Telling the truth

The news about news continues to dominate headlines, and on Sept. 14, The New York Times demonstrated again why readers have legitimate reasons to question media giants: A Times story reported an accusation that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was involved in a lewd and sexually aggressive encounter against a female student in college.

Several Democratic presidential candidates immediately called for Kavanaugh’s impeachment.

The next day, the Times appended an extraordinary “editors’ note” to the story: They had failed to mention that the purported victim refused to speak with their reporters—and that her friends told them she doesn’t remember the purported encounter with Kavanaugh.

Telling the truth demands reporting such details, whatever the rest of the story includes. (The Times reporters said their editors excised the details.)

That didn’t stop Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., from sending an email to supporters of her presidential campaign after the clarification, deriding Kavanaugh’s “illegitimate nomination” and asking for campaign contributions.

Why keep targeting Kavanaugh?

Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal offered several possibilities, including this one: “Because the authority and legitimacy of future rulings that are not pleasing to progressives (most prominently, perhaps, on Roe v. Wade) can be undermined through footnotes that say ‘the 5-4 decision was joined by a justice credibly accused of sexual assault.’”

Meanwhile, 3,000 miles away, a remarkable scene of truth-telling about abortion was unfolding in a California courtroom.

Pro-life advocates David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt are fighting 14 felony counts related to their secret recordings of Planned Parenthood workers describing how they procure and sell unborn baby body parts. A preliminary hearing on Sept. 18 included testimony from Forrest Smith, an abortionist who estimates he’s conducted some 50,000 abortions.

The abortionist testified on behalf of the pro-life advocates.

After listening to Planned Parenthood workers in the undercover videos, Smith said he believed it was clear they weren’t following the protocol expected of most abortionists. Smith said the Planned Parenthood workers described a type of “tumultuous labor” that would cause the baby to come out without the assistance of an abortionist.

“There’s no question in my mind that some of these fetuses were live births,” Smith said. “No question it’s alive.”

Though Smith was a paid witness for the defense, his candor was stunning, according to a report by LifeSite News: “You can kill a human being, which I admit abortion is—but you have to do it in certain ways.”

There’s no right way to kill a baby, and Illinois police confronted that grisly truth as they reported a harrowing discovery in the home of a deceased abortionist: 2,246 medically preserved remains of unborn children.

The family of abortionist Ulrich Klopfer reported the find to police after Klopfer’s death in early September. Authorities said the human remains were stored in small, sealed plastic bags placed in cardboard boxes in his garage.

With such a horrifying discovery, pro-lifers likely were relieved to hear better news: In 2017, the number of babies who died by abortion hit its lowest mark since Roe v. Wade in 1973. But even that’s tempered with sadness: The total number of abortions still reached more than 860,000.

Democratic presidential candidates aren’t giving up their advocacy for abortion, but they talked about plenty of other issues in their televised debate on Sept. 12. Entrepreneur Andrew Yang announced he would give $1,000 a month to 10 American families over the next year, a mini-experiment in his proposal for the federal government to give every American adult $1,000 a month.

The expensive proposition came during the same week the Treasury Department reported eye-popping figures: The U.S. budget gap had widened to $1 trillion in the first 11 months of the fiscal year.

As the Treasury Department confessed the country’s debt, students from Union Seminary confessed their ecological sins—to potted plants. A photo on Twitter included an explanation: “Today in chapel, we confessed to plants … to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we often fail to honor.” The tweet was low-hanging fruit, and plenty of Christians pointed out we should pray to the Creator, not the creation.

A day later, a potential cinematic sin grabbed attention on Twitter: A report from Variety magazine suggested that movie moguls were considering a remake of the classic film The Princess Bride.

Even in a highly partisan country, the truth about the beloved fairy tale seemed clear to fans across the spectrum: Tinkering with the movie is inconceivable.