Star Parker - The Abortion Alternative

With the convictions in the case against abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell – three counts of murdering live babies and one count of involuntary manslaughter – abortion is back in the national discussion.

It’s pretty clear from the Grand Jury report that, during Gosnell’s thirty plus year career, he likely murdered hundreds, if not thousands of babies. But because of the difficulty in documenting it all, he was just convicted of three.

Reports now are coming in from around the nation indicating that more Gosnells are out there.

The abortion lobby claims that as long as we have tight regulations on abortion, a black market will exist. Abortion, they argue, is like any product or service that consumers want and government prohibits or overregulates. If they can’t get what they want legally, they will get it illegally.

We also hear that we get Gosnells when government refuses to pay for the abortions of poor women. The Hyde Amendment, they say, which prohibits Medicaid compensation for abortion, makes unsafe abortion inevitable.

Poor women, according to this reasoning, desperate because of an unwanted pregnancy, pressed because regulations and costs make abortion difficult to get, turn to sleazebag doctors, who will do it cheaply, with no regard for the woman, the law, or safety.

But it is ironic that those who call themselves “pro-choice” argue that the only alternatives facing low-income women are unsafe abortions done by sleazebags or government subsidized abortions.

There is another choice, but those who call themselves “pro-choice” don’t want women, particularly poor women, to consider this option.

This option is called birth.

When conservatives talk about a culture of responsibility, we’re not just talking about the personal responsibility of the individual in trouble. We’re talking about the personal responsibility of the rest of us toward that individual.

There are now thousands of crisis pregnancy centers operating nationwide. Over 2000 are affiliated with either Care Net or Heartbeat International. I maintain a regular active speaking schedule for and consult with these centers.

They work with pregnant women in trouble and provide them the services they need to have their child. They provide ultrasound, parental counseling, life management counseling, help with the physical needs of the mother and child, and, if need be, help with adoption services.

Unwanted pregnancies often are the result of loneliness, fear, and lack of information. Crisis pregnancy centers deal with all this

The left, so called “pro-choice” activists, have an interesting concept of a culture of responsibility. That is to promote a culture that detaches sex from love and responsibility, that minimizes the central importance of family, that justifies youth sex, promiscuity, and the “hook-up” culture. In short, a culture which encourages people to relate to each other in the same callous way as it encourages women to relate to the unborn children that often result from it all.

Then they want taxpayers, other people, to foot the bill.

Is it any wonder we live in a country in which we are drowning in debt directly as a result of this culture of entitlement?

Planned Parenthood, which rakes in hundreds of millions in the abortion business, actively discourages women from going to crisis pregnancy centers.

On the Planned Parenthood website, they call these centers “fake clinics…that have a history of giving women wrong and biased information”.

These crisis pregnancy centers are financed and run by committed Christian Americans where women often, for the first time in their lives, experience love and meaning.

The information they get, that Planned Parenthood calls “wrong and biased,” is that life should be chosen over death and that responsibility is a community affair.

It is not a given that we must live in a country of promiscuity, unwanted pregnancies, and abortion. We do have choice.

We can reprogram the destructive culture that we have created and in which we now live.

Star Parker

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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Star Parker - Mark Sanford - Welcome Back to Washington

Put me down as happy to see former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford coming back to Washington. He handily defeated Elizabeth Colbert Busch in Tuesday's special election for a House seat he himself once held.

I hope he brings his piglets with him.

Once as governor, Sanford showed up at the statehouse in Columbia with two piglets -- one named "pork" and one named "barrel" -- to protest the Legislature's quick move to reject his proposed budget that included large spending cuts.

It's this kind of flair that has characterized Sanford's political career, both his six years in Congress and eight as governor.

He has always been a consistent, principled and courageous conservative. And he has always done it with showmanship and clarity that gets the points across to voters.

He displayed this showmanship in this campaign of redemption, in which he was combatting not just his opponent, but also his deeply tarnished image as result of serious ethical transgressions during his second term as governor.

The story is well known. While governor, Sanford conducted an adulterous affair, disappeared to visit the woman in Argentina, lied about his whereabouts and misused state funds in making the trip.

Sinful stuff.

He survived to serve out his second term as governor, but departed as what seemed to be permanently damaged political goods.

But in the campaign against Colbert Busch, Sanford propped up and debated a life-size poster of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and reminded voters that this was about the left-wing Democratic establishment that has taken control of Washington and changed the course of the nation.

Sanford appealed to voters to look past his personal transgressions, about which he has been upfront and apologetic, and to look to his impeccable conservative credentials and his political experience to do battle in Washington.

Those personal transgressions have, of course, been raw meat for those on the left.

According to Alixandria Lapp, executive director the House Majority PAC, which poured some $450,000 into ads and mail against Sanford, "The House Republican caucus has added yet another ethically challenged embarrassment who will be an albatross around the neck of every Republican forced to answer for Sanford's embarrassing and reckless behavior."

The irony does not drip but pours forth like a tsunami when liberals start talking about morality and ethics.

A few weeks ago, Washington Wizards basketball player Jason Collins announced that he is gay. This was an event of such apparent import that he received a congratulatory phone call from the leader of the Democrat Party, President Barack Obama, and an official tweet from first lady Michelle. Both expressed their pride and joy about Collins' courageous coming out.

The plight of Carolyn Moos, the woman with whom Collins was living for eight years and to whom he once was engaged, was apparently of no interest to the Obamas, despite the president's supposed great concern for women's affairs, nor was the deceptive life that Collins lived with her.

Moos, 34, expressed distress at eight wasted prime years with Collins. She said that she never had a hint that Collins was gay and living a double life, and that she actually believed marriage and children were in the cards for them.

Perhaps if Sanford's adultery was a gay affair, liberals would be more understanding.

When the National Republican Congressional Committee pulled its support from Sanford's race following the news that he trespassed in the home of his former wife (to watch the Super Bowl with his son), support came in from both FreedomWorks PAC and the National Right to Life PAC.

Sanford's persona pulled in two streams of conservatives -- the economic conservatives and the social conservatives -- that many see at odds with each other.

A seasoned, principled and exciting conservative politician and leader is exactly what Republicans need today.

Welcome back to Washington, Mark Sanford.

Star Parker

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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Star Parker - Gun Control

I sat down with Glenn Beck on Blaze TV and discussed the relationship between slavery, freedom and gun control.
I think you'll enjoy this 20-minute discussion.
As always, I appreciate your comments so please leave them below, after you watch the video!
Your foot-soldier for freedom,
Star

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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Star Parker - Planned Parenthood Targets Black Women

In 1854, Abraham Lincoln confronted America’s first “pro-choice” Senator, Stephen Douglas, in a speech in Peoria, Illinois.

“Choice” then was about slavery, not abortion.

Douglas sponsored the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which addressed the sticky question of how to deal with the legality of slavery in new territories entering the union. The Kansas-Nebraska Act resolved this by “choice.” Residents would vote to decide if slavery would be legal in their territory.

Lincoln challenged Douglas’s “pro-choice” position on slavery. According to Douglas, said Lincoln, “…the principle of the Nebraska Bill was very old; that it originated when God made man and placed good and evil before him, allowing him to choose for himself, being responsible for the choice he should make.”

No, said Lincoln. “God did not place good and evil before man, telling him to make his choice. On the contrary, he did tell him there was one tree, of the fruit of which he should not eat, upon pain of certain death.”

Our constitution, conveyed by the nation’s founders 65 years before Lincoln spoke those words, circumvented the question of slavery, permitting the great paradox of a nation founded on the ideals of freedom, which allowed slavery.

The struggle for racial justice in America – whether fighting slavery, or fighting for civil rights - has always been informed by absolute standards of right and wrong, of good and evil, that transcend even the cleverest human mind. Black history is testimony to where we wind up when those standards get lost.

Yet, once again, those standards have gotten lost. And, once again, black Americans are bearing the brunt of the cost of a nation that has lost its moral rudder. This time as result of wantonly legal and available abortion.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, blacks accounted for 35.4 percent of abortions performed in 2009, despite representing, according to the 2010 census, just 13.6 percent of the US population.

Let’s not be deluded that this is an accident.

Analysis of 2010 census data by an initiative called Protecting Black Life shows that 79 percent of Planned Parenthood abortion clinics are located in walking distance of minority neighborhoods – 62 percent within 2 miles of primarily black neighborhoods and 64 percent of Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods.

Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, systematically targets minority women for abortion.

Before the Civil War, there were church going Americans who rationalized slavery by believing that blacks were less than human. This view was legally formalized in the US Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision.

It is not surprising that our first “pro-choice” Senator, Stephen Douglas, supported the Dred Scott decision.

Views echoing Dred Scott help rationalize Planned Parenthood’s targeted destruction of black children in the womb.

In 1957, Mike Wallace interviewed Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, and asked her if she believed in sin.

Sanger, whose racist and eugenicist views are well documented, replied, “I believe the biggest sin in the world is parents bringing children into the world that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they are born.”

It is a sign of these dismally confused times that it was our first black president, Barack Obama, who, last week, became the first sitting American president to address Planned Parenthood.

In his address, the President did not use the word “abortion” once, nor was there a single reference to the current trial and murder charges against Philadelphia abortion Doctor Kermit Gosnell.

You’d think he was addressing Ronald McDonald House, not an organization that provided 333,964 abortions last year, disproportionately on black women.

Black unemployment and poverty rates are almost double the national averages. I suppose Planned Parenthood, with support from our president, and $542 million in taxpayer funds, feels it is doing its part to solve this problem.

Star Parker

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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Star Parker - How Abortion Has Changed America

The trial of Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, facing the death penalty for the deaths of four infants and one woman in his clinic, is over. America has moved on.

It’s exactly what the pro-abortion contingent wants. They want Gosnell out of the news because they want abortion out of the news. Ongoing discussion provokes thought about the status quo. And pro-aborts want to keep things as they are.

And, they have reason to be confident.

Our president, whom no one can accuse of not being politically astute, showed up this week, despite the Gosnell story, as the first sitting president ever to address Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider.

When Kirsten Powers brought attention to Gosnell, with her USA Today column, she said it wasn’t about abortion. “This is not about being pro-choice or pro-life,” she wrote. “It is about human rights.”

For Powers, the story was about lack of supervision. And, of course, where abortions are carried out legally, clinics should be supervised and inspected.

But to leave the story there is to be content with the tip of the iceberg. And the whole iceberg is a huge story that all of America should be looking at.

The whole iceberg is bigger than abortion itself. It is about how profoundly America has changed since Roe v Wade, in 1973, made abortion an accepted part of American life.

Let’s be clear that pro-aborts and pro-lifers differ on far more than technicalities about when life begins. They differ about what life is.

In the state of Pennsylvania, where Gosnell was doing his dirty business, abortion is legal until the developing child is 24 weeks - 6 months - old. Among Gosnell’s many transgressions was performing abortions after 24 weeks.

But Planned Parenthood, and their guest speaker, our president, oppose that 24-week limit. They believe abortion should be legal until the child is born.

In 2007, shortly after the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, which banned a brutal abortion procedure most commonly used to destroy infants from 15 to 26 weeks old, then-Senator Obama spoke at a Planned Parenthood event and decried the decision. He called it part of a “concerted effort to steadily roll back” access to abortion.

Justice Kennedy, who wrote the decision, included a description of one of these procedures on a 26-week-old infant. It takes a certain deadening of the heart, of the soul to read the description of the little baby clasping his fingers and toes as the doctor jams his scissors into his skull , and still believe this should be permitted.

Since Roe v Wade, we’ve given birth to a new materialistic culture of narcissism where reverence for life itself is gone. Life has become a commodity and people use each other as cavalierly as they destroy innocent young life.

As our reverence for life has diminished, so has our reverence for the institutions that surround and support it.

Scholars at the Brookings Institution observed in 1996 that Roe v Wade contributed to the collapse of marriage and the dramatic increase in out-of-wedlock births. The idea that children were part of a sacred institution called marriage started disappearing.

The sense of honor, the sense of shame disappears in this culture of self.

In 1965, seven years before Roe v Wade, less then 10 percent of American babies were born to unwed mothers – 24 percent to unwed black women and 3.1 percent to unwed white women. As of 2010, this was up to 41 percent of our babies born to unwed mothers – 73 percent to black women and 29 percent to white women.

Sixty percent of our out-of-wedlock births are to women in their 20’s.

Soon, as our resources diminish to care for our growing aging population, we will start dealing with our elderly as we do our unborn.

But if everything is meaningless, who cares?

Star Parker

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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Star Parker - Gosnell is Not an Exception

Kirsten Powers has done a national service, by virtue of her now famous USA Today column, of getting the news of the trial of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell on the national radar screen.

This of course, is the horror story of a cesspool in Philadelphia posturing as an abortion clinic, operating without inspection for 17 years. Gosnell, the doctor who ran the place, has been formally charged of murder of one woman and seven infants.

Kirsten Powers

However, the grand jury report and testimony of family and staff at the trial indicate that if there were records in this dump, where life and death were meted out daily, Gosnell would be indicted for hundreds of murders of live children.

Most likely, and sadly, this horror story will have its fifteen minutes of fame and the nation will move on. The national press got dragged unwillingly to report it, finally, because of Ms. Powers’ courageous column. But there is no way to keep them on a story they don’t want to cover.

Maybe we can keep this story alive by keeping in mind a few things.

What was happening in Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society clinic was not some bizarre exception to the rule.

You can ask Day Gardner, founder and president of the National Black Pro-life Union. Her life is dedicated to covering these realities. In her words, “This is not an exception. These realities are happening every day all over our country.”

Despite the sense that no one was paying attention to the Gosnell story before Kirsten Powers wrote about it, know that Dr. Gardner, Dr. Alveda King, and other pro-life activists were demonstrating outside Gosnell’s clinic as early as February 2011.

They held a press conference about the trial on April 4, a week before Powers’ column appeared. Alveda King wrote in her blog the day before, “…Rev. Clenard Childress and Dr. Day Gardner…are in Philadelphia reporting on the Kermit Gosnell trial that the mainstream media is virtually ignoring.“

Just this week, The Washington Times has reported that Gosnell-like conditions have existed at a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Vice President Biden’s own backyard in Delaware.

The Times reports “Abortions have been suspended at a Delaware Planned Parenthood, after several 911 calls made from within the clinic prompted a new investigation by Health and Human Services.”

Two nurses quit to protect their licenses, one saying “I couldn’t tell you how ridiculously unsafe it was.”

According to the story, “Since Jan. 4, five patients have been rushed to the emergency room.”

Last year pro-life activists worked assiduously to get press attention on the story of the death of 24-year-old Tonya Reaves, who died after a botched abortion procedure at a Chicago Planned Parenthood clinic.

These realities persist for two reasons.

• One, we still as a nation are willing to tolerate the reality of abortion. We still allow ourselves to believe that Dr. Gosnell should be convicted of murder because he botched an abortion, the live child was born, and he still destroyed it. But that somehow it would have been okay if that same child died while still in the womb.
• And two, the squalid conditions allowing this butchery to take place all over the nation persist for the same reason that the Gosnell trial almost went uncovered. The press does not want to report about the gruesome truths of abortion. And, because it occurs disproportionately among low income, minority women, they are even less interested.

We can, at minimum, do something as a nation today. We can stop allowing our tax dollars to fund the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood.

Marsha Blackburn

According to Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn), who has submitted a bill to stop funding Planned Parenthood, “Every 94 seconds Planned Parenthood performs an abortion and in that amount of time they take in over $1600 in federal taxpayer money.”

Star Parker

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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Star Parker - The Predictable Liberal Assault on Ben Carson

Dr. Ben Carson stepped into the national spotlight recently when, as speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast, to an audience that included President Obama, he was openly critical of the President’s approach to health care and his overall management of the nation’s economy.

Carson, who is director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, is a hero to many. His life story, rising from a Detroit ghetto to a life of accomplishment and distinction, is a story of American ideals on steroids.

Those ideals say that America is about merit not circumstance. Your life, your achievements are the result of what you do and how you live, not where you came from.

The hard history of blacks in America has always made it a challenge for them to accept this credo. Many still carry a sense that those ideals may be true for whites, but they never were true, and still aren’t true, for blacks.

So in this context, Ben Carson’s story is particularly important. It’s making liberals nervous, and the attacks on him are starting.

He’s now pulled out, under pressure, from giving the commencement address at Johns Hopkins University because some are unhappy with how, in an interview on Fox, he expressed his views regarding the importance of maintaining the integrity of traditional marriage.

Blacks have known about Carson for years. I gave his book Gifted Hands to my daughters to read when they were little girls. A highly acclaimed made-for-TV movie about his life aired in 2009, with Dr. Carson played by Oscar-winning actor Cuba Gooding, Jr.

But this story of personal responsibility, hard work and traditional values is becoming a political story. It is becoming political because Ben Carson’s American dream story, according to the liberal script, is not supposed to work for blacks.

Ben Carson is the biggest threat to liberals since Bill Cosby got out of line at an NAACP banquet in Washington, DC in 2004.

Cosby had the temerity to deliver tough, critical talk about what too many blacks are doing with the freedom that civil rights activists of the 1960’s fought to achieve.

He contrasted the sixties generation with the new generation of black youth sitting in jail. “…..these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake.”

Cosby attributed the chaos to breakdown in values, family, and personal responsibility. It’s the last thing the NAACP crowd wanted to hear that night and he paid a price. He was vilified and marginalized until he backed off.

Liberals never take on what black conservatives actually say because they can’t. So the attacks become personal.

Trillions of taxpayers’ dollars have been poured into black communities over the last half-century producing virtually no change in the incidence of black poverty.

Yet, Ben Carson, through diligence and traditional values, achieved on his own what those trillions of dollars of government programs were supposed to deliver.

Liberal black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates put the cards on the table in an article about Cosby which appeared in 2008 in The Atlantic magazine. The typical black conservative votes for Democrats, he notes, “not out of love for abortion rights.... but because he feels…. that the modern day GOP draws on support of people who hate him.”

So stoking paranoia about racism has always been the strategy of liberals to fend off the political threat of conservative values that so many church-going blacks embrace.

Predictably, Coates has produced a New York Times column on Carson, reducing this great man to the usual caricature of a black empty suit manipulated by white conservatives.

Ben Carson is an accomplished and wealthy man. Americans, certainly black Americans, need him in public life more than he needs to be in public life. Let’s hope the left wing and the haters of traditional morality don’t succeed in making him conclude it’s not worth it.

Star Parker

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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Star Parker - Reject Gang of 8 Immigration Reform Deal

A bi-partisan group of Senators, known as the Gang of 8, have put together a framework for the immigration reform that supposedly America is waiting for.

Provisions of the agreement have been widely leaked and, from what I see, these Senators should return to the drawing board.

If we are going to tackle immigration reform, there should be agreement at the outset on what objectives should be achieved. In my view, there should be three. It should enhance the freedom, fairness, and security of the nation. If not, why bother?

The Gang of 8 proposal makes no gains on any of these fronts, and on at least one – fairness–makes a bad situation even worse.

It seems to be the way of Washington these days to take issues that are huge and complex, devise comprehensive mega-reforms--too massive for any single person to read or grasp, and pass new law that exchanges one set of problems for different even bigger ones.

We just finished going through this with reforms of our financial services system and our health care system. Now we’re about to do the same with immigration.

It’s not smart to think that in one new law we can secure our border, deal with 11 million illegals now in the country, devise a new way of allowing skilled labor to enter the country, and devise a way for employing unskilled foreign labor.

But Washington is trying to do it all and it seems that another legislative disaster is waiting to happen.

A purported achievement of the Gang of 8 is an agreement between big business and unions regarding the hiring of unskilled foreign labor.

As our nation buckles under the load of excessive government, the proposal here is to give Washington even more power and build yet another new government bureaucracy.

The plan calls for a new Bureau of Immigration and Labor Market Research. And why yet another new bureaucracy at a time of trillion dollar deficits and cancelled White House tours for students?

Quotas, which can be adjusted over time and market conditions, will be set for how many visas will be permitted for unskilled foreign labor. We’ll need a new army of bureaucrats sitting in Washington to study and report on conditions of different labor markets.

The quota starts at 20,000 and can reach, over time, a ceiling of 200,000. At its peak, illegal immigration was around 500,000 per year. So in boom times, even at full quota, we could still have illegals sneaking over the border.

Government bureaucrats not only will determine how many can be hired, but also what they can be paid.

In this case, “prevailing wage.” “Prevailing wage” is a defining provision of the Davis Bacon Act, passed in 1931 to keep unskilled black labor from competing with union workers – at the time uniformly white – on federally funded projects.

“Prevailing wages” are generally union wages and assure that taxpayers pay top dollar for government construction projects. Now, in the name of immigration reform, the “prevailing wage” standard is brought, for the first time, to the private sector.

Which gets to the fairness issue. Employment set asides designated for unskilled foreign workers, with wage levels set by government, is nothing but a stick in the eye to competing low wage workers in the American market.

It so happens that today these would be black workers. At 13.8%, black unemployment now is almost double the national average. But according to analysis done by Remaking Debate (remakingdebate.org), unemployment among young black men with no high school diploma is 51.6 percent. Unemployment among all black men and women with no high school degree is 30 percent.

The Gang of 8 immigration reform proposal is a non-starter. We must reject any reform that doesn’t make our nation freer, fairer, and more secure.

Star Parker

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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Deneen Borelli - Dr. Ben Carson - Black Conservatives

FreedomWorks Director of Outreach Deneen Borelli participates in a special hosted by Sean Hannity on American politics and Black Conservatives. Also featuring Rev. CL Bryant and Dr. Ben Carson.

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Star Parker - A New Birth of Education Freedom

As the nation has focused on the Supreme Court hearings on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage, news from the state of Indiana could prove far more important regarding the nation’s future.

The Indiana Supreme Court has just ruled unanimously, 5-0, that Indiana’s school voucher program, signed into law in 2011, the most expansive school voucher program in the nation, does not violate the state’s constitution.

Those who challenged the law argued that the voucher program is unconstitutional because it allows public funds to be used for religious education.

Not so, said the court. The voucher goes to the families, not the schools. It is the parents who decide how to spend it.

Why do I draw connection between the US Supreme Court’s review of same-sex marriage and this voucher decision in Indiana? And why do I suggest that the Indiana decision may be more important to the nation’s future than whatever the Supreme Court decides on same sex marriage?

Same-sex marriage sits before the Supreme Court today because of the dramatic change in public opinion over recent years regarding the legitimacy and morality of same-sex marriage and homosexual relations. General public opinion is far more accepting today of both than it has been in the past.

What has driven this change?

One obvious place to look is the direct generational correlation regarding acceptance of same-sex marriage. Younger Americans are far more accepting of these values than older Americans.

According to the latest survey from the Pew Research Center, approval of same sex marriage among those born between 1928-1945 is 31 percent; 1946-1964, 38 percent; 1965-1980, 49 percent; and after 1980, 70 percent.

So it seems quite reasonable to conclude that the systematic purge over the last half-century of religion and traditional values from our public schools has produced a new generation of Americans with values different from those of their parents and grandparents.

In 1962 the Supreme Court found state-sponsored school prayer unconstitutional. Subsequently, the Supreme Court found unconstitutional posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools (1980), public schools setting aside time for private or voluntary prayer (1985), and “performance of religious activity” at school promotional and graduation ceremonies (1992).

The rationale behind all these decisions was supposedly to preserve and protect religious liberty in our public schools.

But this has not at all what has been happening. The result has not been value free public schools that just teach reading, writing and arithmetic. The result has been to purge traditional religious values from our public schools and replace them with different values – secular humanism.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, “all states are somehow involved in sex education for public school children.”

The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teacher’s union, thought it relevant to their mission to issue a press statement about the same-sex marriage cases currently before the Supreme Court. According to their statement:

“Proposition 8 and DOMA (both of which support traditional marriage) aren’t just unconstitutional, they contradict American values of fairness, inclusion, and freedom for all.”

So somehow it is fair and constitutional, in the view of the NEA, that our schools not be permitted to teach right and wrong, as Christians have understood them from the Bible for a few thousand years, while it is fair and free to teach secular humanism in their place.

Thanks to former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, who signed into law the Indiana voucher program, and a sane and sober court in Indiana, Indiana helps pave the way for a new birth of education freedom in America in which parents can choose where to send their child to school.

No longer will kids be captive to left-wing brainwashing in Indiana public schools. Hopefully soon this will be the case nationwide.

Star Parker

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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Star Parker - Urban Problem Bigger Than Detroit

We are now hearing the usual voices of protest in Detroit in the wake of Michigan governor Rick Snyder appointing an outside expert to take over financial management of the near-bankrupt city.

Detroit is the largest city in American history to be seized in this fashion and turned over to an outside manager.

Reported deficit of the city is $327 million dollars and long-term liabilities are in the range of $14 billion.

But no matter to the unions, politicians, and bureaucrats who have been at the helm for years as the city has spiraled into the depths of the black hole in which it now finds itself. These interest groups, who have been the driving force behind this fiscal travesty, have one interest – to keep their respective beds feathered. Citizens and public welfare be damned.

So they cry foul when adult supervision is sent in to take on the formidable rescue task.

The man Governor Snyder has put in charge, Kevin Orr, is a high-powered Washington, DC black attorney who, according to USA Today, “has extensive experience in municipal finances, public infrastructure projects, public pension matters, and litigation.”

Al Sharpton’s man in Detroit, Rev. Charles Williams III, has called Orr an “Uncle Tom.”

The travesty now taking place in Detroit should be carefully watched by all Americans. This is not a one off exception to the rule, but is just the latest case study of a pathology dragging down the whole nation. And it’s a pathology for which low-income minority Americans are paying the dearest price.

Economist Dr. Walter Williams has noted that the common denominator of the nation’s ten poorest cities with populations over 250,000, of which Detroit is number one, is that they all have been controlled by liberal, Democratic mayors for decades, the majority of which have been black.

Detroit’s former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, son of former congresswoman and Congressional Black Caucus member Carolyn Cheeks-Kilpatrick, is now in jail awaiting sentencing after being convicted on 24 counts for running a criminal enterprise out of the mayor’s office.

The point is that we need to discern a rule of thumb here: the more that human lives are governed by compulsion and entitlement rather than freedom, choice, and personal responsibility, the outcomes are uniformly undesirable.

Compulsion and entitlement, meaning liberal government and union power, means less service, less efficiency, more fraud, corruption, and waste, and insensitivity to changes in the marketplace.

If we are going to save our cities, we need to get back to what built them in the first place: freedom, enterprise, and entrepreneurship.

It took a hurricane and a flood to wake up and turn around the basket case that was New Orleans. Ray Nagin, New Orleans’ mayor during Katrina, who blamed everyone but himself for the debacle that occurred, was just indicted on 21 counts of corruption.

New Orleans is now undergoing a renaissance. The public school system was turned over to a charter operator and the number of failing schools has dropped and test scores are improving.

Low taxes and a new spirit of entrepreneurship, spurred by such imaginative initiatives as Idea Village, has kept unemployment in New Orleans at less than two-thirds the national average.

Let’s get going with ideas like urban enterprise zones, championed by the late Congressman Jack Kemp, and now by economist Art Laffer, and give preferential tax treatment to employers and employees in blighted urban areas.

Abolish the minimum wage in these areas and give kids a chance at entry-level jobs and learning critical job skills.

The possibilities are only limited by our courage and imagination. But only one theme will save our large, urban cities, and their poor minority citizens.

Get them out from under political and union control and restore freedom, competition, and entrepreneurship.

Star Parker

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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Star Parker - What I Saw in Israel

As President Obama prepares for his first trip to Israel, I hope when he gets there he sees what I saw.

Several weeks ago I returned from my first trip to Israel. I went with a delegation headed by Governor Mike Huckabee, who visits Israel at least once every year.

What did I see?

I saw kids, no more than 18 years old, walking down the street, waiting at bus stops, wearing Army green khakis, and carrying machine guns on their backs. One young girl was as black skinned as me.

Kids doing their compulsory army service as part of Israel’s citizen army. Three years for boys, two years for girls. No university deferment. First high school, then army, then university.

I also saw Masada. The fortress at the top of a mountain rising high above the Judean Desert, where, almost 2000 years ago, a contingent of Jewish zealots, having fled Jerusalem after the fall of the second Temple, took their own lives rather than surrender to the Roman troops closing in on them.

New recruits into Israel’s army, the Israel Defense Forces, climb the long winding path to the mountaintop fortress at Masada and vow to not let Masada fall again.

I also saw Israel’s Holocaust Museum, Yad VaShem – the name taken from a verse in Isaiah, “….I will give in mine house and my walls a place and a name…an everlasting name which shall not be cut off…” that documents the horrors out of which the State of Israel emerged.

I walked through the halls of deep mourning and saw the displays, the photos, the books and papers, documenting the unimaginable.

The unimaginable and intentional slaughter of 6 million Jews, a third of the world’s Jewish population, done less then three quarters of a century ago and perpetrated by a German nation which was home to some of the foremost scientists, writers, and philosophers of modern times.

A crime of dimensions beyond human conception, perpetrated by a madman whom at the time some in the Western world thought they could do business with. Now today a madman in Iran, who some in the Western world think they can do business with, denies these events even occurred.

My thoughts turned with agony back to my own home in America where the lives of 55 million unborn children have been taken since 1973.

I saw the prime minister of Israel take 40 minutes out of his busy day, in the midst of trying to form a new government in this boisterous democracy, to welcome our small group into his office in the parliament building and take our questions. He even took one from me, which he answered at length and with care.

I saw a once barren land – a land once described by Mark Twain as “a desolate country…. a silent and mournful expanse” - now fruitful and ripe. Everything the Israelis have touched seems to have come alive and then some.

You see the result of the relationship of a land that uniquely goes with a people and the people that uniquely goes with that land, and you think of the Song of Songs: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine: he browses among the lilies.”

I saw the great hope of my scriptures come alive right before my eyes, and I was left exuberant and confident that the God of truth and justice is still speaking today.

In the words of the Psalmist: “When the Lord brings about the return to Zion we will have been like dreamers…. Then they will say among the nations, The Lord has done great things for them, The Lord has done great things for us. We will then rejoice.”

Yes, I pray that when the president of the United States lands in Israel, for his first time, that he sees what I saw.

Star Parker

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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Star Parker Videos - The Never Again Campaign

“…burned into my memory is the Sunday evening when my father was beaten with a tire iron on the street in front of our home, and in front of us, his four little children. Those three young white men were never caught...when my father, with his surgically reconstructed eye socket and jaw, was released from the hospital and returned home, he did something he never once considered when we lived in the projects. He bought a gun….My sense of security did not come from the Pittsburgh police, or from the law. My sense of security came from my father, and his gun."
G. Marcus Cole Professor at Law, Stanford University

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"Taking Guns away from the law abiding many puts too much power in the hands of an ill-intentioned few."
Star Parker

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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Star Parker - Background Checks Won’t Make Us Safer

In April of 2007, a mentally disturbed student showed up at the campus of his school, Virginia Tech, brandishing two semi-automatic pistols, and murdered 32 students, teachers and school employees and wounded 17 others. Then he took his own life.

It was the one of deadliest mass shooting incidents in American history.

The nation was in shock, as it is now following the December mass murder at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

The press and public outcry was the same then as now. How can we stop horrors like this from occurring? We’ve got to stop criminals and nut cases from getting their hands on guns.
The tragedy spurred passage of the first major piece of federal gun control legislation since the assault weapon ban was passed in 1994.

The new law, signed by President George W. Bush in January of 2008, appropriated $1.3 billion for states to get the names of those deemed mentally ill into the FBI national data base used for gun-purchase screening. This supposedly would solve the problem of lax state compliance and make the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) more effective.

If only this had been the law of the land a year earlier, commentators opined, the Virginia Tech tragedy might not have happened.

Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-NY, a co-sponsor of the legislation, said it would “close the wide gaps in our nation’s firearm background-check system to ensure violent criminals and the mentally ill no longer slip through the cracks and gain access to dangerous weapons.”

But a more sober message came at the time from the now late professor, American Enterprise Institute scholar and presidential Medal of Freedom recipient James Q. Wilson.

He wrote then: “The tragedy at Virginia Tech may tell us something about how a young man could be driven to commit terrible actions, but it does not teach us very much about gun control.”

Even if there were tougher background checks, Wilson continued, “access to guns would be relatively easy … many would be stolen and others would be obtained through straw purchases by a willing confederate. It is virtually impossible to use new background-check or waiting-period laws to prevent dangerous people from getting guns. Those they cannot buy, they will steal or borrow.”

Now, five years after Bush signed the NICS Improvement Amendments Act of 2007 into law, we have “déjà vu all over again.”

Not only have we tragically witnessed another deranged young man entering a school and murdering innocent youth, but we now must witness again politicians offering the same non-solution to allegedly deal with the problem: wider background checks.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY, who is pushing legislation for universal background checks, was one of the original sponsors of the law that Bush signed five years ago.

It is even worse now. Adam Lanza, the deranged young Sandy Hook murderer, used a rifle from his mother’s collection in their home. No background check could deal with something like this.

Schumer will not solve the problem, yet he will make things worse by making it harder for law-abiding citizens to exercise their Second Amendment rights to bear arms and protect themselves.

And exactly how might expanded checks impinge on both our privacy and our rights?

Those who have ever seen a psychologist may be at risk. Those who have any kind of infraction on their record may be at risk.

Some states require doctors to counsel women considering an abortion that the procedure can result in various emotional problems. Might women receiving abortions in these states have difficulty purchasing a gun?

Let’s stop playing games. The problem is people, not guns. Our society suffers from a deficiency of personal responsibility -- not from an excess of personal freedom.

Star Parker

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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Star Parker - More Republican Governors Drink Medicaid Kool-Aid

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has become the eighth Republican governor to agree to expand Medicaid coverage in his state under the provisions of Obamacare.

Is the last line of Republican resistance to Obamacare disintegrating?

In 2011, 26 states joined a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the provision of Obamacare, which forced them to participate in expanding Medicaid coverage as a condition to continue to participate in the program.

The Supreme Court ruled in their favor last year, negating the mandatory requirement, so it is now voluntary for states to expand Medicaid coverage.

The Congressional Budget Office still estimates that expanded Medicaid coverage, though now voluntary rather than mandated on states, will contribute about a third of the reduction in the number of uninsured Americans brought about by Obamacare by 2022.

So it was assumed, once expansion of Medicaid became voluntary, that this was a line Republican governors would not cross. Refusal of Republican governors to play ball could be a serious setback for Obamacare to advance and plant its institutional roots.

But one by one, Republican governors like Christie, and just before him Florida’s Rick Scott, are playing ball.

Christie was graphically honest in describing the perverse dynamics going on.

“…I am no fan of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)…I think it is wrong for New Jersey and I think it is wrong for America…. However, it is now the law of the land and I will make all my judgments as Governor based on what I believe is best for New Jersey.”

By expanding the qualifying conditions for Medicaid, Obamacare opens the door, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest estimate, to adding another 11 million to the almost 68 million already in it.

Those 68 million are paid for by a combination of state and federal funds. However, as incentive to bring in the additional 11 million, the federal government is paying 100 percent of the costs for the first three years.

Christie and seven other Republican governors are agreeing to take the bait.

And Christie says, clear as a bell, that he is doing so even though he knows he is strengthening a program that is bad for his country.

Assume that Christie’s assessment is correct. Multiply by fifty and we can have fifty states agreeing to take a bribe to strengthen and advance a program that will hurt the country.

A classic explanation for why free markets produce prosperity and socialism does not is that individuals benefit in government run markets by taking from someone else. In free markets, individuals benefit as result of serving others, making everyone better off.

Medicaid violates basic management principles.

One, there is no clear institutional responsibility. It has grown through funding from both state and the federal government. Anyone who has ever run an organization knows that absence of clear responsibility produces bad results.

Medicaid spending has grown from .5 percent of GDP in 1970 to 2.7 percent of GDP in 2010 and according to Medicaid’s chief actuary, “From program inception, the cost of Medicaid has generally increased at a significantly faster pace than the U.S. economy.”

And there is no individual responsibility. Medicaid is a pure welfare program. Participants have 100 percent of their costs covered by the government. And once you have qualified, there is no time limit. There are no incentives to behave and spend efficiently.

The only direction of Medicaid is to spend more and more money less and less well.

Delivering health care to low income Americans is a real challenge. But to keep America great, we need to behave intelligently as well as compassionately. If we are going to subsidize health care for the poor, it should be through some kind of voucher to buy insurance. Not through welfare.

Meanwhile, the evil geniuses in Washington have devised a way to get even Republican governors to buy into a welfare program they know can only hurt our nation.

Star Parker

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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Star Parker - Preserve Gun Rights - Save Black Lives

This past Friday [2-15-2013] my organization, CURE, sponsored a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, to bring attention to the importance of rigorously defending the right of all Americans, guaranteed under the 2nd Amendment of our Constitution, to own a gun.

Our event provided a forum for black leaders from the world of politics and public policy in Washington, from the business community, from academia, and from the clergy to express their deep concern about efforts currently underway to limit our God-given and constitutional individual right of self-defense.

Why would an organization like CURE, whose mission focuses on the relevance of American values of faith and freedom to minorities, be so concerned about guns?

Because, as conservative black Americans, we know that the soul of America is kept alive with the free flow of the oxygen of freedom. And we know that when that flow is interrupted in any way, the group that suffers first and most are blacks.

New gun control initiatives coming from our President and from Democrats in congress to respond to a highly publicized tragedy by wanting to expand the power of government and limit the freedom of citizens comes as no surprise.

There is no problem facing America today that liberals do not believe should be solved by more government and less freedom. And liberals are consistent and predictable in their indifference to facts and experience that show whenever they do succeed in growing government and limiting freedom, they make matters worse, not better.

A substantial body of research already shows that gun controls empower criminals and weaken law-abiding citizens.

As John Lott, former chief economist of the US Sentencing Commission, recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “With just a single exception, the attack in Tucson last year, every public shooting in the U.S. in which three or more people have been killed since at least 1950 have occurred in a place where people are not allowed to carry their own firearms.”

Regarding black reality, blacks are the least armed, least protected and defended, and the most assaulted citizens in our country.

According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 42 percent of whites and 16 percent of blacks say that they have a pistol or rifle at home.

And, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, for the period 1980 to 2008, “Blacks were six times more likely than whites to be homicide victims and eight times more likely to commit a homicide.”

Law abiding black citizens live under siege in crime ridden urban centers. Somehow they are supposed to buy the logic that giving more power to those in law enforcement already charged with maintaining order but don’t, while stripping down the freedoms of those that do obey the law, will make them better off?

In a Pew Research Center survey in 2009, 46 percent of whites compared to 24 percent of blacks said they have a “great deal” of confidence in the local police to enforce the law.

Can anyone whom God has blessed with a brain actually think that universal background checks will keep guns out of the hands of gang thugs? Or that these same checks, in which some past legal infraction might nullify a gun application, will not result in even fewer urban law abiding blacks obtaining a weapon for protection?

Perhaps even worse than another make-pretend big government “answer” that will not only not solve a problem, but will make it worse, gun control initiatives mask over the issues that really need attention.

A culture that devalues personal responsibility, that fosters government dependence, that trashes traditional understanding of sex, marriage, and family, and that bans these traditional values from our public schools and our public life.

Americans of all backgrounds must fight yet another misguided liberal attempt to undermine our personal freedom and sap the vitality of our nation.

Star Parker

Black conservative leaders discuss how the NRA was created to protect freed slaves and how important the 2nd Amendment is to ALL Americans.

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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Star Parker - Ben Carson Owes No Apologies

According to Cal Thomas, well-known nationally syndicated columnist, Dr. Ben Carson owes President Obama an apology.

Carson spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC this past week – a bi-partisan annual event held since 1953, attended by members of Congress and usually the President.

President and Mrs. Obama were present this year and Thomas feels that Dr. Carson was out of line for including in his remarks comments about areas considered public policy – our national debt, our tax system, our publics schools, and health care.

According to Thomas: “Our politics have become so polarized and corrupted that a president of the United States cannot even attend an event devoted to drawing people closer to God and bridge partisan and cultural divides without being lectured about his policies.”

Dr. Carson is an African American physician, Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, who rose out of poverty in a ghetto in Detroit. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush in 2008 and is a role model for every American of every background.

I’m also proud that he serves on the national advisory board of my organization, CURE.

Although Carson did mention these various aspects of how we manage – or mismanage – our national affairs, he never once referred to the president or associated his comments on these issues with any political party.

To the extent to which President Obama might have taken Dr. Carson’s remarks as personal criticism, it would only be in the sense of “If the shoe fits, wear it.”

To the contrary, Dr. Carson began his remarks with citations from Proverbs and Chronicles, and tied the issues he spoke about to his broader theme about the moral crisis of our nation today. He talked about the moral decay of ancient Rome and how “they destroyed themselves from within.”

And he then expressed optimism about Americans being able to solve our problems because “we are smart” and that “we have some of the most intellectually gifted people leading our nation.”

No, if President Obama was offended by Dr. Carson’s penetrating remarks, it is because the president had to be the one losing perspective of the moral tone of the event and Dr. Carson’s observations.

What seems to offend Cal Thomas is that Dr. Carson has not fallen victim to the Washington disease that Thomas himself seems to have contracted as result of too many years in our nation’s capital.

Carson noted the vital importance of freedom of expression in America and how “political correctness keeps people from talking about important issues while the fabric of the society is being changed.” He warned that “we can’t fall for this trick.”

What, after all, is the point of a National Prayer Breakfast, “devoted to drawing people closer to God,” if the core issue now dividing us is whether we are indeed a “nation under God” and whether this means that His Word, as revealed in scripture, is even relevant to our national life and how we conduct our affairs.

This Word has already been banished from our public schools and increasingly from all our public spaces. Now apparently it’s even off limits at the National Prayer Breakfast.

If anything, Dr. Carson was forgiving to not mention the moral disaster of abortion legal under any circumstances and 55 million murdered unborn children -supported by our president. Nor did he mention our president’s endorsement of same sex marriage and today’s collapse of the American family.

The prophet Isaiah admonished, “To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices to me? says the Lord…..even when you make many prayers I will not hear: your hands are full of blood….cease to do evil, learn to do good…”

Religious ritual devoid of content is pointless and destructive. This was Isaiah’s message 2800 years ago.

This is Dr. Ben Carson’s critical message for America today. Certainly nothing to apologize about.

Star Parker

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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