The Inmates Take Over The Asylum

by digby

They can’t control them anymore:

You’d think 21-year-old Kristi Burton would be feted by the pro-life establishment. Though she still lives with her parents in Peyton, Colo., and is only partway through law school, Burton has already succeeded where other anti-abortion activists have failed: Last month she got a proposed amendment to her state’s constitution on the ballot that defines a fertilized human egg as a person, the first in the nation. Amendment 48 allows a challenge to the very legality of abortion and has at least a chance of passing, thanks to Burton’s sheer single-mindedness. Last June she founded her own group, Colorado for Equal Rights, and recruited her parents as its first volunteers and donors. Burton spent 40-hour weeks canvassing at churches and garden shows. She needed 76,000 signatures to get the measure on the ballot; she collected more than 130,000. The group now has eight staff members and more than $500,000 in donations.

Yet Burton has not received much support for Amendment 48 from her most natural allies—the country’s major pro-life groups. Heavyweights like National Right to Life and Americans United for Life are not backing it. “There are other ways to protect human life that we focus on because we believe they are the most effective,” says Clark Forsythe, president of Americans United for Life. Although pro-life leaders generally agree with Burton that life begins at fertilization, they fear a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade would ultimately be slapped down by the Supreme Court—still at least one vote shy of an anti-Roe majority—setting back the movement. “The established pro-life movement feels … we should stop trying to overturn Roe because the time isn’t right,” says Richard Thompson, president of the Thomas More Law Center, a conservative public-interest firm that has advised Amendment 48. “Then there is this huge grassroots movement saying it’s immoral not to try and save innocent lives.”

This young woman undoubtedly believes that most people agree that life begins at conception. She isn’t interested in the thorny problem of what to do with women who have abortions if the fertilized egg is considered a “person” — meaning the woman has logically committed premeditated murder. And she doesn’t care that challenging Roe may very well result in its being upheld. She believes she is doing God’s work and doesn’t see why she should pull her punches when the truth, as she sees it, is obvious.

I actually have far more respect for her than I do the smarmy, institutional anti-abortion careerists who have milked this issue for all its worth for over thirty years for political and personal gain. They have known from the beginning that they would never be able to satisfy their true believers because there was never any way in hell that the country would stand for prosecuting women for having abortions. And that is where the true believers’ principles inevitably lead them. It’s a scam.

Colorado is looking good for Obama and let’s hope that results in the defeat of this absurd proposition. But at some point, they’ll probably be able to get a case like this before the Supreme Court. And that, of course, is yet another reason why it’s so important to elect Obama.

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