Center for Arizona Policy Isn't Quite Pro-Life Enough!

The Center for Arizona Policy, (CAP,) the state's foremost lobbyist for conservative christians, seems so focused on trying to outlaw abortions that they have lost sight of what it truly means to be "pro-life."

Currently, Arizona is the only state in the union that refuses to participate in a federal children's healthcare program. As a result, 30,000-50,000 Arizona kids will be without health insurance.

Yet CAP stands mute.

I thought that they considered themselves "pro-life from conception to grave."

Should we outlaw abortions just to deny those children healthcare later? As far as CAP is concerned, heaven and earth should be moved to try to save one single fetus and yet, they won't fight for the healthcare of breathing children?

The shocking thing is, this problem could be solved by one, single letter from the lobby's president, Cathi Herrod...

Arizona Refuses Federal Money for the Disabled

What if there was a program that equipped disabled individuals to leave the welfare rolls and enter into gainful, tax-paying employment?

In fact, there is one and it's very popular.  Many disabled people come to Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) wanting to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, get off the welfare rolls and become tax-paying citizens instead.

So successful is the program that the federal government offers to pay three-quarters of the cost.  Yet die-hard tea-partiers in the Arizona Legislature have refused this "dirty Obama money" for several years.  As a result, people who are genuinely motivated to get off of welfare have been sitting on waiting lists, still collecting government checks, for years.

Scarce AZ Education Funding Spent on Anti-Abortion Message

Educational funding is currently scarce in Arizona and even as the state ranks near the bottom in both spending and performance, money is being spent to place anti-abortion stickers on the back covers of biology textbooks.

To stress the point, the students were instructed to place these stickers on the textbooks themselves.

Medical Marijuana Demagoguery Proving to be Very Wrong

When Prop 203, the initiative to legalize medical marijuana, was being considered in Arizona in 2010, opponents (particularly Shelia Polk and her comrades,) feared the worst:

They predicted "trashed neighborhoods, drug cartels disguised as medical marijuana dispensaries, increased armed robberies, burglaries, murder and organized crime." (*1)

They feared then (and still do now) that medical marijuana cards are "way too easy" to obtain and that marijuana would flood the state since unused meds would be sold on the street to children.

They called medical marijuana a "smokescreen" to full legalization and that we should expect "97-98 percent of medical marijuana cardholders (to be) aged 17 to 35 and suffer(ing) from "chronic pain". (*1)

However, the most recent (2014) Arizona Medical Marijuana Act (AMMA) End of Year Report, produced by the Arizona Department of Health Services (who issues the MMJ cards,) not only shows the opposite to have come true, but in the end, medical marijuana in Arizona is turning out to be small potatoes.