Ruth Institute Blog

Proposition 8′s sponsors will be in court Monday morning to argue whether Judge Walker’s decision to overturn Prop 8 should be vacated on the basis that the long term same-sex relationship he is involved in (and was involved in at the time of the Prop 8 trial, but failed to disclose) constitutes a conflict of interest.

If you want to follow the hearing, and don’t mind going to the website of one of Prop 8′s opponents to do so, then you can find live updates at http://www.afer.org/june13 starting at 9:00am.

from Yahoo News:
France’s top court refused Wednesday to allow French citizenship for 10-year-old twin girls born to a surrogate mother in the United States, in a ruling that affirmed France’s legal ban on surrogacy.

In a case straddling international legal rights and bioethics, the Court of Cassation ruled a California county went too far by ruling that a French couple are legally the twins’ parents.

Keep reading…

“Surrogacy is also banned outright in most European countries, including Germany, Spain, Finland, Italy, and Switzerland. But the French have articulated the reasons for this rejection most eloquently”: Read more…

The Washington Times has been doing some research into what Planned ‘Parenthood’ does with the billions of tax dollars they have received from us over the years, as well as how well they are able (or willing?) to account for how they’ve been spending our money:

Planned Parenthood’s annual reports show more than $2 billion in government income between 2003 and 2008. The GAO report could account for the expenditure of only $657 million of that amount, relying on information provided by Planned Parenthood in its own Single Audit Act reports. That leaves a huge question mark over the remaining $1.3 billion.

Keep reading…

My question is this: If they won’t even tell us what they’re doing with our money, then why in the world should we believe them when they say they aren’t using our tax dollars to perform abortions? (Which would be illegal under current law, by the way.)

Rita Diller comes to the appropriate conclusion at the end of her article:

It is time to strip all government funding from the nation’s largest abortion chain now.

One has to wonder sometimes if Western Civilization is even going to bother showing up for the the future of the world.

Well, not the way things are going in America lately, at least not according to recent government data as reported in the LA Times:

LA Times:
The maternity business has experienced a recession, too, it appears. Births fell 4% from 2007 to 2009, the biggest drop for any two-year period since the mid-1970s, according to federal government data released Thursday.

Meanwhile across the pond, our British cousins are procreating, but not bothering to get married. Consider a few items published recently by their Office for National Statistics: Read more…

from WinnipegFreePress.com:
The last time Canadians had a debate about the definition of marriage, it was over whether gays and lesbians had a constitutional right to marry.

In the end, the courts decided they did.

Now, as a British Columbia judge weighs whether polygamy should be decriminalized, advocates on both sides of the debate are pointing to the legalization of same-sex marriage to bolster their claims.

Keep reading…

from LifeNews.com:
HB 2416 bans the practice of abortion via webcam, also known as telemedicine. Considering the well-documented dangers of abortion pills, women should be able to meet in person with a doctor before ingesting a dangerous chemical… Abortion-via-webcam is just another example of how Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry are concerned with their bottom line instead of women’s health & safety.

Keep reading…

It seems the editors of Mississauga News Magazine are utterly incensed that the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board near Ontario, Canada would not allow a student to form an official Gay/Striaght Alliance club at one of their secondary schools:

The nerve! This is a human rights issue and the Catholic board is coming out — excuse the term — on the wrong side of the argument.

Yeah, yeah… How dare those bigoted, homophobic, hate-mongering Christians manage their own schools according to their own religious precepts?

The editors of the Mississauga News are not the only self-appointed culture police to swing into action:

from LifeSiteNews.com:
In response, NDP [New Democratic Party] education critic Rosario Marchese called on Premier Dalton McGuinty to force GSAs into the Catholic boards, and the homosexual lobby group Egale denounced the board and the authentically-Catholic group Courage in a March 22 open letter to the Ontario government.

Well then, how about this? What if that same Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board were to show that they are not ‘anti-gay’ in some other way?:

from LifeSiteNews.com:
At an equity conference next month, Ontario’s Dufferin-Peel Catholic school board will feature several homosexual activists including one gay magazine reporter who covered the 2010 Toronto Pride Parade, with video showing him gleefully interviewing various Pride participants, including men dressed in sado-masochistic thongs. Read more…

Yesterday there was a segment on NPR titled Taming The Twin Trend From Fertility Treatments. They talked about how various forms of ART have caused an increase in the incidence of twin pregnancies:

Twins, once a rarity to marvel over, are now a common part of American culture, thanks in large part to increased use of reproductive technology. Twins are conceived naturally just 2 percent of the time; for those who get pregnant with fertility treatments the rate is more than 40 percent.

They also discussed some of the health risks associated with twins: Read more…

A pro-life group that monitors the use of cells from babies victimized by abortions is today highlighting a biotech company, Senomyx, which it says produces artificial flavor enhancers using aborted fetal cell lines to test their products.

How could this possibly be happening?!!!

I don’t even know what to say…

LGBTweekly.com:
The Irish edition of tabloid news magazine The Sun recently covered the story of Penny Lawrence, a 28-year-old woman suffering from Genetic Sexual Attraction (GSA) who is now pregnant with her father’s child.

If you seriously don’t think there are folks waiting in the wings for same-sex ‘marriage’ to set the legal precedent they need to make what is described above legal – along with absolutely anything else you could imagine – then check out a website called Full Marriage Equality. (They refer to this father and daughter’s relationship as “consanguinarmory”.)

Today CatholicVote.org published an article that covers a lecture Dr J gave in early February. In fact we already have a thread about it. (Pro-Family Speaker Challenges Students) But apparently people are still writing about her talk, it is a presentation well worth revisiting, and the author of the article very succinctly sums up what I consider be one of the greatest dangers – if not the very greatest danger – of same-sex ‘marriage’. (See the second quote box below.) Read more…

National Right to Life News:
PPFA often argues that increased funding will enable them to reduce the numbers of abortion. The problem is their own organizational reports don’t seem to show that.

The amount that Planned Parenthood has gotten from federal, state, and local governments has been increasing steadily over the past several years, more than doubling since 1998, but abortions done at Planned Parenthood have not gone down. In fact, they have increased dramatically during that same period, rising at a rate … that very nearly matches the rate of those funding increases (see chart).

Keep reading.

Many say they would like abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare”. It can never be made to be truly safe; it should only be legal to save the life of the mother; but at least we can agree on the “rare” part. The study referred to in this article shows us one way that will help us accomplish that much, anyway. (Download the study directly and read it for yourself if you like.)

At most Pregnancy Centers you’ll find a (regrettably) thriving Post Abortion Syndrome Support group – and many of the volunteers at the clinic are often members.

Those of you who have been hurt by abortion (or know someone who has) will want to read this.

For more information, visit Abortion Recovery InterNational’s websites: Read more…

File this one under “Duh! Ya’ think?” We exterminate a third of the offspring who would have otherwise been supporting us in our old age, and then we wonder why the Social Security system didn’t work out the way we had planned.

Remember when our universities were places where civil discourse was sacred?

Take a look at this video. Read the article while you’re at it.

And yet the advocates of same-sex ‘marriage’ keep assuring us that nobody’s civil rights will have to be abridged for them to have their way.

Between 130,000 and 160,000 people demonstrated in central Madrid, Spain, on Saturday against laws that make abortion easier, according to organizers.

Why is it that this event was covered only by Christian news websites?

Steve and Cokie Roberts (Yes, the Cokie Roberts of NPR…) have published a book about how they’ve made an interfaith marriage work for almost forty-five years. And in my ever so humble opinion they do indeed deserve to be praised and admired for standing so resolutely by their vows – especially in an age when prevailing societal values and so-called ‘no-fault’ divorce laws would have made it so easy for either one of them to unilaterally terminate the marriage.

But in an article about their book published today in the Muskegon Chronicle they ventured beyond issues of faith to comment on the same-sex ‘marriage’ debate and asserted that “…same-sex couples bring the same devotion to their relationships — and face the same challenges — as any straight couple.”

The first person to post a comment on the article had a few pointed questions about that: Read more…

JillStanek.com:
Julie Rovner, NPR health policy correspondent: Well, the conflict is really that PP keeps its statistics according to the percent of those services that are provided, not according to how many people get what… Sarah Stoesz from PP kind of misspoke when she said it was 3% of patients who come in get abortions.

It is actually a little bit closer to the 10% that [Susan B. Anthony List President] Marjorie Dannenfesler suggested, because there are about 3 million patients who come in. There are about 300,000 abortions provided…

Neal Conan, host: And the difference might be that the same woman who later received an abortion also got a pregnancy test and counseling and some other services.

Rovner: Absolutely. So many of those patients are getting more than one service and who – many of the patients who get an abortion are probably getting other services as well.

“A little bit closer”? 3 million divided by 300,000 is actually 10%. Furthermore, and the bigger point, as LiveAction.org pointed out, over 35% of PP’s income comes from abortion. NPR would be fair and balanced to report that statistic as well.

Actually, almost 37% of their health center income is from abortions, in fact… Read more…

OK, is this not a full frontal attack on our right to freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and even our freedom of religion, even freedom of thought, no less? Have the advocates of same-sex so-called ‘marriage’ not always vowed that would never happen? But are they not now demanding that everyone else (especially newspapers) call their relationship a ‘marriage’ just because they say that’s what it is, whether or not any of the rest of us happen to think it is so?

Reed-Walkup and Walkup, and that is not a law firm, tried to pay the Dallas Morning News to run a wedding announcement. Officials with the paper, citing the legal status — or rather illegal status — of same-sex marriages in Texas, said, no, no thanks but the announcement can run under the heading “Commitments.” Read more…