Greg Corombos of Radio America and Ian Tuttle of National Review cheer Carly Fiorina for her strong denunciation of Hillary Clinton’s extreme position on abortion and the practices of Planned Parenthood. They also slam the Obama administration for trying to hide at least two aspects of the Iran nuclear deal from Congress. And we rip the network news for airing frivolous stories while ignoring the testimony of Kate Steinle’s father on the issue of sanctuary cities.
A key government agency says the landmark Civil Rights Act forbids employers from firing or refusing to hire people based on their sexual orientation, a ruling critics say has no basis in law and threatens to erode our most basic liberties.
On July 16, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bans discrimination based on biological sex, also ought to apply to sexual orientation. The decision follows a 2012 ruling that extended similar protections to transgender employees and applicants. The only exception is extended to business with fifteen or fewer employees.
“This ruling is absolutely absurd,” said Liberty Counsel Chairman Mathew Staver. “It’s certainly not based upon the statute and so this is lawlessness in the process. This is an activist agency dominated by appointments from President Barack Obama that has a homosexual agenda that trumps not only Title VII and any other statutory law but even the first amendment.”
Staver says there is no rational way to conclude members of Congress in 1964 intended the Civil Rights Act to cover sexual orientation.
“Title VII is what Congress said it is and what Congress said it is is very specific. It’s about sex discrimination. That’s whether you’re male or female, not whether you’re engaging in a certain kind of sexual behavior,” he said.
“They’re not trying to protect a pedophile or a homosexual or a transsexual or a pederast or someone else that has some other sexual fetish or abnormal activity. They’re trying to deal with the difference between a male and a female,” said Staver, who says the EEOC is ignoring the law to advance its agenda.
“This is just three people pretending to have authority which they don’t. Their authority has to interpret the federal Title VII. Title VII does not include homosexuality or any other kind of sexually aberrant behavior,” he said.
What will be the impact on the workplace? Staver contends that if employees keep their sex lives to themselves, most working environments would remain much as they are today.
“Most people are not going to tell someone that they can’t work for them if they’re doing the job and they’re not pushing their sexual activity into the face of other individuals. They’re not going to inquire about what they do when they’re not at the workplace in most situations,” he said.
The problem, says Staver, is that homosexuals often call attention to themselves because their sexual orientation is critical to their overall identity.
“They’re not content just having this as something that they do outside of the workplace. No, this is part of who they want you to understand they are. It is front and center. It is a very sexualized culture,” said Staver. “They bring that sexualized culture into the workplace. They talk about it. They put it into your face,” said Staver.
There are no exceptions in the EEOC decision for churches or faith-based organizations and Staver complaints based on religious freedom will fall on deaf ears.
“If you’re relying upon the EEOC, there is no religious freedom protection. In fact the the head of the EEOC appointed by President Obama, Chai Feldblum, says that if there is a collision between homosexual rights and the first amendment free exercise of religion, you would think that the first amendment wins. She says no. Homosexual rights win,” said Staver.
What options does this leave employers seeking greater freedom in their hiring? Staver says the time for civil disobedience is here.
“We’re entering into a lawless phase. The 3-2 decision by the EEOC is an example. The 5-4 opinion by the Supreme Court on marriage is another example. When we come to a lawless phase, at some point in time we just have to resist and say, ‘We’re not going to allow three people on the EEOC or five people on the Supreme Court to destroy this religious mission and ministry. We’re not going to allow it and we’ve got to push back,” said Staver.
In fact, Staver believes the failure to push back now and over the long haul will put our our most cherished liberties in peril.
“We’ve come to a different place in our history. We’ve come to a place of revolution, where we need to revolt against this tyranny of a few people who, despite what the Constitution and the courts’ precedents say and despite what natural law and the Bible says, they come out with this opinion,” he said.
“They expect 320 million Americans to walk like the Pied Piper and follow them over the cliff. If that’s what happens, then God help us, because we’ve lost our country. We’ve lost our liberty,” said Staver.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Ian Tuttle of National Review welcome the latest video from the Center for Medical Progress that exposes the callous nature of the abortion industry, this time featuring a haggling session over aborted baby parts and an admission that Planned Parenthood sometimes violates its promises to women to harvest intact baby organs. They also slam the Obama administration’s plan to target the second amendment rights of Social Security recipients if they are unable to manage their own affairs. And they shake their heads as Martin O’Malley is forced to apologize for telling liberal activists that “all lives matter”.
Undercover video of a high-ranking Planned Parenthood official casually discussing the graphic dismemberment of the unborn rocked the abortion debate last week, and the head of the group behind the video says there’s much more to come.
The initial video focused on Planned Parenthood conducting abortions in a manner that would preserve fetal organs intact. The Human Capital Project of the Center for Medical Progress produced the video, alleging Planned Parenthood sells the body parts of aborted babies for profit. That is a violation of federal law punishable by imprisonment and hefty fines. Planned Parenthood says it donates fetal tissue for medical research and only charges for the amount needed to be reimbursed for its efforts to donate the specimens.
Reaction to the both the content of the video and the casual manner in which Planned Parenthood Senior Director of Medical Services Dr. Deborah Nucatola describes such grisly actions elicited a swift response. Five states and three congressional committees are launching investigations.
Center for Medical Progress President David Deleiden says this video was part of a 30-month undercover operation at Planned Parenthood. He says what we’ve seen thus far is just the tip of the iceberg.
“We have dozens and dozens of hours of very shocking, troubling footage and admissions from within the top levels of the abortion industry and Planned Parenthood, coming straight from the words of top level Planned Parenthood executives and officials and medical directors and abortion doctors,” said Deleiden.
And it doesn’t stop there.
“We have probably 100-200 pages of Planned Parenthood body parts purchases, internal documents about the practice,” he said.
Several of those documents have already been posted to the group’s website.
Deleiden says other compelling video will emerge as well.
“We also have very compelling eyewitness testimony from people who were actually in real life involved in the harvesting of aborted baby parts at Planned Parenthood clinics,” he said.
The roll-out of the videos and documents will come over the coming days and weeks. Deleiden says there are good reasons for this to come out in stages.
“The whole issue of Planned Parenthood’s baby parts sales is such a complex and multi-layered phenomenon that it’s really important, especially in out 24-hour news cycle, that each piece of evidence gets a fair hearing and gets all the attention that is due to it, so that you don’t actually lose the audience as you’re trying to move forward and educate the public about everything that’s going on,” he said.
How did the harvesting and alleged selling of unborn baby body parts become the focal point of this probe? Deleiden says he and his allies did not know much about the issue when the undercover work started because no one had aggressively investigated it in the past 15 years.
“There’s sort of been a renaissance of fetal tissue harvesting at Planned Parenthood Clinics in the past five years. That was the extent of our knowledge getting into this whole project. Really, everything we’ve learned we’ve learned from the mouths of the abortion doctors and the Planned Parenthood leaders themselves. So we just listened and continued to add to the pile of evidence for two-and-a-half years,” said Deleiden.
On Thursday, Planned Parenthood President Cecille Richards released a video statement to respond to the allegations from the Center for Medical Progress. Richards vehemently denies selling aborted baby parts for profit but admits to donating fetal tissue for research if the families wish to do so. She denounced the Center for Medical Progress but did apologize for the tone of Dr. Nucatola’s comments as lacking compassion.
Deleiden is not impressed.
“It’s a pretty belated apology, coming three days late from Planned Parenthood. I’m also curious what they think is compassionate about saving a baby’s head for laughs or making sure that you don’t crush a certain part so you can sell it later. It seems to me like it’s less of an apology and more of a cynical, last-minute excuse,” he said, noting the tone doesn’t change in the videos still to be released.
“The kind of conversation that our investigators had with Planned Parenthood’s new director of medical services was pretty much mirrored in every other conversation that we had with their abortion doctors. There were many statements made over the past two-and-a-half years that were even more shocking than what was said at that lunch meeting,” said Deleiden.
He says Nucatola’s comments also give lie to Planned Parenthood’s insistence that patient safety is always the top priority.
“If Planned Parenthood is really a legitimate medical provider, you’re expecting them to put the interests of the patient first. As the Planned Parenthood senior director of medical services says in the video, when they are manipulating the abortion procedure and changing things about their technique with the goal of getting better body parts for sale, they’re not putting the interests of the patient first,” said Deleiden.
As for the long-term impact on the abortion debate, Deleiden says these videos will demonstrate how illogical abortion laws really are.
“According to our laws, an unborn child is not considered fully human enough to be fully protected by the law. They’re not protected from being killed by abortion. At the same time, it’s precisely because of their humanity that their body parts are so valuable for sale to biotech companies and for scientific experimentation. That’s why researchers hunt after their body parts like buried treasure,” he said.
“It’s a really disturbing paradox to a lot of people, where we’re saying children are more valuable dead than alive,” said Deleiden.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Ian Tuttle of National Review applaud Scott Walker for signing a 20-week abortion ban in Wisconsin and for his deft handling of the illegal immigration question in Iowa. They also groan as two of President Obama’s most disastrous policies come front and center today, as the UN Security Council approves the Iran deal and the U.S. restores full diplomatic relations with Cuba. And they react with disgust as the GOP is temporarily stuck choosing sides between the personally insulting Donald Trump and conservative-bashing John McCain.
The United States government refuses to acknowledge the Islamic threat confronting our nation and our leaders and citizens turn a blind eye to the danger to their own peril because what is often termed as radical Islam is actually the religion’s purest form.
Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis is the author of the forthcoming book “Never Submit: Will the Extermination of Christians Get Worse Before It Gets Better?” The book is due to be released in late August and is endorsed by the likes of evangelist Franklin Graham.
On Thursday, Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez attacked two different military locations in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He killed four U.S. Marines and seriously wounded a member of the U.S. Navy before being killed himself.
In response, President Obama responded to the deaths of the Marines by calling it a “heartbreaking circumstance” and cautioning Americans not to jump to conclusions.
For Maginnis, this is par for the course for Obama.
“When it’s politically expedient, he jumps to conclusions on other cases. When it comes to Islamic terrorism, he’ll drag his feet and won’t even declare we have a problem with Islamic terrorists,” he said.
The investigation is still in the early stages, but federal officials are classifying the case as terrorism and the early reports of extended trips to the Middle East jihad-related blog writings add fuel to the likelihood that Abdulazeez is the latest in a series of murderers acting in the name of Islam.
“It’s quite possible and probably likely that he was motivated by his faith of Islam and he was motivated by his belief in jihad and that he took out that hostility that is pent up in many of these people against targets of the U.S. government. Of course the most visible (targets) in many communities are the recruiters who wear military uniforms,” said Maginnis.
Obama takes pains to distinguish between what he considers the peaceful religion of Islam and violent extremists who be believes pervert the faith.
“ISIL is not “Islamic,” said Obama to the nation in September 2014.” No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim.”
Maginnis says Obama and his defenders have that all wrong.
“They obviously don’t know Islam. They need to study the Koran, the Hadith, the Sunnah. When you do, you find out that what ISIS is doing is exactly in compliance with what the prophet Mohammad taught and what the Koran says. ISIS is more Islamic than the vast majority of the people that calls themselves Muslims in today’s world,” said Maginnis.
And the worldview of Abdulazeez may be far more common among American Muslims than many realize. Maginnis cites a Polling Company survey conducted in June for the Center for Security Policy.
“Sixteen percent believe that jihad justifies violent holy war here in the United States. Forty-one percent believe that jihad is an obligation that they have from Islam,” said Maginnis.
Other results show 51 percent of American Muslims believe they should have the option of living under Sharia law as opposed to U.S. law. While a majority of Muslims believe Sharia and the U.S. Constitution are compatible, 43 percent believe if they conflict that the Constitution should be considered supreme. Thirty-three percent say Sharia should take precedent.
“What you have is a sizable part of a Muslim population that believes in violent jihad and the imposition of Sharia Islamic law,” said Maginnis, who says America is also faced with the simultaneous problems of unfettered Muslim immigration at the expense of Christians and a government awash in political correctness.
Maginnis adds that while Obama and other officials may be confused with the Islamic end game, others see it very clearly.
“In the book, I chronicle a number of people that have come out of the Islamic faith and say, ‘They are deadly serious about what they’re saying.’ Unfortunately, in the West we tend to forgive that as being naive. They’re not naive. They know exactly what they want, and they’re going to get it at our expense,” said Maginnis, who is quick to add that the general public is oblivious to the creeping Sharia threat as well.
“It’s total ignorance. It’s [fear] of the political correctness that permeates from the top all the way down to our local communities. This is especially threatening to Christians because just like we saw Christian genocide taking place in the Middle East, they have no tolerance for anyone that will not believe in their god, in their way of life, in their laws,” said Maginnis.
He added, “We’ve been the great melting pot for many, many years. This particular segment of the population doesn’t want to be part. They want to take over our country and make it into something tantamount to what you’re seeing today in the Middle East.”
Maginnis admits rolling back this momentum will be challenging, but he before we can win we need to admit we have a problem.
“If we don’t wake up as a nation…then we’re going to pay a very heavy price. And that price could be our own freedom,” he said.
Are you struggling to keep track of the issues and developments in the Greek debt crisis? Fear not. The Capitol Steps explain it all, to the music of “Grease.”
With National Review personnel cleared out for the Alaskan cruise, Greg Corombos of Radio America holds down the fort by himself today. He details Arizona State Sen. Kelli Ward challenging Sen. John McCain in next year’s GOP primary. He also expresses conservative frustration over Pres. Obama referring to the Chattanooga terrorist attacks as a “heartbreaking circumstance”. And he assesses Planned Parenthood’s lame apology over the “tone” of the doctor who casually described crushing unborn babies to harvest their organs.
The Obamacare contraception mandate was a major issue in the 2012 presidential campaign and liberals may soon be pushing for taxpayer-funded abortafacient drugs for young girls as part of the 2016 campaign strategy.
The issue appeared earlier this week in the New York Times’ “Room for Debate” blog. At issue is a growing debate arising out of Colorado.
“The most recent issue involves a pilot test in Colorado, where a private, charitable organization had paid for long-term birth control: implants and IUD’s and other things for teenage girls. They found that dramatically reduced the incidents of pregnancy,” said Galen Institute President Grace-Marie Turner, who contributed to the “Room for Debate” dialogue.
She says activists in Colorado then decided to take the idea statewide on the taxpayers’ tab.
“The Colorado legislature then considered legislation for taxpayer funding for long-term birth control,” said Turner. “It was not able to get through the Colorado legislature…because of the issue of government funded, taxpayer-funded contraception, particularly contraceptive devices that cause an early abortion, as an IUD does.”
Despite the defeat in Colorado, where the legislative chambers are controlled by different parties, Turner says we can expect this to soon become a national debate.
“When you see something like this as a pilot test and it reaches the New York Times that it is absolutely very likely to be advanced as a national agenda,” said Turner. “Hillary Clinton, if she gets the nomination, is certainly going to push women’s issues to the front and center, and this is certainly one of them.”
She added, “If we think that government really is supposed to take care of us, then that would be part of the agenda of those who would be advancing this particular type of initiative.”
She says the template was already set with the implementation of Obamacare.
“The abortion lobby has been very active in pushing for passage of the Affordable Care Act, then including in it a mandate that all private health plans free contraceptive coverage and that includes abortafacients. The preventive care mandate in Obamacare includes sterilization,” said Turner.
Turner believes this is all part of a larger, destructive agenda.
“What kind of message does that send to teenage girls, that we don’t trust them to be responsible with their own sexuality? The government is going to take care of them. They can have sex without consequence,” said Turner.
She says that message from the left is a bald-faced lie.
“There’s no sex without consequence, even if pregnancy is not one of the consequences. The incidents of sexually transmitted diseases will increase. The sense of responsibility for these young women, their ability to have longer-term relationships later in life (will be threatened),” said Turner.
“If young women are not taking care of themselves, men are not going to respect them,” said Turner. “It certainly could be compromising their health. Their sense of being able to earn their place in a civil society absolutely will be compromised.”
While Turner admits Republicans have been “all over the map” on the contraception issue in recent years in response to the contraception mandate, she says there are still stark differences between the two parties.
“There’s this culture of death that I think is such an antithesis to what health care is about. They treat pregnancy as a disease instead of leaving it as the life-giving force that it is. There is a very basic, fundamental difference between the agenda of the right and the agenda of the left. That’s really manifest in this most recent controversy,” she said.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review cheer a new AP poll showing voters are souring big time on Hillary Clinton. They also discuss President Obama bristling at CBS reporter Major Garrett for asking why there wasn’t a bigger push to bring home Americans held in Iran. And they celebrate the Wisconsin Supreme Court forcefully putting an end to the baseless liberal accusations alleging collusion against Scott Walker and outside groups.
