Posted on 05/23/2007 12:35:44 PM PDT by Lesforlife
Leaders of anti-abortion groups criticize Dobson
By Associated Press May 23, 2007
COLORADO SPRINGS — Leaders of four anti-abortion groups criticized Focus on the Family founder James Dobson today, saying he misrepresented a Supreme Court decision that upheld a ban on a controversial abortion technique.
In a full-page ad in The Gazette newspaper in Colorado Springs, the group said Dobson wrongly characterized the court’s April ruling as a victory for abortion foes. The ad said the ruling will actually encourage medical professionals to find "less shocking" methods than late-term abortions, which abortion opponents often call "partial-birth abortion."
(Excerpt) Read more at rockymountainnews.com ...
A spokesman for Dobson did not immediately return a call.
Dobson’s conservative Christian ministry is based in Colorado Springs.
The letter is signed by Brian Rohrbough, president of Colorado Right to Life; the Rev. Tom Euteneuer, president of Human Life International; Flip Benham, director of Operation Rescue/Operation Save America; Judie Brown, president of American Life League; and Bob Enyart, pastor of Denver Bible Church.
Rohrbough is the father of Daniel Rohrbough, a Columbine High School student who was killed in the April 20, 1999, massacre.
Copyright 2007, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.
These guys sound like idiots to me.
The Court allowing any restriction on such an appalling abortion procedure to stand is a step in the right direction.
Would they have preferred it if the Court had discovered a “right” to PBA?
If you read the analysis on the Colorado Right to Life web
site, the court states if the baby is inadvertently pulled out
past the navel, the baby can be killed by pulling off the arms
or legs:
“The Justices build upon the late-term abortion procedure called dilation and evacuation, which this ruling repeatedly up-holds as remaining legal, stating (p. 21) that “D&E will often involve a physician pulling a ‘substantial portion’ of a still living fetus, say, an arm or leg, into the [birth canal] prior to the death of the fetus.” Then for the purpose of this current opinion, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, regarding a still living unborn child, ruled that (p. 22) “the removal of a small portion [‘say, an arm or leg’] of the fetus is not prohibited” and that’s after the baby is pulled outside the mother as far as to his bellybutton (p. 22).”
Focus on the Family wrongly, told callers that the Supreme Court ruling
put an end to 3rd trimester abortions, which is sadly, more than wishful
thinking!
One of those idiots,
Leslie
If so, they were wrong.
Where did Dr. Dobson do more than to say that the SCOTUS decision was correct and hope-providing? He never said the war was won, just one battle.
IMO, this pricey advertisement is a poor prioritization of scarce resources. Attack Dr. Dobson for MAYBE overstating how good the SCOTUS decision was ... or save the money to attack efforts to expand abortion? Seems like an easy call to me. Save the rebukes of Dr. Dobson for private (or, at least, free) correspondence.
Focus on the Family is a $150 million dollar a year
ministry. For the life of me, I can’t understand
why their legal department wasn’t nauseated by the
ruling, apart from not having read it.
The Gazette incorrectly stated “paid for by Colorado
Right to Life and should be running the correction
later this week.
The ad was paid for by private donations to raise awareness of
the wicked Supreme Court ruling which the pro-life industry
applauds.
bookmark
BTW, Dr. Dobson had the advance copy of the ad
with a request to meet so that we wouldn’t need to
run it. Sadly, he declined.
I agree with you and have long believed that the whole issue of "partial birth abortion" was nothing more than a fig leaf for politicians to appear somewhat moderate on abortion. As an example, even an abortion extremist like Rudy Giuliani flip flopped on the ban because he knows it accomplishes little or nothing.
However, while the ban has little practical effect it was a nice change to see the Court not expand the nonexistent right to abortion and impose a restriction no matter how modest.
I don't know exactly what Dobson said, but the decision was a public relations victory if nothing else.
You and I must have read different SCOTUS rulings. I read the one in which the Court held that Roe and its progeny did NOT bar the federal ban on PBA. You must have read some other decision, for you describe it as “wicked.”
Good day.
Amen!
I agree that PBA is a rare, if it happens at all, procedure. The reason I liked the ruling is not that it stops abortions, but it shows that this court could be receptive to rulings in favor of pro-lifers. I have always been bothered by the fact that PBA suddenly appeared on the political scene by the National Right to Life, just a few years ago, and it has given cover to pro-abortion politicians who want to portray themselves as “pro-life” because they are against this one procedure. Rudy Giuliani comes to mind. This ruling, sadly, actually doesn’t stop abortions, but by the panic on the left, it must mean something legally.
It's a point you make on a blog, not in a newspaper ad.
It stops infanticide.
You have to wonder if some of this crowd isn’t worried about having to look for real jobs.
The Supreme Court decision was a major victory for those who favor right to life (as opposed to those who have made a career of right to life.)
Vanity of vanity. Envy, Satan’s favorite sin. You folks have really advanced the cause (sic).
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/05-380.ZO.html
Here’s the opinion for all who want to read it for themselves.
Agreed, although I have been surprised for years that more pro-aborts didn't go for this "cover" by agreeing to ban a patently grisly and barbaric procedure that is almost never performed, if at all. The fact so many steadfastly defended this indefensible procedure has spoken volumes to the average citizen, I think.
I do think it's really silly for pro-lifers to be fighting among themselves over what this ruling means. It means we finally won one, and the way the other side is acting they know it. Let's act like we know it too, and start planning the next one to win.
No, sadly. It doesn’t.
Yeah, right. And there ain’t no law to prevent you from committing infanticide or for that matter any -cide: just go ahead and do it, nothing to stop you. Bravo!
I noticed that too. The ruling's got Ginsburg in a tizzy.
Bizarre.
Would you have preferred a ruling that *overturned* the law against PBA??
This ‘wicked’ ruling was the most pro-life ruling on the supreme court in about 15 years. So the USSC went from horrible to merely bad, it is a sort of progress.
Gardeners of evil
Alan Keyes
April 28, 2007
Shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Gonzales v. Carhart (the case that involved a challenge to the federal law restricting so-called partial birth abortion), I received an email reporting the decision with a copy of the ruling attached. Unlike many whom the media identify as leaders in the pro-life movement, I felt no inclination to leap for joy at the news that the Court’s opinion upheld the constitutionality of the law.
In the first place, I have never been convinced that the legislative action in question had much significance for the pro-life cause. I believe it was mostly intended to provide cover for pro-abortion Republican politicians, who could offer their vote for the PBA restriction as a fig leaf to cover the shame of their supposedly pro-life supporters who put partisan politics above their obligations of conscience. In the second place, it seemed unwise to react to the decision before carefully considering the argument that produced it.
Abominable affirmation
Having done so, I cannot join in, or even understand, the approbation which others have expressed for this decision. It is in fact an abominable affirmation of the Court’s unconstitutional decisions in Roe and Casey. With grotesquely meticulous care, the man whose pivotal vote preserved so-called abortion rights in the Casey decision (Justice Kennedy) carves out an exception intended to prove and strengthen the rules set forth in Roe and Casey.
As my good friend Judie Brown put it recently (at a Colorado Right To Life dinner in Denver), Kennedy played the part of a skillful gardener, cutting back the evil planted by Roe/Casey in order to strengthen and extend its roots, hoping no doubt to make it harder to overturn in any subsequent ruling. While allowing for a state interest in restricting one brutal way of murdering the nascent child, he makes it clear that this restriction is tolerable under Roe/Casey only because abortionists still have access to other equally brutal modes of killing.
At one point, with what seems like dogged satisfaction, Kennedy describes such an alternative in almost clinical detail, no doubt because he knows that in doing so he implicates all the justices who join his reasoning in explicit support for the right to use this alternative to kill the child, even though it is just as horrendous as the one restricted by the “partial birth” legislation.
Arcane logic
This reminds me of the careful logic that I’m told is often characteristic of serial killers, psychopaths who follow arcane rituals in order to distinguish their killings from anything so profane as ordinary murder. In like fashion, Kennedy makes clear that the abortionists who rip the child limb from limb while it is still within the womb are doctors helping a woman to exercise her “right to choose” — while those who mangle the child when it has emerged past a certain point are violators, subject to the restrictive force of law. Though the child is in principle the same person in both situations, the Court’s glassy-eyed observance of its own fanatically arcane and ritualistic logic is supposed to establish some invisible line of demarcation separating one act of murder from the next.
This decision is not a harbinger of hope for an end to the Court-imposed reign of terror in the womb. It is evidence of a legal elite gone mad, hopelessly lost in the maze of its own psychopathic logic. We might think them pathetic if we did not have to live in a nation whose conscience is compromised and confused by the holocaust their insanity has unleashed.
Compromised abettors
After reading the text of the decision, my heart sank at the thought that all four of the supposedly pro-life appointees to the Court had voted to accept its lethal implication. Then I saw the saving grace of Justice Thomas’s brief but clarion concurring opinion, in which he stated simply that although he voted for the decision’s result, he continues to reject the Roe/Casey regime it relies upon, in the conviction that “the Court’s abortion jurisprudence, including Casey and Roe v. Wade, . . . has no basis in the Constitution.” Justice Scalia joined in this morally and constitutionally essential declaration.
But these two stood alone. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, the two G. W. Bush appointees who supposedly offer hope for an eventual return to constitutional sanity, were silent. They let the Gardener of Evil speak for them, with the clear and tragic implication that they concur in his mad, immoral effort to make Gonzales v. Carhart the exception that firmly proves and establishes the murderous rule of so-called abortion rights.
Since all things are possible with God, we must hope that events will disprove this implication. As things now stand, however, Gonzales v. Carhart offers clear evidence that G. W. Bush’s appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court are the compromised abettors of unconstitutional abuse that some of us feared they might be, rather than the constituents of constitutional restoration for whom we still pray.
It points to the sobering probability that the Supreme Court now has a 7-2 majority in favor of persisting in its unconstitutional assertion of the right to murder our posterity. It confirms the truth that I have long asserted, that we cannot expect the restoration of the Constitution to come from the usurping branch of the federal government whose ambitious members have engineered its overthrow.
Ultimately up to us
If we want constitutional rule, we must act so that the other branches can unite to restore it. We must elect to Congress and the Presidency only those candidates who pledge to respect the constitutional imperative “to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,” and to abide by the oath of office that requires them to use their constitutional powers to that end.
We need representatives in Congress and the White House who will say “yes” to the Constitution and “no” to the judges and justices who discard it. And we need fervently to pray for God’s help in finding the courage, discernment, and faith to be the kind of citizens who will vote for and support them, no matter what.
We will finally get the leaders America needs only when we resolve to become the citizens of conscience and principle that we ought to be. For God and our posterity, now is the time.
It’s sad that folks can’t see past the political fig leaves and understand that too many of their leaders are actually naked as a jay bird.
thoughts?
cogent
The Supreme Court decision was a major victory for those who favor right to life (as opposed to those who have made a career of right to life.)
Unfortunately, you've got it backwards. If you look closely, you'll find that it is the people you describe who are the ones touting this ruling as the panacea it isn't, and remaining silent on the dangerous aspects it represents.
The ones who are speaking out about this are heroes...those who stand with Scalia and Thomas. The silent ones, or the ones who are acting like this will stop a single abortion, are allied with Kennedy and Roberts and the Alito.
Keyes:
“After reading the text of the decision, my heart sank at the thought that all four of the supposedly pro-life appointees to the Court had voted to accept its lethal implication. Then I saw the saving grace of Justice Thomas’s brief but clarion concurring opinion, in which he stated simply that although he voted for the decision’s result, he continues to reject the Roe/Casey regime it relies upon, in the conviction that “the Court’s abortion jurisprudence, including Casey and Roe v. Wade, . . . has no basis in the Constitution.” Justice Scalia joined in this morally and constitutionally essential declaration.
But these two stood alone. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, the two G. W. Bush appointees who supposedly offer hope for an eventual return to constitutional sanity, were silent. They let the Gardener of Evil speak for them, with the clear and tragic implication that they concur in his mad, immoral effort to make Gonzales v. Carhart the exception that firmly proves and establishes the murderous rule of so-called abortion rights.”
Alan Keyes:
“I cannot join in, or even understand, the approbation which others have expressed for this decision. It is in fact an abominable affirmation of the Court’s unconstitutional decisions in Roe and Casey. With grotesquely meticulous care, the man whose pivotal vote preserved so-called abortion rights in the Casey decision (Justice Kennedy) carves out an exception intended to prove and strengthen the rules set forth in Roe and Casey.
As my good friend Judie Brown put it recently (at a Colorado Right To Life dinner in Denver), Kennedy played the part of a skillful gardener, cutting back the evil planted by Roe/Casey in order to strengthen and extend its roots, hoping no doubt to make it harder to overturn in any subsequent ruling. While allowing for a state interest in restricting one brutal way of murdering the nascent child, he makes it clear that this restriction is tolerable under Roe/Casey only because abortionists still have access to other equally brutal modes of killing.
At one point, with what seems like dogged satisfaction, Kennedy describes such an alternative in almost clinical detail, no doubt because he knows that in doing so he implicates all the justices who join his reasoning in explicit support for the right to use this alternative to kill the child, even though it is just as horrendous as the one restricted by the “partial birth” legislation.”
Keyes:
“This reminds me of the careful logic that I’m told is often characteristic of serial killers, psychopaths who follow arcane rituals in order to distinguish their killings from anything so profane as ordinary murder. In like fashion, Kennedy makes clear that the abortionists who rip the child limb from limb while it is still within the womb are doctors helping a woman to exercise her “right to choose” — while those who mangle the child when it has emerged past a certain point are violators, subject to the restrictive force of law. Though the child is in principle the same person in both situations, the Court’s glassy-eyed observance of its own fanatically arcane and ritualistic logic is supposed to establish some invisible line of demarcation separating one act of murder from the next.
This decision is not a harbinger of hope for an end to the Court-imposed reign of terror in the womb. It is evidence of a legal elite gone mad, hopelessly lost in the maze of its own psychopathic logic. We might think them pathetic if we did not have to live in a nation whose conscience is compromised and confused by the holocaust their insanity has unleashed.”
well EV, it has to be better than if they upheld it...
until we either get a SOCTUS ruling from whole cloth banning abortions with 2-3 exceptions or it goes back to the states via flipping Roe and NY and Kali can be murder mills then we just have to keep fighting the good fight
this is the problem with our culture and form of government..it favors change but once instituted it’s hard to reverse....short of a constitutional amendment, things never get wholly put right ...
Is it any wonder that the Lord removes His protective Hand from our nation and allows others who have no regard for innocent human life to attack us?
"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever." - Thomas Jefferson
Dr. Keyes speech at our 40th commemoration of America’s first abortion law
was spellbinding!!!
To view 2 video clips of our nation’s premier orator, go to
www.coloradorighttolife.org
The conservatives are all-or-nothing, and they aren't satisfied to win a series of small victories. (In this they remind me of a 2 year old. They want it all, and they want it now.)
It appears from the gang of 4 in Colorado that they would have preferred for the SCOTUS to have ruled against the federal ban because the ruling doesn't give them everything they want, and give it to them right now.
Wrong. They’ve simply read what Kennedy wrote in the decision, while you obviously haven’t, at least with any degree of comprehension.
The money they spent on this ad would have accomplished a great deal more if it were donated to a crisis pregnancy center to purchase an ultrasound machine. I guess these people are more interested in furthering their political visibility than they are in protecting babies.
At least you admit it. Admitting you have a problem is the first step in solving it.
Then they should have published an ad explaining what is wicked about the court ruling and leave Dobson out of it.
This comes off as a hit piece designed only to further the groups' own political visibility. Personally, I think it is about their jealousy of Dobson's success, not any real concern about babies.
That may be a clue why Ginsburg is alarmed. If there is no basis in the Constitution, then court rulings are no longer jurisprudence but dependent on majority votes. And in that world, reasons don't count. Every single vote counts. This is why politicians on both sides--from McCain to Reid-- capitalized on the ruling. They are sensitive to the fickle tide of votes.
Do you work for Focus?
Sure it can.
Bizarre indeed. With allies like these, who needs NARAL?
Let me illustrate why it will not stop a serial killer from doing the deed of offing the alive unborn. When a partial bireth abortion is scheduled, a cervical laminary is placed, to dilate the cervix for the planned procedure. One, two, or three days later, the kill is made, if the child does not spontaneously exit the uterus before the serial killer gets his or her hands on the alive little one while holding scissors and cannula. The way the law is written, this same serial killer can legally add one step to the placing of the laminary, injecting potassium chloride to the heart of the littel one, then deliver a dead child two or three days later. Or infuse a massive amount of saline into the amniotic fluid, to scald the little one to death while the cervix is being dilated. The serial killer isn't prohibited from killing the little one, just prohibited from killing the helpless child in that particular method explained in the bill.
The PBA Ban was only a victory for politicians who play for abortion votes (on both sides of the issue). I seriously doubt it has saved even one life..
Another feature of this ruling is that it recognizes in part a state's privilege
Nope.
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