New Stanek WND.com column, “GOP establishment vs. tea party on abortion”
UPDATE 9/16 1:55p: SBA List just issued a press release that in conjunction with a few other organizations it has just delivered 20k signatures calling on the GOP leadership to include a “separate family values plank with a pro-life emphasis in the upcoming GOP legislative blueprint.” Excellent!
UPDATE 9/15, 2:10p: The Washington Times has a good op ed on this topic entitled, “Social conservatives stay in the fray.”
Also, the Susan B. Anthony List is collecting petition signatures, hoping to get to 10k by the end of the day, telling Republican leaders to include the Life issue in their legislation blueprint. Please sign.
9/15, 7:25a:
Two conservative GOP leaders with presidential aspirations, Mitch Daniels and Haley Barbour, both recently stated they think the GOP should ignore social issues in lieu of fiscal issues.Some think such chatter is a concerted effort emanating from establishment Republicans anxious to win over/hold on to independents heading into the 2010 and 2012 elections.
Indeed, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that the much-touted GOP book released that same day, “Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders,” is “a manifesto of fiscal conservatism” that “avoids the hot-button social issues, including abortion and gay rights, which have been featured in previous GOP campaigns.”
In addition, the Republican National Coalition for Life reports that the Republican’s upcoming 2010 version of the “Contract with America” currently excludes any mention of Life issues whatsoever. RNC4L writes that pro-life stalwart Rep. Steve King is battling for the GOP to include at a a minimum a pledge to defund Planned Parenthood, the United States’ largest abortion provider.
I get really, really tired of the constant, senseless battle with Republicans to uphold the sanctity of human life….
Continue reading my column today, “GOP establishment vs. tea party on abortion,” at WorldNetDaily.com.
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
Jill, it is a HUGE LEAP from becoming a party that wants to end abortion and becoming a party that will just work to end taxpayer funding of it. Huge. We have to fight to keep the pro-life plank in the party platform. We have to have laws ending abortion. That is what this fight is about for me and why I am not supporting Rand Paul in Kentucky. Paul is anti-Fourteenth Amendment and if people with that ideology take over the Republican Party, we will no longer have a party that defends life. Paul and his libertarian friends claim to be pro-life, but it is not pro-life to be opposed to the Fourteenth Amendment. Any time they put fiscal issues over social issues, they are abandoning us. It is NOT OKAY for pro-lifers to allow them to dominate the debate with talk of fiscal issues. Maybe those who are saying we have to fix the economy first would do well to consider that if the country hadn’t accepted abortion, America might not be in this fiscal mess.
Life is so sacred we have many battles to fight. Such as the pornography issue. And the prostitution issue. And we need to figure out the rape issue. Oh, and the school-teacher pedophilia issue. Then maybe we can fight the ABORTION ISSUE.
We scratch our heads wondering why GOP leaders talk about prioritizing the issues? I’m fed up with lawmakers, pro-life leaders, and columnists labeling the tearing apart the child in the womb as an issue. Get your act together!
While this is disappointing to me, it isn’t surprising. The Democrats are not the only party that is out-of-touch with America, they’re just the party that’s the most egregiously so, and the Republicans have been pretending this isn’t the case. Rush Limbaugh has been ranting for at least the past two days that the Tea Party movement isn’t going in lockstep with the Republican party. Which any Tea Partier could have told him and the Republicans wouldn’t happen if they had cared to ask. The Tea Party never existed to serve the Republicans, and they’re idiots if they ever thought that it did.
But if the Republicans think they can hijack this political anger being displayed in movements like the Tea Party to suit their own agenda (rather than changing their agenda to reflect what’s important to the people, which is how politics is supposed to work), they’re going to leave America with no party to turn to. If the Democrats will not fight for what the people want, and the Republicans will not fight for what the people want, the people will find a way to fight for what they want themselves. This steam has to be released somewhere.
Dropping abortion as a major party plank is a symptom of the disease. And I think that’s unfortunate. If Republicans won’t prioritize saving innocent children even when they agree that those children’s lives are in danger, they clearly can’t be trusted to prioritize anything important on any issue at all.
Jill, great article. I encourage you and your readers to make your voice heard at http://www.LifeSpeakingOut.com, a campaign sponsored by the Susan B. Anthony List to encourage the Republican Party to ensure that protecting women and the unborn from the violence of abortion is a true legislative priority should they take back Congress.
All the more reason to push for personhood amendments from the states up. Both parties are failing us.
My bad. Rush has been pro-Tea Party and anti-Republican. And good on him for it. :)
Again, another reason I am not a Republican. I am a Constitution party member. I know some Democrats who are fed up with their party. Both parties are out of touch. period. But I will say to my fellow pro-lifers, when do you keep trying to remodel a house, and when do you get to the point where you realize its just cheaper to tear down the house and rebuild? I don’t know if the Republican party can be saved. Its so infested with amoral, out of touch career politicians. Maybe its time to just tear down and rebuild. The Constitution party is 100% unabashedly pro-life.
Meh — I’m not surprised. The Christie Whitman/Mitch Daniels/Megan Cain-type Republicans think of prolifers as a bad smell that wafted into the country club from somewhere. That’s why I’m an independent — a plague on both their houses!
cranky catholic:
“Life is so sacred we have many battles to fight. Such as the pornography issue. And the prostitution issue. And we need to figure out the rape issue. Oh, and the school-teacher pedophilia issue. Then maybe we can fight the ABORTION ISSUE.”
Of the above, abortion is the MOST consequential. It is a matter of life and death. After we get the right to live protected under law then we can look at the others. Prostitution? Isn’t there something about that being the oldest profession?
If you want to wait until prostitution is eliminated we will never get to securing the right to life. Ditto rape, porn, and other sexual abuse issues. It seems the human condition has been and always will be with us. So let’s not forget about the tiny babies being dismembered limb by limb as we sit in our armchairs and talk about eliminating sexual crimes and sins.
When we are setting priorities we should seek to understand the priorities of God.
Is God more concerned that our nation has bad fiscal policy or that our nation is murdering millions of innocent babies?
Those politicians that don’t understand which is ultimately more important should never get our vote.
Proverbs 6:16-1816 These six things the LORD hates,
Yes, seven are an abomination to Him:
17 A proud look,
A lying tongue,
Hands that shed innocent blood,
18 A heart that devises wicked plans,
Feet that are swift in running to evil…
The “tea party” will destroy the Republican Party if they attack pro-life moderates who aren’t right-wing enough on other issues like gun control, campaign finance reform, tax breaks for the rich, or protecting the environment. They sabatoged John McCain’s presidential campaign by pressuring him to select an imbecile like Sarah Palin as a running mate, despite his stellar pro-life voting record. The Beck/Limbaugh/Dobson crowd can largely thank themselves for helping to hand the presidency to Obama, by undermining McCain in both 2000 and 2008.
excellent, excellent post Devon b.
You know why the Republican party is called the GOP? It’s because all they have to offer is a lot of political gop ! And the right-wing wacko constitution party(which I call the constipation party) is even worse. While the Democratic party is far from perfect, it’s still infinitely preferable to anything else politically in America, because it at least doesn’t want the government to pry into our bedrooms , try to force women to bear children against their will even if a pregnancy would kill them or ruin their health, turn America into a repressive Christian thoecracy little better than the Islamic theocracies in Iran and Saudi Arabia,
destroy the safety net for the unfortunate in America, and persecute gay people.
This nation as a whole has tilted so far right it’s practically in another dimension,a sort of bizarro world where any one who has the slightest disagreement with its horrible reactionary social and economic ideas is automatically labeled a socialsit,Marxist and communist,
an evil,wicked atheist out to destroy morality in America and a “baby killer”.
Sheesh almighty !
@Jerry
I was being facetious. My point was to attach the word ‘issue’ to those things that are absolutely wicked. Surely if I framed a discussion about sexual assault as a “the rape issue,” you might accuse me of diminishing an evil act to something no more debatable than say, the campaign finance reform ISSUE.
88 JAILED for refusing to partake in Adoration of “THE ONE” – http://www.FreeTheND88.org
Great column!
Defund Planned Parenthood. No government funding of abortions here or abroad. Legislate the protection of all human life from conception to natural death. And repeal Obamacare or soon we will have bureaucrats prescribing euthenasia.
Hello Robert B.
At least you aren’t advocating abortion for poor women this time!!! I’m sure you must realize by now that abortion does not save women from dying. Doctors can try to save both mother and her baby in this age of modern medicine. So there isn’t a need for elective abortion in this country unless you feel that “just because I don’t need a baby now” is a good excuse for an untimely killing. To say there is, is following a bunch of pro-abort propaganda.
If the US government had the decency to subsidize poor pregnant women so that they would be able to take good care of their children when born, there would be far fewe abortions here.
I know,you anti-choicers claim there’s already help,but you’re dead wrong. There isn’t even remotely close enough help available from the private sector to lower the abortion rate,let alone “end” abortion,which is an absolute impossibility.
Let’s face it; poor women do not want to bring children into the world they will not be able to provide for. It’s a traumatic experience for them to see their children growing up in abject poverty.That’s why abortions happen.
It’s time for you anti-choicers to stop thinking of abortion as murder.It isn’t.It’s a tragedy.
If you really want to do something about abortion,don’t protest at women’s facilities; that’s futile and totally unproductive.Try to lobby the US government to provide more financial help to poor pregnant women,married or single. There is no other way to deal with the problem of abortion.
Hopefully we can sustain a thrid party.
Robert,
The issue of abortion isn’t the poverty of the women who may have abortions, its the fact that abortion kills innocent human life. The circumstances of ones conception should not dictate if a person is going to live or die. Also adoption is always an option and there are government programs to help poor mothers. One such program is WIC ( Women, Infants and Children).