Elections 2006

From Priests for Life Nov/Dec newsletter:

We are only a year away from critically important elections for the United States Senate, and other offices, that impact the abortion battle. Pro-abortion forces have lost more and more elections in the last several cycles. Next year will be no different, provided we all do our part.

All issues that impact human life are critically important. But that is not to say they are all equal. Pope John Paul II wrote the following in his 1988 apostolic exhortation, The Vocation and the Mission of the Lay Faithful in the Church and in the World (Christifideles Laici): "The common outcry, which is justly made on behalf of human rights -- for example, the right to health, to home, to work, to family, to culture -- is false and illusory if the right to life, the most basic and fundamental right and the condition of all other personal rights, is not defended with maximum determination" (n. 38).

Many in the Church ignore these words and continue to claim that the linkage of all the issues means the equality of all the issues. But linkage is not equality; it is linkage. The right to education depends upon the right to life. If you take the right to education away, the person is still alive. If you take the right to life away, both are gone: the person is no longer alive, and can no longer be educated. The same is true of rights to health care, housing, voting, employment, wages, a clean environment -- and, in fact, everything else.

Life itself is the foundation.

No public official who fails to protect the right to life belongs in public office. This is a message we will echo and re-echo throughout the coming year, and we urge you to do the same.