Truck of horrors

By Deacon Mike Manno

(The Wanderer) – I remember as a kid many of us would wait expectantly for the regular visit from the ice cream man. As soon as we heard the bells from the truck, and sometimes the music it was playing, we would stop what we were doing and run to the front yard and wave the truck down.

Of course that was back in the day when it was safe to play outdoors all day, with our only curfew being when the street lights were lit, and our main concern was how many nickels and dimes were in our pockets so we might be able to get the really big bar.

Unfortunately, many of those trucks have been retired now, and one of the reasons the trucks went idle had to do with safety and questions of liability — once again my profession put the kibosh on our childhood fun.

Anyway, for the most part those trucks are gone, leaving us with only pleasant memories of the care-free times when they made life a little more fun for our friends and ourselves.

But wait, those times may be back. Down in Texas, Planned Parenthood is bringing them back, at least one: a spiffy spanking white model trimmed in pink and blue (turquoise actually), hawking not ice cream but condoms. (Photo below.)

In an attempt to promote the truck, the CEO of Planned Parenthood, Alexis McGill Johnson, tweeted a picture of the truck with the message: “Ice cream, you scream, we all scream for abortion rights,” and “bans off our bodies,” apparently in reference to the new state law banning some abortions. Nice messages for kids, aren’t they?

The truck was reportedly featured prominently at a large Texas music festival, a venue that hosted families as well as children.

The tweet also listed where the truck was and invited everyone to “stop by to grab some free Bans Off swag, condoms, and education on the cold-hearted policies of the Texas legislature.” Of course there was no message about whether or not the truck really had ice cream or if the little tots — at least those who hadn’t met the abortionist’s tools yet — were even welcome.

But Johnson’s tweet might not have had the intended effect. One of the first replies to her tweet said: “I’m very pro-choice . . . but this is pretty f*ed up,” and another, “S**t like this is why I’m no longer pro-choice.” And another, “I’m confused. Like, are kids supposed to get excited about abortions in the same way they get excited about ice cream? That can’t be it, can it? Surely we can all agree that this is off the rails, right?”

One person who also does not agree with Ms. Johnson is Hugh Brown, executive vice president of the American Life League: He called the whole episode “perverse.”
“The ice cream truck evokes fond memories of children, but Planned Parenthood is using it to prey upon children by using something that was clearly intended for children,” he said in a phone interview.

Continuing, “Planned Parenthood has done a masterful job of deceiving people into thinking that it is helping families — instead they are targeting children. This is its business model. And the result is the killing of 330,000 children a year — the size of the city of Pittsburgh.”

Of course he’s right. An ice cream truck peddling condoms and the Progressive Left’s idea of reproductive rights to children is beyond the pale.

But this, of course, is not the first time the traffickers of fetal death have used innocent children to spread their evil agenda. Well known is the Planned Parenthood push for sex education in all public school classrooms: sexualizing students about the different forms of sex, how to use birth control devices, and how to secure an abortion secretly.

“Today’s sex ed lessons can be highly manipulative — carefully designed to get children to approve of the concept of sexual rights and fluid sexual ‘identities,’ and to reject their religious beliefs, the authority of their parents, and even physical reality itself,” said Cathy Ruse, a Family Research Council senior fellow who was the author of a FRC report on the subject in mid-2020 and a former guest on our radio program discussing this same topic.

In that report, Ruse reported that in Austin, Texas, the sex ed curriculum teaches pre-pubescent children about vaginal, anal, and oral intercourse, and in some Indiana schools students are taught how to shop for condoms and to compare prices and brands. Additionally, she reported, a YouTube star with ties to Planned Parenthood created a video shown in Virginia schools about the use of sex toys and self-pleasure.

The American Life League’s Brown, in reference to Planned Parenthood, said, “We’re living in a world going through evil times and this is an evil organization.”

Unfortunately this is all too common today. Yet where is the outrage? For too many, including Catholics, Planned Parenthood is simply a legal business doing something that, while we may not like it, we won’t interrupt our lives to try to stop it.

Planned Parenthood, instead of becoming the pariah that it should be, has been welcomed into our civic and business communities as simply supporting another way of living, and those who work for it are considered just hard-working folks just pursuing a trade, a way to support their families.

But they do so with blood money. They are butchering and killing children and warping the minds of those kids they have missed in utero. The ice cream/condom truck is just another demonstration of how clearly perverse these people are.

Speak now or watch as your children lose their souls. Ask your priests and bishops to do the same. Otherwise the life you lose will be your child’s.

(You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com and listen to him every Thursday morning at 9:30 CT on Faith On Trial on IowaCatholicRadio.com.)