Author William Saletan, who served in the Clinton Administration, and writes of a "pro-choice majority," notes in his 2003 book, Bearing Right: How (pro-choice) Conservatives Won the Abortion War, that the debate over embryonic stem cell research shows that pro-lifers really do care about the unborn, and are not out to "punish" women for having sex outside of marriage.

A July 25th e-mail from Clark D. Forsythe, president of Americans United for Life to Ross Heckmann of California Democrats for Life similarly reads:

Dear Ross,

The Bush administration is considering a proposed policy that would require all recipients of federal money under any program run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to certify that they will not discriminate against healthcare providers who object to participating in abortions.

In response to the proposed policy, abortion advocacy groups engaged in a classic attempt at misdirection, arguing that the policy would negatively impact women's access to contraceptives.

However, a careful reading of both the draft policy and the multitude of existing federal laws protecting healthcare freedom of conscience clearly shows that this policy is directed at abortions, both surgical and chemical (e.g., those induced using RU-486).

Americans, by a large margin, support the right of individuals to refuse to participate in procedures (like abortion) that violate an individual's conscience, morals, or ethics.

Rather engaging in a meaningful and honest discussion of the issues, abortion supporters are feverishly trying to shift the debate to one in which they feel more confident of acquiring some modicum of public support.

The proposed policy simply provides an oversight mechanism to enforce more than a dozen existing (and many long-standing) federal protections for healthcare freedom of conscience.

This step by the Bush Administration is necessary to ensure that existing federal law is enforced and to protect the freedom of conscience of all Americans.

Leading Protestant theologian Dr. Albert Schweitzer taught:

“We need a boundless ethics which will include the animals also.”

Schweitzer opposed the use of animals in entertainment.

“I never go to a menagerie,” he once wrote, “because I cannot endure the sight of the misery of the captive animals. The exhibiting of trained animals I abhor. What an amount of suffering and cruel punishment the poor creatures have to endure to give a few minutes of pleasure to men devoid of all thought and feeling for them.”

In previous years, PETA has endorsed Cirque du Soleil for not using animals. I agree with PETA: animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for "entertainment."

Humans are the only species that drink the milk of another species. All other species drink the milk of the mothers of their own species until they are weaned. Cow's milk is the perfect food--IF you're a baby calf!

To mass produce cow's milk on a large scale via factory farming, cows have to be kept continually pregnant, giving birth, and lactating. The cows are genetically bred to produce excess cow's milk for humans. Male cows (bulls) are useless to the dairy industry, so they become veal. By supporting the dairy industry, one indirectly supports cow killing.

One of the first books I read on the subject of vegetarianism while in college was A Vegetarian Sourcebook by Keith Akers (1983). Describing the environmental damage caused by raising animals for food: topsoil erosion, deforestization, loss of groundwater, etc. as well as the economic inefficiency and waste of energy and resources in raising animals for food in an age of exploding human population growth, Keith Akers foreshadowed John Robbins' Diet for a New America (1987), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

In A Vegetarian Sourcebook, Keith Akers writes:

"Using grasslands for livestock agriculture creates great environmental problems, which greatly limit its usefulness. Grazing systems require ten times more land than feedlot agriculture, in which animals are simply given feed grown on cropland. Grazing systems have to be extensive in order to avoid the catastrophic consequences of overgrazing--which renders a piece of land unsuitable for any purpose.

"Overgrazing and the consequent soil erosion are extremely serious problems worldwide. By the most conservative estimates, 60% of all U.S. rangelands are overgrazed, with billions of tons of soil lost each year. Overgrazing has also been the greatest cause of man-made deserts.

"Even if we grant grazing a role in a resource-efficient, ecologically stable agriculture, milk should be the end result, not beef. Milk provides over 50% of the protein and nearly four times the calories of beef, per unit of forage resources from grazing.

"'When only forage is available, then egg, broiler and pork production are eliminated and only milk, beef, and lamb production are viable systems,' state David and Marcia Pimentel, scientists and authors of Food, Energy and Society. 'Of these three, milk production is the most efficient.'

"An ecologically stable, resource-efficient system of grazing animals for human food could not be anything faintly resembling today's livestock agriculture. It would be a smaller, decentralized, less intensive system of animal husbandry devoted to milk production."

So it may be possible to have animal agriculture (devoted solely to milk production) on a small scale--like the Amish. But the rest of humanity, with an exploding population in the billions, will have to be vegan.

According to the editors of World Watch, July/August 2004: "The human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future--deforestization, topsoil erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities and the spread of disease."

Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk, similarly says: "...the survival of our planet depends on our sense of belonging--to all other humans, to dolphins caught in dragnets to pigs and chickens and calves raised in animal concentration camps, to redwoods and rainforests, to kelp beds in our oceans, and to the ozone layer."