Have you seen this NASA photo before? It is real.. a composite of the Helix Nubela taken by the Hubble Telescope, entitled God’s Eye.
And for most of us it is a reminder that someone is watching…
Most Americans have always thought that our nation, the Founding Fathers and our Constitution were God inspired.
And many have seen the correlation between our demise and turning our back, as a nation, on God.
House rejects sex-selection abortion ban
WASHINGTON (AP) - The House on Thursday fell short in an effort to ban abortions based on the sex of the fetus as Republicans and Democrats made an election-year appeal for women's votes.
The legislation would have made it a federal crime to perform or force a woman to undergo a sex-based abortion, a practice most common in some Asian countries where families wanting sons abort female fetuses.
It was a rare social issue to reach the House floor in a year when the economy has dominated the political conversation, and Republicans, besieged by Democratic claims that they are waging a war on women, struck back by trying to depict the vote as a women's rights issue.
"It is violence against women," said Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., of abortions of female fetuses. "This is the real war on women." (So why aren’t the feminists screaming about this?)
The White House, most Democrats, abortion rights groups and some Asian-American organizations opposed the bill, saying it could lead to racial profiling of Asian-American women and subject doctors who do not report suspected sex-selection abortions to criminal charges.
"The administration opposes gender discrimination in all forms, but the end result of this legislation would be to subject doctors to criminal prosecution if they fail to determine the motivations behind a very personal and private decision," White House spokeswoman Jamie Smith said in a statement. "The government should not intrude in medical decisions or private family matters in this way."
The bill had little chance of becoming law. The Democratic-controlled Senate would likely have ignored it, and the House brought it up under a procedure requiring a two-thirds majority for passage. The vote was 246-168 - 30 votes short of that majority. Twenty Democrats voted for it, while seven Republicans opposed it.
The bill's author, Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., said before the vote that regardless of the outcome, the point would be made. "When people vote on this, the world will know where they really stand."
Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the House's No. 2 Democrat, said he thought the bill was introduced because "somebody decided politically that this was a difficult place to put people in."
The legislation would have made it a federal offense, subject to up to five years in prison, to perform, solicit funds for or coerce a woman into having a sex-selection abortion. Bringing a woman into the country to obtain such an abortion would also be punishable by up to five years in prison. While doctors would not have an affirmative responsibility to ask a woman her motivations for an abortion, health workers could be imprisoned for up to a year for not reporting known or suspected violations of the ban on sex-based abortions.
An earlier version of the bill also made it illegal to abort a fetus based on race.
"We are the only advanced country left in the world that still doesn't restrict sex-selection abortion in any way," said Franks, who has also collided with abortion-rights groups recently over a bill he supports to ban abortions in the District of Columbia after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
Franks and others say there is evidence of sex-selection abortions in the United States among certain ethnic groups from countries where there is a traditional preference for sons. The bill notes that while the United States has no federal law against such abortions, countries such as India and China, where the practice has contributed to lopsided boy-girl ratios, have enacted bans on the practice.
Lawmakers "who recently have embraced the contrived political rhetoric asserting that they are resisting the artificial `war on women', created by Team Obama for political purposes for his upcoming election bid, must reflect on whether they now wish to be recorded as being defenders of the real escalating war on baby girls," said National Right to Life Committee legislative director Douglas Johnson. (Let us remember that both President Obama and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius have always supported late term and partial birth abortions. Senator Obama even voted against giving the tiny survivors or abortions comfort after the procedure, which is barbaric!)
His group, in a letter to lawmakers, said there are credible estimates that 160 million women and girls are missing from the world due to sex selection.
But the Guttmacher Institute, an organization that favors abortion rights, said evidence of sex selection in the United States is limited and inconclusive. It said that while there is census data showing some evidence of son preference among Chinese-, Indian- and Korean-American families when older children are daughters, the overall U.S. sex ratio at birth in 2005 was 105 boys to 100 girls, "squarely within biologically normal parameters."
NARAL Pro-Choice America president Nancy Keenan said that while her group has long opposed reproductive coercion, "the Franks bill exploits the very real problem of sex discrimination and gender inequity while failing to offer any genuine solutions that would eliminate disparities in health care access and information."
Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women's Law Center, said the bill fosters discrimination by "subjecting women from certain racial and ethnic backgrounds to additional scrutiny about their decision to terminate a pregnancy."
"Doctors would be forced to police their patients, read their minds and conceal information from them," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y.
Republicans also used the bill to continue their ongoing criticism of Planned Parenthood, founded by eugenicist Margaret Sanger who endorsed abortion for racial purification, citing a video taken by the group Live Action purporting to show a Planned Parenthood social worker advising a woman on how to determine if her fetus was female before she terminated the pregnancy.
h/t Jim Abrams, June 1, 2012 6:50 am
The passing of this anti-sex-selection abortion law would have been more symbolic than anything else, for nobody would have gone into a clinic and said we want to terminate this pregnancy because of the gender of the fetus, especially after the law passed. As Gretchen Carlson of Fox and Friends said: “Who would ever have thought that America, the United States, would need a law like this?” But with the surfacing of now several videos showing that this despicable practice was not just an isolated incident and now the fact that Congress could/would not pass a bill banning gender selection abortion coupled with progressive politicians trying to turn this “real” ‘war on woman’ into a political shame… we sadly see that we definitely need this law! After this vote we can no longer call the practices of China barbaric; we have defined our own culture as the only advanced country left in the world that still doesn't restrict sex-selection abortion in any way! We have fallen a long way from the the God fearing people that founded our country!
As the polls indicate, pro-choice Americans are at record low and partial birth abortions and gender selection is unthinkable to most Americans; plus the Catholic Church has brought suit against the Obama Conception Mandate of ObamaCare… yet unless you watch Fox news, participate in the conservative blogosphere or perhaps receive a publication for your church, synagogue or a pro-life group you probably don’t know about any of this. the media is silent… blacked out in support of President Obama and his administration. This alone should be a huge flag of how they will handle the news between now and election and worry us all… blacked out news, distortion of their opponents and issues they oppose and slanted favorable news of Obama and Progressive candidates and issues… sounds a whole lot more like the USSR vs. the USA.
What we are is God's gift to us. What we become is our gift to God.
Many feel he United States has fallen from grace… You be the Judge!
Related:
New Live Action video shows Planned Parenthood encouraging gender-selective abortion, Medicaid fraud
America Solidly Now “Pro-Life”
Many ask themselves how we got here… When is the last time you took your kids and grandkids to church? Are they teaching from scripture there? And how can a modern translation of the Bible, The Voice Bible (Paperback: The Voice New Testament), that changes the nouns for God, Jesus Christ and angels to Eternal One, the Anointed One and a messenger of God and then offers a “watered down” version of the Gospel. Was it T.S. Eliot who said the less people read the Bible the more they translate it?” He also said something like ‘Watered down Christianity is worth nothing.’
