Life Links 2/9/10

In Ohio, House Speaker Armond Budish has turned down a request to honor National Right to Life's oratory contest winner on the house floor.

Perhaps his real message to Ohio's teens is that excelling in public speaking isn't worth being honored if their views are different than his," said Mike Gonidakis, executive director of Ohio Right to Life.

This is somewhat interesting. NARAL Wisconsin's former board president is allegedly a thief.

Katherine M. Venskus, 34, of Oconomowoc, allegedly used the card belonging to Minneapolis-based Public Affairs Company to make $15,473 in unauthorized purchases, according to a criminal complaint filed in Dane County Circuit Court.

Venskus was known as Katherine Heringlake when she pleaded no contest in 2002 to forgery, a felony, for stealing almost $13,000 from the National Abortion Rights Action League of Wisconsin, when she was president of its board of directors.

At least one pro-choice student at McGill University in Canada believes in the freedom of speech. In the McGill Tribune, Brendan Steven takes apart his university's Student Society and their plans to discriminate against the prolife group on campus.

But on Wednesday, a motion will be presented at the GA entitled "Discriminatory Groups" that threatens those very rights. This motion makes some wild claims. It claims that denying a woman access to abortions is "an act of discrimination." On the grounds that pro-life groups are therefore "discriminatory," it seeks to alter SSMU's equity policy to include a clause that would prevent SSMU from granting full or interim club status to any pro-life group. The motion also claims that Choose Life utilized coercive tactics at the now-infamous "Echoes of the Holocaust" event.

This entire motion offends me.

The claim that pro-life groups are fundamentally discriminatory is absurd. It has no rational justification. I make this statement as a person who is fundamentally pro-choice. But that doesn't prevent me from understanding the sincere arguments of the pro-life side of the debate. How is the belief that a fetus is a child discriminatory? Whether life begins at conception is both a scientific and a spiritual question, not a question of sexism.