#596 - Peace & Life: New PP center canceled! / Good media - January 28, 2022
Local Community Organizes
and Planned Parenthood Cancels the Lease!
Planned Parenthood intended to build a new large abortion clinic in Brighton, New York, near Rochester. But Brighton Residents Against Violence to Everyone (BRAVE) organized neighborhood constituencies potentially harmed by its presence. Long-time CLN activist Carol Crossed had a hand in this campaign.
It worked! On January 10, 2022, the town received word the lease is cancelled. See details at BRAVE’s website.
On Relevant Radio (a national Catholic network), hear the story starting at 9:19 and ending at 24:26. Our former staff person Thad Crouch has a live phone-in question.
January 22 Anniversary:
Nuclear Weapons Are Illegal
Peace vigils were nation-wide. Julia Smucker (CLN board member) attended one at the Navy shipyard in Bath, Maine. She reports: “As shipyard workers were leaving at the shift change, we held signs calling for the conversion of the type of manufacturing done there and wished them a good and warm weekend. I heard one person say to a coworker, ‘Don't they have anything better to do?’ It occurred to me that this arguably was indeed one of the best things we could be doing: advocating for peace on the anniversary of the nuclear weapons ban that our government is ignoring.”
Positive Media Coverage
In their article on Women’s memories of when Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, The Washington Post includes memories from our own Carol Crossed.
Tish Harrison Warren continues her opinion pieces in The New York Times with The Systemic Realities Created by Legal Abortion. She shows how “choice” doesn’t work well in a patriarchal society that constrains women’s choices so severely. She relates her personal experience, and the experiences of women she’s counseled as an Anglican priest.
Examples of Muddled Thinking
A U.S. Senator recently said “70% of Americans believe in the rule of Roe v. Wade. They want to protect Roe v. Wade. Let’s put it to a vote.”
Setting aside how questionable her statistic is, surely a senator knows that the rules are that Supreme Court decisions are voted on by the judges, not the population.
Assuming she was only a little sloppy in wording and means that abortion policy should be voted on, then she should be aware that’s an anti-Roe statement. The fact that we’re blocked from a democratic vote has been a major complaint about Roe all along.
On Face the Nation on January 23, after giving some thankfully helpful remarks about using diplomacy, the U.S. Secretary of State spoke of threats of sanctions against Russia if they invade Ukraine – and then said “That makes very clear that if there's aggression, there'll be massive consequences. So the choice is his.”
Choice? Choosing to kill large numbers of people in an aggressive war is not valid. It’s an outrage. It should never be presented as otherwise.
The national March for Life was last Friday, and on Sunday, an anti-vax rally happened in Washington, D.C. One pro-Roe author contrasts them well in The Washington Post, saying the first was joyful with much rhetoric about love, and the other was spiteful and angry. Yet he connects the two in Prolifers, RIP. The Pro-Death Movement is Born.
What’s the connection? They’re both, ahem, “right-wing.”
Our Latest Blog Post
Sonja Morin offers some thoughts in Not Your Pawns: A CLE Examination of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict.
Quotation of the Week
Daniel Berrigan
Signing an online petition opposing Amnesty International’s move to endorse abortion as a “right” in 2007:
My moral conviction on abortion and the rights of the unborn are more serious than “a point of view.” It's as close to my conscience as war and the death penalty.
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