According to the U.S. Justice Department, what fueled part of the underlying unrest that exploded in Ferguson, Mo., was that the police there were regarded not so much as officers of the peace, but officers of the fleece.
It seems that certain city officials came to regard the Ferguson police department as revenue collectors. If the city needed more money, the police were allegedly instructed to issue more tickets. And not just a ticket here or a ticket there, but as many as possible.
According to the DOJ report, “Officers sometimes write six, eight, or, in at least one instance, fourteen citations for a single encounter.”
It seems that in many instances African-Americans are more likely to be pulled over, more likely to be ticketed, and much more likely to be arrested. In the words of Niger Innis of Restore the Dream, blacks become “low hanging fruit” — an easy and lucrative source of income for the city government.
Blacks are among the first and most targeted.
But Ferguson is only one among many such cities where the victims pay with their wallets, and sometimes their lives. Accordingly I’m reminded that African-Americans have for years been“low hanging fruit” in another endemic money-making scheme that is nationwide; where victims pay with their wallets and their babies’ lives.
The abortion industry is Ferguson writ large.
In 2013, Ferguson collected $2.63 million in fines and fees from local residents. For the fiscal year 2013-14, Planned Parenthood, which performs about one-third of the nation’s abortions, took in $1.3 billion; 41 percent of that from taxpayers.
Ferguson’s population is a little over 21,000. Planned Parenthood alone eliminated about 16 Fergusons from our population last year alone.
And just like Ferguson, Planned Parenthood systematically targets minorities.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, named for the late Alan Guttmacher, a former president of Planned Parenthood, black women are 3-to-5 times more likely than white women to have abortions, depending on which year’s statistics you’re examining. Hispanic women are twice as likely.
Planned Parenthood will say that this is explainable. Low-income women have more abortions. They suggest that it's just coincidental that low-income women are disproportionately black or Hispanic.
What’s not even remotely explainable, however, is what Planned Parenthood – in a Black History Month press release this year –euphemistically calls its “complicated history.”
This “complicated history” begins with Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger. This is a woman whose life’s mission was to ensure that there be fewer children from what she called “the unfit.”
Whom did she deem “the unfit”? Well, Margaret Sanger had no problem addressing a Ku Klux Klan rally. She wrote that “the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, [is] just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development.” And she developed “the Negro Project,” the goal of which was to reduce the Black population.
Oh, but Planned Parenthood will explain that all this is nothing compared to the “good” that Margaret Sanger accomplished by championing birth control. Whenever I hear this, I’m reminded that Planned Parenthood likes to tell people that we should ignore the 330,000 babies it kills every year because it does pap smears and hands out condoms and harmful chemical and surgical birth deterrents as well.
The nation’s largest abortion chain also likes to say that whatever its past was, it is not racist today. Really?
In 2008, seven Planned Parenthood offices around the country were called and offered donations for the express purpose of aborting black babies. The caller would make statements such as, “There are way too many blacks in America.” In every instance, Planned Parenthood was willing to take the donor’s money, sometimes enthusiastically.
According to Protecting Black Life, 79 percent of all abortion clinics are located in or near minority neighborhoods. Two of Planned Parenthood’s most recent high profile building projects in New Orleans and El Centro, California, are in areas of high minority populations.
Just more coincidence, I suppose abortion supporters would say.
Here’s another “coincidence.” The Department of Justice’s report on Ferguson states that the city’s “law enforcement practices are shaped by [its] focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs.”
Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood clinic director, declares that her facility had abortion quotas that it needed to fill for budgetary reasons. In both instances, money was the motivating force at work. Public service was secondary, if not a pretense.
Ferguson is on the way to being reformed. Officials have resigned and been replaced. Practices are being revamped. But the abortion industry continues in its discriminatory, deadly practices. Every day, 3,000 babies lives, over 1,000 of them African-American, are ended in America before we can hear their cries.
Black lives do matter. All lives matter — in Ferguson, in Florida, in New York, and in the wombs of all of the mothers in America. No longer will we look the other way at Ferguson’s practices — mirrored across the nation — and ignore the injustices, imbalances and symptoms that are being uncovered. No more.
And just as Ferguson’s wrongs are being corrected, I believe that abortion will one day be overcome as well. Then it’s inevitable that we will face the profound, simple truth – all lives matter.
Dr. Alveda C. King grew up in the civil rights movement led by her uncle, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She is a pastoral associate and director of African-American outreach for Priests for Life and Gospel of Life Ministries. Her family home in Birmingham, Ala., was bombed, as was her father’s church office in Louisville, Ky. Alveda herself was jailed during the open housing movement. Read more reports from Dr. Alveda C. King — Click Here Now.
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