Response to Eagle Forum on Personhood

(feel free to print this and bring it with you to your assembly as a handout or reference)

Dear Pro-Life Voter:

Please support the Personhood Amendment #62! The most fundamental right recognized by our Constitution is the God-given right to life. It is government’s foremost duty to uphold the right to life of all innocent human beings, without exception. The Personhood Amendment – Amendment 62 on Colorado's November ballot –recognizes the right to life of unborn children from the beginning of their biological development as a human being.

Forty states currently are following Colorado's leadership and trying, through legislation or ballot initiatives, to get Personhood recognized for the unborn child. This has transformed the pro-life movement and given it new energy! For the first time in recent history, there is light at the end of the tunnel, and we may see abortion prohibited in the relatively near future.

Unfortunately, many politicians, including Republicans, and even some pro-life groups fear losing control of the agenda. They are trying to smother the Personhood movement in its crib! You may see an Eagle Forum flyer here (at political gatherings) today, spreading misleading statements.

They mean to discourage pro-lifers by pointing out that our 2008 measure only received 27% support – the first time any state has ever voted on Personhood. They say we should not try again. What successful social movement has ever given up after its first try? What if the anti-slavery movement had quit at their first setback? What if Britain had surrendered to Hitler because victory seemed impossible? It's not leadership to say, “We tried once and failed, so we should stop.”

In 2008 conventional wisdom held that only one out of eight people would vote for a total abortion ban. Yet in our first time on the ballot we received over 600,000 votes, more than doubling what was expected, in a state that had just elected a pro-abortion governor and president. With a well-run campaign, in this non-presidential election year, where just some Personhood voters bring another voter to the polls, we could win. Of slavery, the Holocaust, and abortion, we're now at two down and one to go!

The anti-personhood flyer claims pro-abortion groups are “enriched” by getting to fight the Personhood amendments in several states. The ACLU and Planned Parenthood don't see it that way. They're suing to keep Personhood amendments off the ballot in Missouri, Alaska, and Nevada, and they've announced that they might sue here in Colorado. (We're ready for them if they do.) And Mississippi has already certified their state's Personhood Amendment to be on the ballot, and signatures are being collected by the hundreds of thousands in Florida and California and elsewhere. Further, the pro-abortion group NARAL put Personhood USA, parent group of one of our sponsors, on their national Hall of Shame! What an honor! They fear what we can see: that Personhood has ignited a broad base of grassroots activity with more being done to stop abortion than any time in the last twenty years!

The “pro-life” opponents of Personhood claim “it’s not the right time,” but it’s never the wrong time to do the right thing. They say they want to back Personhood “eventually,” but the US Supreme Court is not yet “ready” to support a pro-life measure. This admission comes after decades of their efforts to change the court, which admission is proof from their own mouths that their strategy is utterly failing. Republicans have nominated the majority of the federal judiciary, and the federal courts are overwhelmingly pro-abortion, so we need a new, direct strategy of teaching the public and our politicians the difference between right and wrong.

After decades of electing pro-life presidents, there is not a single Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court who has ever once advocated the right to life of the unborn child. So National Right To Life has never been able to claim the $10,000 offered them for simply naming a single pro-life Supreme Court Justice. That check is already written and remains un-cashed in the office of the Colorado-based American Right To Life.

Eagle Forum points to a memo by National Right To Life attorney James Bopp, which claims they fear a challenge to Roe v. Wade now might “make things worse.” Fear never won a fight. Over a million children will die from abortion this year! Fifty million dead children and they are afraid to pursue victory because things might get worse? That's like giving in to terrorists because we don't want to make them mad. Tragically, National Right To Life's general counsel tried to compromise the Republican Party platform by modifying it to support embryonic stem cell research, which is lethal experiments, on the tiniest children, little boys and girls just like the snowflake children, the adopted frozen embryos who themselves are the proof that these are precious little children. Thank God that National Right To Life's attorney failed.

That failed strategy, the old pro-life approach, of electing politicians who are pro-life, who will appoint judges who are pro-life, has failed because we didn’t have “quality control” and all our candidates, without opposition from NRTL, openly admitted that they would ignore abortion when nominating judges. And the proof is in the pudding, along with the poison, of scores of pro-abortion judges that we have unwittingly put on the bench. We need to teach our politicians that there is an actual right to life (i.e. Personhood)! We need to insist that they appoint judges who acknowledge the God-given right to life of each child. Where we stand right now, we don’t need “one more pro-life justice” – we need five! That old strategy has proved an utter failure.

What’s more, we’ve been teaching the American public the wrong lessons. When we say “the unborn child has a right to life!” and then turn around and promote laws to protect some babies, but not others, the American people rightly detect hypocrisy!

Footnote 54 of Roe v. Wade ruling (which tragically was written by a Republican Justice, Harry Blackman, and passed by a Republican majority) points out this very thing – that you cannot say the unborn child is a Person, and then say there are some circumstances when that innocent Person can be killed. That hypocrisy was cited as the reason why abortion was decriminalized– because existing "pro-life" laws actually didn’t recognize unborn children as Persons. But the Roe v. Wade decision itself also said that if a law were passed to recognize the Personhood of the unborn child, then the Supreme Court would have to protect unborn children under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment!

Personhood is a legal strategy, aimed at that "loophole" in Roe. But more than that, Personhood is a social movement, trying for the first time in 30 years to convince the American public that there exists an actual, God-given right to life for innocent children – no exceptions! Imagine the outcry if a massive body of citizens cried out to stop the slaughter, and the courts or politicians stood by and did nothing! They cannot. Personhood will force the politicians and the courts to change – if we insist our politicians support Personhood, then eventually the courts will follow.

Some defeated folks claim we have no power to change things, and we must accept the world as it is. They have no hope for victory, and they want you to abandon hope also. Their reasoning is all based on political calculation and conventional wisdom. But they forget that Christian social movements changed the world by relying on God’s wisdom! Remember the anti-slavery movement! Remember the civil rights movement! These were not secular in nature – these movements were Christian at their core! They dared to believe God would help them, and they changed the world!

That’s the promise of Personhood. In 2008 Colorado launched this strategy, and in 2010 there are 40 states following the example of our first “failure!” We’ve just now set out! We must press forward and not look back!

Press forward with us! Personhood for the unborn child – NOW!!!


Amendment 62 Co-Sponsors
Leslie Hanks
Colorado Right To Life

Gualberto Garcia Jones
303-456-2800
Personhood Colorado

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