Is there a pro-life party?


I will not vote in this election, despite donating money and time to John McCain’s campaign over the course of the past year and a half, as reflection on our poltiical institutions has rendered me utterly disallusioned that the elevation of either major candidate to the presidency will remedy our nation’s ghastly abortion laws.


Princeton philsopher Robert George makes mincemeat of the “freakanomics” logic pro-life Obama supporters employ in defense of their candidate. Indeed, few politicians in recent memory have exerted greater efforts to entrench the dogmas of pro-abortion lobbies into state and federal law. Democrats speak of making abortion “safe, legal, and rare,” and Obama emphasizes how government programs stressing contraceptive use and the dangers of unprotected sexual activity coupled with social outreach programs to pregnant women will lead to a decrease in the number of abortions necessary. His Roman Catholic running mate declares himself as personally pro-life and believes that life begins at conception, but is wary of proscribing what he views as a personal matter onto the country’s laws as a whole. Other Catholic politicians like John Kerry subscribe to this viewpoint, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently reconciled her Catholic faith to a pro-abortion position by erroneously asserting that the Catholic Church lacks a definitive position on the issue.

How someone can believe life begins at conception and abdicate any responsibility for its defense is beyond me. Are we at the point where significant blocks of young pro-lifers are convinced abortion is no different than any other social issue which falls under the rubric of public policy?

The pro-life movement, to paraphrase Michael Gerson, believes the basic foundation of any just society is the preservation of innocent life. Challenging and undermining the erroneously accepted maxim that human life must meet some biological test to recieve the protection of the state should be our primary mission.

Unfortunatley, the Republican Party is more interested in exploiting the pro-life vote without alienating abortion moderates than in revising our abortion laws. The absence of the pro-life position in our political debate is galling for me, especially as more than a few people in the party consider it a top priority. On the one hand, Republicans understand capturing majorities in Congress and the White House means attracting as broad a base as possible. Absent the votes of moderates and apathetics on this issue, few Republicans could win elections, so the logic goes, and therefore, NO change would occur. Well, what have the Republicans accomplished since Roe v. Wade went on the books in 1973? Pro-life presidents put seven of the last nine judges on the court, including Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter. Republican Congresses abetted by the few pro-lifers the extremists have not purged from the Democratic ranks succeeded in passing the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban in 2003 which defined the procedure as gruesome and inhumane, but little else has been done despite Republican dominance of the executive office since 1981. Yet pro-lifers continue to donate more money and time to the Republican organization than any other group, and yet remain content to have their energies exploited without delivering any accomplishments in return.

It has been said to me on more than one occassion, that in refusing to participate in the election, I am allowing the Democratic Party complete control of the courts. Well, Republican control of the courts has not yielded much unless your standard for success is a counterfactual “imagine if so-and-so had tipped the scale.” Where some might accuse me of “taking the ball and going home,” I find it completely irrational to commit myself to a political party with a track record that indicates a lack of willpower to take seriously issues I care about. If I vote for the Republican ticket, I tell the party that they can continue to count on my support absent progress on the issue due to the Democratic bogeyman.

The legal procedures exist to remedy our nation’s abortion laws, provided a sizeable majority of the American people support, or at least not oppose, their repeal. Unfortunately, I fear Roe v. Wade is a symptom of a culture obsessed with instant material gratification and more than capable of rationalizing and internalizing the destruction of innocent life should it interfere with immediate goals. No other society has overseen the extermination of over forty million of its young. We can only hope someday astonished historians of a more enlightened age will ponder the sins of our time with sadness, but celebrate the end of this state-sanctioned infanticide in a date within the near future


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Stalin's and Hitler's Murderers = America's Complacency

Strelnikov (Diary) Saturday, October 25th at 7:03AM EST (link)

The behavior of guards in Siberia and in the Nazi concentration camps has been examined throughout the decades. People have always wondered: how did they “go to work” day after day knowing that they would be overseeing and managing death?

The answer lies in the structure of the human brain: the satiety factor. There is a part of the brain which allows us to become accustomed to anything.

Look at roller coasters in America: contraptions that would have been illegal 40 years ago are now standard. Many put more stress on riders than flying in the Space Shuttle. How is this possible? Because people got used to roller coasters at 50 MPH and at 30 degree angles and became bored with them.

The abortion fight is 35 years old, and by definition, therefore, to many Americans boring. The abortion fight is an old roller coaster. Another year, another million babies dead: we have gotten used to the carnage. Like Siberia and the Nazi camps, the clinics are “far away,” silent, basically invisible, although everyone knows they exist and what is happening there.

I understand your frustration with the Republicans: I do not agree with not voting, since a victory by Dems will probably mean an expansion of infanticide with the possibility of opening up euthanasia coast-to-coast.

Americans are ambivalent: I have known people who want abortions for the rape and incest possibilities, but otherwise want it banned. Others are absolutists in favor of a complete ban. But humans have been ambivalent about this since the caves: most villages had the local “old woman with a stick” to handle the population rate.

When the Leftists lost the battle over the nature of the embryo (i.e. is it human?) in the early years of the debate, they successfully switched to the “pro-choice” argument, which puts the decision/responsibility/sin/crime (take your pick) on the head of the mother, thereby allowing American society to become like Pilate and walk away from the controversy.

That walking away from the problem simply allows human life in general to become cheapened for our society, and creates an atmosphere of selfishness where consequences can be undone (seemingly), is what we see around us today.

But what is the Leftist agenda? Relativism, no consequences, no religion to make you feel bad, no “truth” except for personal opinion, etc. We have seen how attractive this agenda has been to the weaker minded, and if not weaker minded, to the weaker personalities in our society.

Pragmatism prevents the Republican party from being truly pro-life, and so the party pros give lip-service. The reason for the pragmatism is the ambivalence mentioned above in our society. Change the ambivalence in America and you will change the party’s pragmatic thinking.

So I hope you reconsider abstaining!

As of November 4, 2008, the Code Words will be: “Klaatu – Borada – Nikto!”

 

"How someone can believe life begins at conception and abdicate any responsibility for its defense is beyond me."

Moe Lane (Diary) Saturday, October 25th at 7:12AM EST (link)

…Voting for the only candidate who can keep this candidate from doing that is a responsibility.

 

You can stop some abortions by voting for McCain

David123 (Diary) Saturday, October 25th at 9:29AM EST (link)

First, even if no laws are changed, with Sarah Palin on the national stage, leading by example, some women will simply follow her example and choose life even though they retain a legal option of abortion. Sarah Palin is certainly one Republican politician who is pro-life from the heart.

Second: Judges appointed by Obama will consider abortion to be a fundamental constitutional right; abortion will remain a fundamental constitutional right for the next 50 years. Judges appointed by McCain will be sympathetic to overturning Roe v Wade since the text of the constitution makes no mention of a right to abortion.

Third: Consider what is realistically possible short-term. Under a McCain presidency, states such as South Dakota will probably be able to ban abortion except for rape victims or when needed to save the life of the mother. If abortion is legal in some states and illegal in others, abortions will decline. Women who passionately want abortions will travel out of state to get them, but women who are on the fence are likely to avoid abortions if they must travel to get them.

Fourth: An Obama presidency wouldn’t just be pro-choice, it would be actively pro-abortion, and might even be pro-infanticide in some cases.

David123

 

Go on and cop out if you want to, but don't try to depress others from not voting.

Tim_Schieferecke (Diary) Saturday, October 25th at 9:39AM EST (link)

Perfection in a candidate is not possible. Ask anyone here about the R primaries, and they’ll tell you I completely opposed McCain till he was the candidate. Things never magically change over night, but I’ll take McCain’s judicial appointments anyday over Obama’s. The next president will have at least 2 SCOTUS appointments, and if you want Ginsberg replaced with a 35-40 year old far leftist that could be there for the next 40 years, by all means maintain your course of inaction. It is a free country after all, but will it continue to be?

Tim Schieferecke

 

Nonsense and Ignorance

Gandalf (Diary) Saturday, October 25th at 9:46AM EST (link)

As an Evangelical Christian, I would (sadly) wager that you are an Evangelical Christian as well. Why do I guess this? Because I’m hearing more and more of this total ignorance from people of our religious persuasion as we have no historical or political context in which to form our beliefs. We’ve worked for the pro-life movement for the last 8 years, and still abortion is available. The answer MUST be that nobody really cares. But that’s ignoring the way the real world works.

So let me give you some historical context: When Regan took office in 1980, there were little to no conservative judges anywhere in the federal court system. We can blame this on Nixon/Ford, but the fact remains. The way the nomination process works, the Courts must be influenced from the bottom up. We can’t simply come in and try to put people on the Supreme Court without having them in lower courts first. Regan was the beginning of this. Sadly, he did fail on several of his nominees. Bush Sr. had a wider bench to choose from and had a better record at selecting justices. W. has had even a wider bench and give us 2 excellent judges and NO bad ones. We’re now within 1 judge of overturning RvW and other unconstitutional court rulings.

We have no reason to think that McCain won’t give us good justices. He supported both Alito and Roberts (indeed, we have him to thank for Alito’s presence on the court today), and he has said that he will nominate justices like these two. At the very worst he would replace Justices Stephens and Ginsburg with someone like Kennedy or O’Connor. That’s a massive shift to the right. More likely, he’d give us someone like Roberts, which seals the conservative ideology of the court for at least five years.

And your notion that the Republican party has done nothing for the pro-life movement is just false and worse than ignorant. We passed the Born-Alive Protection Act. We passed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban. We are withholding federal monies from supporting abortions in other countries. We passed the Unborn Victims of Crime Bill. We cut funding to the UN’s abortion services. We have supported the right of conscience for doctors/pharmacists who do not wish to perform abortion or distribute abortion inducing drugs. We’ve introduced numerous state restrictions across the country, including one on that ballot in S. Dakota to forbid all abortions except in the case of rape, incest, or the life of the mother. This year, we have the strongest pro-life plank EVER in our National Platform, and we have successfully been able to force the Democrats to soften theirs (even as they nominated the most avid and blood-thirsty pro-death candidate ever).

Get your facts straight. You have been lied to. The Left, and the pro-death agenda behind it, are the ones who are trying to convince you that the Republicans don’t care about the pro-life movement, despite the facts.

And don’t take my word for it. Check out Dr. Dobson’s latest update. Check out the Free Republic’s article on Pro-Life advancements in the last 8 years:

http://www.citizenlink.org/focusaction/updates/A000008358.cfm
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2106680/posts

Just as we’re within striking distance of our goal (overturning RvW), you want to throw in the towel? That’s insane. That, sir, is the very definition of pro-abortion.

Christian Conservative First
Patriotic American Second
Dedicated Republican Third

Yes, the order is important.

55555!

Tim_Schieferecke (Diary) Saturday, October 25th at 9:50AM EST (link)

Well said.

Tim Schieferecke

 
 

Palin speaks all the time advocating pro-life and attacks Obama's vile

Mike gamecock DeVine (Diary) Saturday, October 25th at 10:11AM EST (link)

position on partial birth and the born alive infant protection act.

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