Tell Congress: Remove Abortion Funding & Mandates from Needed Health Care Reform
Congress is preparing to debate health care reform legislation on the House and Senate floors. Genuine health care reform should protect the life and dignity of all people from the moment of conception until natural death. The U.S. bishops’ conference has concluded that all committee-approved bills are seriously deficient on the issues of abortion and conscience, and do not provide adequate access to health care for immigrants and the poor. The bills will have to change or the bishops have pledged to oppose them.
Our nation is at a crossroads. Policies adopted in health care reform will have an impact for good or ill for years to come. None of the bills retains longstanding current policies against abortion funding or abortion coverage mandates, and none fully protects conscience rights in health care. As the U.S. bishops’ letter of October 8 states:
“No one should be required to pay for or participate in abortion. It is essential that the legislation clearly apply to this new program longstanding and widely supported federal restrictions on abortion funding and mandates, and protections for rights of conscience. No current bill meets this test.... If acceptable language in these areas cannot be found, we will have to oppose the health care bill vigorously.”
For the full text of this letter and more information on proposed legislation and the bishops’ advocacy for authentic health care reform, visit: www.usccb.org/healthcare.
Congressional leaders are attempting to put together final bills for floor consideration. Please contact your Representative and Senators today and urge them to fix these bills with the pro-life amendments noted below. Otherwise much needed health care reform will have to be opposed. Health care reform should be about saving lives, not destroying them.
ACTION: Contact Members through e-mail, phone calls or FAX letters.
- To send a pre-written, instant e-mail to Congress go to www.usccb.org/action.
- Call the U.S. Capitol switchboard at: 202-224-3121, or call your Members’ local offices.
- Full contact info can be found on Members’ web sites at www.house.gov & www.senate.gov.
MESSAGE to SENATE:
“During floor debate on the health care reform bill, please support an amendment to
incorporate longstanding policies against abortion funding and in favor of conscience rights. If these serious concerns are not addressed, the final bill should be opposed.”MESSAGE to HOUSE:
“Please support the Stupak Amendment that addresses essential pro-life concerns on abortion funding and conscience rights in the health care reform bill. Help ensure that the Rule for the bill allows a vote on this amendment. If these serious concerns are not addressed, the final bill should be opposed.”WHEN: Both House and Senate are preparing for floor votes now.
Act today! Thank you!
The Stupak Amendment, proposed by Michigan Democrat, Rep. Bart Stupak, would prevent taxpayer dollars from funding abortions.
Hat tip: Common Sense Regained & American Papist.
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Now, please write to one of your Congress Critters. Get your thoughts on paper and into your mailbox. Repeat until the knot goes out of your stomach. After all, writing another letter or two won't kill you, but single payer might.
A Not-So-Brief History of the Government Care Debate in Blog Posts:
Suppose you are tried for a crime. If you are acquitted, by law you cannot be charged with that same crime again. The law that protects you from being hounded by the government with repeated trials for the same offense is the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which says, among other things:nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.To the Framers of the Constitution, the fairness of this law seemed obvious. Legal systems since the Code of Hammurabi had guaranteed people found innocent by a Court the right not to have their judgment of innocence changed to a judgment of guilty.
October 28, 12:27 PM
Today, President Obama signed into law a bill that will dramatically expand the federal hate crimes law, enabling prosecutors to bring federal charges against many more people who were previously found innocent of hate crimes in state court. The hate-crimes provisions were added to a defense appropriations bill, which the President signed in a White House signing ceremony this afternoon.[snip]
The hate-crimes bill was opposed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for allowing the reprosecution in federal court of people found innocent in state court. The Commission called the new law a "menace to civil liberties" because it is an end-run around constitutional double-jeopardy protections.
As explained earlier, the bill’s sponsors seek to use it to reprosecute people in federal court who have already been found innocent of hate crimes in state court, taking advantage of the “dual sovereignty” loophole in constitutional protections against double jeopardy. Civil libertarians like Nat Hentoff and Wendy Kaminer thus object to the bill on double-jeopardy grounds. Backers of the bill, like the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Commissioner Michael Yaki, supported the bill partly as a way of prosecuting all over again people who were either found not guilty, or who were convicted only of ordinary crimes, while being acquitted of hate-crimes (like the teenagers acquitted of hate crimes in the Shenandoah incident, and the California case of Joseph Silva and George Silva).
Such re-prosecutions can be an enormous waste of money, and grossly unfair to the people who are reprosecuted, driving them into bankruptcy to pay lawyers to represent them all over again when they have already been found innocent in state court after an expensive trial. When the government re-prosecutes someone, it gains an enormous tactical advantage over the defendant from using the prior prosecution as a test-run, even if the defendant is innocent — making a guilty verdict possible even if the defendant is in fact innocent.
The bill also raises serious constitutional federalism issues under the Supreme Court’s Morrison decision.
[snip]
Many supporters of the hate crimes bill want to allow those found innocent to be reprosecuted in federal court. As one supporter put it, “the federal hate crimes bill serves as a vital safety valve in case a state hate-crimes prosecution fails.” The claim that the justice system has “failed” when a jury returns a not-guilty verdict is truly scary and contrary to the constitutional presumption of innocence and the right to trial by jury.
[snip]
Supporters of the hate crimes bill also see it as a way to prosecute people even in cases where the evidence is so weak that state prosecutors have decided not to prosecute. Attorney General Eric Holder has pushed for the hate crimes bill as a way to prosecute people whom state prosecutors refuse to prosecute because of a lack of evidence. To justify broadening federal hate-crimes law, he cited three examples where state prosecutors refused to prosecute, citing a lack of evidence. In each, a federal jury acquitted the accused, finding them not guilty.
As law professor Gail Heriot notes, “Some have even called for federal prosecution of the Duke University lacrosse team members–despite strong evidence of their innocence.” Advocates of a broader federal hate-crimes law have pointed to the Duke lacrosse case as an example of where federal prosecutors should have stepped in and prosecuted the accused players — even though the state prosecution in that case was dropped because the defendants were actually innocent, as North Carolina’s attorney general conceded (and DNA evidence showed), and were falsely accused of rape by a woman with a history of violence (including trying to run over someone with her car) and making false accusations.
The new hate-crime legislation adds new identifying characteristics to the specially protected, more-equal-than-others list. A crime against someone having one or more of these characteristics is subject to prosecution by both state and federal governments. If a state doesn't do a good enough job of proving guilt, well, that's what Big Government is for.
Back in 1959, Justice Hugo L. Black dissented to the Supreme Court majority ruling in Bartkus v. Illinois, the decision that made possible yesterday's enactment of double jeopardy for hate crimes. Justice Black observed, "Fear and abhorrence of governmental power to try people twice for the same conduct is one of the oldest ideas in Western civilization."
Some 12 years earlier, in 1947, Black, a former Democrat senator, wrote what he considered to be his "most significant opinion," in Adamson v. California:
I cannot consider the Bill of Rights to be an outworn 18th century 'strait jacket.' ... Its provisions may be thought outdated abstractions by some. And it is true that they were designed to meet ancient evils. But they are the same kind of human evils that have emerged from century to century wherever excessive power is sought by the few at the expense of the many. In my judgment the people of no nation can lose their liberty so long as a Bill of Rights like ours survives and its basic purposes are conscientiously interpreted, enforced, and respected... I would follow what I believe was the original intention of the Fourteenth Amendment - to extend to all the people the complete protection of the Bill of Rights. To hold that this Court can determine what, if any, provisions of the Bill of Rights will be enforced, and if so to what degree, is to frustrate the great design of a written Constitution.
A Democrat strict constructionist. How times have changed.
Hat tip: Ann Coulter
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I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable Service we render to him is doing good to his other Children. That the soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with Justice in another Life respecting its Conduct in this.
~Benjamin Franklin, March 9, 1790, Letter to Ezra Stiles, president of Yale
Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee voted to pass an amendment offered by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) that will make ACORN eligible to play a role in setting regulations for financial institutions.The idea is to "protect" certain financial "consumers" via a brand-new federal agency, Obama's Consumer Financial Protection Agency, the CFPA. The CFPA will have an Oversight Board, and that's not to provide oversight of the agency, which would be my first choice.
The Waters amendment adds to the CFPA Oversight Board 5 representatives from the fields of "consumer protection, fair lending and civil rights, representatives of depository institutions that primarily serve underserved communities, or representatives of communities that have been significantly impacted by higher-priced mortgages" to join Federal banking regulators in advising the Director on the consistency of proposed regulations, and strategies and policies that the Director should undertake to enforce its rules.Wait a second. Aren't these the very "financial consumers" who drove America into a housing crisis by forcing banks to loan to unqualified buyers? And wasn't ACORN, with its 300+ affiliates (including two political parties) the head muckety muck of all community organizations, even getting their legal advice from the Community-Organizer's-Lawyer-in-Chief, before he became president of the country that his pastor of 20 years thought should be damned by God? Those people?
By making representatives of ACORN and other consumer activist organizations eligible to serve on the Oversight Board, the amendment creates a potentially enormous government sanctioned conflict of interest. ACORN-type organizations will have an advisory role on regulating the very financial institutions from which they receive millions of dollars annually in direct corporate contributions and benefit from other financial partnerships and arrangements. These are the same organizations that pressured banks to make subprime mortgage loans and thus bear a major responsibility for the collapse of the housing market.And, we cannot easily forget, the government now effectively owns controlling interests of some of the largest financial institutions in the world. Meaning that ACORN would be controlling those banks.
In light of recent evidence linking ACORN to possible criminal activity, Democrats took an unprecedented step today to give ACORN a potential role alongside bank regulators in overseeing financial institutions. This is contrary to recent actions taken by the Senate and House to block federal funds to ACORN.
A recent inquiry into bank funding of ACORN activities by three House Committees found that institutions that would be regulated by the CFPA have provided millions of dollars to the organization in the form of direct donations, lines of credit, cash, and other assets over the last 15 years.The Bad Guys who voted Aye (besides Madam Waters):
The Waters amendment passed on a vote of 35-33.
Frank (no surprise), Kanjorski, Maloney, Gutierrez, Velazquez, Watt, Ackerman, Sherman, Meeks, Moore of KS, Capuano, Hinojasa, Clay, McCarthy, Baca, Lynch, Scott, Green, Cleaver, Moore of WI, Hodes, Ellison,Klein, Wilson, Perlmutter, Donnelly, Foster, Carson, Speier, Childers, Minnick, Adler, Kilroy, Driehaus, Kosmas, Grayson, Himes, Peters, Maffei. Click here to see the Voting Record for the Waters Amendment (006) with your own eyes.Nice Deb has been spreading the word. Thank you, Nice Deb.
It's simple really. Not long ago Thomas Sowell expanded on an observation made by two Russian economists that hit the nail on the head.
From Investor's Business Daily:
Case in point: a relatively modest 5% increase in the demand for U.S. housing led to a huge increase in financial suffering across America, thus:Nikolai Shmelev and Vladimir Popov said: "Everything is interconnected in the world of prices, so that the smallest change in one element is passed along the chain to millions of others."
What does that mean? It means that a huge increase in the demand for ice cream can mean higher prices for catcher's mitts, among other things.
When more cows are needed to produce more milk to make ice cream, then fewer cows will be slaughtered and that means less cowhide available to make baseball gloves. Supply and demand mean that catcher's mitts are going to cost more.
[snip]
If everything is connected to everything else in a market economy, then it makes no sense to have laws and policies that declare some given goal to be a "good thing," without regard to the repercussions, which spread out in all directions like waves across a pond when you drop a rock in the water.
Our current economic meltdown results from the federal government, under both Democrats and Republicans, declaring homeownership to be a "good thing" and treating the percentage of families who own their own home as if it was some sort of magic number that had to be kept growing — without regard to the repercussions on other things.
We are now living with those repercussions, which include the worst unemployment in decades. That is the price we are paying for increasing homeownership from 64% to 69%.
How did we get from homeownership to 15 million unemployed Americans? By ignoring the fact that there was a reason why only 64% of families owned their own home. More people would have liked to be homeowners but did not qualify under mortgage-lending standards that had been in place for decades.
Politicians to the rescue: Federal regulatory agencies leaned on banks to lend to people they were not lending to before — or else. The "or else" included not having their business decisions approved by the regulators, which could cost them more money than making risky loans.
Mortgage lending standards were lowered in order to raise the magic number of homeownership. But with lower lending standards there were — surprise! — more mortgage payment delinquencies, defaults and foreclosures.
This was a problem not only for banks and other lenders, but also for those in the business of buying mortgages from the original lenders. These included semi-government enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as Wall Street firms that bought mortgages, bundled them together and issued securities based on the anticipated income from those mortgages.
In other words, all these economic transactions were "interconnected," as the Russian economists would say. And when the people who owed money on their mortgages stopped paying, the whole house of cards began to fall.
Now our ACORN-saluting Congress have declared government-run health care for all to be a "good thing" and are treating the tax burden of providing "health care" to every person who resides in--or enters--the United States as some sort of magic number that must be kept growing — without regard to the repercussions on other things.
Meanwhile, state tax receipts are showing the steepest decline on record, one in 10 Americans (9.8%) is out of work, one in 2 (54%) of Americans under the age of 24 is totally unemployed and will continue to be unemployed because job openings for everyone--in all regions of the country--are decreasing, the dollar keeps depreciating, and our national debt has now grown to exceed $516 thousand per U.S. household, whether or not anyone in that household pays taxes.
The philosopher/historian Will Durant once observed that "civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos." If that observation is correct, then we'd best get busy protecting and expanding the remnants of our liberty, because chaos will not be a happy place.
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Many of the questionable ballots were filed under the names of students and people who live in government-subsidized housing and other downtown areas. Still others were submitted on behalf of voters who were alleged to have signed the ballots earlier this month, but those people have not lived in New York state for at least a year, records show. [From the Times Union via Moonbattery at The News Factor.]
The object of the fraud: to ensure that the WFP got on the line in Rensselaer County voting booths this coming November 3 in order to "tip" the election to the Democrats. (Working Family Party votes would have been added to Democrat votes.) According to the lawyer of one of the candidates, "the fraud was carried out by 'individuals associated and working with the Democratic candidates ... they are working to get the WFP lines for their candidates in the general election.'"
Documents at the county Board of Elections show the fraudulent ballots were handled by or prepared on behalf of various elected officials and leaders and operatives for the Democratic and Working Families parties. [From the Times Union via Moonbattery at The News Factor.]ACORN is getting their hooks into all kinds of politicians in New York State these days.
Remember the handful of Senators who voted to keep funding ACORN even after the Giles/O'Keefe videos captured ACORN Housing staff members helping a young man and woman set up a child prostitution business? One of those was Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat/Working Families Party candidate who masqueraded as a conservative until she got her Senate seat and then, overnight, morphed into one of the 20 most liberal politicians in the U.S. Senate. ACORN told her which side of her bread holds the butter: more than half of the people who handed her a margin of victory pulled the lever for Gillibrand on the WFP line, the same line that WFP was entering fraudulent ballots to the Rensselear County Election Board to procure.
We know that the free market is nonsense. We know that the whole point is to game the system, to beat the market, or at least find someone who will pay you a lot of money because they're convinced that there is a free lunch. We know this is largely about power, that it's an adults only, no limit game. We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun. And we get it that if you want a friend, you should get a dog.Yes, there's video:
James Madison, the Father of the U.S. Constitution had a few words to say about power, too:The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny" (1788, Federalist No. 48).__________
Hold onto your socks. If you are not made of iron, prepare to weep. Presented here, Lord Christopher Monckton's full address on global warming lies, global warming lying liars, and Obama's plan to cede U.S. sovereignty to a new world government via the Treaty of Copenhagen, thanks to the global warming lies of lying liars.
Here's a video of Lord Monckton delivering those remarks (hat tip to Nice Deb):The Minnesota Free Market Institute hosted an event at Bethel University in St. Paul on Wednesday evening. Keynote speaker Lord Christopher Monckton, former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, gave a scathing and lengthy presentation, complete with detailed charts, graphs, facts, and figures which culminated in the utter decimation of both the pop culture concept of global warming and the credible threat of any significant anthropomorphic climate change.
A detailed summary of Monckton’s presentation will be available here once compiled. However, a segment of his remarks justify immediate publication. If credible, the concern Monckton speaks to may well prove the single most important issue facing the American nation, bigger than health care, bigger than cap and trade, and worth every citizen’s focused attention.
Here were Monckton’s closing remarks, as dictated from my audio recording:
Lord Monckton received a standing ovation and took a series of questions from members of the audience. Among those questions were these relevent to the forthcoming Copenhagen treaty:At [the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in] Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regime from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.
I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfication of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it – Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize [winner]; of course he’ll sign it.
[laughter]
And the trouble is this; if that treaty is signed, if your Constitution says that it takes precedence over your Constitution (sic), and you can’t resign from that treaty unless you get agreement from all the other state parties – And because you’ll be the biggest paying country, they’re not going to let you out of it.
So, thank you, America. You were the beacon of freedom to the world. It is a privilege merely to stand on this soil of freedom while it is still free. But, in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy, and your humanity away forever. And neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect will have any power whatsoever to take it back. That is how serious it is. I’ve read the treaty. I’ve seen this stuff about [world] government and climate debt and enforcement. They are going to do this to you whether you like it or not.
But I think it is here, here in your great nation, which I so love and I so admire – it is here that perhaps, at this eleventh hour, at the fifty-ninth minute and fifty-ninth second, you will rise up and you will stop your president from signing that dreadful treaty, that purposeless treaty. For there is no problem with climate and, even if there were, an economic treaty does nothing to [help] it.
So I end by saying to you the words that Winston Churchill addressed to your president in the darkest hour before the dawn of freedom in the Second World War. He quoted from your great poet Longfellow:
Sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!Question: The current administration and the Democratic majority in Congress has shown little regard for the will of the people. They’re trying to pass a serious government agenda, and serious taxation and burdens on future generations. And there seems to be little to stop them. How do you propose we stop Obama from doing this, because I see no way to stop him from signing anything in Copenhagen. I believe that’s his agenda and he’ll do it.Regardless of whether global warming is taking place or caused to any degree by human activity, we do not want a global government empowered to tax Americans without elected representation or anything analogous to constitutional protections. The Founding Fathers would roll over in their graves if they knew their progeny allowed a foreign power such authority, effectively undoing their every effort in an act of Anti-American Revolution. If that is our imminent course, we need to put all else on hold and focus on stopping it. If American sovereignty is ceded, all other debate is irrelevant.
I don’t minimize the difficulty. But on this subject – I don’t really do politics, because it’s not right. In the end, your politics is for you. The correct procedure is for you to get onto your representatives, both in the US Senate where the bill has yet to go through (you can try and stop that) and in [the House], and get them to demand their right of audience (which they all have) with the president and tell him about this treaty. There are many very powerful people in this room, wealthy people, influential people. Get onto the media, tell them about this treaty. If they go to www.wattsupwiththat.com, they will find (if they look carefully enough) a copy of that treaty, because I arranged for it to be posted there not so long ago. Let them read it, and let the press tell the people that their democracy is about to be taken away for no good purpose, at least [with] no scientific basis [in reference to climate change]. Tell the press to say this. Tell the press to say that, even if there is a problem [with climate change], you don’t want your democracy taken away. It really is as simple as that.
Question: Is it really irrevocable if that treaty is signed? Suppose it’s signed by someone who does not have the authority, as I – I have some, a high degree of skepticism that we do have a valid president there because I -
I know at least one judge who shares your opinion, sir, yes.
I don’t believe it until I see it. … Would [Obama's potential illegitimacy as president] give us a reasonable cause to nullify whatever treaty that he does sign as president?
I would be very careful not to rely on things like that. Although there is a certain amount of doubt whether or not he was born in Hawaii, my fear is it would be very difficult to prove he wasn’t born in Hawaii and therefore we might not be able to get anywhere with that. Besides, once he’s signed that treaty, whether or not he signed it validly, once he’s signed it and ratified it – your Senate ratifies it – you’re bound by it. But I will say one thing; they know, in the White House, that they won’t be able to get the 67 votes in the Senate, the two-thirds majority that your Constitution has stipulated must be achieved in order to ratify a treaty of this kind. However, what they’ve worked out is this – and they actually let it slip during the election campaign, which is how I know about it. They plan to enact that Copenhagen treaty into legislation by a simple majority of both houses. That they can do. But the virtue of that – and here you have a point – is that is, thank God, reversible. So I want you to pray tonight, and pray hard for your Senate that they utterly refuse to ratify the [new] Treaty of Copenhagen, because if they refuse to ratify it and [Obama] has to push it through as domestic legislation, you can repeal it.
Edited to add @ 8:31 am:
Skimming through the treaty, I came across verification of Monckton’s assessment of the new entity’s purpose:38. The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism, and the basic organization of which will include the following:
World Government (heading added)
(a) The government will be ruled by the COP with the support of a new subsidiary body on adaptation, and of an Executive Board responsible for the management of the new funds and the related facilitative processes and bodies. The current Convention secretariat will operate as such, as appropriate.
To Redistribute Wealth (heading added)
b) The Convention’s financial mechanism will include a multilateral climate change fund including five windows: (a) an Adaptation window, (b) a Compensation window, to address loss and damage from climate change impacts [read: the "climate debt" Monckton refers to], including insurance, rehabilitation and compensatory components, © a Technology window; (d) a Mitigation window; and (e) a REDD window, to support a multi-phases process for positive forest incentives relating to REDD actions.
With Enforcement Authority (heading added)
© The Convention’s facilitative mechanism will include: (a) work programmes for adaptation and mitigation; (b) a long-term REDD process; © a short-term technology action plan; (d) an expert group on adaptation established by the subsidiary body on adaptation, and expert groups on mitigation, technologies and on monitoring, reporting and verification; and (e) an international registry for the monitoring, reporting and verification of compliance of emission reduction commitments, and the transfer of technical and financial resources from developed countries to developing countries. The secretariat will provide technical and administrative support, including a new centre for information exchange [read; enforcement].
Regular readers of this blog know that I've been following the case of Maryam Rustampoor and Marzieh Amirizadeh, two Iranian Christians imprisoned in notorious Evin Prison.The testimony of these two Christians continues to spread across the world. Their unwavering faith has challenged countless believers. Because of Maryam and Marzieh’s example, many Iranian Christians have become even more courageous as they follow Jesus in a hostile environment.
Maryam and Marzieh are aware that Christians all over the world are praying for them. They are encouraged to realize they have not been forgotten, and they have a message for you:
“Thank you for praying for us. We are humbled and strengthened by your prayers and we are determined to remain faithful to Jesus even unto death.”
Our liberties as Americans rest on the fundamental freedoms of religion and conscience, freedoms that we must preserve and protect. The fact that Maryam and Marzieh are enduring imprisonment and facing capital punishment for the mere act of practicing Christianity begins to explain the seriousness with which we must view the fears of teenager Rifqa Bary, another former Muslim who converted to Christianity and whose fate is in the hands of a different pair of judges, not in Iran, but in Florida and Ohio, where we can easily make our voices heard.
Perhaps you are curious, as I was, about the location and audience of Dunn's speech. She clearly is speaking from a pulpit. In this video, I discovered, she was addressing the 2009 high school graduating class of St. Andrew's Episcopal School at the Washington National Cathedral.TEL AVIV – President Obama's newly confirmed regulatory czar defended the possibility of removing organs from terminally ill patients without their permission.Cass Sunstein also has strongly pushed for the removal of organs from deceased individuals who did not explicitly consent to becoming organ donors.
In his 2008 book, "Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness," Sunstein and co-author Richard Thaler discussed multiple legal scenarios regarding organ donation. One possibility presented in the book, termed by Sunstein as "routine removal," posits that "the state owns the rights to body parts of people who are dead or in certain hopeless conditions, and it can remove their organs without asking anyone's permission."
"Though it may sound grotesque, routine removal is not impossible to defend," wrote Sunstein. "In theory, it would save lives, and it would do so without intruding on anyone who has any prospect for life."
Note: In case you are wondering where these wacky ideas come from, wonder no more. At the risk of losing friends, I will point out that Sunstein is a 1978 magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School and is now that school's Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law (on leave). For 27 years, Sunstein taught at the University of Chicago Law School, where he continues to teach as the Harry Kalven Visiting Professor. Another constitutional law product of Harvard Law School and former lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School is none other than Barack Obama.
