708 - Peace & Life: Congressional Doings / Pride Month / Environment - June 7, 2024
Positive Happenings in the U.S. Congress
When the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed to abolish slavery, it had one glaring exception: for those convicted of a crime. Because several state constitutions followed suit, we have a page on our Peace & Life Referendums website about the current trend to have state referendums to remove that exception. For the whole U.S., there’s a joint resolution for a new U.S. constitutional amendment proposed, called the Abolition Amendment. On May 21, 2024, “An Examination of Prison Labor in America,” was held in the U.S. Senate to address this, so hopefully progress is being made.
See more information from the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.
Our member group Democrats for Life is working hard in the next three months to pass bipartisan legislation to Make Birth Free (see their full report on this concept). They have a petition to sign:
Pride Month
Our member group Feminists Choosing Life of New York shared the message of the Consistent Life Ethic at Buffalo's Pride Festival June 3rd. They offer pictures:
Our member group, the Rainbow Pro-Life Alliance, focuses on LGBTQ+ issues.
We offer one related blog post: Right-to-Life Issues in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Literature.
Our Latest Blog Post
In the third of her 3-part series on the connections of the consistent life ethic to environmentalism, Christina Yao Pelliccioni offers The Effects of Climate Change on Marginalized Communities Near and Far.
Quotation of the Week
Helen Alvare
The Consistent Ethic of Life: A Proposal for Improving its Legislative Grasp
University of St. Thomas Law Journal, Spring 2005, Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 267
Groups working mostly on respect for life issues – such as abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide – appear to understand themselves to be fighting . . . on behalf of truth. They firmly believe that if people were to open their eyes and really see the law or the practice of abortion or assisted suicide, they would accept the truth about vulnerable human life, and no longer accept its destruction . . .
But for activists concentrating on dignity of life issues – including access to health care, welfare benefits, the living wage, and other issues – freedom and justice are associated more with being in “solidarity” with the less fortunate.
The website of the anti-hunger group Second Harvest tells us the compelling stories of people living without enough food . . .
Yet understanding freedom and justice too narrowly in terms of one or the other of these themes – truth or solidarity – can easily lead to a failure fully to pursue the consistent ethic, through which we understand freedom in a unified fashion to include both respecting truth and acting in solidarity, especially with those most in need.