Dornan Gives Talk Against Abortion and Sandinistas

Robert Dornan thanked the 200 people gathered Saturday at an anti-abortion prayer breakfast “for putting me back in an active status” in Washington, recalling that the first campaign check he received in his successful 1984 race for Congress came from Pro-Life Political Action Committee of Orange County, which sponsored the gathering at the Buena Park Hotel.

“What makes the pro-life movement so strong,” the Garden Grove Republican said, is that it recognizes that “the building block of society is the family.”

For most of his keynote address, however, Dornan preferred to talk about his recent trip to Central America, charging that unnamed members of the Roman Catholic clergy in Orange County and elsewhere were attempting to “submerge with other issues” that of abortion, focusing instead on Central America.

Priests in Attendance

Sharing the speakers’ table with Dornan were Thomas A. Fuentes, chairman of the Orange County Republican Party and director of communications for the Catholic Diocese of Orange, and Msgr. John F. Sammon, who delivered the invocation. A number of other priests were introduced from the audience.

Dornan said that he met with Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo in Managua, Nicaragua, and Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas in San Salvador, El Salvador, and that both told him they were relieved not to have to face the issue of abortion as it exists in the United States.

American nuns and priests, Dornan contended, were being taken on “revolutionary tours” in Nicaragua and returning with “distorted facts” which disguise the fact that “Managua is becoming a Soviet satellite.” As a result of this “disinformation,” he said, their observations of Nicaragua had the effect of “turning the whole political system upside down” in the eyes of people in this country.

Returned to Abortion Theme

Citing figures provided by Archbishop Obando y Bravo and the U.S. embassy, Dornan said that of 912 Catholic clergyman in the country, 860 were loyal to the archbishop in his opposition to the Sandinista government and that only 52 priests--42 of whom are foreign--support the “Populist Church,” which supports the revolutionary government.

Eventually, however, Dornan returned to the theme of the morning, after telling the anti-abortion activists that he was “sorry if I offended you on Central America.” As a result of their efforts in the political arena, he told the audience, Orange County’s delegation to the state Legislature was “almost perfect for life.”

Identifying the exception as Assemblyman Richard Robinson (D-Garden Grove), he exhorted his listeners to send Robinson “back to private life.”

Longshore on Hand

Earlier in the program, Mary Curtius, chairman of Pro-Life PAC, also referred to the “one exception” to the anti-abortion stance of the county’s delegation to Sacramento, a situation that, she said, “we hope to remedy with the aid of Dick Longshore.” Longshore, who led the Pledge of Allegiance before breakfast was served, failed by only 256 votes in 1984 to unseat Robinson and is considered a likely challenger in 1986.

Other legislators or their representatives from Orange County were introduced from the floor, including one Democrat, Sen. Paul Carpenter (D-Cypress). Conservative activists and protestant clergyman were also on hand, including the Rev. Lou Sheldon, chairman of California Coalition for Traditional Values, who was distributing some of the 1 million copies of a special edition of his group’s tabloid, “Midnight Alarm,” devoted entirely to homosexuality.