The pro-life organization behind the popular Manhattan Declaration has asked Apple CEO Steve Jobs to reconsider the company’s decision to pull its app from the popular Apple App Store.
Last week, Apple removed the Manhattan Declaration app that had been available to its iPhone and iPad customers. The move by the computer company came after opponents of the Declaration, which sets forth pro-life and pro-family values, circulated a petition calling the app a “hate fest” that promotes “hateful and divisive language.”
Change.org sponsored the petition, which, in part, had abortion activists telling Apple that “supporting efforts to restrict choice [abortion] is bad business.”
Manhattan Declaration spokeswoman Michelle Farmer told The Daily Caller today that the organization does not support hate or hateful rhetoric towards people who back legalized abortion and hopes Jobs will be open-minded of its concerns and tolerant of allowing the app at the Apple Store.
“We’re making the argument that if [Jobs] would take a look at the Manhattan Declaration himself, he’d see it’s not written with any rancor. It’s written on a very even keel,” former told The DC. “It’s just appealing to things that people want to come together on, that millions of Americans agree on.”
“There’s no name calling, no offensive rhetoric,” said Farmer. “It restates firmly, without any kind of animosity toward anybody, the central moral teachings of the catholic, orthodox and Evangelical traditions.”
The app consists of a four part survey users can take that rates them on how closely their believes are aligned with the values expressed in the Manhattan Declaration. One question asks “Do you believe in protecting life from the moment of conception?” while another asks “Do you support the right of choice regarding abortion?”
After answering the questions, users of the app can sign the petition or send it to others.
More than half a million people have signed the declaration sponsored in part by Robert George, one of three men who formed the declaration’s drafting committee and a professor at Princeton University.
The 4,700-word declaration issues a clarion call to Christians to adhere to their convictions and informs civil authorities that the signers will not-under any circumstance-abandon their Christian consciences when it comes to pro-life issues.
The Manhattan Declaration text says today’s pro-life movement “claim[s] the heritage of those Christians who defended innocent life by rescuing discarded babies from trash heaps in Roman cities and publicly denouncing the Empire’s sanctioning of infanticide.”
“Like those who have gone before us in the faith, Christians today are called to proclaim the Gospel of costly grace, to protect the intrinsic dignity of the human person and to stand for the common good,” it says.
“In this declaration we affirm: the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of every human being as a creature fashioned in the very image of God, possessing inherent rights of equal dignity and life,” they say.
The liberty section includes a promise: “Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act.”
