Group Associated With President Obama’s Faith Office Blasts Pro-Life Bill
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
February 19, 2009
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — A group whose director has been appointed by President Barack Obama to his new White House Office for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships is blasting a pro-life bill. The Washington-based Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, a political group, has long been pro-abortion.
The group was a co-sponsor of the national pro-abortion march that failed to get the attendance organizers hoped for and its director, Rabbi David Saperstein, is a longtime pro-abortion advocate.
Now, the group has put out a press release attacking a North Dakota bill the state legislature is advancing that allows for personhood for unborn children.
Ironically, the press release does not feature Saperstein’s name. Instead, the comments in it come from Mark Pelavin, the associate director of the action center, and Rabbi Dan Rabishaw, director of the Union for Reform Judaism’s Great Lakes Council.
The press statement says the group is "deeply troubled" by the pro-life bill.
"As its sponsors plainly acknowledge, this disturbing proposal is designed to present a legal challenge to Roe v. Wade, the 35-year-old landmark Supreme Court decision that guarantees women the right to obtain a legal abortion," they add.
The group claims the legislation would somehow legislate the morality of people of other faiths because it would offer legal protection for unborn children from abortions.
"The passage of this troubling bill reminds us to be ever watchful of the continued battles that must be fought and won before reproductive justice can be fully realized in our nation," the group says.
Saperstein himself has attacked pro-life advocates and, in 2005, called "reprehensible" and "abhorrent" comments Focus on the Family head Dr. James Dobson made comparing the destruction of human embryos in embryonic stem cell research to the deaths of Jews killed during the Nazi holocaust.
Saperstein chided Dobson for trying to "link for political purposes" to the death of Jews "research on blastocysts that will be destroyed anyway."
ACTION: Contact the center with your concerns about its abortion advocacy by going to https://rac.org/Feedback/index.cfm?pge_id=1001.
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