From this week’s edition of Peace & Life Connections

Consistent Life Board Member at Chilean University

Richard Stith, a law professor, is a member of the advisory board of the Doctoral Program in Law, University of the Andes in Chile. Other professors there knew he was a consistent-life advocate, so questioned him about the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Dr. Stith, who is fluent in Spanish, answered in a moving defense of the rule of law, here translated: “it was an example of illegal violence. Bin Laden was not even armed when he was killed. This is not the best way to show the United States to be a civilized nation, nor an exemplary way to combat illegal attacks on life.
“Frankly, we have had the wrong approach ever since the original twin tower assault in 2001. Al Qaeda made clear that it was destroying human life in order to defend Muslim faith and civilization. The evil here lies in Al Qaeda’s means, not in its ends. There is nothing wrong with people wanting to protect Islam and Islamic civilization against what they see as world capitalism’s exportation of Western decadence. But the means chosen cannot include violence, particularly violence intentionally directed against non-combatants, i.e. terrorism.
“Tragically, the U.S. treated Al Qaeda’s end rather than its means as illegitimate, for America itself turned to violence to protect our ability to export our economy and our Western values around the world, which we called protecting ‘freedom.’ In so doing, we failed to focus on the most important issue at stake, the sanctity of human life. This is the issue around which we could and should have rallied the world.”

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Quotation of the Week
Faye Wattleton, then President of Planned Parenthood
Donahue, May 15, 1989, Transcript #3288 NBC

“Women are not stupid … women have always known that there was a life there.”

Peace & Life Connections
Issue #69 07.22.11
A subscription button and past issues with an index are available at www.consistent-life.org/weekly.html.

Richard Stith

Richard Stith is a research professor at Valparaiso University in Indiana. Having received both his law degree and a doctorate in ethics from Yale University, he taught legal philosophy and comparative law at Valpo Law for 41 years. From Harvard and from the University of California, Berkeley, he holds degrees in political theory. He was for a year director of the Program in Biomedical Ethics at St. Louis University School of Medicine. He served for many years on the Advisory Council of the National Lawyers Association and on the Board of Editors of the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE LAW and has taught and published on comparative law and legal philosophy in Spain, India, China, Ukraine, Chile and Mexico. In 2001, he became the first U.S. professor to be designated by the European Commission as teacher of a Jean Monnet Module (on the law of the European Union) and shortly thereafter was named the first Swygert Research Fellow in recognition of his scholarship. He is a consultant on the Academic Council for the doctoral program in law at the Universidad de Los Andes in Chile, where he has directed doctoral seminars. Professor Stith has served as a member of the national boards of University Faculty for Life and of the Consistent Life Network. He has been a speaker at national, state, and international right-to-life gatherings and has presented pro-life testimony by invitation before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution and to state and foreign legislative committees. Among his significant publications: “The Priority of Respect: How Our Common Humanity Can Ground Our Individual Dignity,” International Philosophical Quarterly 44 (2004): 165. Other works can be found at http://works.bepress.com/richard_stith/ Email: [email protected]