7 lip-service AZ Republicans dis religious freedom

The front page, above the fold headline in today’s edition of the consistently liberal Daily Endeavor screams out: “Dems, moderates block state birth-control bill.”

Mischaracterizations of the bill aside, the laser-beam focus should be on who those “moderates” are who voted with the “Dems,” and against HB 2625 sponsored by Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Dist.9). The bill modifies certain insurance provider statutes related to religious beliefs and healthcare coverage. It specifies that coverage is not excluded for prescription contraceptive methods ordered by a health care provider with prescriptive authority for medical indications other than for contraceptive, abortifacient, abortion or sterilization purposes.

Republican posers voting with the Democrats are Rich Crandall, Adam Driggs, John McComish, John Nelson, Steve Pierce,  Michele Reagan and of course the jokester Jerry Lewis. Check them out here.

Sen. Nancy Barto (R-Dist. 7), usually no friend of the conservative caucus, yesterday employed a legislative maneuver with this amendment, voting against the bill in order to request a revote.

Rep. Lesko is the conservative PAChyderm Coalition’s top-rated House member, with a 95.2 score.

Obama on ObamaCare: Remember when?

 “If things were that easy, I could mandate everybody to buy a house and that would solve the problem of homelessness.”

That was presidential candidate Barack Obama, criticizing then-opponent Hillary Clinton’s health insurance mandates — dismissing the unconstitutional concept before he ultimately imposed it on the American people.

Later in 2010, Congressional Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi, who famously urged passage of the nearly 2000 page bill with these words: “But we have to pass the [health care] bill so that you can find out what is in it,” pushed the economically unsustainable, socialist monstrosity on America’s citizens

*H/T Media Research Center

“After birth abortion” condoned in medical journal

Infanticide defended by so-called ethicists

The Journal of Medical Ethics calls itself “an international peer-reviewed journal for health professionals and researchers in medical ethics” — which proves that grandiose titles can be worthless.

Under the heading of Law, ethics and medicine, the journal prints a paper co-authored by former Oxford University ethicist Dr. Francesca Minerva and Dr. Alberto Giubilini, a bioethicist from the University of Milan, titled “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?”

In the report published by the BMJ (British Medical Journal) both newborns and pre-born human life are referred to as “potential persons,” as the duo opines that “the moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus, that is, neither can be considered a ‘person’ in a morally relevant sense. It is not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense.”

In case the point was missed, repeated closely on its heels is this: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

The so-called ethicists argue that “after-birth abortion” should be permissible in all cases in which abortion is, stating that like an unborn child, a newborn has yet to develop hopes, goals and dreams — the baby is not a person in the truest sense — someone with a moral right to life. In contrast, parents, siblings and society have aims and plans that could be negatively affected by the arrival of the child and their interests should take priority.

Adoption as an alternative is belittled. Minerva and Giubilini write: “Indeed, however weak the interests of actual people can be, they will always trump the alleged interest of potential people to become actual ones, because this latter interest amounts to zero. On this perspective, the interests of the actual people involved matter, and among these interests, we also need to consider the interests of the mother who might suffer psychological distress from giving her child up for adoption.”

According to this rationale, murder would be  far less distressing to the mother than allowing her child to live in a family ready to provide a loving home.

Reading the dispassionate arguments for death, we are witnessing the slippery slope of marginalizing life from natural birth through natural death as it becomes a hedonistic avalanche. 

Church leaders who supported ObamaCare now outraged

“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.”  - Thomas Jefferson

The Obama administration’s U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has imposed a new mandate putting it at odds with the Catholic Church. It requires all employers — including faith-based ones — that offer health insurance, to provide and pay for all forms of contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs. The mandate will force Catholic hospitals, schools and charities, as well as other religious groups to provide these drugs despite their opposition to them.

Nationally, Bishops say the rule compromises religious freedom. In fact, the battle has raged so intensely that Catholics across America heard about the new provisions as they attended mass this past Sunday in a letter read from the pulpit addressing the church’s stance against the impending federal requirements.

Previously the government has created a “conscience clause,” allowing for  exemptions from regulations going against core beliefs.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has issued the following response to the February 2 post on the White House blog in which it takes the Obama administration to task. Read White House misrepresents its own contraceptive mandate here.

Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan, archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is outraged and urges Catholics and the public at large to contact congress in protest. Here he can be seen in a video criticizing the Obama administration.  This is the letter by Bishop Thomas J. Olmstead, Bishop of the Diocese of Phoenix that was read to Valley parishoners.

Yet the synchronized outrage raises questions of hypocrisy. Federally imposed ObamaCare first came to the public’s attention in 2009 as legislation introduced in both houses of Congress. At the time, Catholic Charities, the Society of St. Vincent DePaul, and the Catholic Health Association — three major Catholic charitable groups were vigorously supporting the newly introduced ObamaCare and rallying the faithful to contact Congress to help pass the legislation. This letter to members of Congress on USCCB letterhead not only urged support of ObamaCare, but specifically advocated for health care for “undocumented persons” calling it “mean-spirited” to do otherwise.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue is threatening that 70 Million Catholic voters are ready to alter the 2012 presidential election. And the USCCB is promising a lawsuit over the Obama provisions.

They appear to be learning too late that socialism is inherently evil. And when government creates “a right,” it can tell the people how to exercise it.

U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to step down

 Here is her message, released via video today.

“Thank you for your prayers, and for giving me time to recover. I have more work to do on my recovery. So, to do what is best for Arizona, I will step down this week. I’m getting better.”

We join in wishing her the best in her continued recovery.

 

Supremes take ObamaCare case

The U.S. Supreme Court announced this morning that it will hear a challenge to the constitutionality of the controversial ObamaCare mandate — an unprecedented and massive expansion of the federal government. Citizens who don’t carry government required health insurance will be penalized.

Numerous legal challenges were filed within minutes of Obama signing the bill last March. More than half the states have joined in filing legal objections to the act, which was passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress. Arizona joined the multi-state, bipartisan lawsuit in April, 2010.

The socialized medicine mandate will guarantee skyrocketing insurance costs and physicians fleeing the field, making it more difficult to afford and find medical care. We may be about to live Benjamin Franklin’s adage, “People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both.”

A decision is expected to be announced by summer, just preceding the Republican and Democrat conventions for the 2012 presidential election.

Check out the impact and resulting loss of freedoms here on Investor’s Business Daily.

Gardasil: Boys become new target of lucrative drug

Parental choice or federal intervention?

Gardasil, the controversial vaccine said to treat sexually transmitted Human Papilloma virus (HPV), is now being recommended for 11 and 12-year-old boys. The drug is touted as protecting against anal and throat cancers, not a major problem with young boys. Originally it was said to prevent cervical cancer and was being sold as a panacea for girls.

Seeing Red AZ wrote about this problematic drug in July 2008.  It first gained national prominence when Texas Gov. Rick Perry mandated its use after Merck Pharmaceuticals PAC gave hefty donations to his campaign. Perry denied the donations influenced his decision to issue the executive order — bypassing the Texas legislature — from which parents could not opt in, but had to submit a written form to the State Health Department in Austin opting out of having their young daughters receive this fast-tracked, unproven vaccine, on the market less than a year.  Perry’s chief-of-staff landed a lucrative lobbying position with the drug company. 

Now, the latest recommendation by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is likely to broaden the use of the HPV vaccine, since most private insurers pay for vaccines once the committee recommends them. The HPV vaccine is unusually expensive. The three recommended doses cost pediatricians more than $300 and patients are often charged hundreds more.

But this is no bargain. Vaccinating the nation’s 11- and 12-year-old boys will cost almost $140 million annually, with the one-time “catch-up” among males 13 to 21 costing hundreds of millions more. Taxpayers, via federal subsidies, pay for about half of all vaccinations.

Not only are the CDC committee’s recommendations routinely used by private insurers to determine which vaccines to pay for, but the Obama administration’s Fed-Med legislation of 2010 requires insurers participating in health exchanges to offer vaccines recommended by the committee. The Wall Street Journal wrote in 2007 that widespread use of the drug would guarantee the drug maker billions of dollars in annual revenue.

Vaccination rates in girls have remained relatively low, as parents balked when reports were released about the lack of substantive testing on the drug, coupled with the motivating profitability factors for the drug manufacturer. So boys are the next best option for Merck & Co.

This excellent editorial on Gardasil appeared n the Journal of the American Medical Association, declaring that “serious questions regarding the overall effectiveness of the vaccine” needed to be answered and that more long-term studies were called for. The article concludes with this cogent observation: “When weighing evidence about risks and benefits, it is also appropriate to ask who takes the risk, and who gets the benefit. Patients and the public logically expect that only medical and scientific evidence is put on the balance. If other matters weigh in, such as profit for a company or financial or professional gains for physicians or groups of physicians, the balance is easily skewed. The balance will also tilt if the adverse events are not calculated correctly.”

Kathleen Ingley: Thy name is hypocrisy

Shocking disregard for men

In her recent “Quick Hit,” Republic editorial writer Kathleen Ingley becomes the face of the hypocrisy that is liberalism. Odd that she chooses the first week of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month to condemn what she views as “costly” prostate surgery for “elderly men.”

It’s doubtful she would have written this same commentary, replacing the words “men” with “women,” or “prostate cancer” with “breast cancer.”  Would she advocate for rationed care if the man in question was her husband, father or sibling? At what age is one “elderly”/disposable? Her short essay is the Obama Health Care mantra condensed into six sentences.

Kathleen Ingley sounds eerily like an echo of Obama’s health advisor Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, brother of Obama’s former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. This chilling three-page article “The Perfect Storm of Overutilization,” detailing the rationing of health care, was printed in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) June 18. 2008.

Dr. Emanuel blames the Hippocratic Oath for the “overuse” of medical care. “Medical school education and post graduate education emphasize thoroughness,” he states. “This culture is further reinforced by a unique understanding of professional obligations, specifically the Hippocratic Oath’s admonition to ‘use my power to help the sick to the best of my ability and judgment’ as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of cost or effect on others.”

The Reaper Curve (below)  is the chart Ezekiel Emanuel used in a Lancet article to illustrate the ages on which health spending should be focused:

Do you fit into the profile worthy of continued medical care?  You might be surprised to see what liberals think of your worthiness — other than your ability to funnel tax dollars into their system geared to exclude you.

Psychiatric group aims to “destigmatize” pedophiles

Goal to “minimize stigma, damage toward minor-attracted persons”

Just when you’re planning a relaxing weekend, we hit you with the latest news from the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) academic conference in Baltimore. The August 17 conference was sponsored by B4U-ACT, a group of pro-pedophile mental health professionals and sympathetic activists.

Presenting professionals discussed removing pedophilia from the association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The intent of this action is to normalize the criminal deviancy of pedophilia by removing it from the category of mental disorder.

According to this account on OneNewsNow, “The entire focus of the event was on the victimhood of the pedophile,” says Liberty Counsel’s Matt Barber. There was “very little concern for the children who are the victims of these individuals when they are raped; who these individuals lust after.”

Barber says the experts’ discussions were focused on “destigmatizing pedophilia … removing the stigma, and [getting] the public to stop demonizing pedophiles.”

For good measure, the APA board also voted unanimously — 157 to zip — to endorse homosexual “marriage.” Here is more from the 2011 Symposium Program. Note the liberal use of the sanitized term “Minor-Attracted Persons.”

The perverts at NAMBLA must be very pleased by the actions of APA. It’s American children who suffer at the hands of these vile creatures, as they are given cover by what pass as mental health professionals.

7 AZ Planned Parenthood sites end abortions

Thanks to a rational Arizona Appellate Court opinion upholding a 2009 law, life prevails over lucrative abortion mills.

Read the August 11, 2011 opinion here. It’s well worth your time.