Radiance Foundation co-founder Ryan Bomberger speaking at the Family Research Council's ProLifeCon, Jan. 23, 2012 (AMERICAN INDEPENDENT/Sofia Resnick)

FRC President Tony Perkins opened the annual ProLifeCon, claiming that an estimated 54 million abortions have taken place since the procedure became legal four decades ago.

“Where’s the moral outrage in America today?” Perkins said.

Gerard Nadal — an anti-abortion activist, blogger and microbiologist — demonstrated some of that outrage, as he accused Planned Parenthood of spreading sexually transmitted diseases and accused the medical community of what he termed “aggressive eugenics.” It’s Nadal’s contention that most doctors only recommend abortion when faced with anticipated genetic disorders or fetal anomalies.

“Doctors will tell woman, ‘If you don’t abort, then I’m not going to treat you,’” Nadal said.

“The one thing that’s become crystal clear is we’re no longer arguing a woman’s right to choose,” he continued. “I long for the good old days of arguing whether a woman has a right to choose abortion. Right now what’s happening in medicine is physicians are not putting on the table what a woman’s options are; they’re just telling a woman, ‘You need to get rid of this baby.’”

Gerard Nadal, anti-abortion activist and molecular biologist, speaking at the Family Research Council's ProLifeCon, Jan. 23, 2012 (AMERICAN INDEPENDENT/Sofia Resnick)

Nadal recently co-founded the Council on Poor Prenatal Diagnoses & Therapeutic Intervention, and on Saturday FRC hosted this group’s first national conference, which involved several physicians, scientists and parents of children with disabilities painting the picture that most doctors are eugenicists. Nadal told The American Independent his organization will spend the next 18 months aggressively conducting research in order to influence public policy. The council is looking into birth control as well as abortion.

Two U.S. representatives spoke at the FRC forum: freshman Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.) and 16-term Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), who last year sponsored a controversial bill that among other things would prohibit state health exchanges created by Obama’s health-care reform bill from covering abortion services, with limited exceptions.

Smith co-chairs the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, which condemned the Obama administration’s recent mandate that insurance plans will eventually have to cover family planning services, including emergency contraception.

“Obama is the enemy of life, as is his people,” Smith said. ”The past three years of abortion extremism by President Obama is a mere foretaste of what will be if he is reelected. Mr. Obama’s abortion extremism will significantly worsen in a second term.”

U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., speaking at the Family Research Council's ProLifeCon, Jan. 23, 2012 (AMERICAN INDEPENDENT/Sofia Resnick)

Another outspoken anti-abortion congressman is Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), who was not at the FRC conference but is expected this week to introduce a bill that would ban abortions in the District of Columbia after 20 weeks, with limited exceptions. Late last year, Franks introduced a federal bill that would criminalize doctors who fail to prove that an abortion was not related to the anticipated sex or race of the child.

Jeanne Monahan, FRC’s director for the Center for Human Dignity, closed the conference with discussion of crisis pregnancy centers, which counsel against abortion and do not offer or refer for contraceptive services. Many of the more than 4,000 CPCs across the nation, which are usually affiliated with one of three networks — Care Net, Heartbeat International, and the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates – have received federal or state funding either through the Choose Life license plate program active in many states or to teach abstinence-only sex-education classes.

On Monday FRC released a new study (PDF) on CPCs in America, an updated version of its 2009 report. Monahan said that among FRC’s findings was that in 2010, CPCs saved the government $100 million by providing free services like pregnancy tests and ultrasound screenings. Monahan said several times that the $100 million is a “very conservative estimate.”

Last year, the Guttmacher Institute released a report claiming that unintended pregnancies cost American taxpayers roughly $11.1 billion each year.

You can watch the entire conference recorded by FRC here.

Photo: Family Research Council seal on FRC’s Values Voters Bus, Jan. 23, 2012 (AMERICAN INDEPENDENT/Sofia Resnick)

An ultrasound machine (source: Flickr/redjar)

A new survey released from the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health found that “strong majorities” of Latina/os registered to vote support “access to legal abortion, affirm that they would offer support to a close friend or family member who had an abortion, and oppose politicians interfering in personal, private decisions about abortion,” the group reports.

The research, which was conducted by Lake Research Partners, was part of a national survey of 600 registered Latina/o voters. The survey asked nuanced questions regarding abortion rights, questions were asked in English and Spanish and it included about 200 surveys conducted via cell phone.

According to the polling data (PDF):

• A strong majority of Latino registered voters (74 percent) agrees that a woman has a right to make her own personal, private decisions about abortion without politicians interfering.
• Nearly three in four Latino registered voters (73 percent) agree that we should not judge someone who feels they are not ready to be a parent.
• Two‐thirds of Latino voters (67 percent) say they would give support to a close friend or family member who had an abortion.
• Most Latino voters seem willing to disagree with church leaders on the legality of abortion.
• Finally, a majority of Latino voters agree that money should not determine access to abortion.

This past year, an anti-abortion rights group prepared to launch a billboard campaign in Los Angeles targeting Latinas. The billboards were to say in both English and Spanish that “the most dangerous place for a Latino is in the womb.”

The group behind the billboard is the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles. The organization’s billboards are an almost word-for-word copy of billboards from a Texas-based group called Heroic Media that targeted African-American women. Heroic Media’s billboard’s said, “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.”

The National Latina Institute issued a press release immediately following news of the billboards, denouncing them. The group said, “These offensive billboards are nothing more than political ploys designed to stigmatize Latina women and communities of color and restrict access to reproductive health care.”

Loretta Ross, national coordinator for SisterSong, told The Florida Independent that the billboards are a “vicious attack on Latinas.” The billboards were eventually brought down.

In Colorado, a personhood amendment is expected to come before voters in November.

In 2011, 26 states enacted 69 laws that in some way restricted access to abortions or reduced funding for family planning services (what NARAL calls “anti-choice” laws), said NARAL President Nancy Keenan, who told reporters that NARAL has been tracking abortion-rights-related legislation since 1995. And since that time, NARAL has calculated that 713 anti-abortion laws have been passed across America. The record year for highest number of abortion-related legislation passed in a single year was 1999, with 70 laws, just one more than last year, Keenan said.

“Last year, we predicted that our opponents would ignore the public’s call to focus on the nation’s immediate challenges, such as the economy,” Keenan said. “Sadly for women, our predictions came true at near record levels. Lawmakers waged a War on Women, and as a result, women in many states will see more political interference in their personal, private medical decisions.”

Hope for abortion rights last year, Keenan said, came from vetoes of anti-abortion bills by the Democratic governors of Minnesota and Montana; U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) describing — on the House floor — a late-term abortion she had due to health reasons, effectively humanizing the debate; and Mississippi voters rejecting a state constitutional amendment that would have outlawed abortion and potentially outlawed in-vitro fertilization and certain forms of birth control.

In 2011, Arizona, Florida, and Kansas enacted the most anti-abortion legislation in 2011, with five measures each, according to the NARAL report. Florida was among 21 states to receive an “F” on women’s reproductive rights. NARAL gave the nation as a whole a “D.” The 2012 “report card” can be viewed here (PDF).

Donna Crane, policy director of NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation (NARAL’s 501(c)3 arm) told reporters that 2012 could be a record-breaking year for anti-abortion legislation. She explained that NARAL has labeled seven states “fully pro-choice” because in these states Democrats control the governor’s office and both state houses; 19 states have been labeled “fully anti-choice” because in these states Republicans control the governor’s office and both state houses; and 25 states are “mixed-choice.”

Based on this assumption and recent legislative trends related to abortion, NARAL suggests that in 2012:

• 36 states could introduce mandatory ultrasound laws.
• 28 states could introduce bans on private insurance coverage of abortion
• 38 states could introduce “copycat” legislation first introduced in Nebraska in 2010 that bans abortions after 20 weeks without any exceptions.
• 40 states could introduce laws that would penalize doctors who fail to determine if race or sex is a factor in a woman’s decision to terminate her pregnancy.
• 33 states could introduce legislation prohibiting abortion providers like Planned Parenthood from receiving state funds for other health services they provide.
• 5 states — Oregon, California, Nevada, Colorado and Ohio — could Florida and Montana in Personhood-style amendment initiatives.

Lissy Moskowitz, deputy policy director of NARAL, said that federal legislative trends expected to be carried over in 2012 include attempts to strip federal family planning funding from abortion providers, to prohibit any insurance coverage — even private — of abortion services, to enact federal race-/sex-selective abortion legislation, and to dismantle parts of Obama’s health-care reform act that guarantee coverage of gynecological exams, birth control and emergency contraception. Moskowitz noted that in 2011 the House of Representatives voted on abortion-related issues eight times, compared with one time in 2010, three times in 2009, zero times in 2008, and two times in 2007 and 2006.

The NARAL representatives also pointed out that if any one of the current GOP presidential candidates unseats President Obama in November, the above federal laws would have a much greater chance of succeeding. Last night in Greenville, S.C., all the candidates but frontrunner Mitt Romney attended an anti-abortion presidential forum sponsored by Personhood USA, during which Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum stated support for personhood-style amendments without exceptions for rape or incest and promised to veto any piece of legislation that includes family-planning funding for abortion providers.

NARAL has created a graphic look of anti-abortion legislation in 2011 compared to other years here. All the information in the report is available here.

The same day NARAL released its report, anti-abortion-rights policy group Americans United for Life released its own 2012 rankings, based on which states enacted the most restrictive anti-abortion laws in 2011. Unsurprisingly, AUL ranked Louisiana its best state in “protecting life,” while NARAL ranked Louisiana its worst state in supporting reproductive rights. AUL’s worst state is Washington, which is NARAL’s second-best state. NARAL ‘s best state is California, which was ranked second-worst by AUL.

]]> http://coloradoindependent.com/110404/anti-abortion-measures-gaining-steam-around-the-country/feed 1 http://coloradoindependent.com/110284/perry-exit-planned-to-boost-anti-romney-gingich-vote http://coloradoindependent.com/110284/perry-exit-planned-to-boost-anti-romney-gingich-vote#comments Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:59:29 +0000 John Tomasic http://coloradoindependent.com/?p=110284 arch job-killing vulture capitalist, and after Romney declined to appear last night at an anti-abortion forum in Greenville.]]> Texas Governor Rick Perry will end his limping bid for the presidency with an announcement scheduled this morning, just two days before voters go to the polls in the crucial South Carolina Republican primary. The timing is aimed to boost support for Newt Gingrich, whose popularity among voters has been climbing again after he unleashed a barrage of attacks on Romney over the last two weeks, painting him as an arch job-killing vulture capitalist, and after Romney declined to appear last night at an anti-abortion forum in Greenville.

There has been no announcement yet from the Colorado Perry campaign, which is headed by Republican US Rep Mike Coffman (CD6). Coffman embraced Perry early in the race but has seemed to distance himself from the candidate as Perry clearly struggled on the national stage. Coffman faces reelection this year in a district recently remade from a GOP stronghold into a competitive district divided roughly equally among independent, Republican and Democratic voters.

CNN broke the news of the coming Perry announcement but Politico offered a cautionary note, referring to the disarray of the Perry campaign that has made his candidacy unpredictable.

“The discord in Perryworld was evident even as the candidate prepared to drop out.

“Top officials in Texas said they were unaware of his intentions and as late as this morning said they genuinely didn’t know whether he was still running.”

The news will come as a disappointment for a bloc of conservatives led by Erick Erickson at national Tea Party blog RedState, who have embraced Perry as a true conservative while excoriating his staff as incompetent.

Erickson wrote this morning of the inevitable end of the Perry campaign, forecasting coming events.

In a post titled “Hero or Spoiler,” he lamented the turn the primary has taken, where unreliably conservative Romney is marching to the nomination, in part because his opponents have split the anti-Romney Tea Party vote.

Yesterday, I argued that Rick Perry should leave the GOP primary in advance of Saturday’s election and endorse Newt Gingrich, who is the most logical fit in the existing field for a Perry endorsement.

The Perry campaign responded that the race would be decided by voters, not pundits behind a computer.

Fair enough. Rick Perry does not want to be seen as a quitter. But quit he will. I do not want him to quit. I urged him to stay in the race. But sadly his campaign has been unable to get the second look I thought it deserved…

It may suck, but it is reality. And we are forced at times like this to deal with reality. The reality is that Rick Perry will be quitting the race, but he is not quitting the fight, which has always been more important…

It’s not like I relish taking this position. I introduced Rick Perry at the 2011 RedState Gathering as the next President of the United States. He remains the best qualified man to be President. I would be thrilled to have him as my President. But he is polling in last place and there are three days to go. It isn’t going to happen.

But throwing his support to one of the other non-Romney candidates could help that person win.

Rick Perry will quit…. The question is whether he will quit before Saturday’s primary and help someone else win as a hero and king maker, or will he quit next week and see Mitt Romney win with Perry serving as the spoiler, keeping either Gingrich or Santorum from winning.

Perry’s joining the race for the nomination last fall generated great enthusiasm but his repeat gaffes and clear casting about on foreign policy questions conjured a sort of caricature version of George W Bush, the last Texas governor to win the White House and a man whose recently past presidency remains deeply controversial and unpopular among Americans on the right and left.

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Today, primary-rival Newt Gingrich’s super PAC, Winning Our Future, launched a video that fits, like attack-campaign yin and yang, with a video launched by the Democratic National Committee in November.

“Think you know Mitt. He claims to be pro-life,” says the ad narrator. The comes footage of Romney when he was running for governor of Massachusetts in which he unabashedly supports abortion rights and the right of minors seeking abortions to win consent from judges rather than their parents.

The DNC ad is similarly foreboding, complete with dark music and blood-red text underliner.

The inevitable left and right attacks on Romney’s stands on abortion actually serve to dampen the urgency to know where he stands on the issue because they underscore the larger, main issue of the Romney candidacy, which is the fact that no one can be sure what Romney thinks from one moment to the next about major policy issues, including one of the most charged political issues of the contemporary American life.

Romney mostly avoided campaigning in Iowa caucuses in the fall because the predominant evangelical Christian Republican voters there make social issues a top priority.

South Carolina primary voters are similarly concerned with issues like gay marriage and abortion but the state has become a key southern peg in the GOP nomination contest, too important to coast through. A multimillionaire former private equity CEO, Romney’s strategy so far has been to veer to discussion about the economy, or more accurately, to discussion of President Obama’s “socialism” and “politics of class envy.”

Romney decided to avoid altogether a voter Q&A forum hosted today in South Carolina by Colorado-based Personhood USA. Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich are all slated to attend.

The forum questions Romney would have faced were sure to be loaded.

Romney has refused to sign a pledge sponsored by Personhood USA and, according to the group, is “the only Republican Presidential Candidate who is not participating in the Presidential Prolife Forum, and the only candidate who has not signed Personhood USA’s Prolife Presidential Pledge.”

Romney told Mike Huckabee on Fox News in November that he “absolutely” would “support the constitutional amendment that would have established the definition of life at conception.” Huckabee was talking unequivocaly about personhood. It is that exchange that fueled the November DNC attacks.

Romney drew fire last year for refusing to sign an anti-abortion pledge sponsored by the Susan B. Anthony List, a Washington-based advocacy group. He said the pledge was “overly broad” and published his own version on his website. He espoused support for the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for abortion, and promised that, as president, he would “support efforts to prohibit federal funding for any organization like Planned Parenthood.”

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GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul (Pic by Gage Skidmore, via Flickr)

One of the current front-runners for the GOP presidential nomination, Ron Paul, released an ad this week touting his anti-abortion rights credentials as a former obstetrician.

Paul has set himself apart from his Republican counterparts for years because of his fairly consistent record against government overreach. Paul, a libertarian, has publicly supported decriminalization of marijuana and has opposing waging wars, among other stances unpopular in the Republican party. Paul is now a real contender for the GOP nomination.

Despite his atypical views on a whole host of issues — which have made him popular among people who typically do not side with the GOP — Paul does mirror his opponents when it comes to the issue of reproductive rights.

This week, his campaign released an ad that highlights his anti-abortion credentials. The ad announces that he has delivered more than 4,000 babies and is “a man of faith that is committed to protecting life.” The ad also features women who claim he is committed to protecting the “unborn.”

His campaign website says about the issue of abortion that:

As a physician, Ron Paul consistently put his beliefs into practice and saved lives by helping women seek options other than abortion, including adoption. And as President, Ron Paul will continue to fight for the same pro-life solutions he has upheld in Congress, including:

• Immediately saving lives by effectively repealing Roe v. Wade and preventing activist judges from interfering with state decisions on life by removing abortion from federal court jurisdiction through legislation modeled after his “We the People Act.”
• Defining life as beginning at conception by passing a “Sanctity of Life Act.”

Because he agrees with Thomas Jefferson that it is “sinful and tyrannical” to “compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors,” Ron Paul will also protect the American people’s freedom of conscience by working to prohibit taxpayer funds from being used for abortions, Planned Parenthood, or any other so-called “family planning” program.

Paul has said before that he believes abortion is “the most important issue of our age.”

You can watch Paul’s new ad here:

3

Joe Perez, a retired city worker, is the owner of this gathering space, a clapboard nerve center of northern Colorado Obama politics tucked into a cul-de-sac between a maze of wooden fences. The interior is plastered with political signs in English and Spanish. One stretches across the entire back wall: “The road to the presidency goes through Greeley” it announces in big-brush block letters. The volunteers point out the sign and laugh at its ironic grandiosity but they also semi-seriously embrace it.

They’ll tell you that Colorado is a pivotal swing state and that it reflects key demographic and economic changes taking place throughout the American west. Although the Northern Colorado Tea Party, for example, is one of the largest Tea Party groups in the country and held repeat candidate forums in the Greeley area during the 2010 election season, its familiar rallying cries– like “We want our country back”– either fail to resonate with or offend the kind of people who are destined to eventually dominate the region. Over the last decades, large numbers of coastal and university-town Americans have come here to work in expanding tech and research industries and, together with the growing mostly still working-class Latino population, are tipping the state’s formerly red-libertarian political profile to a shade of purple that places public good at least on something like par with individual liberty as a top government priority.

In fact, at a glance, the volunteers in Joe’s garage could be northern Colorado Tea Partiers. These aren’t stereotypical fresh-faced Obamatron hipsters; these are politicized older people. Outwardly, the two most glaring differences between these volunteers and local Tea Partiers are that they are an ethnically mixed bunch and that they are intensely organized on election campaign work. They are not discussing the news or politics or the failings of the media– or anything else. They’re on task. It’s nearly a year from Election Day and a holiday week and yet there’s almost no time being wasted in this garage.

Material from the national organization, Obama for America (OFA), spreads out on long foldout tables covered with red-checkered tablecloths. Laptops are open with browsers showing the My Barack Obama or My-BO and Democratic Party VoteBuilder databases. People are typing from the beginning to the end of the meeting. Everyone knows what they’re here to do.

As the meeting progresses, Perez fills out a big white-board calendar set in front of the car door.

A woman named Trish updates a list of thousands of Weld County residents’ names with answers to a host of ground-game questions: Who seemed receptive to the message? Who wants to volunteer? Who changed a phone number? Who needs to register to vote?

Pat Bruner, the meeting facilitator, works off an agenda cheat-sheet provided by the national campaign, ticking off items and adding notes for next week.

Dates are being set for face-to-face coffees with potential volunteers. Follow-up pre-printed OFA postcards are being addressed to be mailed out the week after Thanksgiving. Phone banking time is scheduled to talk to the voters receiving the postcards. There is a Review and Preview meeting set for the middle of December, where the group will look back on progress made and ahead to goals that must be achieved in the first weeks of the new year.

Ten minutes after the meeting starts, the volunteers are all on their phones, looking mainly at this stage to line up more organizers and swell the ranks of the northern Colorado advance teams. Those not typing notes are scribbling away with OFA pens.

The Greeley team has been meeting here to work exclusively on the campaign since August. Nearly all of them worked to elect Obama in 2008 and most have been working to gain public support for Obama’s policy agenda since he was inaugurated. To do that, they have essentially been using the same organizing techniques and as a bonus keeping the campaign’s network of contacts fresh.

Dissipated electricity

Perez’s story of how he recently became involved in Democratic politics is typical of the genre. He moved to Greeley from Denver 30 years ago looking for a smaller, agricultural, more culturally conservative community, something more like western Nebraska where he grew up. Greeley suits him but there were drawbacks.

“It’s so [politically] conservative up here, I felt I couldn’t really speak my convictions,” he said. “I was never political. After Vietnam, I put a McGovern sticker on my car. That was my first political action outside the voting booth. Then I saw Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. He told his story. He said ‘We’re not African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans. We’re all just Americans.’

“Well, I’ve been called a wetback, a beaner, a spic,” Perez said, counting off the names on his fingers. “I’ve been called everything, but never an American. That’s all I ever wanted to be, an American. Obama electrified me about the inclusiveness of the American people.”

That variety of Obama electricity has diminished now that he is also familiar to Americans as the captain of a dysfunctional Washington at a time of crisis. For the 99 percent, the national economy three years after Obama took office is still limping along, throwing up the kind of high unemployment figures it’s easy to imagine would dance like hooded reapers through the dreams of any sitting president. In response, the campaign is looking in part to provide context for voters through messaging that focuses on the alternative realities any of the likely Republican candidates would have brought about.

Perez says one of the main hurdles he’s coming up against in talking to voters is disillusionment, where citizens who cast their first-ever ballot did so for Obama last election and have come to believe it didn’t make any difference. Washington is still Washington: the games go on as usual there while the vast majority of Americans continue to suffer coast to coast.

For these dispirited voters, Perez delivers a list of examples of Republican actions taken over the past three years that he believes demonstrates a cynical obstructionist approach to government. He leads with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s statement from January 2009 in which he held that the “single most important thing [Republicans] want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Perez mentions the debt and budget standoffs this year that saw Republicans bringing the nation to the “brink of disaster” by refusing to consider raising taxes even on millionaires when debt default loomed and Standard and Poor’s delivered an historic downgrading of the nation’s credit rating. Same thing, says Perez, when you look at what just happened with the congressional super committee, which was formed out of desperation to negotiate a compromise budget but failed to do so.

“There’s a vision of an America that guards the living wage, the opportunity of education, that looks after the well-being of its citizens,” Perez said. “That’s Obama’s vision. I share that vision and I think most Americans share that vision, but there’s just a lack of cooperation to get things done.

“The other side doesn’t seem to care about what they call the ‘bottom feeders,’ [people] who should all just take a shower and get a job. The American people want to work, they want to keep their homes. Unemployment benefits put food on the table but they don’t pay rent. People want jobs. These are our family members and friends. They’re Americans.”

As Jim Rutenberg, writing on the campaign message for the New York Times last weekend, put it: “If 2008 was about ‘Yes We Can’ and limitless possibility, 2012 will be to some degree about why we couldn’t (‘Republican intransigence’), and why we shouldn’t, at least when it comes to anything the Republican nominee proposes (‘His party got us here in the first place’).”

Message and mechanics

For now, however, the message seems less important than the mechanics, and on that score the campaign is notching major successes.

By mid-October, the donor-ticker at the Obama for America website rolled past seven digits. More than a million people have given to the campaign, a rate of giving that outpaces the record set by the first Obama presidential campaign. In the third quarter, the re-election effort raked in $42 million and received 257,000 first-time donations. The average amount donated was $55.

By mid-November, the campaign celebrated its millionth one-on-one conversation with voters, a mark of the old-school approach to election politics taken by the Obama team that prioritizes the ground game and an achievement that buoys campaign staffers despite the lousy economy and shifting poll numbers.

“Our opponents… simply lack the broad base of grassroots support that we have,” campaign manager Jim Messina said at the time. “They don’t believe in it. They don’t have any interest in the kind of politics that bring everyday people together to make real change in this country.”

According to a November campaign memo, the national team also confirmed it had signed on its thousandth volunteer neighborhood team leader. The author of the memo announced successes around the country that included a “day of action” in Colorado that drew 537 volunteers who worked from 58 “staging locations” to arrange more than 100 one-on-one meetings with Obama supporters and independent voters.

Obama for America presently has two offices open in Colorado, one in Denver and one in Fort Collins, and is hiring staff to cover the entire state. Two priorities that have taken shape in the state, according to the Greeley volunteers and campaign officials, is to protect voting rights and to reach out to women. Neither priority comes as a surprise.

Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler has made national news for seeking the authority to purge the state’s election rolls of voters he believes may be illegally registered non-citizens or illegal immigrants and for acting to prevent county clerks from mailing ballots to “inactive voters” or legally registered voters who failed to vote in the 2010 election. He has met stiff resistance in these efforts but Democratic sources routinely refer to him as the state’s Katherine Harris, the controversial Republican Florida secretary of state in 2000 who declared that George Bush had defeated Al Gore and who halted recount efforts despite the fact that a margin of only roughly 500 votes separated the candidates and that widespread allegations of irregularities plagued the ballot casting and counting processes.

In 2010, by almost all accounts, women decided the Colorado U.S. Senate race that pitted Democrat Michael Bennet against Republican Ken Buck. Perez said the Greeley Obama volunteers worked on that race intensely, a race Buck seemed poised to run away with. In the end, however, he turned off women in droves with his strong stand against abortion and his mishandling as Weld County District Attorney of a rape case in which he appeared to blame the victim, arguing that the assault charges weren’t worth pursuing and doing so in crude language that betrayed a retrograde view of sex crimes and gender relations in general.

The Greeley volunteer meeting facilitator on Monday, Pat Bruner, a multi-ethnic mainly German-Japanese mom– “a typical Heinz 57 American,” as she puts it– grew up in Fort Collins and worked for the Obama campaign in 2008. She said she has a big family and feels the need to work to put in place a government that embraces the future, that isn’t mired in the battles of the past. She said many of the voters she is meeting with share similar concerns.

“We spend a lot of time just sitting down with people, talking. They’re worried but they’re also very open and positive about the message. We [volunteers] just keep our eye down the road. We know what part we play in the bigger picture. It’s person to person, phone call after phone call. It’s not glamorous. It’s hard work.”

[Image: Obama presides in Joe Perez's garage in Greeley.]

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GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain (Pic by Gage Skidmore, via Flickr)

Presidential candidate Herman Cain became one of the last GOP presidential candidates to sign an anti-abortion pledge created by the Susan B. Anthony List. Mitt Romney is now the only candidate who has not signed the promise.

The Hill reports that Cain announced Tuesday he will sign the pledge:

Cain, an associate Baptist Minister at Antioch Baptist Church North in Atlanta, explained his decision by saying he was “100 percent pro-life” and believes that “all human beings have intrinsic dignity.”

“Where my powers in the Executive Branch are concerned, I will work at all times to oppose government funding of abortion,” he told the SBA List. “I will veto any legislation that contains funds for abortions. I will do everything that a President can do constitutionally to advance the culture of life.”

The “2012 Pro-life Presidential Leadership Pledge” calls on each GOP presidential candidate to promise:

• To only nominate judges “who are committed to restraint and applying the original meaning of the Constitution, not legislating from the bench.”
• To select pro-life appointees to key cabinet positions in their administrations.
• To advance legislation to end taxpayer-funded abortions “in all domestic and international spending programs” and to defund Planned Parenthood.
• To advance a “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” sometimes known as a “fetal pain” bill.

As the American Independent has reported, Cain had said publicly he agreed with the first three pledges. However, he said the pledge called for him, as president, to advance “fetal pain” legislation, which he said was a legislative issue and not the responsibility of a president.

“In no way does this singular instance of clarification denote an abandonment of the pro-life movement, but is instead a testament to my respect for the balance of power and the role of the presidency,” Cain said.

Candidates Michele Bachman, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Rick Perry and Rick Santorum have all signed the pledge.

In a press release, the League calls the film “one of the most offensive and outrageous abuses of the memory of the Holocaust we have seen in years.”

The 30-minute film, which is referred to as the “180 movie,” has garnered almost 1.5 million views on YouTube and has been heavily circulated among anti-abortion activists. The creator of the film, Ray Comfort, recently announced he was sending the movie to high schools in the hopes that the movie is shown to students.

Personhood USA emailed 600,000 voters in Mississippi a link to the controversial film just a day before Mississippians would vote on the failed Personhood amendment.

According to the Anti-Defamation League’s press release:

“The film is a perverse attempt to make a case against abortion in America through the cynical abuse of the memory of those killed in the Holocaust,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director and a Holocaust survivor. “Not only does the film try to assert a moral equivalency between the Holocaust and abortion, but it also brings Jews and Jewish history into the discussion and then calls on its viewers to repent and accept Jesus as their savior. It is, quite frankly, one of the most offensive and outrageous abuses of the memory of the Holocaust we have seen in years.”

The film “180″ is part of an initiative led by “Living Waters,” which has spearheaded “Project Heart Changer,” which aims to change peoples’ minds about abortion and get them to accept Jesus as their savior.

…

In the film, Comfort manipulates the young people interviewed to view the killing of innocent Jews during the Holocaust to be the same as the killing of fetuses. First, he asks the young people whether they would agree to bulldoze innocent Jews into a mass grave and bury them alive it would save their own lives. Then he asks questions about abortion. He tells the young people who answered ‘no’ to the first question that they have just said that they would not kill innocent Jews, but they think it is okay to kill innocent babies.

“We’re talking about a Holocaust in America, in our country, that’s sanctioned by the government,” Comfort says. He goes on to claim that American people allowing abortions is doing exactly what the Germans did, that Hitler had the sanction of the German people to kill Jews.

In a statement responding to the League’s press release, Comfort said:

No one but a Holocaust survivor can really understand the horror of what the Jews suffered. But the analogy stands. Hitler justified their murder by saying that Jews weren’t human. Abortion advocates do the same by calling a baby a “fetus” (as do ADL in their press release). Yet at 6 weeks 6 days a baby has a heartbeat, eyes, a mouth and hands. We show actual footage of this in our movie. Science now tells us that at the moment of conception there is DNA, determining the eye-color, hair-color and the height and personality of the person. Destroy that, and you destroy the person.

“I was extremely concerned when I saw that Romney embraced [proposed state-constitution personhood amendments]. It’s extreme legislation and it’s deceptive. It goes far beyond anti-choice,” DeGette told reporters on a conference call. She underlined the fact that personhood initiatives would outlaw birth control pills and would place in jeopardy millions in private and public money being invested in medical stem cell research.

Coloradans have roundly voted down personhood measures twice at the ballot box in recent elections, she said.

“I think voters in Colorado reject this. Families dealing with parkinsons and diabetes and alzheimers, they’re not in favor of passing edgy bills that endanger [the search for cures].”

Palacio said the fact that the GOP presidential frontrunner has now come out in support of personhood will rightly focus more attention on the groups pushing personhood and the kind of laws they seek every year to write into state constitutions.

“Personhood places the rights of rapists above the rights of their victims,” he said, referring to the fact that personhood initiatives would outlaw abortion in all cases. There would be no exceptions for rape or incest or if the life of the mother were in danger.

“Voters have to know how dangerous these [laws] are.”

Palacio pointed out that Colorado voters during the Republican wave election of 2010 rejected the U.S. Senate candidacy of Republican Ken Buck due in part, he said, to the fact that Buck embraced personhood and admitted he would support a complete ban on abortion in all cases.

Critics of the personhood measure proposed for Colorado in 2010 argued that it would shut down large parts of the thriving biomedical research industry here. Not just stem cell research but basic fertilization research and practices would suffer. In-vitro fertilization, for example, would be outlawed. Legal analysts said the laws would force the state constitution to be altered in hundreds of instances. Pregnant women who used drugs or drank too much or otherwise endangered the fertilized eggs they were carrying could be confined. Penalties for damaging or destroying fertilized eggs would have to be written and funds allocated to cover related difficult to enforce laws.

Asked about the legal consequences of the initiative, Keith Mason, co-founder of Personhood USA, said he would “worry about the [legal] details later,” after the bill had passed.

Yet Buck wasn’t the only Republican candidate last year to support personhood. Although in 2008 most Colorado Republican candidates rejected personhood as extreme, in 2010 nearly every major Republican candidate in the state embraced the proposed amendment. Fourth District Republican Cory Gardner told Tea Party supporters that he was passing out the personhood petition at his church. Gardner won a seat in Congress and has voted for a slew of sweeping anti-abortion bills passed by the GOP-controlled Congress this year.

Beyond Colorado, the national Democratic Party is pushing hard to highlight Romney’s support for personhood, betting the vast majority of voters will shy away from electing a president who will work both to outlaw birth control pills and risk resurrecting the blackmarket abortion industry.

Democratic National Committee launched a video campaign this week and Executive Director Patrick Gaspard sent a letter to supporters going hard at Romney on the issue.

“Personhood” amendments are the notorious measures now being considered in states like Mississippi, Florida, and Ohio, that would elevate a fertilized human egg to the status of a legal person. They would ban IUDs, the morning-after pill, in-vitro fertilization, and all abortions — with no exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest or in cases where the life of a woman is at stake…

“If Romney wants to take the position that abortion and birth control are equal to murder, that’s up to him, but we’ll hold him accountable for it, and not let anyone forget that he’s made the choice to go this far to the right on this issue.”

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