How to win others

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air highlights Sally Jenkins' essay in the Washington Post. My favorite part in Jenkins' essay?

Apparently NOW feels this commercial is an inappropriate message for America to see for 30 seconds, but women in bikini selling beer is the right one. I would like to meet the genius at NOW who made that decision. On second thought, no, I wouldn’t.

There is a parable about evangelism in there someplace, but I don't have time to work it out for you. After 6 years of me blogging and you reading it, you can make up your own Turkism here, I am sure.

They can do better, I think

I was watching the Norma McCorvey video at JT's blog, and after it was over, this kid's face turns up:



Now, before you hit "play", LANGUAGE ALERT, OK? It's very average YouTube fare. But I post it here for you to think about something. If you watch this to the end, his argument is that a baby is better off dead than poor. Think about that: he's proud enough of this argument to post it on YouTube.

Better dead than poor. And his back-up is "better dead than 'unwanted'" -- with the "pwn" that babies put up for adoption have no place to go.

Information always improves opinions, right? Here's some information: Since the end of World War II, interest in adoption primarily has focused on healthy, young infants. By the mid-1950's, the demand for healthy infants grew so significantly that it exceeded the number of children available for adoption, a trend that has accelerated with each passing decade.[adoption.com]

No snark for this one. I'm really stunned that someone would make this argument this plainly about this subject.

Tony Jones on WOTM

Before we talk about this, go ahead and read this overview of abortion statistics from the Guttmacher Institute. And I use those stats because Guttmacher is a essentially a pro-abortion rights organization, so there are no dodges about who said what to whom.

Now, the Freakishly-tall Todd Friel had an interesting second half of his second hour on Monday as Tony Jones of Emergent Village fame and Scott Klusendorf of prolifetraining.com squared up on the question of abortion -- and it became a discussion about tactics.

See: Tony Jones said plainly, "I hate abortion". But his view is that the alleged pro-life movement has had an abysmal record on curbing the number of abortions in this country and that (now President-elect) Barack Obama is going to address the causes of abortion rather than the symptom which is abortion itself.

Jones' view is that if there are fewer women below the poverty line, there will be fewer abortions -- because in his view, poverty causes abortion. Fear of not having money, or not having enough money, causes abortion. And Klusendorf rightly pointed out that there are socialized countries in the world with heavy support for the poor which have exactly the same rate of abortion as the US, so that argument is a little lame.

But I think there's a bigger fish to fry here, and I'm sort of stunned that Klusendorf didn't go after it. This is from Guttmacher: single women account for two-thirds of all abortions, and half of the women getting abortions state that their lack of having a stable male counterpart is the reason they want an abortion.

So what is happening in the real world (as opposed to what I guess Tony Jones has observed at Solomon's Porch in Minneapolis) is that single women are having sex with men they don't really respect -- men they would call (according to Guttmacher) "problem relationships" -- and they don't want a baby making their problem relationships more problematic.

Stew on that a while. It comes back to the problem of evil.

Classic Piper

on Abortion. He's the king of Protestant social theology. God willing we all catch his passion for ... well, God's glory.