Signs of Conscience

        In the United States, while public support of both abortion and the death penalty remain high enough to allow them to continue, there are definite indications of queasiness. As Richard Dieter put it in an interview on NPR in 2008, the death penalty “is being used much less than it had been. There's been a 60 percent decline in death sentences over the past seven years. About a 50 percent decline in executions, smaller death row. . . . [Why?]  There has been a series of revelations about the death penalty, about mistakes, about innocent people who were almost executed and now have been freed. Of course, the DNA revolution cemented that.”

            More recently, Newsweek of June 14, 2010 quoted William McGurn from Wall Street Journal, explaining that now more Americans are against abortion than not: “Notwithstanding a pro-choice orthodoxy that dominates our film, our television, our press and our colleges and universities, strong moral qualms about abortion have not gone away. It’s not as though we can’t change our minds. The same Gallup survey which reported that Americans regard abortion as morally wrong showed than an even larger majority regard homosexual relations as morally acceptable.” While CL takes no position on sexual issues that don’t involve violence, we offer this quotation from unlikely sources as evidence that the public's qualms on abortion relate to violence rather than to sex, and are off the conservative/liberal divide.  

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Participation – Conference Exhibits

        Tables at conferences are an excellent way to get one-to-one interaction with possible sympathizers and open-minded people. Here are some conferences this summer we’d like volunteers for; if anyone is going or lives in the vicinity and would like to staff or otherwise oversee a table, please let us know at weekly@consistent-life.org:

     Baptist Peace Fellowship, Keuka Park, NY, July 12-17

     Pax Christi, Chicago, IL, July 16-18 (already covered, but she’d like company)

     Lutherans for Life, Green Bay, WI, July 23-24

     National Peace Conference, Albany, NY, July 23-25

     Progressive Democrats of America, Cleveland, OH, July 23-25

        And of course, if you know of other conferences that would be good, let us know. These ones are all narrowly U.S. national, including neither more local conferences nor ones outside the U.S., and those are also exceedingly valuable.

        If you need quick resources to put out on a local table, we have a selection of flyers online and you can print as many as you need of whichever you find suitable. Also, products including t-shirts, buttons, and bumperstickers such as the one above are available for purchase.

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Follow-up

        The execution being opposed in last week’s story from First Things magazine did occur, and Joseph Bottum has written a scathing response to the event.

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Delving Deeper – Online Radio

     Several good shows are on the web where the consistent life ethic and related ideas are discussed in greater depth. This week’s featured is from The Liberal Bias Media Hour, a local show hosted by CL Board member Mike Garcher in Valparaiso, Indiana, when he had CL Board member Rachel MacNair on as she was visiting town for speaking engagements. They discuss the idea that killing is traumatic to those who do it and similar ideas from books she’s written.

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Quotation of the Week

Daniel Berrigan, Reflections (Amherst, Mass.), vol. 2, no. 4 (Fall 1979), 1-2.

        “I come to the abortion question by way of a long, long experience with the military and the mainline violence of the culture, expressed in war . . . So I go from the Pentagon and being arrested there, to the cancer hospital, and then I think of abortion clinics, and I see an "interlocking directorate" of death that binds the whole culture. That is, an unspoken agreement that we will solve our problems by killing people in various ways; a declaration that certain people are expendable, outside the pale.”