Anti-Abortion

As the Supreme Court debated the Prop 8 and DOMA cases, Alan Keyes argued that gay rights are incompatible with both the Constitution and even the Declaration of Independence, calling marriage equality the “archetype of all crimes against humanity.”

His core argument is that the government can only recognize rights that are compatible with God’s law. Since he believes homosexuality is an affront to divine law, it cannot be approved of in the US.

Paul Fidalgo today noticed a speech Keyes delivered at a college in Michigan, where he made the case that the government can’t recognize gay rights, reproductive rights and the separation of church and state, just as we shouldn’t recognize the right of a person to pick their nose and eat their boogers.

MLive.com reports:

Just because something “feels right” doesn’t mean it is a “fundamental right” in God’s eyes.

That’s what former presidential candidate Alan Keyes said while speaking to a group of 100 people Wednesday, April 10 at Spring Arbor University as part of the university’s Thomas H. Cobb President’s Leadership Speaker Series.

Keyes passionately spoke on the topic of basic fundamental rights that were first laid out in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution of the United States, he said.

“The Republic is near death and it will die if we don’t wake up," he said. "But wake up to what?”

He answered his own question when talking about fundamental rights, where they came from and how the country needs to recognize that rights come from God.

Abortion, same-sex marriage and separation of church and state are not fundamental rights, Keyes said. If God does not recognize them, they do not exist.

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Keyes said while abortion, same-sex marriage and separation of church and state are not basic human rights there are leaders who are trying to “fabricate” rights.

“People who sit on the U.S. Supreme Court take it among themselves to argue that somehow there should be separation of church and state,” he said. “Nothing in the Constitution requires separation, nor could it because we cannot separate the country from its finding premise without destroying it.”

When arguing what a fundamental right actually is, Keyes gave an offbeat example of a young child who had a habit of “picking in their nostrils and “eating what came out.”

As the child grew up they noticed others were disgusted and did not want to be near him. As an adult the individual argued if others have the right to eat what they want, the individual should be recognized as having the same right.

“How many think that is a fundamental right?” he asked the audience. No one raised their hand.

“Nobody in their right mind would suggest it was,” Keyes said. “What makes something a fundamental right that actually trumps the Constitution of the United States? It can’t just be because you feel like it, or want to do it. It can’t just be that you feel badly about what you do because of the opinions of others, these are not arguments of rights...rights come from God.”

Washington Times columnist Jeffrey Kuhner is using Pope Francis’ election to attack President Obama as an “enemy of the church” who is “waging a war on Christians and on Catholics in particular.” After making the false claim that “Obamacare encodes the federal funding of abortions” and charging that “homosexual ‘marriage’ is a Trojan horse aimed at smashing the family — an invention by cultural Marxists to undermine Christianity’s ancient foundations,” Kuhner maintains that Obama’s policies contribute to a “culture of death.”

Pope Francis is the opposite of a modern American liberal. In fact, he probably finds much of the Democrats’ agenda repulsive. President Obama is waging a war on Christians and on Catholics in particular. His administration is compelling Catholic institutions — schools, hospitals and charities — to provide free birth control and abortion-inducing drugs to employees. This directly assaults Catholics’ conscience rights and freedom of religion. Obamacare encodes the federal funding of abortions. The health care overhaul forces devout Catholics to hand over their taxpayer dollars to fund a procedure they find not only a moral abomination, but a religious prohibition.

Mr. Obama supports homosexual “marriage.” He has allowed homosexuals to openly serve in the military. His pro-homosexual, pro-abortion and pro-contraception policies violate basic Catholic doctrine. He is an enemy of the church.

Contrary to liberal spin, Pope Francis is an orthodox Catholic. His election to the papacy consolidates the theological legacy of Blessed John Paul II and retired Pope Benedict XVI. The Holy Father is walking in their spiritual footsteps. He opposes the secular West’s culture of death. He is a moral traditionalist and cultural conservative. He denounces the mass murder of unborn children. He bravely criticizes homosexual behavior, decrying sodomy as unnatural and immoral. He eloquently defends the sanctity of the family from the onslaught of homosexual “marriage” and homosexual adoption.

Unlike shallow secularists, Pope Francis grasps that civilization depends upon one seminal institution: the sacred marital union between a man and a woman. The purpose of marriage is not cohabitation or affirming some romantic commitment. Rather, it is procreation — having, raising and socializing children. The family is the basic unit that perpetuates one generation to the next. Destroy it, and social collapse is inevitable. Homosexual “marriage” is a Trojan horse aimed at smashing the family — an invention by cultural Marxists to undermine Christianity’s ancient foundations.

This is why Pope Francis publicly challenged the national socialism of Argentine President Cristina Fernandez. Her leftist policies — legalizing homosexual “marriage,” providing free contraception to the public and enabling homosexuals to adopt — are slowly transforming Catholic Argentina. He courageously stood up to her. For this, he has been demonized by the authoritarian Peronist regime.

South Dakota’s state senate today passed a bill that would extend the mandatory 72 hour waiting period women face when seeking an abortion in the state to specifically exclude weekend days and holidays from counting towards the 72 hour period. Apparently, South Dakota’s Republican lawmakers think women aren’t able to think as well on weekends.

The AP reports:

The South Dakota Senate has given final legislative approval to an extension of what is already the nation's longest waiting period for a woman to receive an abortion.

Senators voted 24-9 Thursday to approve the bill, which has already been passed by the House. The measure will become law if signed by Gov. Dennis Daugaard.

Women seeking abortions in South Dakota currently must wait three days after seeing an abortion clinic doctor before they can have the procedure. The bill would make it so that weekends and holidays do not count in calculating the three-day waiting period.

The state House of Representatives approved the anti-choice legislation earlier this month, and it now heads to the governor’s desk.

Brooklyn’s Roman Catholic Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio is out with a column arguing that voters who supported President Obama’s re-election have brought America a “step deeper into the culture of death” and aided “the forces of death.” He claims that Obama “has been a proponent of an expediency that is shameful and criminal in the eyes of Almighty God” and is behind “an assault on the people of faith in our country” through his support for a woman’s right to choose.

DiMarzio concludes that unlike Abraham Lincoln, Obama has not “stood on the side of freedom for all” but instead “stands on the side of political expediency.”

On Jan. 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This Executive Order freed the slaves in the 10 states that were in rebellion. It was not until 1865, with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, that slavery was abolished in the United States.

How far we have come as a Nation that 160 years later we will celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States.

Yet, we also commemorate the 40th anniversary of our national shame: the lamentable Supreme Court decision, Roe vs. Wade, which legalized abortion throughout the nine months of pregnancy.

The so-called “pro-choice” movement has its roots in the ideology of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, who understood her call to be one who would “assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit.” Of course, a young Barack Obama was precisely the sort of unfit child that Sanger and her allies would want to eliminate.

Tragically, the President has not been an advocate for those young children faced with similarly difficult circumstances. He has chosen to use the bully pulpit not to call upon us all to be nobler and to embrace each child, regardless of origins and circumstances; rather, he has been a proponent of an expediency that is shameful and criminal in the eyes of Almighty God.

The forces of death press on from every side in contemporary American culture. It is clear there is an assault on the people of faith in our country. For instance, there are the current health insurance reforms that were imposed on our Nation obligating Catholic institutions to provide employees with medical procedures and services we believe to be in defiance of the will of God.

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In my view, those who voted for President Obama bear the responsibility for a step deeper in the culture of death. Under the cover of women’s issues, we now see an assault on religious freedom and personal conscience.

In our own state, Governor Andrew Cuomo has proposed the largest expansion of abortion rights in New York State history. The irony is that our leadership is proposing this at a time when increasingly more Americans oppose abortion and support greater restrictions upon abortions. New York State, which already holds the record for the most abortions in our country, is now expanding this culture of death. We may lose, but we will stand up for what we believe.

Some may think my tone a bit strident and even un-nuanced. Maybe the time has come for more direct conversation on these matters, if we hope to preserve what is left of our God-given and Constitutionally-protected rights.

Abraham Lincoln was a man who understood the intersection between politics and nobility. He never would have been able to pass the Thirteenth Amendment in 1863. But he started by freeing “slaves” in the Confederate States with his Emancipation Proclamation.

I would have hoped that the first African-American president of the United States would have stood on the side of freedom for all. Instead, he stands on the side of political expediency. Mr. Lincoln, with great difficulty, put out into the deep and paid with his life. Would that our political leaders today would have some of the same courage.

Yesterday on Focal Point, American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer marked the anniversary of Roe v. Wade by predicting that America “will have to pay” for legal abortion: “It could be through civil war, it could be through anarchy, it could be through Muslim fundamentalists and terrorists attacks on the United States, but one way or another we cannot escape God’s justice.”

He went on to argue that Planned Parenthood clinics are no different from Nazi death camps. “You see a Planned Parenthood clinic, just think Birkenau, just think Auschwitz, just think Bergen-Belsen,” Fischer said, “because that’s what you are looking at, you are looking at an equivalent of a Nazi gas chamber.”

Watch:

Later, he repeated the false charge that Planned Parenthood promotes domestic abuse to its members.

Just like other conservative leaders, Fischer never found time to watch the video he is so angry about. If he did he would learn that it’s a British anti-violence video that uses an intentionally misleading title to deliver the real message: “Don’t cover it up.”

Operation Rescue head Troy Newman appeared on The Janet Mefferd Show yesterday to discuss the anniversary of Roe v. Wade and new tactics to recriminalize abortion and fight Planned Parenthood, making sure not to mention the growing support for Roe. Newman said that Operation Rescue and other anti-choice groups must act like the allied bombers who destroyed Nazi arms factories during World War II.

Newman: I’ll give you a little analogy; in 1943 the allied forces sent 1,500 bombers into Germany to destroy the ball-bearing factories and the aviation factories because they knew without ball-bearings they couldn’t produce armaments and methods to destroy the allied forces. So I want to diminish the enemy’s ability to make war on children and I’ve got several plans we’ll be talking about but that that’s the idea. They are going to be well-funded, they are going to be governed by the most radical pro-abortion president ever and the Supreme Court but we’re going to be going after their ability to make war on children.

He also compared the Operation Rescue demonstrations, which have been linked to violence, to abolitionists working in the Underground Railroad and called on activists to channel Gideon, whose 300-man army destroyed the Midianites in the Book of Judges. “I think I told you on a previous radio show, I got tired of going to jail,” Newmain said, “it’s the abortionists that need to go to jail.”

Newman: We peacefully came and laid down our lives and they asked us to leave, ‘Get out that door, go away, get off this property,’ we’d say, ‘I’m sorry I cannot in good conscience get up because if I do the abortionist will come in and he will kill children. So they beat us up and they threw us in jail and they sued us into oblivion and then they passed a federal law to make it a federal crime, a lot like the Fugitive Slave Act. If you were running the Underground Railroad you could face federal time for harboring slaves.

Mefferd: And the RICO lawsuit, the racketeering, it was supposed to be a law used to go after the mob and they started using it against pro-lifers. How much did the lawsuit filing by NARAL and NOW and all these groups, how much damage did that do to Operation Rescue and other big pro-life organizations in terms of the strategies you employed?

Newman: For us rescue was going away anyway because of the massive amounts of jail time. I think I told you on a previous radio show, I got tired of going to jail; it’s the abortionists that need to go to jail. So we were changing our tactics anyway. I think what it did to the rest of the pro-life movement is it made them more fearful of the government and what they could possibly do to them then what happened in actuality. At the end of the day, I’m still standing, I’m still rescuing, I’m still more resolved to end this child-killing than I was back then so they just made me a better pro-lifer.

Mefferd: That’s great. We need about 100 million of you, Troy.

Newman: I’d settle for about—Gideon, 300 courageous men in America that will stand up against Planned Parenthood and we will win the day.

James Dobson’s radio program Family Talk today aired a sermon by Pastor Laurence White, who has worked with conservative figures like Rick Perry, Glenn Beck, David Barton and Rick Scarborough as founder of the “Texas Restoration Project.” The Dobson-endorsed sermon blamed the Holocaust on the separation of church and state and warned of America’s imminent destruction mainly as a result of homosexuality and abortion, arguing that “God will destroy and God should destroy America” if the U.S. does not ban abortion. Despite White’s address, abortion rates are actually higher in countries where the procedure is banned.

Once again the nation is being led down the path to destruction and once again by and large God’s people are looking the other way. I don’t have to tell anyone in this room tonight how far that path to destruction we’ve already traveled. You see the evidence in families that are fractured and marriages that are broken; in young people that lose their way and often their lives in a maze of alcohol and drugs; in a culture that can no longer distinguish between lust and love; that is willing to tolerate the vilest perversion as an “alternative, acceptable lifestyle” while pestilence stalks the land; in public schools that have become facilitators for fornication and procurers for the abortionist knife; in a nation that has lost the moral will to distinguish between that which is right and that which is wrong: we know all too well how far down that road to destruction we have already gone.

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We can win the next election or the next ten elections, we can balance the budget, we can reduce the deficit, we can bring down taxes and build the mightiest military machine on the face of the earth, but if we do no stop abortion then God will destroy and God should destroy America.

Conservative organizations have come out strongly against the UN Convention on the Right of Persons with Disabilities, with Rick Santorum leading the charge. The groups are upset about the treaty ensuring that people with disabilities have equal rights because they claim it is “pro-abortion.”

Article 25 of the Treaty reads in part: 

States Parties recognize that persons with disabilities have the right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health without discrimination on the basis of disability. States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to ensure access for persons with disabilities to health services that are gender-sensitive, including health-related rehabilitation. In particular, States Parties shall:

(a) Provide persons with disabilities with the same range, quality and standard of free or affordable health care and programmes as provided to other persons, including in the area of sexual and reproductive health and population-based public health programmes;

Anti-choice activists are angry about the inclusion of the phrase “reproductive health” in the nondiscrimination clause, according to LifeNews:

Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, has previously noted the pro-life concerns, saying abortion advocates put language in the treaty in Article 25 that requires signatories to ‘provide persons with disabilities… free or affordable health care including in the area of sexual and reproductive health and population-based health programs.’” “Translation: the global community could force America to sanction sterilization or abortion for the disabled–at taxpayer expense” he said. “Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) tried to neutralize the threat during the mark-up in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Unfortunately, his amendment (which would have stopped the treaty from forcing abortion policy on countries that sign) was thwarted by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) after a debate.”

Several pro-life groups are on record opposing the treaty, including Eagle Forum, Family Research Council Action, CitizenLink, Concerned Women for America, Liberty Counsel, and others.

In addition, the Home School Legal Defense Association and the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM) have also came out against ratification.

But Perkins’s claim that the treaty “could force America to sanction sterilization or abortion for the disabled-at taxpayer expense” is simply false.

The State Department makes clear that the treaty “does not include abortion” and the phrase “reproductive health” in Article 25 “does not create any abortion rights, and cannot be interpreted to constitute support, endorsement, or promotion of abortion.”

The Convention is firmly rooted in the principles of equality and non-discrimination. As the Chairperson and many other delegations, including the United States, have noted on countless occasions over the course of negotiations, the treaty reinforces existing rights and is aimed at assuring that persons with disabilities will be treated on an equal basis with others.

This approach was reflected in oral statements and in various places in the written travaux preparatoires, including in a footnote to the draft text of Article 25 that appeared in the report of the Seventh Ad Hoc Committee.

In this regard, the United States understands that the phrase "reproductive health" in Article 25(a) of the draft Convention does not include abortion, and its use in that Article does not create any abortion rights, and cannot be interpreted to constitute support, endorsement, or promotion of abortion. We stated this understanding at the time of adoption of the Convention in the Ad Hoc Committee, and note that no other delegation suggested a different understanding of this term.

Even the National Right to Life Committee reported after the text was adopted that no delegate interpreted “reproductive health” to mean abortion and that “delegates from pro-life nations ultimately accepted this language.” “The committee responsible for enforcing compliance to this treaty would be going way beyond their mandate if they were to interpret the term ‘reproductive health’ to include abortion,” the NRLC said:

The legally undefined and controversial term "reproductive health" remains in the document despite the fact that the term has never appeared in any other UN treaty. However, all parties maintained that the term does not include abortion and that its inclusion in this treaty cannot be interpreted to create any new rights such as a right to abortion.

The final version of Article 25 (a) on health states that nations signing and ratifying the treaty shall: "Provide persons with disabilities with the same range, quality and standard of free or affordable health care and programmes as provided other persons, including in the area of sexual and reproductive health. . . . ."

Delegates from pro-life nations ultimately accepted this language because they were assured and became confident that it does not include abortion or create any new human rights such as a right to abortion.

For example, during the debate the Treaty Chairman, Ambassador McKay of New Zealand, stated repeatedly that the use of the term "reproductive health" in this treaty does not create any new human rights such as abortion. He even added a non-binding footnote to the record of negotiations, not the treaty itself, which he claimed would preclude any such misinterpretation of the term.

Numerous delegates from nations throughout the world including the European Union agreed with Chairman McKay that the term "reproductive health" does not include abortion. No delegate from any nation stated that it does.

In light of all these statements and the language of the treaty, the committee responsible for enforcing compliance to this treaty would be going way beyond their mandate if they were to interpret the term "reproductive health" to include abortion. It is crucial that they do not because nations that sign and ratify a treaty are required to change their laws in order to comply with the treaty.

But for the Religious Right, even definitive evidence that the treaty’s language does not refer to abortion doesn’t change their mind that the Convention on the Right of Persons with Disabilities must be defeated.

According to exit polls, 56% of Ohio voters said that abortion should be legal in all or mostly all cases. But that hasn’t stopped the state’s GOP-controlled legislature from pushing the ‘Heartbeat Bill,’ which would effectively ban abortion in nearly all cases. The House has already approved the legislation but it has not yet received a vote in the Senate, and radical activist Janet Porter has been actively campaigning against Republicans who have not signed on to the bill. Porter’s main legislative ally and the bill’s chief sponsor in the house, Rep. Lynn Wachtmann, is now working to secure support in the Senate for the Heratbeat Bill along with a new proposal to defund Planned Parenthood, even though the healthcare organization doesn’t use taxpayer dollars for abortion services and the move may not be legal.

The Columbus Dispatch reports:

House Health and Aging Committee Chairman Lynn Wachtmann, R-Napoleon, scheduled a possible vote to recommend passage of House Bill 298 for Wednesday.

Backed by Ohio Right to Life and other anti-abortion advocates, the bill stalled last spring over concern that it also would divert funding from hospitals, which was not the intent of supporters. The legislation would create a priority system for awarding federal family-planning funds, putting Planned Parenthood at the bottom of the list and probably cutting off about $1.7 million it uses for birth control and preventive care.

The money does not fund abortions, but supporters argue that tax dollars should not go to any organization that performs abortions.

Meanwhile, abortion foes might be nearing a compromise on the so-called “heartbeat bill,” which would outlaw abortions if a fetal heartbeat can be detected. That’s usually about five to six weeks into pregnancy, when many women don’t yet realize they are pregnant.