Louisiana Passes Amendment Saying There Is No Constitutional Right to Abortion
Louisiana voters passed an amendment to the state constitution Tuesday evening establishing that there is no constitutional right to an abortion.
The New York Times reported that 62% of Louisiana voters supported Amendment 1, “Love Life Amendment,” an amendment stating that nothing in the Louisiana state constitution protects the right to abortion or abortion funding. Louisiana also has a trigger law automatically banning all abortions if Roe v. Wade is overturned, according to NBC News.
“We are protecting our state’s taxpayer dollars and reaffirming Louisiana’s pro-life stance. We also believe that our people should have a say in this,” said the sponsor of the measure, Democratic state Sen. Katrina Jackson, NBC News reported.
“We’ve been working hard to get the word out about what this amendment does and what it doesn’t do,” added Louisiana Right to Life Associate Director Angie Thomas. “This amendment will make sure that Louisiana’s current pro-life laws are protected and can’t be undermined by a couple of judges.”
Abortion advocates argued that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, the amendment unfairly impacts access to abortion.
“We have several cases heading towards the Supreme Court, and any one of them could be a case that undermines abortion rights or overturns abortion protections,” Associate Director of State Issues at the Guttmacher Institute Elizabeth Nash told NBC News.
Michelle Erenberg, executive director of the abortion rights group Lift Louisiana, said the amendment is part of a long strategy to strip the right to an abortion.
“This is a critical moment for an amendment like this to be on the ballot,” added Erenberg. “If we do see Roe v. Wade overturned, it would be used to bolster and solidify the Legislature’s efforts to outright ban abortion in the state.”
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of this original content, email licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
History Demands We Wake Up the Woke
Editorial cartoonist Branco recently designed artwork showing an Antifa donkey with BLM explosives in its hand threatening America with, “Biden wins or the country gets it.”
At first blush, it seems extreme. But is it?
Most liberal “woke” do not participate in violence. But their blind silence on riots and authoritarianism perpetrated by their fellow leftists is a mindless stab in the heart of their own future liberty.
They refuse to view anything that doesn’t fit what they believe is their compassionate narrative, and seem oblivious to the human cost of socialism and its better-dressed uncle, communism. Thinking Constitutional protections only apply to them, they holler “love not hate” while normalizing censorship and threats to anyone who disagrees with their left-wing talking points.
It is almost as if history doesn’t exist for the woke. Yet Americans who have fled oppressive regimes know the erosion of human rights at the core of leftism and socialism doesn’t occur overnight.
Like Katarina Lindley, a successful family physician who is a leader in the osteopathic family physician community, and a board member for DPC Action, an organization supporting doctor/patient-based healthcare reforms.
She started out as Katarina Sokolic, a Croatian girl born in Soviet Yugoslavia in the 1970s behind the Iron Curtain of hunger and despair.
Katarina learned about oppression early when instructed to keep her family’s religious faith secret as it could cause her father to lose his job in a time of unrelenting unemployment. She escaped her homeland in its early post-Soviet phase, trading violence and suffering under a different leftist regime for America.
According to Katarina, “it took years to realize Yugoslavia was not ‘utopia.’ Eventually, everything was controlled by government, and freedom of thought was highly discouraged.”
Midwest physician “Elizabeth Williams” fled Liberia at 14. Her family was chased off ancestral lands by leftist Liberian president Charles Taylor after her father spoke against Taylor’s suppression of speech.
As Elizabeth notes, “first they didn’t allow us to air our views. That led to their stealing our entire lives.”
Left-wing violence destabilized Colombia for decades, and led to wholesale murder of hundreds of thousands and displacement of millions. Young “Enrique Velez,” who now lives in the Washington, DC area, recalls “my family saw kidnapping and extortion of friends and family.
“My parents made the difficult decision to join millions of displaced people after my father was held up and threatened by leftist groups. In America, we finally felt safe. Many families do not get the opportunity to flee here. We pray this country never experiences the same thing.
These now-liberated Americans have real fear for our future. The obliviousness of the woke heightens that fear.
Socialism was previously abhorrent to Americans, but has been sold to America’s youth as “progress,” thanks in part to the false, glorified view Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders presents of central control. It has permeated the ranks of the Democrat’s progressive leaders.
The socialism embraced by the wokes has a history of global oppression. Chairman Mao “freed” Chinese peasants by murdering 45 million of them. National Socialist Adolf Hitler harnessed his leftist power base by murdering six million Jews. Wikipedia has an entire page dedicated to “Mass killing under communist regimes.”
Totalitarianism starts out as the rhetorically more benign socialism. First they come for books and newspapers, then guns, then property, then people’s lives.
The woke may argue these horrors would never come to America. But if they opened their eyes and their minds, they’d know it’s already here, and they are ushering it in.
Social and mainstream media are suppressing and censoring content critical of the Democrat candidate for president. Citizens participating in a New York Jews for Trump convoy were attacked and children threatened with pepper spray by a leftist demonstrator. Liberal officials are closing houses of worship but allowing leftist riots.
Antifa and Black Lives Matter are radical left/Marxist groups who do not embrace peace. Their rioting and blind eye toward looting has cost countless billions and robbed minority and immigrant business owners of life savings and livelihoods. These groups and their woke supporters do not free people—they enslave them to tyrannical mobs and oppressive government.
History is a lesson book. Americans who lived it, or understand it, must explain to the woke that they are sleeping through a montage that heralds an oppression which will eventually include them.
Thanks to liberal educators and entertainment culture, young people are not even aware that socialism is the precursor of abject misery, and the loss of even the smallest of freedoms.
Kat Lindley says America is a beacon of hope. Katarina Sokolic fears a nation that loses its liberties to the deliberately misinformed will never get it back.
That would leave freedom seekers nowhere left to go.
The tyranny of ‘misinformation’
The term is being used by politicians, the press and Big Tech to dismiss opposing views.
The term ‘misinformation’ is not what it was. It used to be a simple designation for a statement that was misleading or inaccurate, regardless of the intentions of said statement’s source. But now, like ‘truth’ and ‘facts’, it has now been politically mobilised by a centrist establishment determined to reassert the absolute control it lost in 2016.
And so, in the hands of anti-Trumpers, Brexit-bashers and pandemic fearmongers, misinformation, like post-truth and conspiracy theory, is always that in which the other side indulges. It is always what Trump and his supporters spread. It is always what those challenging lockdown purvey. And it is always that to which the undereducated, overrepresented masses are in thrall.
The most obvious recent example of the political weaponisation of ‘misinformation’ arrived in the near unanimous response of the political and media class to the New York Post’s exposé, complete with alleged email evidence, of the relationship between Joe Biden’s son Hunter and a Ukranian energy company. The NYPost claimed that in 2015 Hunter took cash from Burisma Holdings (a business for which Hunter was also a board member), in exchange for granting access to his father, who was then US vice president.
There might well be good reasons to be sceptical of a story Biden has always refuted, and to doubt the new evidence, coming as it did from the unreliable duo of Trump’s ex-aide Steve Bannon and former NYC mayor Rudy Guiliani. But to dismiss it as ‘misinformation’, as the uniformly anti-Trump press did? And, most shocking of all, to censor it as ‘misinformation’, as Facebook and Twitter did? That goes way beyond casting doubt on the story, and even attempting to refute it. That is to do something else entirely; it is to attempt to rule it out of public discussion. It is to try to disappear it.
Can you imagine the situation in reverse? Can you imagine the meltdown if a uniformly Trump-supporting media and political class dismissed the New York Times’s endless claims that Russia got Trump elected as pure misinformation? Can you imagine the outcry if Trump’s friends in Big Tech refused to allow stories on its platforms that reported the Democrat-commissioned Steele dossier, which claimed Putin had a video of Trump engaged in a spot of golden-age erotica?
It could never have happened, of course. Not because the Russia-collusion guff wasn’t misinformation – it was, and entirely politically motivated to boot. No, it couldn’t have happened because Trump, with few friends in the media and fewer still in Big Tech, does not have that sort of power. And the attempt to dictate what is true and false, what is to be communicated as information and what is to be censored as misinformation, is a strategy of the powerful.
Indeed, the Democrat machine, in its attempt to wheel Biden into the White House, has even turned this strategy into an actual anti-misinformation operation, internally called the ‘Malarkey Factory’. Employing dozens throughout the US to monitor social media, its aim is to stop opposing views, or ‘misinformation’, as they’re now being called, from gaining traction among voters. As one participant boasted, ‘[We] find and identify the misinformation that is actually moving voters, even if it is a small number of voters, then find who those voters are and see if we can intervene’. Do they not realise how sinister that sounds?
Whether such a strategy works is debatable. After all, the NYPost’s rather run-of-the-mill tale of corruption on Capitol Hill is generating far more heat, thanks to the attempts to suppress it, than it otherwise might have done. But that it exists as a strategy at all is what ought to worry us.
We can also see the strategy again being deployed in the politics of the pandemic. So last week it was announced that Wikipedia would follow in Google’s footprints, and work with the World Health Organisation in the attempt to ‘disarm the misinformation’ about Covid. Likewise, YouTube has said it is expanding its ‘misinformation policy’ to remove claims from its platform that contradict health authorities, such as the NHS in the UK, or the World Health Organisation.
It sounds sensible, especially when the examples of misinformation given include conspiracy theories about the potential vaccine for Covid being used to implant microchips in recipients’ bodies. But the justification for censoring the more demented fringes of the public sphere never stops at the fringes. It always applies throughout. One week it might well be the 5G nutters and anti-vaxxers being damned as agents of misinformation. But the next it could be those who doubt the efficacy of face masks, or who question the UK’s official Covid-related death toll – which, as spiked reported, is precisely what Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, proposes as examples of misinformation. This despite many medical experts, including for a time the WHO itself, casting doubt on the efficacy of face masks; and the UK’s official death toll being subject to official revision. It doesn’t take a wild leap to envisage a situation in which ‘misinformation’ encompasses political criticism of lockdown, and the raft of social restrictions that now lie across the land.
As it is currently being deployed, the term misinformation is not a neutral and objective description of that which misleads; rather, it is a politically partisan description of that with which the powerful disagree. Its function in public and political life, like the newly politicised concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘facts’, is too often tyrannical. It is used to suppress opposing arguments and views, perhaps even to cast them into discursive exile.
Little wonder Harry and Meghan, the King and Queen of Wokezania, seized on this weaponised concept of misinformation last week to advance their views on ‘racial justice, gender equity, climate change and mental health’. As they see it, people don’t hold opposing views; they hold misinformed views, wrong views, views that need to be changed. Or as Harry himself put it, ‘What I see is the digital space [of misinformation] hampering the progress that needs to be made’. In other words, we will make you progress. Such is the tyranny of truth, or ‘information’, in politics.
This is not, as Harry and Meghan have it, a ‘global crisis of misinformation’. Rather, it is the arrogant refusal of the ‘informed’, the woke and the expert to tolerate divergent opinions.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/10/26/the-tyranny-of-misinformation/
Revealed: The new values statement immigrants have to sign before they are granted any Australian visa - and it sends an important message to non-English speakersImmigrants applying for permanent, provisional or temporary visas now have to sign an updated Australian Values Statement before being allowed into the country.
The Australian Values Statement was first introduced in 2007 but has not been substantially updated until October 30, when the new statement came into effect.
Acting Immigration Minister Alan Tudge said the new statement has 'a greater focus on values like freedom, respect, equality and the rule of law'.
Immigrants must now read a 'Life in Australia' booklet available in 41 languages to educate themselves on Australian history, culture and society.
After completing the required reading, immigrants can then sign the Australian Values Statement.
The Values Statement itself requires immigrants to confirm they have read or had explained the provided materials and that they understand Australian society values.
All immigrants must accept respect freedom in all forms, commitment to the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, equality of opportunity for all people, a 'fair go' for all and the English language as the national language as part of the statement.
Permanent visa applicants sign the same statement with two additional pledges.
They must make reasonable efforts to learn English if it is not their native language and an understanding they will need to pledge their loyalty to Australia if they become an Australian citizen in the future.
The declaration that Australian citizenship applicants sign as part of their application has also been updated to mirror the wording of the Australian Values Statement.
Mr Tudge said: 'The updated statement better reflects the importance we place on these values.
'There will now be one statement for both temporary and permanent visa applicants that confirms they understand and will conduct themselves in line with our values and our laws.
'Those who want to settle in Australia permanently will also commit to make reasonable efforts to learn English, so they can fully participate in the community and have the best possible chance to get a job.
'There is no new test or threshold associated with this change.'
The changes are part of the Morrison Government’s $62.8 million investment in creating social cohesion, which builds on the $71 million social cohesion package announced in March 2019.
A new Australian Citizenship Test with a stronger focus on Australian values will also come into effect on November 15.
***************************************
My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
*****************************************
/>
Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
No comments:
Post a Comment