News and Views from around the World
Tennessee law requires public schools to show development of unborn babies
On April 23, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed the "Baby Olivia Act" into law, requiring public schools to show school children a "high-quality, computer-generated animation or high-definition ultrasound" of unborn babies developing in the womb.The law takes its name from Live Action's 3¼-minute computer-animated video, "Baby Olivia", depicting fertilisation and foetal development from conception, including "the development of the brain, heart and other vital organs in early foetal development".
The video goes on to depict milestone events of early foetal development with vivid computer animation, including the emergence of a detectable heartbeat at 22 days from conception, and recordable brain activity at six weeks from fertilisation.
Despite its scientific accuracy and sophisticated animation, vehemently pro-abortion individuals have taken umbrage at the Baby Olivia video, claiming it is "propaganda".
The bill's sponsor, Senator Janice Bowling, has defended the video as "medically correct". John Stonestreet and Timothy Padgett of Breakpoint Colson Center have pointed out that another Live Action video depicting abortion procedures "demonstrated that when people are confronted with the truth about what an unborn child is and what abortion actually does, a significant number will abandon (or at least question) their pro-abortion positions".
Excerpt from by Emily Mangiaracina, LifeSiteNews
(Canada/USA), April 27, 2024.
Trump alienates pro-life voters in election year
Donald Trump delivered another blow to ardent pro-lifers following the decision by the Arizona Supreme Court that the state reinstitute an 1864 ban on abortion at all stages of pregnancy with exceptions only for the life of the mother.
The Arizona Supreme Court did what the former president seemingly wanted: The issue of abortion was in the hands of the state, and the state acted accordingly. Arizona's decision should be seen as a win for the pro-life movement and for the rule of law.
But Trump took to the social media once more to lament the ruling: "The Supreme Court of Arizona went too far on their Abortion Ruling, enacting and approving an inappropriate Law from 1864," he wrote. "So now the Governor and the Arizona Legislature must use HEART, COMMON SENSE, and ACT IMMEDIATELY, to remedy what has happened."
Why would Trump be so against Arizona's abortion ban if he truly believed that abortion regulation should be left up to individual states? A "remedy" is not necessary — the law was followed, and now more Arizonan babies will be allowed to live.
Excerpt from Anastasia Kaliabakos, The American Conservative, April 13, 2024.
Melania Trump raises $1 million for homosexual Republican group at gala event
Donald Trump's wife, Melania, reportedly launched an "unprecedented" GOP campaign to court homosexuals at an event for the Log Cabin Republicans, which promotes homosexual "marriage" and adoption and says identifying as "LGTBQ" should be "celebrated".
Saturday's event, held in the Trump-owned Mara-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, was apparently a small gathering of deep-pocketed homosexuals and others who support the Log Cabin Republicans' agenda, which includes further codifying homosexual "marriage" in law, a nationwide ban on so-called "conversion therapy", and forcing government-assisted adoption agencies to place children in same-sex households at the expense of their safety and wellbeing.
Excerpt from Doug Mainwaring, LifeSiteNews (Canada/USA), April 22, 2024.
Finnish MP to stand trial for third time
for tweeting Bible verse
Former government minister and sitting Finnish parliamentarian Päivi Räsänen (a Lutheran) will stand trial a third time for her Bible-verse tweet, the Supreme Court of Finland has confirmed.
The State prosecutor appealed the case despite the Christian grandmother of 11 being acquitted unanimously of "hate speech" charges before both the Helsinki District Court, and the Court of Appeal.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear that appeal on a date to be set in the future.
Räsänen, who previously served as Finland's Minister of the Interior, stands criminally charged for sharing her faith-based views on marriage and sexual ethics, in a 2019 tweet, and in a 2004 pamphlet which she wrote for her church, centred on the Biblical text, "male and female he created them".
Excerpt from The Catholic Herald (UK), April 19, 2024.
'Normophobia': the new bigotry
Normophobia frames everything conventional, average, given, assumed, traditional, and normative — whether its origin be physiological or cultural — as arbitrarily and coercively constructed to support vested interests, particularly those of white, Christian, heterosexual men. Normophobia is parasitic on human nature, whose givens it promises to abolish in the name of individual desire, even as it uses the resilience of social structures and normal physiology to its own depredations as evidence of its own harmlessness. And over the last half-century or so, conservatives have ceded almost all ground to this parasite ideology.
Above all, it is children who pay the price. Though the effects of divorce are mitigated by wealth, studies show that even the children of well-off demographics are harmed when their parents break up. And the impact of normophobia on children extends well beyond family structure. As children's rights campaigner Katy Faust has observed, a central feature of this ideology is its inversion of the normal caregiving relation between adults and children. That is, it asks children to make sacrifices in the name of adult desires.
Children's needs have not changed just because adult desires have grown more unruly. When we enforce culture-wide bigotry against social and embodied norms in the name of emancipation, we should be clear about what we're doing. We are asking children to accept less so that we, the adults, may have more, and hoping their resilience will be enough.
Excerpt from Mary Harrington, First Things (New York), April 2024.
