“[Our goal is] to be ready as educators and parents to help young people obtain sex satisfaction before marriage.” -Dr. Lena Levine, colleague of Margaret Sanger and medical secretary of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in the 1930s

“We are not going to be an organization promoting celibacy or chastity.” -Faye Wattleton, President of Planned Parenthood from 1978-1992

This summer, one of America’s largest community organization networks was “busted” thanks to the efforts of two college kids with nothing more than a video camera and a desire to expose the truth. The shocking footage of ACORN workers advising Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe on everything from tax evasion to sex trafficking to prostitution sparked a firestorm of controversy and cast doubt upon the credibility of an organization that receives millions in federal funds—funds purportedly used to assist low-income individuals in improving their lives.

Few are aware, however, that before this intrepid pair set their sights on ACORN, O’Keefe conducted a similar campaign against Planned Parenthood. In a series of recorded telephone calls to Planned Parenthood offices across the country, O’Keefe posed as a prospective donor who wanted his contributions restricted to funding the abortion of African-American babies. In each instance he was assured that his wishes would be honored; not once was he turned away or taken to task for his despicable views.

Some interpret this as damning evidence that Planned Parenthood still actively embraces the vision of its founder, Margaret Sanger, who openly advocated for the sterilization of “undesirables” like minorities, immigrants, and the handicapped; and who viewed birth control primarily as a means “to create a race of thoroughbreds.” While the organization would deny that its goal today is to “control” the growth of minorities, it is worth noting that minorities are disproportionately impacted by abortion, of which Planned Parenthood is the leading provider.

From a politically-correct and multicultural perspective, however, Sanger’s current relevance lies not in her eugenicist ideology, but in her legacy of advancing the feminist cause well before the word “feminism” made its way into our lexicon. She was among the first to champion the notion that a woman’s body was her own and that a woman had a right to choose life or death for her unborn child. Almost a century after Sanger opened America’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, NY, Planned Parenthood continues to champion this cause by waging a systematic campaign to liberate young people from the constraints of family and traditional sexual morality.

In spite of evidence indicating that responsible parenting plays a formative role in influencing children’s sexual choices, Planned Parenthood has worked to supplant parents as the definitive authority on kids and sex. Its unabashed advocacy of pre-marital sexual experimentation, promiscuity, and abortion reveals a radical anti-family agenda that has no respect or regard for the role of parents in guiding kids’ sexual choices, no use for the sexual mores that go along with the institution of marriage, and little concern for the emotional or physical health of children.

Unfortunately, few are aware of the extent to which the United States Congress has aided and abetted Planned Parenthood’s crimes against the American family.

Last year, Planned Parenthood received approximately $350 million from the government in the form of grants and contracts. This money subsidized, among other things, an estimated 300,000 abortions. That amounts to 822 abortions every day, or 34 abortions per hour. When Planned Parenthood isn’t busy ridding the world of unwanted children, it’s spending millions to influence public policy and ensure our children are hearing its “sex without consequence thanks to birth control and abortion” message early and often, on the taxpayer’s dime, in public school classrooms across America.

Planned Parenthood goes out of its way to downplay its role as an abortion provider, emphasizing on its website that abortion services only account for three percent of its annual business. What the organization fails to acknowledge, however, is the role it plays in perpetuating the kind of irresponsible and short-sighted attitudes that lead to unwanted pregnancies—and thus, abortions—in the first place.

According to its mission statement, “Planned Parenthood believes in the fundamental right of each individual, throughout the world, to manage his or her fertility…. We believe that reproductive self-determination must be voluntary and preserve the individual’s right to privacy. We further believe that such self-determination will contribute to an enhancement of the quality of life and strong family relationships.” In plain English, that means “Kids, don’t let your parents saddle you with any hang-ups about sex outside of marriage. Use birth control to prevent pregnancy, and if that fails, you can fall back on abortion. Don’t let an unwanted child interfere with your plans for life.”

It’s notable that Planned Parenthood’s mission statement says nothing about the fundamental responsibility of each individual to exercise self-control in the sexual arena. Planned Parenthood’s goal is sex without restraint or consequence. Its view was summed up by President Obama—an ardent supporter of Planned Parenthood—when, during his campaign, he said the mistake of an unwanted pregnancy is a “punishment” that should not have to be tolerated.

But, you can’t eliminate a pregnancy without eliminating the unborn child. Therefore, the abortion that Mr. Obama advocates and that Planned Parenthood provides actually results in the “punishment” of an innocent party. Where’s the justice in that?

Until we repudiate the false notion that we can have sex without consequence and abortion without injury, organizations like Planned Parenthood will continue their government-assisted campaign to sexualize our children. A step in the right direction would be for Congress to defund Planned Parenthood and stop interfering with parents’ rightful role in educating their children about sex.

Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon and the National Security Council’s Senior Director for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Dan Restrepo, visited the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, on Wednesday to compel the country’s recalcitrant democrats to make a deal with the man the latter had lawfully removed from the presidency on June 28th. It remains to be seen whether, pursuant to this deal, ex-President Manuel Zelaya will now be - as he claims - restored to power.  What is already unmistakable, though, is that it is better to be a foe of America than its friend.

The Obama administration has been on the wrong side in this affair from the moment the Honduran supreme court and congress acted as required by their nation’s constitution in the face of Zelaya’s effort to engineer an illegal second term.  Instead of standing with those who lawfully protected democracy, President Obama and his minions immediately joined the region’s authoritarians - including notably Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Castro brothers - in declaring Zelaya a victim of a “coup.”

When the interim Honduran president, Roberto Micheletti, a member of Zelaya’s own party, and his countrymen refused to reinstall the latter, Team Obama unleashed their full “soft power” arsenal upon America’s impoverished ally.  Drawing upon an opinion authored by notorious transnationalist Harold Koh, the State Department’s Legal Advisor, which found that the Hondurans’ action was indeed a “coup” and must be reversed, the U.S. administration and/or its allies on Capitol Hill: cut off most aid to Honduras; issued travel warnings to discourage tourism; blocked visas for officials of the interim government; tried to preclude fact-finding missions to Tegucigalpa by Republican legislators; and promoted the heavy-handed, pro-Zelaya “diplomacy” of the Organization of American States’ leftist Chilean secretary general, José Miguel Insulza.

As the Honduran democrats refused to bend to such coercion, Obama’s team dropped the big one:  The United States would join the hemisphere’s large and growing block of authoritarian nations in refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the election scheduled for the end of this month.

The effect of this power-play would be to deny the people of Honduras the one peaceful means they would have to end the nightmare Zelaya unleashed.  Representatives of all of the parties, including Zelaya’s, were anxious to have the elections go forward as planned and, on the basis of free and fair balloting, democratically select a new president.  During their visit last week, however, the American officials - joined by the widely reviled U.S. Ambassador to Tegucigalpa Hugo Llorens - evidently made the Hondurans, as mafia godfather Vito Corleone would say, “an offer they can’t refuse.”

According to the resulting deal, it will be up to the Honduran high court and legislature to decide whether Manuel Zelaya will be restored to power for the remaining three months of what was once his term in office. As both acted in the first place to depose him, that would not seem likely.

But with the likes of Harold Koh, Tom Shannon and Dan Restrepo calling the shots, the would-be dictator may be right when, according to the Associated Press he claimed on Friday that the “U.S.-brokered pact will restore him to power in about a week.”  In addition to authoring the opinion that justified Obama’s hard line on the Honduran democrats, Koh is fixated on having international norms (for example, opposing “coups”) trump national sovereignty (for example, the Honduran constitution).

Worse yet, as Nicolle Ferrand points out in the Center for Security Policy’s Americas Report, Shannon was no help to Latin American friends of freedom during his tenure in the Bush administration.  That profile would certainly square with a report in Honduras’ El Pais newsapaper on Sunday that Shannon is now lobbying legislators there to allow Zelaya’s restoration.

Then, there is Dan Restrepo, yet-another problematic product of John Podesta’s left-wing Center for American Progress (CAP) - an organization whose staffing of and influence over the Obama administration is extremely worrisome.  Ferrand speculates that Restrepo’s attachment to Zelaya’s restoration may have something to do with his sympathy for the radical drug-legalization agenda of George Soros, a key CAP benefactor.  After all, among Zelaya’s other misdeeds, the ousted president stands accused of being deeply involved in the narco-trafficking that Chavez and the Colombian FARC have increasingly used Honduran territory to conduct.

At the very least, it is predictable that Venezuela and other Chavista regimes will be doing all they can to intervene in Honduras’ pending decisions about Comrade Zelaya’s fate.  They surely will calculate that, with the Americans forcing open the door to their man’s return to power, the more trouble they threaten or foment in Honduras, the more likely it is that he will be allowed to walk through it.

There has been a “coup” alright in Honduras.  America’s friends there have been undercut and demeaned.  This country’s many enemies in the region have been encouraged to redouble their attempt to hijack yet another of its few remaining democracies.  And the United States is diminished by demonstrating that it is willing to use its influence and leverage to hurt the former and help the latter.  Whether Manuel Zelaya actually regains the presidency or not, last week’s “deal” represents a coup for the Obama Doctrine.

“Backed by some of the most powerful members of the Senate, a little-noticed provision in the healthcare overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses. The provision was inserted by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) with the support of Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry and the late Edward M. Kennedy, both of Massachusetts, home to the headquarters of the Church of Christ, Scientist.”

The following are past quotes from Sen. Kerry:

“There is a separation of church and state in America and we have prided ourselves about that all of my lifetime, all of our history.”

“I believe that I can’t legislate or transfer to another American citizen my article of faith.”

The following are past quotes from the late Sen. Kennedy:

“The separation of church and state can sometimes be frustrating for women and men of deep religious faith. They may be tempted to misuse government in order to impose a value which they cannot persuade others to accept.”

“I do not assume…that my convictions about religion should command any greater respect than any other faith in this pluralistic society.”

Catholic League president Bill Donohue had this to say:

Finally, Kerry and Kennedy found a religion they could publicly endorse and whose beliefs they find worthy of a federal subsidy.

The Catholic Church led the fight in Maine against those seeking to reinvent marriage, and won: the vote was 53-47 to repeal the state’s gay marriage law. Bishop Richard Malone deserves credit for fighting against those who sought to restructure this vital institution. Those who favor the right of two men to marry are now 0 for 31 in the states. The people have spoken. The time has come for homosexuals to pack it in.

Those who champion gay marriage and abortion-on-demand lost in New Jersey and Virginia, posting more wins for Catholic values. Jon Corzine supports the right of two men to marry and is a radical on the question of abortion. Creigh Deeds is worse: he once opposed partial-birth abortion but later switched in favor of it; similarly, he said he was opposed to gay marriage but then campaigned against a state constitutional amendment to ban it. At least Corzine was honest. In any event, the defeat of Corzine and Deeds is a victory for marriage and children.

There is one piece of unfinished business: the defeat of health care legislation that forces the public to pay for the killing of children in utero, and eliminates conscience rights for doctors and nurses. The bishops have spoken clearly on this subject. While they want health care reform, and are especially vocal about the need to help the poor, they will not support any bill that funds abortion. Nor will they support any legislation that vitiates conscience rights. President Obama, who says he is opposed to any health care bill that funds abortion, and is against nixing conscience rights, has never once registered any displeasure with current bills that do just that. Deeds tried to fool the people, and look what happened to him—he got creamed.

It was a big night for Catholic values. Hope everyone gets the message.

The Strasbourg court found that, “The compulsory display of a symbol of a given confession in premises used by the public authorities … restricted the right of parents to educate their children in conformity with their convictions.”

“The presence of the crucifix … could easily be interpreted by pupils of all ages as a religious sign and they would feel that they were being educated in a school environment bearing the stamp of a given religion,” the court said in a statement, adding the presence of such symbols could be “disturbing for pupils who practiced other religions or were atheists.”

The seven judges ruling on the case added that crucifixes in the classroom also restricted the “right of children to believe or not to believe,” according to the statement quoted by AFP news agency.

The case was brought to the Human Rights Court by Soile Lautsi, a mother of two from Abano Terme, near Padua, on the grounds that her children were being influenced by having to attend a school that had crucifixes in every room.

Ruling that this contradicted the separation of Church and state in Italy the court awarded her 5,000 euros (7,400 dollars) in damages.

The court did not, however, order the Italian authorities to remove the crucifixes, and the Italian Government said that it would appeal to the European Court of Human Rights’ Grand Chamber, according to the ANSA news agency.

The ruling has sparked an uproar throughout the country, with religious leaders and politicians condemning the ruling using words such as “abhorrent,” “offensive,” “pagan,” and “spineless.”

“This is an abhorrent ruling,” said Rocco Buttiglione, a former culture minister.

“It must be rejected with firmness. Italy has its culture, its traditions and its history. Those who come among us must understand and accept this culture and this history,” he said.

Mariastella Gelmini, the Minister for Education, said that the ruling was “an offence against our traditions.”

“The presence of a crucifix in the classroom does not signify adherence to Roman Catholicism, rather it is a symbol of our tradition,” Gelmini told the ANSA news agency. She pointed out that, “The history of Italy is marked by symbols and if we erase symbols we erase part of ourselves. No one, and certainly not an ideological European court, will succeed in erasing our identity.”

“It is not by eliminating the traditions of individual countries that a united Europe is built,” Gelmini stated.

Mario Baccini, a senator in Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government, said the European Court of Human Rights had “gone adrift in paganism,” while Pierferdinando Casini of the opposition Union of Christian Democrats party said the ruling showed that the European Union’s institutions were “spineless” in their failure to acknowledge the continent’s Christian roots.

Vatican spokesman, Rev. Federico Lombardi, said he wanted to see the ruling and the reasons behind it before commenting, whereas the Italian Bishops Conference said that the verdict was “one sided and ideological,” and “evokes sadness and bewilderment.”

Then there was Obama’s August webcast address to 140,000 religious leaders, whom he urged to “knock on doors, talk to neighbors, spread the facts, and speak the truth” because “there are some folks out there who are, frankly, bearing false witness.” Clearly we’ve got to find and stop those liars, and the Obama administration has tried to so. On August 4th, it set up a web page and email box for people to use to inform on their lying neighbors. Quoting the web page:

There is a lot of disinformation about health-insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end-of-life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health-insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov .

Fortunately the informer mail box lasted only two weeks, ultimately being taken down because of a growing concern about how this information might be used. But Joseph Bottum is right: This whole thing reveals something fundamental about both the Obama administration and the prejudices of our social elites.

First, it is extraordinarily revealing that anyone—anyone —in the Obama administration could have thought it a good thing to solicit citizens to inform on each other when they express negative opinions about administration policy. Coupled with the President’s direct intrusion into elementary schools and his instructions to religious leaders about how to exercise their ministry and even write their sermons (any of which, taken alone, might not be so terribly odious), it seems fair to say that this reveals how perilously close to totalitarian thinking extreme liberals like Obama have come. That Obama is highly Messianic in his rhetoric, in his leadership style, and in the adulation he receives from his followers doesn’t tell the half of it.

Second, it is extraordinarily revealing once again how biased are the default acceptable positions in the United States, for all of this occurred without the President’s reputation being significantly tarnished. We may well ask what the reaction would have been if a Republican administration, or any conservative or traditional religious leader, had done any of these things. Imagine the righteous outcry, the total condemnation, the personal vilification. Again, Bottum is right on target: There is an instinctive one-sidedness at work among our American liberal elites that derives from an established orthodoxy of mere opinion. This one-sidedness takes a very simple form: We are trustworthy; they are not. We can do many things on our side that we would feel bound to denounce if the other side did them, for the other side cannot be trusted, whereas we can.

It is unusual to see this prejudice revealed with such clarity, though it has long been at work. We sometimes even encounter it in email correspondence at CatholicCulture.org . Some defend their political positions (including the support of abortion) with the complacent conviction that at least the people they are voting for are not money-grubbing Republicans who look out only for themselves and don’t care about anybody else. It seems that even some nominally Catholic voters decide weighty issues based almost entirely on their certain knowledge that liberal Democrats are fundamentally good and trustworthy while conservative Republicans are fundamentally selfish and duplicitous. It boggles the mind, but the evidence for this prejudice is extraordinarily strong. Facts and rational argument do not enter into it. And no, I don’t believe that all conservative Republicans are trustworthy and all liberal Democrats are untrustworthy. I am merely calling attention to the prevailing opposite prejudice.

I don’t claim any originality here. I am primarily summarizing the important points made by Joseph Bottum in First Things . But the even more recent attempt by the White House to exclude Fox News from press briefings is another case in point. Fox tends to be critical of Obama, it dominates cable news, and it has been targeted as network non grata by the Administration. To the credit of the Washington bureau chiefs of CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN, the other networks saw this exclusion of Fox as the attack on democracy and freedom of the press that it surely was. They refused to participate if Fox were excluded, and the White House backed down.

That’s great, certainly. What’s not so great is that most of us were at least mildly surprised that the other networks took that stand. Apparently, unlike President Obama, they don’t yet think they are God’s partners in matters of life and death. And, biased or not, since they aren’t God’s partners, they have declined a share in Obama’s Messiahship. They prefer—and rightly—to leave room for opposing views.

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However, those worried that a government takeover of health care will result in health care rationing in keeping with Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel’s “complete lives” theory view these studies with alarm—and for good reason. In a culture where “quality of life” is increasingly viewed as the predominant justification for abortion, assisted suicide, and even infanticide, there is a legitimate concern that these kinds of studies will be used by the government to advance policies that endanger society’s most vulnerable members.

The pivotal question is not whether difficult end-of-life decisions must sometimes be made, or whether—as the NIH studies indicate—sometimes the best decision is to forego heroic measures in favor of simply keeping a patient comfortable in his or her final days. The traditions of hospice and palliative care, for example, both work to keep dying individuals in a state of dignity and comfort without resorting to extraordinary, and ultimately futile, measures. The question is who should make these decisions.

Government-run health care has ominous implications because it supplants individual doctor-patient relationships with generalized protocols crafted by bureaucrats who have no way of accounting for the particular needs of the human beings affected by them. These protocols are often drafted with cost-cutting goals and resource management in mind—not the criteria most want at the top of the list when it comes to life and death medical care.

At many hospitals and nursing homes in the United Kingdom, for example, elderly patients deemed close to death are placed in a “care pathway” designed to ease the dying process and conserve medical resources. Once it is determined that a patient is near death, life sustaining fluids and medicines are withdrawn and the patient is placed under heavy sedation. As bioethicist Wesley J. Smith describes it, “the Pathway misuses the legitimate treatment of palliative sedation, and mutates it in some cases into a method of causing death, known as terminal sedation. This means that sedation is sometimes administered, not because the individual patient actually needs the procedure, but because he or she has been reduced to a category member, and that’s how members of the category are treated.” When this kind of one-size-fits-all approach is employed, casualties are inevitable. One man has already lost his life due to the misapplication of England’s bureaucratic approach to end-of-life care.

At the other end of life’s spectrum, last month a woman in England was forced to watch her premature infant struggle to survive without medical care for hours before finally dying on the delivery room table. The reason? Doctors told the new mother that “national regulations” prevented them from providing medical care because the baby was born two days too early to qualify for life-saving measures. In Canada, the government recently decided to end funding for a medication that adds an additional nine months to the lives of colon cancer patients. Why? “Clinical” evidence suggested that the additional months of life were not worth the cost of the medication.

In each of these situations, end-of-life decisions were made without the input of, and sometimes against the explicit wishes of, the individuals involved. These treatments are not being employed as one option among many—they are being imposed uniformly as a matter of policy.

Few would deny that some measure of reform is needed in the healthcare arena. Our country is on the threshold of a veritable Senior Tsunami; an enormous age wave is coming. As America increasingly becomes a mass geriatric society, large numbers of the elderly will soon need acute and long term care. Yet, even as the demand for medical care is increasing, Medicare funds are in short supply, and something’s got to give.

But if our leaders in Washington are unable or unwilling to come up with a uniquely American solution to this problem, and if the looming healthcare crisis continues to be exploited by leaders on the Left simply as a means to a greater ideological end, there is good reason to fear that the cold comfort of England’s “care pathway” approach to end-of-life care may be coming soon to a hospital near you.

So many poems, so many stories, so little space to use them all! Let’s settle on The Masque of the Red Death and see where that leads us. The tale begins with Prince Prospero gathering a thousand of his friends “into the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys” to seal them from a pestilence, the “Red Death,” which had claimed half of his countrymen. Within this secure confine these masquerading waltzers revel in the company of buffoons and ballet dancers, while cavorting through chambers where a kaleidoscope of colors sprays ghastly patterns across walls and floors. In one room, a giant ebony clock looms over all, sounding its “brazen lungs” on the hour, causing temporary surcease of frivolities. Into this mix enters a masked figure, “shrouded … in the habiliments of the grave,” with a physiognomy of a corpse dabbled in blood. His presence so enrages the prince that he assaults the stranger, only to drop dead in the encounter, as do all of his companions when they discover to their horror that the disembodied wraith was “untenanted by any tangible form.” At the last stroke of twelve, the ebony clock expires with the “last of the gay.”

What does this all mean? Poet Richard Wilbur explains that this windowless fortress represents a dream world whose inhabitants are free from the harshness of “waking temporal consciousness,” symbolized by the deathly figure draped in funereal garb speckled with blood. The ebony clock represents the inevitable countdown to the ruthless truth of reality, from which Poe spent his entire professional life trying to flee. Injecting the reality principle into the fantasies of the revelers destroys them and the world they inhabit.

So what does this have to do with politics? Plenty, especially if one no longer can make sense of stories about Washington’s revelers, whose antics defy normal categories of policy description and push to the farthest boundaries of political and economic sanity. A sampling: multi-trillion dollar deficits are projected for programs that somehow magically will save money, all while being opposed by a majority of the American people. Unemployment soars, in a world where fears of man-made global warming challenge Puff-the-Magic-Dragon for the award of the most favored fantasy of the decade. Charges are hurled against citizens who are regarded as cowards or children by those who haven’t the faintest idea of what lies outside the cocoon of Washington rhetoric. Patriots are prosecuted while psychopaths are protected; allies are betrayed, crucial decisions dithered on, adversaries appeased, dictators coddled, dissent dismissed with contempt and threatened by subtle hints of annihilation.

To some of us who once peppered our lawns with “I Like Ike” signs, whose eyes get watery with the sounds of patriotic music, and whose intellectual architecture includes John Phillip Sousa melodies and tales of Orson Wells’ attack of the Martians, it is all madness. It is Prince Prospero’s costumed specters whirling in masqueraded follies, insulated from the world and from the “red death” of reality. Even Poe would be challenged by such a lunatic environment; indeed, he should sue Washington for copyright infringement.

All of which leaves some with the feeling that what we are witnessing in our nation’s capital today simply cannot go on indefinitely; it is not “sustainable,” to use currently fashionable gibberish. A day of reckoning awaits us; or an apocalypse, call it what you will. Time and repetition have attenuated the shock value of facile comparisons to the Great Depression or banana republic economics. Something more profound is at work here, more disturbing. Call it deep anxiety, that creeping terror that hollowed out the souls of Poe’s characters, leaving them empty and quaking at the same time. Can a void tremble? Yes, it can, he taught us and experience confirms. We’re waiting for the reality principle to assert its truth, for that doleful clock to strike its final note.

God help us all when that time arrives for America.

Some recent comments by prominent Green advocates suggest that one of the simplest and most effective ways to reduce the global carbon footprint is to reduce the population.  As means to that end, they advocate aggressive birth control and abortion.  Their argument is simple enough: fewer people put less strain on natural resources, use less energy, and generate less pollution.  Wealthy countries, so the thinking goes, are particularly suited to implement this strategy because they have ready access to birth control and legalized abortion.

The “Extreme Green” are perfectly comfortable with encouraging members of the human species to destroy their young, but mortified that human beings would disturb an eagle’s nest or a turtle’s egg.  Setting aside this moral confusion, there are significant social and economic implications of population control policies on societies already struggling to cope with a rapidly aging population.

A quick look at the population trends of many of the world’s major industrialized nations reveals that these countries are dying—literally.  This problem has gotten so bad in places like Japan and Russia that their governments have established monetary incentives to encourage people to have more children.  While America is still relatively young and fruitful by comparison, there are many challenges on the horizon.  We are facing an enormous age wave as the leading edge of the Baby Boomers hits 65, seniors are living much longer than they used to, and entitlement programs for the elderly (Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security) are rapidly approaching bankruptcy.  In 1950, there were sixteen working Americans for every retiree.  In 2005, there were only three.  Since America’s entitlement programs are run on a pay-as-you-go basis—and with our widening age-gap—it’s clear that future generations will not see much of a return on their “investment” in these programs.

So the question arises: If Americans stop having children in the name of going “green,” who will sustain our society as it ages?  Who will finance housing, medicine, and other vital needs of the elderly?  Who will care for those unable to care for themselves in their twilight years?  How long before society’s young workers decide that they are tired of supporting an ever-growing cohort of retirees with their tax dollars and come to regard the elderly as expendable?  In the face of scarce economic resources, who’s likely to be deemed less worthy than others and pushed to the back of the line?

This mentality is already at work in the current debate over health care reform.  As America’s population ages and demand for healthcare resources threatens to outstrip supply, proponents of a centralized approach promote ideas like “comparative effectiveness” as a way to ensure an “optimal” distribution of those resources.  Elsewhere in the developed world, the rationing approach to health care is already a daily reality for the very young, the very old, and the terminally ill.

Apparently, however, these problems don’t register on the radar of the extreme environmentalists.  Through their myopic lens, humans are seen as a blight upon the earth that must be reduced and contained.  They view mankind as little more than “resource hogs.”

A more balanced perspective is needed—a humanistic (note the small “h”) perspective.  If western society wishes to preserve itself and occupy a healthy place in the future of the planet, it must restore the institutions of marriage and family to their rightful place and start having children again.  We should not sacrifice the vitality of Western society on the altar of a radical left-wing social agenda.  There are plenty of ways to live responsibly, reduce our carbon footprint, and care for the earth without making ourselves extinct.

Rev. Calvin O. Butts III has managed to grab “at least $7 million in city contracts” under Bloomberg for his church and non-profits.

Rev. Floyd H. Flake is awash in millions of dollars—make that $8 million—in city contracts for city services his church provides.

Rev. A.R. Bernard wins the trophy: the Bloomberg administration decided to sell parts of two streets to his Christian Cultural Center.

According to the article, Bloomberg “has deployed an unusual combination of city money, private philanthropy, political appointments and personal attention, creating a web of ties to black clergy members that is virtually unheard of for a white elected official in New York City.”

Look what Bloomberg got in return: he received the endorsements and “the blessings of the city’s most powerful black ministers, who together preach to tens of thousands of congregants each week.”

Where in the world are the church and state watchdogs when it comes to government aid to black churches? If Catholic priests had this kind of “relationship” with Bloomberg, all hell would break loose.

Once again, white liberal racism is at work: black ministers can endorse political candidates with impunity, but woe to a Catholic priest who preaches against abortion. Moreover, Catholics are still waiting for Bloomberg to say it’s okay to put a nativity scene in the classroom alongside the Jewish religious symbol, the menorah. We don’t even want the mayor to buy us a street.