Posted on 01/20/2003 6:51:27 PM PST by Remedy
The 30th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision arrives later this month and it represents a good time to take stock of where the pro-life movement and, by extension, social conservatism, now stand.
We have a President whose commitment to the pro-life issue surpasses that of Richard Nixon; certainly that of Gerald Ford and George Herbert Walker Bush; and most likely even that of Ronald Reagan. Certainly, in their first two years in office, President Bush and his administration have taken strong stands on behalf of pro-life legislation and the Justice Department has challenged Oregon's euthanasia law.
The GOP's taking control of the U.S. Senate in last November's election and its continued control of the U.S. House are developments that have certainly been welcomed by pro-lifers, but it is no guarantee that a pro-life agenda can be achieved in this session.
For one thing, the Democrats have the numbers in the Senate to frustrate the passage of key pro-life legislation and the confirmation of federal judges who are committed to interpreting the law impartially. Nominees who are neither activist-oriented nor in line with the litmus tests demanded by the pro-abortion lobby and those Senators that do its bidding are likely to face a tough road to confirmation.
But as I had emphasized in my February 16, 1999 letter addressed to the conservative movement, I believe that we social conservatives and pro-lifers should still harbor significant concern about placing all our chips in the basket of politics. The pro-life movement and social conservatives did place most of our chips in that basket back in the 1980s and I think it is fair to say that we came away quite disappointed with the results.
This reevaluation of the pro-life strategy is long overdue and has been taking place in fits and starts for some time. But a new collection of essays that will be published later this month should help to give added momentum to the rethinking of strategy.
"Back to the Drawing Board: The Future of the Pro-Life Movement" (St. Augustine's Press) is edited by Teresa Wagner, a dynamic, young pro-family spokeswoman who had worked as a lobbyist for the National Right to Life Committee and as a legal and policy analyst for the Family Research Council. The reassessment examines each of the five crucial spheres that will determine the movement's future: the law, medicine and science, politics, religion and the culture.
Contributors include such respected names as Human Events editor Terence P. Jeffrey, U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), and my old colleagues in arms Phyllis Schlafly, James Dobson, and Dr. Mildred Jefferson. The range of contributors extends from Howard Phillips, the conservative's conservative, on the right to the thoughtful and principled syndicated columnist Nat Hentoff on the left. I'm pleased to see that former Boston mayor Raymond Flynn, a Democrat who served as Ambassador to the Vatican in the administration of Bill Clinton and who is now President of the Catholic Alliance, is one of the essayists.
My chapter discusses political engagement and in it I reflect upon my 1999 letter, making clear that the rush to interpret the letter as calling upon social conservatives to withdraw from politics was never accurate, but something promoted by the liberals in the news media. My point was that social conservatives had placed too much faith in politics and that we are no longer a 'moral majority' in the way that I had thought we were two decades ago.
There never was a call to have social conservatives stage a Dunkirk-like withdrawal from politics. The grassroots understood what I was saying about the need to develop counter-institutions not infected with the Politically Correct thinking now in vogue throughout much of society that maintains, for instance, it is not right to eat meat because a steer must be slaughtered but it is okay to abort a baby because the young child is only a "choice."
To this very day, many in the news media either miss or willfully turn a blind eye toward the developments taking place at the grassroots level that are in synch with what I had discussed and that provide hope that more and more people are dropping out of our PC society.
Social conservatives must stay politically active but we must also work harder to find new ways to change the culture. One idea in that vein is mentioned in passing in the chapter that I wrote but expounded upon in my recent commentary on "Social Marketing: The Next Frontier for Social Conservatives."
"Back to the Drawing Board" contains thought-provoking reading at exactly the right time that we should be thinking harder about how we can do more to protect life. More should be heard about this book in the coming weeks, and I hope Notable News Now readers and social conservatives will read it and give serious consideration to what the next direction of the pro-life movement should be in this new century.
(Paul M. Weyrich is chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.)
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"Putting all of our eggs in one basket" is not merely putting it in politics, but putting our eggs in the flawed basket of one party that does not mean it, and is not willing to expend any political capital to get the job done. |
There is unimaginable evil in the Democratic Party:
The evil in the Republican Party is mitigated and could be reduced. Republicans can't afford to lose any votes to THIRD parties that don't stand a chance. You cannot give the Democrats any more power than they already have and expect to recover. Ñ Ñ Ñ
[W]e have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. . . . Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. (Source: John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, Charles Francis Adams, editor (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. 1854), Vol. IX, p. 229, October 11, 1798.)
You lack a moral and religious people to elect an Alan Keyes or Howard Phillips. Until you can convert, inform and inspire an amoral, ignorant, apathetic and dependent populace-Bush & like-minded Republicans will be the very best you can expect.
It will take many miracles of Exodus proportions to restore this country.Why Abortion Isn’t Important
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The short version is that she accidently made me an opponent of legalized abortion because she made me realize that the unborn child is a person. |
Are unborn children human beings? Are they persons? No doubt about it. The following essays argue the pro-life case...
Some abortion advocates are willing to concede that unborn children are human beings. Surprisingly enough, they claim that they would still be able to justify abortion. According to their argument, no person-no unborn child-has a right to access the bodily resources of an unwilling host. Unborn children may have a right to life, but that right to life ends where it encroaches upon a mother's right to bodily autonomy. The argument is called the bodyright argument, and it is refuted in the following essays...
Why would it be wrong to kill an adult? Why would it be wrong to kill a baby after it has been born? Questions like these seems trivial, but their answers are extremely important to the abortion debate. What many people fail to realize is that most of the arguments used to justify killing unborn children could be used with just as much force to justify killing newborn children and, in some cases, even full-grown adults. The wrongness of killing is discussed in the following essays...
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I would contend that establishing the notion of 'life support' over 'death expedience' is the key here. |
8. A Woman's Right over her Body?
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This issue is all about influencing public opinion and SCOTUS appointees |
If they refuse to Senate Is to Advise And Consent, Not Obstruct and Delay then Impeaching Federal Judges:A Covenantal And Constitutional Response To Judicial Tyranny.
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Paul Weyrich lost a lot of respect from many of us when he "surrendered" a few years ago. |
I remember this. He had been in the fight a very long time and was very frustrated. He is a great man who happens to be human.J
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navel-gazing when serious pro-life gains are being made and re-outlawing abortion is no longer such a distant dot on the horizon |
18 posted on 01/20/2003 10:55 PM CST by toenail
Maybe they need a little navel-gazing to see the obvious?
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stop and turn around when they were told that abortion could hurt them. |
Abortion Survivors ...Sadly enough, statistically speaking and I have to say this very carefully, statistically speaking women who have had abortions are less likely to bond to their children, and therefore these children are more likely to be abused and neglected. Also, women who were abused and neglected as children are more likely to have abortions. And I can tell you that wherever I have said this, in whatever kind of an audience, people have become really quite upset, sometimes very angry. But I think I can say that having done the research now over a number of years and published a number of papers, that that is a statistically significant connection. That is not to say that every mother who has an abortion is a bad mother, just not true. But it does say that this is something we had better look into, because people are very concerned about rising rates of child abuse, neglect. So that is one area. And that is how it got started.
Best Reference Book on Abortion Complications Updated and ...Detrimental Effects of Abortion: An Annotated Bibliography with Commentary (3rd Edition). This expanded and newly updated edition is the most complete summary available of statistically significant studies on abortion. Compiled by attorney and post-abortion expert Thomas W. Strahan.
Elliot Institute director, David C. Reardon, Ph.D., one of the nation's leading experts on post-abortion issues is asking pro-life advocates around the country to donate copies of Detrimental Effects of Abortion to their local public, high school, and university libraries.
Though Reardon works full time on post-abortion research, he says Strahan's earlier bibliographies have always been his first reference source whenever he begins a new research project.
"Tom Strahan has performed a great service in tracking down all the best studies and organizing their finding in a way that is easily accessible to the average reader," Dr. Reardon said. "Without it, the task of searching for this material on the Internet or in a reference library would be overwhelming. Many of the best studies are simply not indexed under the keywords you would normally expect to find abortion complications."
Strahan edits The Research Bulletin for the Association for Interdisciplinary Research in Values and Social Change and has written numerous articles on abortion. He hopes this revised and expanded reference book will help people to better understand the range of risks associated with abortion.
"Most people think that because abortion is legal, it's safe for women, period," Strahan said. "They think that as long as the government says it's okay, then it must be good for our society. They don't realize that many researchers and scholars studying this issue have found that just the opposite is true."
First, I'm very aware that a baby is a person unto him or herself. If I weren't aware of that fact, I wouldn't oppose legalized abortion. Are you aware that I oppose legalized abortion? Did you bother to read my post? I doubt that you did. Your type is more interested in your stupid posturing than in doing anything effective.
Secondly, I have been very careful not to create any children. I am aware that my strong preference not to create children is a reason to be careful in my actions, and I have been very careful. I clearly said that not being ready for parenthood is no excuse for abortion. Again, I doubt that you bothered to pay attention to that part of my post.
Again, the biggest impediment to banning abortion is that most people don't understand that the unborn child is really a person. One reason that they never consider that argument is that so many in the pro-life movement either oppose abortion simply as a way to harass those who don't want kids or they leave people with that impression. I'm sorry that you have such a big problem with people who don't want to live their lives the way that you want them to live. It's sad that you see the issue as a way to use the government to harass people who aren't like you. Unfortunately, your selfishness is a big part of the reason that we can't sway opinion in opposition to abortion.
One reason that the pro-life movement hasn't had more legislative victories is that groups within the movement itself refuse to accept people who aren't perfectly aligned with them. Therefore, they can never build a coalition to do anything effective.
WFTR
Bill
I'm always reminded of Hannibal Lecter's words to Clarice Starling:
"First principles, Clarice. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?"
Who commits abortions? Mexico med-school refugees. The losers of medicine. Abortionists are the drippings below the barrel. Incompetent. "Good doctors don't rise to abortion; bad doctors sink to it."
They're going to mess up. Sue them for the malpractice we know they're going to commit. Lacerated cervixes. Over-anesthetizing. Yanking the bowel through the uterus. Reusing laminaria. Not sterilizing equipment. It's a no-brainer. They are incompetent doctors, which is why the commit abortions.
They take the lives of defenseless, innocent babies. They are devoid of morals, ethics, scruples, and standards. If they can rip a baby girl apart, what would dissuade them from sexually assaulting the girl's mother? If they can steal someone's whole life, why wouldn't they steal via Medicaid fraud? Abortionists can't be cold-blooded killers and then change psyches when they leave the clinic. It can't be done. Convict them of the other crimes that they, by inclination and training, can't help but commit.
And anyone who thinks that the Republican party is going to try to stop abortion is deluded. Republicans will play up to the white suburbanites with completely assinine diversions like pro-life license plates (how much energy is wasted! in such stupid pursuits), but as long as abortionists are adept at trimming the black population, the GOP isn't interested in shutting them down.
The sad fact seems to be that when there is an unwanted pregnancy, it doesn't matter how devoutly religious and conservative that person is (mother or father), abortion is the way they take to solve it. Father and mother do not want the extra work, time, and money. They lay aside their principles just for the few minutes it takes to have the abortion, and then pick them up again. I suspect that soon more than 50% of American women will have had abortions!
Of course they don't. It's clear what Laura Bush and Barbara Bush have stated about this issue, and their husbands are deferring to them.
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Again, the biggest impediment to banning abortion is that most people don't understand that the unborn child is really a person. |
Antonin Scalia and His Critics: The Church, the Courts, and the Death Penalty What the "pro-choice" American does not believe is that a human fetus is as fully a human life as Uncle Charlie.
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I was amazed at the inconsistency of her believing that a child remembered something from a time when she would not acknowledge that the child was a person with basic human rights. I was amazed that she would support another's right to kill a child at a stage of development where she admitted that her own child had memories and self-awareness. |
Behaviorally speaking, there's little difference between a newborn baby and a 32-week-old fetus. A new wave of research suggests that the fetus can feel, dream, even enjoy The Cat in the Hat. The abortion debate may never be the same.
As if overturning the common conception of infancy weren't enough, scientists are creating a startling new picture of intelligent life in the womb. Among the revelations:
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Take "reproductive health" next. That must be instead called "sexual irresponsibility". |
Fogel says the Christian Coalition Could Dominate American Politics for 50-60 Years
The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism. Robert W. Fogel Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Robert Fogel is a Nobel prize winning economist from the University of Chicago.
Fogel's argument is that American history has seen several Great Awakenings driven by religion and based on the notion of EGALITARIANISM and that we are in the middle of the Fourth Great Awakening.
FIRST GREAT AWAKENING. Lasted from 1730 to 1800 and led directly to the American Revolution. Movement was driven by anger over corruption and immorality of British administration.
SECOND GREAT AWAKENING. Lasted from 1800 to 1880 and focused on the egalitarian concept of EQUAL OPPORTUNITY and stress on INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY. This movement led to Indians rights, temperance (against alcohol), universal education, abolition of slavery and voting rights for all adults.
THIRD GREAT AWAKENING. Lasted from 1890 to 1960 but was based on the egalitarian concept of EQUALITY OF CONDITION. Basic human problems were taken to be the failure of society, not the individual. Poverty was taken to be not the wages of sin, but caused by society. Led to the welfare state, diversity, income tax, regulation of big business, unions, and immigration restrictions.
FOURTH GREAT AWAKENING. Started in 1960 to present. Major shift from THIRD to FOURTH GREAT AWAKENING is the return to egalitarian concept of EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY and stress on INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY. This change in direction runs counter to the entire Liberal agenda based on idea that society is responsible and not the individual.
What brought about the crisis that has led to the FOURTH GREAT AWAKENING? As Fogel points out, between 1890 and 1990, the increase in available wealth to the top 10% of w age earners in this country increased by a factor of four, that is, their actual wealth was multiplied four times. At the same time, the increase in available wealth to the bottom 10% of wage earners actually increased by a factor of 20! But while the multiplication of wealth has been astounding, problems such as crime, drugs, teen pregnancy, and single-parent households all INCREASED! Obviously material resources have not and will not solve the problems.
Enter the FOURTH GREAT AWAKENING. While church membership in the U.S. actually grew in the 1940s and 1950s, it fell off afterwards. Between 1970-2000, church membership in established denominations actually DECREASED by 25%. At the same time the enthusiastic religions more than doubled in the U.S. (and grew by an astounding 250,000,000 in South America and Asia).
The Moral Majority initiated the current religious awakening but was found to be too narrow in focus and intolerant. The CHRISTIAN COALITION has proven to be more flexible and political in nature, and therefore more successful. In Fogel's opinion, the Christian Coalition will dominate American politics for the next 50-60 years if they:
(1) understand they are a POLITICAL MOVEMENT~
(2) can form coalitions on key issues to move their agenda~
(3) can produce real gains for their adherents based on the concept of personal responsibility.
The LIBERALS (Fogel calls them Social Gosplers of the THIRD AWAKENING) will fight a rear guard action, especially in public education and the universities,
New Jersey has 23.
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And anyone who thinks that the Republican party is going to try to stop abortion is deluded. Republicans will play up to the white suburbanites with completely assinine diversions like pro-life license plates (how much energy is wasted! in such stupid pursuits), but as long as abortionists are adept at trimming the black population, the GOP isn't interested in shutting them down. |
Until you can convert, inform and inspire an amoral, ignorant, apathetic and dependent populace-Bush & like-minded Republicans will be the very best you can expect.
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