#600 - Peace & Life: Outrage at Invasion of Ukraine - February 25, 2022
Breaking news: President Biden has just announced that Ketanji Brown Jackson is his nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. We'll have more information on her next week, and invite readers to send us any information they have on her positions or experience with any of our issues to CLNeditors@googlegroups.com.
Outrage of Invasion
Our original mission statement back in 1987 listed the arms race among our issues. Once the Soviet Union fell and nuclear arms were on a downward trajectory, we decided this was outdated. Of course, we feared it could happen again, but decided that if it did, an arms race would still be covered under “war.” Now the danger looms.
Thankfully, Russians are already in the streets protesting by the thousands.
We still also need to note what led up to this. Massive violence starts as small violence. Just Peace concepts are considered in this article in America magazine. National Review has an article discussing how a military mindset that favored NATO expansion was actually counterproductive.
This crisis has been foreseen for weeks, and we’ve done one blog post already: Not Your Pawns: A CLE Examination of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict.
A Little Goes a Long Way
We mentioned last week the Consistent Life Action Foundation grant to Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty and how much just a small grant had accomplished. Here are a couple more of our grantees:
The Mission of Mercy clinic in Maryland is using their grant for steroid injections for pain relief; antibiotics for their dental clinic where 85-90% of the patients have such severe decay that they usually come in with infections, as well as for patients with diabetes or heart disease, for whom ordinary infections can be fatal; and other medications.
Abide Women’s Health Services in Dallas, TX, used their latest installment for bags to carry the goods supplied to their needy clients, enabling the distribution of more essential childcare supplies than otherwise possible.
For information about applying for a grant or making directed donations to our Foundation, please contact us at action@consistent-life.org or 1-866-444-7245.
Events
Our member group Rehumanize International (RI) has a campaign against the barbarity of harvesting unborn baby parts for research. The University of Pittsburgh had said it would investigate, but the report is unsatisfying; see RI’s blog post, Pitt Fetal Tissue Research: Report Leaves Unanswered Questions (see also the full blog on a variety of consistent-life topics).
RI is sponsoring a West Coast Week of Action, March 7-13. There will be “a slew of nonviolent direct actions in Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, and San Francisco to bring awareness to this gross injustice against unborn lives.”
Our Latest Blog Post
Rachel MacNair discusses Suicide Prevention and Other Kinds of Killing. Efforts to prevent suicide in individuals are crucial, but social injustices and the acceptance of killing as a problem-solver are at the root of many suicides. Therefore, suicide prevention includes curtailing social approval of killing.
Quotation of the Week
Richard Stith
MercatorNet, February 10, 2022
(original title: Should Protection or Action be Favored in Our Abortion Law?)
This ultimate goal of protecting the unborn from abortion explains why even those pro-lifers on the Right who otherwise support laissez-faire capitalism have made an abortion-related exception to their own actionist principles.
They have joined with the pro-life mainstream in asking our society and government to take affirmative protectionist steps, to carve out a miniature welfare state approach to pregnancy, childcare, and parental employment, so that we can remove a large part of the despair and desperation that pushes women into taking the lives of their own children before they get to be born.
