Pro-Life Profiles

Do you believe the unborn -- all of them -- have a Right to Life?

Are you willing to act upon that knowledge, by supporting the promising new Personhood movement (all unborn children should be protected as Persons, with a God-given, inalienable Right to Life, under the law), which has gained a foothold in no fewer than 37 states as of today?

These are the questions being asked by a new website -- an effort by American Right to Life -- of high-profile candidates and personalities in the news today, particularly those who are pro-life, or who may be considered to be pro-life by their fans and supporters, but who are really just pretending.

Pro-Life Profiles

As pro-lifers, we do ourselves no favors by pretending pro-abortion leaders are pro-life, even if they say they're on our side. And by even allowing pro-abortion leaders (pro-abortion being defined as supporting even one abortion) to pretend they're pro-life, we guarantee years more disappointment in these leaders, and years more death of unborn children with the tacit or complicit approval of our "Christian" or "pro-life" leaders.

Even National Right to Life opposes Personhood, which means they themselves do not support the Right to Life in law that their name says they should.

It's time for it to stop! Learn the truth!

The Difference Between Wisdom & Folly

Praise God! A piece of criticism offers opportunity to make our argument more strongly, and move the ball forward toward the Personhood Strategy...

Kevin, a conservative Catholic blogger (I'll not identify him further, so that I don't discourage others from posting criticism -- the point is to dialogue, not to jump on everybody who criticizes, but rather to answer their points), posted this in response to our "Don't Let the Elections Get You Down" message:

"a full 27% of voters in Colorado (where even many Republicans are pro-choice) voted not just to prohibit all abortions, but also to end embryonic stem cell research, some forms of in vitro fertilization, and those forms of birth control that cause abortions,"

One of the few reasons I could bring myself to vote for it was because I didn't want it to fail by too much. What makes you think our society would respect such a law if passed? Amendment 48 backers overreached and wasted resources that would have been better directed elsewhere, such as swinging a few state senate or house races. Why was the effort led by a 21-year-old woman? However articulate she is, that's folly. Pro-lifers can't just pretend that these largely futile efforts are good for the cause. We need to ask ourselves if we are tempting God by our efforts. We sometimes ask too much from a deeply mistaken society. Had the Supreme Court even ruled on Amendment 48, it could have only further enshrined our wicked laws, and probably created a few new ones. What good is it if you have justice on your side, if you don't have wisdom?

We replied thus:

Kevin,

Thank you for your strongly felt opinion. I'm disappointed that you didn't have better reasons for voting for Am. 48, but I trust you mean that you disagreed with the strategy, not with the goal.

Our society will never start to respect such laws until they are passed. Period. We must try, or we will never achieve anything.

We admire Kristi because she had the courage to propose a principled law when so many, even on our side, reject principle in favor of compromise. But Kristi was hardly alone in leading the Personhood effort. Besides CRTL's full-scale efforts, there were many organizers, and 1,000 petition gatherers who moved the fight forward.

You're seeming to think the pro-life fight will be won by a margin of support in the legislature, or in the courts. That's not so.

Truly, it doesn't matter what the courts do yet, because abortion is already 100% enshrined, and today's court won't change that. We either try other means, or we give up.

Look at our $10,000 Challenge -- even if we'd waited for 2 or 3 more conservative Supreme Court appointments before trying this, it wouldn't have given us victory, because none of the Supreme Court justices there already would have supported this.

That doesn't mean victory is impossible. It means we must use other means to achieve victory, or else accept that victory may be 100 years away.

The courts, and the politicians will acknowledge Personhood if the people urgently shout for it! The judges and the politicians will NEVER take up the call for Personhood unless the people do it first.

That's what we've done!

And that's why moving forward from this point is so important. If they aren't paying attention this year, they will when we increase the margin by 10% or 20%. It's a matter of educating the public. That's how we'll achieve victory.

And, frankly, that's wisdom -- finding the way toward victory when other means have failed, and victory seems impossible.

Strict Constructionist Judges: A Good Thing for Christians?

I know it's been a Republican Party mantra for years, and I also know that Christians have adopted most Republican mantras as their own. But should Christians really be pushing for "strict constructionist" judges?

Consider this: If the law is corrupt, and a judge follows that law, then that judge is also corrupt.

Then consider this: The Nazi judges tried at Nuremburg in 1945 were strict constructionist judges. They said, in their defense, "I was just following the law" when I ordered that Jew put to death for hoarding eggs. Or, "I was just following the law" when I ordered that Nazi released for killing his neighbor.

In a moral court system -- in God's system of justice -- following the law, absent of moral considerations, is NO defense!

Strict constructionism, the way it's interpreted today, and the way it's applied today, is amoral. If the law says to kill Jews, then that's what these judges would do!

Besides, strict constructionism hasn't gotten Christians anything. Roe v. Wade, to be certain, was created by "activist judges" who should never have interpreted the law the way they did. A strict constructionist wouldn't have made that mistake. But a strict constructionist wouldn't have refused to sign Roe v. Wade on moral grounds. He would have refused to sign it because there IS no "right to privacy", nor any "right to abortion."

On the other hand, a moral justice would have refused to sign Dred Scott, returning a slave to his master. A strict constructionist, depending on how he read the Constitution, might very well have used the "strict construction" of the US Constitution to find a defense of slavery (which did exist, in the letter of the law). Never mind that a moral justice would have pointed out protections for life and liberty also.

Remember American Right to Life's (unclaimed) $10,000 Challenge to National Right to Life! There ARE no pro-life justices on today's US Supreme Court. None of them believes in a right to life. The most "conservative" justice, Antonin Scalia, has said on the record that the right to life is just for "'walking around' people."

Strict constructionist judges are amoral. We might as well have a computer in that office. In fact, a computer would probably decide morally more often than our justices on the US Supreme Court do -- just by random chance!

There was a time, in American jurisprudence, when a judge felt a higher calling to God's moral authority than he did to the actual letter of the law. If a law violated the "natural law" of God, it was appropriate for a justice to abrogate that law, and rule it invalid, because it violated God's natural law.

The Ten Commandments was once part of the law, which justices would use to decide cases. Yes, the Founders intended for judges to follow the letter and spirit of the law as written, but God's moral law, through the Ten Commandments, and the Bible, was PART of that written law!

What Christians should really want to see on the Court is Christian judges -- judges who believe in the Right to Life. Judges who believe in moral absolutes, and in the Ten Commandments.

We need judges who fear God, and who fear His wrath if they disobey God's laws.

$10,000 Challenge to National Right to Life

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Press Release

$10,000 Cash Offered to Nat'l RTL
from American RTL to name 'one' pro-life justice

See this also at Yahoo Denver Post CovenantNews USA Today etc.

"American Right To Life is offering attorney James Bopp $10,000 for National RTL," said the group's president Brian Rohrbough, "if he can name a single justice on the current U.S. Supreme Court who has ever written, or joined in an opinion, that the unborn child has a right to life, whether in a majority ruling or a dissent."

"In 1981, after president Ronald Reagan agreed he would sign federal personhood legislation for the unborn, National Right to Life and their longtime attorney James Bopp actually opposed that effort claiming they supported a states' rights approach," says the group's site AmericanRTL.org. "A quarter century later notice that NRTL and Bopp have long opposed all state personhood efforts."

On May 13, Colorado pro-lifers turned in 131,000 signatures exceeding by 55,000 the number needed to force a statewide vote to acknowledge in law the personhood of the unborn child.

"National Right to Life has misled the pro-life community to think that this is the wrong time to advocate personhood because we need one more Justice on the Supreme Court to have a pro-life majority," said Rohrbough. "But if we added a Justice who would uphold the right to life of the unborn, then we would have only one such Justice. The failed long-term strategy of regulating the killing of a fetus has left America without a single Justice who knows that it's wrong to kill an unborn baby; National RTL's compromise will never produce a pro-life Supreme Court."

Even Dr. James Dobson, a supporter of the failed regulation strategy admits that: "Ending partial-birth abortion... does not save a single human life." And in an article about NRTL's failed PBA ban, Notre Dame Law School's professor emeritus Charles Rice said, "Every justice now on the court accepts the Roe holding that the unborn child is a non-person... The situation remains as described by Justice John Paul Stevens in Planned Parenthood v. Casey." For Stevens had written that "the Court... rejected, the argument ‘that the fetus is a "person"'. ... there was no dissent..." And Clarence Thomas wrote in his Stenberg dissent that "a State may permit abortion," and Antonin Scalia wrote in Casey, "The states may, if they wish, permit abortion-on-demand..."

"American Right to Life will give a $10,000 cash prize to National if their general counsel James Bopp can name even a single U.S. Supreme Court Justice who has ever written or joined in any ruling or dissent advocating the personhood of the unborn," said Steve Curtis, ARTL's vice president and former chairman of the Colorado Republican Party. "To make their strategy appear successful, National Right To Life has misled the pro-life movement into believing that abortion accomplices like Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Thomas and Scalia are pro-life."

In 2002 Scalia said, "I will... strike down a law that is the opposite of Roe v. Wade. ... One wants no state to be able to prohibit abortion and the other one wants every state to have to prohibit abortion, and they're both wrong..." In 2004 Scalia claimed, "Take the abortion issue... there's something to be said for both sides." And on April 9, 2008 Scalia said, "You want the right to abortion? Create it the way most rights are created in a democracy. Persuade your fellow citizens it's a good idea - and pass a law."

"National RTL claims success in Antonin Scalia but he is not pro-life; like all the Republicans on the Court, he is a legal positivist, which is a courtroom moral relativist," Rohrbough said. "Like their Dred Scott counterpart that ruled a black man could be owned as property, the current Republican Supreme Court is wicked and will only learn about the right to life of the unborn from the advancing personhood wing of the pro-life movement."

Contact:
National RTL can contact Donna Ballentine
1-888-888-ARTL (2785)
office@AmericanRTL.org