Monthly Archives: December 2011

News

Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum: who has the pro-life record on abortion?

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Let’s start with an article from Stand to Reason which explains what pro-life politicians should sound like. (H/T Drew)

Excerpt:

Why are major pro-life presidential candidates so bad at answering for the pro-life position?

During the 1992 race, vice-presidential candidates Gore and Quayle went face to face. Quayle fumbled badly when Gore asked him directly, “Would you take away a woman’s right to choose abortion?” Here was a great chance to bring some moral clarity to the discussion. Instead, he babbled.

Mr. Quayle might have simply answered: I think the question is phrased wrong. Rather, “Why do you think it’s OK to kill an innocent human being just because it’s in the way and can’t defend itself?” If Al Gore objected to that characterization, it would be very fair to say, “Which one of my terms is inaccurate? Kill? Innocent? Human being? Defenseless? In the way? (Maybe you’d prefer “troublesome,” “expensive,” or just simply “crippled”?)

The most recent squandered opportunity came last night. (Alan Keyes went on a hunger strike. Maybe if that doesn’t work he’ll just hold his breath until he turns blue. That’ll really show ’em.)

“If a woman was brutally raped and would be emotionally traumatized by carrying to term, would you allow her to have an abortion, or would you force her to have the child?”

This is a perfect forum for clarifying this issue, an ideal opportunity for a leader to offer clearheaded advocacy for the unborn, a terrific time to clear the rhetoric from the air and get to the real issue.

The simple answer is: Why complicate the crime of rape with the crime of taking an innocent child’s life? Or, to put it another way: Why should the child pay with its life because its father is a rapist? (This is even a better response because it asks a question.)

Greg was writing this in 1996, but we do actually have several pro-life candidates this time, and one of them, Rick Santorum, is actually pretty articulate on social issues.

Excerpt:

As a member of the U.S. Senate from 1995 until 2007, Santorum was the prime author and champion of key pro-life bills, including the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, a ban on partial-birth abortion, and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which makes it a separate crime if an unborn child is harmed or killed during the commission of a stipulated list of federal crimes.

Santorum not only has signed the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life Presidential Pledge, but he has helped raise money for that organization, too.

Santorum believes that abortion is never justified, including in cases of rape or incest. During a Republican presidential debate last summer in Ames, Iowa, when panelist Byron York noted that many Americans favor abortion under certain circumstances, Santorum didn’t flinch or back off from his uncompromising position.

“You know, the Supreme Court of the United States, in a recent case, said that a man who committed rape could not be killed, would not be subjected to the death penalty; yet the child conceived as a result of that rape could be,” he said. “That sounds to me like a country that doesn’t have its morals correct. That child did nothing wrong. That child is an innocent victim.”

Rick Santorum actually tries to convince you if you don’t see things his way on social issues. I think there are two candidates who would be pro-life activists if they were elected – Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. But I have more confidence in Santorum’s ability to persuade people who are not already pro-life  to be sympathetic to the pro-life view. He can build consensus, because he is a pro-life apologist, rather than just being pro-life. Rick Santorum is doing exactly what Greg Koukl said that real pro-lifers do.

Now let’s take take a look at Mitt Romney’s record on abortion.

Excerpt:

Two months after his pro-life conversion, Mitt Romney appointed Matthew Nestor to the bench in Massachusetts. Romney seeming bowed to political pressure making Nestor a judge even after Nestor, according to the Boston Globe as far back as 1994, had campaigned for political office championing his pro-abortion views.

One year after his pro-life conversion, in July of 2005, Mitt Romney vetoed legislation that would expand the use of the morning after pill arguing that it would contribute to abortions. But just three months later Mitt Romney slid back and signed a bill that expanded state subsidized access to the morning after pill.

Writing in the Boston Globe on October 15, 2005, Stephanie Ebbert noted:

Governor Mitt Romney has signed a bill that could expand the number of people who get family-planning services, including the morning-after pill, confusing some abortion and contraception foes who had been heartened by his earlier veto of an emergency contraception bill. … The services include the distribution of condoms, abortion counseling, and the distribution of emergency contraception, or morning after pills, by prescription …

But that’s nothing. Two whole years after the pro-life view had settled into Mitt Romney’s conscience and a year after Mitt Romney had vetoed legislation expanding access to the morning after pill, he expanded access to abortion and gave Planned Parenthood new rights under state law. Yes, that Planned Parenthood.

[Romneycare], in addition to providing healthcare coverage for the uninsured and forcing everyone to have insurance, expanded abortion services in the State of Massachusetts. It also required that one member of the MassHealth Payment Policy Board be appointed by Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts.

From Chapter 58 of the Acts of 2006:

SECTION 3. Chapter 6A of the General Laws is hereby amended by inserting after section 16I the following 6 sections: . . . Section 16M. (a) There shall be a MassHealth payment policy advisory board. The board shall consist of the secretary of health and human services or his designee, who shall serve as chair, the commissioner of health care financing and policy, and 12 other members: … 1 member appointed by Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts … (Massachusetts General Court Website, http://www.mass.gov, Accessed 2/5/07)

That’s an example of Mitt Romney’s record on abortion. Those are the facts on Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney when it comes to abortion.

Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum on abortion – in their own words

We’ve already seen that Santorum has the pro-life record and Romney has the pro-abortion record. So now let’s compare Mitt Romney in his own words with Rick Santorum in his own words.

Mitt Romney:

Rick Santorum:

Just to be clear, if you are a pure social conservative, there here is the candidate ranking for you:

  1. Rick Santorum
  2. Michele Bachmann
  3. Newt Gingrich
  4. Rick Perry
  5. Ron Paul
  6. John Huntsman
  7. Mitt Romney

Social conservatives need to vote for a candidate that has a pro-life record, not just pro-life rhetoric and a charming smile.

News

Bad news for believers in naturalistic explanations of the Cambrian explosion

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Before we see the new discovery, let’s review what the Cambrian explosion is all about.

Video 1:

Video 2:

Casey Luskin explains the new discovery at Evolution News.

Excerpt:

A recent article in Science begins by observing that the lack of evolutionary ancestors for the animal phyla that appear abruptly in the Cambrian explosion has been troubling to many evolutionary scientists:

Ever since Darwin there has been a disturbing void, both paleontological and psychological, at the base of the Phanerozoic eon. If his theory of gradualistic evolution be true, then surely the pre-Phanerozoic oceans must have swarmed with living animals — despite their conspicuous absence from the early fossil record.

(N. J. Butterfield, “Terminal Developments in Ediacaran Embryology,” Science, Vol. 334:1655-1656 (December 23, 2011).)

The articles goes on to explain that in 1998, tiny fossil animal embryos were reported that offered “palpable relief” to those evolutionary scientists worried about the lack of Precambrian ancestors.

However, new analyses of these microfossils now strongly suggest that they were not multicellular animals, and thus could not be Precambrian multicellular metazoa that have long been the holy grail for evolutionary paleontologists. Rather, they likely represent single-celled amoeba-like organisms.

[…]A Science Daily article on the study explains that many Darwinian scientists will be dismayed by the results of this study:

Professor Philip Donoghue said: “We were very surprised by our results — we’ve been convinced for so long that these fossils represented the embryos of the earliest animals — much of what has been written about the fossils for the last ten years is flat wrong. Our colleagues are not going to like the result.”

How did the investigators determine the nature of these ancient organisms? The fossils were exceptionally well preserved, such that, as the lead author on the paper stated, “the fossils are so amazing that even their nuclei have been preserved.” These allowed the authors to determine that these were in fact eukaryotic organisms, but not multicellular animals.

Casey goes on to answer the response by naturalists that “the fossil record is incomplete”.

I think it’s important, when deciding whether naturalistic evolution happened, to be aware of these problem areas. So often when discussing Darwinian evolution, people like journalists and philosophers and economists, etc. will just accept the theory because they trust in what experts tell them. There can be a lot of pressure in the university to not be seen as a dumb person, so that people will just go along with whatever their professor tells them to believe. And, that’s not necessarily a bad policy when time is short. However, that is taking evolution on blind faith. It’s a good thing, as we get older, to go back and revisit these things to see if they are really true.

For example, a really educated Darwinian should be able to finish a sentence like this: “People who doubt fully naturalistic evolution do so because of the following pieces of scientific evidence…” If you meet someone who cannot finish this statement, but who still espouses Darwinian evolution, then you know that you are dealing with someone who has jumped to the answer without really working through the problem by themselves. It can be very tempting, especially for artsy types, to just try to jump to the answer that all the smart people believe without really working through the problem. But that’s not a good way to decide what’s true. Everyone has to work through these problems themselves, and listening to the best people on both sides is the way to do that. People who question evolution nowadays don’t question that the universe is billions of years old or that scientific methods have to be used to answer scientific questions. By all means, let’s decide how we got here by appealing to science.

If you would like to see a nice hour-long video on the Cambrian explosion, then click here.

By the way, if you missed my previous post on the new discovery of oxygen in the early Earth’s environment, and the challenge it represents to naturalistic scenarios for the origin of life, then do check that out.

News

Evangelicals in Iowa rally to Rick Santorum, pushing him into 3rd place

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The leftist Washington Post reports.

Excerpt:

The CNN/Opinion Research poll released this week showed Santorum moving into third place in Iowa at 16 percent.

[…]The poll showed Santorum taking 22 percent of born-again Christians, moving him into first place among that group. And if he can make other born-agains believe that he’s the one viable alternative to Romney and Paul, then maybe he can create enough of a rallying effect to unite evangelicals behind his campaign.

“That bandwagon effect at the end can be very powerful in moving numbers dramatically in the last five days,” said former Iowa Republican Party chairman Steve Grubbs, pointing to Huckabee’s win.

There’s also the fact that many voters are receptive to Santorum; other polling has suggested he is a popular second-choice pick.

That suggests voters want to vote for Santorum, but perhaps didn’t see him as someone who could actually win. But if they now see him as a viable option, maybe they move into his camp.

“So it means he still has upside — beyond evangelicals but certainly including them,” said Nick Ryan, the founder of the pro-Santorum super PAC that is current running a quarter-million dollars worth of ads in the Hawkeye State.

The problem, though, is that Santorum is running against two other lower-tier candidates — Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann — who have significant appeal to evangelicals as well. And they aren’t so far behind Santorum (they take 11 percent and 9 percent, respectively) that they wouldn’t also appear to be viable options.

[…]For either Perry or Bachmann, finishing behind Santorum in Iowa likely means the end of their campaign, and that means that Santorum is going to have to work at stealing their supporters.

But at least for now, it appears that he has a genuine opportunity to steal votes from a large pool of voters that doesn’t like either of the two frontrunners.

And given the topsy-turvy nature of the race in Iowa, it isn’t out of the question to think he he could pick up enough votes to win.

Let’s confirm Santorum’s surging poll numbers with this Fox News article.

Excerpt:

After a poll Wednesday showed Santorum suddenly moving into third position in Iowa, a Rasmussen Reports survey released Thursday showed the same line-up. The poll showed Mitt Romney and Ron Paul in a dead heat, with 23 and 22 percent respectively, and Santorum in third with 16 percent.

In a troubling sign for Newt Gingrich, the same survey showed the ex-House speaker tied for fourth with Rick Perry.

The polls nationally and in Iowa have been notoriously fickle this season, and the shape of the race just five days out is no guarantee of any particular outcome on caucus day. Also, national polling continues to show Santorum in the low single digits, leading only former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman.

Just to be clear, if you are a pure social conservative, there here is the candidate ranking for you:

  1. Rick Santorum (Persuasive, Good positions, legislative record, voting record)
  2. Michele Bachmann (Good positions, legislative record, voting record)
  3. Newt Gingrich (Good positions, voting record)
  4. Rick Perry (Good positions, legislative record)
  5. John Huntsman  (Pro-life, pro-gay-rights)
  6. Ron Paul (effectively pro-abortion, effectively pro-gay-marriage)
  7. Mitt Romney (Record is pro-abortion, pro-gay-rights)

Santorum gets the edge over Bachmann because he is more persuasive on abortion and marriage – he actually tries to convince people who don’t agree with him. They both take the right positions and have good records of activism, but Santorum is a social conservative apologist. Social conservatives should not vote for anyone other than Bachmann or Santorum. Perry would be the lowest I would go when everything is factored in.