The Prolife Push

It’s 2002: time for the Senate to ban cloning Back in December, the Senate decided to wait to consider a ban on human cloning. Well, it’s 2002 now, say cloning opponents, and it’s time for action. The Boston Globe reports that the issue has galvanized and united conservatives, and that a major lobbying and advertising campaign has launched this week to energize even more grassroots activism against cloning. “I think human cloning is likely to be the dominant social issue of the year and one of the most explosive domestic issues of the year,” says Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, whose Bioethics Project is behind the advertising push. The National Association of Evangelicals’ Rich Cizik agrees, telling the paper, “Human cloning can mobilize evangelicals and even take them to the polls. … It has political salience, whereas for many of our folks, economic issues make their eyes glaze over.” Gary Bauer, however, stresses that cloning isn’t the only issue Bush will have to pay attention to if he wants to woo evangelicals.

The article also mentions another major prolife advertising campaign launching this week, the Shake the Nation Campaign by D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries. The ads, which are also backed by Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America, the Family Research Council, and other groups, show Norma McCorvey (the “Roe” of Roe v. Wade), Sandra Cano (the “Doe” in Doe v. Bolton), and National Abortion Rights Action League co-founder Bernard Nathanson saying, “Abortion is a lie. And we were once part of that lie. And we will not be part of that lie anymore. Will you?” You can see one of the ads here.

Is Young Life for Christians, or just the sponsoring church? Two siblings from Burbank (Calif.) High School are asking the school board to investigate the local Young Life chapter. They say that it’s just a recruiting tool for Emmanuel Free Evangelical Church. “They say the purpose of the group is to accept Christ as your savior, but it isn’t Christian living to say I am going to hell for being a Catholic, making fun of Jews at school or teasing me about my Rosary beads,” junior Andy Wilcox tells the Los Angeles Times. The story doesn’t say whether those things actually happened. Luke Brower, Young Life’s area director and a member of Emmanuel Free Evangelical Church, says the charges are false.