Here is a good article by George Weigel over at First Things entitled “Tribulation Compounded by Blasphemy.”

As the Revised Standard Version renders the fourteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, Paul and Barnabas remind the proto-Christians of Antioch that it is only “through many tribulations” that we enter the Kingdom of God. The New American Bible translation drives the point home even more sharply: “It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the Kingdom of God.”

Christians in the United States who imagined that, whatever tribulations or hardships they have to endure, they would not include speeches by the president of the United States and the policies of the United States government had better reconsider, in light of President Barack Obama’s April 26 address to the annual Planned Parenthood Gala at Washington’s Marriott Wardman Park Hotel.

It was an appalling speech that had the sole benefit of clarifying the last-ditch commitment of the present administration to the most open-ended abortion license possible. And it drew a line in the sand that those committed to the biblical view of the sanctity of human life cannot ignore—and must challenge.

Planned Parenthood is a multimillion-dollar industry, funded in no small part by the federal government, that has been directly responsible for the deaths of millions of unborn children and is currently responsible for over one thousand such deaths every day; yet the president described Planned Parenthood’s work as “providing quality health care to women all across America.”

Pro-life advocates’ efforts to craft state laws requiring Planned Parenthood clinics and other abortionists to follow the minimal sanitation and safety standards required of true medical facilities are, according to the president, a matter of “shutting off communities that need more health care options for women, not less.”

The clinic-regulation laws that have been passed in states across the country are, the president charged, part of an “orchestrated and historic effort to roll back basic rights when it comes to women’s health”—as if abortuaries that do not meet the health and safety standards required of your local McDonald’s are contributing to anyone’s “health.”

Moreover, such laws are an attempt to mandate “government injecting itself into decisions best made between a woman and her doctor”—as if a butcher like Philadelphia’s Kermit Gosnell, who severed the spinal cords of infants born alive in botched abortions, was any woman’s personal physician.

Read the rest here.