Population
Politics
Samuel
Alito isn't the only nominee under
attack by liberals for his record on abortion. So is Ellen Sauerbrey,
President Bush's choice to be Assistant Secretary of State for
the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.
To
be precise, Ms. Sauerbrey is under fire for supporting Mr. Bush's priorities
at the United Nations, where the former Maryland legislator
and gubernatorial candidate has spent four years as U.S. envoy
to the Commission on the Status of Women. Among her alleged
sins is that she supports the Administration's decision to withhold
$34 million from the U.N. Population Fund because some of the
agency's contributions go to China's appalling forced-abortion policy.
The
Population Fund is one of the principal cheerleaders of China's one-child policy, which has been enforced through
fines, imprisonment, forced abortion, sterilizations and even,
human-rights groups charge, infanticide. Several weeks ago Mr.
Bush invoked a 20-year-old policy — known as the Kemp-Kasten
Amendment — which prohibits federal funding of "any organization
or program which supports or participates in the management
of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization."
One
would think that women's organizations would applaud this decision
— and the appointment of an American woman who champions it.
Mandatory limitations on family size and involuntary sterilizations
hardly represent "reproductive freedom" or "a
woman's right to choose." Instead, groups such as Planned
Parenthood have protested that Mr. Bush is denying women access
to reproductive health and family planning services. Planned
Parenthood is also attacking Ms. Sauerbrey.
Opinion Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/
editorial/feature.html?id=110007515
--
Supreme
Bias: Media Label Alito a Right-Wing
Extremist
New
Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito has been a Justice Department lawyer, a U.S. attorney, and a federal judge. Bill Clinton’s
first nominee to the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was
a federal judge, too, but her resume also showed she had been
a liberal political activist, most notably as the director of
the Women’s Rights Project for the ACLU.
But
in the first hours after each was nominated, network reporters
assured viewers that Judge Ginsburg was a “moderate” and a “centrist,”
while journalists characterized Judge Alito
as a right-wing extremist.
Indeed,
even before President Bush announced Judge Alito’s
nomination on Monday morning, reporters were in a labeling frenzy.
ABC’s Charles Gibson called Alito
“very conservative” and “the most conservative member” of an
otherwise “liberal appellate court.” Over on CBS, Gloria Borger
dubbed Alito “quite conservative,”
the same label applied on CNN by early-morning anchor Carol
Costello. On ABC’s Good Morning America, a breathless Jessica
Yellin labeled Alito
as “conservative” five times in 50 seconds.
Monday
night’s newscasts carried the same message. ABC anchor Elizabeth
Vargas called Alito a “staunch conservative,” while CBS’s John Roberts warned
that “if confirmed, Alito would wipe
out the swing seat now occupied by Sandra Day O’Connor, tilting
the Supreme Court in a solidly conservative direction.” (In
contrast, NBC anchor Brian Williams agreed Alito
was “dependably conservative” but he also saw an “independent
streak,” as did NBC reporter Pete Williams.)
Twelve
years ago, those same networks denied Judge Ginsburg’s liberal
ideology. A few hours after President Clinton announced Ginsburg’s
nomination on June 14, 1993, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell pronounced Ginsburg “a judicial
moderate and a pioneer for women’s rights.” The next morning
on ABC, Good Morning America
co-host Joan Lunden asked
legal editor Arthur Miller: “We hear words like ‘centrist,’
‘moderate,’ ‘consensus builder.’ How will she fit into this
court?” Miller, a longtime friend of Ginsburg, wrongly predicted
she’d be a centrist justice.
Rich Noyes
Human Events
http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=10110
--
Pro-Wife
Extremism
When
President Bush nominated Judge Sam Alito
to the Supreme Court, it didn't take long for extremist groups
to alight on his partial dissent in Planned Parenthood v.
Casey, decided by the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
in 1991, as a pretext to oppose him. Planned Parenthood's Karen
Pearl called the opinion "outrageous" and said it
proved Judge Alito is "far, far
out of the mainstream."
Planned
Parenthood mostly lost the Casey case, in which a three-judge
panel unanimously upheld all but one of Pennsylvania's abortion restrictions. The next year, a 7-2 Supreme
Court majority agreed. But by 5-4, the justices affirmed the
decision of Judge Alito's two colleagues
that struck down a provision designed to encourage a married
woman to inform her husband before having an abortion.
This
was a modest effort to balance a wife's "reproductive rights"
against her husband's. The law did not provide for spousal consent,
only notification. The wife's say-so, in the form of a signed
statement delivered to the physician performing the abortion,
was sufficient to establish that the husband knew. And a woman
seeking an abortion had the alternative of affirming that her
husband was not the father of her unborn child, that he could
not be located, that the pregnancy was the result of marital
rape, or that she feared physical abuse if she informed him.
In any of these cases, no notification was required.
James Taranto
Opinion Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007509
--
Hollywood Still Leery of Religion
After
the last election, a Newsweek poll found 67 percent of Americans
believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, and 82 percent believe
Jesus is the Son of God. Exit polls also found the No. 1 issue
for Americans is "moral values." Hollywood declares
(boasts?) it is delivering to the marketplace products demanded
by the market. If that is so, why is the entertainment industry
so incapable of looking at numbers like that as an opportunity
to mine a vastly untapped source of riches?
The
massive turnout for Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ
was supposed to change Hollywood's resistance, even hostility,
to religion, but there isn't a whole lot of change in sight.
The big Christian movie event of the year is the forthcoming
release of The Chronicles of Narnia:
The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe,
a $150 million production based on the beloved Narnia
series of C.S. Lewis.
The
film was made by Walden Media, the family-friendly producer
that recently delivered the acclaimed family movie Because
of Winn-Dixie 
. Walden's
big-studio partner in the Narnia effort
is Disney. They've hired Motive Entertainment, the same firm
that promoted buzz for The Passion among Christians.
The Narnia story, for the uninitiated,
is the Passion story: Aslan the lion
dies for the transgressions of others and is resurrected to
defeat evil. Churches across the country are building enthusiasm
for the movie, purported to be a much better cinematic presentation
of the Lewis books than previous movie-making attempts.
So
why are some at Disney so uncomfortable with the religious theme
in their own movie, a message embraced by 82 percent of Americans?
"We
believe we have not made a religious movie," Dennis Rice,
Disney's senior vice president of publicity, told the Washington
Times. "It's just a great piece of cinema that is true
to a great piece of literature." The message in that is
clear: Don't think this is a Christian film, because that is
box-office death.
Brent Bozell
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/
opinion/columns/brentbozell/2005/11/04/174316.html
