FRIDAY 5 - September 11, 2020
Barry Sheets
Legislative Consultant

We are in continual prayer for the unborn and our country,
especially today as we reflect upon the 19th anniversary
of the cowardly attack on innocent people
which generated major policy changes in our country. 

Now, if our elected officials would just realize, after 47 years,
we need major policy changes to stop the cowardly attacks on
innocent unborn people. 
 
NEWS AND VIEWS
 
1.  Second verse, same as the first: Yesterday afternoon, Governor Mike DeWine announced his nominee to fill the position of Director of the Ohio Department
of Health. Dr. Jane Duwve, director of public health for the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, later that same evening withdrew her name from consideration for the nomination. The problem? It seems her resume became public and showed that she had been a volunteer for Planned Parenthood, and as a senior grants officer for the “Association for Voluntary Surgical Contraception” a pro-abortion family planning group now known as Engender Health. Kind of sounds familiar, given what we now know about former ODH Director Amy Acton. Governor DeWine, whose spokesman revealed that the Governor knew all about Duwve’s past, doesn’t seem to grasp that “personnel is policy” and that a self-described “pro-life” Governor would be wise to avoid picking cabinet directors for Health that are pro-abortion activists.
 
2. If we can’t trust some state officials to stand for life, perhaps we should focus more on the local level. In Texas, many local communities have passed ordinances creating their jurisdictions as “Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn” and
by order prevent abortions from being performed or abortion providers from locating within the limits of their jurisdiction. A recent article shows Lubbock, Texas, is the most recent city working to add these pro-life protections to their charters. We are happy to work with local communities, cities and county governments to do the same in Ohio!
 
3. Standing for pro-life principles can put you in the cross hairs of people you don’t even know. Just ask former Covington High School, now Transylvania University (Kentucky) student Nick Sandmann, a victim of a radical leftist attack when he participated in a pro-life rally in Washington D.C. that made headlines, and is now having the ACLU, who should have been defending his right to peaceably assemble, now turn and attack Transylvania University for admitting the pro-life hero who won defamation lawsuits against media giants CNN and the Washington Post.  Perhaps the “American Civil Liberties Union” should do a name change to reflect their real agenda. I might suggest something like “Attacking Christian Liberty Unrelentingly” as a more fitting name.
 
4. Speaking of the ACLU, their latest crusade for “civil liberty” is to push for the decriminalization of “sex work” (what we traditionalists call “prostitution”). Their reason? To provide “greater equality” for trans-women of color (read “non-white male to female cross dressing transsexual/transvestites), who, they claim, are the special targets of “police harassment and assault” (read: enforcing laws by arresting those engaging in illegal acts, such as prostitution).  Yep, the ACLU is now squarely in the corner of pimps, sex traffickers and vice. No surprise there, however, as the only “civil liberties” the ACLU cares about is the freedom from Christian morality, decency and law.
 
5. While the ACLU champions the “rights” of transgenders in order to destroy social norms and law, the average American citizen, and some very “woke” feminist groups, see it much differently. In Idaho, the Women’s Liberation Front (WOLF) conducted a poll to see if the public supported a new law to protect female athletes from having to perform against biological male athletes who are “identifying” as female. Not surprisingly, Idaho voters overwhelmingly supported the law. Surprisingly the poll was also conducted in California, and the majority of voters were not in favor of special rights or of pushing transgender “reassignment surgery” on minors, even though California legislators are pushing hard in the opposite direction. For full disclosure, WOLF also opposes the transgender rights push as an attack on women!
 
PROFILE

Each installment of the Friday Five will bring thumbnail profiles
of key policymakers and committees
 
United States Court of Appeals Sixth Circuit Judge Eric E. Murphy—Judge Murphy, the former Solicitor General of Ohio, earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Miami University. He received a Juris Doctor with high honors from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was inducted into the Order of the Coif and was a member of the University of Chicago Law Review. Murphy gained valuable experience clerking for a Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals judge after law school.  He later clerked for Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy of the United States Supreme Court. After these positions, Murphy joined the Columbus, Ohio, office of Jones Day as part of the Issues and Appeals practice group. He became the Solicitor General of Ohio under Attorney General Mike DeWine in 2013, a position he held until picked for nomination to a seat on the Sixth Circuit Court
of Appeals.
    In 2018, Murphy was first nominated to the Sixth Circuit bench by President Donald Trump to fill the seat held by Judge Alice M. Batchelder, who took senior status. His confirmation was not completed during that session of Congress, as Senator Sherrod Brown refused to blue-slip the nomination. Murphy’s nomination was resubmitted in January 2019; the Senate Judiciary Committee moved the nomination to the full Senate on a vote of 12-10. The Senate confirmed the nomination in March of 2019 on a vote of 52-46. Murphy is widely considered to be a judicial originalist and a conservative jurist. This article (with accompanying audio) give you a better flavor of the judicial reasoning of Judge Murphy.
Cleveland Right to Life is a founding member of Right to Life Action Coalition of Ohio. 

The Right to Life Action Coalition of Ohio is an association of metropolitan, county, and local pro-life organizations. RTLACO focuses on developing and strengthening local grass roots pro-life leadership, true representative governing for the statewide organization, a commitment to a consistent and holistic pro-life standard to evaluate both policies and elected officials/candidates, and collaborative engagement to develop priorities for action.