Kindgo
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web page Monday, July 8, 2002
Some 35 members of the Santa Barbara area clergy have joined together to promote a woman's right to kill her unborn baby.
Calling themselves "Clergy for Choice" the pro-abortion group founded last December with the enthusiastic support of Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest segment of the abortion industry, told Santa Barbara News Press reporter Rhonda Parks Manville they want to counter the religious right's view that abortion is always morally wrong and cannot be supported by religious doctrine.
Manville quoted the Rev. Mark Asman of Trinity Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara as declaring "Our position is essentially about the full empowerment of people to determine their own destiny.
"We don't feel the need to say that the people who are anti-choice shouldn't exist, but to say clearly and loudly that there is another position, and that we support a woman's right to choose. Abortion is never an easy choice, but sometimes it is the best choice. People should never be told it is an impossible choice," Asman said.
According to Manville, the group includes "a rabbi and an American Baptist minister. Most members, she writes "belong to local Presbyterian, Episcopal, Congregational and Unitarian churches. Many are women. Most belong to liberal congregations, but some would be considered politically middle-of-the-road."
The exact membership, however, was not available because Planned Parenthood refused to provide a roster of members to the News-Press, "citing privacy concerns."
Manville wrote that the group is united in the belief that there is both a moral and theological justification for their pro-abortion position.
"This is fundamentally a religious issue and a freedom of choice issue, which for me comes from a deep faith in God and a belief in religious freedom," Rabbi Rick Shapiro of Temple B'nai B'rith in Santa Barbara, a pro-abortion "activist for 20 years," told Manville.
"Every religious tradition represented in this country has a different approach as to whether or not abortion is a moral option for a pregnant woman," he said. "Therefore, for me it is an issue of free exercise of religion, and women must be free to choose."
Despite polls that show that most Americans favor abortion rights, Manville wrote, some leaders of Catholic and evangelical Christian churches are opposed, and, she charged, they are very effective as lobbyists. " 'Protecting innocent life' remains one of the key objectives of groups like Christian Coalition of America, which claims 2 million members," she wrote.
"The polls say more people are for choice because they have been misled and misinformed," Pat Riehle, of Right to Life Santa Maria Education Project told Manville. "If these people who are clergy for choice saw the videos of what's going on in the abortion industry, they'd change their minds."
Mrs. Riehle, Manville wrote, maintained that religion is merely one of the components of the anti-abortion movement.
"I am Catholic, but I work with people from all religions. There are atheists for life, too," she said. "I think it's a matter of dealing with the truth and the facts.
"Now that we're talking about cloning and stem cell research, we know that life begins at conception, and that is a medical, scientific fact."
Not cited in the story was the fact that polls also show that a majority of Americans believe that abortion is murder, yet still defend a woman's right to kill the baby in her womb as some kind of unassailable civil right.
Manville reported that Clergy for Choice members claim that anti-abortion groups don't speak for the majority, because most people in religious life hold more moderate views.
"You don't have to be in favor of abortions, just in favor of keeping them legal," the Rev. Dale Morgan of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Santa Barbara told Manville. "I was a residence hall adviser in college, and I knew a woman who was rendered sterile from an abortion. I want them to be safe and legal. A woman's life is at stake."
The Rev. Morgan, added that she prefers adoption to abortion and considers her views to be "pro-life."
"I want to take back that expression," she said. "I am pro-life for the woman who is pregnant, and I am pro-life for the wanted child."
As for the "unwanted" child, well, let's just kill it, she seems by inference to imply.
"We want to protect the mother that is so overwhelmed and disappointed and needing help, and the child that is the innocent one as well," the Rev. Denny Wayman of the Free Methodist Church in Santa Barbara told Manville.
"To take the life of an innocent child is a social justice issue," he said, obviously unable to spot a moral issue when he sees one. "But the only person who can make the choice is the mother. We try to support her in that moment of choosing. There is nothing a person could do that we would reject them, not in the Christian faith. We are not here to judge."
As an example of an allegedly Catholic member of the group, Manville cites an ex-priest, Dan Maguire, incredibly still a professor of ethics in the supposedly Roman Catholic Marquette University's Theology Department.
"The Bible does not condemn abortion," and neither do most religions, said Maguire told the group in a recent visit. "These views have been hidden away, and this book seeks to reveal them."
When religious leaders step forward to advance a pro-choice point of view, "it changes the terrain. It's a signal that religion is open," he said.
Such "openess" is critical if religious people are to look for spiritual guidance when they are faced with the question of whether or not to abort their baby, the Rev. Peggy Johnson of Santa Barbara's First Congregational Church-United Church of Christ told Manville. When issues are reduced to absolute moral debates, people are ashamed to talk about them, and they have nowhere to turn within their church.
"They don't have permission to deal with the deep spiritual issues involved," she said. "People who have had to make this choice are starved to talk to someone about it."
She is also bothered by the alleged inconsistencies that she sees in some people who oppose abortion, but favor the death penalty and war.
"To discuss issues like when life begins is to sidestep the inconsistencies and hypocrisies that are part of our human condition," she said. "We like to choose when we get to decide about life."
Strange, we thought that was a decision only the God they allegedly serve can make.
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God bless,
Kindgo
Inside the will of God there is no failure. Outside the will of God there is no success.
Posts: 4320 | From: Sunny Florida | Registered: Jun 2002
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