Americans and the world will miss Ronald Reagan. True, he has been out of the public eye for the past ten years, but he was still with us on planet earth until last Saturday, and somehow the world seemed a better place just for having “The Gipper” around.
Farewell to the Gipper
I met Ronald Reagan a few times: Once was when he was running in the primary and I helped organize a rally for his arrival at O’Hare Airport. There were only a few of us, but a lot of signs, and we gathered a huge crowd from other gates by announcing that a famous movie star was arriving on a commercial flight at gate so-and-so. I walked him to a waiting car, and said, “The next time you come to Chicago it will be on Air Force One.” It was.
Twice, each on a January 22, I joined other pro-lifers in the Oval Office, and at one meetings sat across from him with my own jar of jelly beans. When Reagan entered the room there was a presence that can only be described as electric.
But everybody has a Reagan story and many are now being written and spoken, as even many liberals who disagreed with most of his policies and beliefs are rightfully eulogizing him.
It’s true that he didn’t do all he could have done to help the pro-life cause, and he disappointed us by appointing Sandra Day O’Connor, but he did write Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation, and he signed many bills attempting to curb abortion. Reagan expressed regret at the end of his administration that Roe. v Wade was still the law of the land.
Yes, he should have done more for the babies. He could have appointed Judge Bork instead of O’Connor as his first Supreme Court nominee. Bork might have made it early on. He had promised to appoint a woman: then why not pro-life Judge Edith Jones of Texas?
We’ll never know. But Ronald Reagan was a good and truly religious man, and the best president of our times, and we’ll miss him. Or, as 91-year-old Ken Detweiler of Dixon, IL, who took Bible classes from Reagan when they were teens, put it, “The whole world’s going to miss him.”
Byrne Blasts Cold-Blooded Judge
Dennis Byrne, in Monday’s Chicago Tribune column entitled “Abortion ruling lacks good logic” pulls no punches. He Says San Francisco U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton’s ruling last week, declaring a federal ban on partial birth abortion unconstitutional, may be right in asserting that there is little difference between partial birth abortion and any other kind of abortion. They are all equally barbaric.
Byrne doesn’t stop with Hamilton’s euphemisms, but draws on testimony given to a judge in a New York trial, describing in detail the method of crushing heads, removing arms and legs, and causing agonizing pain to the unborn.
But Byrne blames pro-lifers for going after a partial birth abortion ban because it makes this “outside” form of abortion seem worse than what Byrne calls “internal abortions.” By attempting to ban partial birth abortion, pro-lifers, Byrne believes, have unwittingly played into the courts’ hands.
Be this as it may, Byrne’s main onus is toward judge Phyllis Hamilton,
whose cold bloodedness sounds like Josef Mengele, the Nazi concentration camp doctor who experimented on live humans.
“What,” Byrne concludes, “Are we to do?”
Let’s Play To Win
What we are to do, Dennis, is make Americas look at abortion. We have to show the pictures. That’s the purpose of our Face the Truth Tours, where we take large photographs of aborted babies out on the highways. That’s what Gregg Cunningham is doing with his Reproductive Choice Campaign trucks, what Troy Newman is doing.
No social movement has ever succeeded without showing pictures of those being oppressed. We must touch the conscience of the nation and we will do it by showing Americans how ugly all abortions are. If we’re not doing that, we’re not playing to win.
So, let’s play to win!
