UNHOLY TRINITY: The three leading candidates to be California's governor, before the appeals court postponed the election, are all Roman Catholics, but that is not good news for California's unborn children since they are all pro-abortion as well. On September 17, the Crusade for the Defense of Our Catholic Church, a project of American Life League, planned to hold a press conference in Sacramento unveiling an ad campaign denouncing "California's Unholy Trinity." Said ALA President Judie Brown, "As a native Californian, I'm saddened that the top three contenders-Arnold Schwarzenegger [R.], Cruz Bustamante [D.] and Gray Davis [D.]-are unabashedly campaigning on their 'Catholic' heritage, while openly defiling the church's teachings by their support of abortion-on-demand."
DEAN'S DEFECTS: Former Gov. Howard Dean (Vt.), the current Democratic presidential front-runner, expanded his dovish foreign policy stances by suggesting that the United States should lessen her support for Israel, her staunchest ally in the Middle East. The week before the Democrats' September 9 debate in Baltimore, Dean said of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, "It's not our place to take sides." He also said of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, "We all know that enormous numbers of the settlements that are there are going to have to come out." Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D.-Conn.), the national security hawk in the Democratic field, took Dean to task. "We have had a unique relationship with Israel, strong support of Israel. Why? Based on values. This is the only democracy in the Middle East, that's the beginning," said Lieberman. "Secondly, based on mutual military strategic interests. Israel is the one country in the region that we can rely on today, tomorrow, ten, 50 years from now to stand with America in a time of crisis." Dean insisted, "My position on Israel is exactly the same as Bill Clinton's."
BUSTAMANTE MEANS BALKANIZATION: In an article titled, "Bustamante: A Troubling Glimpse Into the Future," immigration reform group Project USA asserted, "Events unfolding in the California governor's recall election are confirming for most Americans what they already know: unrelenting mass immigration into the United States is causing increasing ethnic divisiveness. In spite of decades of assurances from the New York Times and others that diversity is our strength, Americans know that diversity without assimilation is, in fact, a weakness. . . . California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, who, significantly, has not found it politically necessary to renounce his membership in a Latino supremacist group [named MEChA], has exacerbated ethnic tensions in the Golden State by, among other things, divisively casting as a racial issue the effort to grant illegal aliens driver's licenses. The naked racialism of Bustamante, and an entire crop of ethnic-identity politicians in California, should serve as a warning to the nation's leaders."
MILITARY VOTING PROBLEMS: In testimony before a September 9 Senate hearing chaired by Sen. John Cornyn (R.-Tex.), Sam Wright, director of the National Defense Committee's Military Voting Rights Project and a captain in the Navy Reserves, spoke of the problems that servicemen-who tend to be conservative-have with absentee voting. "I testified that military absentee voting is exceedingly difficult even in the biennial general election," Wright wrote in an e-mail after the hearing. He told the Senate subcommittee that the Pentagon's new, experimental electronic voting system is a big improvement but will allow only 100,000 servicemen at most to vote next year.
STILL ALLOWED: Focus on the Family won an appeal requiring a public Florida bus company to justify its rejection of ads from the conservative Christian group. "The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals-the same court that this summer ruled against Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore in his Ten Commandments battle-found that a lower court judge was wrong to throw out Focus' lawsuit against the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority (PSTA)," reported Focus on September 15. Focus sued the agency when it rejected its Love Won Out ads for a conference about how to leave the homosexual lifestyle. Unlike private companies, public agencies cannot reject ads for any reason they wish, but PSTA argued that since it had contracted its ad acceptances out to a private company, that company could choose to reject the ads. "Had we lost this case, it would have given the government the green light to get around the Constitution by entering into contracts with private parties and directing the private parties what to do to censor speech," said Mat Staver, who represented Focus on the Family.
