{"id":5039,"date":"2006-10-24T23:24:56","date_gmt":"2006-10-24T23:24:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/see-the-point-is.html"},"modified":"2006-10-24T23:24:56","modified_gmt":"2006-10-24T23:24:56","slug":"see-the-point-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/see-the-point-is.html","title":{"rendered":"See, the point is…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Endowing a Human Rights Chair for a proponent of abortion makes no sense anywhere.<\/a><\/p>\n

But especially at a Catholic university. When the honoree is a priest.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Georgetown University Law Center has named a human rights chair for a controversial priest who has been actively supportive of abortion during and after his time as a U.S. Congressman.<\/p>\n

Dean T. Alexander Aleinikoff announced the establishment of the Robert F. Drinan, SJ, Chair in Human Rights at a formal ceremony Oct. 23; Yale Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh gave the keynote address.<\/p>\n

"Few have accomplished as much as Fr. Drinan, and fewer still have done so much to make the world a better place," Aleinikoff reportedly said. "This new Chair honors Fr. Drinan’s lifelong commitment to public service and will allow us to bring distinguished human rights scholars and advocates to Georgetown Law.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fr. Thomas Euteneuer, president of Human Life International, has called the naming of the new Chair \u201cdeeply disturbing\u201d and \u201chypocritical.\u201d The university has established a human rights chair \u201cin the name of a heretical priest who has spent much of his lifetime advocating for the most heinous of human rights violations: abortion,\u201d he said in a statement.<\/p>\n

Fr. Drinan has been a strong supporter of abortion rights, during his time in public office and afterwards as well, stating that while he was personally opposed to abortion, its legality was a separate issue from its morality. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s hard to know what to say. This is so spectacularly expressive of that huge blind spot carried about by the tender-hearted who cannot see that when you deny human rights to any group, but especially the weakest and most defenseless, anything more you have to say about human rights rings hollow, empty, without foundation. The humblest workers in a Crisis Pregnancy Center, meeting women in their pain, looking them in the eye, offering them hope, working hard to hook up those women with resources to get them through, going home at night and pouring out their hearts to God in prayer for women and their babies – they are nobler advocates for human rights than Drinan could ever hope to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Endowing a Human Rights Chair for a proponent of abortion makes no sense anywhere. But especially at a Catholic university. When the honoree is a priest. Georgetown University Law Center has named a human rights chair for a controversial priest who has been actively supportive of abortion during and after his time as a U.S.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nSee, the point is... - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/see-the-point-is.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"See, the point is... - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Endowing a Human Rights Chair for a proponent of abortion makes no sense anywhere. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5039\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}