#324 Promoting Nonviolence, Referendums - August 19, 2016
Life/Peace/Justice – Regional Conference in Texas Texas Students for life is sponsoring a consistent-life themed conference October 21-22, 2016. Early-bird tickets on sale now until October 1. More details to come.
Promoting Nonviolence
First: as endorsers of Campaign Nonviolence, we encourage readers to see if they have a local action they can join during the Week of Actions, September 18-25. There are over 300 actions planned world-wide. If you can find ways to spread the consistent-life word, even better! See our Resources page. Second: we have an opportunity for our Catholic readers – and our non-Catholic readers who would like to influence one of the world’s largest institutions, and certainly the largest amenable to advocacy of nonviolence. This is shown by The Nonviolence and Just Peace Conference statement: An Appeal to the Catholic Church to re-commit to the centrality of Gospel nonviolence, as well as the Vatican’s December 2015 statement to the United Nations, Nuclear Disarmament: Time for Abolition. Our member group Pax Christi is planning to run a full-page signature ad promoting both of these in the National Catholic Reporter in advance of the U.S. Bishops meeting in November. They need signatures and contributions to run the ad.
U.S. State of Colorado Will Vote on Assisted Suicide Word comes this week that an initiative petition has enough signatures to be placed on the ballot. It’s called “End of Life Options," a common euphemism, and provides for physician-assisted suicide. Safeguards are apparently too expensive for the budget. Though one of our six issues listed in our Mission Statement, we don’t discuss euthanasia much – because thankfully, it’s not that widespread (yet). We do have a blog entry on Figuring Out Euthanasia that explains its major problems, and of course its links to our other issues. The current state of U.S. state-level referendums on our issues is: Assisted Suicide (slippery slope to euthanasia) Colorado "End of Life Options" (formal opposition still organizing)
Death Penalty California – initiative petition for abolition, Proposition 62, The Justice That Works Act Nebraska – vote to retain the abolition passed by the legislature Oklahoma – legislature put on ballot measure to affirm death penalty, State Question 776
Latest CL Blog CL board member Lisa Stiller had Adventures as a Delegate to the Democratic Party Convention.
Quotation of the Week Mary Eberstadt “Pro-Animal, Pro-Life,” First Things, June 2009 For a spokesman who would persuade the world toward the practice of vegetarianism, [Peter] Singer has almost certainly lost many more potential practitioners of a “cruelty-free” diet than he has gained. Subsequent utilitarians have generally followed in his anti-humanist and pro-abortion steps. . . . The sheer decibel level of unreason surrounding the issue of abortion in academic writing about animal rights tells us something interesting. It suggests that . . . the dots between sympathy for animals and sympathy for unborn humans are in fact quite easy to connect — so easy, you might say, that a child could do it. . . . Vegetarians and pro-lifers are strangers to one another for reasons of accident rather than essence, and they also, furthermore, have a natural bond in moral intuitionism that should make them allies.
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