Conference of Anti-War Conservatives “Peace and Prosperity 2016” is a one-day conference happening September 10. Sponsored by the Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity, it takes a Libertarian approach: “The elephant in the living room? Foreign policy. No one wants to really talk about it. Washington is hoping the rest of us won't blurt out that the emperor has no clothes, that US interventionism is making us poorer, less free, and less safe. . . . We believe that US foreign policy is not flawed in its execution, in the selection of targets, in the balance between ‘soft power’ and ‘hard power.’ We think it is rotted to its philosophical core. And our mission here is to try our best to do something about it.”
In his book, Liberty Defined, from which we quoted, Ron Paul explicitly links the “consistent right-to-life position” as opposing abortion, the death penalty, and a foreign policy that promotes empire.
Educating Families
The Catholic Mobilizing Network has put together an interactive education resource to promote conversations on the consistent life ethic. The wording is designed for families with children up to grade 5, but they say adaptation will make it easily usable for middle school and high school youth.
The “seamless garment” is a poetic image coming from the New Testament; the idea of using the “coat of many colors” from the Jewish Torah is offered as an image understandable for children: “By referring to the ornamented tunic, we acknowledge the importance of the whole (the tunic) while simultaneously identifying the unique characteristics (the ornamentations).”
The workshop materials can be downloaded from their “Joseph’s Tunic” website.
Women’s Equality Day: August 26
In the United States, August 26 commemorates the day that the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution passed, granting women nation-wide the right to vote. Marilyn Kopp has a guest opinion column in her local Cleveland paper which includes suffragists’ opposition to abortion. It’s called “Women’s rights and abortion ‘rights’ do not mix.” We also offer the Quotation of the Week below.
Latest CL Blog: Where Violence Begins
The very beginning of all the kinds of killing we oppose is in the human mind, and in the words that express what’s in our minds. Rachel MacNair noticed some startlingly savage language in, of all places, a planetarium presentation – hardly a place where brutal talk would be expected. But if violence is in our very origins, then it can’t really be stopped, can it? So people who support aggression without even quite realizing that’s what they’re doing will see inanimate objects as violent, when those objects actually are just acting normal for them.
Relating this to ancient Babylonian imperial mythology, Rachel suggests a dose of nonviolent reality rather than violent fantasy is needed at the very source, nipping violence in the bud.
Quotation of the Week
Mary Krane Derr
“Pro-Every Life, Pro-Nonviolent Choice”
It’s been said that if men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. On the contrary: if men got pregnant, pregnancy would be treated as the sacrament; abortion would be considered blasphemy against their sacred bodies and lives and those of their children; and pregnant humans would finally, finally receive the alternatives they deserve instead of what one social activist calls, from bitter experience, the “choice” between “abortion or else.”
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