Here’s an Idea to Prevent Use of Chemical Weapons: Don’t Have Them
 
         The United States and most other countries signed the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention which called for destroying them by 2012. If there were no arguments and they had destroyed them all, then the lack of availability from those sources would present a severe obstacle to those heartless enough to use them.  The U.S. has indeed destroyed around 90%, but the remaining 10% of a huge amount is still a large amount. Intense and well-documented use of the weapons by the U.S. includes napalm and white phosphorus and Agent Orange. The first use of chemical weapons in the Mideast in the modern era was when the British used it against Iraqis in 1920.Stephen Zunes (co-editor of our book Consistently Opposing Killing) documents the problem in an article entitled “The U.S. and Chemical Weapons: No Leg to Stand On.”
         The case that the use of such weapons is intolerable is best made by governments who show they mean it by not having any on hand themselves.
 

 

 

Pullitzer Prize-winning photo, children running from napalm in Vietnam

 

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More Resources about Syria
 
        In addition to some of the comments we linked to last week, we have
 
·         a letter of 41 Faith Leaders to Congress; CL Endorsers signing include Bill Scheurer and Marie Dennis, and CL member groups on the list are Evangelicals for Social Action, Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, Sisters of Mercy, and Sojourners
 
·         CL Endorser Jim Wallis comments in a blog of CL member group Sojourners.
 

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The Outrage of Adoption Audits
 
        Adoption is clearly a life-affirming nonviolent alternative to abortion; we haven’t discussed it much mainly because there are so many families not only eager but desperate to adopt, at least in developed countries, that it hasn’t required much comment. Unfortunately, it’s common among those who propose violence that they will defend it by attacking the nonviolent alternatives.
         The United States tax-collecting agency, the IRS, has taken the tax credit that the U.S. Congress provided to ease the financial burden and turned it on its head: while the average rate for audits is about 1% or so, for 2011 it was 69% of those who applied for the adoption tax credit. There are also intolerable delays in getting it to families that were relying on it.
        So, did the IRS turn up anything? Fraud on the adoption credit: zero cases. They did find adjustments to the overall tax in 17% of these cases; the rate for all audits around the same time is 86%. Selecting this group of people was highly inefficient. That didn’t stop it from happening again the next year.
  

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Quotation of the Week
James R. Kelly
“Finding Renewal: Why the pro-life movement should return to its roots”
America Magazine, February 16, 2009.
 
        The fundamental insight, that objections to abortion and objections to war are rooted in the same moral principles, was present at the very beginning of the modern anti-abortion movement. In 1964, almost a decade before Roe v. Wade, Tom Cornell, one of the founders of the Catholic Peace Fellowship, said that it was pacifism that brought him to protest both the Vietnam War and abortion. “Catholic pacifists,” he explained, “are opposed to war because it is the planned, mass taking of human life for political purposes... [and] we are opposed to abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, and economically enforced starvation also, on the same basis.”