LifeNet

How the Washington Post covered the March for Life

The NY Times had a total blackout of the March. For them it didn't exist.

For the past several years the Washington Post has provided good and fairly objective coverage. 

This year, spotty coverage, and you can decide on the slant.

Here's the article -

Thousands of youths join antiabortion March for Life

Here are two letters to the editor, responding to the coverage -

Bring balance to Roe v. Wade coverage

And this is what the Washington Post Ombudsman wrote -

An incomplete picture of the March for Life

... you can find images of the large crowd taken by amateurs on Flickr or Facebook, and I imagine the AP took some, too. Probably Post photographers did as well.

But these shots didn’t find their way into the main Web photo gallery on the march. And I think this is where The Post fell down in its coverage of the march this year. And that’s mostly what antiabortion readers wrote to me about.

The online photo gallery contains 10 photos: seven tight shots of antiabortion demonstrators, two of protesters from the small abortion-rights counter-demonstration (HVCL NOTE; about 20 pro-aborts) on the steps of the Supreme Court and one that showed both sides confronting each other there. In fact, eight of the 10 shots were taken at the high court.

Emotional shots make better photos, yes, but I would have chosen more from the broad expanse of the rally, and at least one photo showing a lot of cheerful, festive people, which is what I see at most demonstrations that I have covered over the years, regardless of the issue at hand.

Vernon Loeb, Post Local editor, said, “In retrospect I wish we had given readers a better sense of the overall magnitude of the march. . .it was far larger than 17,000.”

Said Post Director of Photography Michel du Cille, “We can never please this crowd. We try for fairness to show both sides.”

Small potatoes, but at least the Ombudsman admitted this year's coverage was lacking. And the NY Times - what March?

 

 

Rockland County, NY. March for Life, 2012

Pictures interspersed with thoughts from Cardinal Burke and Blessed Pope John Paul II.

See the brief dialogue below the video - thoughts on one of the pictures.

 

Rockland - The one picture that really got me was the teacher with the home made sign that stated she regrets selling her eggs.

HVCL - YES, I felt the same way - was going to ask if she was with you.

Rockland - No, I was getting rained upon and walking trying to get some pictures before I couldn't use the camera anymore and there she stood in front of me. I asked if I could take her picture and she said she was a teacher and to please tell everyone I could, not to do what she did.

March for Life 2012 - the "All Men are Created Equal" video

This is the first time we had seen this - it was on a large screen at the point where Constitution Ave. veers slightly to the left, before you start going uphill. Everyone in the March would see it. Oh, so true!

The website is www.createdequal.net and the full video was 3:39 in length. Only part is shown below.

 

Report on Rally for Life in White Plains, Saturday, January 21

This annual Rally at the White Plains abortion mill off Mamroneck Ave. and the Post Rd., coincides with the Roe vs. Wade abomination, and the March for Life in Washington. It is well-attended, and sometimes gets press coverage. Here is last year's Rally.

This year the morning started in near blizzard conditions, keeping the number of people who attended to an even dozen.

Among them, Fr. Fidelis Moscinski, CFR, who has returned to New York, after nine years in Europe (England, five years, Rome for studies, two years, and Derry, Northern Ireland for two years). It is a great blessing to have Fr. Fidelis - an extraordinary prolifer, back with us.

Here Fr., in the center, is speaking with Judy Anderson, with Brother Mark Mary at his side, and Brigid Faranda in the background.

Blizzard conditions!

The weather improved as the Rally progressed

Fr. Fidelis led a final prayer (the audio improves after a few seconds)

 

Yonkers-based Advocates of Life launch excellent and comprehensive website

Brilliant - loaded with links, information, and very easy to navigate.

A great resource. We have added it to our list of links to NATIONAL PROLIFE GROUPS on the right side of LifeNet. Hit the link to have a look!

Advocates of Life

Advocates Of Life

OUR MISSION

The Advocates of Life is a coalition of individuals, organizations and houses of worship which endeavor to build a culture of life focused on protecting the unborn, the handicapped and the elderly.

The Advocates serve Westchester County, the Bronx and Upper Manhattan.

Archbishop Dolan WSJ op ed on the Obamacare mandate: "one shudders to think what lies ahead"

Sub-titled: "How about some respect for Catholics and others who object to treating pregnancy as a disease?"

The last two paragraphs excerpted below - hit the link for all 11 paragraphs -

The Catholic Church defends religious liberty, including freedom of conscience, for everyone. The Amish do not carry health insurance. The government respects their principles. Christian Scientists want to heal by prayer alone, and the new health-care reform law respects that. Quakers and others object to killing even in wartime, and the government respects that principle for conscientious objectors. By its decision, the Obama administration has failed to show the same respect for the consciences of Catholics and others who object to treating pregnancy as a disease.

This latest erosion of our first freedom should make all Americans pause. When the government tampers with a freedom so fundamental to the life of our nation, one shudders to think what lies ahead.

The Administration launches a direct attack on Catholic - and other - Churches, and on the primacy of conscience

UPDATE: Even the normally Democratic Party lap dog National Catholic Reporter (NCR) is outraged. NCR - UPDATED: White House refuses to expand conscience exemption

Mandates that contraceptives and abortifacients must be provided in employer health plans with no opt out for conscientious objection.

This is from the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops (USCCB)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                             JANUARY 20, 2012

 

U.S. BISHOPS VOW TO FIGHT HHS EDICT

 

Unconscionable to force citizens to buy contraceptives against their will

No change in limited exemption, only delay in enforcement

Matter of freedom of conscience, freedom of religion

 

WASHINGTON—The Catholic bishops of the United States called “literally unconscionable” a decision by the Obama Administration to continue to demand that sterilization, abortifacients  and contraception be included in virtually all health plans. Today's announcement means that this mandate and its very narrow exemption will not change at all; instead there will only be a delay in enforcement against some employers.

            “In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” said Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan, archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

            The cardinal-designate continued, “To force American citizens to choose between violating their consciences and forgoing their healthcare is literally unconscionable.  It is as much an attack on access to health care as on religious freedom. Historically this represents a challenge and a compromise of our religious liberty."

            The HHS rule requires that sterilization and contraception – including controversial abortifacients – be included among “preventive services” coverage in almost every healthcare plan available to Americans. “The government should not force Americans to act as if pregnancy is a disease to be prevented at all costs,” added Cardinal-designate Dolan.

            At issue, the U.S. bishops and other religious leaders insist, is the survival of a cornerstone constitutionally protected freedom that ensures respect for the conscience of Catholics and all other Americans.

            “This is nothing less than a direct attack on religion and First Amendment rights,” said Franciscan Sister Jane Marie Klein, chairperson of the board at Franciscan Alliance, Inc., a system of 13 Catholic hospitals. “I have hundreds of employees who will be upset and confused by this edict. I cannot understand it at all.”

            Daughter of Charity Sister Carol Keehan, president and chief executive officer of the Catholic Health Association of the United States, voiced disappointment with the decision. Catholic hospitals serve one out of six people who seek hospital care annually.

            “This was a missed opportunity to be clear on appropriate conscience protection,” Sister Keehan said.

            Cardinal-designate Dolan urged that the HHS mandate be overturned.

            “The Obama administration has now drawn an unprecedented line in the sand,” he said. “The Catholic bishops are committed to working with our fellow Americans to reform the law and change this unjust regulation. We will continue to study all the implications of this troubling decision.”

---

First Amendment, heath care, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, Freedom of Conscience, U.S. bishops, United States Conference of Catholic bishops, President Obama, Sister Carol Keehan

# # # # #

Massachusetts Citizens for Life: "Mitt Romney has had a consistent commitment to the culture of life."

From Massachusett's largest pro-life organization:

Massachusetts Citizens for Life President Anne Fox made the following statement on what she said are false attacks on Romney’s record:

 “Since being elected governor, Mitt Romney has had a consistent commitment to the culture of life. As governor, he worked closely with Massachusetts Citizens for Life. Misguided attempts to blame Mitt Romney for the fact that state-funded health care in Massachusetts funds abortion ignore the facts. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 1981 that the Massachusetts Constitution requires the funding of abortion. This decision forces Massachusetts to fund abortion to the same extent it funds other medical procedures. A 1986 attempt to overturn the court ruling with a Constitutional Amendment failed. Obviously, in providing health coverage, the governor and the legislature were bound by this decision.”

Hit thel ink above for the entire article.

 

LaSondra Spears - an open letter to Planned Parenthood

This certainly sums it up. Thanks to Mary LaFrancis for sending us this.

 

This Saturday: Annual "Rally for Life" in White Plains, 12 noon to 1PM

Please join us for this annual event, coinciding with the 39th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, unleashing abortion on demand and resulting in over 50 million lives lost since 1973.

All Women's "Health & Medical Services

222 Mamaroneck Ave.

White Plains, NY

This is the corner of Maple and Mamaroneck

Join us for an hour of prayer and public witness on this 39th anniversary to remember the lives lost and women injured since 1973's Roe v Wade decision.

Co-Sponsored by:

Right to Life coalition of Lower Westchester

Westchester & Putnam Right to Life Committee & People for Life

Hudson Valley Coalition for Life

No. Westchester & Putnam Center for Life

Advocates of Life

Please call Liz @ 914478-1189 for more information

In Florida: Pro-life counselors win another clinic free speech case

In Florida - another effort to stop counseling outside of abortion mills. This was pushed by the Obama Administration under FACE!

Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice had sought to levy thousands of dollars in fines against pro-life activist Mary Susan Pine as well as seeking a permanent injunction banning her from continuing her faithful 20-year ministry outside an abortion clinic in West Palm Beach, Florida.

The Judge was not impressed.

Obama Admin Loses Fight to Persecute Pro-Life Activist

Judge Ryskamp concluded that “the evidence could not lead a rational jury to find that Ms. Pine’s conduct [i.e., having peaceful conversations with clinic visitors on a public sidewalk] constituted a physical obstruction within the meaning of FACE.” The Judge chastised Holder for seeking to apply federal law in a clearly unconstitutional manner, saying, “Stretching the terms of FACE to apply to this case…so that a desire to provide people with information about alternatives to abortion constitutes an unlawful motive, would unjustifiably impinge on Ms. Pine’s First Amendment rights.”

The government’s decision to prosecute Pine despite having no evidence of wrongdoing prompted Judge Ryskamp to suspect a conspiracy at the highest level of the Obama Administration.

“The Court is at a loss as to why the government chose to prosecute this case in the first place. The Court can only wonder if this action was the result of a concerted effort between the Government and the [abortion clinic], which began well before the date of the incident at issue, to quell Ms. Pine’s activities,” the judge said.

This is certainly relevant to the recent efforts of several legislators in the Westchester County Legislature to stamp out similar free speech in Westchester.

Martin Luther King's legacy and how it relates to the pro-life movement.

Appropriate for today.

This is from the website Public Discourse.

The "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" mentioned is a great defense and explanation for civil disobedience. Certainly relevant to the right to life.

Hit the link for the entire essy.  

A few months after Governor Wallace’s inauguration, a group of civil rights protesters, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., descended on Birmingham in a campaign of deliberate disobedience to the segregation ordinances of one of Alabama’s most racially divided cities. Images of peaceful protesters being sprayed with water hoses and attacked by police dogs soon galvanized the nation, and in April a group of white Alabama clergymen published “A Call for Unity” in a local newspaper, urging civil rights protesters to adopt a court-focused litigation strategy rather than taking to the streets in defiance of local law.

After King was arrested for parading without a permit, he took a moment, from the confines of his jail cell, to pen a response to his fellow clergymen and offer a justification for his resistance to segregation ordinances. Like any civically minded lawbreaker, King faced vexing moral and philosophical questions from the outset: how did he know whether a law was just or unjust, and when, if ever, was it morally permissible to disobey? In his now-celebrated “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” King’s answer was that “a just law is a manmade code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.” “To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas,” King explained, “an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.”

Those who praise the modern civil rights movement, but who also want to keep morality and theology absent from public discourse, seldom mention King’s reliance on natural law in his justly famous letter. Scholars such as the late John Rawls were at great pains to show how their thoroughly secularized theories of justice and public reason could make room for King, but in fact they could do so only at the cost of minimizing the seriousness of King’s argument. The son and grandson of Baptist preachers, King had studied the Western philosophical tradition while completing his doctorate in philosophical theology at Boston University, and his defense of civil disobedience drew from the work of Thomas Aquinas in particular.

Human ordinances, Aquinas argued in his Treatise on Law, can be contrary to the human good—and therefore unjust—by way of their end, author, or form. The first mode of legal injustice, according to this schema, is a law designed to bring about private gain at the expense of other members of the community. Otherwise benign laws can also be terribly unjust if made by someone without legitimate lawmaking authority or enforced in an illegitimate or partial manner. King, of course, had in mind Jim Crow laws when he spoke of legal injustice, but the concrete examples he marshaled in his letter followed the general contours of Aquinas’s natural law theory.

******

Following Augustine and Aquinas, King famously claimed that unjust laws were no laws at all. Rather, they were acts of violence and usurpations of law that damaged the human good and failed to instill a moral responsibility to obey.

******

King is of course the kind of historical figure that practically everyone wants to claim as his own. Reality, however, is often complex, and the truth about King is that his primary motivations, his most fundamental commitments—the very core of his thought—were rooted in a worldview repugnant to many of those who now claim his legacy. Despite his personal failings, many of which have come to light in the years since his assassination, we should remember King for who he was: an imperfect man and a Christian pastor who, in the best tradition of American politics, fought for justice by appealing to a law higher than the state while respectfully and thoughtfully engaging his interlocutors on the principles of a just political order.

Native American woman Kateri Tekakwitha to be canonized

Kateri Tekakwitha, called the Lily of the Mohawks. She died in 1680 at the age of 24. There are two shrines to her in upstate NY.

 

Pro-life activist attorney suing law school for discrimination

Of course this is no surprise. And published in the NY Times!

“Frankly, one thing that worries me is that some people may be opposed to Teresa serving in any role, in part at least because they so despise her politics (and especially her activism about it),” Associate Dean Jonathan C. Carlson wrote in 2007 to the law school’s dean, Carolyn Jones.

A study published in The Georgetown Law Journal in 2005 analyzed 11 years of federal campaign contributions by professors at the top 21 law schools as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. Almost a third of these law professors contributed to campaigns. Of those who gave $200 or more, the study found, 81 percent gave wholly or mostly to Democrats, while 15 percent gave wholly or mostly to Republicans.

The percentages of professors contributing to Democrats were even more lopsided at some of the most prestigious schools: 91 percent at Harvard, 92 at Yale, 94 at Stanford. At the University of Iowa, it was 78 percent. Political affiliations and contributions are, of course, an imperfect proxy for ideology, and political beliefs may in any event have no effect on scholarship and classroom teaching.

No surprise - tyical of the academic community.

Today is 600th birthday of Joan of Arc

Planned Parenthood has had a large drop-off in private donations

Their abortion business is mostly unchanged and they get lots of taxpayer money but-

Planned Parenthood Sees 28% Decline in Private Donations

Last week the 2009-2010 Planned Parenthood annual report was released and it shows that the leading abortion group had suffered a significant decline in private contributions. In 2009 they reported 308 million in private donations from individuals, corporations, and foundations yet in 2010 they saw that number fall to 223.8 million.

Ireland's Bishop Thomas Finnegan, outspoken defender of life, RIP

From the Irish prolife website, Family & Life -

One of the most outspoken opponents of abortion among Ireland’s bishops has died. Bishop Thomas Finnegan, the retired bishop of Killala, died on Christmas Day at the age of 86. He led the diocese of Killala from 1987 to 2002. During that time he established the Newman Institute in Ballina, County Mayo, offering courses in the theology of marriage and family. His dream of establishing a fully-fledged Catholic university was not, however, realised.

Here is a wonderfully succinct defense of life:

In May 2001 he issued a pastoral letter calling for a referendum to restore constitutional protection to the unborn. In it, he described abortion as “the fundamental human rights issue of today.” “It is not just a private issue,” he explained. “It is an issue which touches on whether we see the unborn child as deserving of inclusion and protection in the human community; but equally importantly, it is about what kind of care we want to provide for mothers in difficult circumstances. It challenges all of us to build the kind of society where no woman feels that her only or best choice is to end the life of her child. We need to ensure that those who feel that abortion is the only way out of a difficult situation are offered a truly life-giving choice.”

 

New Year's Day: the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

This drawing by Helen Hull Hitchcock, of Women for Faith and Family