Huge Irony: The Gambling Industry Killed a Radical Abortion Amendment

The pro-life movement got a much-welcomed victory last week, but its architects say there’s an even greater irony at work: the abortion industry lost because of a trap laid by the gambling industry.

Aside from seeing the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate promise to expand abortion nationwide and the Republican Party’s presidential candidate step away from pro-life protections at the federal level, pro-life advocates have endured a series of reversals at the state level. Numerous state ballot initiatives have erased commonsense pro-life protections after pro-life advocates could not effectively counter campaigns based on lies and churned out by an endless torrent of abortion industry funding.

Thankfully, one state will be spared this onslaught of abortion-industry lies. The Arkansas Abortion Amendment aimed to overturn popular pro-life laws statewide. “It would have legalized abortion for the entire nine months of pregnancy in many cases, and pretty much obliterated all of the good” pro-life protections that “we’ve had on abortion to protect the health and safety of women,” Jerry Cox, president of the Arkansas Family Council, told “Washington Watch” guest host and former Congressman Jody Hice on Monday.

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But after suing all the way to the state supreme court, the abortion-expansion language will not appear on the ballot due to a technicality. State law requires that proposed initiatives receive 90,704 signatures from 50 counties before being placed before voters. The abortion amendment received 87,675 signatures from volunteers and another 14,143 from paid canvassers. But Arkansas has stringent laws about how the paperwork must be filed, and the abortion lobby failed to file necessary paperwork. As The Washington Stand reported last Friday:

“On Thursday, the court rejected a petition brought by [the abortion lobby front group] Arkansans for Limited Government (A[F]LG), citing an insufficient number of volunteered signatures. Arkansas Secretary of State John Thurston (R) ‘correctly refused’ to count the signatures of paid canvassers when considering whether to allow A[F]LG’s proposed amendment to appear on November’s ballot. … The court found that A[F]LG ‘failed to comply with the statutory filing requirements for paid canvassers.’”

“The far left pro-abortion crowd in Arkansas showed they are both immoral and incompetent,” quipped Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R).

But, according to Cox, there was a glistening gospel detail that hones the beauty of this defeat: The provision pro-abortion forces violated had been supported by the purveyor of another vice: the state’s gambling industry. “The gambling interests, of all people, trying to protect their monopoly on gambling got some laws passed that are very specific when it comes to how you do your filings of paperwork and so forth when you do a ballot measure. And they did that so they could stop people who are trying to change the Constitution that would affect their gambling monopoly. Those laws have been sitting there for about 10 years,” said Cox.

In 2012, Arkansas ballot Initiative 3 and Initiative 4 would have expanded casino gambling statewide and closed the state’s race track. The court invalidated the election results on legal grounds and, within a year, new standards were adopted which continued to be refined up until last year. After last week’s ruling, Attorney General Tim Griffin (R) noted, “The Arkansas Supreme Court confirmed today that the abortion advocates failed to follow the law that other ballot committees had successfully followed for over a decade since Governor Mike Beebe,” a Democrat, “signed the law governing paid canvassers in 2013.”

The precise details of the ruling regarding paid canvassers can best be described as arcane; for those interested in the minutiae, you may read the Arkansas Supreme Court ruling here. Cox used a more understandable analogy: “It’s like a football game. You may be running for the goal line and there’s nobody there to stop you. But if you step out of bounds just a little bit, it’s all over.”

And that means it’s all over for Arkansas’s abortion-expansion amendment, at least for now. Unfortunately for AFLG, the law aborted their amendment before it could reach its full potential and be placed on the ballot this November. “How odd that it was the gambling interests that put this law in place. And yet it tripped up the abortion folks when they were trying to amend the Constitution,” mused Cox.

In effect, the dons of the gambling industry whacked the abortion amendment. Greed scuttled murder. Although neither build healthy societies, if society must choose between vices, it does better to choose the lesser evil.

It’s important to note that the thanks are not all due to the gambling industry. Much of the praise should go to grassroots pro-life organizers who raised awareness about the ill effects the ballot measure would bring their state.

“I’ve been around the petition process for almost 40 years here in Arkansas, and I’ve never seen that many people rise up all at once and urge people not to sign a petition. We believe that reduced their number of signatures, probably by about 50%,” said Cox.

“Because our people around the state blunted their signature effort just enough, they fell about 3,000 signatures short. Had that not occurred, I think we would still be fighting this measure,” he said.

If such a measure comes to your state, Cox urges, “Launch a very aggressive grassroots effort and urge people not to sign the petition. That was a game changer.”

As it turns out, hard work and divine providence went hand-in-hand to save the unborn.

LifeNews Note: Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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