Fox reports on who decides

The Fox News website is carrying a story about the National Catholic Register’s upcoming issue with an editorial about Rudy Guiliani. That, in itself, is interesting. But the language in the Fox article is a story unto itself.

A Catholic newspaper is telling readers that Catholics shouldn’t support White House hopeful Rudy Giuliani because of his support for allowing women access to abortions.

Look at that lead. The wording is…choice. “Catholics shouldn’t support” Guiliani “because of his support for allowing women access to abortions” is a sentence (part) with selectively placed positive and negative references, giving readers cues to think Catholics are bad for women.

The National Catholic Register’s editorial urges anti-abortion voters to choose another candidate other than Giuliani.

So apparently the style book – the manual guiding word usage within a media organization – requires the term “anti-abortion” to identify the people known for decades as “pro-lifers.” Except when quoting the Register

“A Republican party led by a pro-abortion politician would become a pro-abortion party,” according to the editorial that appears on the Web site and is set to appear next week in the newspaper’s print edition.

Editors say “they hope that pro-lifers will ‘be reasonable,’ not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and go along quietly,” but “we won’t.”

“When they ask us to ‘be reasonable’ and go along with a pro-abortion leader, they assume that there is something unreasonable about the pro-life position to start with,” the editors wrote. “We’re sorry, but we don’t see what is so unreasonable about the right to life.

“What looks supremely unreasonable to us is that we should trust a leader who not doesn’t only reject the right to life but even supports partial-birth abortion, which is more infanticide than abortion,” according to the editorial.

Now that’s word clarification.

Giuliani stated in 1999 that he doesn’t see himself changing his position on allowing women the right to a partial-birth abortion, which occurs in the late term of a pregnancy.

Notice at this point, the Fox News article is no longer quoting the Register. So the report returns to the choice language of “allowing women the right to a partial-birth abortion”….wait…”which occurs in the late term of a pregnancy”? Mid-birth is as late as it gets in a pregnancy. 

Last month, he told FOX News’ Hannity & Colmes that he would support a ban on partial-birth abortion if it contained an exception for getting one if giving birth would endanger the life of the mother.

It’s now widely acknowledged by doctors that there is virtually never a health need for a partial-birth abortion.

The editorial also warns that Giuliani’s pledges to appoint judges like Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts ring hollow.

“Would a pro-abortion president give us a pro-life Supreme Court justice? Maybe he would in his first term. But we’ve seen in the Democratic Party how quickly and completely contempt for the right to life corrupts. Even if a President Giuliani did the right thing for a short time, it’s likely the party that accepted him would do the wrong thing for a long time,” the editorial reads.

Saying that parties often become cults of personality built around the president that leads it, the editors argue that if Republicans put an abortion rights nominee on the ballot, the party will lose “the gains they’ve built for decades.

Fox reports. You decide.

(Hat tip to Susie for the notice.)