History

  I don't know which thread this was in, bit Dan was whining about my noting that data indicates that left wing political violence and approval of political violence is a growing problem.  I can't help but note that I posted on this data over a year ago.  

 

https://jsmmds.blogspot.com/2025/09/some-good-some-bad-and-some-ironic.html

Day 10

 https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BrxxB4rVr/

" Abortion Arguments Series: Day 10 of 10 (Final Day)

"What about rape, incest, and fatal diagnoses?"

I saved the hardest question for last.

For nine days, I’ve argued that the unborn child is an innocent human being, and that ending an innocent human life is wrong. Now comes the territory where holding that principle is agonizingly difficult.

Let’s start with fatal diagnoses.

Much of what parents are told is a "fatal diagnosis" is actually an early screening test (NIPT), which carries false-positive rates of 40 to 70 percent for rare conditions like trisomy 18 and 13.

When a lethal condition is confirmed, the humane answer isn't a rushed procedure in a clinic; it is perinatal hospice and palliative care. That model allows parents to meet their baby, hold him, love him, and provide comfort care for whatever time he has. No parent should be told "there's no hope, here's the clinic" without also being told "and here's what it looks like to meet and cherish your child anyway."

Now, when it comes to rape and incest.

Let’s start where we should always start: with the woman.

She was the victim of a horrific, violent crime. None of it was her fault. Her attacker belongs in prison for the rest of his life. She deserves justice, medical care, trauma counseling, and every ounce of support a community can give her. Anyone who discusses this subject without saying that first has lost their moral compass.

I also know the last thing a woman who lived through that wants is a man who never will telling her what to do. So first, listen to some of the women who have lived it.

I’m not claiming these voices represent every woman. Many who abort after an assault report relief, but the women below are almost never heard in this debate, and their reality matters just as much.

Women like Nicole Cooley and Pam Messina, both assaulted, who chose abortion because people told them it would help them move on--only to find that abortion couldn't un-rape them, but instead added a compounding second trauma to heal from. Or Jennifer Christie, assaulted on a business trip, who chose to carry and said that seeing her ultrasound was the first moment she finally didn't feel alone.

Then consider the child.

If biology confirms that a distinct human life begins at conception, then a child conceived in an assault is just as human and innocent as any other. His biological father committed an unspeakable crime, but the baby did not. We do not execute children for the crimes of their fathers anywhere else in law or morality.

Rebecca Kiessling is an attorney and mother of five conceived when her mother was raped at knifepoint. Decades later, she began asking state lawmakers one piercing question: “Did I deserve the death penalty for the crime of my biological father?” We rarely acknowledge there is a living human being on the other side of that choice.

Ending the child’s life cannot undo the assault; it takes a crime with one victim and creates a second. What that mother needs is a community to absorb every shockwave: medical bills, trauma therapy, and, if she cannot raise the child, immediate placement with an adoptive family who will cherish him.

Now, what about the law?

Here is where I distinguish moral truth from legislative prudence. And I know some on my side may disagree with my ultimate conclusion here.

Thomas Aquinas argued 750 years ago that law has to lead a society toward justice at a pace it can actually bear, because laws too far ahead of the people get rejected entirely and accomplish nothing.

Morally, I believe every child has a right to life. But in the voting booth, I will gladly vote for a law that includes exceptions for rape, incest, and fatal anomalies if that is the only law capable of passing today. A statute that legally protects 90 percent of children is infinitely better than an ideological purism that saves none.

Which brings me to the question that I always ask when abortion advocates bring up these tough cases.

Rape, incest, and fatal diagnoses together represent roughly 1 to 2 percent of all abortions.

If we agreed today to legal exceptions for all of those tragic cases, would you support legally protecting the children in the remaining 98 percent?

If yes, our argument is over, and we should be writing a bill together.

If no, then be honest: this was never about rape or fatal diagnoses. Those agonizing cases are being used as human shields to avoid defending why the vast majority of elective abortions should continue.

If the hardest cases are addressed, then the only question left is whether you are willing to protect everybody else.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series.

PS - I plan to have a book out in a few weeks that puts all of these arguments in one place, expands more on each one and shows how they play out in the real world."

What??????

 https://winteryknight.com/2026/09/28/new-study-belief-in-gender-ideology-linked-to-justifying-political-violence/

 

Show of hands, who is surprised by this finding? 

Day 9

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1E9kKmijsN/

" 

Abortion Arguments Series: Day 9 of 10

"You don’t have a uterus, so you don’t get an opinion."

Almost every argument we’ve examined so far has been about the child or the mother: biology, rights, personhood, and the law.

Then comes today’s category. It drops all pretense of discussing the child or the science. It is entirely about disqualifying the speaker.

“No uterus, no opinion.” “Mind your own business. How does her pregnancy affect you?” “This is really about controlling women.”

Different phrases, same move: don’t engage the argument, disqualify the person making it.

Let’s take them apart.

Start with the obvious history: Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973 by a Supreme Court of nine men. Seven of them were in the majority. I have never once heard “no uterus, no opinion” applied to the men who legalized abortion nationwide.

Notice that pro-choice men are never told to sit down. Nobody tells a male senator sponsoring an abortion-rights bill to stay in his lane. Nobody tells a male celebrity tweeting his support that his body isn’t involved. The rule only appears when a man disagrees, which means it was always about silencing opinions you don’t like.

Second, millions of pro-life women exist. Go to any pro-life march or pregnancy center and you’ll find women leading, organizing, and speaking. Polling has never split cleanly by sex; the gender gap on abortion is tiny compared to gaps across religion or party. Are those women disqualified too? Are they “misogynists”?

Third, we reject this standard everywhere else in human rights. If you must personally experience an injustice to oppose it, then men can’t oppose female genital mutilation. Women couldn’t have views on the military draft. And white abolitionists should have stayed silent about chattel slavery.

Furthermore, "How does it affect you?" isn't a principle anyone actually holds.

Nobody tells a straight person advocating for marriage equality that it doesn’t affect them. Nobody tells a man at a domestic violence rally to go home. These same people shouting “no uterus, no opinion” turn around and praise people who speak up for others; they have an entire vocabulary of “allyship” around the duty to care about harms that don’t touch you.

The question only works if you assume there is no one else affected. If an unborn child is an innocent human being, asking "how does it affect you?" makes as much sense as asking why a neighbor cares about child abuse across town. It doesn’t touch you directly. That’s why we have laws.

The accusation underneath all of this is that pro-lifers just want to "control women."

But if that were true, the movement wouldn't be led overwhelmingly by women. It wouldn't spend its resources on diapers, formula, and housing assistance.

Furthermore, the law already reaches men when the child's life is at stake.

Federal regulations for teratogenic medications like thalidomide legally mandate barrier contraception for male patients (even those with vasectomies) and ban sperm donation to protect the unborn.

When a Texas man secretly poisoned his pregnant wife's drinks with abortion pills, the state charged him with injury to a child.

The law knows there is a second party affected. It isn't trying to police a woman's body; it intervenes because an innocent human life is on the line.

Notice what none of these slogans say. None of them prove the unborn child isn't a human being. They just attack who is asking.

The question was never who has permission to speak. It’s whether that child is one of us."

Day 8

 https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1EtMwfhsUZ/

" 

Abortion Arguments Series: Day 8 of 10

"You’re not pro-life, you’re just pro-birth. You don’t support X, Y, Z social program so you only care about them before they’re born"

I imagine most of you have heard this one:

"You fight for the baby until it's born and then you’re done. You don't support paid leave, childcare, or healthcare. You won't foster. If you actually cared about children, you’d fund the programs that help them. Until then, spare me the speeches."

It’s one of the few arguments in this debate aimed at the speaker instead of the unborn child. It’s an attempt to disqualify the messenger rather than answer the message.

Yet underneath the anger, the critic is admitting something vital: children are vulnerable human beings who deserve real care and protection. That’s common ground worth taking seriously.

So let’s face the charge honestly.

First, the claim that pro-lifers abandon mothers after delivery is simply false.

More than 2,700 pregnancy resource centers operate nationwide. They have long been estimated to outnumber abortion clinics by roughly three to one. In 2022 alone, these centers provided an estimated $367 million in free services and material support such as pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, diapers, formula, clothing, parenting classes, and other help for mothers and families.

On personal generosity, the data is just as clear. Barna found that practicing Christians (who form the base of the pro-life movement) are more than twice as likely to have adopted as the general population: 5% compared with 2%. They are also more likely to foster or adopt.

And I don't need a survey to know this movement opens its homes. I was adopted. My sister was adopted. My wife and I adopted our son. Growing up, my parents opened our home to foster children for years.

I’ll own my imperfections as an advocate, but I will not accept the slander that this movement abandons children once they draw their first breath.

Second, look at the structure of the logic.

Suppose the caricature were 100% true. Suppose I had never given a dollar, never adopted, and voted against every social program. The conclusion does not follow that:

"You don't support enough social programs, therefore it's acceptable to end the child's life."

We would reject that logic anywhere else. You don’t have to personally foster three teenagers to believe child abuse should be illegal. You don’t have to volunteer at a soup kitchen to believe assaulting a homeless person is a crime. We never demand that someone solve every hardship in a person’s life before they are allowed to say: "You cannot kill them."

The wrongness of an act doesn't depend on the personal virtue of the person pointing at it. If a thief says stealing is wrong, that's still a correct statement.

Third, run the test that cuts through the noise…

Whenever someone argues that abortion is justified because of severe hardship, ask one question:

Would that same hardship justify ending the life of a two-year-old?

A mother of four facing eviction, lost wages, and sheer exhaustion has a devastatingly real crisis. But would anyone suggest ending the life of one of her existing toddlers to solve it?

Of course not. You’d say: that family needs urgent help. We’d never say: that child’s life should be ended to spare the family the burden. Which means the hardship was never the real reason.

Finally, ask the question that really exposes the distraction:

If you got every single program you wanted–universal childcare, paid leave, expanded healthcare, housing support–would you then support protecting unborn children?

I’ve asked it many times. Most critics say no.

And that tells you everything. The absence of government programs isn’t why they support abortion. If having all of them wouldn't change their mind, then lacking them isn't the reason they hold it.

Having said that, here’s the part of the objection I’ll gladly agree with: women in crisis pregnancies need vastly more support than they are receiving.

As Frederica Mathewes-Green famously observed, a woman seeking an abortion is often like an animal caught in a trap, willing to gnaw off its own leg just to survive. Nobody chooses that out of casual convenience; they walk in because they feel cornered and believe nobody is standing with them.

But that doesn’t mean the woman is sentenced to a lifetime of suffering or the child to a lifetime of being unloved.

In fact, the landmark Turnaway Study followed women who sought abortions but were denied because they were past a clinic’s gestational limit. Five years later, 96 percent of the women who gave birth no longer said they wished they had obtained the abortion.

So let’s do both: support the mother and protect the child.

Just don't pretend that an imperfect safety net gives anyone the right to end a life."

Well…

 https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ddwop6Cs_pk/?stkn=MTVuYWIzZDE1ZWFyNg==

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcUBgRtO4ec/?stkn=MWE0NzZiNXB4bXd3dQ==

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ddk9B_QyGsf/?stkn=MWsxZDljYWx1N204dg==

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dc927Q-NO48/?stkn=MTUwMXFpZ3N3ZXBoaA==

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DduFM3eguLJ/?stkn=MXBkZjd6cWgwNmk4MQ==

Brakes Can Be Good

 https://www.instagram.com/reel/DdoRTnLz9yM/?stkn=MWgycnVlMDh3M3Y4ZQ==