Conspicuously absent from any major media outlet’s coverage of the top stories of 2015 was the undercover exposé of Planned Parenthood’s involvement in harvesting and sale of aborted fetal remains.

Any one of us at any moment could find ourselves facing death, and when that time comes we can only hope to confront the unknown with the peace that comes from the knowledge that we lived our life rightly.

Abortion has come to be a pillar of Progressive ideology. It is an issue that must be embraced and defended unquestioningly and uncritically. For this reason, many who are pro-abortion probably won’t even watch the videos, just as virtually none of the senators that blocked the effort to defund Planned Parenthood watched the videos.

We live in a cultural moment where Christians are being singled out by a highly sophisticated ideological campaign with the express motive of marginalizing them and ultimately eradicating them from public life. So we must speak up when called upon and defend ourselves for the sake of our faith, for the sake of our children, and for the sake of the American tradition of religious liberty.

There is an important factor at play in the issue of race, which is that the issue of race in America has been hijacked by the Progressive Left to such a poisonous extent that authentic dialog has become virtually impossible. And despite his unique and historic opportunity to do otherwise, President Obama has done nothing to improve the situation; in fact he’s made it worse.

The President talks a good game, but when you examine his actions with regard to religious liberty, it’s quickly apparent that his talk is cheap. Unless you subscribe to his particular brand of “faith,” don’t expect this President to lift a pen or a phone in defense of your religious liberty. What you can expect is a man determined to eradicate every last vestige of orthodox religious influence from the public square.

I recently came across an article discussing a new reality television series called “Born in the Wild,” which will document the experiences of women who choose to give birth unassisted and outdoors. According to a Lifetime network executive, “These are all people who have already had babies in hospitals who had unsatisfying experiences and who are choosing to have different experiences. This is something people are doing and we set out to document it.”

I spent much of my early twenties participating in American party culture, and I’m lucky I made it through those years relatively unscathed. Looking back, I made a lot of foolish decisions. I put myself in a lot of compromising situations that could have easily taken a dark turn. What I have to say in the following paragraphs, then, does not come from a place of ignorance or unsympathetic idealism.

I can appreciate that the pro-choice camp is tired of playing defense and might be refreshed to see someone rising from the ranks to offer positive affirmation. However, simply refusing to acknowledge the wrongness of an act doesn’t negate its wrongness. A thief can stand up and announce to the world that he’s a thief and not sorry about it, but at the end of the day, theft is still wrong and everyone knows it. Lying, cheating, stealing, murder… these basic offenses against nature and against one’s neighbor have been prohibited in virtually all cultures at all times throughout human history.

Bill Maher has it right. He hit the nail on the head in his conversation with Charlie Rose, when he said that Liberals’ reticence to criticize Islam is symptomatic of “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” In other words, Liberals are willing to give Muslims a pass on behavior that they would otherwise find condemnable because Liberals view Muslims as a persecuted minority.