I am pro-choice. I have friends who are not. I certainly don't want women of any age to face that choice and have never heard of a woman who had an abortion who was not devastated and saddened by it. I am always wary of people who are ready - rain or shine - to lecture about religiously-based morality but do little or nothing to follow words with concrete action that could reduce the need or desire for abortion.

Wake up Notre Dame protestors. Where were you protesting the war when thousands of American military personnel were killed in Iraq? Where are you when the social service network fails and children go without food, a home or proper education? Your selective piety is insulting to those who have very thoughtful reasons for saying that religion should not dictate policy in a free society, especially one that has two important constitutional religious protections. One is the right to freely exercise your religious beliefs without government inteference. The other is that the government must not promote the establishment of religion by using religious teachings from any faith to set policy.

There was a time 40 years ago when the Catholic Church (and many other Jewish, Muslim and Christian faiths) helped in their own way to end the Vietnam War, worked on ending poverty and preached about civil rights for ethnic and racial minorities. I hear very little of that today. The only rallying point seems to be about the extent to which women should be entitled to reproductive freedom.

It should be no secret to you that abortion clinics have largely been replaced by public and private hospitals with seemingly innocuous medical records of 16 year olds that show a D & C due to unexplained menstrual bleeding, likely induced by an internist who was never trained to perform an abortion. They start the process and then refer the patient to the hospital. The young woman gets the abortion while you were busy making signs to scare the daylights out of young women as they entered clinics.

If you get what you want, more women (especially poor women) will die. I hope that you confess your complicity in taking that right away and seek absolution for that sin. Before you do that, I'd like to know that every single child who needs adoption is adopted. When I hear your protests, I always wonder how many of you have opened your homes to hard-to-place kids. If you are going to take the responsibility for overturning Rowe v. Wade, you should take responsibility for the aftermath. You should be on the front line promising your tax dollars to guarantee that every child will never have to live in a homeless shelter and will get all the education they desire. You should throw in a guaranteed job, at a living wage, for the mothers and fathers of these kids.

By the way, I'm Catholic.

Dick Cheney is having trouble moving on

Forget that his approval ratings while in office were even lower than G.W. Bush's. Forget that he is widely credited with using his position to invent evidence to justify a war with a nation that hadn't attacked us and that never had WMDs. Forget that Halliburton, his former employer, has been paid billions since 2003. Dick Cheney is tanned, rested and ready to launch attacks on the Obama administration with the same scare tactics he used while in office.

Dick Cheney is certainly protected by the First Amendment. He is entitled to his opinions and is free to trash the policy positions of Barack Obama. On the other hand, scaring your own people based on policy positions that were already rejected in November isn't exactly useful. Can't the Republican Party find a fresh face to have an honest debate?

Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Christine Todd Whitman and a handful of others should be permitted to tone down the rhetoric and rebuild their party by drawing in more moderates who spend more of their time listening than lecturing. Mr. Cheney stopped listening long ago and appears to believe that he has all the answers.

No one person has all the answers. No one person has a monopoly on patriotism. Someone ought to let the former Vice President in on that little secret.