California Pro-Life Activists Lila Rose, Walter Hoye Behind Personhood Campaign
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
September 29, 2009
Sacramento, CA (LifeNews.com) — Some familiar faces are behind the new abortion-personhood campaign in California. Lila Rose and Walter Hoye are behind the effort to get the state to recognize human rights and personhood for all human beings from the biological beginning of development.
They submitted the California Human Rights Amendment to Attorney General Jerry Brown following a press conference Monday in Sacramento.
Rose is a 21-year-old pro-life activist who is the president of Live Action, which has engaged in a campaign to expose illegal and unethical activities at Planned Parenthood centers.
Her group’s videos have exposed actions such as covering up potential cases of statutory rape and promoting secret abortions without parental involvement.
"The preborn, while demonstrably alive and demonstrably human, are not protected ‘persons’ under our state constitution," Rose said in a statement to LifeNews.com.
The push is backed by the California Civil Rights Foundation, a coalition of pro-lifers including Rose and sponsor Walter Hoye, the black pastor arrested and imprisoned in 2008 for standing in silent witness outside an abortion center.
"The California Human Rights Amendment recognizes that valuing human life is fundamental to life itself," Hoye said at the press conference, "and is the cornerstone of peace and prosperity for any society."
Hoye and Rose were joined by Judie Brown, president of American Life League and Keith Mason, founder of PersonhoodUSA, a group that is working with local pro-life advocates sponsoring similar personhood amendments in states such as Montana, Florida, Colorado and elsewhere.
"The injustice of denying the personhood of whole classes of human beings is an injustice that cannot go unchallenged," Brown said. "Now is the time for justice. Nothing less is acceptable in a republic based on the principle of equal justice for one and all."
Rose and Hoye now have the task of gathering signatures to get the personhood provision on the ballot.
California state law requires a petition be circulated and signed by a number of people equal to at least 8 percent of votes cast for governor during the last state election.
The California Human Rights Amendment says the term "person" would apply "to all living human organisms from the beginning of their biological development as human organisms — regardless of the means by which they were procreated, method of reproduction, age, race, sex, gender, physical well-being, function, or condition of physical or mental dependency and/or disability."
Some pro-life groups have spoken out against the tactic of floating personhood amendments — not because they oppose personhood for unborn children but because they find them strategically unsound.
Apart from legal concerns that the personhood measures will not accomplish their intended goals, they also say they will be overturned in court and add to the pro-Roe v. Wade case law for legal abortions.
Any such measure would likely find its way to the Supreme Court, where abortion advocates have at least a 5-4 majority and would declare such measures as unconstitutional.
Related web sites:
California Civil Rights Foundation – https://civilrightsfoundation.org
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