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Peace & Life Connections #228 September 19, 2014
New Action Ideas Page Up
CL believes and participates in both education and action to bring about respect for all life. On our website we’ve added a page of ideas for our supporters, for actions by individuals and groups. We have time-sensitive actions specific to election time, actions that only take a few minutes, and more involved ones—any of which can have a huge, even life-saving, impact.
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What Helps Pregnant Rape Victims?
The legislature in the U.S. state of Missouri has thankfully overturned the governor’s veto of a 72-hour waiting period after between being given needed information doing something permanent the irrevocable act of abortion. The governor complained that there was no rape exception. In explaining why rape victims deserve less consumer protection than other women, he claimed it’s patronizing to suggest that women who’ve been raped are unaware of how dire their circumstances are. He said this without citing any conversations he had had with such women. Rebecca Kiessling (on the left in the photo) fills in this gap by offering many women’s voices.
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Euthanasia and Executions
It had to happen eventually: the reasoning behind legalizing euthanasia as a medical procedure to all that request it on grounds of irreversible suffering, including children, has now led an imprisoned rapist in Belgium to request a lethal injection to avoid facing prison for the rest of his life. Thus, a country which like all other European countries has abolished the death penalty has now arranged for its revival under its euthanasia legislation. From the Reuters news story on the case: “Van Den Bleeken, aged about 50 and in prison for nearly 30 years, had complained of a lack of therapy provided for his condition in Belgium and therefore he preferred to die. ‘If people commit a sexual crime, help them to deal with it,’ he said in a television documentary. ‘Just locking them up helps no one: not the person, not society and not the victims.’" Van Den Bleeken makes a good point, but rather than excusing what he requests, it should awaken us all to the nonviolent alternative to killing-as-medical-procedure: compassion, and competent and humane treatment of the physically and mentally suffering.
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Quotation of the Week Tertullian, early Christian writer. On Idolatry, 9.1 & 9.6, written around 197 C.E.
The question is now whether a member of the faithful can become a soldier and whether a soldier can be admitted to the Faith . . . how will a Christian do so? . . . the Lord, by taking away Peter’s sword, disarmed every soldier thereafter . . . What kind of war would we, who willingly submit to the sword, not be ready or eager for . . . if it were not for the fact that according to our doctrine it is more permissible to be killed than to kill. For us, we may not destroy even the fetus in the womb, while as yet the human being derives blood from other parts of the body for its sustenance. To hinder a birth is merely a speedier person-killing; nor does it matter when you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to birth. That is a person which is going to be one: you have the fruit already in the seed.