John McCain: Right on Life

So it took longer than I thought, but I've finally done the research about John McCain to contrast his positions on abortion with Obama's (see "Obama is Far, Far Left on Abortion"). Here's the good news for conservatives: McCain appears to be solidly pro-life.

Starting with his own website:

John McCain believes Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned, and as president he will nominate judges who understand that courts should not be in the business of legislating from the bench.

Constitutional balance would be restored by the reversal of Roe v. Wade, returning the abortion question to the individual states. The difficult issue of abortion should not be decided by judicial fiat.

However, the reversal of Roe v. Wade represents only one step in the long path toward ending abortion. Once the question is returned to the states, the fight for life will be one of courage and compassion - the courage of a pregnant mother to bring her child into the world and the compassion of civil society to meet her needs and those of her newborn baby. The pro-life movement has done tremendous work in building and reinforcing the infrastructure of civil society by strengthening faith-based, community, and neighborhood organizations that provide critical services to pregnant mothers in need. This work must continue and government must find new ways to empower and strengthen these armies of compassion. These important groups can help build the consensus necessary to end abortion at the state level. As John McCain has publicly noted, "At its core, abortion is a human tragedy. To effect meaningful change, we must engage the debate at a human level."

There's a lot more at the link, including encouraging views on adoption, marriage, and stem-cell research.

One of the reasons you may not know much about McCain's views on abortion is that many pro-life groups resent his campaign finance bill, which restricted what they could say about candidates in pre-election advertising. So they aren't solidly behind him, and they aren't out there stumping for him. Here's what National Right to Life has to say:

National Right to Life PAC strongly supports Senator John McCain for United States President and we have supported him in all of his U.S. Senate races.

Even while National Right to Life disagreed with Senator McCain on campaign finance reform, Senator McCain did not waver in his votes against abortion.

Senator John McCain has a solid voting record against abortion and has cast 31 pro-life votes since 1997.

Since pro-life groups are a little lukewarm due to the campaign finance issue, some of the best information actually came from NARAL. NARAL, which wholeheartedly endorsed Obama, considers McCain to be "solidly anti-choice" and gives him a 0% score on abortion votes in the past 6 years. If NARAL doesn't like him, that's a pretty good reason to vote for McCain right there.

One last thing--John McCain doesn't just talk the talk, he walks the walk. From a Karl Rove editorial in the Wall Street Journal (most of the article is a fellow POW, Medal of Honor winner Col. Bud Day, talking about McCain's time in Vietnam, and that's a good read too):

The stories told to me by the Days involve more than wartime valor.

For example, in 1991 Cindy McCain was visiting Mother Teresa's orphanage in Bangladesh when a dying infant was thrust into her hands. The orphanage could not provide the medical care needed to save her life, so Mrs. McCain brought the child home to America with her. She was met at the airport by her husband, who asked what all this was about.

Mrs. McCain replied that the child desperately needed surgery and years of rehabilitation. "I hope she can stay with us," she told her husband. Mr. McCain agreed. Today that child is their teenage daughter Bridget.

I was aware of this story. What I did not know, and what I learned from Doris, is that there was a second infant Mrs. McCain brought back. She ended up being adopted by a young McCain aide and his wife.

"We were called at midnight by Cindy," Wes Gullett remembers, and "five days later we met our new daughter Nicki at the L.A. airport wearing the only clothing Cindy could find on the trip back, a 7-Up T-shirt she bought in the Bangkok airport." Today, Nicki is a high school sophomore. Mr. Gullett told me, "I never saw a hospital bill" for her care.

Contrast that with Obama:

Obama said the battle for abortion rights should be fought from the offensive, instead of a simple defense of what activists have achieved thus far.

And he reiterated his opposition to the two justices appointed by Bush who sit on the Supreme Court--Roberts and Samuel Alito. Obama voted against both.

“It is important for us, obviously, not only to get a Democratic White House as well as a stronger Congress to protect these rights,” Obama said.

I have to admit I'm not thrilled with all of John McCain's policies and proposals. Like a lot of people I know, I wish he was more conservative. But at least he's got this one right. and it's a big one.

Obama is Far, Far Left on Abortion

Every pro-life voter should know about Senator Obama’s positions on abortion. The short version is that he is very, very strongly pro-choice and will fight very hard against any proposal to limit abortion in any way. But here’s some details:

From his own website:

[Obama] has been a consistent champion of reproductive choice and will make preserving women’s rights under Roe v. Wade a priority as President. He opposes any constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's decision in that case.

Obama is endorsed by NARAL. If you want to see NARAL’s summary of Obama’s stand on abortion, just follow the link. It's written from a pro-abortion viewpoint, of course, but there's still a lot of good information in there.

What about partial-birth abortion? Well, here's what Obama said last April when the Supreme Court upheld the federal partial birth abortion ban:

I strongly disagree with today's Supreme Court ruling, which dramatically departs from previous precedents safeguarding the health of pregnant women. As Justice Ginsburg emphasized in her dissenting opinion, this ruling signals an alarming willingness on the part of the conservative majority to disregard its prior rulings respecting a woman's medical concerns and the very personal decisions between a doctor and patient.

I am extremely concerned that this ruling will embolden state legislatures to enact further measures to restrict a woman's right to choose, and that the conservative Supreme Court justices will look for other opportunities to erode Roe v. Wade, which is established federal law and a matter of equal rights for women.

It actually gets worse--even if the baby survives an attempted abortion and is alive outside the womb, Obama doesn't think he or she has a right to life. As a state senator, Obama opposed a bill modeled after the federal Born Alive Infant Protection Act. Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum comments:

That bill was the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. During the partial-birth abortion debate, Congress heard testimony about babies that had survived attempted late-term abortions. Nurses testified that these preterm living, breathing babies were being thrown into medical waste bins to die or being "terminated" outside the womb. With the baby now completely separated from the mother, it was impossible to argue that the health or life of the mother was in jeopardy by giving her baby appropriate medical treatment.

The act simply prohibited the killing of a baby born alive. To address the concerns of pro-choice lawmakers, the bill included language that said nothing "shall be construed to affirm, deny, expand or contract any legal status or legal right" of the baby. In other words, the bill wasn't intruding on Roe v. Wade.

Who would oppose a bill that said you couldn't kill a baby who was born? Not Kennedy, Boxer or Hillary Rodham Clinton. Not even the hard-core National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). Obama, however, is another story. The year after the Born Alive Infants Protection Act became federal law in 2002, identical language was considered in a committee of the Illinois Senate. It was defeated with the committee's chairman, Obama, leading the opposition.

Let's be clear about what Obama did, once in 2003 and twice before that. He effectively voted for infanticide. He voted to allow doctors to deny medically appropriate treatment or, worse yet, actively kill a completely delivered living baby.

Arguably, one of the ways in which a president can most influence the abortion issue is through the appointment of Supreme Court Justices and lower court judges. It’s quite likely that the next president will appoint 3 or 4 justices to the Supreme Court--and possibly even as many as 6. So, what kind of justices would Obama appoint? Here’s an excerpt from an article by Jennifer Rubin--the first paragraph is Obama himself speaking, the second is some analysis from the article:

Now there’s going to be those 5 percent of cases or 1 percent of cases where the law isn’t clear. And the judge then has to bring in his or her own perspectives, his ethics, his or her moral bearings. And in those
circumstances, what I do want is a judge who is sympathetic enough to those who are on the outside, those who are vulnerable, those who are powerless, those who can’t have access to political power and as a consequence can’t protect themselves from being -- from being dealt with sometimes unfairly. That the courts become a refuge for justice. That’s been its historic role. That was its role in Brown v. Board of Education.

Steven Calabresi, professor of law at Northwestern University and co-founder of the Federalist Society (who also serves on John McCain’s legal advisory committee), says “I think it means he has completely the wrong idea of what a judge is supposed to do.” He notes that since the first Congress all judges have taken an oath to “do equal justice unto the rich and the poor,” but, by asking judges in essence to side with the less well off, Obama is “calling on judges to disregard this.”

If you’re a pro-life conservative, you probably think that unborn children are exactly the kind of vulnerable, powerless people a judge should protect--but you also recognize that the sort of liberal judge being described here doesn’t think that unborn children, even those old enough to survive outside the womb, are people.

By now you should be getting the idea that Obama is, as columnist Amanda Carpenter put it, “more pro-choice than NARAL.” So just one final quote, from an article about an Obama campaign stop during the Pennsylvania primary:

And now Obama has oddly claimed that he would not want his daughters to be "punished with a baby" because of a crisis pregnancy -- hardly a welcoming attitude toward new life.

Granted, virtually no one wants their child to experience a teenage pregnancy. But the phrase “punished with a baby” seems to me to betray a rather negative view of the miracle of life.

Check back in a couple of days for a look at John McCain's pro-life record.

California Court overstepped boundaries with redefinition of marriage

The decision by the California Supreme Court last Thursday was another example of judicial tyranny. As the Dissenting Opinion states, the question of whether marriage should be redefined should not be within the bounds of the court’s jurisdiction. This matter was already decided by the citizens of California back in 2000 when they passed Proposition 22 which codified into law that marriage is a union between a man and a woman. The will of the people was therefore usurped by judicial fiat.

Most likely, the decision will be stayed pending the ballot initiative this November, which aims to amend the State Constitution by explicitly stating that marriage is between one man and one woman. If passed, this amendment will protect the will of the people regarding the definition of marriage from further attacks from the state's judicial branch.

Court Rules No Same-Sex Benefits in Michigan

-- Citizenlink.org