Month: December 2019

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“Kentucky argued the law is ‘simple and straightforward,’ calling it part of an ‘informed-consent process.’ The law, Kentucky said, ‘does nothing more than require that women who are considering an abortion be provided with information that is truthful, non-misleading and relevant to their decision of whether to have an abortion,’” CNN reported.

CNN noted that the court “rejected the case without comment or noted dissent by any of the justices.”

Pro-life advocates praised the Supreme Court for their decision to uphold the Kentucky law.

“March for Life applauds the U.S. Supreme Court decision today upholding a Kentucky ultrasound law,” March for Life President Jeanne Mancini said in a statement sent to The Daily Wire. “Women facing an unexpected pregnancy deserve to have as much medically and technically accurate information as possible when they are making what could be the most important decision of their life.”

President and CEO of American United for Life (AUL) Catherine Glenn Foster said the decision “confirms that women deserve the truth.”

“Americans United for Life hails the final legal victory today of Kentucky’s common-sense informed consent provision simply ensuring that abortion facilities offer women who are thinking about abortion visual, ultrasound confirmation of the humanity of the life in their womb,” Glenn Foster said in a statement sent to The Daily Wire.

“Consistent with the Supreme Court’s direction that mothers considering abortion may be given accurate, nonmisleading information about abortion and the nature of human life, today’s decision confirms that women deserve the truth, and cannot give real informed consent to an abortion unless facilities are transparent and honest about what abortion really is,” the AUL president added. “That’s a right that was denied to me when I was 19 years old and making a difficult, life-changing decision, and I am so relieved that going forward, the women of Kentucky will have the opportunity I never did.”

“The fact that there were no recorded dissents from any of the justices is notable,” added Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, a former federal law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. “That ought to help demonstrate the common-sense, straightforward nature of Kentucky’s law.”

Pro-abortion advocates had claimed Kentucky’s pro-life law violates the First Amendment by mandating abortion-seeking women see their child and hear their heartbeat before going through with the life-ending procedure.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that this was nonsense.

“As a First Amendment matter, there is nothing suspect with a State’s requiring a doctor, before performing an abortion, to make truthful, non-misleading factual disclosures, relevant to informed consent, even if those disclosures relate to unborn life and have the effect of persuading the patient not to have an abortion,” the three-judge Sixth Circuit panel said in its ruling, CNN noted.

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By Wayne Allyn Root

I got a kick out of a recent Letter to the Editor about my last newspaper column. It was from another angry, bitter liberal (is there any other kind?) complaining that I’m a liar. They claimed Trump’s economy is not so great. And they claimed it’s actually worse than either the Obama or Jimmy Carter economy.

I should stop writing about liberals being unstable, unbalanced, delusional and hateful. It’s much better to just let them talk. The more liberals say, the better Trump looks to voters.

Ironically, on the very same day this angry, Trump-hating, Root-hating, Letter to the Editor appeared, America received some of the best economic news in years.

The November jobs report came out on Friday. Set aside the fact that Trump has produced one of the greatest stock markets in history; GDP is far above Obama or Jimmy Carter, who both produced disastrous economies that nearly destroyed the middle class; 3.5% unemployment is the lowest in 50 years; the highest number of Americans are working in history; and black and Latino unemployment is the lowest in history.

But the latest jobs report is better news than all of that!

266,000 new jobs were created in November. That’s 79,000 jobs more than economists expected…in a month! The number of jobs was also revised upwards by 41,000 for the two preceding months.

Manufacturing jobs soared by 54,000 in November, the biggest monthly gain in over two decades (since 1998).

Wages were up 3.1%. That’s the 16thmonth in a row wages are up 3% or higher under President Trump.

Ask any worker if a bigger paycheck for 16 months in a row matters? I dare you.

CNBC called it “a blowout jobs report.” They also reported, “You can’t contradict these are the best numbers of our lives.” CNN said, “A couple of generations of people have not seen this kind of unemployment rate continue to be that low.” Fox Business reported, “This is one of the best reports…What a way to end the decade, on this report, it’s outstanding.”

So, I ask all my readers, who is the one lying? Who is the delusional one?

I don’t need to wait for an answer. Just look at the latest Rasmussen Presidential Approval poll. It was already a robust 49% for Trump before the latest impeachment hearing on Wednesday. That’s when Democrats trotted out a bunch of angry, radical, Marxist, white male-hating, America-hating, capitalism-hating, Ivy League law school professors to testify in front of the nation.

Smart move. This group makes even Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren seem likable!

The very next day, Trump’s approval soared to 52%- just a smidge below the highest of his entire presidency. Those Ivy League law professors made quite a depression. I’m surprised Democrats didn’t trot out used car salesman and dentists.

On Friday Trump’s approval was 51%- significantly above where Obama was on the same day of his presidency. Even though Trump has faced 96% negative news coverage.

Among white voters Trump’s approval is positive 53% to 46%. Among male voters it’s positive 59% to 40%. And most shocking, Trump’s approval is 31% among black voters.

It’s clear what voters think about President Trump and the Trump economy. It’s clear who they believe and who they think is lying. But please keep the angry, delusional liberal Letters to the Editor coming. You’re making my job so much easier.

I’m honored to report I received a personal invitation from President Trump to visit the White House next week. I’ll be sure to say congratulations and THANK YOU from all my fans who have better jobs, higher wages and far higher retirement accounts because of President Trump’s policies.

All I can say is, the Trump Economic Miracle is the best revenge.

Wayne Allyn Root is the host of “The Wayne Allyn Root Show” on Newsmax TV, nightly at 8 PM ET, found on DirecTV Ch #349, or Dish TV Ch #216, at https://ift.tt/2zOf79k He is also a nationally syndicated radio host of “Wayne Allyn Root: Raw & Unfiltered” found at https://ift.tt/2g4uzmV

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President Trump spoke to the press Saturday at the White House as he departed for Florida for speeches before the Israeli-American Council National Summit in Hollywood and a Republican fundraising dinner in Aventura.

Trump told the waiting reporters that his personal attorney former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani “found plenty” of “good information” during his recent trip to Ukraine and Europe.

Trump then added that he believes Giuliani wants to present a report to the Attorney General William Barr and to Congress. Trump added Giuliani has not told him what he found.

Rudy Giuliani and Viktor Shokin

Giuliani reportedly traveled to Budapest and Ukraine this past week to meet with several Ukrainian officials about corruption.

OAN reporter Chanel Rion has been traveling with Rudy Giuliani and reporting on his investigations in Hungary and Kiev, Ukraine.

In her report released on Sunday night Chanel Rion mentioned that Ukrainian officials showed her six criminal cases involving the Bidens, Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.

Budapest-Kiev-Vienna.

Tracking down Ukrainian witnesses we collected hrs of testimony, documents, and stunning revelations.

Seems Dem impeachment set loose a chaos from which they are unlikely to recover.

If our FBI decides to act, that is…@OANN – https://t.co/toyTU1RPtw pic.twitter.com/YdQDU4FZbT

— Chanel Rion OAN (@ChanelRion) December 8, 2019

The post Breaking: Ukrainian Official Reveals Six Criminal Cases Opened in Ukraine Involving the Bidens appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

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If the House of Representatives votes to impeach President Donald Trump based on the evidence currently on the record against him, it would be a violation of the U.S. Constitution, Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz says.

“It would be an utter abuse of the power of Congress. The Constitution sets out four criteria for impeaching a president: Treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” Dershowitz explained to LevinTV host Mark Levin on Sunday night’s episode of Life, Liberty & Levin on Fox News. “Unless one of those criteria is met, Congress does not have the authority to impeach, and if they do, their impeachment would be void. Alexander Hamilton said any act of Congress that is inconsistent with the Constitution is void.”

The Harvard legal scholar also took issue with the notion that impeachment is whatever Congress says it is, which has become a popular talking point among Trump’s political opponents.

“Congress may be able to get away with it,” Dershowitz added, “but this confuses what Congress can get away with with what Congress is sworn to uphold. Any member of Congress who votes to impeach President Trump without a finding that he is guilty of treason, bribery, other high crimes or misdemeanors is violating their oath of office.”

Dershowitz also compared House Democrats’ search for an impeachable offense to use against the president to the authoritarian behavior of the leaders of the former Soviet Union.

“What they’re trying to do is what the KGB under Lavrentiy Beria said to Stalin, the dictator — I’m not comparing our country to the Soviet Union; I just want to make sure it never becomes anything like that,” Dershowitz said. “Beria said to Stalin, ‘Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.’ And that’s what some of the Democrats are doing. They have Trump in their sights, they want to figure out a way of impeaching him, and they’re searching for a crime.”

Dershowitz went on to warn that Democrats have created “open-ended criteria which bear no relationship to the words of the Constitution itself” and that a potential impeachment of President Trump would set a precedent that will “weaponize impeachment, and the next Democrat who gets elected will be impeached.”

Watch:

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Looney Indeed

Finally an accurate view of Looney Schiff

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The post Alan Dershowitz to Mark Levin: Impeachment ‘would be an utter abuse of the power of Congress’ appeared first on Conservative Review.

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Turn back the pages of history to the rise of consumerism in America. Josh McMullen, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Regent University in Virginia Beach, delves into when and how America become the consumer giant that it is today. 

How have department stores and advancements in transportation influenced consumerism? What are the striking similarities between advertisements through the decades? And did consumerism play a role in the battle against communism in the mid-1900s?

We discuss these questions and more on this episode of The Daily Signal Podcast. Enjoy reading the lightly edited transcript below or listening to the podcast:

Virginia Allen: We are joined on The Daily Signal Podcast by Dr. Josh McMullen, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Dr. McMullen, thank you so much for joining us.

Josh McMullen: It’s very wonderful to be here. Thank you.

Philip Reynolds: Dr. McMullen, let’s start with an easy question. How long have you been teaching history and was that something you always knew you wanted to do?

McMullen: I’ve been teaching history … at the university level for close to 12 years now, almost 10 of those here at Regent University. I’ve always been fascinated by history. Even as a child, I tended to really enjoy nonfiction kind of history books.

My undergraduate degree was actually in biblical studies but I did make the transition over to history when I was in seminary. I first began as a church historian and then eventually went on to do doctoral work in American history.

Allen: Both Philip and I graduated from Regent University and we were both privileged to to have you as a professor and to take your history classes. I remember sitting in your history classes just being amazed at how you were able to really make history come alive.

One of my favorite subjects that we discussed in your U.S. history class was the rise of consumerism in America. You know, it’s so easy to forget that there was a time before Amazon Prime where we couldn’t just buy anything when we wanted to, but there actually was a shift in society and this didn’t just happen by accident.

You break down that shift in American history when the home really began to become a place of consumption instead of production. Can you explain a little bit of that transition?

McMullen: Sure. I’d be happy to. Particularly in the colonial era, the home really was kind of a place of production. I mean, it was either family farms and so you were producing crops either to sustain yourself or maybe to also engage in trade, or if you are an artisan, you know, a baker, a butcher, your shop tended to be connected to your home or very close to your home and so work and family life, there wasn’t a sharp distinction. These things overlapped.

I mean, even children, if we think about it, children often engaged in farm work. They also tended to be apprentices and they learned the trade of their father or their grandfathers. This is why so many of our last names are based on maybe the trade of our family.

We do begin to see a shift in the late 1700s and early 1800s in American culture. There’s this kind of what we might call bifurcation between work and home life, where people begin to leave home to go to work. That seems, of course, completely normal to us now. I mean, it’s hard for us to actually imagine anything different than that but that was not always the case.

The home then in some ways after work gets taken out of the home and put into a business or a factory or the office, the home then becomes, particularly during the Victorian Era, during the 19th century, as really a place of consumption, right? We purchase things, we put them in our homes on display. The home, and really the family, kind of shifts pretty dramatically in American life after the early 19th century.

Reynolds: You know, this shift of work identity really that we see taking place, it was very important to that era, especially, I remember, in our U.S. History 1 class we talked about the Victorian Era and that was kind of one of the hallmarks of the Victoria Era, this work identity.

Could you go a little more in-depth about sort of the thought process behind this shift in work identity and the thought processes behind that and behind this larger amount of consumption that started to take place?

McMullen: Yes. You know, there is this interesting shift, particularly in identity, and so in the Victorian Era you have pretty strong, and we might even say strict, kind of female and male roles, and of course there have always been male and female roles in all periods of society.

In the Victorian Era, you really begin to see this kind of rise of the Christian gentleman who kind of … leaves the home, goes out into the marketplace, kind of does battle—the marketplace is this kind of jungle, this place where, you know, he’s really got to fight tooth and nail—and then he comes home and the home is kind of a place where he’s the gentleman, it’s full of etiquette.

And we see a real shift with women as well, where the Victorian mother, she … gets really separated from work. She’s no longer really seen as a worker. She’s kind of seen more in a domestic role and that domestic role in a lot of ways also takes on a consuming role, a consumption role.

In the colonial period, men really probably did as much purchasing as women, to the best of our knowledge, but once we get into the Victorian Era and then even further into the 1900s we see that men are kind of seen as the workers and women in many ways are kind of seen as the consumers. There’s this kind of interesting gender role change that is affected by the market economy and the role of consumption in American life.

Allen: Let’s talk about the rise of the department store. What was the very first department store and how did Americans react to its establishment?

McMullen: Yes. The department store … you know, it wasn’t like it was unveiled at one moment. These stores developed over time and so there’s actually a lot of debates surrounding which was really truly the first department store in terms of how we think of a department store.

Le Bon Marché in Paris makes a case that it’s really the first. You have others like Macy’s. In New York, of course, we think of the Thanksgiving Day Parade, and you’ve got Marshall Field’s in Chicago, Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia. You know, all of these these now-department stores can kind of try to make a case that they were truly the first, but they all really begin to emerge in the mid-1800s and by the late 1860s, really 1870s and 1880s, the department store as kind of we know it really emerged.

I think Americans at this point were already embracing consumerism, that in many ways the middle class and consumption were almost synonymous, right? Kind of American thought is you’ve reached a particular status and basically that status means that you’re able to consume.

I guess if there was one criticism of the department stores, it was the fact that so many young women worked in department stores and in some ways this gave those women a little bit more social and economic independence.

Some critics of the department store may have seen it as loosening maybe the moral fiber of the Victorian family. But really most of these women, at least in the 1800s, working in department stores were not kind of radical feminists.

They liked the independence that the job gave them, the economic and the social independence, but most of them still went on to get married. They would quit their job, they would quit their job at the department store, and kind of really become that kind of domestic matriarch of the Victorian Era. Their time in the department store was more kind of a period of life rather than a new self-identity.

Now, that does change once we get into the 20th century, but throughout the 1800s we kind of see that’s the role that department stores play.

Allen: That is really interesting.

Reynolds: Yeah, absolutely. Now to sort of shift gears here, and, yes, pun intended, but to shift gears, let’s talk about road infrastructure. I think that’s something that not a lot of people realize is something that influences us day to day. … What sort of role did [road infrastructure] play in the rise of consumerism?

McMullen: Yeah, that’s a great question. Well, in the early period of the department store, so 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, it was the railroad that played a key role because the railroad really did primarily two things. It allowed those goods to be brought in at cheaper rates to these department stores and so the department stores, you know, they don’t rise in a vacuum. They rise in the context of all kinds of industrial revolution and transportation developments.

Then the railroad also could bring people on the outskirts of the cities or these kind of just beginning suburbs into the department stores. The train played a key role in that early part of the consumer era in America.

Post-World War II we do see that roads play a very key role in the development of what we might call modern American consumer culture.

You know, we tend to think of the 1950s as kind of this car-crazy culture. The interstate highway system is built during this time. We do see that roads play kind of a key role, right? People can take vacations, they can live in the suburbs, they can travel further to work, they can drive to stores. There’s a whole industry of consumption that arises around roads.

You know, Thanksgiving was very recently. Think about the kind of consumption that would have happened because of all of that holiday travel. You’ve got hotels and motels, you’ve got fast food, you’ve got all kinds of things that just cater to people traveling the roadways.

Again, with those roadways, just like with trains, we see increased transportation through trucking, which allows goods and services to be done more cheaply, which brings down prices of consumer goods, which allows people to spend more or to get more … bang for their buck. It allows people to travel to stores. … Transportation in general has always been tied very closely to consumer culture in America.

Allen: With that rise of consumerism, obviously, all those products now needed to be advertised so that people would buy them. What are some of those maybe early advertising trends that we’re even still seeing today?

McMullen: Yeah, there’s been some wonderful cultural historians who have done work on advertising in America. It really is shocking how closely the advertising strategies of our own era match some of the advertising strategies of the 1910s, 1920s.

From the very beginnings of advertising, you begin to see a celebrity endorsement. I mean, you have celebrity endorsements dating all the way back into the 1920s and, of course, celebrity endorsements are a huge aspect of advertising in the modern era. You know, you want this basketball player or this football player or this musician to endorse your product, whatever that product may be. That kind of celebrity, that celebrity status.

There’s always been an appeal to image as well. Very early on in the 1900s and 1920s we see that beauty products were the most advertised consumer products. I don’t know what the exact statistics today would be, but I’m assuming that beauty products still tend to be some of the most heavily advertised products that we have on the market.

There’s easily this appeal to image from the very beginning, right? You want to look this way because first impressions matter and many of the commercials that we see today still appeal to that “first impressions matter” kind of mentality. Yeah, [there are] striking similarities between early advertising and today.

Reynolds: Yeah. Now, this whole rise in consumerism has been going on for quite some time, but we definitely, I think, see somewhat of a boom, and you can confirm or deny this, but a boom in the 1950s and that’s right around the time when we have Communist Russia really growing in power and the Soviet Union expanding. Is there a link between this expansion of communism and America’s fear of communism and the rise of consumer culture?

McMullen: Yeah, I mean, I think that there is. I mean, I think it’s important to realize that consumer culture had developed earlier than the Cold War, but that the Cold War really expanded it and maybe increased it.

I think that one of the key ways that as a culture, and there are many ways that America defined itself in the face of kind of Soviet communism, but one of the key ways that Americans wanted to distinguish themselves from Soviet communism was to be this land of abundance, this land of economic, particularly, abundance.

We wanted to show that democratic capitalism literally could produce the goods in comparison to, you know, these descriptions of the Soviet Union as kind of these bleak non-consumeristic … you know, this land where no one had access to the latest and greatest goods.

This is absolutely tied to American identity in the ’50s and ’60s. … You know, here is a family, an average family, who can afford the latest washing machine. They can afford this nice home in the suburbs. They can enjoy this good meal. This is a comparison to this Soviet family who lives in Soviet bloc housing, who lives on rationed food, who doesn’t have the latest technology.

There really is this comparison with kind of the Soviet Union. I think one of the places that we see this very clearly is in this Nixon/Khrushchev debate.

There’s this debate in Moscow in 1959 between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev and they’re having this debate in this model American home. The United States had gone over there as part of the United States Information Agency. We don’t necessarily need to get into details but there was this model American home and Nixon and Khrushchev have this debate in this model American home.

Nixon is … basically pointing at this model American home and saying, “This is where our average American family lives. This is what they have. Clearly democratic capitalism is better than Soviet communism.”

I think that’s a key kind of moment and I think it really illustrates the importance of consumption in the battle against communism in the ’50s, ’60s, and even into the ’70s and ’80s.

Allen: So interesting. Wow. For anyone who’s interested in learning more about the history of this rise of consumerism in America, do you have any great resources that you could recommend?

McMullen: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot out there. People have been doing a lot of great work in this field for many, many years. I think one of the leaders in this field is an historian by the name of T.J. Jackson Lears. … He’s been doing work for several decades now in the area of consumerism and American culture advertising but there’s a lot of others as well.

There’s a classic book on advertising in the American dream by Roland Marchand. There’s even some great books out there that talk about the intermingling of economic and political policy in the United States with consumerism. Lizabeth Cohen has written a book called “A Consumers’ Republic,” which is excellent in that area.

I think there’s also kind of a fun read by Leigh Eric Schmidt. It’s called “Consumer Rites.” It talks about the intermingling of consumerism and holidays in America. He looks at Easter, he looks at Christmas, he looks at Valentine’s Day, and that’s kind of a fun read for people who really enjoy those holidays, but they can also see the intermingling of consumerism with those holidays. Those are just a few resources that people could go to.

Reynolds: Awesome. Thank you so much, Dr. McMullen.

McMullen: Well, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

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Last week, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee trotted out a trio of dispassionate legal experts to explain why the impeachment of Donald Trump was justified. They were there to bring a veneer of gravitas and erudition to what’s been, until now, a highly partisan affair.

But however smart people such as Michael Gerhardt, distinguished professor of constitutional law at University of North Carolina, might be, they aren’t immune from peddling partisan absurdities. Once Gerhardt argued that Trump’s conduct was “worse than the misconduct of any prior president,” we no longer had any intellectual obligation to take him seriously on the topic.

Because, while I’m certainly not a distinguished professor, I am very confident that history began before 2016. Which means that, even if I concede Gerhardt’s framing of Trump’s actions — bribery, extortion, etc. — I can rattle off at least a dozen instances of presidential misconduct that are both morally and constitutionally “worse” than Trump’s blundering attempt to launch a self-serving Ukrainian investigation into his rival’s shady son.

Let’s ignore for a moment that American presidents have owned their fellow human beings, and focus instead on the fact that in 1942, the president of the United States signed an executive order that allowed him to unilaterally intern around 120,000 Americans citizens of Japanese descent. Not only was the policy deliberately racist, it amounted to a full-bore attack on about half the Constitution that he had sworn to uphold. Such an attack was a specialty of FDR’s, despite the all the hagiographies written about his imperial presidency.

Woodrow Wilson — who regularly said things like, “a Negro’s place is in the corn field” — didn’t merely re-segregate the civil service, personally firing more than a dozen supervisors for the sin of being black; he first pushed for, and then oversaw the enactment of, the Sedition Act. Wilson threw dissenters and political adversaries into prison, instructed the postmaster to refuse delivery of literature he deemed unpatriotic, and a created an unconstitutional civilian police force that targeted Americans for political dissent.

So, all of what Wilson did was “worse.”

Sorry to say, but despite their great achievements, both John Adams and Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, the latter without any congressional approval. Surely, deep down, even those who act as if Russian social media ads can topple the republic believe that denying citizens their fundamental rights of due process is a more serious offense than Trump’s rhetoric and actions.

We can go on and on. Andrew Jackson ignored courts and laws and used his power to ethnically cleanse lands that he also sometimes happened to have a financial interest in. Teddy Roosevelt threatened American citizens with military intervention and abused his power in one way or another every day of his presidency. A reckless John Kennedy probably shared a mistress with a leading Chicago mobster Sam Giancana, whom he met in the White House, setting himself up for blackmail or worse.

Nixon may have lost his job after obstructing an investigation into freelance GOP spying on his political opponents, but Lyndon Johnson skipped any pretense, and just asked the FBI and CIA to spy for him. CIA officials, illegally operating inside the United States, spied on the Goldwater campaign in 1964 and brought Johnson information he used to undermine his opponents at every turn. That’s “worse.”

Johnson also lied about the Gulf of Tonkin, escalating the Vietnam War, and then kept lying about the war until he left office. I won’t even bother to catalogue the instance of other presidents misleading the public — either though lies of commission or lies of omission — in their efforts to precipitate or extend military conflicts, costing thousands of American lives. All of this misconduct is in every conceivable way “worse” than Trump’s actions.

Bill Clinton couldn’t go a month without some shady and humiliating scandal.

Now, maybe, Gerhardt doesn’t view incidents that weren’t investigated, prosecuted or contemporaneously illegal as “misconduct.” That would be unfortunate. But even if so, referring to Trump’s actions as “worse than the misconduct of any prior president” would be terminally ahistorical.

Of course, to argue, “Sure, he’s bad, but hey, there were worse presidents than Donald Trump!” is a terrible defense. Indeed, it is no defense at all. Impeachment should be decided on the facts of the case, and nothing else besides. But this isn’t a case in favor of Trump; it’s a plea for people to resist the compulsion to say insane things because they dislike this president. There is plenty to criticize without embracing hyperbole or losing all sense of historical perspective.

COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

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At first, “A Christmas Love Story” has all the hallmarks—if you’ll excuse the pun—of a typical Christmas TV movie.

A single lady choir director, Katherine, gets her youth choir geared up for the holidays. A young man, Danny, shows up as a volunteer for the props—but as soon as the choir director exits the room, he’s on the piano, crooning out a tune with the skill of a pop star.  

Naturally, there’s an “obstacle:” The dad of the young man, Greg, doesn’t want his son to spend time in choir because the goal is for him to work at a financial firm, not live in a garret while chasing singing stardom. 

And of course, of course, because this is a Christmas movie not made by a Grinch, Greg is a widowed, attractive guy who as soon as he meets Katherine starts to realize that maybe a life singing is better than a life on Wall Street.

So far, so normal.

Then, “A Christmas Love Story” has a unique twist.

Look, I’ve grown fond of Hallmark movies over the past couple of years. But I look to them much as I look to sugar cookies: insubstantial, cheerful fluff. In short, I don’t anticipate being genuinely moved one iota when watching them.

But “A Christmas Love Story” somehow manages the impossible.

We find out that Katherine gave up a child for adoption when she was younger, and shortly after, that Danny is her son—and the whole reason he volunteered to help with the choir is that he wanted to meet her. The two have a short, beautiful conversation in which Katherine expresses her joy that Danny’s adopted mom was the right woman to raise him and her happiness at seeing her son grown up.

It’s a wonderful moment—and as I found out later, all the more poignant because the actress depicting Katherine, Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth, was adopted herself.

In an article published on People in 2015, Chenoweth says:

I knew that my birth mother loved me so much that she wanted to give me a better life. And my parents, Jerry and Junie Chenoweth, were looking to adopt a baby and found me—literally less than one week after I was born.

Growing up, my parents explained my adoption by telling me, “We chose you.” It was a wonderful way to put it to an adopted child. And I think it’s true. An adoption is a full-circle blessing.

Chenoweth added, “I would thank my birth mother for loving me enough to make such a huge sacrifice. It’s a great gift for me to be able to say: ‘I know that I came from love, and I know that I have love.’”

No wonder the scene was so powerful.

When my dear friend, fellow Hallmark movie aficionado and Susan B. Anthony List vice president of communications Mallory Quigley tweeted about the movie’s pro-life message, Chenoweth responded that it was “told from my gut”:

Thank you. Told from my gut. https://t.co/YM8040bxHB

— Kristin Chenoweth (@KChenoweth) December 8, 2019

“That scene happened to me,” Chenoweth said on Facebook Live, per The Daily Wire. “I am adopted and I had this virtually same conversation with my birth mom.”

“I remember [my birth mom] saying to me, ‘Can you ever forgive me?’” she added. “And I was like, ‘There’s nothing to forgive. You gave me such a great life.’ I got the right parents.’”

If you’re looking for a family-friendly movie this Christmas season that affirms the value of all human life, check out “A Christmas Love Story.” It’s a powerful reminder, in this season of counting our blessings and cherishing our loved ones, that people matter the most—and every one of us deserves a chance to live. 

The post From a Hallmark Movie, a Powerful Pro-Life Message appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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