Legacy of Judas: Response to Bopp
The Legacy of Judas
National Right to Life
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Then one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot
went to the chief priests and said,
"What are you willing to give me if I deliver Him to you?"
And they counted out to him thirty pieces of silver.
So from that time he sought opportunity to betray Him.
In 1981, after president Ronald Reagan agreed he would sign federal personhood legislation for the unborn, National Right to Life and their longtime attorney James Bopp actually opposed that effort claiming they supported a states' rights approach. Move forward in time a quarter century to today. Notice that NRTL and Bopp have long opposed all state personhood efforts. Demonstrated below, NRTL has continuously promoted legislation that undermines the personhood of an innocent child. In betrayal, NRTL quietly worked to oppose Colorado's 2008 and South Dakota's 2006 abortion ban referendums. Now, like a thief in the night they are circulating a recent Bopp memo to pro-life legislators and religious organizations to oppose personhood efforts in Colorado and elsewhere. NRTL is attempting to turn pro-life officials against this legitimate effort to end abortion and enforce the God-given right to life.
A stalwart authority of the pro-life movement, Dr. Charles Rice of Notre Dame, accurately reports that not one of the U.S. Supreme Court justices, which includes those supported by NRTL, has ever affirmed personhood and the right to life for the unborn. The Court's infamous Partial-Birth Abortion ruling advocates "an injection that kills the fetus," and "less shocking methods" of killing the same late-term children, and explicitly keeps PBA legal declaring that the baby can be delivered up to "the navel" and then terminated. This Gonzales v. Carhart decision is a virtual PBA manual. Yet against the landslide of changing opinion among pro-life leaders (because they have now read the decision for themselves), Bopp continues to praise these justices who delivered the most aggressively pro-abortion, brutally-wicked decision ever issued by a U.S. court.
Written on the letterhead of Bopp's law firm, this August 7, 2007 11-page memo states, "And some have shamelessly vilified the Supreme Court justices who gave us this important victory... This is a grave injustice to these justices..." -James Bopp
"Woe to you also, lawyers!
For you build the tombs of the prophets,
and your fathers killed them.
In fact, you bear witness that you approve the deeds
of your fathers; for they indeed killed them,
and you build their tombs."
NRTL and their longtime lawyer Bopp bear witness that they approve of the justices they lobbied for, who rule to continue to slaughter the innocent. The grave injustice is against the unborn. The growing list of Christian pro-life leaders condemning the evil PBA ruling include:
- Judge Roy Moore
- Ambassador Alan Keyes (see 30-second clip)
- Human Life Int'l president Rev. Tom Euteneuer
- Notre Dame Law School Professor Charles Rice
- American Life League's Judie Brown
- Congressman Bob Dornan
- NRTL and AUL founding board member John Archibold
- And many more.
And the founder of Focus on the Family also confirmed that:
"Ending partial-birth abortion... does not save a single human life."
- Dr. James Dobson, May 2007, FocusAction.org.
James Bopp and NRTL led the partial-birth abortion fiasco that wasted fifteen years but raised for the pro-life industry a quarter-billion dollars on a PBA ban that from its very inception never had the authority to prevent a single abortion. Attorney James Bopp is an Advisor to false pro-life candidate Mitt Romney, who says he was pro-choice from 1970 through the 1990s, but then eyeing the Utah's governor's mansion in 2001 wrote that he was not "pro-choice;" but then in 2002 ran for Massachusetts governor boasting of his defense of abortion rights; and then had a false pro-life 2004 conversion to enter the Republican presidential primary, while still defending abortion rights six months later in 2005, and to this day supports killing the tiniest humans for grisly research. Yet James Bopp dresses up this wolf in sheep's clothing. Meanwhile NRTL has endorsed the anti-personhood Fred Thompson, making them the only advocacy group in history supporting a candidate who uses most of his air time to oppose a federal amendment that would give them victory.
"Woe to you lawyers!
For you have taken away the key of knowledge.
You did not enter in yourselves,
and those who were entering in you hindered."
NRTL has turned over the reins of a Christian movement to secular humanist lawyers whose moral relativism undermines the personhood of the unborn and their God-given right to life. James Bopp and NRTL ask justices to approve of laws that end with, "and then you can kill the baby;" pull the baby out to the navel, or wait twenty-four hours, or get a parent's permission, or sign this form, "and then you can kill the baby." Justices who uphold such child-killing regulations get pushed even further from understanding that the child is endowed by His Creator with the inalienable right to life, a right that even pro-lifers have no authority to bargain with.
The love of money and influence corrupted the religious Pharisees and lawyers, leading them to buy the loyalty of Judas. This strategy lives on with National Right to Life, which has the rare distinction of receiving funding from the Republican National Committee, with the RNC buying NRTL's allegiance with pieces of silver. Thus, NRTL affirms its affiliates routinely opposing pro-life candidates in support of even pro-abortion candidates (for ex., see the Oregon RTL 2004 Voters Guide). NRTL, always brokering power, raising money for bloated salaries, and funding comfortable retirement programs, opposes all efforts, including South Dakota's recent referendum, toward actually ending abortion. NRTL and Bopp only prune the abortion weed and thereby strengthen its root, betraying those who trusted them, using donations not to protect children, but to regulate the most visibly egregious actions of the abortion industry, unwittingly doing Planned Parenthood's public relations work for them. So Bopp approves of legislators and justices who relegate a child's right to life to a second tier negotiable issue by authorizing murder as long as you use the NRTL-approved methods (like the alternative PBA methods upheld by the Supreme Court).
Every industry seeks to strengthen and preserve itself, and the Child Killing Regulation Industry led by NRTL that Bopp represents is no different. NRTL, its officers, and their longtime General Counsel James Bopp have become part of the establishment that the political parties and Planned Parenthood can comfortably coexist with for the next forty years in the wilderness. Now that National RTL has abandoned any pretense at a Christian worldview and biblical strategy, American Right To Life has formed to provide alternative leadership and the vision, not to regulate child killing, but to end abortion.
Jesus Christ said that a tree is known by its fruit. For over a quarter century NRTL's strategy has been to elect Republican child-killing regulators to eventually bring about a culture of life. Evaluate that strategy. Republicans have nominated fully sixty percent of the current federal judiciary, which today is overwhelmingly pro-abortion. NRTL has spent decades misleading donors as to the positions of federal justices. Our Republican U.S. Supreme Court has not a single justice who supports the personhood and God-given right to life of the unborn. Not one. Now conceding a point to our widely-read open letter to Dr. James Dobson, Bopp has acknowledged that even supposed pro-life justice Antonin Scalia rejects the personhood of the child. As we wrote:
Justice Antonin Scalia said on Feb. 4, 2002 at a Pew Forum, "I will strike down Roe v. Wade, but I will also strike down a law that is the opposite of Roe v. Wade. ... One [side] wants no state to be able to prohibit abortion and the other one wants every state to have to prohibit abortion, and they're both wrong..." All Christians should grieve at this. No state, no subdivision of government whatsoever, has the authority to set up extermination camps, or abortion clinics. This wicked legal principle is not pro-life, it is pro-choice, by process.
NRTL's endorsement of Fred Thompson reveals their abandonment of a Christian opposition to child killing. Thompson infamously uttered the words, as D.A. Arthur Branch on Law and Order, "I am pro-life, but I am even more pro-law." The country that sets aside God's enduring command, Do not murder, has become a lawless nation. Under the guise of the rule of law, NRTL has fallen to where it endorses those who would allow the states to slaughter the innocent. Hypocrites.
Forty years ago, in 1967, Colorado's Republican governor John Love signed a permissive abortion law for permanent impairment, rape, and incest. The Republican governor of California followed suit within months. Roe v. Wade was written by a Republican justice, Harry Blackmun, and voted into law by a Republican majority. Terri Schiavo's judicial murder was sanctioned and permitted by Republican judges all the way through, from Judge George Greer, to the 11th Circuit, to the Supreme Court. Bobby Schindler hoped that the Republican 11th Circuit would intervene to stop his sister from being starved to death. But all six of the Reagan, Bush, and George W. Bush judges voted to allow her judicial execution, including those the pro-life industry lobbied for, like William Pryor. All six.
This evil fruit from the godless NRTL strategy will never end abortion. This legacy of Judas has not lead to a culture of life but in fact strengthens the culture of death. A culture that undermines the value of human life, promotes suicide and results in the murder of the innocent through abortion, infanticide, and even crimes like the recent Church, Shopping Center, and school shootings. Predictably, such murder-suicide crimes are on the increase and sadly reminiscent of the crimes at Columbine High School where my son Daniel was murdered. American Right to Life will expose and oppose NRTL's immoral leadership and promote the God-given right to life through uncompromised pro-life education, social pressure, and personhood legislation.
By the founding president of American Right To Life, Brian Rohrbough. After his son Danny was murdered at Columbine High School, Brian became active in the fight to end our culture of death.
Citations: Matthew 26:14-16; Luke 11:46-48, 52.
Please note regarding Focus on the Family: During Colorado's historic Amendment 48 battle in 2007 and 2008, Focus on the Family largely opposed the personhood amendment (e.g., see the Rocky Mountain News, Personhood poses quandry) and they quietly distributed James Bopp's anti-personhood memo to pro-life state legislators and pro-family groups trying to get them to oppose the personhood amendment.
