| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Fredric L. Rice" |
| Date: |
12 Aug 2005 07:35:44 PM |
| Object: |
Abortion rights advertisement accurate enough |
Ad Attacking Supreme Court Nominee Provokes Furor
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/11/politics/11abort.html?pagewanted=print
WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 - An advertisement that a leading abortion-rights
organization began running on national television on Wednesday,
opposing the Supreme Court nomination of John G. Roberts Jr. as one
"whose ideology leads him to excuse violence against other Americans,"
quickly became the first flashpoint in the three-week-old confirmation
process.
Several prominent abortion rights supporters as well as a neutral media
watchdog group said the advertisement was misleading and unfair, and a
conservative group quickly took to the airwaves with an opposing
advertisement.
The focus of the 30-second spot, which Naral Pro-Choice America is
spending $500,000 to place on the Fox and CNN cable networks, as well
as on broadcast stations in Maine and Rhode Island over the next
two weeks, is on an argument in an abortion-related case that
Judge Roberts made to the Supreme Court in the early 1990's,
when he was working in the first Bush administration as the
principal deputy solicitor general.
The question before the court was whether a Reconstruction-era
civil rights law intended to protect freed slaves from the
Ku Klux Klan could provide a basis for federal courts to issue
injunctions against the increasingly frequent and violent
demonstrations that were intended to block access to abortion clinics.
The court heard arguments in the case, Bray v. Alexandria
Women's Health Clinic, in October 1991 and then again the
next October before finally ruling in January 1993, by a
vote of 6 to 3, that the law did not apply. Justice Sandra
Day O'Connor, whom Mr. Roberts has been nominated to succeed,
voted in dissent. The decision prompted Congressional passage
of a new federal law to protect the clinics.
Mr. Roberts participated in both arguments, presenting the
administration's view that the law in question, the Ku Klux Klan Act,
did not apply to the clinic protests. In earlier cases, the
Supreme Court had parsed the law, which prohibits conspiracies
to deprive "any person or class of persons of the equal protection
of the laws," as requiring proof that a conspiracy was motivated
by a "class-based, invidiously discriminatory animus."
In this case, two lower federal courts had found that the clinic
protests met that test because they were a form of discrimination
against women. But Mr. Roberts argued that the demonstrators were
not singling out women for discriminatory treatment but rather
were trying to "prohibit the practice of abortion altogether."
He told the court that even though only women could become pregnant
or seek abortions, it was "wrong as a matter of law and logic"
to regard opposition to abortion as the equivalent of discrimination
against women.
The administration's position initially attracted relatively
little attention when it entered the case in the spring of 1991.
But after a summer of violent protests at clinics in Wichita, Kan.,
during which Mr. Roberts and other administration lawyers
opposed the authority of a federal judge there to issue an
injunction, the situation had become politically sensitive.
Mr. Roberts began his second argument by saying the administration
was not trying to defend the demonstrators' conduct but rather to
"defend the proper interpretation" of the statute.
That distinction is blurred in Naral's advertisement, prepared by
Struble Eichenbaum Communications, a Democratic media company here.
The spot opens with a scene of devastation, the bombing of an
abortion clinic in Birmingham, Ala., in January 1998. Emily Lyons,
a clinic employee who was seriously injured in the attack, appears
on the screen. "When a bomb ripped through my clinic, I almost
lost my life," she says.
Mr. Roberts's image then appears, superimposed on a
faint copy of the brief he signed in the 1991 case.
"Supreme Court nominee John Roberts filed court briefs
supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic
bomber," the narrator's voice says. The spot concludes
by urging viewers to: "Call your senators. Tell them
to oppose John Roberts. America can't afford a justice
whose ideology leads him to excuse violence against
other Americans."
According to Factcheck.org, a nonpartisan project of
the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University
of Pennsylvania that monitors political advertisements
and speeches for accuracy, "the ad is false" and "uses
the classic tactic of guilt by association." The imagery
is "especially misleading" in linking the 1998 clinic
bombing to the brief Mr. Roberts signed seven years
earlier, Factcheck said in an analysis at its Web site,
www.factcheck.org, under the heading: "Naral Falsely
Accuses Supreme Court Nominee Roberts."
As the Factcheck critique began to be trumpeted by conservative
groups early Wednesday, Naral prepared a rebuttal of what it
called "glaring errors" in the organization's analysis.
Michael Bray, a defendant in the case, had been convicted
several years earlier for his role in bombing abortion clinics,
Naral said, adding that since the Bush administration and
Mr. Bray were on the same side of the Supreme Court case,
"John Roberts did, therefore, side with a convicted clinic
bomber" as well as with Operation Rescue, "a violent fringe group."
Naral's president, Nancy Keenan, defended the advertisement
during an interview in her office here.
"It's tough and it's accurate," Ms. Keenan said.
"It has done exactly what we expected it to do," she added,
namely to provide a "wake-up call" about the stakes for
reproductive freedom at issue in the current Supreme Court vacancy.
"Conventional wisdom says the Roberts nomination is a done deal,
so it behooves us to make sure the American public knows who
John Roberts really is," she said.
Ms. Keenan, a former Montana state legislator who has headed
the organization for the past year, said it was important to
note that because the federal government was not a party in
the Bray case, the administration's participation in the
Supreme Court appeal was voluntary.
"They chose what side to take," she said. "That tells us something."
Within the larger liberal coalition of which Naral is a part,
there was considerable uneasiness about the advertisement,
although leaders of other groups generally refused to speak
on the record. One who did, Frances Kissling, the longtime
president of Catholics for a Free Choice, said she was
"deeply upset and offended" by the advertisement, which she
called "far too intemperate and far too personal."
Ms. Kissling, who initiated the conversation with a reporter,
said the ad "does step over the line into the kind of personal
character attack we shouldn't be engaging in."
She added: "As a pro-choice person, I don't like being placed
on the defensive by my leaders. Naral should pull it and move on."
Walter Dellinger, a former acting solicitor general in the
Clinton administration and longtime Naral supporter, sent a
letter on Wednesday to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary
Committee and its ranking Democrat, Arlen Specter of
Pennsylvania and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, respectively.
Mr. Dellinger said he had disagreed with Mr. Roberts's argument
in the Bray case but considered it unfair to give
"the impression that Roberts is somehow associated with clinic bombers."
He added that "it would be regrettable if the only refutation
of these assertions about Roberts came from groups opposed to
abortion rights."
A conservative group, Progress for America, said it would
spend $300,000 to run ads, beginning Thursday, on the same
stations on which the Naral ad is appearing. "How low can
these frustrated liberals sink?" its advertisement asks.
---
http://www.ElmerFudd.US/ http://www.notserver.com/
http://sf.irk.ru/www/ot3/otiii-gif.html
http://www.rightard.org/ http://www.thedarkwind.org/
http://www.spaink.net/cos/warhero/
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| User: "jack" |
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| Title: Re: Abortion rights advertisement accurate enough |
12 Aug 2005 11:19:02 PM |
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Everyone is condeming these ads (liberals (e.g., Al Franken) and
conservatives alike), and they have been pulled.
Would have been nice if consevatives did the same with that swiftboat
joke.
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| User: "Fredric L. Rice" |
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| Title: Re: Abortion rights advertisement accurate enough |
13 Aug 2005 01:40:44 AM |
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"jack" <jack.barnhardt@gmail.com> wrote:
Everyone is condeming these ads (liberals (e.g., Al Franken) and
conservatives alike), and they have been pulled.
Would have been nice if consevatives did the same with that swiftboat
joke.
I finally saw some of the ad in question. I had to wonder if it
was something Karl Rove put together to try to discredit the
pro-rights movement.
---
http://www.ElmerFudd.US/ http://www.notserver.com/
http://sf.irk.ru/www/ot3/otiii-gif.html
http://www.rightard.org/ http://www.thedarkwind.org/
http://www.spaink.net/cos/warhero/
.
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