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Debate with the Family Research Council

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This is kinda fun, and a little scary.

--- Original Message --------------------------------------------------

Mr. James Hughes

1005 N 28th St

Van Buren, AR 72956-3883

E-Mail: [email protected]

Subject: Freedom

Date: November 26, 2004

My question is: How can you reasonably justify the statement that the FRC defends freedom while at the same time taking actions to deprive individuals of such freedoms as the right to an abortion or the right to engage in a partnership contract regardless of sex? How can you violate individual rights in the name of freedom? Freedom in the political sense means freedom from government coercion, but in supporting a ban on abortion and homosexual marriage and bio-research, government coercion is exactly what the FRC supports. It is an either-or issue. Either one supports Freedom or one supports tyranny, which is it?

Respectfully yours,

James Hughes

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Dear James,

Thank you for emailing Family Research Council. We appreciate the opportunity to discuss the issues of abortion and marriage with you.

We (and the majority of the pro-life community) believe that every single human life from the moment of conception until natural death ought to be protected by law. This belief comes from our regard for the sanctity of life.

Until the 1960's, almost all states banned abortion except when necessary to save the life of the mother. Then advocates of legal abortion began putting exceptions in several state laws. In the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade, the United States Supreme Court granted women the "fundamental right" to have an abortion. Roe v. Wade repealed all state laws prohibiting abortions. Its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, extended the "right" to abortion to all nine months of pregnancy if the mother's "health" is at stake. Yet, because health was defined as everything from physical well-being to psychological and financial well-being, abortion became an unrestrained practice.

Life is an unalienable right. The Declaration of Independence states that "all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." In its Preamble, the Constitution of the United States declares that one of its purposes is to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." The national government has the duty of securing the rights of all Americans. The significant question that individuals have trouble agreeing to is at what stage a human being is entitled to his or her unalienable rights. From the moment of conception? Beginning at the second trimester, or the third trimester, or not until the baby is born? In other words, when does life begin? Once we answer this question, we can establish when it is the state's duty to begin providing protection.

Modern medical science proves that life begins at conception. (The website, www.justthefacts.org , reveals this fact in detail.) We know that the moment the ovum is fertilized by the penetration of the sperm, the 23 pairs of chromosomes are complete; the zygote has a specific genotype that is distinct from both parents; and the child's sex, size, shape, skin, color, hair color, eye color, temperament, and intelligence are already determined. Between the time the human being begins as a single fertilized cell to the time it becomes an adult (from fusion to maturity), 45 generations of cell division occur, 41 of which occur BEFORE birth.

Realizing the significance of the fact that life begins at conception, the First International Conference on Abortion, meeting in 1967 in Washington, D.C., declared, "We can find no point in time between the union of sperm and egg and the birth of an infant at which point we can say that this is not a human life." Dr. Jerome Lejeune, one of the world's foremost authorities in genetics and the discoverer of the cause of Down's Syndrome, also testified in the Municipal Court at Morris County, New Jersey on April 13, 1991 that life begins at conception.

Therefore, the United States government ought to protect every human life from the moment it is conceived. Protecting the lives of unborn children is not a matter of "telling a woman what she must do with her body." It is a matter of caring about both the child and the mother, as each has been endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights.

Regarding the issue of allowing homosexuals to marry: the fundamental "right to marry" is a right that rests with individuals, not with couples. Homosexual individuals already have exactly the same "right" to marry as anyone else. Marriage license applications do not inquire as to a person's "sexual orientation."

Many people who now identify themselves as homosexual have previously been in legal (opposite-sex) marriages. On the other hand, many people who previously had homosexual relationships have now renounced that behavior and married persons of the opposite sex. If we define a "homosexual" as anyone who has ever experienced homosexual attractions, then both of these scenarios represent "homosexual" individuals who have exercised their right to be legally married.

However, while every individual person is free to get married, no person, whether heterosexual or homosexual, has ever had a legal right to marry simply any willing partner. Every person, whether heterosexual or homosexual, is subject to legal restrictions as to whom they may marry. To be specific, every person, regardless of sexual preference, is legally barred from marrying a child, a close blood relative, a person who is already married, or a person of the same sex. There is no discrimination here, nor does such a policy deny anyone the "equal protection of the laws" (as guaranteed by the Constitution), since these restrictions apply equally to every individual.

Some people may wish to do away with one or more of these longstanding restrictions upon one's choice of marital partner. However, the fact that a tiny but vocal minority of Americans desire to have someone of the same sex as a partner does not mean that they have a "right" to do so, any more than the desires of other tiny (but less vocal) minorities of Americans give them a "right" to choose a child, their own brother or sister, or a group of two or more as their marital partners.

James, I hope I have answered some of your questions and addressed some of your concerns. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have further questions or concerns.

Sincerely,

Kathy Athearn

Correspondence

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Kathy,

Thank you for your timely response.

I understand the issue of abortion and homosexual marriage. My question is how do you justify the claim that the FRC is an advocate of freedom (again freedom in a political context can only be defined as freedom from government coercion), when it also advocates the use of force to forbid abortion and homosexual marriage?

Although that question was my primary reason for correspondence, I would like to also address the points you made in your previous reply.

As you stated individuals have the inalienable right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. None of these three can be violated to secure the other, or they are all forfeit. If you take away life, you lose everything. If you take away liberty (freedom) you lose the capacity for life (in the human sense of the word) and the pursuit of happiness. If you take away the right to the pursuit of happiness you make the other two meaningless. In the case of abortion you have a human being (the mother) and a potential human being, a cluster of cells which, given time may develop into an actual human being. The only way a baby can be born is to injure the mother. A person certainly has the right to choose whether or not they will endure personal injury for whatever reason. If the mother has no right to choice what happens to her body by what logic does a child have that right? To make that claim is to invalid both parties right to life. Thus a child rightly only gains rights after it is born, until then it lives by permission and by the grace of its mother, who does not have to endure the labors of child birthing; she does so by right, not by compulsion. To say that every embryo conceived has the right to destroy the body of its mother, destroys all rights. By what logic does a fetus have the right to a woman's body, if she herself does not? That is exactly what is meant when the government compels an individual to give up the right to Liberty for the sake of what she has made possible.

The issue of marriage is one of contracts. Marriage is a partnership contract. The government cannot rightly dictate the content of a contract, rather the governments role is to enforce the contract. The edict that two men or two women cannot marry, is essentially the same as saying a black man and a white woman cannot marry; it is discrimination.

In closing, why would you even care if two men were married. In the words of Thomas Jefferson "it neither picks [your] pockets nor breaks [you] legs"

Respectfully yours

James Hughes

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Good arguments, but I have a question:

Are there any copyright problems with publishing someone else's e-mail response? I've tried to figure out the issue, and have at various times come to opposite conclusions about whether an e-mail response like the one you posted is fair game for "re-posting". I've had some back-and-forth debates with people like Michael Fumento and Dinesh D'Souza, and have sat on their (sometimes very revealing words) replies because I didn't want to get in any legal trouble.

Anyone know?

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Good arguments, but I have a question:

Are there any copyright problems with publishing someone else's e-mail response? I've tried to figure out the issue, and have at various times come to opposite conclusions about whether an e-mail response like the one you posted is fair game for "re-posting". I've had some back-and-forth debates with people like Michael Fumento and Dinesh D'Souza, and have sat on their (sometimes very revealing words) replies because I didn't want to get in any legal trouble.

Anyone know?

you would only run into trouble if what they sent to you was copyrighted, which emails usually arn't.

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