifesaving care” and to be an irreplaceable component of the nation’s healthcare system. After careful evaluation and study, CLI issued a lengthy report proving that Planned Parenthood centers are primarily focused on contraceptive services, sexually transmitted infection testing, and abortions. Additionally, they noted that there is “little or no demonstrable capability for definitive diagnosis or a range of treatments for any disease or condition at Planned Parenthood centers.” In layman’s terms, this means that if a woman needs a mammogram or biopsy to detect breast cancer, she would NOT be able to receive these tests at any Planned Parenthood facility. In fact, there isn’t a single Planned Parenthood that has the resources to diagnose or treat any type of cancer. Indeed, with the exception of abortion, Planned Parenthood offers no services that cannot be easily found at alternative providers.

This is not surprising. From its founding by Margaret Sanger in the early 1900s, Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) has been using abortion to target the Black community. Sanger was a leading proponent of controlling the birth rate of those individuals she deemed undesirable or unfit. Sanger laid out her extreme form of eugenics in a 1932 book entitled, “My Way to Peace” where she called for the sterilization of those with mental and physical disabilities, including “morons, mental defectives, epileptics.”

In 1939, Sanger put her plan into action by introducing the “Negro Project,” which was designed to help states with eliminating the “dysgenic horror story” of blacks who reproduced “carelessly and disastrously.” To increase the effectiveness of the project, Sanger even had the unmitigated gall to recruit Black leaders and Black pastors to sell the concepts of contraception and sterilization to the minority populations.

It wasn’t until April 2021 that PPFA even acknowledged the racist roots of the organization by admitting that Margaret Sanger had aligned herself with ideologies and organizations that were unequivocally white supremacist and in doing so had caused permanent damage to millions of people, including generations Black people. Of course, PPFA’s mea culpa was pure window dressing. PPFA is still targeting Black babies for extermination by sending out the same tired, old message that access to abortion in minority communities is a necessary form of health care.

According to Right to Life of Michigan statistics:

• On average, 900 black babies are aborted every day in the United States.

•  The abortion rate for Black women in the United States is almost four times that of White women, which according to CLI, exposes Black women to increased exposure to hemorrhage and infection, the two major causes of maternal mortality.

•  Since 1973, abortion has taken more Black American lives than every other cause of death combined.

Sadly, even when numbers like this clearly expose the determination of the abortion industry – and PPFA in particular – to abort Black babies, prominent Black leaders like former President Barack Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris continue to support them.

While this whole line of thought is frustrating and sad, the most appalling aspect is that the systematic extermination of 20 million Black babies over the past 49 years has happened in THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA…Land of the free…Home of the brave. We need to be better than this.

Regardless of what the U.S. Supreme Court decides in Dobbs, there’s no way to erase the damage that abortion has done to the Black community. However, we can build a better America by protecting the most vulnerable members of our society. After all, as Nelson Mandela pointed out, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.”

This article was originally published by The Family Foundation.

In the aftermath of the events of January 6, 2021, the narrative is becoming more and more fixed. Simply stated, it claims that the vast majority of Americans who voted for Trump were gun-waving, white supremacist, insurrectionist, Christian nationalists, who need to be marginalized, if not purged from society. For many reasons, we need to continue to challenge that narrative. And recent world events involving Russia, China, and Canada provide a perfect opportunity to push back against that misleading and caricatured narrative.

To be clear, having voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, I do not want him to run again in 2024. And I am sympathetic to the argument that, in many ways, did Trump more harm than good, especially in his post-election behavior and in the damage that was done to our Christian witness when he looked to him as some kind of political savior. (I know that strong Trump supporters find this perspective utterly outrageous, but that’s a battle I am not here to fight.)

But the purpose of this article is not to offer a retrospective analysis of the Trump presidency. Rather, it is to respond to those who cannot possibly understand how God-fearing, Bible-loving, morality-espousing people could vote for Trump. We actually had some very good reasons.

Let’s start with the recent events in Canada and Prime Minister’s invoking of the Emergencies Act in an attempt to crush the Freedom Convoy protesters. According to reports, he “invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in the country’s history to crack down on protests against his vaccine mandate — just days after the Biden administration urged him to use ‘federal powers.’”

How much of this came directly from President Biden? Only those involved know for sure.

But if true, an obvious question arises: Could you imagine the Trump administration encouraging this kind of extreme crackdown against freedom-loving, peaceful protesters? Could you imagine Trump telling Trudeau, “Yeah, you really need to crush this resistance”?

I think not.

Yet, when it came to international policy and America’s role in the world, those of us who voted for Trump felt far more confident in his leadership than the leadership of Biden. Does this make us violent white supremacists? Or, put another way, when it came to the massive implications of our international policies, was there no justifiable reason to vote for Trump?

As for Russia, while Trump’s critics claimed that he was either too friendly with Putin or actually admired him, others saw things quite differently.

Writing for the Jewish Press on July 24, 2018, Daniel Greenfield claimed that, “Trump Stood Up to Putin, Obama Appeased Him.”

He wrote, “The architects of Obama’s appeasement of Putin have been some of the most militant voices denouncing Trump. . . . Instead President Trump has steadily reversed Obama’s tide of concessions to Putin.”

He continued, “The media is outraged over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But when that happened, Ukraine asked for weapons and the only aid that Obama offered their country was MREs. It took months for Obama to come through with boots and tires. Meanwhile Trump has delivered actual weapons.

“Why did Obama refuse to provide Ukraine with weapons? According to senior officials, to avoid antagonizing Moscow. Trump isn’t afraid of Russia. Obama however was shaking in his loafers.

“While Trump approved anti-tank missiles for Ukraine, Obama slow-walked shipments of boots, putting them on trucks instead of planes so that they took months to arrive, so as not to upset the Russians. Meanwhile the Trump administration cut the red tape by dipping into its own European stockpiles.

“In the time it took Obama to ship boots to Ukraine, Trump shipped Javelin missiles.”

And he closed with this: “Unlike Obama, President Trump sold weapons to Ukraine. Unlike Obama, he bombed Assad and took on Russian mercenaries. Unlike Obama, he provided Poland with working Patriot missiles. Unlike Obama, he didn’t base his foreign policy around fearing to offend Moscow. Unlike Obama, he stood up to Russia.”

The fact is that many of us who voted for Trump felt that he would do a better job of standing up to the world’s strongmen than Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden would do. (For a relevant Twitter poll, see here.)

As for China, allow me to share two personal anecdotes. While in Australia in early 2020, shortly before the COVID travel restrictions, I was picked up at the airport by a Chinese national who was now an Australian citizen.

When I asked him for his views on Chinese President Xi, he told me plainly that he thought he was dangerous. When I asked him for his views on President Trump, he said, “He’s a hero.”

In fact, a colleague of mine who has spent almost all his adult life living and working in China, and who is well-connected to the underground Chinese church, told me that every Christian he knew in China was praying fervently for the reelection of Trump. And when Trump lost, many of them wept.

More broadly, a Bing search for the words how Trump stood up to China (not in quotes) yields pages of articles and videos with headlines like this: “It Takes a Trump to Stand Up to China” (The Hill, December 6, 2016); and “Finally, a President Stands Up to China” (Townhall, August 28, 2019).

To be sure, Trump had more than his share of critics when it came to his Chinese policies, with CNN claiming in July 2020 that, “Trump blasts Beijing in public, but privately Trump org imports tons of Chinese goods.”

But the fact remains that America just competed in the Beijing Olympics, with our athletes being urged not to protest and our official diplomatic protest seeming quite tepid, even with its reference to China’s “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity.”

Really now, if we truly believed that China was guilty of “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity” shouldn’t we rather boycott the Olympics? Why not put teeth in our words?

Obviously, I cannot imagine the pressures President Biden is under, and the purpose of this article is not to throw stones at him. (How many Biden-bashing articles have I written?) And, to repeat, I do not want to Trump to run again in 2024 for quite a few reasons.

I’m simply reminding those who broad-brush and smear all of us who voted for Trump that international policies were a major consideration for many of us, with those policies potentially affecting hundreds of millions of lives. (And I’ve not said a word here about our policies with Iran.)

That is hardly a matter of white supremacy or dangerous Christian nationalism. This is matter of worldwide humanitarian concern.

This article was originally published at AskDrBrown.org.

I was hoping not to step into the sticky wicket that the Charlottesville protest, counter-protest, and at

tack created. All discussions of fault or causation carry the risk of being labeled a bigot or hater. But, for a number of reasons, fearful silence is not a justifiable response.

Southern Poverty Law Center 

One of those reasons is that the Plainfield Patch published an article titled “Illinois Hate Groups: Map Shows Active Racist Organizations” in which the Patch cites the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to alert Illinoisans to the presence of “32 hate” groups in Illinois, including the Illinois Family Institute.

It is both morally indefensible and intellectually dishonest of the ethically impoverished Southern Poverty Law Center to include the Illinois Family Institute (IFI) on its list of “hate” groups, alongside repugnant white supremacist groups/white separatists/white nationalists.

IFI is included on this list because we espouse theologically orthodox views of homosexuality, marriage, and the intrinsic and profound meaning of objective, immutable biological sex—views that are held by the Catholic Church, a dozen Protestant denominations, the Mormon Church, Seventh Day Adventism, many non-denominational churches, 2,000 years of church history, the Bible, and Orthodox Judaism.

Other Christian organizations included on the SPLC “hate” groups list are the American Family Association, Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, Liberty Counsel, and the Ruth Institute.

The goal of the SPLC’s malignant slander is to stigmatize and marginalize any group that defends marriage and sexual morality. Is the Plainfield Patch absolved of all moral culpability for smearing IFI because technically all it did was cite the anti-Christian hate group known euphemistically as the SPLC?

To be clear, the Illinois Family Institute and its sister organization Illinois Family Action—both of which have blacks serving on our boards–unequivocally denounce racism and hatred directed at any persons.

White Separatism and racism

Every decent person and certainly every Christian should denounce the vile racist beliefs of white separatists/white supremacists. We should condemn the actions of the domestic terrorist who launched his car into a crowd to mow down those whose beliefs he rejected. His actions (and the beliefs that impelled them) are as repugnant as those that led to lynchings, Jim Crow laws, and the Holocaust.

Christians must speak truth even when doing so is difficult. In a letter to his son who has embraced the ugly and false beliefs of what has come to be called the “alt-right,” a father reveals what commitment to truth may entail:

On Friday night, my son traveled to Charlottesville, Va., and was interviewed by a national news outlet while marching with reported white nationalists, who allegedly went on to kill a person.

I, along with all of his siblings and his entire family, wish to loudly repudiate my son’s vile, hateful and racist rhetoric and actions. We do not know specifically where he learned these beliefs. He did not learn them at home.

I have shared my home and hearth with friends and acquaintances of every race, gender and creed. I have taught all of my children that all men and women are created equal. That we must love each other all the same.

Evidently Peter has chosen to unlearn these lessons, much to my and his family’s heartbreak and distress. We have been silent up until now, but now we see that this was a mistake. It was the silence of good people that allowed the Nazis to flourish the first time around, and it is the silence of good people that is allowing them to flourish now.

Peter Tefft, my son, is not welcome at our family gatherings any longer. I pray my prodigal son will renounce his hateful beliefs and return home. Then and only then will I lay out the feast.

He once joked, “The thing about us fascists is, it’s not that we don’t believe in freedom of speech. You can say whatever you want. We’ll just throw you in an oven.”

Peter, you will have to shovel our bodies into the oven, too. Please son, renounce the hate, accept and love all.

The proper response to racial hatred is not the curtailment of speech rights, the destruction of property, or violent vigilantism. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mr. Tefft understood what antifa anarchists clearly do not.

Antifa’s anarchism

Peter Beinart, associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York, writes about the history and current incarnation of the troubling antifa movement in an article in the Atlantic titled “The Rise of the Violent Left”:

Since antifa is heavily composed of anarchists, its activists place little faith in the state, which they consider complicit in fascism and racism. They prefer direct action: They pressure venues to deny white supremacists space to meet. They pressure employers to fire them and landlords to evict them. And when people they deem racists and fascists manage to assemble, antifa’s partisans try to break up their gatherings, including by force.

Such tactics have elicited substantial support from the mainstream left.

…

The violence is not directed only at avowed racists like [Richard] Spencer: In June of last year, demonstrators—at least some of whom were associated with antifa—punched and threw eggs at people exiting a Trump rally in San Jose, California. An article in It’s Going Down [an online website for “anarchists” and “autonomous anti-capitalists”] celebrated the “righteous beatings.”

…

As members of a largely anarchist movement, antifascists don’t want the government to stop white supremacists from gathering. They want to do so themselves, rendering the government impotent. 

…

Antifa believes it is pursuing the opposite of authoritarianism. Many of its activists oppose the very notion of a centralized state. But in the name of protecting the vulnerable, antifascists have granted themselves the authority to decide which Americans may publicly assemble and which may not. That authority rests on no democratic foundation. Unlike the politicians they revile, the men and women of antifa cannot be voted out of office. Generally, they don’t even disclose their names.

…

The people preventing Republicans from safely assembling on the streets of Portland may consider themselves fierce opponents of the authoritarianism growing on the American right. In truth, however, they are its unlikeliest allies.

The causes of both racial hatred and anarchism are numerous and complex. As Americans grapple with understanding them and finding solutions, I hope and pray they will think deeply about the causative roles these three phenomena play in rendering young people—particularly young men—vulnerable to racist or anarchistic ideologies:

• the absence of faith in the one true God

• the break-up of nuclear families and the concomitant absence of fathers

• the dissemination in government schools of Critical Theory, which teaches students that whites are oppressors based on nothing other than their skin color

Pastor and theologian John Piper reminds Christians that what unites humans—what humans of all races and ethnicities share in common—is far greater, more profound, and more substantive than the things that divide us:

In determining the significance of who you are, being a person in the image of God compares to ethnic distinctives the way the noonday sun compares to a candlestick. In other words, finding your main identity in whiteness or blackness or any other ethnic color or trait is like boasting that you carry a candle to light the cloudless noonday sky. Candles have their place. But not to light the day. So color and ethnicity have their place, but not as the main glory and wonder of our identity as human beings. The primary glory of who we are is what unites us in our God-like humanity, not what differentiates us in our ethnicity.

Recovering and passing on to our children an understanding of the political principles on which the greatest country in the history of the world was founded is essential to fostering unity amid diversity. So too is faith in God.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
(William Butler Yeats)

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