HERNDON, VIRGINIA, May 8, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is one of the rising stars on the national pro-life stage – and he reads and supports LifeSiteNews.com.
LifeSiteNews.com is “the homepage for one of the computers in our house,” the eloquent lawyer and former Virginia state senator told a gathering of influential members of the pro-life movement at the website’s 15 anniversary gala in Herndon, Virginia, on April 28.
During his 20-minute speech to a special VIP event before the banquet dinner, he said to advocates for the unborn, “You’ve got to have the tools, the information. That’s what you get from LifeSiteNews.”
He said that often when reading the website’s stories he says to himself, “I haven’t read this anywhere else.”
“I’m very appreciative of that fact,” he said. “And we use it. And we’ve learned from it.”
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That information helped fuel Cucicnelli’s own meteoric rise to national political prominence.
His first vote after winning a special election to replace retiring senator Warren Barry in 2002 was to cast the tie-breaking vote to overturn then-Governor Mark Warner’s veto of the legislature’s partial birth abortion ban.
During three terms in the state senate, he earned the record as one of the Old Dominion’s most reliable pro-life, pro-family legislators – no mean feat in a district that included portions of the D.C. suburbs, some of the most affluent neighborhoods in the United States and the most liberal in the state of Virginia. “As a conservative in Fairfax, I was covered by the Endangered Species Act,” he said.
During that time, he never outspent an opponent – “not that I wouldn’t like to,” he quipped, “it just never worked out that way.”
Nonetheless, he maintained his stance for life. “I drafted Virginia’s parental consent law in the Senate,” he said. “I’ve led efforts to defund Planned Parenthood in Virginia, and I was the patron of the ‘Choose Life’ license plate.”
During the 2010 Tea Party landslide, he was elected state attorney general.
Cuccinelli gained national attention after he filed a legal challenge arguing all of ObamaCare should be ruled unconstitutional. The health care bill’s fate now rests with the Supreme Court.
His office has also drafted new health and safety regulations for the state’s abortion clinics. “For more than 25 years, Virginia’s abortion clinics were unregulated, not even minimal health and safety regulations were being enforced,” he said.
He reminded the pro-life activists of a unique moment in June 1984, when the “Virginia Society for Human Life held a joint press conference with the National Organization for Women. It was the only one of those ever, but they were both complaining about the same thing: If you take these regulations off, then the women in these clinics – who are making a choice we don’t like but who are due respect themselves as individuals – will deteriorate. And it happened very, very quickly.”
He said the new regulations, which go into effect next January 1, grow out of his belief that the law must “respect the dignity of the women going into those clinics.”
“We’ve got to deal with Mom and baby,” he said. “We can’t ever leave one of them behind.”
Despite being buffeted by legislative battles, Ken Cuccinelli revealed that he draws strength from reading Ephesians, chapter 6 and inspiration from Mother Theresa’s 1994 amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of the unborn.
“If we’re all wrong and life begins at birth, then we’re trying to push our society to inconvenience women for the benefit of what will” become human beings, he said. “If they’re wrong, they’re taking human lives. You tell me which one you’d be more willing to risk.”
“How sure are you that you’re right?” he asked. “What’s the cost of being wrong?”
The key, he said, is not simply legislative victories but an intellectual engagement to convince others that the pro-life message is right. “We could change the laws to end abortion, and the battle would go on the next day,” he said. “This is a permanent state of conflict. The way we win the most, the fastest is converting as many minds as possible, and LifeSiteNews plays a role in that.”
“Information is our primary weapon,” he stated, but it has be coupled with “the moral courage to use it, to talk to that friend of yours at work, to push your pastor, to hold candidates accountable.”
That synergistic motion of information, advocacy, and legal action will save lives.
He closed by thanking LifeSiteNews.com founder Steve Jalsevac by name and “all the reporters…for the work you all do to give us that ammunition to convert the other side in the battle we’re in for life.”
You can make a special 15th anniversary donation to LifeSiteNews here.