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Rest in Peace: Jerry Berrigan
CL supporter Jerry Berrigan, brother of the better-known Phil and Dan Berrigan, has passed away at age 95. His
local newspaper obituary speaks of how he embodied his family’s activism; see also
Popular Resistance.
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Update on Planned Parenthood (PP) Scandal
Word has it that there are a dozen videos, to be released weekly for sustaining media attention;
the third one is in a short documentary format.
U.S. Senator Rand Paul, who though he’s not a CL Endorser
we’ve quoted linking abortion and war, is working to stop federal tax dollars to PP; several corporate donors or previous donors to PP have clarified that they don’t intend to donate anymore; and some states are investigating and therefore some state tax donations may decrease.
Groups such as MoveOn and RH Reality Check are becoming alarmed by this state of affairs and in attacking the videos are accusing them of being deceptive. Though the edited versions do emphasize the negative, the producers offer full footage of the two videos of interviews with PP officials for those looking for context. The good news is that PP supporters are making accusations of deception. It would be far more distressing if they found the practices described in the videos acceptable.
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Quotation of the Week
Russ Douthat, op-ed columnist,
New York Times, July 25, 2015
[D]welling on that content [of the Planned Parenthood videos on fetal parts] gets you uncomfortably close to . . . that moment when you start pondering the possibility that an institution at the heart of respectable liberal society is dedicated to a practice that deserves to be called barbarism. That’s a hard thing to accept. . . .
This reluctance is a human universal. It’s why white Southerners long preferred Lost Cause mythology to slaveholding realities. It’s why patriotic Americans rarely want to dwell too long on My Lai or Manzanar or Nagasaki. It’s why, like many conservatives, I was loath to engage with the reality of torture in Bush-era interrogation programs.
But the reluctance to look closely doesn’t change the truth of what there is to see.
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We note with pleasure that in the U.S. there have been 25 years of legislatively-arranged accommodation of the needs of people with disabilities, ranging from transportation access to better employment opportunities. There is still much to be done – unemployment is still too high – but the ADA has been a helpful and successful experiment.
