Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Some of our favorite articles are in this category, and they’re here because they didn’t fit into one of our main blog categories.

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Planned Parenthood’s Absurd Position on HIV Disclosure

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Estimated reading time: 9 minutes.

This morning I saw an article on DailyWire and I couldn’t decide if I was surprised or not. Kimberly Ellis points out that in Matt Lauer’s recent interview with Charlie Sheen, they were operating under a clear assumption that it is morally obligatory to disclose your HIV status to a sexual partner. Then Ellis points out that Planned Parenthood disagrees with Lauer and Sheen in their booklet for teens with HIV, Healthy, Happy and Hot.

Should I be surprised? On one hand, finding out that Planned Parenthood thinks HIV people have a moral right to not tell their sexual partners of their condition ought to be shocking. It’s a horrible, evil, destructive view. But on the other hand it shouldn’t be surprising because it coheres with what I already know about Planned Parenthood: they think the rights of some people to live (like the unborn) are less important than the rights of other people to have sex.

Two months ago I wrote an article about my conversation at the University of Michigan with a student I called Brent. Brent was honest enough to admit that he was pro-choice because he believed that the right to have sex was absolute, and without the right to kill unborn children, women wouldn’t be able to exercise that right.

Brent and Planned Parenthood (and many other pro-choice people) are making the same mistake: believing that the right to have sex is absolute. They are wrong. Your right to have sex is less important than another person’s right to live. Your right to live is more important than another person’s right to have sex.*

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Six Ways I’ve Seen Pro-Choice People Try to Censor Pro-Lifers

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Estimated reading time: 11 minutes.

Abortion is not merely immoral, it is obviously immoral.

This is why I’m so dedicated to helping pro-life people learn to dialogue well. I want all pro-life people to use the most persuasive arguments and learn to communicate graciously, relationally, and clearly. Those components in combination are an incredible recipe for the kind of environment where pro-choice people change their minds about abortion.

That abortion is obviously immoral is also why I’m open-minded. Some people think that being open-minded means being wishy-washy, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Being pro-life and open-minded means being pro-life because it’s rational, not because it’s comfortable. I’m pro-life because rationally it’s what I have to be, not because it’s what I want to be. If somehow my arguments against abortion were defeated and a stronger argument for abortion was presented to me, then I would change my mind.

Any open-minded person should be disgusted whenever people try to silence their political opposition.[Tweet that] I’m almost never disgusted with pro-choice people. I honestly think most of them mean well, but suffer from a combination of self-deception, flawed reasoning, and difficult emotional experiences. But I become truly angry when anyone attempts to shield himself and others from hearing arguments against his view by preventing his opposition from speaking.

I want to defeat pro-choice arguments by presenting better arguments, but I want the opposing arguments to be made. Sometimes I even help pro-choice people make their arguments stronger before I present my own. I believe the more light that is cast on both views, the more clearly the pro-life side comes out the victor.

Censorship attempts to prevent one of the sides from being visible. Censorship doesn’t want people to choose the more compelling view, it wants to force people into only having one view to choose from. Censorship is an incredibly powerful weapon for anyone cowardly enough to use it.[Tweet that]

Honest dialogue is aimed at truth, which makes it the greatest friend of the truth-seeker. It is created by two people being willing to acknowledge that they have been wrong before and that they want to believe true things, no matter how uncomfortable. Censorship, on the other hand, is the greatest enemy of the truth-seeker.

Censorship is at its strongest when it is hidden in the shadows, so out of a desire to make it as weak as possible and make it easier to recognize in the future, I am going to briefly share six experiences (or types of experiences) where I have seen attempts to censor pro-life people.

Unfortunately the attempts at censorship are getting more and more common. I’m not afraid of pro-choice arguments, but I am afraid of a political climate that trains people to refuse to even listen to pro-life arguments. If enough people are brainwashed to only listen to people that agree with them, we will not be able to stop abortion.

All six of these experiences are of pro-choice people doing the censoring. I’m not saying that censorship doesn’t exist on the other side, but I do think it is significantly less common. I formally renounce all attempts pro-life people have ever made to censor pro-choice people. Let them speak. If the truth is on our side, what have we to fear?

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