If You Can’t Explain the Opposition to Your Case
by Rachel MacNair Our student group organized a program explaining what was wrong with nuclear energy back in the late 1970s at Earlham College, a Quaker school where I majored in Peace and Conflict Studies. We did such a fine job of explaining the dangers that a student in the audience asked a very sensible…
A Complex Man’s Complex Legacy: What the Movie Rustin Leaves Out
by John Whitehead The great civil rights activist and thinker Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) has received renewed attention thanks to the recently released movie Rustin. The movie is an engrossing look at Rustin’s role as an advisor to Martin Luther King and the organizer of the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, DC. Rustin…
Rehumanize Conference 2023
Comments and screenshots from Consistent Life Network board members who attended: John Whitehead In her introductory remarks for the 2023 Rehumanize International conference, Creative Director Maria Oswalt offered some valuable practical advice for Consistent Life Ethic advocates. She emphasized the importance of working across differences, whether political, religious, or philosophical. She gave examples of…
Heartbreakingly Common: Suicide Among Veterans
by Sarah Terzo As of 2012, more active duty military personnel and veterans have died from suicide than from combat. Here are more statistics that show how large the problem is: Veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan have the highest suicide rate.1 Twenty-five percent of people who die by suicide in the US are veterans, but…
Sleepwalking toward Nuclear War: The Lessons of the Able Archer Scare
by John Whitehead Since nuclear weapons were created, nations have repeatedly come close to nuclear war. The most famous episode was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Another terrifying near miss occurred 40 years ago this November. In 1983, with extreme Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, a NATO military exercise…
Victoria Woodhull – First Woman to Run for U.S. President
This is an excerpt from ProLife Feminism: Yesterday and Today. The introduction was written by Mary Krane Derr. Introduction Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927) and Tennessee Claflin (1845-1923) Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, sisters from a poor, chaotic Ohio family, became the first female stockbrokers on Wall Street after a stint as…
The Back Alley and the Front Alley
by Rachel MacNair When Roe v. Wade first passed, I was actually pleased, because I thought it would put the back-alley butchers out of business. But here in Kansas City, there was an abortion doctor named Richard Mucie who was in fact put out of business pre-Roe because a woman had died a horrific death from an abortion…
Medical Dangers, Sex Abuse, Labor Problems, Racism: Documenting Planned Parenthood
by Rachel MacNair Problems at Planned Parenthood is a new website that lets the facts speak for themselves. This site offers extensive documentation, organized under each of the almost 600 U.S. Planned Parenthood centers. It’s sponsored by the Problems at Planned Parenthood Committee. The site also offers thousands of patient reviews from Google and…
Gaza War: Outrageous and Foolish
Statements of heartache and horror abound around the world. Every war is monstrous, and it hurts so badly when a new one is declared Here we offer comments focused on the one that flared up so badly this last weekend. Stephen Zunes Facebook Posts Professor of Politics, University of San Francisco Zunes is co-editor of…
A Plea for Quiet – and for Peace: Consistent Life Ethic Themes in Fahrenheit 451
by John Whitehead Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s classic dystopian science fiction novel, turns 70 years old this October. The novel has been described as being about censorship, which is an accurate but limited characterization. The book contains other themes, some of which may interest consistent life ethic activists. The novel imagines a future United States…