Last Friday in the nation’s capitol thousands again made the pilgrimage for life and pray for an end to the terrible evil begun on January 22, 1973. On that infamous day the nation’s highest court denied the right to life of the most vulnerable in our society, the innocent unborn child.
The evil legitimized by the Roe v. Wade decision has stained the fabric of our society and culture with the blood of nearly 50 million unborn children legally killed in their mother’s wombs.
The anti-life movement continues to expand in Washington, D.C. as pro-abortion zealots stop at nothing to enshrine in law and expand in practice, the slaughter of innocents. The evil axis of Planned Parenthood, NARAL and the ACLU have found a welcome ally in President Obama who in his first week in office, issued an executive order overturning the prohibition of American foreign aid from going to organizations that finance overseas abortions, proposes a radically pro-abortion health care reform plan, and has consistently nominated notoriously pro-abortion officials to his administration.
Perhaps one of most notorious nominees who holds “fast in a grip of deadly attitudes about human life” is Dawn Johnsen, a law professor at Indiana University, who has been nominated to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. The pro-abortion activist has been criticized by those who oppose her nomination for calling women "fetal containers," comparing pregnancy with slavery, labeling pregnant women "losers in the contraceptive lottery" and comparing pro-lifers to the Ku Klux Klan. The Obama nominee was also infamously involved in an attempt to strip the Catholic Church of its tax-exempt status for violating IRS rules by holding a strong pro-life position. Described as an extreme and dangerous anti-Catholic by William Donohue of the Catholic League, who further suggests that Johnsen “is not someone who simply takes issue with the Catholic Church’s pro-life position; she wants to punish the Catholic Church.”
White House officials have confirmed that as the Senate reconvenes Johnsen will be re-nominated along with other nominees whose nominations expired last year. If confirmed, Johnsen would be in charge of the office that formulates the attorney general's formal opinions and provides counsel on some of the most important legal questions of our time. Rhode Island Senator Whitehouse as a member of the Judiciary Committee has the duty and responsibility of hearing the radical nominee’s testimony and making a judgment if her nomination should go forward. He would do well to remember that the radicals he so often criticizes on the Senate Floor also include radical anti-Catholic and pro-abortion extremists like Johnsen. Her nomination is an insult to every Catholic man, woman and child in Rhode Island and across the nation.
We call upon both our U.S. Senators Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse to reject her nomination and stand with the majority of Rhode Islanders in rejecting the extremist views of such a radical as Dawn Johnsen. The “new dawn” of this tyranny which is epitomized in the Johnsen nomination must be stopped and we ask all Rhode Islanders to let Senators Reed and Whitehouse know that support for her is unacceptable and especially offensive to the members of the Catholic community.
