Praise If Earned - Criticism If Due

Ponder well the following news item on abortion quoted IN CAPS from Baptist Press News Service followed by its applicability to our two local legislative "voters-on-our-behalf " namely, Senator Rick Olseen and Representative Jeremy Kalin as their views and actions fit into this timely topic in the Minnesota venue:

"UNLESS SHE HAS A PARENT'S PERMISSION, A TEEN-AGE GIRL IN CALIFORNIA CAN'T GO ON A SCHOOL FIELD TRIP; SHE CAN'T GET A BODY PIERCING; CAN'T GO TO THE TANNING SALON AND CAN'T EVEN GET AN ASPIRIN FROM THE SCHOOL NURSE."

Quite a list of "protections" built in by society is it not?

Yet with reference to the most important possession in life - life itself - the same girl, on her own initiative or somebody else's counsel, is guaranteed the "right" to destroy (abort) the separate life living within her and to subject the girl to the life-threatening risks to her own life from the abortion procedures.

And no one - not even her parents - can stop her because the parents are taken totally out of the picture! Surely that is not the society we wish to foster in Minnesota.

Maybe it stretches hope and credulity to think that Senator Olseen tilted his windmill in the right direction by getting a bill signed into law by Governor Pawlenty on May 21, 2007 imposing restrictions on "body piercing" under a certain age.

But even with that as a very charitable interpretation or hopeful sign of progress toward moral insight by Senator Olseen nevertheless a ghoulish irony leaps out.

Senator Olseen would, by law, restrict a minor's relatively minor act of permitting the piercing of a part of the human body for the purpose of attaching decorative ornamentation because of the "risks" involved in "piercing" while giving free reign and absolute permission for abortion providers to rip into her body and destroy a developing person.

Representative Kalin, as far as can be determined by available records, evidently is solidly pro abortion.

These two legislators have a lot of explaining to do to justify their stand on abortion.