I wanted to make sure you saw this letter to Pastor Rick Warren we have posted at RedState.  In light of the recent reports about Barack Obama’s opposition to the Born Alive Infant Protect Act (legislation that would require life sustaining medical treatment for infants born alive despite an attempted abortion), the issues Hunter raises in this letter are too important to ignore.

We hope Pastor Warren will ask the tough questions, not just the popular questions.
Erick
 
The text of the letter, written by Redstate Contributor Hunter Baker, is below:

Dear Pastor Warren,

I am writing to you to express concern about something that may get lost when you host the candidate forum with John McCain and Barack Obama at Saddleback Valley Community Church which is likely to receive national attention. The decision to address you on this question in an open letter comes with some trepidation, but I have attempted to reach you through your media agency, the church email, and your personal email with no effect. I hope this message in a public forum will come to your attention instead of sitting unread in a pile of fan mail and requests for favors.

You see, I understand and appreciate who you are and what you’ve done. You are one of the most widely known pastors in the nation and have written one of the best-selling non-fiction books of the past several decades. I have many times walked into friends’ homes and have seen The Purpose-Driven Life sitting on coffee tables or bookshelves. When Time named you one of the most influential evangelicals in America, I agreed and applauded the selection.

During this period of well-deserved fame, you have been a good steward of the blessings God has provided. You gave away 90% of your massive royalties and repaid your church for years of salary. Instead of following the sometimes frivolous paths of other celebrity pastors, you focused in on the suffering of AIDS victims in Africa. You and your wife Kay have been outstanding role models. You have avoided making intemperate statements. Neither have you become some kind of caricature of the pastor in politics, ready to drop anything for a talking-heads appearance anywhere, anytime.

In your news release about the candidate forum, you suggest that you will avoid “gotcha” questions. The topics highlighted in the release are poverty, HIV/AIDS, climate and human rights with a special emphasis on character and leadership rather than programmatic details.

There is much to be said for rising above partisan politics. After all, the church is on a mission from God to all the earth. It is emphatically not intended to be a tool for either one of the political parties. We are after bigger game than a balanced budget, the right kind of welfare state, or term limits. We seek redemption for a world we believe has lost its way.

However, there are certain issues that demand the church’s involvement, issues of basic justice, issues of life and death. Perhaps the least ambiguous of those issues is the protection of babies throughout pregnancy and immediately after birth. We live in a culture that, strangely, acts as though unborn children are like genies that can be stuffed back into the bottle. We know that isn’t true. We know that abortions end with little piles of bloody flesh and bone. Fetuses don’t merely cease to exist. They experience violent physical death.

There are many doctrinal issues that divide Christians, but the protection of young life should not be one of them. Pastor Warren, as Protestants, we are part of a tradition that loves to point to the early church — the young church so pure in our estimation — still uncorrupted by the power of empire. That church, that persecuted church, was a tireless defender of life. Early Christians counseled against abortion and actively rescued infants exposed to the predators and the wild by Roman parents who vested few rights in human beings shortly after birth. A child of the wrong sex or one who looked weak could be abandoned. How strange it is that today a candidate claiming to be a Christian could oppose the Born Alive Infants Protection Act or a ban on partial birth abortion! To do so is to disclaim not only a major part of Christian teaching, but also a cultural advance in favor of protecting the weak and innocent.

Pastor, you know both John McCain and Barack Obama. You know where they stand on the protection of innocent human life. While it is a fine thing to allow both men to expound upon their experience, their leadership ability, and their attitudes toward challenges of the future like AIDS or climate change, I submit that you would do a disservice to your congregation and to the church at large if you host both candidates and ignore the issue that divides them more clearly than almost any other. Barack Obama has indicated a willingness to change his position on a number of issues, including drilling for oil, the way the Iraq war is conducted, and the proper understanding of gun ownership rights. But his position with regard to abortion rights is positively adamantine. Abortion on demand is non-negotiable. McCain, on the other hand, has consistently voted against a broad abortion license.

Some would respond to me, though I doubt you would, that I am emphasizing one issue unfairly. My answer is that this issue is basic. If the year were 1958, instead of 2008, do you think it would be right to host such a forum and ignore segregation, knowing one candidate was ardently in favor of the separation of the races? You and I both know that it would be wrong to gloss over a glaring breach of that kind. We both know many in the church were wrong in just that way. (It is a terrible irony of history that Mr. Obama now stands with those who favor the persistent removal of an entire class of human beings from legal protection through legal fiat. How I wish it were not so.)

My hope is that you will make no promise to leave the foundational issue of the sanctity of life untouched in this forum. If the lack of that promise means the forum may not take place, then I suggest it would be better to cancel it.

With respect,
Hunter Baker

It’ll be interesting to see if Rick Warren responds to Hunter Baker. I hope Rick doesn’t just give softball questions to Obama, the pro-abortion extremist, but he probably will, sadly.

Topeka, KS (LifeNews.com) — Very rarely does a sitting governor oppose fellow party members running for an election, but pro-abortion Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius is doing just that. The potential Barack Obama running mate is attacking a pro-life Democrat and supporting his primary opponent because she disagrees with his abortion stance.

LifeNews has an article detailing more censorship of the pro-life message:

Detroit, MI (LifeNews.com) — The popular video sharing web site YouTube is the subject of criticism again for removing a pro-life video exposing abortion. In this new case, YouTube took down a video from Citizens for a Pro-Life Society showing an abortion center that was investigated for illegally dumping medical waste.

 We also need to emphasize responsibility. If a couple don’t want a child yet, perhaps they should use a condom… what an idea. There’s also adoption, for those who decided to not use a condom.

Pro-abortion people often invoke the “choice” mantra. I’m all for choice–choice of what cell phone plan to buy, choice of what kind of car to buy, choice of school to attend. Everyone is for the choice of consenting adults to choose whom to have sex with of course, and rapists should be put away for the rest of their lives. Conservatives are often for many choices, from school choice to choice of bars to allow smoking to choice of what kind of food to buy. Liberals are often against many choices, but for the “choice” to kill a child.

 So squawking “choice” means nothing. It must be made specific. And no one should have the “choice” to kill her or his own child, just because the child is related to them, whether that child’s unborn, partially-born, or newborn. It’s no coincidence that many of the pro-abortion pundits, such as Anna Quindlen of Newsweek, advocate not only abortion-on-demand, but also killing embryos for their stem cells. She also has defended infanticide, by coming to the defense of Andrea Yates when she drowned her five children in her tub, sickenly mocking her detractors as “yappers!” Pure evil.

Showing love and responsibility means standing up for what’s right, even if it’s unpopular. Sadly, many people are too preoccupied with being “hip” and are too ignorant to realize that evil is often excused in the name of groupthink. I’m all for choice, and people should mind their own business most of the time.

Those rare exceptions when the government does have an interest is people’s business includes when a child or other innocent human being is being killed. That’s actually inline with the idea of choice, since the child has no choice to live or die, but the abortionist can choose to kill or let the child live.

We’ve got a long list of reasons NOT to vote for the pro-abortion extremist Barack Obama, who not only supports killing the unborn but partially born and newborn as well! sick. You may not agree with all of the reasons not to vote for him, but everyone should agree killing innocent human beings is wrong. Check out the list here: Reasons NOT to vote for Obama

In the political arena, I feel it appropriate to use the brutal realities of abortion. These would be the photos of aborted babies, and the *Abortion is murder* signs, but when approaching women on the issue of abotion, there must be a spirit of truthfulness, gentleness, and an attitude that says, *I care about you and your situation*. We can validate her and her feelings without approving of her decision (should it be abortion). We can share information about her choices so that she can make an informed decision. We can offer her emotional support, that says, *I still care for you even though you aborted*.

I write this after being educated. I thought that it was all about the baby. I had this vigilante mindset that I was going to save the babies. I just started the pursuit of being a counselor in a crisis pregnancy center with the intention of “saving babies”, but on the first day of training, I discovered the woman. I was taught that we would be serving women who have been through the ringer, and the situation they are in has them in such a moral and physical deilemmna. And my purpose was not to save their baby from destruction, my purpose was to care for her and minister to her where she is at. My purpose is to share information with her and then hope and pray she makes the right decision concerning her life.

I do not agree with abortion. I think that every woman who gets pregnant should carry the baby to term and either parent, or make an adoption plan for her baby. In a perfect world, this would happen. But since we live in an imperfect world, I urge you to consider the woman. I urge you to feel compassion for the struggle she’s in. I urge you to recognize the pain that the abortion causes her emotionally, physically and spiritually. There are sometimes circumstances that in her mind, although do not make her choice to abort “right” they force her into a decision that no woman should have to make.

So today, my thought is don’t forget about the women. They need people to care for them, and not pass judgment on them.

One of the main focuses of the article should be that no one knew the girl was pregnant.

“People who knew her at school said she wore baggy clothing, and nobody suspected she was pregnant, the Houston Chronicle reported Thursday.”

This girl’s classmates didn’t even suspect she was pregnant, and the parents aren’t mentioned at all in the article.  How could a 14-year-old girl go through an entire pregnancy and no one, least of all her parents, notice until she was giving birth in a school restroom?

The scary thing is that this doesn’t seem like a random occurence.

“The incident came just three days after another 14-year-old girl delivered a stillborn fetus in the bathroom of an airplane on her way back to Houston from a middle-school field trip. “

A similar situation 25 miles away in just three days? This should be addressed. Something needs to be done.

Perhaps the problem is that these girls don’t know any better. Perhaps the problem is that they do know better and that’s why they tried to hide it. Perhaps the problem lies not with the girls, but with their teachers, parents, role models, etc.

Something caused these girls to become pregnant. I’m pretty sure the number 1 cause of pregnancy is sex. I’m even going to go out on a limb and assume these girls became pregnant because they weren’t taught about safe-sex, if they were taught anything about sex at all. (The alternative is that they just didn’t care, which is a more frightening possibility.) If we as a society do not educate our children about the “adult world” that they are becoming a part of at younger ages, there will be more news stories exactly like this one.

We need to step it up. We need to have more education about such matters in our schools instead of just ignoring it and hoping that parents will teach their kids about sex, because obviously some parents aren’t doing that. These children - yes, a 14-year-old is still a child - missed something. Whether it was information about sex,  safe-sex or even other alternatives such as adoption, whatever they missed could have prevented these tragedies.

Something has to be done.

A common argument from pro-abortion activists is that women will die by the thousands if abortion is made illegal. In the 1960s, the argument was used to prompt the legalization of abortion. It is still used today.

The evidence against this myth actually comes from PRO-abortionists. Former director of Planned Parenthood gave information to the contrary in 1960:

“Abortion is no longer a dangerous procedure. This applies not just to therapeutic abortions as performed in hospitals but also to so-called illegal abortions as done by physician. In 1957 there were only 260 deaths in the whole country attributed to abortions of any kind…Second, and even more important, the conference [on abortion sponsored by Planned Parenthood] estimated that 90 percent of all illegal abortions are presently being done by physicians…Whatever trouble arises usually arises from self-induced abortions, which comprise approximately 8 percent, or with the very small percentage that go to some kind of non-medical abortionist…So remember…abortion, whether therapeutic or illegal, is in the main no longer dangerous, because it is being done well by physicians.”

Imagine the response! Someone for legal abortion was saying that it wouldn’t make a difference! If abortion is made illegal, women will still find physicians that will cater to their wants and perform abortions. There’s no need for the back-alley dangers that are suggested.

Dr. Bernard Nathanson, former director of NARAL (the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League) now speaks against abortion. In 1979, Nathanson wrote a book, Aborting America, in which he wrote:

How many deaths were we talking about when abortion was illegal? In NARAL, we generally emphasized the frame of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it was always 5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year. I confess that I knew that the figures were totally false and I suppose that others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the ‘morality’ of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics? The overriding concern was to get the laws eliminated, and anything within reason that had to be done was permissible.”

Proof that the “thousands of deaths” are nothing more than a desperate scare tactic.
In 1972, the year before the Roe vs. Wade decision, the CDC reported ONLY 39 maternal deaths from illegal abortion. 39? That is a vast difference from the alleged 5,000-10,000.

 One could argue that abortions are more dangerous now that they are legal. Think about this:

How can there be any real safety in an environment where the main concern is to perform as many abortions as possible in order to increase the abortionist’s profit margin?

Abortionists want money. Abortions are their job, their way to get money. Can we honestly expect them to take precious time to go through every safety precedure if they are protected by law? The answer to that, quite simply, is no. Legalized abortion does not protect women. It does the opposite.

An Open Letter to Relevant Magazine:

Relevant Editorial;

I’ve written a few online articles for you back when you were first starting.

I am just writing to ask why you use misleading pro-abortion vernacular in your recent issue with the huge mug of Rob Bell on the front cover. You mention the pro-abortion politicans’ stances on abortion as “pro-choice.” The term “pro-choice” was cynically concocted by population control advocates such as Lawrence Lader of the Population Council (and founder of National Abortion Rights Action League) when selling the idea of abortion to the 60’s feminists, in order to reduce the populations of the poor and minorities. Bernard Nathanson, the co-founder of NARAL, later became pro-life after “performing” thousands of “abortions” and detailed all of this in interviews and his book, Hand of God. ALL early feminists, including suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to Alice Paul Walker were pro-life. They saw abortion as just another way to dehumanize women. Even recently, the husband of the lawyer in the Roe v. Wade case wrote then-President Bill Clinton to legalize the morning after pill in order to kill more poor people (this letter was found in the Clinton presidential library and exposed by Judicial Watch).

The Associated Press style guide, while somewhat biased itself, suggests using “abortion rights advocate” to describe pro-abortion politicians and “anti-abortion” to describe pro-life politicians. That would be better than using the propagandistic and misleading term, “pro-choice.” Pro-choice to do what? Own a slave? You’d be pro-slavery then, not the simplistic and misleading “pro-choice.” It’s insane that some people who call themselves Christians object to genocide in Darfur then turn the other way and ignore the genocide of abortion, the killing of an innocent, living human being. According to one of your polls, over 50 percent of people think that Christians can be pro-abortion (or for abortion “rights” as your magazine put it). That is sickening and evil. Can Christians be for the raping and killing of darfur refugees? No. And they can’t be for the killing of innocent human beings. I know that was just an unscientific poll and not your writing, but that points to a sad and ignorant culture that doesn’t know what the euphemism of abortion is or doesn’t care and is therefore morally vapid.

You call pro-abortion politicians “pro-choice” but say that pro-life politicians “consider themselves pro-life,” as if they really aren’t and that’s their own label. Why add the “consider” tag to just the pro-life candidates, as if their label is somehow innacurate but the other one isn’t? Please be honest in your labeling: pro-life people are against abortion and also infanticide, the killing of newborns and infants, euthanasia, and the killing of embryos for research and experimentation (embryonic stem cell research, which isn’t needed at all due to recent scientific advancements). In other words, “pro-life” is, indeed, an honest description of the position, while “pro-abortion” is also honest and much more accurate than the misleading and incomplete “pro-choice” mantra.

You feature a hi-res face of Rob Bell, who teaches that the Bible isn’t really all true (like Mary being a virgin) and other heresies. Bell, adopting the vernacular of 9-11 insider wackos, states that the war in Iraq is “for oil.” If it were for oil, then why are we losing billions of dollars because of the war and not making money off the oil? That’s just pure propaganda. I was against the Iraq War from the start because I was afraid of the sectarian violence that would ensue afterwards: I actually knew what Shiite and Sunni were before this whole mess. But that doesn’t mean I believe irrational and illogical fantasies about the war being “for oil.” Only a truly ignorant person who is not well-read would believe such Michael Moore-style nonsense and misinformation. Just because Rob Bell is extremely popular doesn’t mean what he is teaching is true. In fact, we should think critically even more as a person gains a huge following. He may have some good points, but be brave and point out where he contradicts the word of God instead of just trying to please men. We should please God.

Since when did Relevant turn so relativist/left wing? Try to read outside of Brian McLaren’s hip heresies and read something that might challenge you! McLaren has stated that the Bible is just a good story and not literally true, that he is a fan of the people behind the Jesus Seminar (the people who say that Jesus didn’t literally raise from the dead), and has refused to say that homosexuality is a sin. He puts Christianity on the same level as all religions, basically insinuating Jesus lied when he said he was the Way. He also believes in universalism, which is unbiblical and untrue.

This same issue features an article by Jim Wallis, a left-wing activist who advises pro-abortion politicians such as Howard Dean. He may not be as out there as some, but why only focus on “hip” left-wing speakers, many of who contradict the Bible?

The truth is not found inside misleading vernacular or celebrity-driven hysteria. Why not interview deeper thinkers or people who believe in the Word of God? Why focus on Moby, a pro-abortion relativist, and let him complain about the Church, as if he’s so much better? Yes, the church has problems, but do we need Moby to tell us? Why focus on Rob Bell, who only wants to please man and never offend anyone except Bible-believing Christians, when the gospel itself is offensive to many? “For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.” 2nd Timothy 4:3

Chad
Culture Jam for Life
www.culturejamforlife.com

It is the opinion of some in the medical field that during an abortion a baby can actually feel the pain.  This year in Indiana, Senate bill 146 will determine whether or not women who are considering abortion will be required to learn about the ability of their baby to feel pain.  (More information about the Indiana bill here.)

At a mere 20 days after conception, the foundations of a baby’s brain, spinal cord, and nervous system are formed.  At 4-5 weeks after conception, before some women even realize they are pregnant, the pain receptors are formed.  That means the baby can feel pain.  Before the mother even thinks about abortion, the baby inside her is growing and developing. 

Mechanisms that inhibit or moderate the experience of pain do not begin to develop until weeks 30-32. Any pain the unborn child experiences before these mechanisms form is likely worse than the pain an older child or adult experiences.

The unborn’s experience of pain may actually be heightened.

How can we as moral and just human beings knowingly subject the future generations of our race to this incomprehensible torture?

There is no way to justify it, except by admitting that we ourselves are either immoral or unjust.

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