Articles and Videos – Page 1141

An Arkansas Marijuana Monopoly?

Aug 8, 2013Jerry3 CommentsMarijuanaMarijuana

Attorney General Dustin McDaniel recently approved a ballot measure to legalize marijuana in Arkansas—of course just for medical purposes.

It’s hard to believe the sponsors of this measure really imagine the people of Arkansas think the effort is about medicine. Even the name of their group, Arkansans for Responsible Medicine, is an insult to our intelligence. There’s nothing responsible about anything that creates more drug addiction, and there is nothing medical about legalizing marijuana. So if this latest effort is not about responsible medicine, what is it about?

Follow the money. If voters approve this measure, they will be allowing marijuana businessmen to open a chain of marijuana stores across Arkansas.

Marijuana is big business. You can bet that the out-of-state marijuana interests who are poised to finance the campaign to legalize marijuana are expecting to make lots of money selling our citizens this harmful drug.

There’s nothing like having control of a marijuana monopoly to make a drug dealer’s day.

Columnist Offers Solution to Divorce: “Wedlease”

Aug 7, 2013Jerry2 CommentsMarriageMarriage

Last Sunday a guest column appeared in the Washington Post advocating “term marriages” or “wedleases”—temporary marriages that would end after a predetermined number of years.

The column claims this could reduce divorce. In the column, the author points out how common divorce has become in recent years, and asks the question, “Why doesn’t society make the legal structure of marriage more congruent to our behavior” by legalizing temporary marriages? He even goes so far as to claim when a temporary “wedlease” expires, the husband and wife could renew their marriage “lease” or go on about their separate lives as simply “as vacating a rental unit.”

The idea sounds so far-fetched that you would almost think the column was satire. The truth is, however, with more couples trying “open” marriages and many states choosing to define marriage as something other than the union of one man to one woman for a lifetime, it’s worth taking time to explain why “wedleases” simply would not work. (more…)

Columnist Asks if “Another Gosnell” Operating in Delaware

Aug 5, 2013JerryAbortionAbortion, Life, Pro-life, Sanctity of Human Life

In a column published by the Washington Post last Friday, Kirsten Powers asked whether a Planned Parenthood clinic in Delaware has been secretly operating under Kermit Gosnell-like conditions.

Powers recently helped bring media attention to Gosnell’s trial. Gosnell was convicted earlier this year of murdering babies born alive following abortion procedures. The grand jury report in his case cited horrific conditions–including blood-stained medical records, insufficiently-trained staff members, and a complete lack of organization–at Gosnell’s clinic.

Powers’ most recent column tells about three whistleblowers who came forward recently from a Delaware abortion clinic, saying,

“[T]wo former Planned Parenthood nurses – Joyce Vasikonis and Jayne Mitchell-Werbrich – have been ringing alarm bells since April about the ‘meat-market-style, assembly-line abortions,’ they witnessed at the Delaware clinic. Moreover, they have complained of lax regulation and a lack of government oversight of abortion clinics in Delaware.

“This week they were joined by Melody Meanor, a former health-care manager at Planned Parenthood of Delaware. Meanor testified that she felt compelled to come forward because she was ‘offended when Planned Parenthood of Delaware attempted to discredit the [prior] testimony’ of Mitchell-Werbrich and Vasikonis who described what she too had witnessed.”

Among other things, the three women say Planned Parenthood’s Delaware clinic was disorganized and allowed staff to perform serious medical procedures without sufficient training. Mitchell-Werbrich specifically said she saw one abortion doctor “slapping a patient,” and placing patients on unwashed operating room tables.

Many abortion advocates have claimed Kermit Gosnell’s abortion clinic was an outlier, and that most clinics are well-maintained. However, between the testimony of these three women; the closure of a North Carolina abortion clinic last week for some two dozen health violations; and recent stories out of Texas of an abortion doctor who allegedly killed infants born alive; one has to wonder whether Gosnell-like abortion clinics are far more common than many would have us believe.