I like exercising my right to choose..Over the years I have made many choices, some big, important ones, others less significant. Like in November when I get to vote for people to represent me, or in January when I choose hot chocolate over tea on a cold winter's night. I don't want to give up my freedom to choose such things. I was reminded of my great freedoms a few weeks ago when a radio commercial prompted me to exercise one.

    It was one of those commercials that you don't really pay attention to until the millionth time you've heard it. It was convincing. It was loaded with statements about the rights I have been given since the founding of this country. I like my freedom, so that didn't  sound so bad. the voice penetrating my airwaves made statements that sounded real close to the Declaration of Independence or some other document of great importance. It purported freedom.

    We heard it at the breakfast table after we said grace.

    We heard it on our lunch break over peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

    I heard it in my children's rooms at night as it lulled them to sleep between their favorite songs.

    Eventually we listened.

    What we heard was ugly - real ugly.

    This commercial didn't have anything to do with the freedoms we have been given in this country, except one - the right to life, or more accurately, the right to take it away. It was steeped in o-

    influence these radio and television commercials have on our children over an extended period of time is very worrisome.

    At a conference last year, I had the chance to listen to a speaker addressing the potential effects of bad music on young people. He said that many of us don't take very good care of ourselves, that we enjoy high-fat foods, a sedentary lifestyle and, perhaps, a few vices like smoking or drinking. Usually we get along fine, but eventually the cholesterol count goes up, the waistline goes out, and the arteries get clogged. Often these changes are gradual and we don't notice them until they cause us harm. Much like the effects of some music. Gradually, a negative build-up occurs.

    I thought of this when I realized what the potential influence this commercial and others like it could have over a period of time - especially on vulnerable listeners such as our children. We mustn't be lulled into acceptance by the repetition of a message we have become bored with.

    We must learn to recognize and denounce messages that oppose the Gospel of Life. I found a gem of a statement in the documents written at the Second Vatican Council: "Parents on their part should remember that it is their duty to see that entertainment and publications which might endanger faith and morals do not enter their houses and that their children are not exposed to them elsewhere." (Decree on the Means of Social Communication, Chapter 1, pg. 287)

    What a challenge! The next time those prochoice commercials come on, join me in exercising our freedom of choice by turning them off before they turn your children on.

    One of the women was married to a foreign service officer who had recently been notified of an impending assignment abroad. "The same week that Bob got his 'warning that we have to go overseas," she said, "I missed by period. And I thought to myself, 'Oh, no, not another abortion!"'

    "Oh, I know," said the other woman, while Bottum listened in amazement. "It's so expensive, and you feel sick for days afterward." "And right in the middle of moving," the wife of the foreign service officer concluded. "But it turned out to be a false alarm."

    In relating this story to readers of the Wall Street Journal, Lorena Bottum argued that these women weren't moral monsters. Rather, they were moral ciphers, "best described not so much in positive terms as in double negatives: not unfriendly, not unkind, not unintelligent, not uneasy." Taught by our laws that an abortion is of no more moral consequence than an appendectomy, they inevitably fail the test when the crisis comes. An abortion to avoid unpleasantness in packing up one's house becomes not an agonizing, wrenching "choice," but a cost-benefit analysis with an obvious answer.

    All of which has something to do with the recent horror in Littleton, Colo.

    "Defining deviancy down" has become a staple phrase in discussions of crime, juvenile delinquency and other social pathologies. Perhaps one of the lessons of the Columbine High School massacre is that, in addition to dumbing down deviancy, contemporary American culture and law have been numbing down moral sensibilities.

    Twenty-plus years of abortion-on-demand have numbed Lorena Bottum's neighbors' consciences. The murderous antics of Jack Kevorkian were given prime-time exposure on CBS: a case of the numbed down further numbing down a mass audience. Video games, TV programs, movies and other forms of "entertainment" that gratuitously display extreme violence have numbed down the moral sensibilities of both adults and teenagers.

    And that, it seems to me, has more to do with explaining the Columbine High School massacre than the public policy positions of the National Rifle Association - with most of which, I should add, happen to disagree.

    During the pope's visit to St. Louis, a reporter asked whether I didn't think John Paul II's warnings about a "culture of death" were off-putting; surely there was some other way to voice these concerns. I wonder if my reportorial friend would rephrase his question in the aftermath of the slaughter in Littleton? Or after one of America's most honored television programs gave the pathological ghoul Kevorkian the publicity he craves?

    When life is reduced to a commodity; when utility measures a person's worth; when the mysteries of life-giving and dying are degraded into exercises in pragmatic calculation; when sex is another contact sport and violence is entertainment; when childhood is stripped of innocence: that, it seems reasonable to suggest, is a "culture of death." The numbing down of moral sensibilities is one of its causes.

    In the immediate aftermath of the Columbine massacre, there were numerous calls for enhanced school counseling programs to try to prevent such things in the future. I wish them well, but I doubt they're the answer. Why, after all, do we allow young people to be exposed to the kinds of degraded "entertainment" that, evidently, helped warp the minds and spirits of the Columbine murderers? Doesn't prevention have a certain priority here?

    It is time to revisit the question of censorship. The claim that any censorship of television, movies, video games, CDs or the Internet threatens the free speech essential to democracy is ludicrous. Violent trash that feeds the culture of death has no more legitimate claim to constitutional protection than Jack Kevorkian had a constitutional right to murder a man on "60 Minutes."

    While legislators and judges debate restoring censorship, a staple of civilized societies for centuries, parents, consumers, and stockholders have other tools at their disposal: boycotts and shareholder actions. They should be used. The alternative has now been made unmistakably clear.

George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

    I was recently discussing abortion with Debbi, who is "pro-choice." At one point she asked me, "Are you against the death penalty?" Now usually, a "let's change the subject" tactic like this should be handled by gently returning to the current subject of the conversation. But in this case, I took a different approach.

    "Oh yes," I said, "I am very much opposed to the death penalty, as is our Priests for Life organization. I preach against it frequently." "I see," Debbi said. I continued, "Yes, you know, the death penalty is bad for a number of reasons. One reason is that it simply feeds into the notion that you can solve the problems of a society by putting people to death." "That's right," Debbi agreed. I went on to say, "We need to find better solutions than just pushing another person out of the way when they present a problem. Human problems demand humane solutions, and killing is not one of them."

    Little did Debbi seem to realize in the midst of this exchange was that I presented to her an argument that applies perfectly well to abortion.

    There is, indeed, an important connection between abortion and the death penalty, and my pro-life work throughout the world has shown me that opponents of abortion are very likely to be opposed to the death penalty as well. Certainly, they are not identical issues. There's a big difference between a criminal and a perfectly innocent baby. Yet at the same time, the difference is not so great as to obscure the equal dignity of both. As John Paul II declared in Evangelium Vitae, "Not even a murderer loses his personal dignity."

    While we use our full strength to abolish both abortion and capital punishment, it is also a healthy perspective to compare the statistics. Official statistics on U.S. executions have been recorded only since 1930 by the U.S. Department of Justice. The figures show there have been 4,381 executions from 1930 until February of this year. There were none in the 1968-1976 period.

    A historian named Watt Espy, director of the Capital Punishment Research Project in Headland, Ala., has traced the history of the death penalty in the U.S. In a work published in 1994, he estimated that 18,645 executions had taken place since the early 1600s in what is now the U.S.

    If you add the 265 that have occurred from 1995 until now, you come up with a figure of 18,910. Turning to abortion, the web site of the Alan Guttmacher Institute (which is strongly pro-abortion) reports that in 1996 alone there were 1.37 million abortions just in the United States. That's 3,753 per day, one every 23 seconds. In other words, the total number of deaths by capital punishment for our entire history is less than the number of deaths by abortion every five days.

        2. "I’m personally opposed to abortion, but can’t impose my views on others." Our response: This is not a matter of views, but of violence. The law is supposed to protect human life despite to views of those who would destroy it.

    3. The government should not be involved in such a personal decision as abortion. The government got "too involved" in abortion when it claimed to have authority to deprive some human beings of their right to life. The Declaration of Independence asserts that government exists to secure the rights already bestowed by the Creator. Moreover, when somebody's "choice" destroys somebody else's life, that choice is no longer merely a personal, private matter.

5. Abortion is the law of the land. The "law of the land" can be changed, just as it was changed regarding slavery and segregation. Leadership means seeing the injustice that others miss, and inspiring others to utilize the methods the law permits to make necessary changes.

6. I support women's rights and health. That is precisely why you should examine the evidence, which is more plentiful than ever, that abortion is destructive of women's health, and listen to the growing voices of those who have been harmed by abortion. That is also why you should examine how the abortion industry, through unregulated and dangerous clinics continues to deceive and exploit women.