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Papal effect on Life Chain?

Yesterday in Valparaiso, IN, we held our annual peaceful, prayerful Life Chain protest against abortion. A  Mennonite protester asked a Catholic, “What do you think of your Pope coming out pro-abortion?” This is how media-spun papal talk may be perceived at the grassroots level.

 

Interestingly, our numbers here were way down this year (though they were up slightly in a nearby town).  Perhaps someone should survey a sufficient number of yesterday’s Life Chains around the country. If there was a significant decrease, this datum might provide some empirical evidence of the possible negative effect of the Pope’s statements referred to recently by David Brooks and might encourage the Holy Father to be more cautious in the future.

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]