Sunday, December 24, 2006
Fighting for Their Lives
This is my first post in about two months. I haven't intentionally boycotted blogging during that time period; I've just been busy and tired lately, with work and taking care of Eric and all of those high priorities. Yes, plenty of people have successfully blogged and done all of those other things, but I believe those people don't prioritize sleep as highly as I do--and I don't even go to bed as early as I want (it's been consistently around 1am lately).
So, besides all that, what've I been up to? One of the main things I've been looking at is how I can be effective in the fight against abortion.
The Supreme Court is considering the constitutionality of Congress' ban on partial birth abortion. That's good news to me, because even though it means that the ban has been challenged, it also means that the Supreme Court, the originator of the ban on laws prohibiting abortion in general in their Roe vs. Wade decision, will be considering the ethicality and constitutionality of abortion practices. They will have to decide if there is a line to be drawn, why it is to be drawn, and where to draw it. Since the argument used to nullify all laws prohibiting abortion in general uses a far-reaching rationality based on an "implied right to privacy" in "the due process clause" (which in my understanding only applies to criminal investigations and legal proceedings for people charged with a crime) as its core foundation, and since there is a possibility that there are now possibly five out of nine conservative-leaning judges, I hope and pray that a decision will be made that affirms that the preamble of the Constitution makes it clear that all persons, born or unborn, have a Creator-endowed right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that the judicial system of this country must recognize and enforce, as it already does in double-homicide cases where a person murders an expectant mother along with her unborn child.
There are three groups out there that I've looked at so far. One is called Stand True, the next is called the Thomas More Society, and the other is called the American Life League--more specifically, its absorbed subsidiary, STOPP, which stands for Stop Planned Parenthood.
The Thomas More Society is a legal group whose purpose is to support the pro-life cause in the legal arena. I'm not sure that they're even involved in the fight for the constitutionality of the ban on partial birth abortion, because the only information I've seen so far is regarding a twenty year old case where a bunch of pro-life demonstrators that obstructed the entrance to an abortion clinic were charged with racketeering in an attempt to require that the courts order an injunction on all such activity everywhere in the country. This group is appealing a lost case, trying to argue semantics about whether the case should be overturned because "property" was not "obtained." The opposition is arguing that control of the abortion clinic was obtained by those standing outside and that such control is a form of abstract property. This seems to me to be a side issue, and I'm disappointed that this has been the main focus of an organization with such a purpose for so many years.
Stand True is a small organization whose philosophy is that the best way to fight abortion is to change the point of view (or world view) of individuals in this country one heart at a time by both getting them the message of the Gospel and taking a stand for pro-life views through events such as the March for Life and the annual Students' Day of Silent Solidarity, which is going to have its name changed to include more people next time around. I appreciate their recognition that a society with values such as our society has cannot be pointed in a pro-life direction with those values unchanged, and that Jesus is the only one who can make such a transforming change in so many people. I don't think that the organization has much influence right now (the number of babies they claim to know about whose lives were saved by this year's efforts is lower than twenty), but they are a pursuing a noble course of action and I hope to see their cause gain infulence and their organization grow in size and recognition.
STOPP is, as their name implies, focused on one aspect of the fight against abortion, and that is interfering with and ultimately obliterating the efforts and infulence of Planned Parenthood, an organization who has clinics in every state, many of which do surgical abortions, and others of which distribute propaganda and medications that can be used for chemical abortions. One of the ways in which the American Life League and STOPP fight against Planned Parenthood are by encouraging and supporting Pregnancy Crisis Centers, which offer alternative ways than abortion to dealing with unexpected pregnancies. They help these organizations make their operations efficient, effective, and compliant with all applicable laws, mainly by distributing operating manuals and a newsletter. Another way they wage this war is by making available, through an affiliate, a list of organizations that support Planned Parenthood that are considered boycott targets. As far as I can tell, this boycott is not widely known, though it is known to Planned Parenthood, which has used some tactics to stop the widespread distribution of this list, such as encouraging pro-Planned Parenthood people to overwhelm the affiliated organization with requests for this list to create financial hardships and drain the budget. It worked well enough that the organization is now only offering the list for a cost of around $32.00 for the first copy and a few dollars per copy after that. This is the only reason why I don't already have a copy of the list. I can understand how fradulent, resource-depleting requests for paper copies of the list would inhibit the organization's ability to do its work, but the catch is that there is no free, downloadable copy of this list anywhere. Even though Planned Parenthood's dirty tactic was the main reason for the switch to a payment-required distribution system, I believe that the organization has gone too far and is now relying too heavily on distribution of the list to raise funds for their administration costs and other activities. In my own opinion, an organization with such a cause shouldn't need to rely on list orders for its money, and if it isn't getting enough donations to continue the work, it should evaluate why not and make corrections so that they are, whether that involves spreading knowledge for their cause to the right people with the right resources, getting involved in other activities which are closer to the majority of pro-lifers' hearts, or some other creative, ethical method that I can't pull off the top of my head.
I'd like to hear from you (my readers, if I have any left) about your views on these issues: Do you think that organizations that financially support Planned Parenthood deserve to be boycotted? Do you think that such a boycott, if ineffective due to non-universal cooperation among the pro-life base, should be abandoned until an organization does something more significant that could be targeted by such a boycott? If I were to make the list available to you (for free) in the form of "additional copies" of the paper list, would you want one? If I were to get the information to you (electronically or otherwise), would you participate? Would you encourage others to participate? To give you an idea of what this involves, a few of the organizations that are on the list (per the page that you go to before you pay to get the list) are McDonalds, Time Warner, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson. I for one would need to give up cable TV and cable high speed internet in favor of DSL and staticky antenna TV (because dish TV is expensive and certainly not a part of any internet package), assuming that AT&T (the DSL provider) is not also on the list.
Friday, December 01, 2006
Family Outing
Note: This blog entry was originally posted on 10/27/06 and is being reposted after turning on comment moderation due to the inconsiderate posting of spam as the third comment. I apologize to those of you who also had your legitimate comments deleted.
Eric took the longest car trip of his life today, and he absolutely loved every minute of it. Car seats are awesome! After I got off of work, our little family plus Grandpa & Grandma on Mommy's side piled into our SUV and headed over to our favorite place to eat, a wonderful Chinese cousine restaurant that Becky and I haven't been to since just before little Eric showed up in Mommy's little (at that time) womb. It was a wonderful dinner, just like we remembered. The Won Ton Soup there is the greatest appetizer I have ever, ever had at any restaurant anywhere. Even the menu had been overhauled in the last nine months and was packed full of pictures of the food and inserted nicely into page protectors with gold-colored borders. We were the only ones there after the first 15 minutes or so, even though the restaurant would be open for another hour and a half, and the usual waiter was even more friendly than he normally is. Eric got to sit in the middle of the semi-circular booth bench, and the waiter pulled the table out a little bit so that his car seat would fit there. Then he took our group picture on two different digital cameras, making sure that there were no glasses or napkins in the way of Eric's little face. He fully answered all of our questions, especially the one about whether they use MSG, seeing how babies aren't supposed to have it and Eric drinks whatever types of molecules Mommy eats. They do put MSG in everything there because their primary customers just love the stuff, but he said he would have them not use it for all of our meals. He even brought us extra tea bags for the tea when I asked him what flavor the tea was--it was green tea--since it tasted like warm water to me every time I've tried it. I tipped him just over 20%, but I wish I had tipped him a little more for all of his helpfulness and for making our first family restaurant experience so enjoyable. As for Eric, he was sound asleep from the time we left until Daddy put him on the changing table and he decided to wet his completely clean and dry diaper as soon as it was open. He was hungry shortly after that, but he's once again sleeping soundly until some time in the middle of the early morning when he'll wake up and we'll try to stay awake as we wait for him to gobble down some nutritious bottle of soy-based formula (there's not enough milk to satisfy his large appetite quite just yet, but he gets every ounce that there is).
I'll try to put the most recent pictures up on the Kodak Gallery tomorrow. We've got some of Grandpa and Grandma with Eric and some with a couple more of Eric's relatives from Daddy's side.
In other news, our little boy is growing!! He had a follow-up doctor's appointment today, where the doctor informed his mommy that she was doing a great job in caring for him, because his jaundice is gone and he now weighs seven pounds and nine ounces, a good seven ounces more than he weighed at birth, and a full nine ounces more than what he weighed when he left the hospital.
