"It supplemented factual information with a value judgment."

With that one sentence, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals not only struck down a South Dakota law dictating values to doctors and patients, but also summed up social conservative ideology, their campaign tactics and their governing majority that makes social conservatives responsible and accountable for every branch of government today.

The South Dakota law would have required doctors who perform abortions to tell women that they are about to "terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.” The Federal Appeals Court wrote, “Unlike the truthful, nonmisleading medical and legal information doctors were required to disclose” in the Supreme Court’s 1992 decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, “the South Dakota statute requires abortion doctors to enunciate the state’s viewpoint on an unsettled medical, philosophical, theological and scientific issue, that is, whether a fetus is a human being.”

In another example of social conservative government dictating values, comes reports that the Bush Administration abstinence-only policies for teens is now becoming a "no sex unless you are married" policy of your United States government. That's right freedom loving people, the Taliban is here. The justification for this policy is that 19-29 year olds are having children, but recall that the same social conservatives instituting this no sex policy advocate prohibiting contraception and encourage families of between 7-10 children.

So 19-29 year old voters strapped with college debt, your government, replacing fact with value judgment, could determine that contraception will be outlawed, that you cannot have sex outside of heterosexual marriage, and then once married, you will have to use natural family planning and produce 7-10 children to be raised on James Dobson's tapes and lectures. Welcome to the USA!

The "we know best" abstinence campaign will spend millions of taxpayer dollars to promote one narrow ideology. James Wagoner of Advocates for Youth summed it up best, "They've stepped over the line of common sense. To be preaching abstinence when 90% of people are having sex is in essence to lose touch with reality. It's an ideological campaign. It has nothing to do with public health."

Emerging from the courts, the congress and the administration is a consistent pattern of social conservatives tactics — replacing fact with value judgments. As the mid-term elections approach, voters must decide if they want to continue on a course that has clearly lost touch with reality and moved unabashedly into dictaing values to people. Voters must use these facts to assert their own values, or risk having other people's values dictated to them.

One reason some of us work so hard to promote choice is because we don't want to go back to a time when we had none. Choosing time is here.