By Judie Brown
When a highly respected news source like Catholic Vote chooses to focus on entertainer Taylor Swift, I take notice. But the silliness of the headline gave me even greater pause. It reads: “Poll: 18% of Voters Likely to Back Whoever Taylor Swift Endorses in 2024.” Swift is a pro-abortion woman who makes no bones about her one hundred percent support of the act that kills preborn babies. One has to wonder at what point a pop singer became a political expert. But so goes a world in which the sound bite rules, even when it is silly.
It is the same place where the Biden Department of Education chose to meet with the Southern Poverty Law Center and later, according to one report, target groups of parents who fight for their rights and add them to a hate map! SPLC issues an annual “Year of Hate and Extremism” report, which targets groups that it finds extreme—groups that now include parents who exercise their rights as parents.
It is disturbing to think that parental rights groups are perceived as enemies of the state, yet we do live in a nation where feckless leadership is in fashion.
An excellent example of this ineffective type of governing is found in the actions of several United States senators who are pushing a new piece of legislation designed to protect children younger than 13 from joining social media platforms. Numbered S 1291, the proposal already has 10 cosponsors. But the most curious part of this effort is that while social media is viewed as dangerous for children, abortion and contraception are not. In fact, a recent reprise of state laws on killing the preborn children of minors reveals that parental involvement in such a decision is not universally required.
It seems that killing preborn people is not deemed as bad as using social media when it comes to adolescents, which begs the question, Whatever happened to common sense? Apparently, it went out the window with the decriminalization of contraception and abortion. Lest we forget, pregnancy is not viewed in our nation as a wondrous event but rather as a disease that can be treated and eliminated.
Sexual assault that results in a pregnancy has also been under scrutiny of late due to the passage of the US Supreme Court Dobbs decision. The Journal of the American Medical Association reviewed rape-related pregnancies in 14 states where there are total abortion bans. But the truth is somewhat different.
According to Michael Cook of Mercatornet, “The authors admit that ‘rape-related pregnancy rates may have decreased since the publication of earlier studies due to increased use of emergency contraception.’ So does that mean that the figure is even less than 26,000? . . . Papers around the world relayed the claims made in the JAMA Internal Medicine study to their readers. It was the most-read article on the journal’s website. But news hounds and doctors failed to question the reliability of its lurid claims – especially in the light of the fact that all of the authors have links to the abortion industry.”
Again, fake news parades as actual documented truth, and those who hear it are none the wiser. This is how it goes when our land is populated with sheep who rarely bother to question things they hear or read in order to discern what is false and what is true.
Whether it is entertainment, government policy, or conversations among friends, when the information we are getting is not based on facts, people will be misled. This situation causes us to wonder how many among us are victims of such mindless discourse. Our concern is a critical one, especially when the subject is killing relabeled as choice or destructive medicine redefined as reproductive care.
That is what is truly mind-numbing.
image: Paolo Villanueva via Flickr | CC-2.0
