The same week that the Virginia Senate voted to cut off funds to Planned Parenthood, pro-life students outed the organization for alleged racism.

Lila Rose, UCLA sophomore and founder of The Advocate, a pro-life student magazine, recruited an actor to make phone calls to Planned Parenthood clinics in seven states posing as a racist who wanted to make a donation earmarked for the abortion of black babies. Without objection or question, every representative the actor spoke to said they would accept such a donation.

Here is the dialogue between the actor and the representative at the Idaho branch, according to a video montage Rose posted on YouTube:

Actor: …I really faced trouble with affirmative action, and I don’t want my kids to be disadvantaged against black kids.

Planned Parenthood: Yes, absolutely.

Actor: And we don’t, you know, we just think the less black kids out there the better.

Planned Parenthood: (Laughs) Understandable, understandable… This is the first time I’ve had a donor call and make this kind of request, so I’m excited and want to make sure I don’t leave anything out.

This was not the first time Rose, who claims to be a Christian, used “behind the scenes” techniques with Planned Parenthood. In November 2006, Rose posed as a pregnant 15-year-old. She used an undercover camera to record a Planned Parenthood employee advising her to claim she was 16 so they wouldn’t have to report it as a case of statutory rape. When Planned Parenthood found out, they threatened to sue Rose.

Rose told WoW that she believes Christian journalists, like government agents, are justified in going undercover, and even lying, in order to fight against human rights abuses, such as slavery and abortion.

“You see Christians in history going undercover with this kind of infiltration to save a life, or find a truth…this is the kind of thing we can do bravely,” she said.

On Thursday, Planned Parenthood’s CEO Rebecca Poedy apologized for the actions of the representative at the Idaho branch and said, “Planned Parenthood firmly and unequivocally denounces racial bias in the delivery of health care.”

The charge of racism has legs, though, because Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger helped to fund her organization by suggesting — accurately — that it would cut down the number of African-American births. A much higher percentage of black babies than white babies are now killed before birth.

“How do you approach a homeless person in the street?” Michael Jackson (not the superstar) asked a group of attendees at the “Loving Your Neighbor” symposium in Washington, DC, two weeks ago. “You don’t. You don’t have to, ‘cause I’ll approach you and give you every scheme or every scam you’ve ever heard of.”

Drug addiction and jail time filled Jackson’s early life. At 24, he moved out of his parents’ house and into the streets, where a cousin taught him “all about being homeless”—the blankets, sleeping on grates, and panhandling.

In an attempt to redirect her son’s life, Jackson’s mother sent him to live with an uncle in Nebraska, where he met a pastor who saw potential in him and later guided him into a pastoral position. But when Jackson’s addiction resurfaced, he returned to DC, and to the streets.

That’s when Emily Guthrie, director of Capitol Hill Group Ministry, an interfaith organization that fights homelessness, found Michael sleeping on a grate outside of her building. Although Guthrie admits that Jackson initially scared her, she decided to help him get back on his feet by plugging him into substance abuse training, assisting him in the job search, and helping him secure affordable housing—the single most important issue in combating homelessness, she said, particularly in DC, where more than 9,000 homeless roam the streets every night. Other significant issues, she said, are mental health, physical health, and domestic violence.

Jackson, who now works as a supervisor for the Department of Public Works, doesn’t encourage well-meaning passersby to drop coins in a cup. Instead, he said, focus on the homeless as real people. Find out their names. Don’t just ask, “What can I do?” Ask, “Who can I be?”

The newest urban missionaries don’t run after-school programs, soup kitchens, or homeless shelters. Instead, they swing deals, invest, and manage real estate. Or so Robert Lupton, founder of FCS Urban Ministries, an inner-city Atlanta community development organization, told representatives of 40 Washington, DC, churches on Friday at a symposium on “Loving Your Neighbor.”

“Gentrification calls for whole new ways of doing ministry,” Lupton, author of Compassion, Justice, and the Christian Life, said to the 400 attendees. Whole new ways that harness the talent that is already sitting in church pews—in lawyers, in bankers, in property managers.

Lupton explained that 50 years ago, U.S. cities witnessed a middle-class flight to the suburbs, leaving cities with poverty and crime. Now former suburbanites are returning to urban centers, moving into low-income neighborhoods.

Lupton, a middle-class suburbanite, moved to an inner-city Atlanta neighborhood more than 35 years ago, bought a “fixer-upper,” and began trying to minister to the poor around him. But as his property began to increase in value, his neighbors—the very people he had moved to the city to reach out to—found themselves forced from their homes because they could no longer afford them.

That’s when Lupton realized that “gentrification without justice is a curse upon the poor.” So he and several business-savvy friends began developing mixed-income neighborhoods so that his low-income friends could stay put and enjoy the benefits of “gentrification with justice.”

This kind of justice, Lupton explained, calls for a whole different set of hands to do the work. The mentors and soup-kitchen volunteers are only as good as the neighborhoods they work in. And the neighborhoods are only as good as those who are willing to fight for housing situations like the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Hope IV housing policy, which provides rental assistance and case management for low-income elderly.

“The housing issue is the single most important justice issue in our generation,” Lupton concluded.

Poinsettias and steaming apple cider greeted shoppers at the second annual Holiday Peace Bazaar hosted by Washington D.C.’s Church of the Resurrection. Here, at the bustling corner of 8^th and North Carolina Streets in the heart of Capitol Hill, shoppers forego standard Christmas list items for an array of fair trade crafts from around the world.

In the corner of the church’s fellowship hall, a group of young women browsed through pressed-flower journal and bags, all handcrafted by women in India with the Kalpana Project. Next to that, a middle-aged couple displayed bags and baskets from Five Talents, a microfinance organization active in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Amani products filled a second room, as shoppers squished by each other to sort through the latest collection of handbags, aprons, and placemats sewn by marginalized women in eastern Africa.

Black and white photos of African children pointed the way to a table displaying greeting cards with paintings by children from northern Uganda, including former child soldiers. “Children’s art resonates with people,” explained Andrew Briggs, a recent graduate of Taylor University. Last January, Brigg’s launched Freedom in Creation, an arts-based advocacy project, to teach art to children and help them give back to the community. He explains that the funds raised through Freedom in Creation funnel into Living Water International, an organization that provides clean water to deprived communities.

Shoppers continued to trickle in, hot cider or coffee in hand. A little boy in a red jacket munched on a cookie, as an older man with a gray beard and a cowboy hat browsed through the displays.

Across the stain-glass lighted room, Stephanie Zito, who used to work for World Relief in Darfur, knit something orange as she told shoppers about her collection of photographs from Sudan—$4.50 each or five for $20. Crinkled faces of elderly women and pensive-looking young girls peep out from among the photos. In one, a baby’s foot pokes out from underneath a green blanket. “This baby is the child of one my friends,” Zito explained. Where does the money go? Back to Sudan through organizations that partner with World Relief.

Although statistics suggest that half of teenage girls in Washington, DC, will be pregnant at least once, the DC Board of Education is discussing next week the elimination of all abstinence programs from the District’s schools.Activist members from the Local School Restructuring Team (LSRT) are pushing for a Health Education Standard that will ban abstinence education in favor of contraception-based instruction. They have already succeeded in getting Stuart-Hobson Middle School in northeast DC to shut down the school chapter of ULTRA Teen Choice, a character-based, peer-counseling organization that promotes abstinence outside of marriage.

Since November 2006, ULTRA at Stuart-Hobson had been conducting weekly club meetings about such issues as HIV/AIDs, pregnancy prevention, peer pressure, marriage, and self worth. ULTRA had also begun to match students with college-aged mentors committed to abstinence.

The program has no statistics at this point, but its director, Richard Urban, told WoW that many teens have made commitments to abstinence. One participant, seventh-grader Cameron Tate, wrote what he had learned: “If you’re a teenager in school, the baby would distract you while you’re studying. My life is care free.”

Boy meets girl. They spend one serendipitous day together. Then, he adopts her baby.

Bella, which opened yesterday in select theaters across the country, contained all the necessary elements for the perfect romantic comedy—a charming lunch at an outdoor café, a fun-loving meet-the-parents dinner, and a long walk along the beach. But instead of “happily ever after,” the film was a soul-wrenching hour and a half look at death, abortion, and redemption through the eyes of José (Eduardo Verástegui) a former Mexican soccer star who loses his glory and his dreams after he kills a young girl in a reckless driving accident, and Nina (Tammy Blanchard), a struggling waitress who finds herself pregnant and jobless on the same day. As Jose battles with his guilt, Nina grapples with the life growing inside of her.

Written and directed by Alejandro Monteverde and produced by Metanonia films, a new name in the independent film circuit with a mission to “make a meaningful difference in people’s lives,” Bella took the People’s Choice Award at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival and the Crystal Heart Award this year at the Heartland Film Festival.

Unapologetically pro-life and refreshingly realistic, Bella doesn’t shirk from the horrors of abortion, nor shy away from its straight-shooting adoption message. As Nina tells José that she plans to “take care of things,” José imagines her sobbing uncontrollably as she emerges from the abortion clinic. Flash forward about five years, Nina truly sobs when she meets Bella, the daughter Jose has been raising for her.

In the end, it’s a love story after all—a love story between a young man and a life worth rescuing; between a young woman and a life worth giving to another.

Atheist Christopher Hitchens, author of the bestselling God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, showed once again on Thursday night, Oct. 11, that he takes no prisoners. At Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., he debated Alister McGrath, Oxford professor of historical theology and author of Christianity’s Dangerous Idea.

Hitchens highlights: Christ’s atonement for sins was an immoral act, God is a sinister dictator, Christian repentance is masochistic, humans are little more than quasi-chimpanzees, and Christianity is similar to Marxism and Nazism.

McGrath politely attempted to counter Hitchens’ attacks on Christianity one by one, finally asserting that God is not a “celestial dictator” but a “celestial liberator.” McGrath’s generous eye contact and Oxford reserve, pitted against Hitchens’ well-rehearsed vitriol, did not induce a standing ovation from the Georgetown crowd, but he did raise thought-provoking questions, including: “In a world where reason and science do not deliver what we once thought they did, on what can we base our lives if we are to know what we are truly living for the good, the beautiful, and the true life?”

The King’s College, New York City, is sponsoring on Oct. 22 a debate between Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza, author of What’s So Right About Christianity.