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COMMENTS.
Perhaps it is time to review the mission and goal of this monthly Legislative Report that we have titled State of Things - SOT.
Ca. Right to Life is dedicated to preserving and protecting the right to life from conception to natural death. We have been active in the educational and legislative arena since 1980. We realize that there are many fine pro-life groups doing marvelous life saving work. We are merely one of many such dedicated organizations in the state and nation.
There are at least 7 different ways to protect and defend human life: Sidewalk and pregnancy center counseling, educational, legal (court cases) political; and, also through religious associations as well as providing for the post abortive mother and father.
CRLC chose the legislative arena, which, though the most seemingly remote from the work to save lives, is, in fact, one of the most direct. It was California legislation (mid-1960’s) that brought abortion to our state followed by the 1973 Roe v Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. However, it has been the legislature, state and federal, which has enabled abortion’s expansion to a point where it is now considered a mainstream, well-funded industry. The defeat of anti-life/anti-family legislation has the potential to save untold numbers of lives just as surely as the actions of sidewalk counselors.
It has been my experience during the 20 plus years that CRLC has researched legislation, that even those elected officials professing their allegiance to the right to life cause approach legislative tasks with blinders on. They see each bill as an island unto itself without understanding the broader implications of either harm or protection for innocent human beings. The legislators are bombarded daily by lobbyists promoting their anti-life cause. Legislators are wined and dined and catered to and made to feel that they are on a level with the gods. If they never hear from the pro life people in their own districts they begin to believe their own press.
With the Democrats holding a simple majority of the votes in the California legislature it is a foregone conclusion that abortion is safe, well funded and protected. Now that the legislature has gained control, so to speak, over who gets into the world, they have moved on to organizing and planning the lives of those who can be referred to as abortion survivors.
Author Thomas Sowell refers to these people as the Intelligentsia or The Anointed which he describes as those elected officials and Think Tank elitists who believe that only they have the foresight to guide the path of human endeavor.
This, I believe is the motive behind all the health care plans, the workforce development plans, the universal education plans (otherwise known as core standards) and all the other plans being referred to as “best practices.” They do all the heavy thinking and none of the active work of providing services.
It is also pro life work when we confront the elected officials with our rightful demands to protect and respect innocent human life. We have to show these elected officials what lies behind the seemingly innocuous legislation that they are voting for. If we don’t it underscores their belief that they have a right, given by the citizens who elected them, to direct our lives comprehensively.
Now, then, enters the lesser gods of humanism, the handmaids of these Anointed, who can be described as opportunistic. They see a personal profit to be made in delivering the unsuspecting citizen into the hands of the idealists, by performing the work of the state in delivering prescribed, tax funded “services” to these, now government dependent, human beings.
How many times since 1973 have we heard that abortion is better for us than childbirth?
That freedom from sexual restraint is a good? Now we are being deluged with opinions from pseudo-scientific outfits, that placing our 3 year old babies in professional day care/preschool is their only hope of ever being prepared for a place in the global world.
How many times have we heard from so-called Women’s advocacy groups that it is better for a woman to be in the workforce than in the home? And, now, of course, that the mothers are out in the workforce, do we hear, from the same groups, that since they are out of the home it is bad for the children, therefore, professional groups have to get tax money to develop school-based after school programs for the children to make up for that lack of a mother in the home.
And, of course, there are the community organizers. Many of these groups have infiltrated the churches with their promise of assisting parishes to obtain the goals of the diocesan Social Justice Committees. Of course, these groups do not work for nothing. They are salaried through tax funding, foundation grants, church membership fees and partnerships with labor and industry. Their goals are always the same, immigration, jobs, affordable housing, health care. Not the salvation of souls, but the pseudo improvement of temporal needs through government services.
Legislation and the courts have helped to create and sustain the abortion/ population control industry. We, the pro life citizens are the only ones, acting as individuals or in concert with pro life and pro family organizations, who can defeat this insidious population control industry community by community.
When we read of abortion clinics closing we don’t cheer. We ask ourselves where have they gone? Why don’t they need that clinic anymore? We exist to tell you where they have gone and how they are continuing their insidious and destructive activities.
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TEENAGE PRO LIFE SURVIVAL CAMP.
Those of us who have worked long and hard in the pro life/pro family arena can take heart in the fact that many young people are standing up for life and learning the ways in which to legitimately defend life.
Jeff White, formerly of Operation Rescue, has developed a teen summer survival camp now in its second or third year. It is held in Southern California each summer for about 6 weeks. It is a training ground for activism in witnessing to life. Some students and parents from Contra Costa County have attended this program. It could always use your financial support.
Recently, while on an assignment to be witnessing to life a group of Survivor Camp students set up a display in downtown Los Angeles where there happened to be an outdoor televising of a local TV show called the Jimmy Kimmel show.
It seems that the camera crew hired for this broadcast taping took a dislike to the students display and attempted to intimidate and disburse the students. The students declared their freedom of speech rights only to have the crew turn their extremely hot kleg lights on some students holding a large banner. The lights were so hot they singed a couple of the students, almost melting a plasticized arm band.
Heated words were exchanged between adults on both sides causing the police to intervene. It was finally settled, an apology was issued by the Kimmel Show producers and the students were vindicated of any wrong doing.
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COMMUNITY ORGANIZING.
Recently I had the opportunity to interview a local, young, Latina Community Organizer who is working within a Catholic Parish in the Oakland Diocese. The Pastor with whom she is working is so enamored of this group, CCISCO, (Contra Costa Interfaith Supporting Community of Organizing) that he has placed their logo on his parish letterhead stationery and provided this woman with an office and committee within the parish. Parish committees are referred to as Local Organizing Committees - LOC. The committee at this particular church is an all Latino committee “because we can’t get anybody else to join” she said. The Chancery takes no position on the development of these groups within the parish and, therefore, within the diocese.
The young woman stated that she is working with 4 of the 5 Catholic parishes in Concord. CCISCO is also working with other Contra Costa based Denominations and local legislators as well. Outside of Contra Costa County, in Alameda County, other community organizing groups are active within churches. Community of Renewal - COR - is one of these groups.
Depending upon the size of the Parish. Each provides a donation to CCISCO anywhere from $200.00 to $1,000.00 for the privilege of working with CCISCO. This is standard. Community organizing groups do not volunteer their services. They use local residents and parish members as volunteer protestors for hidden agendas. They also engage in verbal virtuosity, as Thomas Sowell says by substituting kind, compassionate words and phrases for reality, i.e. undocumented instead of illegal.
This young woman proudly informed us that only the previous week she had taken a busload of parish school students to Sacramento where they assembled at the Catholic Cathedral prior to going off to lobby the legislators for health Care and Immigration issues. http://.ccisco.org.
During our interview the Community Organizer talked about CCISCO’s work in the area of immigration reform. They focus on the “undocumented” immigrant, the one who is not eligible, so she said, for a social security number and, therefore, a decent paying job. She mentioned working with the City of Concord in the hopes of finding employment for this group of undocumented (illegal) residents in the building trade area particularly in the town development of the former military base. She stated very firmly that due to a person’s status as an undocumented, that person is never able to become a naturalized citizen and, therefore, never able to get a decent job. That is why, in reference, she was working to get recognition and citizenship for this group of people. [Note: Diocesan Social Justice Committees and the state office of Bishops, in Sacramento are constantly working to produce a change in the immigration laws allowing illegals to obtain almost instant legal status. This is referred to in legislation as The Dream Act.]
I checked with the United States Customs and Immigration Office in San Francisco regarding her claim. It is not quite accurate. I make no claim to being well informed about immigration laws. but, according to a USCIS representative, there are ways for anyone reaching the age of 18 years, to begin application for naturalization. Few of them requiring deportation of the individual or his/her illegally established parents.
It has been pointed out in previous legislative reports that Planned Parenthood and PICO have often been listed along with the California Catholic Conference and or Catholic Charities, in support of legislation. Also, in an earlier SOT we reported on a Parish Nurse’s activities in an Antioch, Ca. Parish in which she admitted that she referred young people to Planned Parenthood for reproductive services. She didn’t mention working with Birthright or Pregnancy Crisis Centers.
An article in the most recent Catholic Voice, the official publication for the Oakland Diocese, reported on a South Alameda County faith-based organization entitled COR and how it is working to help youth. The article also quoted a community organizer with a group called “Youth Up-rising.” Checking this group online shows that they connect youth to Planned Parenthood’s clinics for abortions and contraceptives.
So, we have the situation of the Bishop stating his pro life concerns while the parishes are, at the same time, coordinating their efforts with groups who promote abortion and contraception to the youth of the parishes. And, don’t forget the dues that these parishes are paying for the “privilege” of working with these groups.
In addition, while researching this article I came across a community organizing group in the Monterey area referred to as COPA - Communities organizing for (relational) Power in Action. They are also working in Catholic and Protestant parishes and are planning a meeting with Monterey’s Bishop Garcia, on June 20. Researching this group online brought me to a Maryland based site called CASA de Maryland, located in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, which lists COPA as one of its action item committees. CASA is an affiliate of La Raza which also works with Planned Parenthood. So an organization headquartered in the nation’s capitol masquerades as a local, social justice type ministry on the California shores.
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AN EXAMPLE OF VERBAL VIRTUOSITY.
SB 438 by Sen. Leland Yee, (SF-Dem) is entitled Charter Schools: Freedom of Speech and of the Press. It has sailed right through 6 Senate Committee hearings obtaining the votes of Republicans and is now passed out of its second Assembly committee hearing. It is on its way to the floor and then to the Governor.
This bill has nothing to do with freedom of speech or anything else. It has to do with clamping controls just a little tighter on Charter Schools. The Charter School Assn has opposed it. Another bill, by Assemblywoman Brownley placing restrictions on Charter Schools has been withdrawn due to lack of votes. I suspect that the reason for its withdrawal is that SB 438 is moving ahead and will eventually obtain the same results.
Our office received a phone call from recently elected Assemblyman Chris Norby regarding our position of opposition on SB 438. He said that since pro life people fight so strongly for our free speech rights we shouldn’t be opposing this bill. What he doesn’t understand is that this bill has been cleverly devised to make it appear that it is a freedom of speech issue when, in fact, it is not.
Charter Schools have been created by state legislation as an alternative schooling for parents who are dissatisfied with the public school system. They are referred to as voluntarily chartered by like minded groups with their own local official and parental controls. Even many private schools and Catholic schools have applied to become Charter schools in order to obtain the tax funds needed to survive.
It has never been the intention of the legislature to leave these schools alone to prosper in competition with the regular public schools. The legislature has been slowly writing legislation that is drawing these schools into an ever tighter state control from which, because of the funding, they will never leave. Even President Obama is now suggesting that Charter Schools are an answer to the educational dilemma.
Legislators like Asm. Norby do not look beyond the nice words on the page. He sees Freedom of speech and thinks, okay that’s a Republican Principle, I should vote for that.
He fails to understand that wiser and craftier legislators than he have learned how to use language to dissemble. He can tell his constituents that he voted for freedom of speech when, in fact, he has voted for restriction of conservative speech on Charter School campuses.
You can still stop this bill by contacting your assembly member and urging a “NO” vote on SB 438. Most likely we will ultimately have to direct our urgings to the Governor because of the Democrat majority in the legislature.
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OBAMA APPOINTS A PLANNED PARENTHOOD FAVORITE.
President Obama has, during a Congressional recess, appointed Donald Berwick, MD, as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The National Partnership for Women and Families’ Campaign for Better Care is just delighted that Obama has snubbed the proper political process of Congressional approval in order to install someone who believes in rationing health care as a means of re-distributing the wealth. He seems to also be enamored of the British Health System.
Didn’t the President promise that there would be no rationing in health care?
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Published by: California Right to Life Committee, Inc, 1920 Monument Blvd, PO
Box 309, Concord, Ca 94520. (925) 899-3064.
Your comments, suggestions and thoughts on items for inclusion in this report are earnestly requested.
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