Trump to address March for Life via livestream

Washington D.C., Mar 7, 2020 / 12:00 pm (CNA).- Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry has dismissed arguments made before the Supreme Court against a state abortion law as “absolutely a lie.” In a Thursday interview, Landry said efforts to conflate the case with a Texas law regulating abortion clinics, struck down by the court in 2016, were clearly false. 

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case June Medical Serves v. Russo on Wednesday, as lawyers for a Louisiana abortion clinic challenged the state’s Unsafe Abortion Protection Act, which requires that abortionists in the state have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the facility.

Critics of the law have likened it to a similar statute in Texas which the Supreme Court struck down in the case Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt in 2016. The court ruled that the admitting privileges requirement in Texas’ H.B. 2 placed “an undue burden on abortion access.” 

In an interview Thursday on EWTN Pro-Life Weekly, Landry said there was no reasonable parallel to be drawn between the two cases. 

The Texas law, he argued, singled out abortion facilities by only requiring abortionists to have admitting privileges, without making that a requirement for other ambulatory surgical centers. Under the Louisiana law, abortion centers are simply being brought into line with existing regulation – doctors at all other ambulatory surgical centers are already required to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, regardless of the type of procedure they perform. 

Unsafe Abortion Protection Act, Landry said, brings abortion clinics out of a “no-man’s land,” making them subject to the same regulations other ambulatory surgical centers already meet in Louisiana.  

Landry argued that by conflating the two separate laws and cases surrounding them, the mainstream media is echoing the plaintiff’s argument “which is absolutely a lie.” 

“Texas’ law and Louisiana’s law and the cases are as different as an apple and an orange,” he said. 

Louisiana Solicitor General Liz Murrill, who defended the law before the Supreme Court, agreed, saying in the same interview that abortionists “shouldn’t be given a special exemption to rules that we’re applying to other doctors in our state.”

Murrill said there is a “robust legislative record to support our law,” and argued that the law was being challenged by those with an interest in deregulation – an interest in clear conflict with what was best for women.

“I think it’s just fundamentally in conflict with the interests of the people who are protected with health and safety regulations,” Murrill said. “If you think about a seat belt law, we wouldn’t let Ford Motor Company challenge a seatbelt law or an airbag law in the name of the people who are protected by that airbag.”

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Liz Murrill, Louisiana’s Solicitor General, defended Louisiana’s <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/ProLife?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#ProLife</a> law in the Supreme Court yesterday. It was a case brought on by an abortion facility over admitting privileges. Murrill explains why she considers this a conflict of interest. <a href=”https://t.co/lPIPd7paoS”>pic.twitter.com/lPIPd7paoS</a></p>&mdash; EWTN Pro-Life Weekly (@EWTNProLife) <a href=”https://twitter.com/EWTNProLife/status/1235719240767791104?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>March 6, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>

Kate Scanlon is a producer for EWTN Pro-Life Weekly.

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Denver Newsroom, May 7, 2020 / 08:19 pm (CNA).- A Christian ethic of service and solidarity must be an important feature of the business response to the coronavirus epidemic and its economic impact, Catholic business educators have said.

For Karel Sov… […]

Washington D.C., Nov 30, 2019 / 04:59 pm (CNA).- For the first time in more than three decades, a majority of Americans favor life imprisonment without parole over the death penalty as a punishment for murder.

A Gallup poll released this week found that 60% of survey respondents said life without parole is the preferable sentence for a person convicted of murder, while 36% said the death penalty is preferable.

This is the first time in Gallup’s 34 years of tracking that respondents have favored life imprisonment over the death penalty. In the 1980s and ’90s, Americans showed a clear preference for the death penalty for convicted murderers.

The latest survey was conducted in October, and polled 1,500 adults living throughout the United States.

The past five years has seen a shift among all major subgroups toward favoring life imprisonment, Gallup said. Two-thirds of women, and a little over half of men surveyed support life imprisonment over the death penalty.

Almost 8 in 10 Democrats favor life imprisonment without parole to the death penalty, while almost 6 in 10 Republicans favor the death penalty.

But while life imprisonment is generally seen as a better punishment for murder, a majority of Americans still approve of the use of the death penalty, Gallup found. Fifty-six percent said they approve of the death penalty as a punishment for murder, and 42% said they oppose its use.

These numbers have remained roughly consistent in recent years, but are down from the 1990s, when up to 80% of Americans voiced approval of the death penalty.

“The percentage of Americans who are in favor of the death penalty, generally, has fallen to 45-year lows,” said Gallup Senior Editor Jeffrey Jones. “And when given an explicit alternative, for the first time in at least 30 years, more say life imprisonment with no possibility of parole is a better punishment for murder than the death penalty.”

Jones noted that state laws have changed alongside public opinion on the death penalty.

“Five states have abolished the death penalty this decade, leaving 29 where it is legal,” he said. “Several states where the death penalty is legal have instituted moratoriums on its use or are considering abolishing it. Many recent cases that have cast doubt on death penalty convictions in light of new evidence may be helping to move public opinion away from it.”

In 2003, the Obama administration placed the federal use of the death penalty on hiatus, while the Justice Department reviewed execution protocols. The move followed a series of rulings against the three-drug cocktail that had been linked to botched executions in several states.

The Trump administration announced over the summer that it is planning to resume federal use of the death penalty. Attorney General William Barr has ordered executions to be scheduled for five inmates on death row, although court challenges have halted the executions from moving forward.

Pope Francis has called the death penalty a rejection of the Gospel and of human dignity, calling on civil authorities to end its use. Last year, the Catechism of the Catholic Church was revised to describe the death penalty as “inadmissible,” citing the increasing effectiveness of detention systems, the unchanging dignity of the person, and the importance of leaving open the possibility of conversion.

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