Choice Hotels Reverse a Bad Choice

The frequent "Taking Action" posts appearing on this blog suggest how important a responsibility we believe citizen advocacy is -- an importance profoundly increased for Christians who are called to be salt and light in their enveloping culture.

And, as we have seen over the last 30 years of working in pro-life, pro-family causes, the effect of our phone calls, letters and conversations can be tremendous. In fact, we can't figure out why Christians continue to take their powers of influence so lightly.

But even a few can make a significant difference.

Case in point? The despicable partnership between New Jersey abortionists and a couple of Choice Hotels that we spoke of last Friday has ended. And the sole cause is the heat generated by pro-life advocates over the matter.

Family Research Council received this message from Choice Hotels just two days after their publicizing the matter:

"'A copy of the Washington Update (dated October 22, 2008)... recently crossed my desk. It referenced two hotels within the Choice Hotels franchise system. The email message highlighted your organization's concerns regarding these hotels, and I wanted to take this opportunity to respond to you directly as this issue has been resolved. The Clarion Hotel & Conference Center, upon reflection, has ended the practice of offering special rates to patients of the Cherry Hill Women's Center... we do try to be sensitive to issues and questions raised when it is within our power to do so and we are happy to provide you with this positive update...' Sincerely, Anne Madison, Vice President, Corporate Communications, Choice Hotels International, Inc."

Way to go, Choice Hotels. Way to go, FRC. And way to go, to all of you who responded to the call.

What Lies Ahead?

It's a very scary prospect. But after the MSM, Hollywood and the government schools have had their way for two generations, what else can we realistically expect?

Until Tomorrow

I'm afraid we are still very much occupied with moving my Mom into a nearby assisted living apartment and so I'm passing on blog business until tomorrow morning. See you then.

Blogging Lapse

Yesterday's absence of blogging here at Vital Signs (not to mention posting just one today, an important one, though) comes because of an especially hectic schedule: a rushed visit to a hospital emergency room yesterday (our friend is okay now), hosting my youngest brother and his wife in from Colorado, detailed meetings with the people from the assisted living apartment where my Mom becomes a resident on Monday and, most hectic of all, moving her furniture and other belongings out of her current 2-bedroom townhouse.

Sorry.

I'll be back at it Monday. Meanwhile do take a look at the following post and take appropriate action. Thanks.

Abortion Hotels?

From the Family Research Council comes a sickening report about two New Jersey motels catering to local abortionists...and how you can effectively protest this bizarre behavior.

Women certainly don't profit from abortion, but the Quality Inn in Maple Shade, New Jersey does. In a story that has rattled the local community, New Jersey Right to Life confirmed this week that two area hotels are offering discounted rooms to women who can prove they've had an abortion. Both the Clarion Hotel in Cherry Hill and the Quality Inn in Maple Shade reduce room rates by up to $50 for girls with a receipt from the nearby abortion center. The Quality Inn even goes so far as to give away "free pancake and egg breakfasts" to girls who can produce a stamped clinic pamphlet.

According to volunteers from the area's "40 Days for Life" campaign, many of the patients leaving the Cherry Hill clinic are "alone, crying, and in extreme pain." After their digoxin injections, these mothers are sent home or to area hotels to wait for their babies to die. The next day, they return to the clinic to deliver their dead children. Do these area inns really want to facilitate the killing process? And, from a legal standpoint, are they prepared to incur the liability if any medical complications arise? Unfortunately, the reason these women need a place to stay is because the clinics don't care enough about their health to monitor them overnight, despite the medical risks. That should be a clear signal to these hotels that local abortionists are harming women.

Of course, the hotels may honestly believe that theirs is a compassionate offer. But even with the best of intentions, a discount like this only makes it more affordable for young girls to cross state lines for an abortion. As the Right to Life branch accurately points out, New Jersey doesn't have a parental notification law on the books, making it an even more attractive location for young girls who want to obtain an abortion without ever calling home.

Ironically, both the Quality Inn and the Clarion are part of an umbrella corporation called Choice Hotels International. Join us in urging the Choice chain to choose life. Call the company toll-free at 800-300-8800 or log on to www.choicehotels.com. In the upper right corner, you'll see a tab for "customer support." Click through to voice your concerns. Rather than play a disturbing role in promoting abortion, encourage this company to start stocking pamphlets from nearby pregnancy resource centers.

Today's Posts

Have You Started Packing Your Christmas Box Yet?

Excuse Me, Doctor. But Your Donor Isn't Dead.

Assisted Suicide Was NOT "His Only Viable Option"

Obama Lawyer: Protecting Voter Fraud & Silencing Freedom of Speech

Is James Dobson the Reason for Colin Powell's Endorsement of Barack Obama?

Huge Ad Buys and a Huge Media Sellout -- The G.O.P. Is In Trouble

Have You Started Packing Your Christmas Box Yet?

It's getting that time of year again...the time to pack your boxes for the wonderful gospel outreach of Operation Christmas Child!

Learn more about how to get your family and church involved right here at the Samaritan's Purse web site.

Excuse Me, Doctor. But Your Donor Isn't Dead.

I've drawn attention here on Vital Signs to the ethical problems related to "brain death" and organ donation a few times this year: Is "Mostly Dead" Enough When It Comes to Taking Organs?, Surprise, Surprise: "Brain Death" Isn't Death, First, Do No Harm...Unless You Can Get Good Value Out of that Guy's Organs, and Hastening Death to Get the Organs. In doing so, I've noted that this long-kept secret of taking organs from donors who are, uh...not dead yet..seems to finally leaking out to the general public. Not like it should...but it's starting.

Here is yet another instance. It is a report about an Australian doctor who believes that taking organs earlier than actual death is, in fact, acceptable. But when he wrote an article in the Journal of Law and Medicine which honestly explained the medical facts and then simply suggested that the public be better informed about the matter -- well, he learned how seriously bothered other medicos can get when the "brain death" myth gets busted in public.

Assisted Suicide Was NOT "His Only Viable Option"

From the moment that Daniel James drank the milky liquid and laid his head on the pillow, there was no going back. Within minutes his eyes had closed, his breathing slowed and then he was dead, his once-vigorous body peacefully but lethally shut down by the barbiturate solution he had swallowed.

Such is the scene at Dignitas, the Swiss clinic that offers assisted suicide, where Daniel died last month. Nan Maitland, who has previously accompanied somebody committing suicide at Dignitas, said: “It takes place in a flat, very plainly furnished and decorated but extremely nice. It is a new place...

His family issued a heartfelt statement. “His death was an extremely sad loss for his family, friends and all those that care for him, but no doubt a welcome relief from the ‘prison’ he felt his body had become.”

In addition, his mother said: “He couldn’t walk, had no hand function, but constant pain in all of his fingers. He was incontinent, suffered uncontrollable spasms in his legs and upper body and needed 24-hour care.

“While not everyone in Dan’s situation would find it as unbearable as Dan, what right does any human being have to tell any other that they have to live such a life, filled with terror, discomfort and indignity?”

Julie James said Dignitas had been her son’s only viable option...

He could not move from the chest down and lost the use of all his limbs. Unable to make the enormous mental adjustment from robust athlete to tetraplegic, he became convinced that he wanted to end his life. His condition, however, meant that he could not commit suicide, unless he chose the long and painful horrors of starvation. Instead, he wanted help.

To opponents of euthanasia, the help he should have had was not from Dignitas. They believe he should have had help to rediscover hope and to live a new kind of life.

“This young man, Daniel James, did not need help to kill himself: he needed help to live with severe disability,” said Dr Peter Saunders of the Care Not Killing Alliance, which campaigns against assisted suicide. “It is most unfortunate that he fell into the hands of Dignitas when he did. He was still very much in the acute stage of loss and he was also almost certainly profoundly depressed. It is a terrible tragedy.”

Saunders added: “What is needed is a more positive outlook in caring for people’s physical and spiritual needs. People can come through these difficulties.”

One who did was Roger Addison, who, as a promising 21-year-old rugby player for Pontypool, was paralysed in a scrum in 1966. Now 63, he resides at a Cardiff hospital, attended by family and rugby friends. His determination to live appears unwavering after 40 years of serious disability.

“Roger has this huge belief that he is here for a purpose,” said Arthur Crane, an official at his old club. “He has been an inspiration.” ...

(Source: The Times (U.K.), October 19)

Obama Lawyer: Protecting Voter Fraud & Silencing Freedom of Speech

From Conn Carroll over at the Foundry (The Heritage Foundation's always illuminating blog):

Want a preview of what an Obama Department of Justice would look like? Look no further than Obama for America general counsel Bob Bauer’s letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey last Friday. Bauer wants the special prosecutor investigating the U.S. attorney firings to start investigating John McCain, Sarah Palin and other Republicans such as Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). Their crime? Calling on our nation’s law enforcement officers to investigate widespread reports of vote fraud...

Is James Dobson the Reason for Colin Powell's Endorsement of Barack Obama?

In an article in which leftist journalist Max Blumenthal acts as if he was present at meetings (that he wasn't) and sees into people's minds and motives (which he can't), he blames James Dobson and Sarah Palin for driving Colin Powell into the arms of Barack Obama. And, not surprisingly, in doing so, Blumenthal gets a lot of his own sputtering indignation towards "the Christian Right" off his chest.

...Over a decade ago, when General Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, emerged as the Republican Party’s most popular figure, James Dobson targeted him, fearing his political ascendancy might spell doom for the party’s anti-abortion wing. Dobson’s tactics ranged from threatening conservative movement leaders who dared to praise Powell’s political potential, to devoting an entire broadcast of his top-rated radio show to attacking Powell’s advocacy of condom use. Dobson and his minions laid the groundwork for Powell’s castigation from the Republican Party. Yet by helping to force Powell into the wilderness, Dobson may have also provoked his momentous act of political vengeance...

Huge Ad Buys and a Huge Media Sellout -- The G.O.P. Is In Trouble

The editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer emphasizes a glaring fault in the American political game. Combined with the hypnotized media's devotion to Barack Obama and the Democrats, the Republican Party is in very deep trouble.

So too is the country.

Here's a bit of the editorial.

Anyone with a TV can see proof daily that the presidential public-financing system is broken and needs to be fixed.

Democrat Barack Obama spent more than $3 million last month on TV ads in Pennsylvania, enabling him to run a wide variety of TV commercials seemingly nonstop...

In Indiana, he is outspending McCain 20-to-1. In North Carolina, the Democrat has spent nearly six times as much as the Republican on TV commercials.

This unbalanced playing field was created by Obama, the first major-party nominee to reject public financing in the general election since the system was created in 1974. Democrat Hillary Clinton also would have turned down public money, had she won the nomination. Their party is accustomed to being outspent by the Republicans.

Obama backed out of his earlier pledge to accept public money when it became clear just how much he could raise, helped by the Internet. He was already shattering presidential fund-raising records before he brought in a whopping $150 million in September...

Today's Posts

Catching Up with The Book Den

Proposition 8. Will Marriage Prevail?

Should Science Be Free from Ideology?

Out of Iran

Christians Under Fire in India and Iraq

What If It Were a Republican Who Had Ties to a Domestic Terrorist?

Why Are There More Global Warming Skeptics Nowadays?

Yet More Evidence of the Obama/Ayers Friendship -- The Friendship Obama and the MSM Keep Lying About

Catching Up with The Book Den

Every once in awhile I take in hand the backlog of my "literary blogging" over at The Book Den. I did so last night with a zipped-through catch-up post that, even if it wasn't very thorough or complete, brings me to the present. Finally.

The post covers a whole lot of stuff in just a few paragraphs but the readers among you might find it of some interest as the authors mentioned include Chesterton, John Buchan, Dickens, Robert Novak, Rafael Sabatini, P.D. James, Victor Hugo, Neville Shute, Mark Steyn, Hillare Belloc, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Anthony Trollope, H. Rider Haggard, Alexander Dumas, Conan Doyle, and a few more.

Proposition 8. Will Marriage Prevail?

Next to the presidential election,
California Proposition 8 is the
most important vote in America.

Huh? Well, tell me then --
just what is Proposition 8 and why are the stakes so high?

Here's Dennis Prager with the answers.

Should Science Be Free from Ideology?

The latest newsletter of Nebraskans Concerned for Ethical Research is ready to read right here. You'll see there's some changes going on with this excellent organization, changes that will improve and extend their very important work. Check it out. And especially note this quick-hit item...

Your Turn: Questions from the Public

In this space, we feature actual questions we get from phone calls, e-mails, and road shows. Please contact NCER with a question you would like answered in this space.

Q: Shouldn’t science be free to go wherever it can without interference from concerns based on ideology?

A: Ideology comes from the Greek words for “idea” and “word.” An ideology is a coherent expression of ideas united by a guiding ethic. There’s no such thing as “neutral” research, especially when human life is involved.

Ethical research requires that two questions be answered: 1) Can we do it? 2) Should we do it? If research is to be an ideology-free zone, shall we scrap the Nuremberg Code on research involving human beings? It was established to prevent experimental horrors such as those perpetrated by the Nazis.

What about the Declarations of Helsinki and Geneva, and other impositions of ideology on research? What about the Institutional Review Board at the University of Nebraska Medical Center? UNMC says the IRB was established “to assure the protection of all human subjects in research projects.”

More ideology.

Fortunately, as you see in the pages of this newsletter, ethical ideology and progress are not mutually exclusive.

Out of Iran

Christians Under Fire in India and Iraq

Prayer Digest reports that violent persecutions of Christians are escalating in Orissa, India. Hundreds of churches and thousands of Christian homes have been burned down and some 60,000 or more are living in refugee camps or hiding out in the forest. Forced "conversions" to Hinduism from knife-wielding thugs are common with local police said by many to actually be accomplices in the violence.

Meanwhile, another false (and brutally coercive) religion is behind the persecution of Christians in Iraq. Several thousand Christians (almost half of the Christian population of Mosul in northern Iraq that remains a stronghold of al Qaeda.) have fled the city after attacks upon them by violent Muslims. Christian homes have been firebombed. Christians have been murdered on the streets. And the threats of even more violence are growing.

Pray for those suffering. Pray they will stay faithful. Pray for peace, justice and spiritual power.

What If It Were a Republican Who Had Ties to a Domestic Terrorist?

Doug Patton takes an interesting angle on the Bill Ayers/UNL fiasco in his latest column. Check it out right here.

Why Are There More Global Warming Skeptics Nowadays?

From Lorne Gunter's "Thirty Years of Warmer Temperatures Go Poof" in the National Post (Canada) comes these remarkable paragraphs:

In early September, I began noticing a string of news stories about scientists rejecting the orthodoxy on global warming. Actually, it was more like a string of guest columns and long letters to the editor since it is hard for skeptical scientists to get published in the cabal of climate journals now controlled by the Great Sanhedrin of the environmental movement.

Still, the number of climate change skeptics is growing rapidly. Because a funny thing is happening to global temperatures -- they're going down, not up...

Prior to the past decade of climate hysteria and Kyoto hype, the MWP (Medieval Warm Period) was a given in the scientific community. Several hundred studies of tree rings, lake and ocean floor sediment, ice cores and early written records of weather -- even harvest totals and censuses --confirmed that the period from 800 AD to 1300 AD was unusually warm, particularly in Northern Europe.

But in order to prove the climate scaremongers' claim that 20th-century warming had been dangerous and unprecedented -- a result of human, not natural factors -- the MWP had to be made to disappear. So studies such as Michael Mann's "hockey stick," in which there is no MWP and global temperatures rise gradually until they jump up in the industrial age, have been adopted by the UN as proof that recent climate change necessitates a reordering of human economies and societies...

Don Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University, says, "It's practically a slam dunk that we are in for about 30 years of global cooling," as the sun enters a particularly inactive phase. His examination of warming and cooling trends over the past four centuries shows an "almost exact correlation" between climate fluctuations and solar energy received on Earth, while showing almost "no correlation at all with CO2."

An analytical chemist who works in spectroscopy and atmospheric sensing, Michael J. Myers of Hilton Head, S. C., declared, "Man-made global warming is junk science," explaining that worldwide manmade CO2 emission each year "equals about 0.0168% of the atmosphere's CO2 concentration ... This results in a 0.00064% increase in the absorption of the sun's radiation. This is an insignificantly small number."

Other international scientists have called the manmade warming theory a "hoax," a "fraud" and simply "not credible."

While not stooping to such name-calling, weather-satellite scientists David Douglass of the University of Rochester and John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville nonetheless dealt the True Believers a devastating blow last month.

For nearly 30 years, Professor Christy has been in charge of NASA's eight weather satellites that take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily around the globe. In a paper co-written with Dr. Douglass, he concludes that while manmade emissions may be having a slight impact, "variations in global temperatures since 1978 ... cannot be attributed to carbon dioxide."

Moreover, while the chart below was not produced by Douglass and Christy, it was produced using their data and it clearly shows that in the past four years -- the period corresponding to reduced solar activity -- all of the rise in global temperatures since 1979 has disappeared.

It may be that more global warming doubters are surfacing because there just isn't any global warming.