Over the course of the Thanksgiving holiday, Apple Inc. decided to discreetly remove the app for The Manhattan Declaration from its iTunes store due to accusations that the declaration was equivalent hate-speech and inflammatory. As many of you know The Manhattan Declaration is a concise document that was put together by three leading American Christians who wished to simply express traditional Christian (Catholic and Protestant) values which are a currently under severe threat in this country and provide an easy, accessible means of garnering support for such values through a petition signing campaign. The first value expressed by the declaration is of course the sanctity of life and a firm opposition to all forms of violence against unborn life as well as the elderly and disabled. Nearly half a million people have signed the petition to date, amongst them some very prominent religious and Pro-Life leaders (including our very own Marjorie Dannenfelser!).
Strangely enough, the Manhattan Declaration app had been up for some time without any uproar or polemics and had even received a 4+ rating from Apple for containing no objectionable material whatsoever. Recently, however, a pro-abortion politically progressive website named Change.org (which incidentally only has 7,000 members in comparison to Manhattan Declaration’s 481,000) complained to Apple that the Manhattan Declaration app was offensive to “free choice” (AKA abortion rights). For some reason, despite the relatively minor stature of Change.org, and without any warning to the Manhattan Declaration folks, Apple decided to talk down the app and have since refused to put it back up on the i-Tunes store.
In response, the Manhattan Declaration has begun another petition drive to get Apple to reinstate the app to the i-Tunes store. Please get involved if you can to correct this ridiculous affront to Americans’ rights to express their religious values and to loudly proclaim the rights of the unborn and the utter injustice of abortion.
