Extremists use Constitution to favor, oppose

To the editor:

Congress has passed and President Bush says he will sign federal legislation banning the most barbaric procedure known to medicine: partial-birth abortion. Predictably, the extreme left-wing fanatics are predicting the end of civilization as we know it, along with decent health care for women.

The usual crowd from the far left of the Democratic Party was calling this legislation unconstitutional, a violation of individual rights and the first step to banning all abortion. Any restriction on abortion is unconstitutional, according to this crowd. Funny. When we on the right object to the never-ending stream of gun-control laws they continually push, those same extremists discount those very same constitutional arguments.

To these extremists, the right to abortion is absolute. Yet when it comes to the Second Amendment this same crowd argues that no right is absolute. There has never been an infringement of the Second Amendment they did not see as reasonable.

You would think that at my age I would cease being astonished at the absolute hypocrisy and two-faced arguments of the extremists on the left, but this is so outrageous and blatant as to amaze even me.

ROBERT A. CRON

Advance, Mo.