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NRL News
The Power
of Free Speech To Change a Nation Often it’s only a throwaway line, or a cliché, but occasionally it is so true it’s almost scary. In this case, it’s the latter. You simply had to be in Kansas City at the Hyatt Regency Crown Center June 14-16 to appreciate the impact of one of the best attended, most inspiring conventions NRLC 2007 has held in 35 years. It’s hard to know what there was more of: enthusiasm or opportunities to learn. Or maybe the great abundance of the latter helps explain the sheer volume of the former. Either way, the feedback in the hallways and over dinner spoke volumes: NRL 2007 was a huge success. Our story about NRLC 2007 can be found beginning on the back cover. Please read it and take the opportunity to order tapes or CDs by going to pages 20 and 21. You’ll not only benefit personally, you’ll also be moved to share these lively sessions with family and friends. While at the convention we heard the first highly distressing news of the disappearance of Jessie Davis, 26, the mother of a two-year-old and almost nine months pregnant. Instantly, there was that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. The little boy was found unattended and what little the child could tell authorities suggested he had witnessed violence. Jessie and her baby were found dead almost a week after her disappearance. The man who is said to be the father of both children, Bobby Cutts, appeared in court, charged with killing both Jessie and the unborn child she’d already named Chloe. There are enough similarities to the heart-shredding death in December 2002 of Laci Peterson and her nearly-full-term son, Conner, to make you shudder in horror and disbelief. Out of that immensely sad tragedy came the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act, enacted April 1, 2004. There are 35 states that recognize the unlawful killing of an unborn child as homicide in at least some circumstances. If the case goes to trial, Bobby Cutts will also be tried for Chloe’s death under Ohio’s own law that punishes perpetrators who take the lives of unborn babies at “any stage of prenatal development.” For the citizenry, laws such as these transcend the usual pro-life/pro-abortion divide for obvious reasons. For equally obvious reasons, pro-abortion Democrats in Congress fought the Unborn Victims of Violence Act tooth and nail. Even outside the abortion context, any recognition that a pregnant woman carries a valuable human being inside her is anathema. Free speech—and assaults there on—was big news this past month. As you know from reading the story on page 6, the Supreme Court delivered a ringing endorsement of free speech. By the thinnest of margins, 5-4, the justices upheld Wisconsin RTL’s challenge to one of the many egregious components of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance “reform” bill. Chief Justice John Roberts had no difficulty understanding that Wisconsin RTL’s ads were issue ads—commercial broadcasts intended to encourage people to ask their two senators not to filibuster President Bush’s judicial nominees—not “express advocacy”—attempts to tell people how to vote on a senator who happened to be running for re-election. That’s the good news. Then there’s the bad news. Once, not so long ago, people who ought to know better, insisted that the newly empowered Congressional Democrats would not directly assault talk radio. This naive belief never made any sense. Talk radio is mostly conservative (because that’s what the market dictates) and filled with vocal, articulate, passionate pro-lifers. Democrats are overwhelmingly liberal and enthusiastically pro-abortion. Their talk show voyages have capsized, leading Democrats to talk about re-instituting the “Fairness Doctrine.” By regulating talk radio—forcing stations to “balance” a Rush Limbaugh with, say, Al Franken—Democrats wouldn’t have to worry that the liberal counterpart to conservative talk radio, Air America, filed for bankruptcy in October. They could stifle those who disagree with them by making life miserable for the stations that carry them by insisting the stations also run programming no one wants to listen to. “Conservatives fear that forcing stations to make equal time for liberal talk radio would cut into profits so drastically that radio executives would opt to scale back on conservative radio programming to avoid escalating costs and interference from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC),” a story in the publication The Hill explained. Well, yes! This would have a huge impact on the capacity of pro-lifers to use talk radio programming to circumvent the major pro-abortion newspapers and television networks. But that, of course, is one of the objectives! From the pro-abortion point of view, this kind of outrageous meddling could not come any too soon. An analysis entitled, “Turnaround on Abortion,” strongly suggests that the change in the way Americans look at abortion may be far more substantial than even pro-lifers have believed. Produced by Christopher Blunt, a political consultant at Overbrook Research, and Fred Steeper, a consultant at Market Strategies, the analysis illuminates how different the landscape is from what it was 15 years ago and how that new climate of opinion has helped sway public sentiment in our direction. The study is principally of the state of Missouri, but its conclusions may well have wider application. (The raw data for this are 30,000 survey interviews conducted statewide between 1992 and 2006 for various Missouri campaigns.) In a nutshell, nowadays many more people identify as pro-life, particularly strongly pro-life, than was the case in the early 1990s, which “serve[s] as a good general gauge of perception of the abortion debate—and, more importantly, how the public aligns itself with the two sides of the debate.” People’s self-identification changed for many reasons, but largely because the public’s perception of the two sides changed. In the early 1990s, when the front pages of newspapers obsessed on stories of real and imaginary violence perpetrated by people who claimed to be “pro-life,” not surprisingly the average American did not want to be identified with that camp. The long, long campaign to enact the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban completely changed the discussion. Pro-abortionists find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to explain their “support for partial-birth abortion and opposition to popular policies such as parental consent,” according to Blunt and Steeper. “Not only has the public been paying attention, but average voters have been drawing their own conclusions about who the abortion extremists are—and changing sides to reflect those conclusions.” These shifts are found in virtually every category. Most encouraging of all, perhaps, is the move among “today’s young women” who “are now the most strongly pro-life (40%) and least strongly pro-choice (20%) group, reversing the two-to-one ratio of 1992.” Free and open speech is the air that a democracy breathes. You and I fill our lungs every day and produce the kind of life-affirming truth that is gradually replacing the lies that have polluted our political discourse for decades. |