John Boehner's "Deal"

by Chris Johnson
www.americandecency.org


The "deal" struck last Friday by House Speaker Republican John Boehner and Democrats President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will fund the government for the remainder of fiscal year 2011 (through the end of September) and cut approximately $38.5 billion in spending.

It will also allow Planned Parenthood to continue to kill 910 American children every day. CNSNews.com explains the math:

"According to a fact sheet released by Planned Parenthood last month, the group did 332,278 abortions in 2009. That equals an average of 910 abortions per day—or about 38 per hour, or one every 95 seconds."

The writer of the article, Terry Jeffrey, also explains what all that breaks down to for government funding per abortion. Or to speak more clearly, this is how much of OUR money goes to killing babies so their irresponsible mothers don't have to be inconvenienced.

"Though the hundreds of millions in federal tax dollars Planned Parenthood receives annually theoretically are not supposed to be used to pay for the hundreds of thousands of abortions the group does each year, the fact remains that the approximately $326.88 million Planned Parenthood received from federal programs in 2009 equaled about $932 per abortion it performed."

Tax are due in 3 days, do you know where your money's going?

I'm going to give Boehner the benefit of the doubt and assume that he's looking at the big picture and planning on ending funding to Planned Parenthood in the 2012 budget, but this kind of genocide should not be a bargaining chip.

I met a guy during my time in D.C. who told me that he was a conservative, but he didn't think we should make such a big deal out of issues like abortion. He said he believed in life from the moment of conception, but that the child was alive "kind of like a tree is alive."

To be fair, once he started thinking about that, he kind of backed off that assertion, but it made me think. We come up with nicer words for horrible things and it allows us to become sort of numb to the issue.

I'm talking about using words such as "abortion" instead of what it really is - murder. Or saying "fetus" instead of "baby." In the movie "Hotel Rwanda," which portrays the beginning of the Rwanda genocide, the Hutu tribe refers to the Tutsis as "cockroaches" in attempt to dehumanize them. I think that's what has happened with the issue of abortion.

In that spirit, I was horrified to hear that Boehner had settled for a deal which did not defund Planned Parenthood. If those were postnatal babies, would the same deal have been struck? If Planned Parenthood were putting 910 two year-olds in gas chambers every day, would Boehner have signed off on this "deal?"

The answer is obviously no, but whether or not the umbilical cord has been cut should not define humanity, and there is no sliding scale on the value of a human life.

I'm hearing a lot of Republicans, conservatives, even pro-life websites saying Boehner did what he had to do and made the right decision. I hear people say that the Republican congress, which is pro-life almost without exception, only controls "one half of one third of the government," which is kind of like saying "the dough only makes up one third of a pizza." Without the House of Representatives, everything falls apart.

Why is the House especially important? Because all appropriations must start in the House of Representatives. In other words, if the House doesn't begin a bill to fund something, it doesn't get funded. So Republicans had the ultimate leverage.

Why would Boehner throw that away, particularly on such an important - literally life or death - issue? The only answer is politics.

A problem that is making itself painfully clear is manifested in the election cycle. Republican leadership is looking forward to the 2012 elections and making important decisions based on what will keep them and their party in office.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the importance of keeping the right people in power. But when reelection becomes more important than doing what's right for the nation - indeed, even something as basic as protecting human lives - something is out of balance.

Another argument is that if Boehner hadn't agreed to this "deal," our troops would not have been paid for a month. It could have potentially cost some of our soldiers their lives.

That resonates with me. My grandfather and my great-grandfather served in the Army, I have a
sister in the National Guard, and I dreamed of joining the military myself for a lot of my childhood. Few people have more respect and admiration for the U.S. military than I.

But we aren't losing 910 soldiers every day. And as priceless as the life of every man and woman who has chosen to put themselves between us and the enemy is, the lives of the innocent children in their mother's womb are just as priceless.

And just as our soldiers are better equipped, both in training and equipment, to defend America's citizens than we are ourselves, we are the only defense that those children have.

May our leadership in the future have the courage to protect America's children.