Yep, you read that right. Dawn Eden’s got all the details.

Did you just pay your state and federal taxes? Good for you! Thanks to taxpayers’ generous funding, Planned Parenthood Golden Gate can afford to make an MTV commercial depicting a young girl going down on her boyfriend under the sheets.

By now you have all seen the headlines about Daniel Edwards’ “Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston,” a life size statue depicting Britney Spears giving birth.

For a bit of a different take on this, check out what the Funky Presbyterian has to say about it. He’s got a fascinating position, here’s the first bit…

Here’s what I love about it:

First it’s pro-life, which is great. Second it is a very well executed sculpture. The Pro-Life movement is of course linked with the political right, which is not known to be a friend of the arts, so to a see a pro life work that has actual artistic merit is encouraging to me as a pro-lifer and as an artist.

In addition, I especially love that the work is mildly provacative. It would have been so easy for someone to have done a nice safe sculpture of a fully clothed mother cradling her child (ala Mary Cassat or whatever). But what would be the point of that? The fact that this work is mildly provacative removes it somewhat from the sphere of the political right & especially from the “Christian” right. Let’s face it. Minature models of this statue are not going to be sold as pewter bookends in any Chrisitian bookstore, with the proceeds going to a pro-life organization. So the very nature of the work cleanses the pro-life message from the ideologue stigma often (unfairly or fairly) attached to it by more liberal opponents. Ralph Reed ain’t making naked statues of Britney Spears.

Which is the other thing I love about this piece. The fact that it is Britney Spears works fantastically on a number of levels. First, if the provacative nature of the work removes the accusation of “conservative ideologue”, identifying the woman as Britney Spears removes the whole “frou-frou- too-cool-for school-artsy-fartsy-wine-and-cheese-pretense” from a work that could otherwise be seen as merely high culture sophistication. Britney is as low culture, as pop culture as it gets. Even better, Britney is pop culture icon ten minutes past her prime, which is the worst of all possible crimes in our culture.

More…

Check out the photo essay of the Walk for Life march in SF yesterday.

March for Life is happening today. Several well known bloggers are there, including LaShawn, Kathryn Lopez, Charmaine Yoest, and Peter Shinn.

There is a campaign underway to renew the focus on defining life as having begun at conception. The bill (HR 552) introduced back in Feb ‘05 is here. The Prolife Alliance has an interesting summary of why this would end abortion on demand without a constitutional ammendment.

When the Supreme Court handed down its now-infamous Roe v. Wade decision, it did so based on a new, previously undefined “right of privacy” which it “discovered” in so-called “emanations” of “penumbrae” of the Constitution.

Of course, as constitutional law it was a disaster. But never once did the Supreme Court declare abortion itself to be a Constitutional right.

Instead the Supreme Court said:

“We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. . . the judiciary at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.”

Then the High Court made a key admission:

“If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s case [i.e. “Roe” who sought the abortion], of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life is then guaranteed by the [14th] Amendment.”

That’s exactly what a Life at Conception Act would do.

ABC News reports that the majority of Americans support Alito and support Roe v. Wade being upheld.

At the same time, this ABC News/Washington Post poll finds that six in 10 would want Alito, if confirmed, to vote to uphold Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 abortion-rights case.

The chart accompanying this story says that 35% want Roe overturned. So much for that position being “out of touch” with mainstream America. One of every three people you see walking down the street wants Roe to be overturned, and most probably even think of that to mean “make abortion illegal” which is really not what it would do.

What I also found fascinating was that those who claimed to go to church monthly are not any different than the population at large, regarding Roe, and even those weekly church goers only favor overturning Roe by slightly more than half (54%). And 27% of Democrats want Roe overturned.

Interesting stuff.