Helena, Montana - 02/26/2009 - Montana's Senate passed constitutional Personhood Amendment, SB 406, in a 26-24 vote. The amendment, introduced by Senator Dan McGee, passed on its third reading on the Senate floor this morning. This is the first Personhood Amendment in U.S. history to pass a State Senate.
"Senator Dan McGee, writing the language of SB 406 himself, has shown what it truly means to be pro-life," stated Keith Mason, of Personhood USA. "Senator McGee's successful efforts on behalf of all human beings at all stages of human life are a giant step forward in historic efforts to ensure the rights and protection of every individual."
SB 406, which defines person for the purposes of application of inalienable rights, states, "All persons are born free and have certain inalienable rights...person means a human being at all stages of human development of life, including the state of fertilization or conception, regardless of age, health, level of functioning, or condition of dependency."
"Praise God! The honor of being the first State Senate in U.S. history to recognize the personhood of pre-born children goes to Montana," commented Cal Zastrow of Personhood USA. "Thanks to the leadership of Sen. Dan McGee, The Montana Personhood Amendment now moves forward to the State House of Representatives."
Read more about it here.
1 comment:
From Tom in Visalia:
Here's an interesting take by Bishop Wright of Durham on the abortion issue in a magazine interview in 2004...
Question, National Catholic Reporter: I suspect one response would be that abortion is the defining moral issue of our times. If we can't protect unborn life, this argument runs, we can't protect anyone or anything.
Bishop Wright: This is where I really would get quite angry with that point of view. Though I happen to agree with the stance on abortion, it seems blindingly obvious that it is not the big moral issue of our time.
Global debt and the economic systems that were set up in 1944 with the Breton Woods Agreement, to slope the table so the money slides into the pockets of the Western banking system, at the cost of keeping most of the world in unpayable debt, seems to me as big a moral issue as slavery was 200 years ago.
I and others intend to bang on about it until we achieve something. I just don't think we can say, "abortion is the issue." Apart from anything else, there are millions of children being born all the time in Africa, in Latin America, on the Indian subcontinent, whose economic circumstances are such that it would almost be better if they hadn't been born.
The reason they're in those economic situations are precisely because of decisions taken in the World Bank and the IMF, and they are structural decisions, not just particular decisions. This has been so intensively and extensively studied, people have shown it so often, that I just wonder what kind of blindness it is that prevents people from seeing it.
Of course part of the answer is, our churches have endowments. We've got investments in these things, and you can't tell us to go back on that. That's a serious problem, but it's a problem that's got to be addressed. Yes, abortion matters, but all this matters much, much more. Just in terms of sheer quantity, there are millions more people whose lives are totally blighted by it. That's where I would go for starters. To play around with your Democratic presidential candidate, for example, seems to me to play with one particular pawn without noticing what's happening on the chessboard as a whole. When you see the whole, I think you have to say, let's try to address the big issues. If you haven't got the courage to do that, addressing the little issues of one particular person and his views on this or that looks like a displacement activity. It looks like something you do rather frantically in order to avoid having to talk about the elephant in the living room.
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