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Bp. Sanborn dismantles Bergoglio’s false theology…

LEO WATCH, Episode 1

Robert Prevost’s First Few Weeks as ‘Pope’ Leo XIV

For almost a month now, the Vatican II Church has been under new management. After the death of Jorge Bergoglio (‘Pope Francis’) on Apr. 21, the conclave to choose his successor ended on May 8 after only four ballots, and Robert F. Prevost stepped onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica as ‘Pope Leo XIV’.

With Francis’ demise, the long-running FRANCIS WATCH program produced by True Restoration has now also come to an end, although all 48 audio episodes naturally remain available for free listening and downloading at FrancisWatch.org… READ MORE

Editors’ Note: In recognition of the 100th anniversary of Pierce v. Society of Sisters, this article is published as the third in a three-part series on religious freedom. 

What can the minority in a democracy reasonably expect from the majority? Church-state conflict in this country always seems to boil down to this basic question, whether the issue is Christian crosses on highways, objections to vaccine or mask mandates, privileges for general reporting requirements, prayers in schools or legislative sessions, funding for religious institutions, Native American objections to government land projects, or so many others.  

Yet nothing illustrates the problem quite as vividly as religious exemption. Exemption is sometimes called “accommodation,” a term that seems inapt. An accommodation is an obliging adjustment. If I plan on serving burgers and sausages at a barbecue, but I learn that one of my guests does not eat meat, I make an accommodation by including a pasta salad and grilled zucchini. I do so willingly, even complaisantly, because I harmonize the wishes of the vegetarian guest with the interests of the rest. Everybody wins. 

But everybody does not win with exemption. Exemptions (of any kind, religious or otherwise) from the laws are little negations of the laws. They suggest that the laws are actually not as important or essential as had been supposed. Exemptions are, in this way, politically subversive. They destabilize the legal settlements of democratic majorities, while encouraging sentiments of entitlement and interiority. True, sometimes democratic majorities enact broad exemption laws, as they did in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and its state analogues. And yet James Madison once warned that the dangers of faction needed to be managed lest they engulf the common good. The ascendancy of exemption suggests that, today, faction is how Americans understand the common good. We have embraced a kind of federalism of personal autonomy.  

The mechanics of exemption as a matter of legislative grace suggest that there may be a difference between exemption as exception and exemption as constitutional mandate—between voluntary and compelled concession. Moderate use of exemption can reinforce the law’s primacy while making a softening indulgence. It can make the regulatory pill a little easier to swallow. It can even cement the hierarchy of authority. These exemptions are the backyard barbecue variety, the easy and non-threatening ones, and there are many in the law that are like this. “We are in charge,” such exemptions say, “but we’ll give you this one because we don’t really care.”  

More systematic use of exemption, by contrast, disrupts. Required exemption is not so much a concession as an expression of a transformed politics where there is no more culture war because there is no common culture left to fight about. Or to put it another way: exemption as the rule, as the political baseline, is a type of ersatz culture war. This may be one of its key functions—to fight the culture war from the rear. Exemptions of this sort are more threatening to the ruling power.  

Whether disruption is good or bad will depend considerably upon one’s views about the law’s merits and one’s position on the culture wars. People will feel differently about those questions. I myself often favor more aggressive sorts of exemption, precisely because of their unsettling possibilities. But that is beside the point. What is worth noticing here is the destabilizing potential of exemption. We can observe the pressure that exemption puts on the law while prescinding from the merits. And we should want to do that: legal strategies that might succeed in one or another case might have larger political effects that are also worth considering. 

As for the Constitution, scholars disagree about whether religious exemption was ever required as an original matter by the Free Exercise Clause. Others say that religious exemption may be a diffuse element of American legal culture, a logical corollary of the separation of church and state in the old, jurisdictional sense of separated spheres of civil and ecclesiastical authority. Whoever is right, the constitutional status of religious exemption is highly uncertain as a matter of original meaning. That may explain in part why some originalists partial to religious exemption have made common cause with non-originalists to defend it on non-originalist grounds.  

Be that as it may, today’s elaborate network of religious exemption laws and its constitutional status surpass what the most zealous champion of exemption can find in American history. The cry of “religious freedom for all” is admirable in many respects but also suggestive of a larger difficulty. “Religious freedom for all” is entirely defensible if it means that nobody should be coerced into religious belief or practice. Perhaps it also means that no one should be punished expressly on the basis of religious commitment as such, though that seems more doubtful: the line between belief and conduct sometimes can be maintained but at other times, as the Supreme Court says, it cannot.  

But if “religious freedom for all” means constitutionally required exemption from the laws for any claimant who has a sincere objection to them, under circumstances where the laws contain, or even merely contemplate, any other exemption, that is a more complicated matter. When the dissolution of religion as a coherent legal concept is combined with a demand for exemption, one has the makings of a potent political instrument. Of course, requests for exemption may still be overridden if the state has a compelling interest in its law that it is achieving by the least restrictive means, but those concepts are also highly contested. 

Exemption understood in this way—as a challenge to the polity’s bedrock—compels partisans of the political establishment to face up to which commitments they refuse to compromise. By “the establishment,” I mean not only the church-state sense of the term but also the broader sense used in Romans 13: the political settlements of the “powers that be.” Exemption can provoke our own powers to confront what they think is sufficiently embedded in the American political foundation for them to tell the minority, “No. You must obey our way. You may not have your way.” 

The Hand That Rocks the Cradle 

Of the three law and religion cases that the Supreme Court agreed to hear this term, Mahmoud v. Taylor seems like the surest bet for the religious claimants. The case concerns a 2019 Maryland regulation that sought to promote “educational equity,” which it defined as “view[ing] each student’s” “gender identity and expression,” “sexual orientation,” and other specified “individual characteristics as valuable.” To implement the law, the Montgomery County Board of Education introduced a series of books for elementary school students with (often explicit) LGBTQ themes. Official guidance documents directed teachers to read at least one of these books aloud each year followed by a discussion in which they should “[d]isrupt the either/or thinking” of children about biological sex, and should not suggest there could be reasonable disagreement about these matters. 

This instructional program did not sit well with hundreds of parents—a sizable minority—from a broad range of religious traditions, who requested that their children be permitted to opt out of it. That request initially was granted, but was later refused. The parents were further informed that they would not be told when the books would be read. These were all sudden policy changes: for years the Board had frequently allowed opt-outs for any “instruction related to family life and human sexuality,” as well as for “classroom discussions or activities” that families believed would “impose a substantial burden on their religious beliefs.” The parents promptly sued, arguing that the denial of the opt-outs and notice violated their rights of religious liberty. 

The Board makes two principal arguments: first, that the program merely exposes children to these books, and that having the books available for children is not a “substantial burden” on anybody’s free exercise of religion. And second, that the number of objectors to this particular program distinguishes the ordinary opt-out request, inasmuch as exempting so many students makes it virtually impossible for the school to teach the way it (and the state legislature) wants. 

The case is not difficult. The Board’s first argument is belied by the record. This is not a case about exposure to books sitting mutely on shelves, but about active instruction and the development of certain types of sentiments and attitudes in very young children. Children are required to attend school. They are required to sit and participate in instruction to which their parents object on religious grounds, and in which the school’s express object is to form their minds in a definite way. That seems to meet the legal standard for a substantial burden on religious exercise. 

The second argument is also easy legally. The school argues that the large number of objectors essentially precludes the new program from operating. To grant opt-outs at this rate is to kill the curriculum. Analogous claims have been made before. The trouble for the Board is that the Supreme Court has interpreted the “general applicability” prong of the free exercise test broadly. The Board gerrymandered its refusal for this specific religious objection alone. Its policy of granting exemptions from curricular and non-curricular school programming, and what the parents plausibly characterize as its “slapdash blitz” to eliminate opt-outs for this particular program, are likely to doom its position.  

Cycles of Exemption, Disestablishment, and Establishment 

The case is interesting because underneath the legal doctrine, it illustrates the fissures that exemption can create when it is used to unsettle the deep places in the political foundation—that is, the establishment. In fact, it shows how exemption and establishment exist in a kind of political cycle. Grant them frequently enough, and exemptions become an instrument of disestablishment. Exemptions are, in this way, establishment disruptors. And when they disrupt, they can usher in, bit by bit, their own establishment. I do not claim that the plaintiffs in Mahmoud intend these effects. What they want is simply that their children not be compelled to sit through this instruction. Their object is not to create a new establishment. But the point is not about this case specifically, but the changes that exemptions can bring about over time. 

In a thoughtful amicus brief in the case, Professor Eugene Volokh and Professor Justin Driver argue that exemptions on the scale contemplated in Mahmoud would “undermine the educational system” by “upsetting the balance” between state control of education and individual rights of free exercise. Reading their brief, one is reminded of Justice Harlan’s epigram that “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.” Undermining the educational establishment is what exemption desired by large numbers of people can do. Indeed, it is what it is well suited to do, inasmuch as it presents itself to the Court as a mere opt-out, while its real function can be to change policy. 

Exemption used in this way therefore puts pressure on the majority to decide on what it will not compromise to the minority. This is what the Board was pressed to do. It is showing just how committed it is to this type of instruction. Public schools have long served the function of foundational civic formation in this country, of assimilation of the plural mass into the core creeds of the American polity. It may be that in this case, the Board just pushed its creeds too far (or perhaps too fast?), and when it was met with resistance, it dug in. Indeed, Mahmoud v. Taylor sits against the backdrop of a public-school establishment that is now losing some of its footing to a new educational movement, school choice.  

The dynamic of exemption in controversies like these illustrates what I have described as the continuum of free exercise, disestablishment, and establishment. That continuum might be represented in a four-stage narrative cycle.  

In the first stage, the establishment is firm and entrenched. Dissent from it is only possible through limited and disconnected exemptions that pose no threat at all to the settled way of doing things. In fact, exemption at this point looks like an act of liberal generosity by the ruling power, whose control may be strengthened by it. 

In the second stage, the establishment experiences some fragmentation, and the majority provisionally accepts several different accounts of its fundamental commitments and orthodoxies. It pluralizes to negotiate deepening difference. Exemption begins to be used not merely as an individuated opt-out, but as a more direct challenge to the establishment, or to features of it, revealing fissures and generating more organized pockets of disestablishmentarian resistance. 

In the third stage, certain new disestablishmentarian programs achieve greater strength, and exemption is supplemented by other organizational strategies. Features of the old establishment are gradually supplanted in law and policy. It is generally at this comparatively advanced stage that institutions like the Supreme Court involve themselves in dismantling the old establishment to make space for what will come next.  

In the fourth stage, one or more of the ascendant disestablishments starts to gain traction as a new establishment and tests its own reach into the political structure. The cycle begins again.  

The matter is contestable, of course, but it seems we have reached something in the range of the second and third stages in both Mahmoud and one of the other law and religion cases that was before the Court involving religious charter schools. In that case, Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, the Court recently deadlocked 4-4, resulting in the public school establishment’s default victory because it had prevailed in the lower courts. Yet the equipoise of the justices on the merits (Justice Barrett had recused herself) suggests that all of these disputes, together with the rising school choice movement, reflect new and interesting disruptions to the prevailing system of general education in this country.  

Whether one thinks those disruptions are good or bad is, as I have said, a different matter. But thinking through the relationship of exemption to political establishment is worthwhile apart from the result in any given case, especially for those of us who are both religious believers and American citizens.

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.

Today, Thomas More Society attorneys on behalf of Choose Life Marketing, filed a reply in support of their motion to dismiss in the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts, against a meritless lawsuit brought by abortion provider Four Women Health Services.

Four Women Health Services argues the marketing services provided by Choose Life Marketing for Abundant Hope, a pro-life pregnancy center and co-defendant in the case, “mislead” women seeking abortions, simply because Choose Life Marketing employs standard marketing practices to better help Abundant Hope offer alternatives to abortion, such as parenting support, adoption resources, and material assistance.

“Massachusetts’ abortion businesses, backed by a former attorney general with a history of targeting pro-life speech, are attempting to tear up the First Amendment and suppress speech they disagree with,” said Peter Breen, Executive Vice President and Head of Litigation at Thomas More Society. “Choose Life’s amplification of the reach of pregnancy centers in Massachusetts is lawful and protected by the First Amendment, no matter how the abortion industry tries to twist it.”

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The newest filing follows an earlier motion to dismiss, filed by Thomas More Society attorneys on March 14, 2025. In a rare move, the court allowed Four Women Health Services to completely rewrite their original complaint, after conspiratorial claims spurred by the pregnancy center’s effective community outreach. The abortion facility then added Choose Life Marketing as a defendant, alleging “unfair business practices” under state and federal law, in a renewed attempt to stifle its speech.

“This meritless lawsuit hijacks commercial laws to gag the pro-life message which the abortion provider opposes,” explained Nathan Loyd, Staff Counsel at Thomas More Society. “The First Amendment protects the right of pregnancy centers to tell women they exist and provide free assistance.  If successful, the plaintiff’s theory threatens all kinds of community organizations and charities offering free services that others charge for—think about food banks giving free food, or women’s shelters giving free housing—across Massachusetts and the country.”

“At core, the abortion provider fears that the pro-life message is more persuasive than its own pro-abortion message. It thinks it will make more money by silencing pro-life speech.”

Four Women Health Services is represented by former Attorney General of Massachusetts, Martha Coakley, who was prominently rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark pro-life free speech case, McCullen v. Coakley (2014).

The filing, Choose Life Marketing’s Reply in Support of Motion to Dismiss in Four Women Health Services v. Choose Life Marketing, can be found here.

The post Abortion Biz Sues to Stop Pro-Life Pregnancy Center That’s Costing It Customers appeared first on LifeNews.com.

The Texas Health and Human Services Commission has released its Induced Termination of Pregnancy (ITOP) data for January 2025, reporting 14 medically necessary abortions performed under Texas law’s life-of-the-mother exception for that month. This brings the total reported number to 171 medically necessary abortions in Texas during the 31 months following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, which overturned Roe v. Wade.

Each abortion represents a rare and tragic case where a pregnancy posed a threat to the mother’s life or a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function. Notably, no doctor has been prosecuted, sued, or sanctioned for any of those abortions. No woman has lost her life for lack of an exception in the law.

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At the same time, reported elective abortions have remained at zero each month since the Human Life Protection Act took effect in August 2022.

The Texas Legislature recently passed SB 31, the Life of the Mother Act, by Sen. Bryan Hughes (R-Mineola) and Rep. Charlie Geren (R-Ft. Worth), to create Continuing Medical Education (CME) for physicians and Continuing Legal Education (CLE) for attorneys working in hospital settings on how the life-of-the-mother exception functions under Texas law. SB 31 also harmonizes the exception language across all pro-life statutes to align with the Human Life Protection Act. Governor Greg Abbott is expected to sign SB 31 into law.

Under the Human Life Protection Act, an unborn child is protected from elective abortion from the moment of conception. However, the law explicitly permits physicians to perform an abortion when, using reasonable medical judgment, they determine that a pregnancy endangers the mother’s life or could cause a serious risk of impairment of a major bodily function.

“These newly reported numbers offer continued reassurance that the law is working — protecting unborn children from elective abortion while making room for doctors to provide medically necessary abortions for women facing threats to their life or health during a pregnancy,” said Amy O’Donnell, Communications Director for Texas Alliance for Life. “SB 31 ensures that physicians treating pregnant women and attorneys advising them understand what the law allows, so that no woman is denied care due to fear or confusion.”

“SB 31 is about building confidence for the professionals responsible for making critical decisions in medical cases involving threats to pregnant women’s life and health,” O’Donnell added. “With proper education, we can ensure that every Texas woman receives timely care.”

LifeNews Note: Amy O’Donnell is the Communications Director for Texas Alliance for Life.

The post Texas Records 30 Straight Months of 0 Elective Abortions appeared first on LifeNews.com.

The Democratic Party plans to spend millions of dollars over several years to reach religious voters — a bid pro-life Democrats greet with skepticism and which Christian political experts say is doomed to fail unless Democrats fundamentally alter their views on social issues to a position “believers can affirm in good conscience.”

During a visit to Utah last week, Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin announced a four-year undertaking to cultivate voters of faith. “Martin admitted that his party has struggled with how to reach voters on issues of religion and faith. While Democrats tend to ‘shy away from those topics, they should instead embrace them,’ he said,” reported the Utah-based Deseret News.

Martin, who is Roman Catholic, said his faith is important to him and a “big reason” why he has dedicated his life to public service. Martin said he believes Democrats have excluded Christian values from their political discourse, because they are too inclusive. “I feel like the Democratic Party, we try to be inclusive of so many people, sometimes we shy away from conversations about faith and religion, because we don’t want to alienate people and push them out of the conversation,” Martin told the news outlet. “But I think, in a way, when we do that, we’re actually … pushing people out who want to hear us talk about our faith and our religion and why we believe in the things we do.”

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Martin is right to be concerned. Multiple election cycles show a deep, sustained, and increasingly deficit in Democrats’ support among Christians. In 2024, exit polls showed President Trump won Protestants by a 22-point margin (white Protestants by 41 points), Roman Catholics by nine points (although Harris won Hispanic Catholics by 18 points), nearly two-thirds of “other Christian” believers and Latter-Day Saints, respectively.

Today, a bare majority (54%) of Democrats identify as Christians of any description, and the number of white Christian Democrats has fallen by half over the last 15 years, according to a 2024 study from the Pew Research Center.

The DNC’s new State Partnership Program will send state parties $22,500 a month in the hopes that, with “the investment of time, energy and money, a red state can become a purple state and then eventually a blue state,” Martin told Deseret News.

Martin previewed that, as in years past, the Democrats’ faith outreach will center almost exclusively around one verse of the Bible: Matthew 25:40, which reads, “And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, in as much as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.’”

“I think that our party has always stood up for those who are the least amongst us, who have the least … I think that a lot of churches also believe that, right?” Martin told the newspaper. “We need to create social safety nets so people and communities aren’t falling through the cracks.”

But pro-life advocates and pro-family experts say the problem is not rhetoric; it’s the substance of the party’s platform on key moral and biblical issues. “If Democrats truly want to win back the trust of faith-driven voters, especially in red and purple states, they must end the abortion litmus test within the party and seek moderation on other issues embraced by religious families,” Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life of America, told The Washington Stand. “There’s no path to a durable majority that excludes pro-life Democrats and alienates those value-based voters.”

But Day, who has seen the number of elected Democrats willing to vote for pro-life legislation dwindle over the decades, feels “a bit skeptical that Democrats have the ability to get out of the echo chamber where they reside right now.”

“Just this past weekend, Archie Williams, a proud, pro-life Democrat, spoke up at the Utah Democratic Party meeting to suggest that running pro-life candidates could help win back seats. He was booed,” said Day. Six of Utah’s 29 state senators are Democrats, as are 14 of 75 members of the House of Representatives. “That reaction to Archie’s suggestion isn’t just disheartening — it’s a political liability,” she said.

Numerous Democratic lawmakers have defected from the party, often citing abortion and other values issues in their exit. Kentucky State Senator Robin Webb (R-18), a former Democrat who voted in favor of most state pro-life legislation and religious conscience rights for clerks like Kim Davis, recently became a Republican. “The rural values that we have grown up [with] and value have been a continuous struggle for me,” Webb told Laura Ingraham on Monday night. Local media now describe Democrats in the state Senate as a “superminority” of six, outnumbered by 32 Republican legislators.

While Day said it makes good political sense for the DNC to invest money in red-state party infrastructure, “unless that is met with substantial changes to adherence to the national Democratic messaging that is not resonating with middle America voters, it will not be successful.”

The Democratic Party tried a similar outreach to faith-based voters two decades ago after values voters supporting Ohio’s 2004 referendum against same-sex marriage narrowly tilted the entire presidential election to Republican George W. Bush. Democrats began discussing their newfound, deeply felt faith in every election message. At one point, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (R-Calif.) announced, “My favorite word is The Word” and pledged to support “public policy that would be in keeping with the values of The Word.” She went on to call abortion “sacred ground,” reportedly stopped the House from voting on the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act dozens of times, and said during a debate on embryonic stem cell research that “science has taken us to a place that is biblical in its power to cure.” Pelosi also declared same-sex marriage is “consistent” with the Roman Catholic faith, insisting “my faith compels me” to support the redefinition of marriage. Similarly, then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) exclaimed “Praise God!” after Congress passed legislation redefining marriage nationwide in 2022.

The use of Matthew 25 has proven a staple of Religious Left rhetoric for decades, at times migrating into political discourse. In a 2017 Christianity Today editorial, Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va.) alleged the verse justified his government-focused health care policies.

More recently, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) made a fleetingly brief reference to “the least of these” in Matthew 25 during the 2024 vice presidential debate with J.D. Vance, applying the verse to open borders immigration policies. Evangelicals for Harris cited the verse to assert that Kamala Harris — who denounced pro-life laws as “immoral” when she became the first sitting vice president to visit an abortion facility last March — campaigned on “biblically inspired, pro-family policies.”

But the 2024 Democratic Party platform endorsed taxpayer-funded abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy, vowed to “vigorously oppose” laws protecting minors from the predatory transgender industry, and promised to keep “fighting” parents’ efforts to keep sexually explicit books out of the hands of minors.

“From a biblical standpoint, the Democratic Party faces significant challenges appealing to believers today — and it’s not simply about messaging or rhetorical missteps. Fundamentally, the party’s platform and many of its policies stand in stark contrast to what Scripture teaches about human dignity, life, and morality,” David Closson, director of the Center for Biblical Worldview at Family Research Council, told TWS.

“The first and most critical issue is the party’s stance on the sanctity of life,” Closson, the author of the new book “Life After Roe: Equipping Christians in the Fight for Life Today,” elaborated. “Scripture is clear that human life begins at conception and that every life is created in the image of God (Psalm 139:13-16; Genesis 1:27). The Democratic Party’s unwavering support for abortion-on-demand — even up to birth — is in direct contradiction to biblical teaching about the value of life. This makes it very difficult for Christians committed to biblical ethics to support a party that actively promotes policies that end innocent lives.”

“Second, the party’s positions on gender and sexuality also clash with biblical truth,” Closson continued. “The normalization and celebration of same-sex relationships and gender ideology, including efforts to allow minors to pursue gender transitions, violate God’s good design for human sexuality (Genesis 1:27; Romans 1:26-27; Matthew 19:4-6). Christians believe God’s plan for sexuality and family is good and leads to human flourishing, so policies that contradict this are not something believers can affirm in good conscience.”

Finally, while Democrats often talk about caring for “the least of these,” which is indeed a biblical priority, “their policies often fail to recognize the foundational role of the family and the church in caring for the vulnerable. Government programs can help, but when policies undermine the family or religious liberty, they end up harming the very people they claim to help,” said Closson.

“While Ken Martin is right that people want to hear authentic conversations about faith, for Christians, it’s not enough to simply talk about faith in generic terms. The Bible gives clear moral teachings, and political platforms and policies must be measured against those standards. That’s why the current Democratic platform, despite its outreach efforts, faces serious credibility issues with biblically minded believers,” Closson concluded.

Day agreed that however pragmatic it may be for Martin to try to plug his party’s hole with voters of faith, unless those efforts are “paired with an openness to moderates and pro-life voices, it won’t reach the voters Democrats are currently losing. The hemorrhaging will continue if Democrats advance their current strategy of bad ideas and resistance.”

LifeNews Note: Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

The post Democrats Think They Can Attract Christian Voters While Promoting Abortions Up to Birth appeared first on LifeNews.com.

Last week, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered a lower court to vacate rulings that allowed abortions to resume last March in the once abortion-free state.

Following the narrow passage of Amendment 3, which enshrined abortion up to “viability” in the state constitution, Judge Jerri Zhang of the 16th Circuit granted injunctive relief for Planned Parenthood, the main plaintiff in Comprehensive Health of Planned Parenthood Great Plains & Planned Parenthood Great Rivers vs. Missouri.

The lawsuit was filed the same day Amendment 3 passed, along with a motion for a preliminary injunction against the abortion ban already in place, as well as laws on gestational limits, safety regulations, informed consent, and many others.

“In the months that followed, Judge Zhang gave Planned Parenthood exactly what it wanted,” comments Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue, “unfettered, unregulated abortion in a pro-life state.”

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The Missouri Supreme Court did not uphold Judge Zhangs’ decisions, but it also did not close the door on injunctions altogether. Instead, the decision ordered Judge Zhang to “reevaluate” Planned Parenthood’s request under a “more rigorous standard.” This means another injunction could be granted down the road.

Until then, however, Planned Parenthood has ceased committing abortions at its Kansas City and Columbus locations. In fact, according to the Planned Parenthood website, the Kansas City location is completely closed until further notice.

“We don’t know how long this reprieve will last,” says Newman, “but we are thankful that the blood of innocent children in Missouri cannot be shed at this moment. And it’s encouraging to see a state Planned Parenthood thought it had conquered with a pro-abortion amendment fighting back and fighting hard. Add the new pro-life amendment headed to the ballot, and Missouri has a serious chance at reestablishing near total protection for babies in the womb.”

Just weeks before the Missouri Supreme Court’s order to vacate, lawmakers approved a new ballot measure that will repeal last year’s abortion amendment and reinstate pro-life laws, including a near total ban on abortion.

Originally, Judge Zhang granted injunctive relief partly on the grounds that Planned Parenthood was likely to win their case due to the passage of Amendment 3. The full case is set to be heard in early 2026. However, if this new referendum passes later that year, any further injunctions as well as this whole lawsuit will be moot. Without Amendment 3, Planned Parenthood will have nothing to stand on.

Newman adds, “Of course, as is the case with so many other crumbling Planned Parenthood affiliates around the country, Planned Parenthood Great Rivers and Great Plains seem to be putting hoards of money and resources towards turning Missouri into an abortion desolation while their own employees are speaking out against dysfunction and abuse within their clinics.”

Even Planned Parenthood’s support of Amendment 3 was rife with internal conflicts. Just two months after the amendment passed, Planned Parenthood Great Rivers’ Chief Medical Officer made national news when she publicly resigned – reportedly the ninth resignation within PPGR since choosing to campaign for the amendment.

Five years earlier, Planned Parenthood Great Plains had “incurred substantial legal expenses” from endless lawsuits and challenges to pro-life laws. The end result was laying off dozens of employees who were already complaining of a toxic work culture, lack of transparency from the administration, and a chaotic work environment. Of course, CEO Brandon Hill was taking home a salary of more than $200,000 while these other employees were being ushered out the door.

“Planned Parenthood can’t seem to understand that even its own employees aren’t buying its ‘care no matter what’ facade anymore,” says Newman. “Care? About what? Its next politically-driven lawsuit? Six-figure salaries for its CEOs? Planned Parenthood is nothing more than a corrupt, Big Abortion money-pit. It doesn’t care about the lives of babies in the womb, or the mothers in their lobbies, or even the employees behind their desks. Missouri doesn’t need Planned Parenthood, and neither does anyone else.”

LifeNews Note: This article was originally published by Operation Rescue, a leading pro-life, Christian activist organization dedicated to exposing abortion abuses, demanding enforcement, saving innocent lives, and building an abortion-free America. The author, Sarah Neely, is Chief Operating Officer for Operation Rescue. 

The post Every Planned Parenthood in This State Has Been Closed appeared first on LifeNews.com.

In a recent conversation with Peter Kwasniewski, the much-beloved defender of the Roman Rite remarked: “I’m *known* (for better or for worse) for talking about liturgy, but not so much for talking about other topics.” In this article, my goal is to change that narrative by providing you with a personal reflection onKwasniewski’s brilliant book Treasuring the Goods of Marriage in a Throwaway…

Source

The Trump administration today has rescinded a rule from Joe Biden that attempted to force ERs to become abortion clinics.

Biden tried to use the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) to force hospitals to kill babies in elective abortions. But on Tuesday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that Biden’s policy has been overturned.

In 2022, the Biden administration announced its intention to force doctors to perform abortions under EMTALA. Shortly after the announcement, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a memorandum and a letter from then-Secretary Becerra stating that EMTALA grants the administration authority to override state pro-life laws, even though EMTALA does not mention abortion but explicitly protects the “unborn child.”

Now, the Trump administration’s health department and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has rescinded that mandate and letter and has affirmed the plain words of the statute: EMTALA protects both the “pregnant woman” and the “unborn child.”

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Because the administration’s action now protects mothers, unborn children, and doctors’ conscience rights, Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed a voluntary dismissal of the lawsuit they had filed against the Biden administration earlier this year to challenge the mandate.

In Catholic Medical Association v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, ADF attorneys represented the Catholic Medical Association, a national network of about 2,500 physicians and health care providers, arguing that the abortion mandate overstepped statutory authority and violated members’ conscience rights.

“Doctors—especially in emergency rooms—are tasked with preserving life. The Trump administration has rolled back a harmful Biden-era mandate that compelled doctors to end unborn lives, in violation of their deeply held beliefs,” said ADF Senior Counsel Matt Bowman, director of regulatory practice. “Emergency room physicians can and do treat life-threatening conditions such as ectopic pregnancies, and every state allows doctors to do whatever is necessary to preserve the life of a mother. Now, doctors will be able to perform their life-giving duties without fear of government officials forcing them to end life and violate their beliefs.”

The decision drew praise from pro-life advocates.

“It is so encouraging to have an administration that once again prioritizes the well-being of pregnant women and their doctors.  I commend President Trump and Dr. Oz for rescinding the harmful Biden-era guidance that warped EMTALA obligations and created widespread confusion in emergency rooms nationwide,” said pro-life Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi.

“EMTALA is a decades-old statute that was originally designed to protect mother-patients and their unborn children in emergency situations, but the Biden administration manipulated the law’s purpose by issuing guidance that forced emergency room doctors to perform abortions, regardless of their states’ life-affirming laws,” she told LifeNews. “Restoring EMTALA to its original purpose brings much-needed clarity to our incredible emergency room doctors across the country and peace of mind to the patients they serve.”

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René Girard reread many of the classic novels of Western literature in preparation for a survey class he was about to teach. Girard’s insight, which he garnered as a result, was expressed in Deceit, Desire and the Novel, which was that all great books – the ones we have come to consider the classics – have the same structure and trajectory. There is a hated protagonist (essentially an antagonist) who comes to see the error of his ways. But, in order for this to happen, the author has to forgive this central figure who represents disliked aspects of himself. Girard refers to this as self-transcendence, which is uncommon and thus great novels are rare. It is, of course, easier to see the mote in another’s eye rather than the beam in one’s own.

The oyster has its grit to create a pearl, and the author has a related irritant; an annoyance, to the point of obsession, that provides the inspiration and motivation to write his novel. Cervantes was irritated by unrealistic stories of chivalry and has Don Quixote, thanks to his poor taste in reading material, insanely adopt the role of the knight errant featured in them, only to be relentlessly mocked, humiliated and beaten up within the novel. Flaubert’s hated figure is Madam Bovary. She too has been reading the wrong books and she destroys her life by trying to get it to conform to the fantasies found in romance novels. Julien Sorel in The Red and the Black, inspired by Napoleon’s rise to power, is a relentless, scheming, user of women and social climber whose every other utterance is described as “hypocritical.” Marcel Proust’s Monsieur Swann in Remembrance of Things Lost is self-destructively obsessed with a semi-prostitute Odette whose every act of predictable unfaithfulness pierces his heart. Swann is superseded in the novel by “Marcel” who exhibits similarly self-destructive behavior involving jealousy and obsession with Gilberte and Albertine. In both cases, the self-delusion is enough to make one want to shout, “You idiot!” at the characters. Naming the character after himself makes the claim below all the easier to support.

All these instances turn out to be cases of projection. When something really annoys you, out of all the things to which one could take umbrage, it means you have a special emotional connection to it. In many cases, it is something about yourself that you dislike. Without the personal connection, no high level of emotional intensity would be reached. I, for instance, am self-conscious about being an adjunct instructor since it gives one a child-like status next to the grown-up tenured professor, despite so many of them being very prosaic souls indeed. On one occasion I repeated Samuel Johnson’s assertion in a Facebook post that no one reads Alexander Pope’s Paradise Lost and wishes that it had been longer, because I thought it was funny and probably generally true. A tenured English professor took exception to this. In our brief exchange, I mentioned that I had been reading and thinking for several decades with around 200 editor-reviewed articles to my name and had a right to my well-earned (in some cases) opinions. His response? “Maybe.” Since Johnson was Pope’s biographer and responsible for helping to make Pope famous and I was merely repeating Johnson’s opinion, perhaps Johnson and I deserve more than a “maybe.” Obviously, the professor touched a sore point.

Continue reading … (the next post with the link)

A radical bill to expand assisted suicide in Oregon received strong pushback during a public hearing on Monday. SB 1003 would expand Oregon’s “Death With Dignity Act” (DWDA) to make it easier for practitioners to end the lives of medically vulnerable people through assisted suicide.

SB 1003 came before the Oregon Senate for its second public hearing on June 2 following strong opposition and subsequent amendments earlier in the legislative session. Medical and mental health professionals and advocates for the medically vulnerable expressed vigorous opposition to the bill, noting that the amended legislation still poses serious risks to medically vulnerable people in Oregon and nationwide.

“What we’re facing is not a decision on ‘death with dignity,’ we’re facing a decision on death on demand,” Oregon Right to Life political director Sharolyn Smith said in testimony during the public hearing, urging senators to reject the bill.

Smith noted that numerous efforts to expand the bill have taken place since the initial passage of Oregon’s DWDA in the 1990s. And even without expansion, the bill places the lives of medically vulnerable people at risk.

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According to the Oregon Health Authority (OHA)’s most recent annual report; DWDA prescriptions increased statewide by 8% in 2024 following a 30% jump in 2023; waiting periods are routinely waived (29% of cases in 2024); patients are very rarely referred for psychiatric evaluation (physicians wrote 607 prescriptions in 2024 and referred only three patients for psychiatric evaluation); the ingestion status of some 178 patients (29% of those prescribed lethal drugs last year) was unknown to the OHA as of the annual report – suggesting that lethal cocktails may be dangerously available in households across the state.

RELATED: Report: Oregon Assisted Suicide Prescriptions Increased 8% Last Year After 30% Spike in 2023

In her testimony, Sharon Quick, President of the Physicians for Compassionate Care Education Foundation, pointed out that removing restrictions would jeopardize patients and devalue the lives of the disabled. She said that the overall condition of individuals suffering from a terminal illness would in practice render “consent unlikely” and “ingestion dangerous.”

Others who testified in opposition to the measure included Salem-based psychiatrist Dr. Satya Chandragiri, M.D. and pro-life Representative E. Werner Reschke.

After the conclusion of public testimony, Oregon pro-life Republican Senator Daniel Bonham remarked that many individuals have submitted written testimony opposing the bill from across the U.S., suggesting that “this is bigger than just an Oregon issue.”

Following the rollback of Oregon’s DWDA residency requirement, Oregon allows people from across the country to receive lethal prescriptions in Oregon, making any expansion of the law a matter that impacts the nation as a whole, not merely the state.

In addition to oral testimony, hundreds of individuals and groups from across the country submitted written testimony opposing the measure.

In his written testimony, Dr. Chandragiri said “SB1003 undermines the principle of adequate informed consent and the importance of trusting therapeutic relationship and the physician’s ethical duty – to ‘do no harm’, which has long been a cornerstone of our health care system.”

“Physician-assisted suicide is a threat to people with disabilities because it removes some of the explicit and implicit support for them by introducing the possibility of suicide,” Dr. Nathan Bradford, M.D., of South Carolina wrote. “Many of my patients require large amounts of societal and family support and resources. I can visualize a situation in which they would feel an obligation to undergo euthanasia to no longer pose a burden.”

“Assisted suicide is a deadly, discriminatory and exploitive practice because it creates two classes of people: those whose lives are protected, and those whose deaths are encouraged,” Dr. Mark J. Snell wrote. “There is no amount of ‘safeguards’ that will ever make assisted suicide safe or acceptable. We should instead introduce bills that provide for improved multidisciplinary care for our society’s most vulnerable. As physicians who care for patients with advanced illness, our profound duty is to relieve patients’ suffering rather than assist in their deaths.”

RELATED: Delaware Becomes 12th Jurisdiction to Legalize Physician-Assisted Suicide

Introduced in February, SB 1003 went before the Senate Judiciary Committee for its first public hearing on March 3, where it was similarly met with strong opposition from many experts and advocates. As originally introduced, Senate Bill 1003 would have reduced the 15-day waiting period to a mere 48 hours; allowed non-physicians to prescribe lethal drugs; and forced health care facilities to publicly disclose their participation in assisted suicide, making it easier to funnel patients toward pro-assisted suicide facilities.

Following pushback, lawmakers amended the bill to soften some of its more radical proposals following pushback. However, the amended bill would still reduce the 15-day waiting period to seven days; replace the word “physician” with “practitioner,” opening the door to later changes that would allow non-physicians to prescribe lethal drugs; and require institutions to advertise their DWDA participation on their websites or in a written notice presented to patients.

SB 1003 was moved to the Rules Committee in April without recommendation for passage, but the measure was picked up again and scheduled for a public hearing in June.

At the time of drafting/publication, a total of 427 individuals and groups submitted written testimony opposing SB 1003 while only 12 submitted testimony supporting the proposed legislation.

A work session is scheduled for Wednesday, June 4.

LifeNews Note: Ashley Sadler is Communications Director for Oregon Right to Life. Oregon Right to Life Education Foundation is actively involved in connecting churches with pro-life pregnancy resource centers across the state, as well as creating and distributing localized resource guides to ensure that abortion-vulnerable moms and families throughout Oregon have access to life-affirming options.

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