Thursday, April 1, 2004
Abortionists Admit Dismemberment Horror
"Another doctor a day earlier had testified that a fetus sometimes does not immediately die after limbs are pulled off."
That's the sole reference we could find to the major piece of blockbuster testimony in searching the wire services today for accounts of the partial-birth abortion trial going on in New York.
Pro-abortion reporters and editors don't like to dwell on reality, doncha know.
Here's some slightly less horrific testimony that the media will relate from U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
"Does the fetus feel pain?" Judge Richard C. Casey on Wednesday asked another abortionist, Dr. Timothy Johnson, a plaintiff in one of three lawsuits challenging the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.
Johnson: "I guess whenever I ..."
Judge Casey: "Simple question, doctor. Does it cross your mind?"
The abortionist said it did not.
Judge Casey: "Never crossed your mind?"
Johnson: "No."
Judge Casey: "So you tell her the arms and legs are pulled off? I mean, that's what I want to know. Do you tell her?"
Johnson: "We tell her the baby, the fetus, is dismembered as part of the procedure, yes."
Casey asked if abortionists admitted to the mother about "sucking the brain out of the skull" of the baby.
Some Settling of Contents May Occur
Johnson: "I don't think we would use those terms. I think we would probably use a term like 'decompression of the skull' or 'reducing the contents of the skull.'"
Judge Casey: "Make it nice and palatable so that they wouldn't understand what it's all about?"
Johnson: "We try to do it in a way that's not offensive or gruesome or overly graphic for patients."
April 2, 2004
Do Preborn Feel Pain During Partial-Birth Abortion?
by Terry Phillips, correspondent
The callousness of the abortion industry comes under scrutiny at a trial on the federal ban on partial-birth abortion.
In a New York courtroom this week, a federal judge forced an abortion doctor into a frank discussion on the effects of abortion procedures on the preborn baby. It came in a case challenging a ban on partial-birth abortion.
The abortionist, Timothy Johnson, wants partial-birth abortions to continue — and the judge to strike down the nation's new law banning them. The judge, Richard Casey, asked Johnson if it had "ever crossed his mind" that a pre-born baby feels pain. The abortionist twice indicated he'd never thought about it.
Dr. David Stevens, who heads the Christian Medical Association, isn't surprised that an abortionist would ignore the humanity of the preborn.
"We should expect people who are trying to defend the indefensible to say anything in court," Stevens said. "We really shouldn't be surprised. What's a little lie when you're willing to kill babies in the most gruesome manner possible?"
The lie, or the admission of what — at best — can only be described as an incredible lack of caring, came after Johnson had told the judge he knew of no scientific research into preborn pain. If true, Johnson flatly ignored research published by Dr. Jean Wright, an expert on the pain of the preborn.
"Not only do they feel pain," Wright said, "they feel it anywhere from three to five times more intensely."
It's fact, but the abortion community wants to suppress legal testimony about the pain of the preborn.
"We scientists have come to grips with that," Wright explained. "but the abortion community has denied it and wanted to keep that kind of information away from the lay public."
Ironically, abortionists themselves, by suing, are being forced to expose the truth behind their industry under the questioning of Judge Casey.
"He's making the gruesomeness of this procedure a matter of court record," Stevens said.
In the process, America will, perhaps, finally see abortion in its stark, brutal reality.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
To learn more about partial-birth abortion, please see the Focus on Social Issues Web site. You can find an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) article there, among other resources.
http://64.4.26.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=69c2c8f1ab7667ce5249de3859c37920&lat=1081279458&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2efamily%2eorg%2fcforum%2ffosi%2fbioethics%2ffaqs%2fa0027734%2ecfm
Partial-Birth Abortion
June 23, 2003
by Carrie Gordon Earll
Public opinion supports banning it and Congress has done just that. So, what are the facts regarding partial-birth abortion?
Q. What is a partial-birth abortion?
A. The term "partial-birth abortion" describes a late term abortion procedure also known as Dilation and Extraction (D & X). This particular abortion method first came under public scrutiny after a 1992 presentation by abortionist Martin Haskell in which Haskell graphically described the D & X abortion technique.1
According to Haskell's presentation, the initial step in performing a partial-birth abortion involves two days of dilating the mother’s cervix. Afterward, the abortionist uses an ultrasound probe to locate the lower extremities of the preborn baby. He then works large grasping forceps through the mother’s vagina and cervix, and into her uterus. The abortionist grasps a leg of the baby with the forceps and pulls the leg into the mother’s vagina. "With a lower extremity in the vagina, the surgeon uses his fingers to deliver the opposite lower extremity, then the torso, the shoulders and the upper extremities. The skull lodges at the internal cervical os,"2Haskell explained.
While clutching the baby’s upper body, the abortionist "takes a pair of blunt curved Metzenbaum scissors. . . . He carefully advances the tip, curve down, along the spine and under his middle finger until he feels it contact the base of the skull under the tip of his middle finger. . . . The surgeon then forces the scissors into the base of the opening. The surgeon removes the scissors and introduces a suction catheter into this hole and evacuates the skull contents. With the catheter still in place, he applies traction to the fetus, removing it completely from the patient."3
Q. Are Partial-Birth Abortions Medically Necessary to Save the Mother’s Life or Protect Her From Injury?
A. "With all that modern medicine has to offer, partial-birth abortions are not needed to save the life of the mother, and the procedure’s impact on a woman’s cervix can put future pregnancies at risk."
Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, M.D. Letter to the Editor The New York Times, September 26, 1996
"Most partial-birth abortions are performed on healthy mothers with healthy babies," and "there is no obstetrical situation that requires the willful destruction of a partially delivered baby to protect the life, health or future of a woman."
Nancy Romer, M.D., Curtis Cook, M.D., Pamela Smith, M.D. and Joseph DeCook, M.D. Letter to the Editor The Wall Street Journal, October 14, 1996
Q. What does the American Medical Association(AMA) say about Partial-Birth Abortions?
A. "Our panel could not find any identified circumstance in which the procedure was the only safe and effective abortion method." (The AMA supported the federal ban passed by Congress and vetoed by President Clinton.)
Daniel H. Johnson Jr., M.D. President, American Medical Association Letter to the Editor The New York Times, May 26, 1997
Q. How many partial-birth abortions are performed each year?
A. Since states do not have mandatory and uniform abortion reporting requirements, there is no way to know how many partial-birth abortions are performed each year. Abortion supporters insist that only about 500 partial-birth abortions are performed annually.4 However, Martin Haskell, the abortionist who developed the procedure, reported in 1992 performing more than 700 partial-birth abortions in his abortion practice.5 Furthermore, according to one New Jersey newspaper, physicians in that state admit performing at least 1,500 partial-birth abortions a year in their state alone—three times the national number claimed by abortion advocates.6 According to a survey conducted by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, "an estimated total of 31 providers performed the procedure 2,200 times in 2000." 7
Q. Why are partial-birth abortions performed?
A. Supporters of partial-birth abortion say that the majority of partial-birth abortions take place in cases where the fetus suffers from abnormalities or severe defects.8 However, Haskell told one publication that most of his partial-birth abortions were elective, meaning there was no medical reason for the abortion.9 Ohio abortionist Martin Ruddock admits that more than one-half of his partial-birth abortions involve normal fetuses.10
Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, confessed to that he "lied through [his] teeth" during a 1995 interview with ABC’s "Nightline" when he stated that women had partial-birth abortions only in the most extreme circumstances of life endangerment or fetal anomaly. Fitzsimmons went on to say that a vast majority of these abortions are performed on healthy babies and healthy mothers.11
Q. What states have passed partial-birth abortion bans?
A. As of October 1, 1999, 29 states have passed bans on partial-birth abortions: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, Ohio*, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
*Does not use "partial-birth" language but describes similar procedure.
Q. What is the status of these laws?
A. Prior to the summer of 2000, the status of these laws was mixed, with some in effect and others the subject of court challenges. On June 28, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in the case of Stenberg vs. Carhart, which questioned the constitutionality of Nebraska’s ban on partial-birth abortions. The court, in a 5-4 decision, ruled that Nebraska’s law was unconstitutional on two grounds:
• It does not clearly distinguish between partial-birth abortion (dilation and extraction, or "D&X") and the most commonly used late-term abortion procedure (dilation and evacuation,or "D&E")
• It does not include an exception for the health of the mother
In her concurring opinion, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor states that laws that meet these two criteria would be, in her view, constitutional. However, pro-life legal experts say that based on past court rulings, an exception for the mother’s health is broadly interpreted and would render the ban worthless.12 The Carhart decision effectively renders all state bans on partial-birth abortion unconstitutional.
Q. Didn’t Congress vote to ban partial-birth abortions?
A. Yes, several times. In 1995 and 1997, the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate voted to prohibit partial-birth abortions. Both times President Clinton vetoed the legislation. In response, the House voted twice to override the president’s vetoes.13 Twice the Senate attempted overrides and failed by as few as three votes. The third time Congress passed the ban - the Senate in 1999 and the House in 2000 - the bill died in conference committee.
Since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Carhart addressed a challenge to a state law banning partial-birth abortion, it is not known whether the current court would also apply the decision to any federal ban of the abortion procedure. However, in 2002, pro-life attorneys drafted new legislation designed to satisfy the court’s criteria in Carhart while still banning the late-term abortion method. On March 13, 2003, the U.S. Senate approved the new version of the ban by a vote of 64-33. The U.S. House of Representatives followed suit on June 4, 2003 by a vote margin of 282-139. The measure now goes to conference committee before heading to the White House where President Bush has pledged to sign the bill.14
Carrie Gordon Earll is the Senior Policy Analyst for Bioethics at Focus on the Family and a fellow with the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity.
________________________________________
1Martin Haskell, M.D., "Dilation and Extraction for Late Second Trimester Abortion," Paper presented at the National Abortion Federation Risk Management Seminar, September 13-14, 1992, Dallas, Texas.
2Haskell, 1992
3Haskell, 1992
4 Ruth Padawer, "The Facts on Partial-Birth Abortion," The Record, September 15, 1996, p. A1.
5Haskell, 1992
6Padawer, 1996.
7Lawrence B. Finer and Stanley K. Henshaw, "Abortion Incidence and Services in the United States in 2000," Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, Volume 35, Number 1, January/February 2003, p. 13.
8William Douglas, "House Bans One Kind of Abortion," Newsday, November 2, 1995, p. A7.
9Diane M. Gianelli, "Shock-Tactic Ads Target Late-Term Abortion Procedure," American Medical News, July 5, 1993, p. 1.
10 David Brown, "Late Term Abortions," Washington Post, September 17, 1996, p. Z12.
11Diane M. Gianelli, "Medicine Adds to Debate on Late-Term Abortion," American Medical News, March 3, 1997, p. 3; David Stott, "An Abortion Rights Advocate Says He Lied," The New York Times, February 26, 1997, p. A12.
12Dorinda Bordlee, "Abort Reform for Now," Editorial, Washington Times, July 13, 2000, p. A19.
13Chris Black, "Abortion Foes Falter in Override Bid," Boston Globe, September 19, 1998, p. A4.
14Robin Toner, "Measure Banning Abortion Method Wins House Vote," The New York Times, June 5, 2003, p. A1.
Doctor: Fetus Feels Pain After 20 Weeks
By KEVIN O'HANLON, Associated Press Writer
LINCOLN, Neb. - A type of abortion banned under a new federal law would cause "severe and excruciating" pain to 20-week-old fetuses, a medical expert on pain testified Tuesday.
"I believe the fetus is conscious," said Dr. Kanwaljeet "Sonny" Anand, a pediatrician at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. He took the stand as a government witness in a trial challenging the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.
The act, which was signed by President Bush in November, has not been enforced because judges in Lincoln, Neb., New York and San Francisco agreed to hear evidence in three simultaneous, non-jury trials on whether the ban violates the Constitution.
Anand said fetuses show increased heart rate, blood flow and hormone levels in response to pain.
"The physiological responses have been very clearly studied," he said. "The fetus cannot talk ... so this is the best evidence we can get."
The Bush administration has argued that the procedure, referred to by opponents as "partial-birth abortion," is "inhumane and gruesome" and causes the fetus to suffer pain.
During the procedure, which doctors call "intact dilation and extraction" or D&X, a fetus is partially removed from the womb and its skull is punctured. It is generally performed in the second trimester.
Abortion rights advocates argue that it is sometimes the safest procedure for women, and that the law will endanger almost all second-trimester abortions, or 10 percent of the nation's 1.3 million annual abortions.
The law would be the first substantial limitation on abortion since the Supreme Court legalized it 31 years ago in the landmark case Roe v. Wade.
Challenges to the ban were filed by several doctors being represented by the Center for Reproductive Rights, the National Abortion Federation and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The issue is expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Collateral Damage - Abortion...
Abortion "Doctor" Admits Partial-Birth Abortions Can Hurt or Kill Women
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
April 6, 2004
San Francisco, CA (LifeNews.com) -- Contradicting claims made by a Planned Parenthood medical director, an anonymous abortion practitioner admitted during the partial-birth abortion trial in San Francisco that such abortions can damage the cervix of women, possibly causing their death.
Justice Department attorney Mark Thomas Quinlivan asked Dr. "Doe," testifying under a pseudonym to remain confidential, "Could there potentially be risks to the cervix when you are opening the forceps wide enough to get around the calvarium [the baby's head]?"
"Yes," the abortion practitioner admitted.
"In fact, one of those risks might be a perforation or a laceration of the cervix, right," the Bush administration attorney asked.
"Yes," came the response.
"And another risk might be a perforation or a laceration of the lower uterine segment," Quinlivan asked.
"Yes," the abortion practitioner said.
Quinlivan then asked whether those same risks apply during the next step of the abortion procedure, when the deceased baby's head is removed.
"And when you are crushing the calvarium, there are the same risks that we talked about earlier, possible perforation or laceration of the cervix, the lower uterine segment, or the uterus; is that right," the attorney asked.
"Yes," came the response again.
Then, according to the court's transcript, Quinlivan questioned whether a cervical or uterine laceration could be severe enough to cause a woman to "exsanguinate and die."
The abortion practitioner answered yes.
"Can you tell us what exsanguinate means," the attorney said.
"To bleed to death."
But those comments doesn't square with earlier testimony from Maureen Paul, the chief medical officer at Planned Parenthood Golden Gate.
Earlier in the trial, Paul told the court that "there is no evidence" of long-term adverse effects from an abortion.
In fact, research shows cervical damage to be a leading cause of long term complications following abortion.
During a pregnancy, the cervix is normally rigid and closed, but, in order to perform an abortion, the cervix must be stretched open considerably. During the forced dilation, the cervix muscles can be torn and occasionally ripped off the uterine wall.
According to the Elliot Institute, a research group that focuses on the aftereffects of abortion, 12.5% of first trimester abortions required stitching for cervical lacerations.
The Springfield-based group also points to a second study of women in Hawaii that found that cervical lacerations occurred on 22 percent of the women who had abortions.
Such cervical problems frequently lead to a permanent weakening of the cervix. This weakening may result in an "incompetent cervix" which, unable to carry the weight of a later pregnancy, opens prematurely, resulting in miscarriage or premature birth.
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
April 6, 2004
San Francisco, CA (LifeNews.com) -- Contradicting claims made by a Planned Parenthood medical director, an anonymous abortion practitioner admitted during the partial-birth abortion trial in San Francisco that such abortions can damage the cervix of women, possibly causing their death.
Justice Department attorney Mark Thomas Quinlivan asked Dr. "Doe," testifying under a pseudonym to remain confidential, "Could there potentially be risks to the cervix when you are opening the forceps wide enough to get around the calvarium [the baby's head]?"
"Yes," the abortion practitioner admitted.
"In fact, one of those risks might be a perforation or a laceration of the cervix, right," the Bush administration attorney asked.
"Yes," came the response.
"And another risk might be a perforation or a laceration of the lower uterine segment," Quinlivan asked.
"Yes," the abortion practitioner said.
Quinlivan then asked whether those same risks apply during the next step of the abortion procedure, when the deceased baby's head is removed.
"And when you are crushing the calvarium, there are the same risks that we talked about earlier, possible perforation or laceration of the cervix, the lower uterine segment, or the uterus; is that right," the attorney asked.
"Yes," came the response again.
Then, according to the court's transcript, Quinlivan questioned whether a cervical or uterine laceration could be severe enough to cause a woman to "exsanguinate and die."
The abortion practitioner answered yes.
"Can you tell us what exsanguinate means," the attorney said.
"To bleed to death."
But those comments doesn't square with earlier testimony from Maureen Paul, the chief medical officer at Planned Parenthood Golden Gate.
Earlier in the trial, Paul told the court that "there is no evidence" of long-term adverse effects from an abortion.
In fact, research shows cervical damage to be a leading cause of long term complications following abortion.
During a pregnancy, the cervix is normally rigid and closed, but, in order to perform an abortion, the cervix must be stretched open considerably. During the forced dilation, the cervix muscles can be torn and occasionally ripped off the uterine wall.
According to the Elliot Institute, a research group that focuses on the aftereffects of abortion, 12.5% of first trimester abortions required stitching for cervical lacerations.
The Springfield-based group also points to a second study of women in Hawaii that found that cervical lacerations occurred on 22 percent of the women who had abortions.
Such cervical problems frequently lead to a permanent weakening of the cervix. This weakening may result in an "incompetent cervix" which, unable to carry the weight of a later pregnancy, opens prematurely, resulting in miscarriage or premature birth.
The Sounds of Silence
I'm with the Democrats on this one. Bush's plan sounds like quasi-socialism to me and I certainly don't like Wexler's plan of raising taxes. So I'm siding with the Democrats here in the hopes that the entire socialist retirement program of Social Security will collapse sooner than later and cease to exist for all eternity. All for the good of this great nation of course!!!
http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_luskin/luskin200505190928.asp
May 19, 2005, 9:28 a.m.
“Raise taxes!” says the congressman. “Shhhh!” the media reply.
If a Democrat falls in the forest and the liberal media doesn’t report it, does it make a noise? Predictably, we’re still waiting to find out.
On Monday, Florida congressman Robert Wexler broke ranks with fellow Democrats by offering a plan to reform Social Security. Amazing! After months of party-line stonewalling, Wexler made a gesture of bipartisanship. And yet there hasn’t been one solitary word about it in the “paper of record,” the New York Times.
This is big news. Why the silent treatment from the liberal media?
Could it be the liberal establishment is hoping that if they pretend Wexler’s initiative doesn’t exist, it will just go away, allowing the Democrats to get back to business as usual by boycotting President Bush’s efforts at reform? Or it could be that Wexler himself is seen as a bit of a liability at the moment, as it has been revealed that he is among the biggest recipients in the House of Representatives of lobbyist-paid travel (the same thing Democrats are persecuting Tom DeLay for, although DeLay has done less of it)?
More likely, the reason for the media silence is that the substance of Wexler’s Social Security reform proposal is an embarrassment to the Democratic party. You see, Wexler’s proposal consists of just one element: raise taxes — 6 percent on anyone making more than $90,000 a year. Yes, normally Democrats aren’t embarrassed about wanting to raise taxes. But in the case of Social Security, higher taxes carry some special problems.
First, Social Security is already running a surplus — it takes in more in taxes each year than it will pay out in benefits (it will do so until 2017). Raising taxes today will just make that surplus larger. That’s a problem because that surplus isn’t being saved for the sake of the system’s future needs. The so-called Social Security Trust Fund uses the surplus to buy special-issue Treasury bonds — which is to say, it hands the surpluses over to the federal government to spend.
The federal government is not itself doing any sort of savings in order to retire those bonds when they come due. So when they inevitably come due decades in the future, taxes will have to be raised again. That’s right — the more taxes are raised now, the more they’ll have to be raised again in the future.
Second, even blithely assuming that today’s tax revenues could somehow be saved toward future Social Security benefit payments, is Social Security as we know it really something we want to raise taxes for? Aren’t there other priorities? For instance, the Democrats have been fond of saying that Medicare is in a bigger fiscal crisis than Social Security — and they’re right about that. And of course they have a long wish list of federal initiatives all requiring higher taxes.
It comes down to a penetrating question posed by economist Michael Boskin:
. . . why would we want to raise taxes on well-off workers to fund higher benefits to well-off retirees?
But wait — isn’t Social Security supposed to be a program designed to keep the elderly out of poverty? No: That’s what the Democrats are always saying, but the reality is that everyone, rich or poor, gets Social Security benefits. Visualize this: At this very moment Warren Buffet receives Social Security benefits.
Instead of raising taxes, President Bush has proposed the idea of “progressive price indexing” of Social Security benefits. The idea is to cut back the rate of scheduled benefit growth for the highest wage earners, while increasing the growth of payable benefits for the lowest wage earners. The combination of the two goes a long way toward restoring fiscal balance to the program, preserves and enhances the safety net for the neediest, and addresses Boskin’s question about taxing the well-off to provide benefits for the well-off.
For all that, the Democrats are attacking the idea of progressive price indexing as an attempt to slash benefits for the middle class. But that’s simply a lie. According to Social Security Administration models, for the middle 20 percent of average lifetime wage earners — surely that defines the “middle class” — progressive price indexing would increase benefits payable in 2050 from $1,208 (in 2005 dollars) to $1,380. And that doesn’t even include the additional increase in benefits that would accrue from investing in personal accounts. And the benefit improvement is even greater for workers below the middle class.
The Democrats are ignoring those figures. Instead, liberal think tanks (like the Center for Budget Policy and Priorities) and liberal pundits (like Paul Krugman) are focusing on the purportedly middle-class $60,000 wage earner, whose benefits — they claim — would be lower under progressive price indexing. The claims are false, because these opponents ignore the fact that, under current law, benefits will automatically be slashed across-the-board after 2041 when the Social Security Trust Fund’s assets are depleted.
And the Democrats’ claims are false because $60,000 in Social Security wages is anything but middle class. Remember, your wages used for calculating Social Security benefits are an average of your 35 best years. If that average is $60,000, chances are it included a number of years when your earnings were considerably less. With that in mind it should be no surprise that, according to the Social Security Administration actuaries, only 15 percent of Social Security beneficiaries have $60,000 or more in average earnings. Yet Democratic House minority leader Nancy Pelosi calls such people “solidly middle class.”
So what’s up with the Democrats? President Bush’s plan for progressive price indexing enhances benefits for the true middle class and below, and moves Social Security a long way back toward solvency. Why do they want to tax the well-off to fund benefits for the well-off?
Simple — this has nothing to do with Social Security at all. They’re against Bush’s idea simply because it’s Bush's idea. And they’re in favor of raising taxes for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks — because that’s where the money is.
Congressman Wexler had the courage to come out and say it. But if the liberal media gets its way, you won’t hear him at all.
— Donald Luskin is chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC, an independent economics and investment-research firm. He welcomes your visit to his blog and your comments at don@trendmacro.com.
http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_luskin/luskin200505190928.asp
May 19, 2005, 9:28 a.m.
“Raise taxes!” says the congressman. “Shhhh!” the media reply.
If a Democrat falls in the forest and the liberal media doesn’t report it, does it make a noise? Predictably, we’re still waiting to find out.
On Monday, Florida congressman Robert Wexler broke ranks with fellow Democrats by offering a plan to reform Social Security. Amazing! After months of party-line stonewalling, Wexler made a gesture of bipartisanship. And yet there hasn’t been one solitary word about it in the “paper of record,” the New York Times.
This is big news. Why the silent treatment from the liberal media?
Could it be the liberal establishment is hoping that if they pretend Wexler’s initiative doesn’t exist, it will just go away, allowing the Democrats to get back to business as usual by boycotting President Bush’s efforts at reform? Or it could be that Wexler himself is seen as a bit of a liability at the moment, as it has been revealed that he is among the biggest recipients in the House of Representatives of lobbyist-paid travel (the same thing Democrats are persecuting Tom DeLay for, although DeLay has done less of it)?
More likely, the reason for the media silence is that the substance of Wexler’s Social Security reform proposal is an embarrassment to the Democratic party. You see, Wexler’s proposal consists of just one element: raise taxes — 6 percent on anyone making more than $90,000 a year. Yes, normally Democrats aren’t embarrassed about wanting to raise taxes. But in the case of Social Security, higher taxes carry some special problems.
First, Social Security is already running a surplus — it takes in more in taxes each year than it will pay out in benefits (it will do so until 2017). Raising taxes today will just make that surplus larger. That’s a problem because that surplus isn’t being saved for the sake of the system’s future needs. The so-called Social Security Trust Fund uses the surplus to buy special-issue Treasury bonds — which is to say, it hands the surpluses over to the federal government to spend.
The federal government is not itself doing any sort of savings in order to retire those bonds when they come due. So when they inevitably come due decades in the future, taxes will have to be raised again. That’s right — the more taxes are raised now, the more they’ll have to be raised again in the future.
Second, even blithely assuming that today’s tax revenues could somehow be saved toward future Social Security benefit payments, is Social Security as we know it really something we want to raise taxes for? Aren’t there other priorities? For instance, the Democrats have been fond of saying that Medicare is in a bigger fiscal crisis than Social Security — and they’re right about that. And of course they have a long wish list of federal initiatives all requiring higher taxes.
It comes down to a penetrating question posed by economist Michael Boskin:
. . . why would we want to raise taxes on well-off workers to fund higher benefits to well-off retirees?
But wait — isn’t Social Security supposed to be a program designed to keep the elderly out of poverty? No: That’s what the Democrats are always saying, but the reality is that everyone, rich or poor, gets Social Security benefits. Visualize this: At this very moment Warren Buffet receives Social Security benefits.
Instead of raising taxes, President Bush has proposed the idea of “progressive price indexing” of Social Security benefits. The idea is to cut back the rate of scheduled benefit growth for the highest wage earners, while increasing the growth of payable benefits for the lowest wage earners. The combination of the two goes a long way toward restoring fiscal balance to the program, preserves and enhances the safety net for the neediest, and addresses Boskin’s question about taxing the well-off to provide benefits for the well-off.
For all that, the Democrats are attacking the idea of progressive price indexing as an attempt to slash benefits for the middle class. But that’s simply a lie. According to Social Security Administration models, for the middle 20 percent of average lifetime wage earners — surely that defines the “middle class” — progressive price indexing would increase benefits payable in 2050 from $1,208 (in 2005 dollars) to $1,380. And that doesn’t even include the additional increase in benefits that would accrue from investing in personal accounts. And the benefit improvement is even greater for workers below the middle class.
The Democrats are ignoring those figures. Instead, liberal think tanks (like the Center for Budget Policy and Priorities) and liberal pundits (like Paul Krugman) are focusing on the purportedly middle-class $60,000 wage earner, whose benefits — they claim — would be lower under progressive price indexing. The claims are false, because these opponents ignore the fact that, under current law, benefits will automatically be slashed across-the-board after 2041 when the Social Security Trust Fund’s assets are depleted.
And the Democrats’ claims are false because $60,000 in Social Security wages is anything but middle class. Remember, your wages used for calculating Social Security benefits are an average of your 35 best years. If that average is $60,000, chances are it included a number of years when your earnings were considerably less. With that in mind it should be no surprise that, according to the Social Security Administration actuaries, only 15 percent of Social Security beneficiaries have $60,000 or more in average earnings. Yet Democratic House minority leader Nancy Pelosi calls such people “solidly middle class.”
So what’s up with the Democrats? President Bush’s plan for progressive price indexing enhances benefits for the true middle class and below, and moves Social Security a long way back toward solvency. Why do they want to tax the well-off to fund benefits for the well-off?
Simple — this has nothing to do with Social Security at all. They’re against Bush’s idea simply because it’s Bush's idea. And they’re in favor of raising taxes for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks — because that’s where the money is.
Congressman Wexler had the courage to come out and say it. But if the liberal media gets its way, you won’t hear him at all.
— Donald Luskin is chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC, an independent economics and investment-research firm. He welcomes your visit to his blog and your comments at don@trendmacro.com.
Friday, May 13, 2005
Oil for Food: The List Goes On & On
These war dissidents were trying to hide their guilt/involvement…what's your excuse?!
http://www.nationalreview.com/rosett/rosett200505121840.asp
May 12, 2005, 6:40 p.m.
Congress gets deeper inside the U.N.-sponsored “Saddam Bribery System.”
When Senator Norm Coleman (R., Minn.) last year compared the United Nations Oil-for-Food scandal to “an onion,” he had just one thing wrong: The more you peel, the bigger it gets.
The latest insights into this cosmos of U.N.-fostered corruption come by way of a bipartisan report just released by the Senate Permanent Subcomittee on Investigations, or PSI, led by Coleman. In detail, with supporting documentation, the report shows how Saddam Hussein, via Oil-for-Food, gave rights to buy millions of barrels of underpriced Iraqi oil to two politicians who supported his regime: former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua and British Member of Parliament George Galloway.
In a press release, Coleman notes: “This report exposes how Saddam turned the Oil for Food program on its head and used the program to reward his political allies like Pasqua and Galloway.”
That’s news, because both Pasqua and Galloway have denied allegations that they received any such riches from Saddam’s regime. Galloway last year won a libel suit in the U.K., against the British Daily Telegraph, over similar allegations — which were based on documentation different from that produced by Senate investigators.
The importance of this Senate report goes well beyond those two names, however. Using documents from Saddam’s own records, supplemented by interviews with officials of the former Saddam regime, Senate investigators are uncovering detailed new evidence that Oil-for-Food served as a vehicle for Saddam to thwart sanctions, fund terrorists, and buy political influence within the U.N.’s own Security Council.
Citing interviews with Saddam’s former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, former vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan, and an unnamed former senior Iraqi official, the Senate report says that Iraq's Baathist regime, in doling out rights to buy cheap oil through the U.N. program, “gave priority to foreign officials, journalists and even terrorist entities.” Ramadan, Saddam’s former vice president, told Senate investigators that such oil allocations were “compensation for support.” According to the report, the list of terrorists named by these Iraqi officials as engaging in this quid pro quo includes “the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abu Abbas, and the Mujahedeen-e Khalq.”
Another of the report’s findings is especially interesting in light not only of Saddam’s subversion of Oil-for-Food to bust sanctions, but also as context for the hot debate within the U.N. Security Council just prior to the U.S.-led military overthrow of Saddam in 2003. The report explains that the prime targets of Saddam’s scheme to buy influence were “individuals and entities from countries on the U.N. Security Council.” Both documents and interviews with former senior officials of Saddam’s regime confirm that “The regime steered a massive portion of its allocations toward Security Council members that were believed by the Hussein regime to support Iraq in its efforts to lift sanctions — namely, Russia, France, and China.”
It turns out that not only did several of Saddam’s oil-ministry charts expressly separate oil-allocation recipients by country; these charts further spelled out whether the country was a member of the Security Council.
The Coleman PSI report also serves as an intriguing pointer to a roster of some 270 names published in a Baghdad newspaper, Al-Mada, in January, 2004 — the so-called "Al-Mada list" of politicians, businesses, and other entities alleged to have received lucrative oil allocations in suspect deals with Saddam. When the list came out, it was viewed with interest, but skepticism. Absent supporting documentation, it was hard to know how much of it might credible. The names ranged from that of a former French ambassador to the U.N., to the former president of Indonesia, to a Bangladeshi Islamic fundamentalist, to the Russian Orthodox Church.
It is possible that some of the figures named are innocent. But so far, investigations into specific entries on the Al-Mada list have been hitting a significant amount of paydirt. Pasqua and Galloway are on it. So are all three of the terrorist groups named in the new PSI report. So is a Jordanian, Fawaz Zureqat, named in the PSI report as one of the go-betweens “who facilitated several oil transactions for Galloway.”
Also on the list are a number of other figures now embroiled, with substantial supporting evidence, in the Oil-for-Food scandal. These include U.S. businessman Samir Vincent, who recently copped a plea with federal prosecutors now investigating cases involving bribery and wire fraud related to Oil-for-Food. The recent subject of a Financial Times expose is on it, Italian politician Roberto Formigoni. So is another American businessman, Shakir al-Khafaji, reported by the Wall Street Journal to have received funds from Saddam and helped bankroll the lobbying activities of former weapons-inspector turned anti-sanctions activist, Scott Ritter. So, for that matter, is the former head of the Oil-for-Food program, Benon Sevan — found by Paul Volcker’s U.N.-authorized investigation to have engaged in a severe conflict of interest involving Saddam’s oil allocations under the program.
Another name from the Al-Mada list, about to surface in Washington, is that of Russian nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky. His alleged dealings with Saddam under Oil-for-Food will be among the subjects covered in a hearing Monday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, led by Rep. Joe Barton. Also discussed at that hearing will be a raft of senior French officials apparently named in records of Saddam’s regime as potential targets of influence.
It also looks likely we will be hearing more about the neon names of the hour: Pasqua and Galloway. Pasqua could not be reached for comment. One of his aides, Bernard Guillet, also named as having received oil allocations from Saddam, is currently under investigation in France. Galloway, in a statement issued Wednesday, again denied ever trading in or seeing a barrel of oil (apart from one a British newspaper deposited in his garden). Galloway went on to call Coleman’s team “a lickspittle Republican committee,” (in fact, both the committee and its report are bipartisan) and said he had received no response to repeated requests to appear before the committee and rebut their evidence.
This has produced in the past 24 hours a spirited exchange, in which Coleman issued a statement that “at no time” did Galloway contact his committee “by any means, including but not limited to telephone, fax, email, letter, Morse Code or carrier pigeon.” Coleman went on to invite Galloway to testify at a PSI hearing next Tuesday that will enlarge upon this week's report, under the title “Oil for Influence: How Saddam Used Oil to Reward Politicians and Terrorist Entities Under the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program.” Coleman promised that “There will be a witness chair and microphone available for Mr. Galloway’s use.” Galloway replied by telling the Financial Times that “assuming we get the visas,” he’ll be there “to give them both barrels — verbal guns, of course, not oil.”
As evidence continues to bubble out of the great sinkhole that was once Oil-for-Food, there will no doubt be more scandal to come. It may be worth taking a moment to reflect on just how far the U.N. strayed in this program from its widely advertised humanitarian brief. The program, which ran from 1996-2003, was supposed to allow U.N.-sanctioned Saddam to export Iraq’s oil solely to buy humanitarian aid, such as milk and medicine, for the people of Iraq. The idea was that the U.N. would oversee the process, with the Secretariat collecting 2.2 percent of Saddam’s oil revenues to defray its costs for ensuring the integrity of the program. (That U.N. commission totaled $1.4 billion, from which U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan last year plucked $30 million in residual funds to cover the U.N.-authorized independent inquiry led by former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, who has yet to provide the kind of insight offered in this Senate report).
The U.N. let Saddam pick his own business partners, and kept the deals secret, and at Annan’s behest greatly expanded the program. That opened the way to Saddam for such scams as underpricing oil and allocating shipments as rewards to favored business partners, who could then make fat profits by reselling these allocations on the world market. The Senate report quotes a former Iraqi official saying that inside Saddam’s oil-marketing agency, this arrangement was known as the “Saddam Bribery System.”
The flip side, for the aid contracts, was that Saddam would overpay, effectively skimming money out of the humanitarian funds and transferring it to favored aid contractors. As the program became an entrenched feature at the U.N., routinely renewed about every six months at the urging of Secretary-General Kofi Annan to the Security Council, Saddam began demanding kickbacks on these deals. That added a layer of graft which allowed him to amass not only favors owed, but money salted away in secret accounts for his own uses.
The cynicism of this setup is neatly captured in the evidence laid out in the report that not only did Galloway, the British MP, receive oil allocations from Saddam, but that "to conceal payments associated with at least one such allocation" he used a charity, the Mariam Appeal, set up in the name of helping a four-year-old Iraqi girl suffering from leukemia.
Somewhere in all this, the U.N.-authorized Volcker inquiry is engaged right now in a legal showdown, demanding that House investigators give back boxfuls of evidence that Rep. Hyde’s Committee on International Relations subpoenaed recently from an investigator who resigned last month from Volcker’s team, claiming Volcker's most recent report had been too soft on U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Sen. Coleman and Rep. Chris Shays, who heads yet another congressional panel investigating Oil-for-Food, have also issued subpoenas for this evidence. A restraining order, obtained by Volcker’s committee, expires next week. There is room to wonder who is most likely to enlighten us as to the true depths of Oil-for-Food’s dirty secrets: Congress, now pouring forth information to the public; or Volcker, already sitting on millions of still-secret U.N. documents, who wants his stray boxes of evidence back.
— Claudia Rosett is a journalist in residence at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4550309.stm
Russians accused over Iraqi oil
A US Senate committee has accused Russian politicians of accepting millions of dollars in oil allocations from Saddam Hussein.
A report from the committee said Iraq offered the allocations to persuade Moscow to lobby for an end to UN sanctions against Iraq.
Much of the committee's information was provided by former Iraqi officials.
Russia's foreign ministry has declined comment until a UN-appointed committee issues a final report in the summer.
About 30% of the oil Iraq sold via the UN-administered oil-for-food programme was allotted to Russia, it said.
Last week, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said it had evidence that former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua and British MP George Galloway had received oil allocations, charges vigorously denied by both men.
Mr Galloway has said he will testify before the committee on Tuesday. Mr Pasqua said he had yet to be invited, but would defend himself "when the time comes".
"I don't intend to sit idly by," he said, accusing "certain people" of having used his name to commit fraud within the oil-for-food programme.
Multiple investigations
The report is the latest in a series of publications from the Senate committee and from a UN panel chaired by former US central banker Paul Volcker.
Other revelations have come from the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), set up by the US to search for weapons of mass destruction.
All three have pointed to massive smuggling of oil outside the oil-for-food programme, which the ISG estimated earned Iraq $8bn.
Most went through Turkey and Syria - with the US and UK turning a blind eye to the trade, many observers believe.
Presidential aides named
The Senate's latest report deals instead with the official oil-for-food trade, which the ISG estimated raised some $1.5bn for Iraq.
The senators accuse a number of senior Russian politicians and officials of accepting allocations of oil which could then be sold at a profit.
Russia is an oil exporter, and therefore would have been unlikely to need the oil, the report says.
The report mentions former presidential aides Alexander Voloshin and Sergei Issakov, and ultranationalist MP Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
Influence on policy
Based on documents from Iraq's state oil firm and from US oil firm Bayoil - an intermediary whose managers were indicted by the US in April - the committee says millions of barrels were allocated to the three men.
Its report said Mr Issakov and Mr Zhirinovsky personally negotiated allocations.
And it suggests the contracts could have brought profits of $16m to the Russian Presidential Council, at the time headed by Mr Voloshin, and $8.7m to Mr Zhirinovsky, although it does not present direct evidence of receipt of any money.
Speaking last year in response to earlier reports of corruption in the former Iraqi regime, Mr Zhirinovsky said he had never accepted bribes and that "somebody in the West" had an interest in discrediting Russia.
The senators say the allocations were part of a scheme to influence the Russian government's policy towards Iraq and UN sanctions.
They also provided revenue to the Iraqi government, which demanded kickbacks on each barrel it shipped between 2000 and 2002.
Much of the information was given to the Senate committee by two former Iraqi officials, Tariq Aziz, the one-time Deputy Prime Minister, and Taha Yassin Ramadan, a former Vice-President.
http://www.nationalreview.com/rosett/rosett200505121840.asp
May 12, 2005, 6:40 p.m.
Congress gets deeper inside the U.N.-sponsored “Saddam Bribery System.”
When Senator Norm Coleman (R., Minn.) last year compared the United Nations Oil-for-Food scandal to “an onion,” he had just one thing wrong: The more you peel, the bigger it gets.
The latest insights into this cosmos of U.N.-fostered corruption come by way of a bipartisan report just released by the Senate Permanent Subcomittee on Investigations, or PSI, led by Coleman. In detail, with supporting documentation, the report shows how Saddam Hussein, via Oil-for-Food, gave rights to buy millions of barrels of underpriced Iraqi oil to two politicians who supported his regime: former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua and British Member of Parliament George Galloway.
In a press release, Coleman notes: “This report exposes how Saddam turned the Oil for Food program on its head and used the program to reward his political allies like Pasqua and Galloway.”
That’s news, because both Pasqua and Galloway have denied allegations that they received any such riches from Saddam’s regime. Galloway last year won a libel suit in the U.K., against the British Daily Telegraph, over similar allegations — which were based on documentation different from that produced by Senate investigators.
The importance of this Senate report goes well beyond those two names, however. Using documents from Saddam’s own records, supplemented by interviews with officials of the former Saddam regime, Senate investigators are uncovering detailed new evidence that Oil-for-Food served as a vehicle for Saddam to thwart sanctions, fund terrorists, and buy political influence within the U.N.’s own Security Council.
Citing interviews with Saddam’s former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, former vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan, and an unnamed former senior Iraqi official, the Senate report says that Iraq's Baathist regime, in doling out rights to buy cheap oil through the U.N. program, “gave priority to foreign officials, journalists and even terrorist entities.” Ramadan, Saddam’s former vice president, told Senate investigators that such oil allocations were “compensation for support.” According to the report, the list of terrorists named by these Iraqi officials as engaging in this quid pro quo includes “the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abu Abbas, and the Mujahedeen-e Khalq.”
Another of the report’s findings is especially interesting in light not only of Saddam’s subversion of Oil-for-Food to bust sanctions, but also as context for the hot debate within the U.N. Security Council just prior to the U.S.-led military overthrow of Saddam in 2003. The report explains that the prime targets of Saddam’s scheme to buy influence were “individuals and entities from countries on the U.N. Security Council.” Both documents and interviews with former senior officials of Saddam’s regime confirm that “The regime steered a massive portion of its allocations toward Security Council members that were believed by the Hussein regime to support Iraq in its efforts to lift sanctions — namely, Russia, France, and China.”
It turns out that not only did several of Saddam’s oil-ministry charts expressly separate oil-allocation recipients by country; these charts further spelled out whether the country was a member of the Security Council.
The Coleman PSI report also serves as an intriguing pointer to a roster of some 270 names published in a Baghdad newspaper, Al-Mada, in January, 2004 — the so-called "Al-Mada list" of politicians, businesses, and other entities alleged to have received lucrative oil allocations in suspect deals with Saddam. When the list came out, it was viewed with interest, but skepticism. Absent supporting documentation, it was hard to know how much of it might credible. The names ranged from that of a former French ambassador to the U.N., to the former president of Indonesia, to a Bangladeshi Islamic fundamentalist, to the Russian Orthodox Church.
It is possible that some of the figures named are innocent. But so far, investigations into specific entries on the Al-Mada list have been hitting a significant amount of paydirt. Pasqua and Galloway are on it. So are all three of the terrorist groups named in the new PSI report. So is a Jordanian, Fawaz Zureqat, named in the PSI report as one of the go-betweens “who facilitated several oil transactions for Galloway.”
Also on the list are a number of other figures now embroiled, with substantial supporting evidence, in the Oil-for-Food scandal. These include U.S. businessman Samir Vincent, who recently copped a plea with federal prosecutors now investigating cases involving bribery and wire fraud related to Oil-for-Food. The recent subject of a Financial Times expose is on it, Italian politician Roberto Formigoni. So is another American businessman, Shakir al-Khafaji, reported by the Wall Street Journal to have received funds from Saddam and helped bankroll the lobbying activities of former weapons-inspector turned anti-sanctions activist, Scott Ritter. So, for that matter, is the former head of the Oil-for-Food program, Benon Sevan — found by Paul Volcker’s U.N.-authorized investigation to have engaged in a severe conflict of interest involving Saddam’s oil allocations under the program.
Another name from the Al-Mada list, about to surface in Washington, is that of Russian nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky. His alleged dealings with Saddam under Oil-for-Food will be among the subjects covered in a hearing Monday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, led by Rep. Joe Barton. Also discussed at that hearing will be a raft of senior French officials apparently named in records of Saddam’s regime as potential targets of influence.
It also looks likely we will be hearing more about the neon names of the hour: Pasqua and Galloway. Pasqua could not be reached for comment. One of his aides, Bernard Guillet, also named as having received oil allocations from Saddam, is currently under investigation in France. Galloway, in a statement issued Wednesday, again denied ever trading in or seeing a barrel of oil (apart from one a British newspaper deposited in his garden). Galloway went on to call Coleman’s team “a lickspittle Republican committee,” (in fact, both the committee and its report are bipartisan) and said he had received no response to repeated requests to appear before the committee and rebut their evidence.
This has produced in the past 24 hours a spirited exchange, in which Coleman issued a statement that “at no time” did Galloway contact his committee “by any means, including but not limited to telephone, fax, email, letter, Morse Code or carrier pigeon.” Coleman went on to invite Galloway to testify at a PSI hearing next Tuesday that will enlarge upon this week's report, under the title “Oil for Influence: How Saddam Used Oil to Reward Politicians and Terrorist Entities Under the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program.” Coleman promised that “There will be a witness chair and microphone available for Mr. Galloway’s use.” Galloway replied by telling the Financial Times that “assuming we get the visas,” he’ll be there “to give them both barrels — verbal guns, of course, not oil.”
As evidence continues to bubble out of the great sinkhole that was once Oil-for-Food, there will no doubt be more scandal to come. It may be worth taking a moment to reflect on just how far the U.N. strayed in this program from its widely advertised humanitarian brief. The program, which ran from 1996-2003, was supposed to allow U.N.-sanctioned Saddam to export Iraq’s oil solely to buy humanitarian aid, such as milk and medicine, for the people of Iraq. The idea was that the U.N. would oversee the process, with the Secretariat collecting 2.2 percent of Saddam’s oil revenues to defray its costs for ensuring the integrity of the program. (That U.N. commission totaled $1.4 billion, from which U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan last year plucked $30 million in residual funds to cover the U.N.-authorized independent inquiry led by former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, who has yet to provide the kind of insight offered in this Senate report).
The U.N. let Saddam pick his own business partners, and kept the deals secret, and at Annan’s behest greatly expanded the program. That opened the way to Saddam for such scams as underpricing oil and allocating shipments as rewards to favored business partners, who could then make fat profits by reselling these allocations on the world market. The Senate report quotes a former Iraqi official saying that inside Saddam’s oil-marketing agency, this arrangement was known as the “Saddam Bribery System.”
The flip side, for the aid contracts, was that Saddam would overpay, effectively skimming money out of the humanitarian funds and transferring it to favored aid contractors. As the program became an entrenched feature at the U.N., routinely renewed about every six months at the urging of Secretary-General Kofi Annan to the Security Council, Saddam began demanding kickbacks on these deals. That added a layer of graft which allowed him to amass not only favors owed, but money salted away in secret accounts for his own uses.
The cynicism of this setup is neatly captured in the evidence laid out in the report that not only did Galloway, the British MP, receive oil allocations from Saddam, but that "to conceal payments associated with at least one such allocation" he used a charity, the Mariam Appeal, set up in the name of helping a four-year-old Iraqi girl suffering from leukemia.
Somewhere in all this, the U.N.-authorized Volcker inquiry is engaged right now in a legal showdown, demanding that House investigators give back boxfuls of evidence that Rep. Hyde’s Committee on International Relations subpoenaed recently from an investigator who resigned last month from Volcker’s team, claiming Volcker's most recent report had been too soft on U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Sen. Coleman and Rep. Chris Shays, who heads yet another congressional panel investigating Oil-for-Food, have also issued subpoenas for this evidence. A restraining order, obtained by Volcker’s committee, expires next week. There is room to wonder who is most likely to enlighten us as to the true depths of Oil-for-Food’s dirty secrets: Congress, now pouring forth information to the public; or Volcker, already sitting on millions of still-secret U.N. documents, who wants his stray boxes of evidence back.
— Claudia Rosett is a journalist in residence at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4550309.stm
Russians accused over Iraqi oil
A US Senate committee has accused Russian politicians of accepting millions of dollars in oil allocations from Saddam Hussein.
A report from the committee said Iraq offered the allocations to persuade Moscow to lobby for an end to UN sanctions against Iraq.
Much of the committee's information was provided by former Iraqi officials.
Russia's foreign ministry has declined comment until a UN-appointed committee issues a final report in the summer.
About 30% of the oil Iraq sold via the UN-administered oil-for-food programme was allotted to Russia, it said.
Last week, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said it had evidence that former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua and British MP George Galloway had received oil allocations, charges vigorously denied by both men.
Mr Galloway has said he will testify before the committee on Tuesday. Mr Pasqua said he had yet to be invited, but would defend himself "when the time comes".
"I don't intend to sit idly by," he said, accusing "certain people" of having used his name to commit fraud within the oil-for-food programme.
Multiple investigations
The report is the latest in a series of publications from the Senate committee and from a UN panel chaired by former US central banker Paul Volcker.
Other revelations have come from the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), set up by the US to search for weapons of mass destruction.
All three have pointed to massive smuggling of oil outside the oil-for-food programme, which the ISG estimated earned Iraq $8bn.
Most went through Turkey and Syria - with the US and UK turning a blind eye to the trade, many observers believe.
Presidential aides named
The Senate's latest report deals instead with the official oil-for-food trade, which the ISG estimated raised some $1.5bn for Iraq.
The senators accuse a number of senior Russian politicians and officials of accepting allocations of oil which could then be sold at a profit.
Russia is an oil exporter, and therefore would have been unlikely to need the oil, the report says.
The report mentions former presidential aides Alexander Voloshin and Sergei Issakov, and ultranationalist MP Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
Influence on policy
Based on documents from Iraq's state oil firm and from US oil firm Bayoil - an intermediary whose managers were indicted by the US in April - the committee says millions of barrels were allocated to the three men.
Its report said Mr Issakov and Mr Zhirinovsky personally negotiated allocations.
And it suggests the contracts could have brought profits of $16m to the Russian Presidential Council, at the time headed by Mr Voloshin, and $8.7m to Mr Zhirinovsky, although it does not present direct evidence of receipt of any money.
Speaking last year in response to earlier reports of corruption in the former Iraqi regime, Mr Zhirinovsky said he had never accepted bribes and that "somebody in the West" had an interest in discrediting Russia.
The senators say the allocations were part of a scheme to influence the Russian government's policy towards Iraq and UN sanctions.
They also provided revenue to the Iraqi government, which demanded kickbacks on each barrel it shipped between 2000 and 2002.
Much of the information was given to the Senate committee by two former Iraqi officials, Tariq Aziz, the one-time Deputy Prime Minister, and Taha Yassin Ramadan, a former Vice-President.
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
Republicans and Catholics Support Stem Cell Research!!!
http://www.nationalreview.com/lopez/lopez200505040759.asp
May 04, 2005, 7:59 a.m.
An Adult Approach...to life and death
These days it's common to hear that "conservative" or "pro-life" policy toward stem cells is a disservice to folks like the late President Ronald Reagan who suffered from Alzheimer's. Quite a bit of the media coverage about the new pope, Benedict XVI, has emphasized that he's against stem-cell research. In a recent Washington Post article, Ivy Reyes, who had stopped by a Manhattan church to say a prayer for pontiff, emphasized to a reporter: "I'm hoping he can find a balance with the science."
If you follow the media's lead, we are to believe that the pope, like President Bush, is against stem-cell research. But neither of them is against stem-cell research. Actually, I don't know anyone who is against stem-cell research. And I would know, because I agree with the Vatican and the U.S. president on this topic.
My posse is against embryonic-stem-cell research, and against cloning to create embryos for use in stem-cell research (or any research). But we're not against stem-cell research.
Embryonic-stem-cell research is not the only hope for mankind, as we are typically led to believe. The prospects of adult-stem-cell and umbilical-cord stem-cell research are repeatedly ignored by media and activists who could use both to promote funding of and research in stem-cell projects and totally avoid the ethical chaos that comes with working with human embryos.
Earlier this year, Bishop Donald W. Wuerl of Pittsburgh, put his Church's view clearly in a pastoral letter on human life: "Adult stem cell research ... has been described as the most promising advance in medical science in the last decades. The Catholic Church is not opposed to the development of these therapies and remedies for a host of ailments and deficiencies that afflict the body. Stem cell research using stem cells from ethical sources is a continuation of the work that has been done for millennia by physicians and researchers seeking cures for illness and healing for the sick."
Adult stem cells made a memorable appearance in the presidential elections last fall, when, during the second prime-time debate, questioner Elizabeth Long asked: "Senator Kerry, thousands of people have already been cured or treated by the use of adult stem cells or umbilical cord stem cells. However, no one has been cured by using embryonic stem cells. Wouldn't it be wise to use stem cells obtained without the destruction of an embryo?"
Senator Kerry didn't have much of a response, and most folks glossed over it and moved on. His running mate, meanwhile, would later shamelessly use the death of Christopher Reeve to play snake-oil salesman: "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."
But Long was right-on with her question. And the Democratic ticket was painfully and dangerously deaf and dumb.
After a nation watched Ronald Reagan's son praise the medical promise of embryonic stem cells at the Democratic convention, Ronald D. G. McKay, a stem-cell researcher at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, called the contention that embryonic-stem cells will cure Alzheimer's "a fairy tale."
As Michael Fumento, author of BioEvolution: How Biotechnology Is Changing Our World, one of the few commentators who've shone a light on adult stem cells, has written: "Scientists have already discovered at least 14 types of ASCs that ... could perhaps be 'trans-differentiated' into all the types of cells we need."
And adult stem cells are not mere pie-in-the-sky hopes of potential medical progress. Adult stem cells are cells at work today. Dr. Scott Gottlieb has written, "Adult stem cells have already been used for more than 20 years as bone marrow transplants to reconstitute the immune systems of patients with cancer and to treat blood cancers such as leukemia."
Umbilical-cord stem cells are another potentially fertile opportunity for medical progress. Cord blood is rich in stem cells. A mid-April report from the Institute of Medicine, the results of a yearlong study, recommended the establishment of a national network of cord-blood stem-cell banks for just this reason. Congress, which has a cord-blood bill on the table, should focus on this concrete alternative to endless yapping.
As the report notes, four million babies are born every year in the United States and the majority of their umbilical cords are thrown away. They could be used to treat some 11,700 Americans annually, according to the Institute of Medicine. That'd be a concrete start.
We're all adults here — and adult and umbilical-cord stem cells make sense for new medical research. How about a mature discussion, free of some of the hollow hype? Lives depend on it.
— (c) 2005, Newspaper Enterprise Assn.
May 04, 2005, 7:59 a.m.
An Adult Approach...to life and death
These days it's common to hear that "conservative" or "pro-life" policy toward stem cells is a disservice to folks like the late President Ronald Reagan who suffered from Alzheimer's. Quite a bit of the media coverage about the new pope, Benedict XVI, has emphasized that he's against stem-cell research. In a recent Washington Post article, Ivy Reyes, who had stopped by a Manhattan church to say a prayer for pontiff, emphasized to a reporter: "I'm hoping he can find a balance with the science."
If you follow the media's lead, we are to believe that the pope, like President Bush, is against stem-cell research. But neither of them is against stem-cell research. Actually, I don't know anyone who is against stem-cell research. And I would know, because I agree with the Vatican and the U.S. president on this topic.
My posse is against embryonic-stem-cell research, and against cloning to create embryos for use in stem-cell research (or any research). But we're not against stem-cell research.
Embryonic-stem-cell research is not the only hope for mankind, as we are typically led to believe. The prospects of adult-stem-cell and umbilical-cord stem-cell research are repeatedly ignored by media and activists who could use both to promote funding of and research in stem-cell projects and totally avoid the ethical chaos that comes with working with human embryos.
Earlier this year, Bishop Donald W. Wuerl of Pittsburgh, put his Church's view clearly in a pastoral letter on human life: "Adult stem cell research ... has been described as the most promising advance in medical science in the last decades. The Catholic Church is not opposed to the development of these therapies and remedies for a host of ailments and deficiencies that afflict the body. Stem cell research using stem cells from ethical sources is a continuation of the work that has been done for millennia by physicians and researchers seeking cures for illness and healing for the sick."
Adult stem cells made a memorable appearance in the presidential elections last fall, when, during the second prime-time debate, questioner Elizabeth Long asked: "Senator Kerry, thousands of people have already been cured or treated by the use of adult stem cells or umbilical cord stem cells. However, no one has been cured by using embryonic stem cells. Wouldn't it be wise to use stem cells obtained without the destruction of an embryo?"
Senator Kerry didn't have much of a response, and most folks glossed over it and moved on. His running mate, meanwhile, would later shamelessly use the death of Christopher Reeve to play snake-oil salesman: "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."
But Long was right-on with her question. And the Democratic ticket was painfully and dangerously deaf and dumb.
After a nation watched Ronald Reagan's son praise the medical promise of embryonic stem cells at the Democratic convention, Ronald D. G. McKay, a stem-cell researcher at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, called the contention that embryonic-stem cells will cure Alzheimer's "a fairy tale."
As Michael Fumento, author of BioEvolution: How Biotechnology Is Changing Our World, one of the few commentators who've shone a light on adult stem cells, has written: "Scientists have already discovered at least 14 types of ASCs that ... could perhaps be 'trans-differentiated' into all the types of cells we need."
And adult stem cells are not mere pie-in-the-sky hopes of potential medical progress. Adult stem cells are cells at work today. Dr. Scott Gottlieb has written, "Adult stem cells have already been used for more than 20 years as bone marrow transplants to reconstitute the immune systems of patients with cancer and to treat blood cancers such as leukemia."
Umbilical-cord stem cells are another potentially fertile opportunity for medical progress. Cord blood is rich in stem cells. A mid-April report from the Institute of Medicine, the results of a yearlong study, recommended the establishment of a national network of cord-blood stem-cell banks for just this reason. Congress, which has a cord-blood bill on the table, should focus on this concrete alternative to endless yapping.
As the report notes, four million babies are born every year in the United States and the majority of their umbilical cords are thrown away. They could be used to treat some 11,700 Americans annually, according to the Institute of Medicine. That'd be a concrete start.
We're all adults here — and adult and umbilical-cord stem cells make sense for new medical research. How about a mature discussion, free of some of the hollow hype? Lives depend on it.
— (c) 2005, Newspaper Enterprise Assn.
Thursday, April 28, 2005
And It Still Burns On & On & On & On......
The brushfire of democracy, started by the Bush administration, has grown into a raging fire of change in the Middle East...and muslim extremism stands no chance of dousing this giant!
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050428/D89O4U401.html
Pro-Reform Activists Rally Across Egypt
Apr 27, 10:48 PM (ET)By SARAH EL-DEEB
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Hundreds of pro-democracy activists protested in 15 Egyptian cities and towns Wednesday, drawing out large numbers of riot police who briefly detained 75 protesters, organizers said.
Witnesses in some cities, including Suez in the east and Benha in the Nile Delta, reported that police beat protesters with batons to disperse them.
The organizers said they were pleased that the protest had spread from Cairo, where they've held numerous protests during the past five months. "We are expanding to cover all of Egypt," said Amin Iskandar, a leader of the group, Egyptian Movement for Change.
The group has been unappeased by government proposals to open the presidential election process to more than one candidate and held a series of protests since December, calling for an end to President Hosni Mubarak's 24-year rule, the repeal of emergency laws that give security forces broad powers, and pro-democratic reforms.
Under internal and U.S. pressure, Mubarak earlier this year asked parliament to adopt a constitutional change that would open up this fall's presidential election. Previously Egyptians voted 'yes' or 'no' for one candidate, nominated by parliament.
Mubarak has not yet said if he would seek another term. He has held office since Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981.
In Cairo, hundreds of riot police barred 300 protesters from the Supreme Court, so they assembled on the steps of the nearby journalists syndicate.
"Down with Mubarak! Down with Suleiman!" the demonstrators chanted, referring to President Hosni Mubarak and his chief of intelligence, Omar Suleiman.
About 1,200 people rallied in the southern city of Luxor, including lawyers and Islamists. Hundreds also gathered in the southern cities of Minya and Qena, and at venues in northern Egypt including Alexandria, Suez and Benha.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050428/D89O4U401.html
Pro-Reform Activists Rally Across Egypt
Apr 27, 10:48 PM (ET)By SARAH EL-DEEB
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Hundreds of pro-democracy activists protested in 15 Egyptian cities and towns Wednesday, drawing out large numbers of riot police who briefly detained 75 protesters, organizers said.
Witnesses in some cities, including Suez in the east and Benha in the Nile Delta, reported that police beat protesters with batons to disperse them.
The organizers said they were pleased that the protest had spread from Cairo, where they've held numerous protests during the past five months. "We are expanding to cover all of Egypt," said Amin Iskandar, a leader of the group, Egyptian Movement for Change.
The group has been unappeased by government proposals to open the presidential election process to more than one candidate and held a series of protests since December, calling for an end to President Hosni Mubarak's 24-year rule, the repeal of emergency laws that give security forces broad powers, and pro-democratic reforms.
Under internal and U.S. pressure, Mubarak earlier this year asked parliament to adopt a constitutional change that would open up this fall's presidential election. Previously Egyptians voted 'yes' or 'no' for one candidate, nominated by parliament.
Mubarak has not yet said if he would seek another term. He has held office since Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981.
In Cairo, hundreds of riot police barred 300 protesters from the Supreme Court, so they assembled on the steps of the nearby journalists syndicate.
"Down with Mubarak! Down with Suleiman!" the demonstrators chanted, referring to President Hosni Mubarak and his chief of intelligence, Omar Suleiman.
About 1,200 people rallied in the southern city of Luxor, including lawyers and Islamists. Hundreds also gathered in the southern cities of Minya and Qena, and at venues in northern Egypt including Alexandria, Suez and Benha.
Monday, April 25, 2005
Judicial Legislation & Dangers of "Lochnerizing"
(There may not be a more important article to read in our lifetimes, than what you are about to read...)
http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=IS05D01&f=PG03I03
Judicial Activism and the Constitution: Solving a Growing Crisis
by: Dr. Robert P. George
Judicial power can be used, and has been used, for both good and ill. In a basically just democratic republic, however, judicial power should never be exercised--even for desirable ends--lawlessly. Judges are not legislators. The legitimacy of their decisions, particularly those decisions that overturn legislative judgments, depends entirely on the truth of the judicial claim that the court was authorized by law to settle the matter. Where this claim is false, a judicial edict is not redeemed by its good intentions or consequences. Decisions in which the courts usurp the authority of the people are not merely incorrect, they are themselves unconstitutional. And they are unjust.
Unfortunately, such decisions are growing in number and in the range of topics they cover. A crisis is at hand, and solutions must be found.
Should courts be granted the power to invalidate legislation in the name of the Constitution? In reaction to Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion in the 1803 case Marbury v. Madison,[1] Thomas Jefferson warned that judicial review would lead to a form of despotism.[2] Notably, the power of judicial review is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. The courts themselves have claimed the power based on inferences drawn from the Constitution's identification of itself as supreme law and from the nature of the judicial office.[3] But even if we give credit to these inferences, as I am inclined to do, it must be said that early supporters of judicial review, including Marshall himself, did not imagine that the federal and state courts would claim the sweeping powers they exercise today. Jefferson and other critics were, it must be conceded, more far-seeing.
After Marbury, the power of the judiciary expanded massively. This expansion, however, began slowly. Even if Marbury could be described as telling the Congress what it could and could not do, it would be another
54 years before the Supreme Court would do it again. And it could not have chosen a worse occasion. In 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney handed down an opinion for the Court in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford.[4] That opinion declared even free blacks to be non-citizens and held that Congress was powerless to restrict slavery in the federal territories. It intensified the debate over slavery and dramatically increased the prospects for civil war.
Dred Scott was a classic case of judicial activism. With no constitutional warrant, the justices manufactured a right to hold property in slaves that the Constitution nowhere mentioned or could reasonably be read as implying. Of course, the Taney majority depicted their decision as a blow for constitutional rights and individual freedoms. They were protecting the minority (slaveholders) against the tyranny of a moralistic majority who would deprive them of their property rights. Of course, the reality was that the judges were exercising what in a later case would be called "raw judicial power"[5] to settle a debate over a divisive moral and social issue in the way they personally favored.
It took a civil war and several constitutional amendments (especially the Fourteenth Amendment) made possible by the Union victory to reverse Dred Scott.
The Dred Scott decision is a horrible blight on the judicial record. We should remember, though, that while it stands as an example of judicial activism in defiance of the Constitution, it is also possible for judges to dishonor the Constitution by refusing to act on its requirements. In the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson,[6] for example, legally sanctioned racial segregation was upheld by the Supreme Court, despite the Fourteenth Amendment's promise of equality. In Plessy, the justices announced their infamous "separate but equal" doctrine, a doctrine that was a sham from the start. Separate facilities for blacks in the South were then, and had always been, inferior in quality. Indeed, the whole point of segregation was to embody and reinforce an ideology of white supremacy that was utterly incompatible with the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Fourteenth Amendment. Maintaining a regime of systematic inequality was the object of segregation. As Justice John Harlan wrote in dissent, segregation should have been declared unlawful because the Constitution of the United States is colorblind and recognizes no castes.[7]
A half-century and more passed before the Supreme Court got around to correcting its error in Plessy in the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education.[8] In the meantime, the Court repeated the errors that had brought it to shame in the Dred Scott case. The 1905 case of Lochner v. New York[9] concerned a New York law limiting to 60 the number of hours per week that the owner of a bakery could require or permit his employees to work. Industrial bakeries are tough places to work, even now. They were tougher--a lot tougher--then. Workers risked lung disease from breathing in the flour dust and severe burns from the hot ovens, especially when they were tired and less than fully alert. The New York state legislature sought to protect workers against abuse by limiting their working hours. But the Supreme Court said no.
The justices struck down the law as an unconstitutional interference by the state in private contractual relations between employers and employees. The Court justified its action with a story similar to the one it told in Dred Scott. Again, it claimed to be protecting the minority (owners) against the tyranny of the democratic majority. It was restricting government to the sphere of public business and getting it out of private relations between competent adults, namely, owners and workers.
The truth, of course, is that the Court was substituting its own laissez-faire economics philosophy for the contrary judgment of the people of New York, who were acting through their elected representatives in the state legislature. On the controversial moral question of what constituted real freedom and what amounted to exploitation, unelected and democratically unaccountable judges, purporting to act in the name of the Constitution, simply seized decision-making power.[10] Under the pretext of preventing the majority from imposing its morality on the minority, the Court imposed its own morality on the people of New York and the nation.
Like Dred Scott, Lochner eventually fell, brought down not by civil war, but by an enormously popular president fighting a great depression. Under the pressure of Franklin Roosevelt's plan to pack the Supreme Court, the justices, in 1937, repudiated the Lochner decision and got out of the business of blocking worker protection and state and federal social welfare legislation. Indeed, the term "Lochnerizing" was invented as a label for judicial rulings that overrode democratic lawmaking authority and imposed upon society the will of unelected judges.
For many years the Court took great care to avoid the least appearance of Lochnerizing. In 1965, for example, in a case called Griswold v. Connecticut[11], the justices struck down a state law against contraceptives in the name of an unwritten "right to marital privacy." Justice William O. Douglas, who wrote the opinion, explicitly denied that he was appealing to the principle of Lochner.[12] Indeed, to avoid invoking Lochner's claim to a so-called "substantive due process" right in the Fourteenth Amendment, Douglas went so far as to say that he had discovered the right to privacy in "penumbras formed by emanations" of a panoply of Bill of Rights guarantees, including the Third Amend-ment's prohibition against the government quartering of soldiers in private homes in peacetime, and the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.
Griswold, though plainly an incidence of judicial activism, was not an unpopular decision. The Connecticut statute it invalidated was rarely enforced and the public cared little about it. Its significance was mainly symbolic, and the debate about it was symbolic. The powerful forces favoring liberalization of sexual mores in the 1960s viewed the repeal of such laws--by whatever means necessary--as essential to discrediting traditional Judeo-Christian norms about the meaning of human sexuality. But the Court was careful to avoid justifying the invalidation of the law by appealing to sexual liberation or individual rights of any kind. In Douglas's account of the matter, it was not for the sake of "sexual freedom" that the justices were striking down the law, but rather to protect the honored and valued institution of marriage from damaging intrusions by the state. Otherwise uninformed readers of the opinion might be forgiven for inferring mistakenly that the ultraliberal William O. Douglas was in fact an archconservative on issues of marriage and the family. They would certainly have been justified in predicting--wrongly, as it would turn out--that Douglas and those justices joining his opinion would never want to see the Griswold decision used to break down traditional sexual mores or to encourage non-marital sexual conduct.
A mere seven years later, however, in Eisenstadt v. Baird,[13] the Court forgot everything it had said about marriage in the Griswold decision and abruptly extended the "constitutional right" to use contraceptives to non-married persons. A year later, the justices, citing Griswold and Eisenstadt, handed down their decision legalizing abortion in Roe v. Wade. And the culture war began.
The Roe decision was pure Lochnerizing. Roe did for the cause of abortion what Lochner had done for laissez-faire economics and what Dred Scott had done for slavery. The justices intervened in a large-scale moral debate over a divisive social issue, short-circuiting the democratic process and imposing on the nation a resolution lacking any justification in the text or structure of the Constitution. Indeed, Justice Harry Blackmun, writing for the majority, abandoned Griswold's ideas of "penumbras formed by emanations" and grounded the new constitutional right to feticide in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, just where the Lochner court had claimed to discover a right to freedom of contract. Dissenting Justice Byron R. White accurately described the Court's abortion ruling as an "act of raw judicial power."
Having succeeded in establishing a national regime of abortion-on-demand by judicial fiat in Roe, the cultural left continued working through the courts to get its way on matters of social policy where there was significant popular resistance. Chief among these was the domain of sexual morality. Where state laws embodied norms associated with traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs about sex, marriage, and the family, left-wing activists groups brought litigation claiming that the laws violated Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of due process and equal protection, and First Amendment prohibitions on laws respecting an establishment of religion. The key battleground became the issue of homosexual conduct. Initially, the question was whether it could be legally prohibited as long as that prohibition came from the states. Eventually, the question became whether homosexual relationships and the sexual conduct on which such relationships are based must be accorded marital or quasi-marital status under state and federal law.
In 1986, the Supreme Court heard a challenge to Georgia's law forbidding sodomy in Bowers v. Hardwick.[14] Michael Hardwick had been observed engaging in an act of homosexual sodomy by a police officer who had lawfully entered Hardwick's home to serve a summons in an unrelated matter. Left-wing activist groups treated Hardwick's case as a chance to invalidate sodomy laws by extending the logic of the Court's "right to privacy" decisions. This time, however, they failed. In a 5-4 decision written by Justice White, the Court upheld Georgia's sodomy statute as applied to homosexual sodomy. The justices declined to rule either way on the question of heterosexual sodomy, which the majority said was not before the Court.
The Bowers decision stood until 2003, when it was reversed in Lawrence v. Texas,[15] the case that set the stage for the current cultural and political showdown over the nature and definition of marriage. In Lawrence, the Court held that state laws forbidding homosexual sodomy lacked a rational basis and were invasions of the rights of consenting adults to engage in the type of sexual relations they preferred. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy claimed that such laws insult the dignity of homosexual persons. As such, he insisted, they are constitutionally invalid under the doctrine of privacy, whose centerpiece was the Roe decision.
Kennedy went out of his way to say that the Court's ruling in Lawrence did not address the issue of same-sex marriage or whether the states and federal government were obliged to give official recognition to same-sex relationships or grant benefits to same-sex couples.[16] Writing in dissent, however, Justice Antonin Scalia said bluntly: "Do not believe it."[17] The Lawrence decision, Scalia warned, eliminated the structure of constitutional law under which it could be legitimate for lawmakers to recognize any meaningful distinctions between homosexual and heterosexual relationships.
On this point, many enthusiastic supporters of the Lawrence decision and of the cause of same-sex "marriage" agreed with Scalia. They saw the decision as having implications far beyond the invalidation of anti-sodomy laws. Noting the sweep of Kennedy's opinion, despite his insistence that the justices were not addressing the marriage issue, they viewed the decision as a virtual invitation to press for the judicial invalidation of state laws that treat marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Indeed, litigation on this subject was already going forward in the states--it had begun in Hawaii in the early 1990s when a State Supreme Court ruling invalidating the Hawaii marriage laws was overturned by a state constitutional amendment. Lawrence turned out to be a new and powerful weapon to propel the movement forward and embolden state court judges to strike down laws treating marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
The boldest of the bold were four liberal Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court justices who ruled in Goodridge v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health[18] that the commonwealth's restriction of marriage to male-female unions violated the state constitution. The state legislature requested an advisory opinion from the justices about whether a scheme of civil unions, similar to one adopted by the Vermont state legislature after a like ruling there, would suffice. The four Massachusetts justices, however, over the dissents of three other justices, said, No, civil unions will not do.[19] And so same-sex marriage was imposed on the people of Massachusetts by unelected and electorally unaccountable judges.
Clearly, the United States has endured episodes of judicial activism throughout its history. Just as clearly, incidents of judicial overreaching, much of it spurred by issues of sexual morality, are accelerating.
Here, there is a double wrong and a double loss, a crime with two victims. The first and obvious victim is the injured party in the case: the endangered worker, the unborn child or the institution of marriage itself. The second is our system of deliberative democracy. In case after case, the judiciary is chipping away at the pillars of self-rule, undermining laws and practices, from statutes outlawing abortion to public displays of the Ten Commandments, that are deeply rooted in the American tradition.
Checking the "raw power" of today's judicial activists will require both changes in judicial personnel and targeted measures designed to remedy their specific abuses. For example, there is no alternative, in my judgment, to amending the Constitution of the United States to protect marriage. The Massachusetts state legislature has made an initial move towards amending the state constitution to overturn Goodridge, but the outcome is uncertain. The process of amending the constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is lengthy and arduous (except, apparently, for the judges themselves). Even if the pro-marriage forces in Massachusetts ultimately succeed, liberal judges in other states are not far behind their colleagues on the Massachusetts bench. Hovering over the entire scene, like the sword of Damocles, is the Supreme Court of the United States, which could at any time invalidate state marriage laws across the board. You may think, They would never do that. Well, I would echo Justice Scalia: Do not believe it. They would. And if they are not preempted by a federal constitutional amendment on marriage, they will. They will, that is, unless the state courts get there first, leaving to the U.S. Supreme Court only the mopping-up job of invalidating the Defense of Marriage Act and requiring states to give "full faith and credit" to out-of-state same-sex "marriages."
My own view, however, is that we need auniform national definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Here is why: Marriage is fundamental. Marriage is the basisof the family, and it is inhealthy familiesthat children are reared to be honorable people andgood citizens. Marriage and the family are thebasic units of society; no society can flourishwhen they are undermined. Until now, a social consensus regarding thebasicdefinition of marriagemeant that we didn't needto resolve the question at the federal level.Every state recognized marriage as the exclusive union ofone man and one woman. (The federalgovernmentdid its part at one point in our history to ensure that this would remain the case by making Utah's admissionto the Union as a state conditional upon its banning polygamy.)
The breakdown of the consensus certainly does not eliminate the need for a uniform national definition. If we don't have one, then marriage will erode eitherquickly--by judicial imposition, unlessjudges are stopped--or gradually, by the integration into the formal and informal institutions of society of same-sex couples who, after all,possess legallyvalid marriage licenses from some state.[20] In the long run, it is untenable for large numbers of people to be considered married in one or some states of the United States yet unmarried in others. As Lincoln warned it would be with the evil of slavery in his time, it is inevitable that the country will go "all one way or all the other." Slavery would either be abolished everywhere or it would spread everywhere. The same is true of same-sex "marriage," in the long run--and perhaps even in the not-so-long run.
Besides addressing specific examples of judicial activism, as the Federal Marriage Amendment would do, Americans can and should work to ensure the nomination and confirmation of constitutionalist judges to our courts, especially the Supreme Court.
If personnel on the Supreme Court do change, the question follows: Is it legitimate for the Court to change its view of the law, and here, specifically, the Constitution? The legal doctrine of stare decisis--literally, to stand on what has been decided - is important and worthy of respect. That doctrine does not strictly bind, however, in cases in which a judicial decision is a gross misinterpretation of the Constitution, and especially where a decision constitutes a usurpation of the constitutional authority of the people to govern themselves through the institutions of deliberative democracy. The Supreme Court, over time, gradually backed away from its "freedom of contract" decisions and completely reversed itself in its decisions on racial segregation and the Jim Crow laws--and it was right to do so.
In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the basic holding of Roe was reaffirmed by the Court on stare decisis grounds. Three of the justices who joined the majority--all Republican appointees--called on the "contending parties" in the debate over legal abortion to end their differences and accept the Court's ruling as a "common mandate rooted in the Constitution."
This was little more than a call for one side of the argument--the pro-life side--to surrender. Having written a series of abortion rulings lacking any basis in the Constitution, the justices took it upon themselves to ask the millions of Americans who oppose their unjustified ruling simply to submit to their ukase. Of course, the American people are under no obligation to "end their differences" by capitulating to judicial usurpation. On the contrary, they have every right under the Constitution to continue to oppose Roe v. Wade and work for its reversal. When judges exercising the power of judicial review permit themselves to be guided by the text, logic, structure, and original understanding of the Constitution, they deserve our respect and, indeed, our gratitude for playing their part to make constitutional republican government a reality. But where judges usurp democratic legislative authority by imposing on the people their moral and political preferences under the guise of vindicating constitutional guarantees, they should be severely criticized and resolutely opposed.
Robert George is This paper is based substantially upon Professor George's article, "High Courts and Misdemeanors," which appeared in Touchstone magazine (www.touchstonemag.com) and upon his lecture, "Judicial Usurpation and the Constitution," which was given at the Heritage Foundation in Spring 2005. It is reprinted here with permission of both Touchstone and the Heritage Foundation.
Notes
END NOTES
1. 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137 (1803).
2. See Thomas Jefferson's criticism of claims by the judiciary of authority to bind the other branches of government in matters of constitutional interpretation ("making the judiciary a despotic branch") in his Letter to Abigail Adams, September 11, 1804, in 11 Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Albert E. Bergh ed. 1905), 311-13.
3. See Marbury v. Madison.
4. 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1856).
5. Roe v. Wade 410 U.S. 113, 222 (1973) (Justice Byron White, dissenting).
6. 163 U.S. 537 (1896).
7. Plessy v. Ferguson, 559 (Justice Harlan, dissenting).
8. 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
9. 198 U.S. 45 (1905).
10. See Lochner v. New York, 54-55 (Justice Holmes, dissenting). This is the standard reading of Lochner, shared by contemporary conservatives and liberals alike. For a powerful challenge to the standard reading, and a thoughtful defense of the majority opinion, see Hadley Arkes, "Lochner v. New York and the Cast of Our Laws," in Robert P. George (ed.), Great Cases in Constitutional Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), ch. 5.
11. 381 U.S. 479 (1965).
12. See Griswold v. Connecticut, 482.
13. 405 U.S. 438 (1972).
14. 478 U.S. 186 (1986).
15. 123 S. Ct. 2472 (2003).
16. Lawrence v. Texas, 2484.
17. Lawrence v. Texas, 2498 (Justice Scalia, dissenting).
18. 798 N.E.2d 941 (Mass. 2003).
19. Opinion of the Justices to the Senate, 802 N.E.2d 565 (2003).
20. See Christopher Wolfe, "Why the Federal Marriage Amendment is Necessary," University of San Diego Law Review (forthcoming, 2005).
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Where Was God?
This is a question posed by many of us after tragedies. I've wondered it at times? Even my wife asked me this question after reading about Saddam's genocide in Iraq. It is not an easy question to answer.
It is a question that is perhaps best answered by those who have been there. Those who have faced situations seemingly so evil, that many of us can't comprehend just how God could have been there and permitted them to happen.
The following articles were written by and about my cousin, Nick Baumgart, of Littleton Colorado. Nick was not only friends with the killers (Eric and Dylan) but also the boyfriend and prom date of Rachel Scott, one of the first massacred in the Columbine school shooting. Nick was there that day and speaks about his first hand account while attempting to answer the question…"Where was God?"
You will also find below, statements made by Rachel's father Darrell Scott in his address to the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee and other speeches given while touring together with Nick. Their statements don't call for a ban on guns, nor do they blame music, movies, or entertainment for the violence that occurred that day. Rather…they speak about God and bullying and parenting and what could have forced these two peers to turn on fellow students, including Nick himself. (http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/shooting/0811list1.shtml "... Classmate Nick Baumgart's name also appeared on a Harris list.")
http://www.cnn.com/US/9904/24/scott.funeral/
"A truer friend you couldn't find," said Nick Baumgart, who escorted Scott to the prom a week ago. "You could be having the worst day of your entire life. All she had to do was smile."
http://www.vop.com/previous_broadcasts/1999/may/99184.html
May 5, 1999
There was a heart-wrenching bit of irony in some of the newspaper stories that came out the Saturday after the Columbine shootings. A young man named Nick Baumgart shared from his heart about a girl named Rachel. Just three days before this Colorado tragedy, Nick and his date, Rachel Scott, had gone to the senior prom together. There was a picture of the two of them: he had on his tuxedo; she was wearing a formal black dress. They talked and laughed about the play she was writing, the poems. I mentioned Monday that she was an active, happy member in the Celebration Christian Fellowship Church; I'm sure her love for Jesus tinged their last conversation. And now she was dead; murdered out in the yard of the school.
But then the ironic flashback. This Nick, who sat in his tuxedo with the pretty high school senior, also remembers a recent summer. He spent most of his Colorado days that summer up in a tree house with a kid named Eric David Harris. In elementary school he played with Dylan Bennet Klebold. And now these two former friends were responsible for killing his prom date, Rachel.
And you know, we look at these side-by-side images — and it tears us up. How did friendships go so wrong? How did two boys, often described as decent and caring, end up planning and writing in diaries for almost a year about killing their former friends and classmates? They plotted for a maximum kill, a high body count.
And this takes us back to the unanswerable question: WHY? In the L.A. Times' weekend religion section, that's all there was. "Age-Old Query: Where Was God?" There weren't many coherent answers. Back when the Oklahoma City bombing happened, Ann Landers threw up her hands at the thousands of "Why's" that flooded in. "I have no answer," she confessed. Billy Graham went to that Sunday memorial service and said much the same thing: "This human race has no answers. The mystery of evil is something we don't understand."
You would think that most of the world — as it looks at the simple joy of a Saturday night prom date, and then the horrors of April 20 — would at last look up at heaven and say to God: "All right! We GET IT! We see that sin is evil and righteousness is good. We understand now that Lucifer's plan is deadly and Yours is Life eternal, Life abundant. At last we comprehend that the wages of sin are death, that violence breeds violence, that for mankind to go its own way is a slow suicide. God, at long last, why don't You COME! And rescue us all! Because after these past 6000 years, at last WE GET IT!"
Friend, I know that many times I've prayed in earnestness and almost frustration because it all seemed so clear. This is the unspoken anguish behind the Christian's "Maranatha" prayer. God, we GET it!! We're slow and spiritually stupid, but not THAT stupid. After the Holocaust and then Rwanda and then Kosovo and the Lewinsky mess and babies born with AIDS and now Columbine High School, it's painfully clear, agonizingly clear, that Satan's agenda for this world is nothing but mass suicide.
And as the world has watched this unfolding drama over the past 15 days now, there are signs that we might be slowly learning. After this shooting, the churches were filled. People stood together in their grief. People were reaching out for some shred of faith, some assurance that death was not the end, that these funerals were not the final chapter. High school seniors gathered almost spontaneously in nearby parks, by the cars of their fallen friends, to hold hands and pray.
I mentioned Monday that we wouldn't look for silver linings where perhaps there are none. But this Nick, whose treasured friend Rachel is now dead, has found some. Students at Columbine High have bonded, he says. The cliques seem to be gone now. And he adds that maybe they're gone for good. The athletes, the preps, the nerds, the invisible clubs where some kids owned BMWs, Vipers, and Humvees . . . all those lines of division have been erased in Littleton, Colorado. What some called the giant "jock-ocracy" is now gone. The meanest kid he knew in the school, who teased and bullied, spent April 20 helping other students escape from the carnage. He helped girls cross the chain-link fence; he made lists of survivors. "He was nice. He cared." And this Nick Baumgart thinks that the change is permanent. The whole city is different now, he senses. All the merchants donating money. People embracing on the street. The unity is for real.
And yet, friend, here's the reality we have to try to understand. Tragedy hit . . . and so everyone went to church. With bullets whizzing around, and dead bodies in that library, and the horror of mass funerals, the town of Littleton reached out to God on April 20, 1999. But what about on April 19 and 18 and 17 and 16? Was it clear to everyone a day BEFORE that to live in relationship with God is the best way, the only way?
Four days before the shootings, a 16-year-old girl named Sarah DeBoer was going about her Friday business at Columbine High. She exchanged pleasantries that day with both Eric and Dylan. "They both were nice," she said later. "I've known them since my freshman year. They were probably the nicest people you could ever meet." Now, after the slaughter, how were things? "I turned and saw Dylan," she says, "and he shot at me."
And the point, again, is this: do we only understand the goodness of God when the evilness of the world is thrust into our living rooms on CNN? Does the devil have to shoot right at us before we turn our eyes to heaven? And really, perhaps this is what God is waiting for. Even after Auschwitz and Bosnia and Littleton, Colorado, so few people still seek an abiding relationship with God ALL THE TIME, not just during a crisis.
For years preachers have kind of joked about, and also lamented, what they call "C & E Christians." People who show up at church just for Christmas and Easter. They don't want a daily relationship with God; they just want to say hello — and goodbye — during the two major "(quote) church holidays." And now maybe we have "C & S Christianity," which gets people to church only following crises and shootings. We only enter the house of our invisible heavenly Father when our hearts are aching from a teenager's funeral. But when the hurts fade, we return to our own lives.
In his book with the challenging title, Disappointment With God, Philip Yancey writes about how the children of Israel had what we so often seem to demand. God showed Himself to them! He was real! He was right there! He gave them all the signs and wonders. They heard His voice booming from the mountaintops. They saw His manna every morning; they drank from the rock where He provided miracle water. And yet, they seemed to really look His direction only when they were hungry. Or when the water ran out. Or when the locusts or the Philistines swooped down on them. So few of them seemed to want God ALL THE TIME. Unless there was a shooting or a tragedy, they went their own way. The relationship was unendingly shallow, marked just by the little moments of crisis connection.
And so maybe this is the silver lining from Littleton, Colorado. As people seek God NOW, during a crisis, will they STAY with Him as the crisis passes? Healing will be slow in this battle-scarred community, but it WILL come. And what then? Will the prayers in the parking lots slowly disperse as the memories fade? Will church attendance revert to normal? Or will 1,870 students — minus the 14 we have lost, plus one teacher — and their parents, and their friends, and those of us who wept by our own TV sets, learn that to seek God ALL the time is the only way to lasting wholeness?
I have a good friend, a faithful, conservative Christian, magazine editor of a prophecy journal, who reads his Bible, never smokes or drinks, and — I would think — hardly ever even darkens the door of a movie theater. Except that last summer he quietly bought a ticket to see both the Hollywood films, Deep Impact and Armageddon. Why did he break his own rule? Because he's convinced as he studies the prophecies of these end times, that God might well permit the devastation suggested in those two films — a meteor crashing into earth and killing millions — before people will truly turn to God and permanently hang onto Him.
Is he right? I don't know. But friend, I do know that God is seeking a people who will seek HIM. Not just when they hurt or when bad news comes from the sheriff's office. There were tragic moments at Columbine High School where police officers came up to parents and soberly asked them to retrieve their child's dental records. A mother's worst fears were abruptly realized. And at that moment they would seek God.
But how about the other times? How about ALL the time? And how about all of US?
In the book of Revelation we find page after page of blood-soaked sorrow. Earthquakes and famines and death. Sometimes we call these things the seven last plagues, a great tribulation — and the murders in Colorado are just a foreshadowing of what might be yet to come. People living then will have a mass crisis of faith: seeking God and not finding Him. But through it all, we read in chapter 14, there is a group. Things are bad, but they don't seek God just when things are bad. Plagues are raining down, but that's not the motivation of their love. No, it says in verse 4: "They follow the Lamb wherever He goes."
Rachel Scott had that. Nick Baumgart still does. How about each of the rest of us?
http://www.geocities.com/crisjam1/rjscott_promdate1.html
Prom date reminisce the good times spent with his friend, Rachel.
By Stepanie Simon; Los Angeles Times, April 24, 1999
He's thinking about Rachel.
Nick Baumgart has a show - me face. He's just 17, a high school senior, with adolescent acne and eyes full of promise. He likes acting and cooking and his is an eager face, a what-will-the-world-unfurl-for-me-today face.
This week, though, pains haunts it. He tugs at his lower lip a lot and he does a lot of hard swallowing. His eyes are dry but red. He hurts. He, too, is thinking of Rachel.
Rachel Scott- an actress, a musician, a poet, a kid -was 17 when she was shot dead Tuesday. Nick had taken her to the prom the Saturday before.
Nick sees her as she was last Saturday night, the only girl at the prom in a sleek, black dress. (Everyone wore pooky pastels)
He tugs at that lower lip. He sees her in the limo, talking the crazy talk that made her so fun. She had a good time pondering, he remembers now, if elephants have toes. He sees Rachel in the restaurant, the only one in his group who dared sample the pate. He looks at the photo of her, so pretty, so bright, sees her laughing as she struggled to pin on his boutonniere.
Nick sees Rachel alive, and he's hopeful. "She's' certainly not gone. She's going to be a part of us."
Nick and his friends have spent hours remembering Rachel. Joking about how she used to imitate the spitting dinosaur from "Jurassic Park". Laughing at how she would take any dare you could throw at her.
They've decided to finish the play she was writing and produce it next year at Columbine. They hope, too, to publish her notebook of poems. As a tribute to Rachel, Nick's even considering a career in acting. He's always wanted to be a chef, but he met Rachel through the drama club, and somehow sticking with acting just feels like a good way to honor her.
"In a lot of ways, she's going to keep living." Nick promises, sure in this case it's not a cliché.
Surrounded by friends from his church youth group, Nick broke down and sobbed Tuesday night when a classmate told him she had seen Rachel dead in the schoolyard. Since then though, he has tried so hard to convert his hurt into hope. Unlike many of his friends, he evens wants to go back to school- not back to Columbine, but back somewhere- to finish out the last 19 days of his senior year. He thinks that will give him closure.
His mom, Bonnie, worries he's being too much of a trooper. "There's a lot buried in there," she says.
Holding on always to that image of Rachel in her black prom dress, Nick has decided it's not constructive to be mad. Or to feel scared or even ask why. Rachel, he says, "would absolutely kick our butts if she saw us making such a big deal over her."
So he's trying to heal through positive thinking. He's concentrating now on all the good that has com from the Columbine killings.
His Exhibit A: Students have bonded.
The meanest boy Nick has ever known- a guy who trips people and laughs, who teases kids till they cry- spent the hours of the shooting helping others. He boosted girls over a chain-link fence to safety and compiled lists of everyone who had made it out. He was nice and cared. Nick is sure the transformation will last.
"When you're running through the halls fearing for your lives, it doesn't matter who's a cheerleader and who's Johnny football star." he explains. "That's all so petty. I don't think anyone in the school could go back to it now."
Nick's Exhibit B: The community has bonded.
Littleton looks like so many affluent, anonymous suburbs. Strip mall after strip mall. Tidy lawn after tidy lawn. But business owners came forward by the dozens to donate food, money, flowers, even building supplies to fix up the school.
"It's ironic, that something like this could do that."
So far, there is no Exhibit C. But Nick's working on it.
Today is Rachel's funeral.
She will be remembered by her parents, her younger brother, and her many, many friends as a girl who found much joy in life and who spread much joy around her.
Rachel wanted to be a Broadway actress. And a poet too. She was beautiful, fun, and sparkled.
The other afternoon, Nick and his friends got together again to reminisce about good times with Rachel. "We spent 2 1/2 hours without a pause and we weren't even close to done." Nick recalled, smiling.
"I'm doing OK", he said, and rubbed his lip, "I'm OK."
http://www.rachelschallenge.com/aboutrachel.php
"Rachel was the only one at prom in a black dress. Everyone else was wearing bright colors and pastels, but there she was in black. No one could have pulled it off more gracefully, and no other color would have looked better on her. She looked like a movie star arriving for the Oscars. She was like that though, never doing what everyone else was doing just because everyone else was doing it, and never being different just for the sake of being different." - Nick Baumgart Rachel's friend and prom date
http://www.imakenews.com/bermudacom/e_article000098898.cfm
Spreading Rachel's message
http://www.rachelschallenge.com/
Bermudian schoolchildren have been hearing an unusual message of kindness and compassion this week - from survivors of the horrific Columbine High School massacre. Rachel's Challenge is a national movement founded by Darrell Scott, father of Rachel Scott, one of the 12 students killed by gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Kiebold on April 20, 1999. Scott, his son Craig and survivors Nicole Mowlem and Nick Baumgart were in Bermuda this week to spread Rachel's belief that one act of kindness can spread a chain reaction. Craig even believes that had people shown more kindness to the killers, the events of that day might never have happened. A copy of Darrell Scott's book, "Chain Reaction" has been donated to Bermuda school libraries and all student have been given a Rachel's Challenge bag tag to show their support.
Darrell Scott's Message:
Darrell Scott, the father of Rachel Scott, a victim of the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colorado, was invited to address the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee.
What he said to our national leaders during this special session of Congress was painfully truthful. They were not prepared for what he was to say, nor was it received well. It needs to be heard by every parent, every teacher, every politician, every sociologist, every psychologist, and every so-called expert!
These courageous words spoken by Darrell Scott are powerful, penetrating, and deeply personal. There is no doubt that God sent this man as a voice crying in the wilderness. The following is a portion of the transcript:
"Since the dawn of creation there has been both good & evil in the hearts of men and women. We all contain the seeds of kindness or the seeds of violence. The death of my wonderful daughter, Rachel Joy Scott, and the deaths of that heroic teacher, and the other eleven children who died must not be in vain. Their blood cries out for answers."
"The first recorded act of violence was when Cain slew his brother Abel out in the field. The villain was not the club he used. Neither was it the NCA, the National Club Association. The true killer was Cain, and the reason for the murder could only be found in Cain's heart."
"In the days that followed the Columbine tragedy, I was amazed at how
quickly fingers began to be pointed at groups such as the NRA. I am not a member of the NRA. I am not a hunter. I do not even own a gun. I am not here to represent or defend the NRA - because I don't believe that they are responsible for my daughter's death. Therefore I do not believe that they need to be defended. If I believed they had anything to do with Rachel's murder I would be their strongest opponent."
"I am here today to declare that Columbine was not just a tragedy-it was a spiritual event that should be forcing us to look at where the real blame lies! Much of the blame lies here in this room. Much of the blame lies behind the pointing fingers of the accusers themselves.
"I wrote a poem just four nights ago that expresses my feelings best.
This was written way before I knew I would be speaking here today":
Your laws ignore our deepest needs,
Your words are empty air.
You've stripped away our heritage,
You've outlawed simple prayer.
Now gunshots fill our classrooms,
And precious children die.
You seek for answers everywhere,
And ask the question "Why?"
You regulate restrictive laws,
Through legislative creed.
And yet you fail to understand,
That God is what we need!
Men and women are three-part beings. We all consist of body, soul, and spirit. When we refuse to acknowledge a third part of our make-up, we create a void that allows evil, prejudice, and hatred to rush in and wreak havoc.
Spiritual presences were present within our educational systems for most of our nation's history. Many of our major colleges began as theological seminaries. This is a historical fact.
What has happened to us as a nation? We have refused to honor God, and in so doing, we open the doors to hatred and violence. And when something as terrible as Columbine's tragedy occurs - politicians immediately look for a scapegoat such as the NRA. They immediately seek to pass more restrictive laws that contribute to erode away our personal and private liberties. We do not need more restrictive laws.
"Eric and Dylan would not have been stopped by metal detectors. No amount of gun laws can stop someone who spends months planning this type of massacre.
The real villain lies within our own hearts. Political posturing and restrictive legislation are not the answers. The young people of our nation hold the key. There is a spiritual awakening taking place that will not be squelched! We do not need more religion. We do not need more gaudy television evangelists spewing out verbal religious garbage. We do not need more million dollar church buildings built while people with basic needs are being ignored. We DO need a change of heart and a humble acknowledgment that this nation was founded on the principle of simple trust in God!"
"As my son Craig lay under that table in the school library and saw his two friends murdered before his very eyes-He did not hesitate to pray in school.
I defy any law or politician to deny him that right! I challenge every young person in America, and around the world, to realize that on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School prayer was brought back to our schools. Do not let the many prayers offered by those students be in vain.
Dare to move into the new millennium with a sacred disregard for legislation that violates your God-given right to communicate with Him. To those of you who would point your finger at the NRA - I give to you a sincere challenge. Dare to examine your own heart before casting the first stone! My daughter's death will not be in vain! The young people of this country will not allow that to happen!"
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1998/schools/they.hid.it.well/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/april99/suspects042299.htm
http://cgi.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1998/schools/they.hid.it.well/
http://www.rachelscott.ca/whosrachel.html
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