"RIGHT-TO-LIFE" INERTIA | 2005-03-21
A nine-year-old little girl was kidnapped, raped and murdered by a repeat sex offender.
Her father, a good working man, is trying to get the Florida legislature to change the laws on repeat offenders to get them off the streets and save other little girls.
Well, there is legislative action going on, and there are tens of thousands out marching. The right-to-life bureaucracy is bringing out its groups to demand action to keep the feeding tubes from being removed from a brain-dead woman. Congress is in session right now for emergency action to do this.
The kids can wait.
There is this giant network of right-to-lifers who do knee-jerk stuff, and they have themselves a good, solid, knee-jerk cause. They are not about to worry about some nameless children getting murdered.
The days when the pro-life movement was totally dedicated to the saving of unborn children are in the past.
This week, while the people who call themselves pro-life are marching in the streets and Congress and the President are receiving the usual avalanche of letters from those who call themselves pro-lifers, hundreds more children will be molested by repeat child attackers.
That can wait. The "right-to-lifers" have themselves some raw meat and they want the spotlight. They are so powerful that the Democrats in Congress didn't even dare challenge them. President Bush, smelling the votes, is poised to sign the bill.
It's a cheap show of power for the so-called pro-lifers. The Democrats will fight any attempt to strip away the "rights" of child-molesters. The Trial Lawyers would make them.
That father's attempt to get some people to march on the Florida legislature will be a secondary event, lost in the pro-life publicity.
All that "pro-life" power could have America's children protected before the end of this week, while the nation's dander is up.
But they have other things to do.
For this "pro-life" power, what do a few hundred nameless kids whose lives will be ruined and many killed, matter? Look how righteous one can be, look at the money one can raise by their exercise in shooting fish in a barrel? This brain-dead woman is a chance for that huge organization to grind into action.
If "pro-life" melded into the fight to protect children, it would lose its special name. Its leaders would become just one more part of a mass of honest citizens trying to do the right thing.
They wouldn't be special any more.
Right-to-Life has become like the NAACP. The NAACP pays "black leaders" fine salaries to live in nice suburbs and yell about Confederate flags. Meanwhile the working people in the Nation of Islam patrol the projects in the ghettoes and God help the drug dealers they find.
On the right and the left, the pro-lifers and the NAACP are in the way, hogging the limited, precious publicity and time and resources serious causes desperately need.
"Well," says the NAACP, "It's really the same cause, driving drug dealers out of the projects and banning the Confederate flag."
"Well," say the people who call themselves pro-life, it's really the same cause, keeping a single brain-dead woman what they call"'alive" and cracking down on repeat child molesters who never stop until they are put away permanently.
The kids can wait.
No sane person believes that diverting all attention to pet, easy causes is the same thing as putting what little time and resources decent people have into overcoming the lawyers and judges who make it open season on little children.
The NAACP and the pro-lifers make a lovely combination. I wrote a book in 1976 entitled "A Plague on Both Your Houses."
To the NAACP and those who call themselves pro-lifers, I repeat, "A plague on both your houses."