Pro-Life Link

I found this lovely site and wanted to share it for today's 40 Days for Life post; it seem appropriate given tomorrow's feast day. Excerpt:

Patron Saint of Mothers with Health Problems

Saint Gianna Beretta Molla: (1922-1962). A deeply spiritual wife and mother, and doctor of pediatric medicine in Mesero, Italy, Gianna also served the elderly and poor through the St. Vincent de Paul Society. In 1961, Gianna elected to continue her life threatening fourth pregnancy rather than abort her unborn child. Seven days after her daughter was born, Gianna died. See this link for more information.

Patron Saint of Unwed Mothers

Saint Margaret of Cortona: (1247-1297). Born of poor parents in Laviano, Italy, Margaret left home as a young teen to live with nine years with her young lover, bearing him a son out of wedlock. When her lover was murdered by his enemies, Margaret underwent a conversion and embraced a live of penance, prayer, and apostolate, living the Rule of 1221. "I have put thee as a burning light," Our Lord said to her, "to enlighten those who sit in the darkness.--I have set thee as an example to sinners, that in thee they may behold how my mercy awaits the sinner who is willing to repent; for as I have been merciful to thee, so will I be merciful to them." See this link for more information.

PATRON SAINT OF MOTHERS IN DIFFICULTY

Blessed Anna Maria Taigi: (1769-1837). Born in Siena, Italy, Anna Maria married a butler named Domenico. Always living on a financial brink, Anna supplemented Domenico's meager income with various jobs while raising their six children, tolerating Domenico's jealous outbursts and impatience, and caring for elderly parents who came to live in the cramped family quarters. Anna Maria became a Third Order Trinitarian and practiced many penances as well as had a deep prayer life. Many, including bishops, sought her counsel.

Do visit this lovely site for pro-life prayers and links--and have a Happy Halloween!

The Great Halloween Dilemma

Happy Halloween, everyone! Oh, wait. Happy All Saints' Eve! Er...happy vigil of the feast of All Saints' Day?

You know where this is going, don't you?

Every October 31st, Catholic families, especially homeschooling ones, wrestle with the question of just what to call the day, and just how to celebrate it. Is Halloween pagan and evil? Is Halloween silly harmless kids' fun? Is Halloween overly-commercialized to the point where it will soon be the Christmas of October? Is Halloween too gruesome and scary these days? Is it better, more holy, more spiritual, more right, to celebrate All Saint's Day instead?

In point of fact, since Halloween is just a shortening of All Hallow's Eve, which itself pretty much means the vigil of the feast of All Saint's Day, I don't think it really matters all that much what you end up calling it. So, Happy Halloween, everybody!

But all those other questions remain. Now, I don't think you can make the claim that Halloween is pagan and evil; at least, I can't make that claim. I realize that serious scholars dispute the pagan connections to the day's celebrations, and just how many of the old rituals got wrapped up in the new ones--but then, we have the same fight every year about Christmas, and whether the tree or the lights or the various Christmas foods are somehow a continuation of some kind of old evil paganism, and what Real True Christians (tm) should do about it all. The point is that regardless of which of the scholars of antiquities are right about how much or how little influence the various pagans (Druids get blamed a lot) had on our present celebrations, unless you're busily stirring a cauldron full of foul-smelling stuff and chanting Druidic (or would-be, fake Druidic) spells, you're not practicing paganism by celebrating Halloween (or Christmas for that matter); you can't be a pagan by accident.

It's pretty clear, too, that the intention of Halloween is for it to be silly harmless kids' fun. Whether the kids in question dress up as superheros and go door to door looking for goodies, or whether the kids in question dress up as saints and have a blast at an All Saints' party, the point of the evening is hardly forging chains of thralldom to the evil underworld, is it?

So far, I've been pretty neutral about Halloween. The truth is that we've celebrated it in two different ways: costumes and trick-or-treating, and saints' outfits and an All Saint's Party. The reasons I got tired of the first way of doing things and started participating in the second way had to do more with the next two questions in the third paragraph: Halloween as over-commercialized, and Halloween as gruesome and scary.

I may not be the crunchiest of crunchy-cons, but I've started to feel unsettled about our nation's way of celebrating holidays. As soon as the back-to-school clothing and items disappear from the store shelves (in early to mid July) the first glimmerings of Halloween merchandise start to show their black and orange glory in the "seasonal" aisles of the big-box stores; and long before Halloween even arrives we can see the Christmas trees and other "holiday" goods being set up in the hopes that the longer the items are on display, the more of them will be purchased by eager consumers who can't get enough of red and green plastic. If Halloween were just candy and costumes it would be bad enough to have these items on display from before August through the end of October; but now we have Halloween goods in every section of the store, as if people can't celebrate October 31st without hanging pumpkin-face towels in their guest bathrooms and purchasing the matching hand-soap dispensers and other accoutrements with which to festoon their homes long in advance of the actual holiday.

And nearly all of those goods are made overseas, most of them in countries under Communist rule, where the young people--many of them women--work fifteen hour days seven days a week for a salary that equals a few hundred dollars a month. Reporters are digging into the toxic working conditions and other exploitative business practices that characterize these workers' lives--but as long as there is demand for these kinds of cheaply made, worthless seasonal goods, the goods will be produced.

Granted, the average Catholic homeschooling family isn't really contributing to this problem--few of us go out and snap up silly "seasonal" items, and many make and re-use costumes even if they are choosing to celebrate the "trick-or-treating" way.

But the other disturbing trend in Halloween is the trend toward the gruesome and scary--really scary, not "silly green-faced witch on a broomstick" scary--aimed and directed at our children by the marketers behind the masks and costumes.

In a big-box retail store last night I saw a little boy, younger than any of my children, gleefully playing with a fake knife his parents were buying for him, making stabbing motions with it. Now, I'm well aware that little boys can turn almost anything into a weapon, and I have no problem with toy knives or even toy guns--but this thing was grotesque: the "blade" part was clear plastic, and every time the boy made the "stabbing" motion dark red fluid like fake blood filled the blade, so that it looked as though he was holding a knife drenched in blood. The boy thought this was great, and was having fun aiming it at his little sister.

Is it just me, or is that way too graphic a "toy" for a child to be playing with?

I've heard from parents who can't even take their children in or near the "Halloween" aisles of the stores: from the truly horrific monster masks to the Frankenstein statue whose motion sensor makes him rip his own head off every time someone gets close, this stuff is the stuff--literally--of nightmares. By the time a child is old enough not to find these things frightening, he's almost too old to be trick-or-treating anyway.

Our girls went trick-or-treating the first few years we lived in this neighborhood. It always seemed like a bit of an anticlimax: all that costuming and preparation, followed by about an hour of going door-to-door for too-much candy, not all of which they could even eat (allergies, alas). So when my sister-in-law, whose littles were even littler than my girls, suggested a family All Saints' party as a substitute we jumped at the chance to celebrate in a way that would last longer and be more fun for everyone.

At this point, two of my girls feel like they're "too old" to trick-or-treat anyway (boys seem to enjoy this aspect longer, don't they?). So getting to dress up like a saint or a virtue and then going to a party with games, food, fun, and a really awesome cake (at least, when it's Aunt's turn; they can't wait for the pumpkin cake roll!) is much more fun than going door-to-door for candy.

Now, is it better, holier, more spiritual, etc.? I'd never say so. Not everyone has the opportunity for a party like our family party, and there's certainly nothing wrong with the "trick-or-treat" variety of celebration. We decided to do what we're doing because this really is what works best for our families, and it's turned out to be a lot of fun, and to be a way to keep Halloween special and exiting long past the age when trick-or-treating seemed like the most fun thing in the world (which seems to be somewhere between five and eight, but that's probably just at our house).

The truth is that there's no one "right" way to celebrate Halloween. This really is a holiday for which the Bean Principle, "Do what works best for your family," seems to be operative. However you celebrate All Hallow's Eve, have a happy celebration--and a wonderful All Saints' Day tomorrow!

Another List. Most of it Just Plain Silly.

I've got just about enough time for one more list post, so here are some things I've been wondering and thinking about, in no particular order:

1. If Obama's elected and he reinstates the so-called "Fairness Doctrine," does that mean that in 2012 it will be illegal for one presidential candidate to host his own thirty-minute infomercial without allowing the other candidate thirty minutes of equal airtime?

2. If John McCain is the moral equivalent of a mass murderer for his ESCR support, what does that make Barack Obama for his support for this sort of thing?

3. If Rod Dreher writes, "Fluorescent lighting is like the taste that stays in your mouth when you eat a snack cake with creme filling from the vending machine. It's the hydrogenated vegetable oil of lighting." and Maclin Horton comments "Great simile in your last line there." a) is it a sign of the apocalypse, b) did Maclin like the simile in the penultimate line, c) did Maclin like the metaphor in the last line, or d) am I a total English major weenie? :)

4. If Jen at Conversion Diary writes a lovely post about consumption and asceticism, is it really horrible that I remember this? (Okay, maybe not horrible, but definitely showing my age.)

5. Will the Stuff Catholics Like blog ever resurface?

6. Will I ever attain the intellectual level necessary to understand half the posts at this blog, and if I do, will it be necessary for me to determine beforehand a) how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and b) whether, if a tree fell in the forest where no one could hear it, it would still be mediate remote material cooperation in evil without a proportionate reason for the tree to vote for McCain?

7. If Cardinal Egan posts a beautiful picture of an unborn baby, and people still can't see the baby's inherent dignity, obvious humanity, and intrinsic sanctity of life, how worried should we be to live among such people?

8. If we can get rid of some ugly modern music by the Vatican's ban on the use of Yahweh to represent the Tetragrammaton, what are the odds that we can expect a future ban on the use of songs where the singer takes the place of God and sings such things as "I the Lord of Sea and Sky" etc.? 'Cause that would take care of about 3/4ths of the problematic stuff.

9. If a strategy for continued weight loss during Halloween week depends on one's inability to eat chocolate without it triggering a migraine, and all sorts of evil candy companies start making white chocolate coated versions of the good stuff, how many extra minutes of exercise a day will be necessary to maintain equilibrium?

10. How late will we be up next Tuesday night--and how are we going to feel come Wednesday morning?

A List or Two

I don't have a lot of time to write this afternoon, so I thought I'd write a couple of list posts.

This first one is about lists--grocery lists, to be exact. I'm generally a "list" sort of person, and like to organize my thoughts or keep track of things by using lists; unfortunately, though, that habit hasn't carried over into my grocery shopping habits.

I really only have one way of grocery shopping: the guerrilla shopper method. It works like this:

1. Think of one to ten things I need at the store.
2. Go to the store.
3. Stagger out of the store an hour and a half later with eight to twenty grocery bags whose contents cost anywhere from twelve to fifteen dollars a bag.
4. Get home, unpack groceries, and realize that anywhere from one to nine of the things I went to the store for didn't end up being purchased.
5. Repeat steps one through four the next time I get to the store.

Not exactly the best method, as you can imagine.

With budgets being what they are, and so on, I've been wanting to improve my grocery shopping efficiency. A while ago I found a list generator online (which has probably been shared by others before) and I bookmarked it; there were two things I didn't like about it, though, so I didn't try it. Those two things were:

1. It came from a "working mother's" website and had "working mom"** in its title;
2. I didn't write it myself, so the categories were arranged differently from how I would have done it.

I thought I would use it as a template for the creation of my own perfect organized shopping list, but since that never happened, I decided to try it today. The generator is here for anyone who'd like to try it, too.

It really couldn't be easier to use: clickable items, big boxes to type in your own items, and then a "submit" button which creates your own trip-specific list for you to print. The categories are still arranged in a way I find slightly counterintuitive, but with the ample space to add your own things and the ease of creating different shopping lists every time it's not a bad list, overall. I did find one big flaw: the list doesn't mention toilet paper at all, which is a pretty big omission--though that's one item I don't usually forget to buy.

Is it any easier to use than the old-fashioned half-sharpened pencil and back of random envelope? Only in that the categories are a helpful reminder of things you know you're out of but aren't thinking about: I knew I was out of ginger, a spice I use frequently, but I wouldn't have thought to write it down if I hadn't been using this list.

And if it cures the "guerrilla shopping" habit, I'll let you know!

**UPDATE: No offense to the moms who work outside the home meant. I just hate the phrase "working mom," because it seems to imply that moms who stay at home with their children and even teach them somehow don't work. We're all working moms; the only non-working moms I'm aware of are the ones who both stay at home and can hire full time live-in help, and I don't know any of them personally. :)

The Pen is Mighter Than the Sword, But Only if the Pen is Held by Chuck Norris

God bless Chuck Norris, who wrote an amazing pro-life essay published on World Net Daily. Excerpt:

Some people think after 35 years of ceaseless controversy since the Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade that abortion is an "old" issue better dropped. I do believe the economy is the issue in this election, but it's certainly not the only issue. We can't just be concerned about our finances. We must also be concerned about America's future, and those who occupy it. Our posterity matters. Their rights matter. And that includes their "unalienable Rights," with which have been "endowed by their Creator," and among them are the quintessential rights: "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Abortion is not about a woman's "right to choose." It is about a more fundamental "right to life," which is one of three specifically identified unalienable rights in the Declaration (and the Constitution through Article VII and the Bill of Rights). And it is a violation of government's primary purpose: to protect innocent life.

We can couch our action in terms like "abortion," "termination" or "a women's right to choose," but it's still the killing of an "inconvenient" human life. And it won't end there. As my friend and prolific author Randy Alcorn wrote, "Abortion has set us on a dangerous course. We may come to our senses and back away from the slippery slope. Or we may follow it to its inescapable conclusion – a society in which the powerful, for their self-interest, determine which human beings will live and which will die." [...]

The truth is: If Obama is elected, we will place a man in the highest office in the land who has the most liberal views and voting record on abortion of any president in American history. As a state senator in Illinois, he led opposition three years in a row (2001-2003) to a bill similar to the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, which prevents the killing of babies unintentionally left alive by abortion. He also opposed the ban on partial-birth abortion and strongly disapproved of the Supreme Court decision upholding the partial-birth ban. He does not support the Hyde amendment, which prohibits taxpayer funding of abortion through Medicaid. He also voted to block a bill that would have required a doctor to notify at least one parent before performing an abortion on a minor girl from another state. Before a Planned Parenthood action fund last year, Obama promised to give first priority as president to the signing of the Freedom of Choice Act, which would make partial-birth abortion legal again. Strangely, Obama even once said he would not want his daughters to be "punished with a baby" due to an unwanted pregnancy. With the next president likely adding two justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, it is clear that, as president, Obama will appoint and support the most liberal judges and legal eagles, resulting in a pro-abortion advantage in our courts that will push abortion liberties to every extent of the law and land.

Do read the whole thing. Or Chuck Norris will find you and make you read it.

Seriously, the one good thing that has come out of this election season has been the uplifted voices of so many people, from bishops to public figures to celebrities to ordinary men and women, all of them saying in the face of the ugly reality of abortion and the hideous disregard for human life our national laws permitting abortion on demand from conception until birth (and perhaps even after, if Obama has his way): Enough. Enough of this madness, this destruction of innocent human lives, this infliction of pain and psychological trauma on the women left to grieve a loss they dare not even acknowledge in the face of the world's approval of their "choices."

Let's keep that going, whomever is elected next Tuesday. Let's keep focusing on the blood of the innocent shed every day in this country, in the name of "choice." Let's recommit to ending abortion in America.

A Sneak Peak at the Obama Infomercial

Int. Living Room Set

We see "Bibi Brown" and "Mick Michaels" seated in comfortable leather chairs; the camera pans toward them as the intro music fades.

BIBI

Hi, I'm Bibi Brown...

MICK

...and I'm Mick Michaels...

BIBI

...and we're here today to tell you about the latest, most exciting, and most all-around amazing new development in Presidential Candidate technology. Isn't that right, Mick?

Mick stands up and walks toward the camera.

MICK

That's right, Bibi. You know, I've been a voter for fourteen years, now, and I can't remember ever seeing a new product in the Presidential Candidate line as exciting, as innovative, and as all-around fantastic as..

MICK/BIBI

(together)The Obama-matic!

Bibi stands up, and gestures toward a television which is playing video footage of Barack Obama's campaign.

BIBI

You know it, Mick! You see, unlike other, limited Presidential Candidate models, the Obama-matic stands for whatever you say he does! There's no messy weighing of complicated issues--just elect the Obama-matic and wait for all that good audacity to kick in. It's like magic!

MICK

With today's busy families and their complicated lives, voters just don't have the time to figure out a candidate's past, who he really is, or what he really believes. In the old days, you might have to read hundreds of actual newspapers to find out all of that! And even today, when our newspapers and TV journalists make it easy by saying the exact same thing and staying away from all that tiresome objective reporting, some voters still feel compelled to look to their church, their civic organizations, or other resources to find out which candidate supports their views.

Cut to Bibi, who is now wearing glasses and holding a stack of disorganized papers.

BIBI

My church says to vote pro-life, my garden club says to vote for the environment, my neighborhood association says to vote for lower property taxes--it's all just TOO MUCH!

She dumps the papers into a trash can which has the word "Issues" circled and crossed out in red.

MICK

It is too much, Bibi.

BIBI

So what is a voter to do, Mick?

MICK

I think we both know the answer to that...

MICK/BIBI

(together) The Obama-matic!

BIBI

Unlike traditional boring candidates with actual positions on hundreds of complicated issues, the Obama-matic candidate is for just a few simple things, like "Hope" and "Change!"

MICK

It can't be as easy as that, Bibi.

BIBI

But it is, Mick! Obama-matic stands for hope and change, and that's all you need to know!

MICK

Wow! I already knew that the Obama-matic model of the Presidential Candidate was amazing, but hearing it over and over again just makes him sound even better!

BIBI

And that's not all. Once you elect the Obama-matic to be the new President of the United States of America, you'll find that the built-in rationalization you get from voting will help keep you excited and approving of every single thing he does as President!

MICK

You know, Bibi, some of our audience has already tried voting for the Obama-matic. Let's take some calls to see just how much they liked it...caller, you're on the air with Mick and Bibi!

CALLER

Hi.

MICK

Hi. Tell us your name, and what it was like to vote for the Obama-matic.

CALLER

My name is Keith, and voting for the Obama-matic...well, wow. Wow!

MICK

Wow, hey? That good?

CALLER

Thrill up the leg good. Everybody should vote for the Obama-matic. He's going to change everything.

MICK

Thanks, Keith. Do we have someone else, Bibi?

BIBI

We sure do! Hi, you're on the air with Mick and Bibi!

CALLER

Yes...um...I have a question about the Obama-matic.

BIBI

Okay, caller, what's your question?

CALLER

I've heard he comes pre-installed with the abortion feature, and I really don't want that feature, so...should I still vote for the Obama-matic?

BIBI

Well, remember, the great thing about the Obama-matic is that he stands for whatever you believe he does. So if you believe he's really going to reduce abortions even though he says he's for them, then...guess what?

CALLER

Then I can believe he's going to reduce abortions?

BIBI

Absolutely.

CALLER

Okay, thanks, then.

BIBI

You're welcome, and enjoy voting for the Obama-matic!

MICK

Bibi, we're almost out of time, here, and we've spent so much time talking about how great the Obama-matic truly is, but I want to make sure our viewers know how to get the experience of helping to elect the most innovative new Presidential Candidate model in history.

BIBI

That's right, Mick! Voters, all you need is a voter registration card, and the experience of voting for the Obama-matic is yours!

MICK

And if you don't have a valid voter registration card, the nice people at ACORN will help you get one.

BIBI

Or, if you live in Ohio and aren't verifiably deceased, then you can vote, too!

MICK

There are just so many ways to take this great opportunity to vote for the Obama-matic. But remember, you absolutely must take advantage of this offer before November 4th.

BIBI

And like all Presidential Candidate models, the Obama-matic comes with a four-year guarantee. If you're not absolutely delighted with the Obama-matic, just wait four years, and you can replace him with somebody new.

Music begins to play and the camera pans slowly away from Mick and Bibi.

MICK

That's all the time we have for now! Bye folks!

BIBI

Bye! And don't miss your chance to vote for...

MICK/BIBI:

(together) The amazing Obama-matic!

Because I Said I Would

I wasn't really serious about this. Not really.

But then another commenter named Aaron wrote this brilliant bit:

"Song of the Voters of America"

Chorus:
We have come to plug out noses
We have come to punch a chad
And we all agree the choices both are bad


We would like to vote third party
Show the GOP the door
But remember this, Obama scares us more

So I thought it might be fun to do what I said I'd do:

Voter's Anthem:

Refrain:
It is time, we have chosen
We'll go vote for one or other,
We're not happy with our choices
But we'll go vote anyway.
Campaign signs, VP blunders,
ESCR--what a pain!
We don't like him, we don't want him
But we still pick John McCain.

Then how can we stand justified? How can we vote this way?
No one else we can support now, we'll just vote against The One
Who's the guy for Big Abortion, who'll sign FOCA before long,
Who thinks he can heal the planet, who's all wrong. (Refrain)

Then how are we to stand at all, shills for the GOP?
No; we all hate ESCR, but we still have to defeat
That same guy for Big Abortion, who'll sign FOCA before long,
Who thinks he can heal the planet, who's all wrong. (Refrain)

No paeans to John McCain from me; no uncritical unthinking partisanship. Just an unhappy acceptance of the reality of this election, and a hope that we won't find ourselves fighting to save the pro-life movement from a legion of legal restrictions and a gaggle of pro-abort SCOTUS judges by the time this is all over.

The Price of a Life

Today is day 35 of the 40 Days for Life campaign. According to the 40 Days for Life blog, at least 384 women are confirmed to have changed their minds about abortion and decided to keep their babies during this campaign:

And that’s why we continue to rejoice in the many reports we’re hearing of saved lives.

The latest tally of confirmed lives saved as a result of this fall’s 40 Days for Life campaign is up to…

…384!!

Here are just a few of those stories:

“Another turnaround!” notes Major in Huntsville, Alabama. “That makes six here since 40 Days for Life started. This one was 18 to 20 weeks into her pregnancy. Please pray for her!”

“A pregnant woman came to speak to me after having left the abortion clinic,” said Joanne at 40 Days for Life in Providence, Rhode Island. “She changed her mind because people were praying outside. She has decided to have the baby.”

A couple spoke to a 40 Days for Life volunteer outside the abortion facility in Louisville, Kentucky, then went in. A while later, they two came back out and the man said, “You got to me. We couldn’t do it!” Jenny said there is so much to be thankful for. “Isn’t it so humbling that God has called us to be a part of this?”

I've been writing about the election for the most part for these past several days--with just one week to go from today I suppose that's understandable. But consider this for a moment:

Under an Obama presidency, efforts like 40 Days for Life may very well become illegal, since they'll be defined as "interfering with access to a woman's fundamental right to an abortion."

Anyone who thinks a President Obama would allow peaceful protests of clinics, sidewalk counseling, and the like to continue as they do today hasn't been paying attention to what the Democrats and their masters in the abortion industry really want: they want to shut down the pro-life movement altogether.

Each of those 384 canceled appointments is a cause of rejoicing for us: 384 babies will be loved and celebrated instead of murdered in the womb. But for abortionists, those 384 live babies means a loss of about $160,000 in income (according to the Guttmacher Institute, which puts the price of an average abortion at $413). And with Obama completely in the pocket of the big abortion providers, rest assured that steps will be taken to guarantee that abortion clinics don't lose money just because someone cares enough to talk confused and anguished women out of paying $413 to have someone kill their babies.

As we head into next Tuesday's election, let's keep these three hundred eighty four women and their babies in our prayers. And let's hope that it will still be legal to pray and counsel in front of abortion clinics this time next year.

Partisanship in the Press

So, you think the media's way too biased in this election? Think they're being unfair in their coverage of the campaign? Apparently, they agree:

We were all set to dismiss Harris’ mother as a crank. Same for VandeHei’s: a conservative dismayed by what she sees as kid-glove treatment of Barack Obama. Then along came a study — funded by the prestigious Pew Research Center, no less — suggesting at first blush, at least, that they may be on to something.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s researchers found that John McCain, over the six weeks since the Republican convention, got four times as many negative stories as positive ones. The study found six out of 10 McCain stories were negative.

What’s more, Obama had more than twice as many positive stories (36 percent) as McCain — and just half the percentage of negative (29 percent).

You call that balanced?

OK, let’s just get this over with: Yes, in the closing weeks of this election, John McCain and Sarah Palin are getting hosed in the press, and at Politico.

And, yes, based on a combined 35 years in the news business we’d take an educated guess — nothing so scientific as a Pew study — that Obama will win the votes of probably 80 percent or more of journalists covering the 2008 election. Most political journalists we know are centrists — instinctually skeptical of ideological zealotry — but with at least a mild liberal tilt to their thinking, particularly on social issues.

So what?

The writer goes on to say, hey, it's not our fault that the Obama campaign has been a paragon of well-managed messianic fabulousness, while the McCain campaign has devolved into nothing but endless bickering between The Crank and The Hick Diva; we're not responsible for the reality, no sir; it's just our job to report it. So what?

So what, indeed.

It's as if a group of colorblind people insisted that blue was really orange, and any perception to the contrary was merely the bias of all those people who thought otherwise. It couldn't possibly be the bias of the colorblind people who couldn't actually see the reality, could it? No; of course not.

So media bias in favor of Obama is a sham, according to the media; it's not their fault at all that Obama's so mind-bendingly, thrill up the leg terrific.

Right.

Thankfully, a few actual reporters are giving the rest of the MSM a run for their money. We had Barbara West in Orlando, asking actual questions instead of mouthing praise and worship to Joe Biden; now Bill Sammon of Fox News reports the following, according to Drudge:

Barack Obama laughs off charges of socialism. Joe Biden scoffs at references to Marxism. Both men shrug off accusations of liberalism.

But Obama himself acknowledges that he was drawn to socialists and even Marxists as a college student. He continued to associate with Marxists later in life, even choosing to launch his political career in the living room of a self-described Marxist, William Ayers, in 1995, when Obama was 34.

Obama's affinity for Marxists began when he attended Occidental College in Los Angeles.

"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully," the Democratic presidential candidate wrote in his memoir, "Dreams From My Father." "The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists."

Obama's interest in leftist politics continued after he transferred to Columbia University in New York. He lived on Manhattan's Upper East Side, venturing to the East Village for what he called "the socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union."

After graduating from Columbia in 1983, Obama spent a year working for a consulting firm and then went to work for what he described as "a Ralph Nader offshoot" in Harlem.

"In search of some inspiration, I went to hear Kwame Toure, formerly Stokely Carmichael of Black Panther fame, speak at Columbia," Obama wrote in "Dreams," which he published in 1995. "At the entrance to the auditorium, two women, one black, one Asian, were selling Marxist literature."

Obama supporters point out that plenty of Americans flirt with radical ideologies in college, only to join the political mainstream later in life. But Obama, who made a point of noting how "carefully" he chose his friends in college, also chose to launch his political career in the Chicago living room of Ayers, a domestic terrorist who in 2002 proclaimed: "I am a Marxist."

Also present at that meeting was Ayers' wife, fellow terrorist Bernardine Dohrn, who once gave a speech extolling socialism, communism and "Marxism-Leninism."

It's absolutely outrageous that now, just one week before the election, American voters are finally learning the truth about Barack Obama and his political leanings. Frankly, Obama's past Marxist associations and affiliations with people who espouse those views ought to have been front-page news way back during the primaries, and they would have been, had Obama been a Republican or a less-liked Democrat. But since he was the MSM's anointed one, they decided to give him a pass on all of his past, frequently chastising anyone who did try to discuss any of that as a racist.

It is, apparently, racist in America to raise questions about the past beliefs, statements, and associations of an African-American presidential candidate; that, anyway, has been the MSM's magic bullet used to kill any story that might have delved into Obama's past without the admiring adjectives and glossing-over of any inconvenient truths. But as members of the MSM try to wrap themselves in the garment of objectivity, pretending that the only reason they've been all but cheerleading for Obama is because he's just incontrovertibly fantastic, they should remember that the rest of us can see right through those gossamer threads--and we're apalled by their naked partisanship.

Avoiding the Oscar Option

Now, I promise that I'm not going to badger people who've decided they must abstain from voting or vote third-party this time around. We're all doing the best we can under difficult circumstances to decide how best to vote as serious Catholics, and though we may reach different conclusions we are still striving for the same goal. I wish I could say the same about Catholic Obama voters, but the best I can come up with is that they must be uninformed; the bishops have taught with such clarity this year that we can't draw parallels between abortion and other issues that would create the false illusion that abortion is no different, from a moral gravity perspective, from these other issues. Those of us who either vote for McCain despite our misgivings, vote for a dq3, or leave the presidential race blank on our ballots, are at least all trying to accomplish the same goal of limiting evil; we've just decided this means different things.

Having said that, though, and having struggled myself with the "what to do" question, I want to address one point that the dq3/blank ballot Catholics keep making, and which I came to reject as not quite true, or at least not true in the way they seem to think it is: the notion that we will ultimately influence the major parties by our actions in abstaining or dq3 voting.

Astonishing though it is to realize, if you add up all the votes for all third party candidates for the presidential elections from 1980 through 2004, they total 43,929,518 votes--not generally enough to win a single election, even if these had all been cast by unique voters, which they were not. That is, people who voted third party in 1980 might have voted the same way in 1988, and so on; the forty-three million votes took seven elections to accumulate. Even more astonishing is the fact that more than twice that many, or roughly one hundred million, Americans don't vote at all in most elections. So while the "message" ought to be that roughly one hundred six million (averaging the third-party votes over seven years) eligible voters find neither major party candidate even remotely worth supporting, that's not the message that is being received; the major parties simply concentrate their efforts on those who are likely to vote, and ignore the ones who don't--whether those are principled Catholics waiting for better choices or apathetic atheists who find voting as amusing and meaningless as the other ritualized behaviors of a specific carbon-based life form which is only slightly more intelligent than a chimpanzee, or anyone in between.

It doesn't matter to the major parties, in other words, why the non-voters don't vote, or why the handful of dq3 supporters vote for third-party candidates, with the possible exception of those few candidates who have garnered more than a few million votes in a single election; I'm sure Ross Perot's nearly twenty million votes got the attention of the two big parties, but I doubt anyone else in recent memory has garnered anywhere remotely close to that level of interest. We can deplore this, we can write about it, we can refer to the dangers of the two-party system, all of which I've done myself on occasion; but we can't, by mere magical thinking or ill-placed optimism, create a different reality from the reality that actually is.

None of this means that we should accept, with a defeatist air, that the flawed two-party system is the only way. But if we're serious about wanting other choices, then we have to stop pretending that we can somehow effect change on the eve of a hotly-contested election by sitting it out or voting for some relatively harmless kook who would never get our vote if he actually were a major party primary candidate.

We have to get involved.

Part of the problem is that some of us are people who love to hate politics. We enjoy bashing both parties for their shortcomings, but we'd never consider joining either major party, getting involved in a local race in order to help a really good candidate advance through the party ranks, getting involved in the pro-life arm of the party, or otherwise working to make things better so that four years from now we won't be stuck with the same sort of choices all over again.

Or perhaps we really, truly believe that a third-party is the way to go, but we have yet to pick one or create one and throw our energies and efforts into that party, helping them to get established and maybe convincing the party leadership to concentrate on state and local elections first, instead of aiming for the moon by running for the presidency from day one.

I know the objections: we're already involved in non-political good works, there's no time, political solutions aren't the answer, etc. But we can't pop out of our trash cans once every two or four years like Oscar the Grouch, complain that there's just no good choices, abuse the election participants as easily deluded saps on happy pills, and then slam the lid down to wait for the next opportunity for some cathartic public grouching about it all.

If we're serious as Catholics in a troublingly flawed era in a nation which seems to be forgetting the whole "under God" part, if we really do want to use Catholic social principles to help shape a more just and more righteous nation, if we really do believe that the law must not fail to protect the unborn, uphold traditional marriage, and otherwise protect the family as its foundational unit--then we can't leave to chance the idea that perhaps next time around one of the major parties will run a good candidate, or if not, at least they'll get the message that we're displeased which we will send by our continued lack of participation.

I think the only message they'll get will sound like the lid slamming down on the trash can of a notorious malcontent--and they'll ignore it as they always do, and move on.

Good Company

If you can, read this whole opinion piece from philly.com by Christine M. Flowers, an area lawyer:

You've heard of Joe the Plumber - well, this is Joe the Bishop.

Joseph Martino is head of Scranton's Catholic diocese, which may hold the key to at least one battleground state. Catholics are a good bellwether for national trends. And Bishop Martino is trying to make sure his flock trends in the right direction.

He recently issued a letter warning that "being 'right' on taxes, education, health care, immigration and the economy fails to make up for the error of disregarding the value of human life."

This is a swipe at prominent cafeteria Catholics and noted theologians like Nancy Pelosi who've tried to argue that Catholics shouldn't be one-issue voters. Knowing that many Catholics tend to be squeamish about the party's stand on abortion, Democrats have tried to appeal to this important demographic by playing bait-and-switch - if they can divert our attention from their support for the abortion lobby, we'll be able to pull the lever for Obama.

That might work with the I'm-personally-against-but-don't-want-to-impose-my opinion types. But they can't hoodwink Joe the Bishop. Martino has enunciated the church's beliefs by emphasizing that if you don't respect life at its most defenseless and elemental, concern for the rest is meaningless. [...]

Barack Obama, despite the backpedaling he's done on the campaign trail, is NARAL's best friend. While Joe the Senator is more reticent about his support for abortion rights, saying that, for him, life begins at conception, Obama has long made it clear that Roe is sacrosanct.

He voted to block legislation to mandate medical care for babies who survived botched abortions because he felt it infringed on the right to choose. He's also promised to sign the Freedom of Choice Act if elected. Among other things, FOCA would let tax dollars be used for abortions, gutting the Hyde Amendment. [...]

Last week, a miracle came into my life. His name is Alexander Christian, and he's my nephew.

He's more precious than anything at the Barnes Foundation. I'm sure that if Obama had the chance to hold Alex, he'd flash that radiant smile of his and talk about my nephew's right to a bright future.

But Bishop Martino knows Alex had a right to that future even while nestled in my sister's belly.

And while Catholics can run from that truth, they can't hide.

At least not in Scranton.

This was well written, a quick run-down of the reasons why Catholics shouldn't vote for Obama. And the writer seems to have made the same calculation I did: if you're against Obama, you should at least consider voting for McCain, who won't drive the country even further in the direction of the culture of death.

I understand that this election requires a lot of soul-searching, a lot of prayer as we decide what to do. But if we can stand idly by and watch someone so rabidly pro-abortion as Obama is elected to the office of the presidency, and, in effect, shrug and say "If the GOP expected us to stop him, they shouldn't have insulted us by offering such a deficient candidate on their side," then I wonder just how evil a presidential candidate would have to be in the future for us to rethink that formulation.

For now, I feel pretty good knowing that my McCain vote puts me in the company of people like Christine Flowers. Seems like good company, to me.

Another Obama Video

A lot of people have now seen this video, thanks to the Drudge Report's highlighting of it; I think it's amazing that Obama's past views and opinions are just now beginning to surface. Whatever else happens in this election one thing has become brilliantly clear: the mainstream media did not even remotely do their jobs in regard to Obama and his past; while Sarah Palin has been scrutinized to the microscopic level and John McCain had to present his birth information to show that being born in the Panama Canal Zone didn't make him ineligible for the presidency, information about Obama's views would still be unavailable were it not for the dedicated efforts of citizen journalists who are tracking down these old interviews and unearthing Obama's stated positions on issues.

Here's another video--and audio--showing Barack Obama's view of race relations and reparations, giving an insight into the philosophies of a man who may very well be our next president:



This is scary stuff. Since when do we pay taxes "to" our fellow citizens? Since when has America not been willing to make "sacrifices" to advance the common good? Oh, but we're not talking about the common good: we're talking about a paradigm that still sees African-Americans as being fundamentally unable to get the same educations, make the same choices, have the same careers, and have access to the same success as other Americans, despite years of civil rights successes, mandated diversity programs, quotas in higher education and in jobs, and so on. In Obama's view of America only by taking the wealth of the highest earners, the "white executives in the suburbs," and redistributing it to inner-city children and other "powerless" people, can we truly bring about what he calls on this tape "a new day and a new age."

Why do I get the feeling this "new day" and "new age" are the same old day that hit Russia at the turn of the last century? Why does this sound so wearily familiar, the utopian ideals that we can solve poverty and racism and crime and all other social problems by applying Marxist principles and redistributing wealth?

It Came Down To This

After all the writing and hand-wringing and agonizing--all of it genuine, no matter how inconsistent and incoherent and seemingly contradictory it has been--I went and voted today, participating in Texas' generous early voting opportunities.

I have to say, Texas homeschooling moms, if you go vote during off-hours on a Sunday or a quiet weekday and the nice volunteers are handling a few people at a time, it's quite likely that a really, really nice couple of grandparent-like people will insist on showing your children the "instructional" touch screen machine, letting each one of them "cast" fictional "ballots" for Abe Lincoln or Grover Cleveland or Mark Twain (can you imagine Twain in the Senate?). They enjoyed the learning experience tremendously, especially the one who is studying American government this year.

There was a lone Obama pamphleteer outside the polling place; I have to wonder if she was really far enough away to be legal, but she probably was. The same nice volunteer who showed the girls the touch-screen demo machine kidded us about not bringing our registration cards; we could show a photo i.d., or...er...a president's face on paper...though he was more direct, and I joked back that I was gonna tell on him. ;) It's nice, though, that we've moved so far as a nation that poll taxes and other disenfranchisement tools can be joked about in polling places; I wouldn't really have it any other way.

So I got my computer access code (wondering about the security of touch-screen voting and whether that's ever going to be the problem some say it will), went to the machine, and voted...

...for John McCain and Sarah Palin.

I expect the Real Catholic Bloggers (TM) to revoke my Catholic blogging creds any day now.

Seriously, though, I weighed all my options, thought about what Zippy Catholic and Mark Shea and Amy Welborn and others have said about this whole confusing election scenario, thought about honesty and truthfulness and what I really meant by my vote, if I voted for someone else but still hoped McCain would defeat Obama only because of how truly bad for the pro-life movement I know Obama will be; I thought about telling our Lord, "My Jesus, You know I don't like McCain's ESCR position; I hate it. But I really did prefer him over Obama, so I lied when I said I preferred this other person or left the ballot blank." Because I would have to tell Him that, if I didn't vote the way my conscience was directing me to vote.

And why? Why would my conscience direct me to vote for someone who supports something I know is evil?

Because his opponent supports much more evil, and will do more evil. And I had to think of it this way, to be truly honest with myself: If McCain does win, will I be glad I helped him with my one tiny vote to defeat the evil that Obama will undoubtedly do? Yes. But if Obama wins, will I find some consolation in knowing that I did the one tiny thing I could do to stop him, regardless of whether I could be effective all on my own or not? Yes.

I know it will not come down to the same thing for everyone who reads this. The disgust with the Republican party for what has happened in these last eight years with a president who didn't really appear to support any intrinsic evils at all is palpable and real, and the fears that a pro-ESCR president will push the party further away from protecting innocent unborn life is not an unwarranted one (though McCain's choice of the truly pro-life Sarah Palin instead of Lieberman or Tom Ridge to run with him is a note of encouragement in that respect). Some are already convinced that the battle for unborn lives has been lost in the political arena, and that we waste our time voting for this or that supposedly pro-life candidate; I disagree, but I respect the argument so long as it's not defeatism dressed up as pragmatism as it sometimes can be.

I admit that the more esoteric arguments about how voting is really symbolic or civic ritual and one's vote is worth zero or less than zero are over my head; I have a feeling that if I were to go hunting with Zippy, and he shot just to the left and just to the right of a deer, he'd triumphantly claim to have hit it, as the old joke about hunting with statisticians goes. A handful of people may really understand Zippy's argument, and a handful of that handful may believe him to be right; but I'm not one of either handful, so again, I'd be acting dishonestly if I voted according to Zippy's principles instead of my own.

We have a little over a week to go before the general election, and I know that prayers and fasting and other efforts that God's will be done are going forth; these may indeed be more efficacious than mere voting. But what I kept uncovering myself in prayerful consideration was: decide what will do the most good, and then act honestly. My own decision was that the most good possible in this present election would be defeating Barack Obama in order to protect the greater number of unborn children who will die as a direct result of his liberal abortion policies; once I had decided that, the only honest thing left for me to do was to vote for McCain, because the only way Obama can be defeated is if McCain is elected. I have the utmost respect for those who may reach different conclusions, and will never think less of anyone who decides they must sit this one out, or that they must vote for a dq3 candidate, because their conscience so dictates. One thing is certain: after next Tuesday has come and gone, and the election has become a part of history, we will need to grasp hands and work together to create a culture of life; we can't afford to let voting or politics stop us from our untiring efforts on behalf of the unborn.

The Blank Ballot Option

Continuing our look at voting options, I notice that I've left out an option that has, at some times during the course of this election cycle, been the most attractive to me: leaving the boxes beside the presidential candidates blank, and only voting for state and local candidates and ballot initiatives.

Our ballots do not have a "none of the above" option; would that they did. There are plenty of times, especially in local races, where that's the option I'd like to select. For example, we have a pro-abort Republican U.S. Representative in our district. Primary votes have not removed this candidate. So when this candidate is up for reelection I simply leave that race blank.

And in Texas we elect judges, and I finally reached the point where I decided my philosophical opposition to an elected judiciary compelled me to leave these races blank, too. There are several reasons I'm opposed to an elected judiciary, but two of the biggest are: judges can more easily be corrupted if they have to run for election/re-election constantly; and it is pretty well impossible to determine for sure what a judge thinks about issues like abortion, gay marriage, and euthanasia, since judicial impartiality prevents them from answering direct questions like that. I give credit to some pro-life groups who have asked judicial candidates which recent presidents they most admire or which present SCOTUS judges they most resemble, but then you have the problem of still not knowing exactly what they mean (e.g., one lists Roberts, another Scalia, another Thomas--which of the three is the most likely to be truly pro-life? etc.). Even if you select someone who is described as a strict constructionist who admires Scalia and Reagan, you don't really know what they will do from the bench: the judge in Florida who ordered Terry Schiavo's death, Judge George Greer, is an elected judge and a Republican who is himself disabled, all things which would make a voter think he'd be the last person to promote euthanasia--and we see how that turned out.

But back to the presidential race: I was struck by a comment from Lydia McGrew over at WWwtW (it's down a bit on the page):

P.P.S. To all: Newsflash from VFR--Chuck Baldwin is some variety of 9/11 truther. Why does "third party" have to mean "kookball"? It's a shame, really.

I've voted for third-party candidates, even for the presidency, in the past. When I have done so, it has been in situations where the Republican candidate was someone I didn't much want to see elected and where the Republican candidate was either winning hugely or trailing the Democrat by a significant margin long before election day. In particular I point to the Clinton/Dole election: Dole was disappointingly "moderate" in many ways, Clinton was up for re-election and had already done the damage he was going to do to the pro-life movement (Mexico City policy in particular), and Clinton was enjoying such a comfortable lead that there wasn't really any hope of stopping him. The third-party candidate I voted for then was someone I wouldn't have minded seeing elected if by some miracle he had been, so my vote was an honest vote in favor of a principled conservative whom I admired.

But as I said in the post about third-party candidates, there isn't such a person among this year's selection of dq3 candidates. There isn't someone whom I could support in such a way that if some miracle allowed the person to be elected I'd be very happy about it. Some in the WWwtW thread I referenced said, in essence, that "Pastor Chuck" may be a bit of a kook, but they like what his party stands for--and I thought, well, John McCain is a disappointment, but I like the Republican Party platform better than I have in years, so is it really different? (And yes, I know, the "John McCain supports intrinsic evil" is the difference; I'm not trying to make light of that.)

For me, personally, though, a vote for the two most pro-life candidates, Baldwin or Schriner, would essentially be a lie: I'd be saying I want one of them to be president, when in all honesty I don't have the same admiration or respect for them as I have had for the dq3 candidates I've voted for in the past. Even if it were possible to send a message to the major parties with one's dq3 vote, I'm very much afraid that the only message one may send by supporting someone who's just a bit "kooky" is that one isn't a serious voter.

But the blank ballot option avoids all of that question of lying with one's vote, or supporting someone one wouldn't wish in a million years to see running one's local city council, let alone the country. (And let me just say, again, to avoid hurting feelings, that I emphatically do not characterize all dq3 votes as "lying" or otherwise acting dishonestly. If you truly do wish Joe Schriner or Chuck Baldwin to be our president, or anyone else for that matter, you ought to vote accordingly. It is neither lying nor wasting one's vote to vote for the candidate you honestly wish would be elected, practical considerations aside.) So if you are unhappy with the two major party candidates but equally unimpressed with the third-party choices, you can certainly decline to vote in the presidential race; we are supposed to participate in our civic life as Catholics in society, but that doesn't mean "vote in every race on every ballot in every election that comes up" ought to be the template for participation.

Having said all of that, though, I had to consider some things that Mr. M., among others, discussed with me about the blank ballot option: could I honestly say that in this year's election the choice of the president was a matter of indifference to me, or that I saw both men as equal to each other in terms of their support for intrinsic evil? Was this really a good election for the blank ballot option?

I realized that several of my unthinking criteria for the blank ballot option didn't actually exist in this election. For example:

1. This is not an election whose conclusion is foregone (despite the wild polling). It is still possible for either candidate to win.
2. This is not an election in which the candidates are undistinguished from each other. We don't have a "moderate" Democrat running against a "moderate" Republican; we have an "extreme left" Democrat running against a "center-to-right" Republican.
3. On the issue of life, it is possible for Obama to create an environment that is extremely inimical to the right of the unborn to live--he really can, singlehandedly, set the pro-life movement back about thirty years. From FOCA to SCOTUS appointees to "health care" mandates that will increase government funding for abortion and curtail the rights of doctors, nurses, and other health care workers to refuse to participate in abortions Obama has actively promised to create a nightmare world for pro-life citizens. While I am, and remain, deeply disappointed with McCain's ESCR position I believe it's a kind of sophistry to equate it with Obama's clearly destructive and anti-life viewpoints and intended policies.
4. While I kept saying to myself, "But I'm not in a swing state!" Mr. M. pointed out that I can't say that for sure. Polls, after all, can be wrong in either direction. Worse, wasn't I really saying that of the two men who can actually win the election, Obama or McCain, I hoped McCain would win in that I hoped Obama would lose--but I was unwilling to say so myself, relying instead on others to say so on my behalf?
5. I can't improve on Daddio's words, here. It's true that we can't specifically vote against a candidate (again, would that that were an option!) But we can, as Daddio says, vote FOR the guy who is AGAINST Obama. Leaving the ballot blank does nothing to defeat Obama, and given how much our bishops have written to us this election season about their own deep concerns for the unborn, I can't help but think that "voting in such a way as to limit the greater evil" is the same thing, more elegantly phrased perhaps, as "voting for the guy who is against the guy that we're against."

Now, this is where my thinking has been; I realize that each person may come to a different conclusion. But if you are in a situation where you truly cannot support John McCain in good conscience, but truly can't support a dq3 candidate either, the blank ballot option is still a valid choice; it's the closest thing we have to a "none of the above" vote.

Balderdash

I know, I know, why bother getting riled up over something printed in the National Catholic Reporter in the first place? From high school on my Wanderer-reading friends and I referred to the paper as the Distorter, since their unofficial motto seemed to be: "Promoting the writing of unabashed heretics since Day One!" So it's not really a surprise to see this rag publishing an editorial about how the United States Bishops' efforts to remind Catholics that we're not permitted to overlook the abortion issue when voting is really a "narrow anti-abortion effort" that "hurts the pro-life cause." Consider:

Another presidential election cycle is nearly ended, and once again the Catholic bishops in the United States have sadly distinguished themselves for the narrowness and, in too many cases, barely concealed partisanship, of their political views.

Cycle after cycle they have promulgated the same message: Abortion trumps all other issues and the only credible approach to fighting abortion is voting for candidates who express a wish to overthrow Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.

We have persistently criticized the American bishops on this page for such a limited political strategy. For more than a quarter of a century they have generally used whatever political capital they might have in attempts to deliver the Catholic vote to whomever is making the most agreeable promises that year.

Year after year, however, the bishops get little in return for their antiabortion political endorsements, while often aiding in the election of politicians who have little regard for the rest of the church’s social agenda.
The abortion rate has been going down steadily in America, from a high of 29.3 abortions per 1,000 women ages 15-44 in 1981 to 19.4 abortions for the same demographic through 2005, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

No one has the definitive answer on why the rate is decreasing. Depending on political persuasion and which side of the debate one falls on, the possible reasons range from more emphasis on abstinence programs to better education and more funding for prevention of pregnancy. Undoubtedly, one unquantifiable element is continuing education about the reality of abortion and the sacredness of life that has persuaded some to bring pregnancies to term.

No one, however, is suggesting that politicians promising to overturn Roe had any influence on a woman’s choosing to bring a child to term.

I know my readers are a talented and well-educated bunch, but it's just possible that a few among you might not speak "Progressive Catholic." I was, sadly, immersed in it in parochial schools until my parents courageously took us out of school and taught us at home, where I learned to my astonishment that such concepts as "mortal and venial sin" "male priesthood" and "respect for life from conception until natural death" had not, as my "progressive" teachers insisted, been done away with by a new church that was being sung into being, albeit by tone-deaf singers wailing truly unfortunate songs.

I did, however, become relatively fluent in "Progressive Catholic," and will translate the above paragraphs into ordinary English (warning to the progressives among us: I may even use non-inclusive pronouns!!):

Paragraph One:

Although only a little more than a quarter of U.S. bishops have urged their flocks to remember the unborn when they are voting, we find this an alarming trend away from the narrowness and, indeed, naked partisanship of former ages, when we could count on the U.S. bishops all but endorsing the Democrat candidate. We've never had a problem with bishops talking about preferential options for the poor, a "seamless garment" ethic, illegal immigration and access to health care, and so long as it was tacitly understood that all of these issues in the balance scale outweighed the whole abortion problem we were fine with bishops being narrow and partisan. But this new trend of 1/4 of the bishops failing to be narrowly partisan in favor of the Democrats is alarming to us, since we've believed for ages that only the Democrats correctly reflect Jesus' social Gospel of wealth redistribution.

Paragraph Two:

Though this is the first time in living memory so many bishops have pointed out that when a choice exists between two candidates one of whom is a much greater enemy to unborn human life than the other, Catholics must place abortion as an issue of primary importance in making their selection, we know some bishops have consistently done so (probably the malcontents who don't like liturgical dance and yelled at Sister Helen when she offered to give the homily). Even though it's pretty foolish to pretend that bishops have routinely counseled their flocks to remember what we owe in solidarity to our unborn brothers and sisters when we vote, since if they had done so all these years we'd probably be closer to outlawing abortion altogether than we are now, we're going to assert this anyway. After all, we feel as though it's true.

Paragraph Three:

This descends into utter ridiculousness. If the bishops over the past twenty-five years have expended any political capital at all, it has been in the "peace and justice" arena, and has involved bishops withholding their taxes to protest nuclear weapons and sternly lecturing their flocks about the need for amnesty for illegal aliens. No one can credibly make the claim that the American bishops have been in the pocket of the Republican party for the last twenty-five years--or at any other time. Still, we feel justified in engaging in pure snit because we feel abandoned and betrayed, and are this close to talking about brokenness and nourishing each other. We mean it--don't push us.

Paragraph Four:

This paragraph contains the money quote, which, in case you missed it, was this sentence: "Year after year, however, the bishops get little in return for their antiabortion political endorsements, while often aiding in the election of politicians who have little regard for the rest of the church’s social agenda." This is our unshakable paradigm: Democrats are true Christians in every way (even if you have to squint to get past that speck in their eye called abortion) while Republicans take as their model the innkeeper at Bethlehem, whose concern for his evil profit margin made him put the Holy Family in a stable and made the Baby Jesus cry. Democrats champion the oppressed; Republicans try to figure out new ways of oppressing the poor, coming up with such evil strategies as objecting--can you believe it!--to giving federal income tax rebates to people who don't actually pay federal income taxes in the first place. Since it is perfectly clear (to us anyway) that Jesus would have insisted on wealth distribution and community organizing "power" strategies as the only basis for a just Christian society, we can't understand how the bishops could possibly let concern for the unborn trump all of this.

Paragraphs Four (b), Five and Six:

Of course, the abortion rate has been going down. But it's not because the bishops keep talking about it, and it's certainly not because pro-life politicians have been elected and continue to be elected. We don't know why the abortion rate has been going down--education, maybe? We like teachers, so we'll call it that. Of course we're ignoring the abstinence-focused education programs pushed by those pro-life politicians, because we know that had absolutely nothing to do with the decline in abortion. We mention it briefly, but we don't want our readers to stop and think about it, because if abstinence education works, and if abstinence education is proposed by pro-life Republicans and hated by pro-abort Democrats, then our entire premise that the bishops are shilling for pro-life political candidates without getting anything in return is as faulty as a lay-led liturgy workshop at a bishops' conference. Lucky for us, our readers aren't terribly strong in making logical connections--if they were, they wouldn't read our paper for very long.

Having carefully translated most of the NCR editorial for the benefit of And Sometimes Tea readers who may have escaped the "Progressive Catholic" dialect in their own youths, I'll just repeat the title of this post in summation: balderdash.

Obama: Charismatic Demagogue, Enigma

This piece by Mark Levin on National Review's The Corner blog is a must-read. I'll probably refer back to it during the course of this next week, but for now I want to get it out here. Excerpt:

There is a cult-like atmosphere around Barack Obama, which his campaign has carefully and successfully fabricated, which concerns me. The messiah complex. Fainting audience members at rallies. Special Obama flags and an Obama presidential seal. A graphic with the portrayal of the globe and Obama's name on it, which adorns everything from Obama's plane to his street literature. Young school children singing songs praising Obama. Teenagers wearing camouflage outfits and marching in military order chanting Obama's name and the professions he is going to open to them. An Obama world tour, culminating in a speech in Berlin where Obama proclaims we are all citizens of the world. I dare say, this is ominous stuff. [...]

But beyond the elites and the media, my greatest concern is whether this election will show a majority of the voters susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue. This may seem a harsh term to some, and no doubt will to Obama supporters, but it is a perfectly appropriate characterization. Obama's entire campaign is built on class warfare and human envy. The "change" he peddles is not new. We've seen it before. It is change that diminishes individual liberty for the soft authoritarianism of socialism. It is a populist appeal that disguises government mandated wealth redistribution as tax cuts for the middle class, falsely blames capitalism for the social policies and government corruption (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) that led to the current turmoil in our financial markets, fuels contempt for commerce and trade by stigmatizing those who run successful small and large businesses, and exploits human imperfection as a justification for a massive expansion of centralized government. Obama's appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the "the proletariat," as an infamous philosopher once described it, about which a mythology has been created. Rather than pursue the American Dream, he insists that the American Dream has arbitrary limits, limits Obama would set for the rest of us — today it's $250,000 for businesses and even less for individuals. If the individual dares to succeed beyond the limits set by Obama, he is punished for he's now officially "rich." The value of his physical and intellectual labor must be confiscated in greater amounts for the good of the proletariat (the middle class). And so it is that the middle class, the birth-child of capitalism, is both celebrated and enslaved — for its own good and the greater good. The "hope" Obama represents, therefore, is not hope at all. It is the misery of his utopianism imposed on the individual.

Do read the whole thing; Levin is identifying something important, here, something which has caused me to worry about an Obama presidency in a way I never really worried about Clinton (though I found his policies deplorable and his person despicable, to say the least).

Bill Clinton was, and seemingly still is, a deeply flawed person whose social liberalism and big-government politics were frequently upsetting to conservatives like me. But I don't recall schoolchildren chanting for Clinton; the media was sympathetic to him but no where near as brazenly partisan in his favor as they are in regards to Obama; and when all was said and done we may not have liked Clinton at all, but we did know who he was and what he stood for (even if some of us would sum those things up as "small-time crooked politician who hit the White House jackpot and carried on like a younger, slightly slimmer Boss Hogg the whole time he was there).

We are one week away from the election, and we still don't know:
-why Obama held dual citizenship (U.S. and Kenyan) until his 21st birthday,
-whether he ever actually practiced the Muslim religion, even as a child (which most of us wouldn't consider a disqualifier, but shouldn't we know?),
-why none of his student records including his senior thesis have ever been released,
-why the only samples of his writing extant before his polished, highly literate first autobiography was published are some extremely bad poems,
-what his involvement with Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers and his wife, Rev. Wright, and other mentors or important figures in his life actually means,
-why he has continually lied about the import of his BAIPA vote, even when records demonstrating the truth have been made public,
-why he so often voted "present" instead of taking a stand on the legislative matters before him,
-what exactly he means by "change," and just how much taxes are going to go up for people whose incomes are between $50,000 and $250,000--because if you believe he intends to keep his promise about lowering taxes...well, that's another topic.

And these are just for starters. And we have a little over a week to go.

I'd appreciate a little feedback from readers who are so inclined: can you think of a single presidential candidate in your lifetime about whom so little was known just a week or so before the election? Because I can remember a few elections, now, and I can't think of anyone who revealed so little about himself but created such an aura of inevitability about his candidacy.

Like Mark Levin says, it's really rather frightening, when you come to think about it.

Now, THAT'S More Like It! Or, Biden Meets Actual Press

Two members of the American media have restored my belief in the possibility of a free press: anchor Barbara West and news director Bob Jordan of WFTV-Channel 9 in Orlando, Florida, who conducted this interview Thursday (HT: Drudge Report):



There was a time when presidential candidates could expect to be asked hard, direct questions like these from any news reporter they allowed to interview them. Today, this kind of questioning is only acceptable if you're interviewing Republican candidates--and especially if you're interviewing Sarah Palin. Biden's "deer in the headlights" look says it all: he expected the usual puffball questions such as "Senator, could your running mate just absolutely positively be more to-die-for fabulous than he already is?" Instead, Biden got asked the kinds of things people are thinking and talking about--such as just how socialist Obama's "share the wealth" tax plan really is, and whether ACORN's illicit activities tarnish Obama's image given his level of involvement with ACORN and other community organization groups in the past.

It would have been nice if the mainstream media would have managed to ask a few of these questions long before now, since the election's only a little over a week away. Still, since the MSM has already anointed Obama and given him the full measure of their approval, it's nice to know that a couple of journalists in Florida still remember what journalists are supposed to be.

What We're Fighting For

I'm sure by now you've seen Cardinal Egan's letter with the beautiful picture of the unborn baby at twenty weeks gestation:

Have you any doubt that it is a human being?

If you do not have any such doubt, have you any doubt that it is an innocent human being?

If you have no doubt about this either, have you any doubt that the authorities in a civilized society are duty-bound to protect this innocent human being if anyone were to wish to kill it?

If your answer to this last query is negative, that is, if you have no doubt that the authorities in a civilized society would be duty-bound to protect this innocent human being if someone were to wish to kill it, I would suggest—even insist—that there is not a lot more to be said about the issue of abortion in our society. It is wrong, and it cannot—must not—be tolerated. [...]

But what about the being that has been in its mother for only 15 weeks or only 10? Have you photographs of that too? Yes, I do. However, I hardly think it necessary to show them. For if we agree that the being in the photograph printed on this page is an innocent human being, you have no choice but to admit that it may not be legitimately killed even before 20 weeks unless you can indicate with scientific proof the point in the development of the being before which it was other than an innocent human being and, therefore, available to be legitimately killed. Nor have Aristotle, Aquinas or even the most brilliant embryologists of our era or any other era been able to do so. If there is a time when something less than a human being in a mother morphs into a human being, it is not a time that anyone has ever been able to identify, though many have made guesses. However, guesses are of no help. A man with a shotgun who decides to shoot a being that he believes may be a human being is properly hauled before a judge. And hopefully, the judge in question knows what a "human being" is and what the implications of someone's wishing to kill it are. The word "incarceration" comes to mind.

Now, I agree with the cardinal's argument: if it's wrong to kill an unborn human at twenty weeks gestation, then it's also wrong to kill him or her earlier. He or she is human, and deserving of life.

That said, the abortion rights extremists often complain that since most abortions are performed early, many between week six (when mom finds

out she's pregnant in many cases) and week twelve, it's not a bad idea to show the humanity of the unborn child even earlier. Sometimes pictures are worth thousands of words:

Week five or six:

Week eight:

Week ten:

Week twelve:

Every one of these photos shows a human being between five or six and twelve weeks gestation. Most abortions occur before week twelve, with over half occurring in the first nine weeks and another 37% taking place between week nine and week twelve. Surgical abortions are not done before six weeks gestation, meaning that these photos show the ages of development at which most unborn babies are killed in utero.

Though so-called "medical" abortions using the vile RU-486 can be done earlier, the reality, as Cardinal Egan points out, is that the humanity of the unborn doesn't depend on how human he or she looks. There is no point from conception onward that the little one in utero deserves to be killed, or should not be protected. These tiny humans deserve the same right to life as the rest of us; when we deny that, we deny our common humanity, and may eventually reap the consequences of that terrible denial.

And Speaking of Bishops

Apparently, over a quarter of the American bishops have now said or written that abortion is the chief concern in this election (HT: Lifesite News):

A quarter of America's bishops have said that the most important issue for voters in the forthcoming presidential election is abortion - comments that may help boost the fortunes of Republican candidate John McCain.

Some 50 out of the nation's 197 active bishops have published articles or given interviews during the run-up up to the election urging abortion as the key issue on which voters should decide which way to vote. [...]

Among the bishops who have intervened is Bishop Robert Hermann of St Louis who last Friday wrote: "the issue of life is the most basic issue and must be given priority over the issue of the economy, the issue of war or any other issue." His comment came in a column for the archdiocesan newspaper that appeared hours before Mr Obama addressed 100,000 people in the heavily Catholic city.

In Missouri - a normally Republican state where Mr Obama has taken a lead in the polls over recent weeks - Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City-St Joseph wrote in his diocesan newspaper that "despite hardship, beyond partisanship, for the sake of our eternal salvation", Catholic voters "should never" support a candidate who favours the continued legalisation of abortion.

In Colorado, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver made national headlines after calling Mr Obama "the most committed abortion-rights presidential candidate of either major party since the Roe v. Wade abortion decision". Later that same day, saying that he was speaking solely as a "private citizen", Archbishop Chaput told a dinner for a Catholic women's organisation in his archdiocese that the assertion by his Catholic supporters "that Senator Obama is this year's ‘real' pro-life candidate requires a peculiar kind of self-hypnosis, or moral confusion, or worse".

I'm glad my local bishop is one of the fifty. If yours isn't, perhaps a respectful letter to him on the subject before election day might be possible?

Like I said below, the attention the bishops are paying to the abortion issue this election is truly unprecedented. We should be deeply thankful as Catholics for this wise guidance, and pray for the continued leadership from our shepherds on this grave moral issue of our times.

A Look at Doomed Quixotic Third Party Voting

Continuing the conversation about voting, I want to look today at the third-party option, often called in Catholic blogging circles the "doomed quixotic third-party" vote, or the dq3 vote to make typing it over and over again much easier.

There are a few assumptions I want to look at more closely about this kind of voting, especially as it pertains to presidential elections; bear in mind that there are often strong third-party candidates for state and local office, and there's no "doomed" or "quixotic" involved in voting for those, since it is completely possible for them to win the office for which they are running.

I'd like to start by saying, as I have many times before, that a dq3 vote for the presidency isn't at all a "wasted" vote; I've never said that, and never will. People who select a dq3 candidate to support for whatever reasons are no less entitled to their legitimate choice in an election than anyone else is, and voting dq3 is an honorable and worthy way to cast one's ballot.

Having said that, though, I will admit to being very unsure that a dq3 vote is the most moral or best possible use of one's vote, which is what is being claimed by many Catholic dq3-ers in this election. The reasoning goes something like this:

-Barack Obama supports intrinsic evil (abortion, partial-birth abortion, infanticide, FOCA, etc.).
-John McCain supports intrinsic evil (ESCR).
-A Catholic voter may vote for John McCain to limit the greater evil, as the bishops have said.
-However, given various prudential realities about one's vote and the speculation that voting for McCain will continue the slide of the Republican Party away from life and toward death, a truly Catholic voter should stand on principle, refuse to participate in the two-party charade any longer, and vote for someone who however unelectable does not support intrinsic evil at all.
-The failure of truly Catholic voters to do this is a direct contributing factor to the continuation of the two-party charade and the reason we keep having such dismal choices.
-So, to vote for virtue, so to speak, Catholics really ought to avoid voting for McCain and throw their vote instead to a dq3 candidate until things change for the better, even if that never actually happens.

As you can imagine, I have a few problems with this.

The first problem is that John McCain is not Barack Obama, even if he very regrettably takes the wrong position on ESCR. It is hard to disprove the reality that the right of the unborn to live will be so terribly eroded under an Obama presidency that we may lose our chance forever to give them the legal protections they deserve as their fundamental human right. To pretend that McCain's wishy-washy support of ESCR is exactly the same thing as Barack Obama's total commitment to evil in regards to abortion is to blur a few pretty solid lines; moreover, the threat Obama poses to religious freedom, especially that of medical professionals who could lose their licenses if they conscientiously object to participating in abortions or in the dispensing of abortifacient contraception during his administration, is chilling to contemplate. I would not call John McCain the best choice for president, or even a "good" choice all things considered, but I would say that he is more likely than Obama to limit evil, and that it takes a lot of mental gymnastics to deny that.

The second problem is that this viewpoint seems awfully dismissive of what the bishops are saying and how they are saying it: all over this nation, for the first time that I can remember, the bishops of America are saying, in effect, that we can not overlook Obama's firm commitment to the evil of abortion nor draw false equivalences between abortion and such issues as war or poverty when casting our votes. Are the bishops telling Catholic voters to vote third party, or even strongly hinting that we ought to do so? Not at all; a priest of deep integrity whose wisdom and holiness I trust greatly said months ago that despite the grave misgivings we all have about McCain, the absolute damage Obama would do to the Supreme Court was, in his mind, compelling enough reason to vote for McCain--if only to limit that damage. So it's quite hard to weigh such advice against the repeated statements of bloggers, some of them anonymous, who insist that there is not and can not be proportionate reason to vote for McCain.

The third problem I have with this is one that is somewhat personal; I know there are dq3 voters who are all fired up with enthusiasm for Joe Schriner or Chuck Baldwin, and I have no quarrel whatsoever with that. I, myself, am not. I admire the Constitution Party in many ways and have voted for their candidates in the past, but have some doubts about Pastor Baldwin's qualifications; I admit to being even less sanguine about Mr. Schriner, who I am sure is an admirable gentleman, but who ought (in my opinion) to consider running for local public office as a way of getting started, instead of running for president in three consecutive election cycles without any proof that he can run much of anything. Since I've raised the same sort of objections to Obama's candidacy I hope I won't be accused of elitism or unfairness in pointing out this defect in Mr. Schreiner.

So for me to cast a vote for a dq3 candidate in this election would be the moral equivalent of a lie: I'd be saying "I would like this person to be president," when in point of fact, I wouldn't, actually. It's not that I don't admire their views and philosophies--but I have grave doubts that either one of these two gentlemen would have the necessary administrative qualities to settle things in Iraq, keep Congress in hand, set foreign and domestic policy, deal with foreign heads of state, show leadership on budgetary and economic issues, and otherwise do the day-to-day business of running the country.

Now, some might object: "But that's not the point of a dq3 vote! It doesn't matter if the dq3 candidate isn't qualified to be president! The point is to express our displeasure with the major party choices, to send a message, and to keep our souls unstained."

We'll get to the "souls unstained" part momentarily, but let's look at the idea that a dq3 vote sends a message or expresses our displeasure in any way at all:

Most of the time, it does nothing of the sort.

Let's stick with Mr. Schriner and Mr. Baldwin for the moment; if there are any other dq3s that Catholics find acceptably pro-life, please be assured I'm not leaving them out intentionally--these are just the names I've heard most often from my fellow Catholics.

Chuck Baldwin has qualified to be either on the ballot, or to be a formally recognized write-in candidate, in all but three states according to this website. In Texas he is a write-in candidate. A vote for Chuck Baldwin will most likely be counted and recorded eventually in those states where the Constitution Party is on the ballot; will it "send a message" to the major parties?

Well, in 2000 the Constitution Party candidate received 98,020 votes, or 0.1% of the votes cast. In 2004 they received 143,630, or 0.12% of the votes cast. Prior to that, in 1996 as the US Taxpayers Party they received 184,820, or 0.2% of the votes--the most they ever received, since previously as the US Taxpayer's Party they had only received 0.04% of the vote. I'm not all that certain that a strong message of any kind is being sent by vote totals significantly below 1% of the popular vote.

At least these votes are counted; candidates who receive less than 1/2000 of the popular vote are lumped into one category as "other" votes, which would include Joe Schriner; in 2004 he received about 142 recorded votes, though some states may not have recorded votes for him as he didn't qualify to be on the ballot or to appear as a recognized write-in candidate.

The bottom line here is that if you are a Catholic unhappy with our two-party system and want to send a message, it's entirely possible that you can send the same message by simply leaving the presidential race blank on your ballot; voting for a dq3 is truly a symbolic act, whatever other kind of voting might or might not be.

But let's get back to the "souls unstained" idea, which is my fourth problem with the "dq3 votes are more moral and more holy than limiting-evil by voting for deeply flawed candidates" way of looking at all of this.

If there were truly a moral danger to the faithful; if it were truly the case that it is morally unacceptable or even sinful to vote for McCain, the bishops would be saying so--that can especially be stated given that the bishops have said that it is morally unacceptable to vote for someone who wholeheartedly approves of abortion as Barack Obama does! In fact, one bishop is being investigated for denouncing Obama's position on abortion:

In a letter sent to the IRS on Wednesday (Oct. 22), Americans United for Separation of Church and State accused Paterson Bishop Arthur Serratelli of illegal partisanship for lambasting Obama's support of abortion rights.

In a column posted on the Diocese of Paterson's website and published in its weekly newspaper, Serratelli also compared Obama to King Herod, the biblical monarch who ordered the death of John the Baptist.

The bishop did not refer to Obama by name but only as "the present democratic (sic) candidate." [...]

Serratelli wrote that Obama has pledged, if elected president, to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, abortion-rights legislation the Catholic Church vehemently opposes.

"If this politician fulfills his promise, not only will many of our freedoms as Americans be taken from us, but the innocent and vulnerable will spill their blood," Serratelli wrote.

Since I don't believe our bishops are overwhelmingly biased in favor of Republican candidates and policies, I have to believe that if our bishops saw similar dangers to the souls of the faithful in voting for McCain, they'd say so.

And so, to me, this matter of "real true Catholic voters (tm) only vote for approved doomed quixotic third-party candidates regardless of the fact that these candidates can't possibly win and in no way will limit the evil of an Obama victory" starts to take on shades of other "Real True Catholic (tm)" controversies, from the "RTCs only go to Latin Masses" to "RTCs only homeschool" to "RTC women only wear skirts and dresses" to "RTCs think NFP is as bad as birth control even if the Vatican won't admit it" and so on.

This is so long that I think I need to conclude by saying, once again, that voting for a dq3 doesn't mean you're one of the people who believes it's the only moral way for a Catholic to vote. If you truly, enthusiastically support Baldwin or Schriner or your next-door neighbor who runs every year in a state that counts all write-in votes or whomever, then you needn't apologize to anyone for your thoroughly non-wasted vote. My remarks here are directed toward those who are convinced that even though the Church says we may vote to limit evil when both candidates support evil to some degree, especially when one candidate supports evil to a much greater and more damaging degree than the other, we still ought to insist that this is an impure and borderline-sinful way to vote. To those who hold this view, I say: my friends, when the Church says so I'll cheerfully line up behind you to vote for a dq3 whom I can support in good conscience. Until then, I refuse to condemn those who, however flawed they believe and even know McCain to be, are standing steadfastly against the much graver harm they are convinced Barack Obama will inevitably do, especially to the unborn.

Parental Notification, Revisited

Two different polls show that Californians are likely to support parental notification laws, though the details vary:

A newly released survey of California voters shows support for Proposition 4 - a proposed law that requires a waiting period and parental notification before a girl under 18 is allowed to have an abortion. The initiative holds a 19 percentage point lead among likely voters, 52% to 33%. The survey was conducted for the Knights of Columbus by the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion between September 28 and October 5, 2008.

The survey shows that Proposition 4 has majority support among women (55% to 31%), Latinos (61% to 27%), those who are married (59% to 25%) and those age 45 or older (55% to 28%). The initiative also leads among men (49% to 34%). Those opposed include likely voters 18 to 29 years old (52% to 41%).

The poll also shows that Proposition 4 leads by double digits in every region of California except the Bay Area, where a plurality of 48% is opposed.

Among California likely voters, 75% say that parents or legal guardians have the right to know if their underage daughter is seeking an abortion.

Here's the other poll:

A California proposition calling for parental notification before an abortion can be performed on a minor is holding on to a slight edge among voters, although a large number of those surveyed say they haven't made up their mind, according to a new poll.

The poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found that 46 percent of voters favor Proposition 4, while 44 percent say they will vote no. Ten percent said they were unsure of how they will vote.

"Voters are closely divided on this issue," said Mark Baldassare, the institute's president and chief executive. "There's been very little movement on it in the last few months."

Interesting differences, yes?

Whatever the actual case may be, it's looking as though liberal California may well be on the verge of enacting a parental notification law. These laws do have a tendency to reduce abortions; many young girls discover to their amazement that their parents are much more likely to be supportive and welcoming of their new grandchild, whatever the circumstances, than they are to insist that he be killed. You would think that all sane people would want this kind of restriction on abortion, so that minors aren't having abortions, with all the possible surgical complications and so forth, without their parents even knowing about it.

But you'd be wrong. Barack Obama opposes parental notification. He also voted against prohibiting minors from crossing state lines to get abortions and against notifying parents when their minor daughter crosses state lines to get an abortion in another state. And if he's elected president and signs the Freedom of Choice Act, all such laws will immediately be nullified; the federal government will be taking the position that unfettered access to abortion is more important than the safety and health of minor girls who seek them.

If I do end up voting for John McCain in a few days, Obama's rabid support for abortion and especially his promise--or threat--to sign FOCA as his first act in office will be significant motivations. This is pure evil, and must be stopped.

McCain and ESCR

As the election looms ever closer, the Catholic voter is left to put all the pieces together and decide what to do. Do we vote for McCain in spite of his ESCR stand, hoping to influence him positively later, and accepting the vote not as an unqualified endorsement of McCain but as an attempt to limit the far greater evil Barack Obama would unleash, possibly setting back pro-life efforts decades and even shaping the court in such a way that it will be impossible to see an end to legalized abortion on demand in America in our lifetimes? Do we vote for a third-party candidate, accepting the full reality of that vote? Do we abstain from voting in the presidential race entirely on the grounds that we values voters have already been de facto disenfranchised?

I know that each person reading this will be leaning one way or the other; perhaps, like me, you find more than one of those options attractive and are trying to decide exactly what to do in the voting booth. Over the next couple of days I hope to talk about all of these options--and then, this weekend, I hope to vote as Texas allows anyone to vote early who wishes to do so.

I'm being quite honest when I say that I haven't decided exactly what to do. I may or may not decide to tell you what I eventually do, either; the secret ballot is a good idea, generally. But thinking out loud up to that point is beneficial to me, so I hope you won't mind if I do so.

The first thing I thought about was the possibility of voting for McCain, so I'm going to focus on that in this post. I realized that there are lots of things to like about the McCain/Palin ticket; there are other things I don't much like, some of which I've talked about before. But the big looming issue for Catholic voters is the ESCR support. McCain does support ESCR to some degree, however limited; he might call for more funding for it if he's elected. We can't ignore that; in fact, a vote for McCain is predicated upon the idea that one wishes to limit the greater evil, not choose the so-called "lesser" one. Evil is evil, and only if we intend to be absolutely clear about our own rejection of ESCR and any funding for it can we vote for McCain--and we must desire to stop Obama as a prerequisite of such a vote.

You will notice that I'm not tackling the more esoteric "but does our vote actually count, or is it a symbolic civic ritual that can't possibly ever affect outcomes" logic in this post. I've done so before, and may engage that argument again, but I can't help but wanting to paraphrase Flannery O'Connor, and insist that if the thing's a ritual, then...but you know the rest of that quote. What I've come to think is that when we vote we should vote as honestly as if our vote really could affect the outcome of the election, given the reality of the election itself. That is, we can't pretend that we could singlehandedly elect Marcus Sheavius as Supreme Emperor and Grand High Poohbah Potentate of the American Continent, because that does ignore the reality of an American election, which is that we're only selecting a president, and that only one of the two major party candidates will actually win in any given election unless there's been such a groundswell of support for a particular third-party candidate before the election that this person is a contender. But I'll get into that more when I write about third-party voting, probably tomorrow.

For today, considering the option of voting for McCain, I thought about it this way: if I knew that either McCain or Obama were going to be elected, and I could actually help one or the other of them with my vote, which one would I vote for? The answer was obvious: I'd vote for McCain. I would insist on keeping a watchful eye on him in regards to ESCR, and I'd loudly voice any opposition I had to anything else he did that I didn't like, but of the two major party candidates he's the one I'd rather have in charge of things in general--if only because I believe that there is a very real chance Obama will do actual evil beyond anything McCain might do or attempt, especially in the arena of abortion.

Since I doubt I'm alone in thinking this way, I had the idea to write to the Texas Republican Party to ask them about McCain's ESCR stance. The answer I got made me think that there are a lot of pro-life Texans out here who've got my back, in a manner of speaking. Here's the answer I got, and less than an hour after I sent my query:

Mrs. Manning-

The Republican Party platforms (both Texas and National) are very clear in our stance opposing ESCR. Governor Palin has also been outspoken in her opposition to ESCR. Sen. McCain has, admittedly, been less than solid in this position. It is my hope and prayer that he will come around, and I am confident that Governor Palin will lead him to the light in this regard. I guarantee you the Republican Party of Texas will not waver from its position and will call him out if he takes any action in office contrary to the platform. It is also important to note that Obama/Biden are avowed enemies of life and would not support our position in any way. [Emphasis added--E.M.]

I have to admit that I liked this response. It seems to be well within a Catholic's view of the matter: McCain's not an "avowed enemy of life;" his ESCR position is disappointing; we're going to keep praying and working to get him to change his mind; we're not going to let him take any actions on ESCR that are contrary to what we believe without raising opposition to it. I could see taking a "limiting the graver evil" approach and voting for McCain with this in the background much more readily than I could see, say, voting for Bob Barr who is personally pro-life but whose Libertarian party is in favor of abortion, generally speaking.

But why vote this way at all? Why not vote for a doomed quixotic third-party (dq3) candidate who supports no intrinsic evil at all? Isn't that what every pro-life Catholic in America should be doing?

I'll get to that tomorrow.

This is Just...Weird

If you click on the link below, it takes you to the YouTube video of Colin Powell on Meet the Press, endorsing Barack Obama. Go to about the 2:40 mark, and you'll hear the following:

Colin Powell on Meet the Press

Powell: ...and there's going to be a crisis come along on the twenty-first or twenty-second of January that we don't even know about right now, and so I think what the president has to do is to start using the power of the Oval Office and the power of his personality to convince the American people and to convince the world that America is solid, America is going to move forward, we're going to fix our economic problems, we're going to meet our overseas obligations, but restoring a sense of purpose, a sense of confidence in the American people and in the international community in America.

First, we have Joe Biden prophesying a crisis if Obama's elected; now we have Colin Powell giving this ambiguous warning which includes a date--a day or two after the inauguration. Is it just me, or is this completely bizarre, even for election-season-conspiracy-theory fodder?

Warning: Polls Aren't Trustworthy

Can you imagine this? Pollsters actually warned people reading their poll not to take the results too seriously! Sadly, though, the poll in question was not a presidential poll; instead, it showed the possibility that California voters will, after all, vote against gay marriage:

SAN FRANCISCO—The red-hot issue of same-sex marriage continues to sharply divide Californians, according to a poll conducted last week. If a vote were held today on Proposition 8, a state ballot initiative that would reverse the decision of the state's Supreme Court earlier this year and eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry, 48 percent of likely voters say they would vote yes, supporting a ban, while 45 percent say they would vote to leave the law alone. Seven percent of voters remain undecided. The initiative, which will appear on the ballot in two weeks, requires a majority to pass.

Pollsters caution that the poll may not be a perfect measure of where California voters currently stand on the issue. "Polling on ballot measures in general is an inexact science, and polling on homosexuality in general is a tricky business," says a description of the SurveyUSA poll, which has a margin of error of 4 percentage points. "SurveyUSA urges all who examine these results to not put too fine a point on the 3 points that separate 'Yes' and 'No' today." [Emphasis added--E.M.]

As television advertisements for and against Prop 8 have begun to flood the airwaves here over the past month, garnering almost as much attention as the presidential race, it has become increasingly clear that California voters remain deeply divided on same-sex marriage. In a half-dozen separate polls conducted over the past month, likely voters have been deadlocked on Proposition 8 each time. Through September, supporters of same-sex marriage appeared to be ahead by more than 5 points. But over the past several weeks, as the first pro-Prop 8 advertisements began to appear on TV—drawing criticism from legal experts, who have said their claims about same-sex marriage's impact on churches' tax exemptions and public-school education are misleading—the polls began to swing the other way.

Translation, for those who don't speak MSM: We want you to believe polls when they're going our way, especially when they show Barack Obama ahead by dubiously large margins; we want you to put your full faith in them and trust that we're right. However, when a poll seems to indicate that an issue isn't going our way, we will suddenly remember that polling is an inexact science at best, and urge you to ignore the poll. Further, if advertisements that show you how we plan to reshape society into a gay-friendly, hostile-to-religion-and-traditional-family entity are influencing you, we'll editorialize right in the middle of our article by inserting an indirect quote from conveniently anonymous "legal experts" in the hopes that you will doubt the veracity of the ads instead of doubting us; the number of people who doubt the MSM can't be measured accurately by any poll ever created, largely because most of us failed math and can't count that high.

Watching the machinations of the press as they continue to pretend they're an unbiased, objective group of citizen-reporters with no agendas of their own, gosh golly, no sir, swear on a stack of press passes, cross my heart and hope to be reassigned to Flyover Country, has begun to be one of the most amusing pasttimes of this present election season.

None So Blind

A group of Catholics has decided that despite the rather unprecedented clarity of our bishops here in America as to the impossibility of voting for people who are as rabidly pro-abortion as Barack Obama is, they'd like to launch a website encouraging Catholics to vote for him:

The web site is sure to stoke controversy in Catholic circles with this statement: “Is Barack Obama really pro-life? The answer is ‘yes.’ Looking through the lens of Catholic Social Teaching, Senator Obama has spent his entire career striving for the common good. He supports health care programs that will cover all Americans, a living wage for working families, and solutions that allow distressed families to stay in their homes.”

It goes on to say that Obama, a strong advocate like his party of abortion rights, will reduce the number of abortions by promoting health care for pregnant women and infant care.

Abortion is one of the most polarizing issues in America and official Catholic doctrine on the matter is clear: the church regards it as murder.

What's really interesting is that the news article about this new "Catholic" website fails to mention who the Catholics behind it are. They are as follows:

Victoria Reggie Kennedy (wife of Sen. Edward Kennedy)

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend

Thomas P. O'Neill III

James Roosevelt, Jr.

William V. D’Antonio (visiting professor at Catholic University and author of dissident "Catholic" books).

Lisa Schare (state Chair of the Catholic Democrats of Ohio)

Patrick Whelan MD PhD (co-director of Pax Christi Massachusetts; a sample of his writing is here).

In other words, the usual suspects. Add Sen. Edwards' secretary and Steve Krueger of Voice of the Faithful, and you've got an assortment of East Coast liberal Catholics who never met a Democratic Party fund-raiser they didn't like, and who probably think of your typical 40 Days for Life protester as an "extremist" who somehow thinks protecting the unborn is--gasp!--more important than universal government run health care.

The only encouraging thing about this disgraceful website is that it seems pretty clear that the liberal, dissident, pro-Democrat Catholics who are squishy on abortion are getting older and older all the time. We young(ish), Pope John Paul II Catholics find the Biden-era liberals in our Church to be a challenge to our patience, but otherwise, we pretty much ignore them--as we will their extremely uninspiring "shades of gray" website.

Our Clothes-Minded Elites

With less than two weeks to go before the election, the mainstream media has seized on an issue so voraciously that there are already over seven hundred news links on Google (tm) News alone on this one topic. What could it possibly be, that has the MSM in such a tizzy? Is it Iraq, the economy, social issues like abortion and gay marriage? Is it the ACORN voter registration fraud story that keeps getting bigger and bigger all the time? Is it the wild divergence in the polls, which show Obama anywhere from barely neck and neck with McCain to up by fourteen points? No; it's none of these:

It's the cost of Sarah Palin's wardrobe.

Breathlessly, if somewhat cynically, the MSM is invoking the spirit of Joe the Plumber: how can Sarah possibly justify letting the Republican National Committee spend a staggering $150,000 on clothes, hair and makeup for Palin as well as clothing for the rest of her family? In these times of economic crisis how can an Alaskan hockey mom governor spend all this cash--RNC cash, not her own money--on clothes?

Of course, the MSM is being rather hypocritical, considering that most of the news anchors who will read these words with furrowed brow (assuming their last Botox treatment has worn off) are also wearing rather expensive designer suits for which they didn't pay. Consider this, from an article in the NY Sun in 2006 about Katie Couric:

She estimates that Ms. Couric will need to purchase at least 10 designer suits, and matching shoes, which could cost more than $30,000. Not that those brand-name outfits would set her back much, even if she didn't have a wardrobe allowance. At CBS, Ms. Couric will reportedly take home some $15 million a year.

While Ms. Couric may be commanding a salary on par with or higher than her male counterparts, women broadcasters face more pressure to keep up appearances, Ms. von Sperling said. "Here is the unspoken rule: Anchormen are allowed to get that wise, distinguished, salt-and-pepper gray," she said, referring to the just-named anchor of World News Tonight, Charles Gibson. "For anchorwomen, that's not the case. Katie Couric will be dying her hair until she no longer wants to be an anchorwoman. Katie's a very smart cookie, and I'm sure she was aware of that when she took the job."

Prices have gone up a little in the last two years; Hillary Clinton can only get about five of her signature pants suits for $30K:

The clothes aren't cheap. Jackets are about $3,000, shirts run to $1,350 and pants hover around the $2,000 mark. For first-time clients, there is a minimum three-suit requirement, simply because it costs so much to make the mannequins.

Now, I'm not going to say that $150,000 for clothes and so forth for seven people (Sarah, her husband, and the children) isn't excessive. But our elites in the media and in politics are well aware how much image is worth, and would be the first to notice if the Palins' clothes were the sort of nice but still off-the-rack garments they can afford on their approximately $120,000/year salary. We would be hearing endlessly about how Sarah's lower-end clothing proved she was an unserious candidate, and Tina Fey would do a skit showing Sarah in the fitting room at Wal-Mart, wouldn't she?

So the Republican National Committee--not the Palins, mind--made the decision to spend some Committee funds on the Palins' public image. It's perfectly legal for them to do that; and considering that none of the other candidates in the race is coming from a similar economic background, it was probably a smart thing to do. The Obamas made over four million dollars last year; Joe Biden's suits have been familiar to the media since the Cronkite era, so the MSM has nothing to gain from criticizing him; the McCains have plenty of cash for clothes that will look good on prime time TV. But Sarah Palin has been under attack from the minute she set foot on the national political stage, so it probably seemed like ordinary prudence to make sure that the media couldn't criticize her for being poorly dressed on top of everything else they found to dislike about her.

The real problem, as I see it, is that we're drifting dangerously close to an oligarchy in America, where only elite people from elite schools and/or elite families with large sums of money to spend will ever have a shot at any national political office, let alone the presidency. So much of this comes from our media's perception that anyone who doesn't dress, speak, and think like they do must be an incompetent hick who is too incurious and provincial to be running for office; the elevation of image above reality, and style over substance, shows how true that is becoming. But there are serious consequences to this kind of thinking, and one of the worst is that our leaders become a protected class whose own self interest will always trump what is good for the nation.

Some observers of this election would say that we've already reached that point; it would be hard to disagree.

The Predictability of Cynicism

Nobody who reads this blog regularly will be surprised to know that I admire Mark Shea very much; I think he is a talented writer and a sincere Catholic thinker who generously shares these talents with all of us on his blog and elsewhere.

In particular I think Mark's persistent efforts to remind his fellow Catholics that we can't approve of torture even if (or especially if!) "our guys" are the ones doing it have been a positive service to Catholics everywhere; we, like everyone else, need to be reminded that our Church's moral teachings trump our partisan leanings and our (often justifiable) concerns about the dangers of radical Islam. We aren't entitled to break the moral law for whatever seemingly sound reasons, and Mark has put forth a valiant effort in calling us to remember that whenever we drift away from what the Church is saying, we probably need to stop and ponder who is more likely to be wrong: ourselves, or the Church?

In these days leading up to the election, however, I've begun to find some of Mark's writings a bit troublesome. I want to be clear, here: Mark is not saying that people will sin by voting for John McCain, though he rejects the notion of doing so himself utterly on the grounds that McCain supports baby-killing just like Obama even if McCain's is presently limited to ESCR and Obama's isn't limited to the unborn; Mark also says that pro-life voters who keep voting for Republicans are like an abused wife who stays with her husband so as not to anger him further, saying: "Stop kidding yourself that the GOP is run by pols who actually care about the prolife movement. It isn't. It's run by people who find the prolife movement useful..." So people who vote for McCain aren't necessarily sinning, according to Mark--but they are being rather stupid and easily duped by people who don't care at all about the unborn except during election years, and then only in a sham way designed to get votes. Which doesn't mean these voters should do what Mark is doing and vote for a doomed quixotic third-party candidate, though this is (to Mark) clearly the only sane option.

With all due respect, I think Mark isn't really correct, here, on two counts: one, in that he seems to believe that people who decide to vote for McCain are cheerleaders for ESCR or plan to stand back (like that abused wife) and let McCain have his way with embryos without doing the utmost to stop him; and two, that the failure of Republicans to end abortion during their time of political dominance proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that they're all--or mostly, or at least their leaders--evil unborn-hating tricksters who have no intention of ever ending the murder of the unborn on the grounds that if they did we pro-life voters would immediately breathe a sigh of relief and then start voting for Democrats in droves because we really do think they're the morally superior party, all except for that abortion thing.

I'm exaggerating, of course. But what troubles me is that Mark really does seem to think that voting for a doomed quixotic third-party candidate (please, let's use the abbreviation dq3 from now on!) is the right thing to do, and that those of us who fail to realize this in time may not be guilty of actual sin, but we sure aren't doing anything good.

Now, if Mark was limiting his discussion to voters in non-swing states, he might have a point, in that I can no more hurt McCain's chances in Texas than Mark can hurt Obama's in Washington; so why not throw our votes to a dq3 candidate? Of course, as I mentioned in the comments section on Mark's post, votes for write-in candidates are often not counted unless the candidate receives a certain percentage of the vote (all but impossible, in a presidential election); so while it may feel emotionally satisfying to vote for Baldwin or Average Joe Schriner, the vote "counts" as much as leaving the presidential race blank--an equally emotionally satisfying option, without the downside of supporting a "professional" presidential candidate who, if truth be told, may be just a little nuts (and that goes for all the dq3 candidates, not one in particular).

But by making blanket statements which can't be proved or disproved to the effect that the Republican leadership is a cabal of secretly pro-abortion types who play us all for fools once every four years, Mark may be encouraging swing-state voters to sit this one out, or vote for a dq3--and if enough people do this, it may be enough to guarantee Obama the victory (well, that, plus all the deceased and second-grade and fictional voters ACORN has registered).

In no way am I suggesting that swing-state voter must vote for McCain, of course. A swing-state voter who genuinely believes McCain's support for ESCR makes him unworthy of the presidency or who is fired up with enthusiasm for, say, the Prohibition Party's exciting ticket of Amondson/Pletten for 2008 should vote accordingly, and more power to him/her! But Catholics in swing states who had already decided to vote for McCain in a deliberate attempt to keep Obama from becoming our next president and unleashing his pro-abortion policies--and judges--on an unwary nation should not for a moment think it is incumbent upon them to change their minds and vote for a dq3 as the only moral option for a Catholic voter in this election.

I understand the level of cynicism it's possible to attain during political seasons; as I've said before, I find it very tempting to drop out altogether, or to decide that a follower of Christ need not dirty his or her hands in the election booth. It's easy to decide (though a bit of a violation of the eighth commandment) that all politicians are dirty rotten scoundrels who will say or do anything to be elected, while they secretly revel in the killing of the unborn, the desperation of the poor and the oppressed, and the tears of orphans.

But if this past Sunday's Gospel reminded us of anything, it's that living as a follower of Christ in the world sometimes means rendering unto Caesar, even if Caeser is the last person on earth we want to render anything to. The Pharisees who set a trap for our Lord thought they had Him: if He said to pay the tax, why then, he was a supporter of a murdering usurper who oppressed God's own people! But if He said they shouldn't pay--why then, he was preaching insurrection and rebellion against the lawful authority! Our Lord's answer caught them off guard, and sent them slinking away.

Our votes are important--but they are just votes. We can't bring about the Kingdom of Heaven by voting for it; we must never vote against it, though, by voting for actual evil. When faced with two candidates, one of whom will certainly increase evil, and the other of whom may well limit it despite his own weaknesses in that area, we may, indeed, choose to vote to limit evil. It is not an act of stupidity, blind partisanship, or "abused wife syndrome" to conclude this; it is very much in line with the teaching of the Church.

Abortion, Unveiled

Jeff Miller, The Curt Jester, has a wonderful post up today about the resistance to the term "pro-abortion" by those who actually do believe in abortion on demand:

Having a conversation with an Obama supporter I heard yet again the argument "nobody is pro-abortion." This made me wonder just why it is that people who support legal abortion as an option don't want to be called pro-abortion? This seems to me to say quite a deal. If as they often contend that it is not a child and just a lump of tissue of the equivalent of a tadpole then what is the big deal if I or someone else call you pro-abortion. Why should their be any argument about this and why shouldn't they be proudly pro-abortion? If they are not pro-abortion then do they think they are anti-abortion? Is there a middle ground where you are neither for or against abortion? Don't think so.

Besides the definition of "pro" that applies is "an argument in favor of a course of action." If you say that abortion is an acceptable course of action then you are in fact pro-abortion. There is often an equivocation about letting it be a choice for somebody else to make. But again if you support somebody in their choice of action you are in favor of that action happening. If I said it was okay for an individual to choose to go around shooting people or not based on their preference, I would in fact be pro-murder even if I never shot someone myself.

Do read the whole thing; it's a good exploration of a curious bit of verbal engineering. There's a reason that pro-aborts will talk about choice and reproductive freedom and the rights to one's own body (never mind the body of the unborn child) and so on, but never use the word "abortion" to describe what they're talking about.

One thing that has always bothered me terribly is the language of "choice" from a strictly grammatical standpoint. Politicians and pundits and writers who should know better will prattle on and on about "a woman's right to choose" while blithely overlooking the simple fact that the verb "choose" is a transitive verb; it must have an object! I myself could say that I'm in favor of "a woman's right to choose:" her husband, her outfit, that cute pair of shoes she saw at Macy's, chocolate in large quantities, blogs to read, adult beverages--the list is endless. But if by "a woman's right to choose (insert direct object)" you mean "a woman's right to choose to pay someone to kill her unborn offspring by some hideous method of execution or other that completely disrespects the child's inherent and inviolable right to life" then of course I'm going to oppose that--and I'm going to think pretty poorly of people who don't.

Of course, some of the dodginess around the word "abortion" comes from the fact that "abortion" means "paying someone to kill your unborn offspring by some hideous method of execution or other that completely disrespects the child's inherent and inviolable right to life." And those who support legalized abortion don't really want to admit that, so they pretend it's possible to support other people's so-called right to do exactly that without actually having to admit they think it's a pretty good idea.

Which puts abortion supporters in the position of claiming that there's this fundamental human right out there, which belongs to every woman, but which it's impolitic to name let alone describe even while you loudly and fiercely insist that you support it to the hilt. It's as if people championed the "right to choose" to vote, while whispering the word "vote" as if it were an obscenity, and absolutely refusing to explain touch-screen ballots, hanging or dimpled chads, or other nitty-gritty details of the actual act of voting.

Jeff Miller is right: this makes no sense at all, but we've been letting abortion supporters get by with the "personally opposed, but" dodge for far too long. We need to make them say out loud what it is they support; we need to insist that they give "choose" its object; we need to fight for the linguistic clarity that shows the ugly horror of abortion stripped of all its gauzy euphemisms.

Two Different Looks At 40 Days For Life

It's interesting how different the secular and religious media can sound when talking about abortion, especially abortion protests. From the secular Tacoma News Tribune:

TACOMA, Wash. -- For 40 days, a small group is huddling on the sidewalk outside Planned Parenthood here to oppose abortion. Volunteers take shifts, holding signs and praying aloud along Martin Luther King Jr. Way.

Up to 175 people are taking part in the vigil in Tacoma, one of more than 170 cities in the United States and Canada participating in "40 Days for Life."

Their goal is to prevent abortions and stir up Christians to oppose abortion, said Peggy Ghigleri, director of the Tacoma campaign.

"A lot of the churches have become silent about abortion," said Ghigleri, a Tacoma homemaker and Catholic.

Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Aurora Jewell said people with the Tacoma vigil have harassed and intimidated patients and staff members this fall at the Tacoma Health Center.

Planned Parenthood provides volunteer escorts to walk with patients to and from their cars, Jewell said.

"They shouldn't have to be intimidated when they're trying to access health services," she said.

Vigils and protests against abortion haven't been as prevalent in recent years. But abortion is still a volatile topic. It was an issue in the final presidential debate, with John McCain saying he opposes the Roe v. Wade decision and Barack Obama saying he supports a woman's right to choose.

And from the Christian One News Now website:

The 40 Days for Life campaign, a period of fasting and prayer to save babies from abortion, is in its final two weeks.

Various events are being held outside abortion facilities throughout the country, and David Bereit is spearheading the campaign. "We have a total of 268 children who have been spared from abortion, 268 women who have been spared from a life of regret," he comments. "We have had tens of thousands of people on the streets participating in peaceful vigils in front of abortion facilities in 179 cities across 47 states."

Bereit firmly believes the positive influences from this campaign will not stop at the end of the 40-day period. "We know that this is something that they're forming a habit -- that they will be continuing to do this long after 40 Days for Life is over because children are dying 365 days a year," he says. "Women are being wounded 365 days a year, and so 40 Days for Life is merely a beginning, not the end."

Shawn Carney, the national outreach director for the campaign, says pro-life pregnancy resource centers have seen a significant increase in their client numbers as well as mothers who are choosing not to abort their babies. Christian Newswire reports that Planned Parenthood calls the 40 Days for Life campaign "40 days of harassment," but Carney contends the image of people praying outside an abortion clinic "has given women a sense of hope at a point in their lives when they feel most vulnerable and desperate."

The real untold story in the years of pro-life activism is the story of all those mothers who have been persuaded by pro-life protesters to change their minds, to give birth, to welcome their babies or place them in loving homes for adoption. I think the very presence of these children--some of them now adults--makes the case against abortion far more eloquently than words ever can. How can anyone look at the face of an angelic child and insist that his or her mother should still have had the right to kill him or her?

That's something the religious sources writing about abortion always understand--and something the secular ones seldom do. Abortion is a dreadful finality; the people praying and protesting outside clinics are trying to keep the women entering them from becoming the unfortunate mother of a dead baby instead of the joyful mother of a living one. It's too late for her to decide not to be a mother--she already is.

The secular media dutifully reports that women are being "harassed" by the presence of clinic protesters. But as of today, the 40 Days for Live blog reports that over three hundred babies have been confirmed to have been saved by the presence of prayerful participants; three hundred children will enter this world in due course instead of ending their lives in a soul-killing clinic before their mothers even had a chance to meet them. That's the real story of 40 Days for Life, the real success of this movement, even if the secular media never reports it at all.

Jon Stewart Loses It

Over at The Weekly Standard blog, writer Mary Katherine Ham has this interesting account of Jon Stewart's speech to college students at a rally in Boston, in which he said the following:

"He (McCain) made an interesting vice presidential choice.

I like the woods...I just don't know if I would pull my vice president out of the woods randomly.

She came out again today. She was talking to a small town, she said that small towns, that's the part of the country she really likes going to because that's the pro-America part of the country.

You know, I just want to say to her, just very quickly...[expletive] you.

I've never seen someone with a greater disparity between how cute they sound when they're saying something and how terrible what they're saying is.

Don't ya know, Obama, by golly, he just is a terrorist? What? Oh, you know, he just, gosh, kills babies, you know.

I'm so over the idea that only small-town America is the heart and soul. Small-town America is fine, but it's the same as cities. Cities are just a lot of towns piled on top of each other in one place.

They have this whole thing that somehow we can write off entire swaths of the country, that we are somehow...I get it. You know, New York City wasn't good enough for [expletive] Osama bin Laden, it better be good enough for you.

I can't take it anymore. After eight years of this divisiveness, we're back to this idea that only small-town America is the real America.

I get it. I'm from New York. We have a lot of gay people. But homosexuals don't have sodomy on Russian flags."

Ham points out:

The media has devoted hundreds of stories of late to the tenor of audience comments at McCain-Palin rallies, fretting about "rage" and "incitement" by the campaign, but the only account of Stewart's appearance is a one-sentence mention in the Boston Globe, and his abusive Palin comments are not included.

Not only that, but imagine for a moment that some McCain supporter had gone so clearly off the rails about either Obama or Joe Biden, and had said anything even remotely like what Stewart said above (Russian flags? What the heck does that even mean?). But nobody's even paying attention to the foam-at-the-mouth malcontents on the left, mainly because a lot of them really are the mainstream media and their associates.

I have a feeling that in Jon Stewart's ideal America, there is no divisiveness, because the people who believe that abortion and gay marriage are wrong are no longer allowed to speak in public without the threat of being silenced by either the law or the press. The scary thing is that I have a feeling Barack Obama's ideal America is about the same.

Not News

So, a pro-abortion politician decides to go out on a limb, and endorses--get this!--another pro-abortion politician for the presidency.

Breaking news this is not.

In fact, this is so not news that a telephone psychic could have predicted it, and probably thrown in a "Celebrity will be arrested either for drug use or drunk driving or both" for free.

But when your candidate's all hat and no cattle, as they might say around here, Powell's endorsement is worth playing as if it meant something, when all it really means is that if abortion is your issue it will always come first--and that's as true of those on the other side of the abortion debate as it is over on this side. Unless, of course, enough people on this side decide to quit fighting.

A Vote For Obama IS a Vote For Abortion

Something has been bothering me all weekend about Doug Kmiec's much discussed LA Times' opinion piece; well, a lot of things, actually, most of which have already been dissected and examined by far better writers all over the Internet. And this thing, this one little nagging thing, has probably also been written about elsewhere, but having had time to think about it further I'd like to share some thoughts with you.

It's about the title of the piece: "For Obama but against abortion."

I understand that Kmiec is saying that while he's against abortion, he's still planning to vote for Obama. But I kept thinking about it in terms of the vote itself, as if Kmiec and all those other personally-swooning-for-Obama-while-still-disliking-abortion-Catholic voters were really trying to make the claim (which, in a way, they are) that it is possible to vote for Obama while voting against abortion.

But it's not. A vote for Obama is a vote for abortion. It really is as simple as that.

Now, the Catholics for Obama contingent may howl that it's unfair to put it that way; they've said over and over that they don't believe in abortion! And they don't. But Barack Obama does. He believes it's the right solution for an unwed teen mother, who will otherwise be "punished" with a baby; he believes it's so completely the mother's choice that partial-birth abortion must be allowed lest the mother's choices are curtailed by the removal of this gruesome late-term murder from the list of legal ways to kill your own flesh and blood before his or her birth; he believes in it so much, that should a baby survive his or her abortion, Obama said that having to call a second doctor to assess the child's viability (rather than leave the decision about leaving the baby to die alone in a closet full of dirty linen to the doctor who was already trying to kill the little tyke in the first place) places an "undue burden" on the woman's original decision to have an abortion. Obama may say that nobody is really pro-abortion, but unless he's quibbling about the meaning of the word "is" I'd say he's pretty much the illustration beside the dictionary entry for the term.

So a vote for the most pro-abortion candidate ever to run for the presidency in America is definitely a vote for abortion, however much one's own distaste for abortion may make the vote a conscience-wringer. The voter may be personally opposed to the candidate's stance on abortion, but the candidate's position is unlikely to change, and should Obama be elected and take office the unleashing of public funds to pay for abortion, the curtailing of the rights of protesters to stand against abortion, and all the other things Obama has promised NARAL and Planned Parenthood he will do will be done.

I think they, the pro-Obama Catholics, do understand this. After all, aren't they the ones who keep saying that a vote for McCain is a vote for war or a vote for poverty? The difference is that it's possible to argue that McCain doesn't intend to start any new wars and plans to finish (that is, not prematurely retreat from) the one we're in; it's also possible, and indeed, necessary, to point out that voting against socialism isn't the same thing as voting for poverty. It is not possible to argue that Obama doesn't intend to force taxpayers to fund more abortions, to work to strike down every state law that restricts abortion in any way (including parental notification and patient information laws), to overturn the ban on partial-birth abortion--because Obama has promised to do exactly this.

Don't believe me? Just look here. It's a campaign promise, true, but it's a promise, nonetheless. If John McCain were promising to start more wars or make people poor, you might be able to draw some kind of moral equivalence (though abortion is still the graver evil). But when Obama actually promises to sign the Freedom of Choice Act as his first priority as president, trying to tell yourself that he's really a fine choice for pro-life voters is an exercise in futility. He has promised to be the Abortion President, and that is exactly what he will be.

I know that some of the Catholics for Obama have engaged in extremely convoluted arguments to the effect that Obama will actually decrease the number of abortions: money taken from the rich and given to the poor = fewer poor people = fewer women in crisis pregnancies = fewer abortions, according to their calculations. But laying aside the fact that this version of the equation is quite faulty in places, including a) that only poor women have abortions, and b) that artificial contraception is the missing step in this equation, which ought also to be unacceptable to Catholics, we are still left with the fact that Obama's vocal support for FOCA has the same effect as trying to divide the end result of our "But Obama's really a good choice for pro-life voters!" equation by zero, a logical impossibility. Greater access to, and greater funding for, abortion will mean more abortion. And Obama has pledged to support both greater access to and greater funding for abortion.

Catholics planning to vote for Obama already know all of this. But they have decided that this time, things are different; this time, they can vote for the most pro-abortion candidate ever to have run for public office, and it doesn't mean that they approve of abortion. They may not, indeed, approve of abortion; but they appear to have decided that it's no longer necessary to vote against it. A vote for Obama is a vote for abortion; Obama himself has promised that it is.

Paul Says It All

At his blog Thoughts of a Regular Guy, Paul has written one of the best things I've seen yet addressing the problem of the squishy pro-Obama Catholic voters. Do read it all; but I especially liked:

So to the Doug Kmiecs and Nicholas Cafardis of the world, the Morning's Minions and the Radical Catholic Moms, and even the Joe Bidens, Nancy Pelosis, and all the others so proudly proclaiming "I'm Catholic and I'm supporting Obama, and you should too!" if you want to support the Infanticide Champion for president, I won't call your faith into question.

If you want to vote for the party that holds ordinary people like Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber and me in contempt, go ahead. If you want to stand with those who consider Christians to be rubes and fools, feel free. If you want to vote for the party that fought to kill Terri Schiavo, be my guest. If you want to support those who support recreational embryo-destructive stem cell research -- but not adult stem cell research -- that's your legal right. If you want to support the party that promises to replace our capitalist economy, which has been the engine that has enabled America's unequalled-in-history levels of charity within its own borders and throughout the world, with a socialist system that will make all of us poor, I'm sure I can't dissuade you. If it floats your boat to vote for the guy who'll repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, thus spreading gay "marriage" across the land, who am I to say anything? [...]

If you're this sort, I have only two requests of you: either don't come to my blog and try to show that your support for the Party of Death is consistent with your Catholic faith, or else, after you've won, that you spend even half, even one-quarter, of the energy you've spent on convincing Catholics to vote for abortion this year on getting the Democrats to turn away from their enthusiastic support for abortion next year.

Republican pro-lifers have been vocal in policing the failures of Republican leaders in living up to our pro-life standards. But we have seen no such activity from Catholic Democrats towards their own candidates or officeholders. As Bishop Naumann wrote, if every Catholic Democrat wanted to eliminate the abortion plank from the Democratic Party national platform, it would be gone tomorrow. But there is no credible pro-life movement within the Democratic Party. [Emphasis addded--E.M.].

Many of us who generally vote Republican aren't happy with the party generally or this election particularly. Some of us will decide, in the end, to subject the oft-abused olfactory organ to yet another squeezing as we vote reluctantly for party of most lives (embryonic lives used in stem-cell research not included; some restrictions may apply; void where prohibited). Some will decide they can't support McCain, or that since their state isn't in any danger of going to Obama they shouldn't increase his overall popular vote tally given the various things McCain supports that they don't. Some have already decided that doomed quixotic third party candidates are the only way to go this time around, and are trying to convince the rest of us that this is the only truly sane and/or truly moral option. I can easily see a thoughtful Catholic voter making a case for any of these options, and so I can easily see a thoughtful Catholic voting (or not) in any of these three ways.

But to decide to vote for Obama means, in effect, that as a Catholic you believe one of these things:

1. That it is neither desirable nor necessary for a Catholic in a non-Catholic nation to work for just and moral laws which promote the common good by protecting human life from conception until natural death if your fellow citizens appear to have decided they'd rather live in an atheistic/agnostic secular materialistic/deterministic/relativistic society which contains no such protection for innocent human life; that, instead, it is only necessary that you voice these principles while promising not to "impose" them on the rest of society, and confine any action on your part to whatever efforts in volunteering to aid in crisis pregnancies remain legal in a post-abortion-opposition society.

2. That while it might theoretically be desirable and necessary for a Catholic in a non-Catholic nation to work for just and moral laws which promote the common good by protecting human life from conception until natural death, it is not practically possible at the present time, and will not be again for the foreseeable future, thus mandating that you make your peace with the most vocal advocates in favor of the killing of the innocent unborn by supporting them and working with them in every way possible so as to escape the marginalization of this person's opponents that will occur as soon as he rises to power; the end game, of course, would be to be a generally good influence, though a terribly weakened one giving that a person in this situation has already revealed the extent to which he will compromise.

3. That abortion, troubling though it may be, is still a complex and multifaceted issue that can't be solved, especially not by banning it outright; and that in the grand scheme of things, it is not as troubling as hostility toward illegal immigrants, the prosecution of an unjust war, the delay in providing free universal health care to all in America, poverty generally, or any one of a number of other issues, on which you find yourself lining up completely with the Democratic Party. This convinces you that abortion isn't really your problem or America's problem so much as it is the problem of all those single-issue activists out there; sure, in a perfect world, there wouldn't be abortion, but as we don't live in a perfect world and as the already-born deserve the lion's share of our attention and concern, the idea that people would throw their votes away on the Republican candidate solely because of abortion seems disproportionate, and wrong.

Now, there are probably tons of variations on these three themes, but I've heard some version of them from more than one pro-Obama Catholic who insists that he is pro-life. But as several bishops have reminded us in recent days, none of these ways of thinking is really in line with justice: the unborn, some forty-eight million of whom have perished in the years since Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton made abortion on demand until birth (and, in Obama's America, possibly even after), cry out to heaven for that justice, and woe unto us as a nation if we don't hear their cries, or find them less interesting than the calls for hope and change from the candidate who, as far as I can discover, has not even said that he is personally opposed to abortion.

Clarion Call

I've been busier than usual today, but I really can't put off posting this outrageous story (Hat Tip: Charlotte at Cheeky Pink Girl, who sent this to me):

CHERRY HILL, NJ, October 17 /Christian Newswire/ — An abortion clinic that performs abortions up to the sixth month of pregnancy has worked out an arrangement with two area hotels to provide substantially discounted room rates for women seeking abortions.

Based on reports from local citizens participating in the 40 Days for Life prayer vigil outside the Cherry Hill Women’s Center, New Jersey Right to Life has confirmed that the Clarion Hotel in Cherry Hill offers a reduced rate of $59 for a room originally priced at $109 to those women who provide a receipt from the clinic that says they have to stay overnight. In addition, the Quality Inn in Maple Shade offers a discounted rate of $74.95 for a room originally priced at $99.99 and a free breakfast of eggs and pancakes for women who present a stamped pamphlet from the clinic.

Good Counsel Homes, a Catholic agency that assists homeless pregnant women, recently cancelled its banquet at the Clarion upon learning of the hotel’s arrangement with the abortion clinic.

Clarion Hotels, along with Quality Inns, are, in a rather evil irony, associated with the Choice Hotels chain.

My family and I have sometimes taken advantage of Choice's discount offered to HSLDA members; I know that the hotels are franchised and are individually owned and operated, but after this I can say with certainty that I'll be more inclined to choose some other hotel chain for our family's rare trips. There's something pretty terrible about the "kill your baby, get a discounted hotel bill and free eggs and pancakes" mentality; even though there are probably pro-life Choice Hotel franchise owners out there, the fact that even one owner would decide to do something so terrible makes me disinclined to give the chain any business at all.

Evil isn't always most shocking when it's most dramatic. Sometimes it's most shocking when it's most banal. You can see for yourself, from the same webpage as above:

Note: At 4:48pm central, a call was made to the Clarion Hotel in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. The clerk was asked to confirm whether a discount was offered to patients at the Cherry Hill Women’s Center (abortion clinic). The female clerk answered, “Yes. The rate would be $59 dollars a night instead of $109.” The caller than said: “Let me get this straight, if I KILL my baby, I get a discount from your hotel. If I KEEP my baby, I don’t.”

The clerk answered, “Yes.”

Wow. Just wow.

Wow, indeed. There's almost no way to express in words the depth of evil in such a morally abhorrent situation.

Families For Life

One of the great things about being part of a large, vibrant Catholic family is that my siblings and I are all still on the same page in regard to issues of human life, and the need to protect the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death.

From one sister comes this link to an article by Kathryn Lopez at NRO, titled "Lives Depend on Your Vote." If you haven't read it already, you might enjoy it! (I'd excerpt it here, like I usually do, but there appears to be a requirement that one get permission to do so at the top of the article.)

From another sister in Ohio comes this link to a report on the Life Chain event she and her family participated in recently; the pictures that featured some of my nephews have been removed from the main site, but if you watch this video they're in some of the still shots near the end (just look for the adorable kids holding the poster over their heads!). :)

We concentrate a lot on voting and politics, as we should. But building a culture that respects life starts one family at a time; my parents' sacrifice to raise nine children at a time when doing so was hardly popular has led to one religious vocation, five marriages (so far!), and the eagerly-awaited arrival of their eighteenth grandchild, all being raised in families who teach our children the importance of protecting and preserving the sanctity of human life, and that abortion is a grave moral evil which must be opposed. As important as it is to vote pro-life, it's even more important to live it, and to transmit the values we hold to the next generation.

From Conception To Natural Death

I'd like you to take a moment to read an obituary with me. No, it's no one I know, and as the gentleman was of extremely advanced age, never married, and had what appears to have been a good kind of life, the obituary isn't the sort that makes you gasp and say "How sad!" even if you didn't know the person; it's actually rather intriguing:

Marion Joshua Hite

Recitation of the rosary followed by a funeral Mass will be at 9:30 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 11, 2008, in Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Portland for Marion Joshua "Doc" Hite of Beaverton, who died Oct. 4 at age 102.

Marion Joshua Hite was born Dec. 9, 1905, in Boring. A farmer in Gresham and a truck driver, he also owned a body-and-fender business. He was a member of the church.

Survivors include his sisters, Pearl Barger and Marie Spencer.

Remembrances to Human Life International. Arrangements by Zeller.

See what I mean? Short, sweet, a life of over a century summed up in a handful of words. But why does a farmer, truck driver, and body-and-fender business owner ask for remembrances to be made to Human Life International?

There was more to the story, which is here:

A gentle legend in the pro-life world has died.

Each day for decades, Doc Hite walked, stood, sat and eventually slumped outside a Portland abortion clinic, urging adoption over abortion. His mission was persistent testimony to what he considered a slaughter of innocents. Hite, a member of Holy Rosary Parish, kept up his protest until he was 100.

He died Oct. 4 at age 102, after several years of sickness thwarted his mission. There was a rosary and funeral Mass at Holy Rosary last weekend.

“Only the dear Lord knows how many babies he actually saved,” says Thomas Di Novo, a Beaverton member of a Catholic men’s association that included Hite as its spiritual inspiration. “I know we are not to declare anyone a saint before the church does, but there are many who thought of him as a living saint.” [...]

He did not usually speak harshly of others, but did have some words for Christians who would not join him. “I quoted Scripture,” he told the Sentinel in 1999. “‘Naked and you clothed me, thirsty and gave me drink.’ What will He say to them? ‘I was being tortured and killed by the abortionists and you never lifted a finger to stop it!’” [...]

Hite always spoke respectfully if pleadingly to the women he encountered outside the building, urging them to call a 1-800 number for information about adoption. He was rarely, if ever, harsh and leaned toward compassion.

There are about 10,000 abortions in Oregon each year and usually about one in three are performed at Lovejoy.

Hite’s motivation, he told the Sentinel in 1999, is “love of God and children.”
Some of the women who did not abort because of his presence at the clinic would bring their babies to see him. You could count them on one hand, but most people assume there were many others who made their decisions without telling him.

Hite, who according to the article had many nieces and nephews, never had any children of his own, and said two years ago that it might have been nice to have had children. But he did have children--the women he helped, the babies he saved, they will be the children who know him someday, God willing.

As his friend said, we can't canonize anyone before our Holy Mother Church does. But if there are some miracles soon in Portland, especially ones that involve the lives of the unborn, I think the Church will know where to start looking.

Marriage and the Nation

Lydia McGrew at What's Wrong with the World has written a wonderful post about the bait and switch reality of gay marriage legalization:

What interests me, however, is this fact: Massachusetts has an explicit statutory law requiring that parents be notified and given an opt-out opportunity for the discussion of "human sexuality." So why wasn't the Parkers' wish granted? It's very simple: Since homosexual "marriage" is now officially, legally recognized in Massachusetts, parents who object to such propoganda material are told that it is not about "human sexuality" but rather just about "real life."

This point is made explicitly by a school principal in this NPR story (you must click on another link to listen to the whole story) about a gay fairy tale in which a prince "marries" a prince. This principal even pontificates a bit about "abiding by Massachusetts law," as though the legalization of homosexual "marriage" means (as it obviously does not) that public schools are legally required to read gay fairy tales in class.

Get it? See, if the people in the little "diversity" story in the Parker boy's bookbag are just a family, and the relationship between the two men is just a marriage, then unless the book contains explicitly sexual material, it is no more about sexuality than any little booklet showing a little girl living with her mom and dad. For that matter, I suppose that a mom and dad in some book given to children could kiss, hug, or hold hands if it came up in the story without the book's concerning "human sexuality," so by this logic, so could her dad and his homosexual partner. Very clever. (Note: I am not saying that this happens in the book. I haven't read the book. I'm only pointing out what could happen in the book without the book's obviously falling under the statute.)

The legal logic is impeccable, and so is the bait and switch. Homosexual rights, we have been told, is about your right to do what you want to do in your own bedroom, to be left alone, not to be persecuted for your private acts. But let's be clear: That is so only insofar as this really is about sex. The private acts in question are sexual acts. But the whole goal has been not simply to permit those private acts, which no one was running out to try to stop anyway. The goal was to force normalization of those acts, and everyone knows well that the normalization of a particular type of sexual act is the unspoken theme and purpose, the very raison d'etre, for such books as Who's in a Family? and King and King. It is not, after all, as though the little girl's father and his partner are heterosexual college buddies who live together to save on the rent! A book like King and King, being a "love story," makes this point even more obvious. So of course this is about human sexuality, but it's oh-so-easy, once normalization has taken place, to pretend that it isn't.

So we started with privacy, and here is where we have ended up: "Oh, this isn't about sex at all. See, now that this is legally recognized as marriage, this is about real life. This is just about different kinds of families. It's a public matter and must be treated in public as any other marriage is treated publically." Gotcha.

Do read the whole thing, if you can.

I'm getting very tired of pro-gay marriage advocates asking "How does my gay marriage threaten your marriage?" as if that's all this was about. Their faux marriage threatens mine personally, immediately, and specifically no more than the current faux marriage of some oft-married, oft-divorced Hollywood starbeing's does.

But the total re-shaping of society in which marriage has nothing to do with biological parenthood and where parenthood has nothing to do with marriage does hurt me; it hurts all of us. You can't have an enduring social order based on temporary whims of passion engaged in by spoiled adults; you won't have progeny, if the bearing of children is seen as no more important or valid a lifestyle choice than some same-sex groom's choice to pair his white Swarovski-crystal encrusted wedding pumps and gray suit with an olive green derby hat to make his eyes really pop.

We've already created a nightmare situation for traditional marriage, where marriages are supposed to be exclusive and permanent and ordered toward children, and are instead open and temporary and ordered toward self-indulgence and narcissistic contraceptionism. Adding same-sex marriage to that already destructive reality will only hasten the complete collapse of traditional marriage, and with it, the collapse of America.

No nation has ever survived very long when its citizens decide their fun is too much ruined by the duties of fatherhood or motherhood. No nation has ever elevated an inherently sterile relationship to the status of marriage, either; the combination will be lethal for our country.

Bracing Ourselves

I know that some will see this post as unnecessarily defeatist, since the election is still over two weeks away.

But as the latest polling data shows, it might be wise to start thinking about the possible ramifications of an Obama presidency, so that we can get a head start identifying those areas of our lives most likely to be impacted and positioning ourselves to defend our most important principles.

Now, some will point out that the polls are all over the place; one has Obama ahead only by two percentage points, while the infamous CBS/NYT poll puts it at fourteen, leading to suggestions that their polling agents might occasionally want to poll people outside their actual corporate headquarters once in a while. But the reality is that nobody has McCain ahead, and with so short a time before the election, barring a last-minute October Surprise or other spoiler, it seems more likely than not that Obama will be our next president.

I remember how shocked some of us were when Clinton was first elected. It didn't seem possible that such an unprincipled and morally deficient person, so staunch a supporter of abortion (for, one sometimes suspected uneasily, his own reasons), so left-leaning and dictatorial a figure could possibly have been selected by a majority of the populace to lead America. What kind of nation could we be, that our fellow citizens would choose such a man as their leader?

I suspect the same kind of soul-searching will take place in the event of an Obama victory. But those who think that such a victory will be a good moment for Republican conservatives to redefine who they are and what is important to them from within the party are forgetting something--history. When the first George Bush was defeated in his second campaign, when Dole lost (however deservedly), the Republican party has moved, not to the right, but to the left. Should McCain go down in defeat, the neo-con wing of the party will scream that it's the fault of the die-hard social conservatives who insist on taking "extreme" positions against abortion and gay marriage, when clearly every American from kindergarten on believes that they have a fundamental right to both (as soon as they're old enough, that is).

Last year, I wrote this post about the flaws of our two-party system; while it might be slightly comforting to reflect on the notion that no matter how badly McCain might be doing, at least we haven't had to endure a Giuliani campaign, there is a part of me that wonders whether it wouldn't be better, in the end, for us conservatives if the Republican party drew that line in an upcoming national election, and went ahead and nominated a pro-abort, pro-gay marriage type. They could then compete with the Democrats for the same voters, and the rest of us could begin the arduous and lengthy process necessary for the forming of a new and viable third-party; because, while I may yet be voting for a third-party candidate this time around (especially after last night's less than encouraging answer from McCain on abortion and judges) I'm under no illusions that any of those parties are even remotely positioned to become national contenders.

Should we wait, though? Realizing that Republicans in general have continued to be disappointingly weak, for example, on abortion--and especially in making the scientific, moral, and philosophical case to the American people for its abolition--should we wait until the party is officially in the hands of "personally opposed" candidates? Or should we call for the establishment of a truly conservative party that will do exactly that?

Should we wait for the Republicans to quit bumbling around the gay marriage issue by offering civil union and partnership dodges that will only lead to full marriage rights in the end anyway, or support a fledgling conservative party that will stand firmly against the redefinition of marriage to accommodate a handful of people whose commitment to sexual perversion isn't even remotely akin to marriage?

Should we wait for the Republicans to come to understand that big business isn't necessarily the friend of those who embrace traditional living, rejecting the mindset that mindless consumerism is a patriotic virtue, or form a party of conservatives who realize that conservation and conservatism go rather well together, and that the increasing 24/7 demands of corporate employers are demeaning to their workers' human dignity and detrimental to a stable family life?

Should we wait for the Republicans to realize that a leaking border and promises of amnesty aren't helping working families who are already here, and are cheapening the struggles of those who sacrifice greatly in order to come to America legally--or should we work toward a new conservative party that, without abandoning human compassion, still makes it a priority to seal our borders and end the policy of turning a blind eye toward illegal immigration?

Should we wait for Republicans to stop thinking that America's role in the world demands military intervention in every corner of the globe, and come to understand that empire-building nearly always destroys the nation that engages in it; or should we form a party that truly will put America and American interests first, and engage in conflicts only when all peaceful options have been tried and have failed?

More and more, the two political parties seem like pale shadows of each other, and their policies seem to be aimed at the same goals--only the smallest details differentiate them, and aside from Ron Paul who truly called for constitutional-level reform, nobody seems to be proposing anything that would put the federal monster back in its place, and return to state and local governments power that was long since usurped from them.

So if Barack Obama is elected, our best ability to protect and preserve what we hold dear will most likely not come from the Republican Party; our best bet may lie in ending the game of pretending the Republicans really represent our interests, and, instead, create and support a new party which will actually do so.

A New Theme Song for the Campaign

I know the debate will be discussed exhaustively by people far more qualified than I am to analyze the tics and nuances before they quit pretending to be neutral and declare Obama the winner, on the grounds that he was presidential and McCain was doing an elderly angry rabid squirrel impression--which is what they decided they'd say three days ago, but they couldn't file their stories till after the debate, in case the unwashed Pajama Bloggers called them on it.

Still, of all the things to come out of the debate tonight, the "Joe the Plumber" theme is the one many Republicans are seizing on. Readers of National Review's "The Corner" emailed in comparisons between this meme and the "Bob the Builder" theme song; since blatant theft is an even more sincere form of flattery than mere imitation, I'm going to steal their clever refrain and run with it:

Joe the Plumber!
Can we tax him?
Joe the Plumber
Yes we can!

Wright, Dohrn and Ayers and ACORN too
Biden and Shelly plus you-know-who
Give them your cash or they'll take it by stealth
Stealing your money's called "spreading the wealth."

Joe the Plumber!
Can we tax him?
Joe the Plumber
Yes we can!

Time to elect them, they know what to do
Re-engineering our society, too
Abortion, gay marriage will be such fun
He'll keep the Change, though, 'cause he is The One

Socialism? Yeah!
Liberalism? Yeah!

Joe the Plumber!
Can we rob him?
Joe the Plumber
Yes we can! Yeah!

From Australia, A Wise Look At Palin-Hating

This opinion piece by Miranda Devine in the Sydney Morning Herald was quite an interesting read. I think she understands where so much of the Sarah Palin Hate comes from:

Judging by the opinion polls this week, the Alaskan Governor, Sarah Palin, probably will not get to be the US vice-president. But in her brief starring role on the global stage she has been a powerful psychic enema, flushing out the poison at the heart of establishment feminism for all to see.

No more sheathed claws or pretence about "tolerance" and "diversity". From Madonna to Sandra Bernhard, Pamela Anderson, Naomi Wolf, Lindsay Lohan and Kathy Lette, a certain type of influential progressive woman has been driven to insane rage by Palin's very existence. [...]

Not that Palin is a favourite of males of the left-leaning entertainment establishment, with Matt Damon last week damning her as a "scary thing".

But the intemperate reaction by women to Palin flags something beside ideological differences - a weird, visceral rage, with its roots in some entrenched psychic pain. There is an echo of bitchy high-school jealousy of the popular queen bee from the snarling, self-mutilating nerd and goths who vainly lusted after the cute boys she snared.

The consolation for the losers is that homecoming queens are meant to get married, get pregnant, get fat and lose their looks so the self-made strugglers such as Bernhard and Madonna can patronise them at school reunions. Palin, by having it all, has cheated. Not only was she Miss Wasilla 1984, but she married her childhood sweetheart, Todd Palin, kept her figure, had five attractive, seemingly well-adjusted children and was successful in her career. [...]

There is much more than high school angst to Palin hatred. Her ideology is 180 degrees wrong - evangelical Christian, hunting, oil-drilling and, most important of all, anti-abortion.

There is even a bumper sticker, "Abort Sarah Palin", and no diatribe against her fails to mention abortion.

Abortion is the emotional peg on which Palin-haters hang their hatreds and justify their intemperance. The touchstone issue which makes both sides hyperventilate has become such a bedrock article of faith for establishment feminists that they question it as little as their born-again Christian nemeses question the existence of God.

Even in light of medical advances in foetal surgery, premature baby medical care and prenatal imaging, it is unthinkable that progressive women would rethink abortion, even late-term abortion.

For them "choice" is not about choice at all, which is why Palin is such a threat.

Read the whole thing, if you can; it's a well-written look at the hostility feminists harbor toward Palin. One of the most interesting quotes comes from a female MP who voted against a recent abortion bill in Australia; she says, in part: "Feminists like myself are just saying [this issue] is not about criminality, but what abortion does to the woman … It injures her deeply. [But] we continue to feed the denial."

Americans are starting to notice the absolutist extremism that comes from pro-abortion politicians. Why, many Americans are starting to wonder, would anyone oppose a waiting period, or information being given to the woman, or parental notification? Why would anyone support grisly late-term abortions or abortions past viability? Why do "pro-choice" people refuse to support any choice other than the choice to kill the unborn human in his or her mother's womb?

The more that question is asked, the more the mask of insane rage and hatred will be removed form the faces of the pro-aborts; and underneath it, in many cases, I suspect we will see pain: the pain of their own abortions that still haunts them, the pain of knowing that they did, indeed, kill a child they would love to have now, and to know, the pain of realizing that this one inhuman act they committed cut them off, in a way, from what is good and decent and noble in humanity--the pain of unexpressed remorse, and unresolved guilt and sorrow.

Imperturbable?

There's no media bias in favor of Barack Obama; no, there's not, it's all in your head. Like here:

Barack Obama is nearly impossible to rattle. His aides and friends are fond of pointing out that his emotional highs are not too high and his lows are never particularly low. It is Obama's almost preternatural calm that will be John McCain's main obstacle at Wednesday night's final presidential debate in Hempstead, N.Y. [...]

Under these challenging circumstances, and with a vast audience of voters tuning in, McCain will enter the debate hall for his last chance to shake up the race. In order to change the dynamic, McCain will have to produce a major memorable moment at the expense of his rival — by forcing an error, exposing a flaw or unattractive trait, or revealing an inconsistency or weakness — which would then be replayed incessantly on the airwaves, rapaciously dissected by the media, and seized upon by the public.

Yet after more than a dozen primary debates and two previous high stakes presidential debates, Obama has remained calm to the point of being boring, and so low energy that McCain often appears to be arguing with himself. Obama nevertheless is uniformly confident and well prepared, his natural demeanor translating into a reassuring steadiness in the eyes of a jittery public.

I apologize to anyone who gets dizzy and passes out from the fumes rising from all those superlatives. Objective press? Not so much, I'm thinking.

The thing is, Obama has revealed plenty of unattractive traits, and has seemed far less than "imperturbable" on many occasions. But the only place these moments of less than stellar presentations have been "played incessantly" is YouTube, and as far as "rapacity" goes, I guess the media wore itself out going after Sarah Palin, and just doesn't have the energy left to expose the flaws of their favorite son.

For just one example, consider this, from Saddleback. Or another, a montage of various gaffes Obama has made, here. We don't see these kinds of clips on the nightly news; we only see the more polished, more confident examples. If Obama seems "imperturbable" at all, it's only because of the video editors at the MSM news channels.

I think that no matter how tonight's debate goes, within seconds of it ending the talking heads will be telling us how brilliantly Obama did, how magnificently he answered every question, and how (playing by the talking points Obama's campaign thoughtfully pre-released to the press so they'd know what to say) erratic John McCain was.

I have one more prediction to make: tonight, several key players in the mainstream media will use the word "presidential" to describe Barack Obama--again, regardless of how well or poorly he actually does in tonight's debate. They will sigh the word, "Presidential," they will coo the word, "Presidential," they will tag him with that label and then use it at every opportunity between now and election day to get it into the public mind. Some of the less balanced MSM types may abandon any pretense that they're being objective, and may all but endorse him. If he does unusually poorly, though, they may insert the word as a question, "Yes, I know, but was he presidential?" they will ask each other, giving every chance for the word to be affirmed, and for the paid opinion brokers to tell us that yes, tonight, despite whatever flaws, Barack was Presidential.

It's pretty easy for a candidate to appear "imperturbable" when the people who do the most to shape public opinion are themselves helping to create the illusion--and in the coming days, the illusion that Barack Obama is "presidential" will be created in exactly the same way.

From the "Water: Still Wet" Files

I didn't think this was ever really in question, did you? Excerpt:

WASHINGTON — U.S. Catholic voters are split on the issues of abortion and same-sex marriage between those who attend church at least twice a month and those who attend church less often, according to a survey released Tuesday (Oct. 14) by the Knights of Columbus.

The survey found that both Catholics (73 percent) and non-Catholics (71 percent) agreed that America needs a "moral makeover." Non-practicing Catholics — defined as those who attend church less than twice a month — were more likely to support abortion rights and same-sex marriage than the American population at large. [...]

Seventy-five percent of practicing Catholics oppose same-sex marriage, compared to 54% of non-practicing Catholics. Sixty-five percent of non-practicing Catholics identified themselves as "pro-choice" on abortion, compared to 36% of practicing Catholics.

I'm glad the Knights of Columbus did this survey, in all seriousness; too often, as Carl Anderson said, anyone who calls himself "Catholic" is recorded as such on national media surveys, which leads to all those headlines about Catholics supporting intrinsic evils that no self-respecting practicing Catholic would support for a minute.

Sadly, some practicing Catholics still do support abortion and gay marriage--but it's a much smaller number than media reports tend to suggest. Still, if roughly one of every three or four practicing, regular-Mass-attending Catholics is confused about these issues, I think it's time that one out of every four homilies specifically addressed Church teaching about the intrinsic evil of abortion and of homosexual acts, and why the Church is opposed to abortion and gay marriage.

Granted, some Dallas Catholics would get sore feet from all the marching out of Mass week after week, but eventually, they'd have to settle down--and that's a small price to pay, anyway, to make sure the truth is being proclaimed in and out of season.

Shut Down the CCHD

The other day, I received an email from a blogger named "A WashingtonDC Catholic" urging me to join his efforts to shut down the so-called Catholic Campaign for Human Development. He gets no argument from me; the organization would better be named "The not-quite-Catholic Lobby Group for Liberal Democratic Political Power," since their efforts tend toward that direction. Indeed, if I had to guess, I'd say that many of their partners are actually opposed to human development--if we're talking about development in utero, that is.

I finally got a chance to check out his blog post, which is here:

For the next month, in addition to my regular postings, I will be advocating the shutting down of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD). Unfortunately, the current structure of the CCHD has allowed it to assist in the financial crisis the US currently faces, as well as, possible voter fraud in this election on a scale that would make Boss Tweed jealous.

He goes on to make recommendations as to the ending of the CCHD charade.

Lest you think "A WashingtonDC Catholic" is exaggerating, I received a link from my sister-in-law to this Deal Hudson piece from InsideCatholic:

The Catholic Campaign for Human Development gave $1.1 million to ACORN in 2007. You can find this fact on the CCHD Website. If you add up all the groups called ACORN or Association Of Community Organization For Reform Now, you get a total of $1,111,000 in 2007.

With all the new scandals about ACORN, this funding may become more problematic for the CCHD than it already is.

Take a look at the clips below [go here--E.M.] from ACORN's 2008 National Convention and ask yourself whether you are comfortable with $1,000,000 of your Catholic money being given to them.

The CCHD is nothing more than a Saul Alinsky-esque organization that believes in worldly, political power as the solution to all human woes. Consider this:

Whether or not Barak Obama becomes the nest president of the United States, the annual Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) bears responsibility for raising this community organizer to his current national prominence. Through CCHD funding, he received a Machiavellian practicum. Through CCHD-funded organizations, Catholics sponsored his education - not at Harvard but in the Chicago streets. Thanks to CCHD grants, this convicted pro-abort has been backed by Catholics every step of his short, meteoric rise.

They aren't the only ones using the religious institution of their preference for political ends, of course, but the CCHD has been in business since 1970, pouring millions into Alinskyian organizing. [...]

The real money goes, instead, into organizations that promote social change. CCHD's founding resolution states that its primary funding will be for social projects "aimed at eliminating the very causes of poverty." To clarify what "social projectsE2 the CCHD thinks will "eliminate poverty", one has to look at what it funds.

A good percentage of these Catholic grants fund Alinsky-style, broad-based community organizations - including organizations Obama trained under and worked for - to restructure society along a socialist model. Alinskyian community organizations want to be the mediators of government, education, job training, job placement, healthcare, housing, and social services.

And if that isn't enough of a bitter pill, these organizations network with other progressives who fight against any limitation of abortion "rights" or homosexual "rights." Like Obama.

It's an absolute outrage that Catholic money is being funneled away from truly Catholic works of faith and mercy, and spent on two-dollar charlatans and hucksters who are selling the evils of socialism under a so-called "social justice" mantle. It's especially outrageous when one of these hucksters ends up running for president, on a platform of support for moral evils that Catholics abhor. "A WashingtonDC Catholic" is right--it's time for Catholics throughout America to demand that our money no longer be used for this sort of liberal leftist Democrat bilgewater, and insist on accountability and proof of tangible aid to the poor from our charitable contributions.

The Midpoint

Can you believe it's the midpoint for 40 Days for Life already? They've been doing a wonderful job, from everything I've been reading, in their efforts to save lives, change hearts, and provide a constant witness for the unborn.

The Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth's newspaper, which arrived at my house today, contained both the text of the recent joint letter from Bishop Vann and Bishop Farrell and this nice article:

It is the halfway point in a national event organizers call the longest and largest coordinated pro-life mobilization in history, and the Diocese of Fort Worth is playing its part in it. The event, “40 Days for Life,” which began Sept. 24 and will end Nov. 2, is a focused prolife effort that involves 40 days of prayer and fasting, peaceful vigil, and community outreach. Local participation, which takes place at Planned Parenthood near downtown Fort Worth at 301 N. Henderson St., has included volunteers from 17 parishes, student groups from Texas Christian University, the College of St. Thomas More, and the University of North Texas, as well as youth groups from Nolan Catholic High School and others.

“Forty Days for Life,” was founded in 2004 in Bryan/College Station, when a group of four people, two of them college students, prayed for an answer about how to reduce abortion in their area.

“They prayed, ‘God what do you want us to do?’” said Vicki Hauck, longtime director of Respect Life at St. Maria Goretti Parish in Arlington, “and they got the idea of prayer and fasting around the clock.” Hauck, along with 40-Days local outreach coordinator Reese Lantrip, helped advertise this year’s event among parishes in Arlington and Mansfield. The four people who founded the first 40-days event in 2004, put it together in a few weeks, activating some 1,000 people in College Station, according to Laura Barker, who was a volunteer at that time. They attribute to that event the resulting 28 percent decline in abortions in the community. [...]

“Now there are people participating in 170 cities across the United States and in Canada,” Hauck said. “Many people think that abortion is a woman’s choice, but when a grass roots movement like this takes place, it shows you God can take this little mustard seed and see what God can do?” [...]

Every hour of every day is scheduled, and, according to Giselle Ferguson, vigil coordinator, people call when they cannot be there, [outside the abortion clinic--E.M.] and others fill their spaces. There are always at least two people there, on the sidewalk, praying, she said, and sometimes extra ones stay longer than their own shifts. The Franciscan Friars of the Renewal and the Knights of Columbus took on all the 1 to 3 a.m. shifts, Castro said.

Hauck and her husband Jerry took two late hours, from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday. “As we knelt there,” she said, “we saw a pickup truck approaching, and we looked up, and it was Chuck Pelletier and his wife Pat, coming by to see how we were doing.” The Pelletiers are long-time pro-life activists in the diocese.

“Later that same night a black car approached, and I watched carefully and then realized it was our bishop!” Bishop Vann had presided at a confirmation, then a Shepherd’s Café, and stopped by the 40-Days site on his way home. “He said, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’” Hauck said. “What an awesome shepherd we have!” [...]

“In hindsight we see clearly. So many people around us don’t see it now, but we are the lens for them,” she [Laura Barker--E.M.] said. “Someday we will look back and say, ‘I can’t believe, as human beings, we thought it was okay to murder our children.’”

I've quoted from the article at such length because it's just so uplifting to read. The spirit of joyful hope that characterizes the pro-life movement, but especially the younger volunteers who are witnessing outside the clinic day and night, is inspiring, especially compared to the sour-faced reaction from, sadly, my generation (and a little older) who marched out of Mass rather than listen to the truth that Catholics may not, in good conscience, support pro-abortion candidates when there are reasonable alternatives.

I hope that someday we all will say, in addition to "I can't believe, as human beings, we thought it was okay to murder our children," this sentence: "I can't believe, as human beings, we thought it was okay to support, campaign for, and vote for people who thought we should murder our children." Hindsight, as Mrs. Barker said above, can be so brilliantly clear.

Motherhood, America, and the Draft/Combat Orphans

The Drudge Report today has a link to this story; apparently, Obama supports drafting women:

Even as the U.S. confronts two long wars, neither Sen. John McCain nor Sen. Barack Obama believes the country should take the politically perilous step of reviving the military draft.

But the two presidential candidates disagree on a key foundation of any future draft: Mr. Obama supports a requirement for both men and women to register with the Selective Service, while Mr. McCain doesn't think women should have to register.

Also, Mr. Obama would consider officially opening combat positions to women. Mr. McCain would not. [...]

Mr. Obama has said repeatedly that he will draw down the U.S. military presence in Iraq if he becomes president, but he has also said he would increase the number of troops in Afghanistan, where Taliban forces have seen a resurgence in recent years.

During a CNN/YouTube debate for Democratic presidential candidates last year, he said he doesn't "agree" with the draft.

But he did say women should be expected to register with the Selective Service, comparing the role of women to black soldiers and airmen who served during World War II, when the armed forces were still segregated.

"There was a time when African-Americans weren't allowed to serve in combat," Mr. Obama said. "And yet, when they did, not only did they perform brilliantly, but what also happened is they helped to change America, and they helped to underscore that we're equal.

"And I think that if women are registered for service -- not necessarily in combat roles, and I don't agree with the draft -- I think it will help to send a message to my two daughters that they've got obligations to this great country as well as boys do."

So, according to Obama, the only reason women have been excluded from combat roles in the military, and from registering for the draft, is because of discrimination, just like the bigotry and discrimination that kept African-Americans out of combat roles. It has nothing to do with the fact that women, generally speaking, aren't as strong as men are; and we're also generally smaller. The average height for a woman in America is 5'4"; of course, many branches of the military currently accept people less than five feet tall. But for combat?

In reality, the reason that Obama can say something so insulting about women realizing they've "got obligations" to this country is because he, and many other Americans, particularly the liberal Democrat ones, no longer value the one unique obligation women used to have, and used to be appreciated for: the obligation to be mothers to the next generation of citizens, to raise them, nurture them, oversee their educations, and make sure that in terms of virtue and a sense of responsibility they were ready to do their civic duties when the time came.

Democrats no longer believe in motherhood. They haven't for a long time, now; I realized when I read their party platform back when I was eighteen (sadly, it wasn't a presidential election year) that this was true. The party platform was full of sorrow for mothers--all those poor, poor mothers out there who couldn't even afford day care for their children, and thus had to live empty meaningless lives at home while their husbands worked in fulfilling jobs! Universal government-sponsored day care was one of their big issues then, though they've shifted now to health care instead, and are hiding the day care mandate under the cute label "early childhood education." (Motto: let's get those newborns into school! The sooner they start being exposed to the teachers' union, the sooner they'll all be good Democrats!)

Today, with so many mothers of young children working full time, the notion that a child needs anything special from his or her mother probably looks pretty stupid to the average American. Even active-duty military moms aren't discharged for pregnancy anymore, and are only given forty-two days leave after they give birth; what baby needs his or her mother longer than that? With the advent of the same-sex marriage era, we're being taught that children can be raised by two men or two women just as well as by one of each; so children just need some kind of caring adults around--or even uncaring but well-paid ones--and they'll thrive. Mothers are just incubators, and after that they're completely unnecessary excrescences, totally and absolutely replaceable. In Barack Obama's America the idea that mothers of young children--or of any children--ought to be exempt from a military draft on the grounds that their children might need them will be laughed to scorn by the feminists who hate the whole notion of motherhood.

Some of us still believe otherwise. Some of us believe that mothers are not replaceable in their children's lives. And we value fatherhood, too; but there is a difference. For we admire those fathers who serve our country; and though we know their absence is not without cost to their families, the fact is that even in a biological and psychological sense infants and young children need their mothers' nurturing and nursing and bonding in a different way than they need their fathers' presence.

Societies and cultures that forget this tend to be destroyed easier than societies and cultures that don't. A mother is not just one of many random adults who can help take care of a child; she is vital to the child, and her actions and words will have a greater influence in her children's lives than she can even imagine.

Dissent in Dallas

So, the bishops of Dallas and Fort Worth issued a joint pastoral letter which talked a lot of nonsense about how voting to end war or end poverty (admirable as those goals might be) doesn't mean you can overlook the unborn, and now you're really unhappy. Because after all none of your trendy Catholic friends are single-issue voters, and while you won't come right out and call yourself "pro-choice" (at least, not where your priest can hear you) the fact is that you don't know any unborn people personally, and you'd rather vote for the hip young diversity dude who talks just exactly like Sister Kathleen did about everything else (no, not Sister Kathleen Stern-face, but young Sister Kathleen stretchpants, with the guitar and the inner child and the groovy long hair; goodness, she must be over seventy now, but that's too, too depressing to realize as it makes one uncomfortably aware that one is on the wrong side of fifty). Sister K, as she liked to be called, said just the same kind of things about justice and oppression and the redistribution of wealth and taxing the rich capitalists who profited from everyone else's misery, so clearly the Pro-Abort candidate is a better fit for Catholic voters, right?

Only that's not what the bishops just said. And when the letter was read in your church this Sunday you gripped your well-manicured hands in anger, and maybe even thought about joining the storm of six or ten people who marched out; but unlike them, you don't actually remember the Vietnam protest era personally, and marching out would be a bit inconvenient what with your plans for Sunday brunch afterward with the equally irate woman two benches up who couldn't march out if she wanted, surrounded as she is by young families with children--honestly, who takes their kids to Mass week after week like that anymore? Uncouth, really.

So you wait, and when the pro-life petition is read during the prayer of the faithful you're even more annoyed than ususal; we get it, you think, wondering if the wild conspiracy your Womanchurch friend told you about the Republicans "buying" the local diocese could, after all, be true--because only a Republican would make this big of a deal about abortion.

And you tune out for a while, thinking about how much you and your brunch guests will enjoy complaining about the Church's sudden and ugly involvement in politics, and you even start to imagine talking to the media about it all, saying, perhaps, something like this:

Nicole LeBlanc said several people walked out of Dallas' Holy Trinity Catholic Church during the 11 a.m. Sunday Mass, when the letter was read at the time usually reserved for a homily.

Ms. LeBlanc, an Obama supporter, said she, too, was upset.

“As a Catholic, we’re taught about being independent moral agents with free will,” she said. “That letter from the bishops is basically telling us that if we vote for a candidate who supports abortion rights, we are basically immoral and our souls are imperiled.”

Ms. LeBlanc also said she felt the letter “has gone too far towards bringing political endorsements in the church, which is obviously not legal.”

Ms. LeBlanc said a protest of the letter is likely to occur outside the pastoral center of the Dallas Diocese this Wednesday afternoon.

Of course, you're not Ms. LeBlanc, though you know her; you travel in the same circles, and it's just like her to follow through with your own half-formed plans.

It's not until the Communion hymn that you're able to relax. It's one of your favorites from your childhood, and you sing along, "Whatsoever You Do to the least of my people, that you do unto me." Thank goodness this doesn't have anything to do with abortion," you think to yourself, as you wonder whether you should wear your Obama '08 button to the next parish council meeting.

Just For Fun

A Simple Thought

I didn't have time to write today; since Sarah Palin said everything that needed to be said, (Hat tip: CMR) anyway, I thought I'd just post a picture or two.

As 4-D ultrasounds become more and more prevalent, it's going to become increasingly difficult for the pro-abort extremists to justify their murderous intentions. That baby in the picture is a baby, not a "product of conception" or "unwanted tissue" or anything else that can be destroyed at will--yet it is legal in America to kill that baby at any time before birth.

I know the objection, that late-term abortions account for only a handful of all abortions, that an earlier abortion doesn't really kill a person. But this little one is only ten weeks old:


If we're going to end the evil of abortion in America, we need to keep showing these little ones, whose lives are so brutally ended before they are born. The media won't show these kinds of pictures, and the pro-aborts don't even want women considering abortion to see them, lest they change their minds when confronted with the humanity and beauty of the lives growing inside them. Abortion really is murder; we only have to look at these tiny precious humans to realize that.

We Interupt All This Serious Blogging...

...for something that, in the grand scheme of things, isn't really all that important; but it's just something I need to say.

Lots of Catholic mommy bloggers have reviewed the costumes coming from this company, around this time each year as homeschooling families get ready for All Saint's Day parties. I want to be clear, here: the costumes are lovely, small businesses deserve to be paid a fair price for handcrafted goods, and there's nothing wrong with a business choosing to make and sell such items; indeed, there is plenty that is admirable.

But let's be honest. The average homeschooling Catholic one-income many-child (or even not-so-many) family simply cannot afford All Saint's Day costumes or dress-up clothes that range in price from about $30 for a "diocesan shirt" (for a priest costume) to upwards of $70. In fact, only two items, the shirt and a brown Franciscan robe, are less than $40; most items are in the $50-$70 price range.

I'm sure I'm not alone (being the completely non-crafty type of mom) in that I read one of these reviews a year or two ago, ooohed and aahed over the lovely costumes, clicked on the link--and suffered severe sticker shock. To put it in perspective, when my girls needed a nice new dressy church outfit for a recent occasion I swept through the local bargain stores and clearance racks both in town and online, and managed to outfit them all for a staggering total of about $80.00--for three complete girls' Sunday outfits. And two of the three are tall enough to have to wear women's sizes (they're taller than me, actually). So the very idea of paying nearly that much (or, probably, that much by the time you add shipping) for one dress-up/costume item sent shivers down my thrifty spine. In a word, we can't afford something like that, not in our wildest dreams of affluence. Buying three of those costumes would cost at least half, if not more than half of my total bill for the year's educational supplies.

Now, I'm not saying that people who can easily afford these costumes shouldn't support a Catholic family business and enjoy the costumes to the fullest extent; that ought to go without saying. But as I said, the idea, sometimes repeated on the blogs of various homeschooling moms who are reviewing these costumes, that these are an "affordable" dress-up product is really going to depend on your individual family circumstances, and unless I'm completely crazy and off-base, I think that many, many families would find a $50-$70 price tag for a single gift for one child to be not exactly synonymous with their experience of the meaning of the word "affordable," especially right now.

So, All Saint's Day is coming, and your children saw the pretty costumes on your Google Reader feed, but there's no way you can afford one for even one let alone all three or four or five or eight or twelve of your kids. And, like me, you're afflicted with the uncrafty gene; you're a M.I.S.C.R.E.A.N.T., whose best efforts are a little...well...

So what do you do?

The great thing about costumes is that, lovely as the examples of the ones for sale are, costumes don't actually have to be perfect. One year my girls went to our family All Saints' Party as Faith, Hope, and Charity--different colored tee shirts to which we had affixed big felt symbols, the anchor, the cross, and the heart, pretty much sufficed for the costume--but we added some capes (buy fabric, buy large pins to secure fabric around neck or directly to shirt, repeat as necessary) just for fun. Any nun saint uses an old black knit dress of mine, belted around the waste, with a bit of fabric or an old white pillowcase for a veil; if a cape is required we follow the "cape procedure" above. Queen saints need a pretty dress--usually one they actually wear to Sunday Mass--with lots of glittery accessories and a crown; and such favorites as Kateri Tekakwitha or St. Joan of Arc just need a slightly modified inexpensive secular costume, or the accessories for such a costume with normal clothes of an appropriate type and color underneath.

And if you've done the typical saint costumes for years now and want to try something different, there's the "patron of..." choices. Your son's been St. Michael multiple times? St. Michael is the patron of policemen, so a pair of dark pants, a dark shirt, and a shiny badge (plastic from the dollar store, or tinfoil over cardboard) and you're good to go! Your daughter has been every nun saint in the calendar? Two of mine, this year, are dressing up as some of Our Lady's titles: Mirror of Justice and Mystical Rose, to be exact. And there are the virtues: a cardboard box with marker lines for bricks, with arm holes cut out at the sides, would be cute for "Fortitude," right? (Fort...itude, that is.) I have, so far, resisted the temptation to festoon a child in tacky felt banners and send her along as the "Spirit of Vatican II..." but you can tell I've considered it. :)

Most children I know love to play dress-up. But they don't look for perfection or beauty in their costumes, and are content with whatever we can do. A wisp of fabric and a carefully-selected accessory or two are all that are needed to set their imaginations soaring. Again, that doesn't mean that the lovely handcrafted costumes aren't a treasure to those who do can and do buy them; but in our imitation of the saints, being content with what we have, avoiding all covetousness, and refusing to make something that is childlike in its simplicity into a materialistic value that is beyond our means is more important than trying very hard to look like a saint--from the outside only.

The Right To Know Nothing

A pro-abortion group is suing in Oklahoma over a law that requires that a woman who wants an abortion find out a bit about what she's actually doing:

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — An advocacy group is suing over an Oklahoma law that prohibits a woman from getting an abortion unless she first has an ultrasound and the doctor describes to her what the fetus looks like.

In the lawsuit filed Thursday in Oklahoma County District Court, the Center for Reproductive Rights says that the requirement intrudes on privacy, endangers health and assaults dignity.

The law, set to go into effect Nov. 1, would make Oklahoma the fourth state in the nation to require that ultrasounds be performed before a woman can have an abortion and that the ultrasounds be made available to the patient for viewing, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based health research organization.

The other states are Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. [...]

"Anti-choice activists will stop at nothing to prevent a woman from getting an abortion, but trying to manipulate a woman's decisions about her own life and health goes beyond the pale," said Stephanie Toti, staff attorney in the U.S. Legal Program of the Center for Reproductive Rights and lead attorney on the case.

Isn't it amazing that making sure that a woman knows that she's actually killing an unborn child if she has an abortion is seen as "trying to manipulate a woman's decisions..."? What on earth are the pro-aborts--oh, excuse me, Ms. Toti, pro-death activists--afraid of? That the woman might actually see that tiny head or those tiny hands or those tiny feet and decide that, unlike Ms. Toti, she's not actually enough of a moral monster to go through with the scheduled killing?

Since when does the exercise of what is increasingly (and sickeningly) being called a "fundamental human right" require that the person "exercising" that "right" be kept in complete ignorance as to the enormity and horror of what it is she is actually doing?

The Tyranny of Gay Marriage

By now, of course, you've heard that today Connecticut became the third state to tear down and destroy the traditional definition of marriage, deciding that since neither biology, reproduction, parenthood, or anything else sane or rational has anything to do with getting married, we might as well let two guys or two gals call themselves a married couple; marriage is meaningless, so why shouldn't everybody have one?

Of course, the Court's reasoning is amazingly bereft of anything even approaching an idea; essentially, the four members of the Connecticut Supreme Court that foisted this travesty upon the unwilling citizens of their poor state behaved like two-year-olds, stomping their judicial feet and imposing a judicial fiat that boils down to "Because I want to!" See for yourself:

The Supreme Court released its historic ruling at 11:30 a.m. Citing the equal protection clause of the state constitution, the justices ruled that civil unions were discriminatory and that the state's "understanding of marriage must yield to a more contemporary appreciation of the rights entitled to constitutional protection."

"Interpreting our state constitutional provisions in accordance with firmly established equal protection principles leads inevitably to the conclusion that gay persons are entitled to marry the otherwise qualified same sex partner of their choice," the majority wrote. "To decide otherwise would require us to apply one set of constitutional principles to gay persons and another to all others."

Got that? The whole history and tradition of what a marriage is and whom it involves and what it's for must yield to the judges' trendy new ideas, 'cause otherwise they don't get what they want. That's no different than a child informing his parents that they must yield to his request for a later bedtime, on the grounds that he wants one, and that some of his friends have been known to be given one.

You can go ahead and start planning for incestuous marriages, polygamy, group marriages, swingers with tax breaks, and any other hideous perversion of marriage you can imagine; it's all going to be there, because absolutely nothing in the Connecticut Supreme Court's temper tantrum--it's way too kind to call it a decision--would forbid any of that. Heck, if they're going to make some kind of god out of the equal protection clause, why can't kids get married? On what grounds do we deny fifth-graders, whom we fully expect to be sexually active and thus shove condom-covered bananas at them in the schools, the right to get married to the opposite or same-gender paramour or paramours they're romping under the bleachers with?

You can also start planning for the brave new world where Catholics and others who share our beliefs about marriage are defined as bigots, marginalized, excluded, and persecuted for adhering to our Church's teachings about the sanctity of marriage and the absolute impossibility of two men or two women having anything even remotely equal to the fruitful and loving relationship of a husband and a wife. Indeed, a gay "marriage" will never be equal to a real marriage for the simple reason that a gay couple can never as a couple bring a new human life into being for which they are responsible; even a married couple who can't have children of their own can model Christ's love to their adopted children, but gay "couples" who adopt are causing spiritual damage to "their" children's souls, handing them scorpions instead of bread, and making them little more than objectified pawns in their game of pushing for societal approval.

Next week, I'm going to return to Rod Dreher's idea that we traditionalists might, indeed, have to form intentional communities in order to stand strong with each other against the onslaught that this madness will inevitably produce. To a certain extent, we've already begun to do that, through this medium of the Internet and the ability it gives us to connect with each other. In the meantime, we have to do what we still can while we still can to keep our children from growing up with the lie that gay marriage is good and the lie that opposing it is bigotry. Their souls require us to remain diligent, despite the growing darkness.

Depression, Times Two?

The stock market continues to slide, straining the ability of overworked financiers to come up with appropriate metaphors and causing wild rumors of an all-out metaphor shortage:

"The story is getting to be like that movie Groundhog Day," said Arthur Hogan, chief market analyst at Jefferies & Co. He pointed to the still-frozen credit markets, and Libor, the bank-to-bank lending rate that remains stubbornly high despite the Fed's recent rate cut.

"Until that starts coming down, you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone getting excited about stocks," Hogan said. "Everything we're seeing his historic. The problem is historic, the solutions are historic, and unfortunately, the sell-off is historic. It's not the kind of history you want to be making." [...]

"We're stuck in a morass and I think it's going to take quite some time to come out of it," said Stephen Carl, principal and head of equity trading at The Williams Capital Group. [...]

"I think the market's way oversold. But I can't stand in the way of this falling knife - I'd get sliced open," said Phil Orlando, chief equity market strategist at Federated Investors. "Investors are just saying, get me out at any price."

It's hard to believe that all of those images come from a single AP article; if they're not more careful during these desperate times, outraged English professors all across America may descend on Wall Street with completely blank protest signs to convey their anger at so random and wasteful a deployment of strained metaphors, which are already overworked and exhausted as they are every campaign season.

I joke about this because we don't yet know just how serious it all will become. I tend to avoid talk of hoarding food and planning to head for the hills, because there seems to be an element among conservatives (and they have a liberal counterpart, too) that seems to delight in the prospect, and have spent more time on this earth in hill-heading strategic planning than in actually living their lives. But there's no doubt that it's unsettling to hear people who remember the Great Depression start to talk about how this could end up being just as bad for the average American family, when the Dow finishes its current rate of decent and the dust clears enough for us to assess the damage properly.

There's no way to know, yet. But I take comfort in one thing: as a one-income homeschooling family we're already living a pretty sustainable lifestyle compared to many of our counterparts.

Think of it. When the Great Depression hit, most people had only one source of income. As more and more men lost their jobs families faced grinding poverty.

But now, most people rely on two separate incomes just to live in their homes and pay their bills. Let's face it: most people rely on two separate incomes to qualify for enough credit to live in their homes, and they're already living on borrowed money. How many people do you know who owe ten, twenty, even thirty thousand dollars or more in credit card debt alone? How many people do you know who would default on their mortgages if only one spouse were out of work?

If massive layoffs follow this current drop in the markets as some suspect they will, one-income families won't be immune at all to the devastating effects of that. But a one-income family has the possibility of having two people replace that one income--if times were desperate enough. The two-income family, though, usually needs to replace both incomes to stay in their homes and continue to live a life even remotely similar to the one they lived before.

One income-families, especially homeschooling families, have some other advantages as well:

-The mother usually cooks most of the family's food from scratch, and can do so economically;

-A second car, while nice to have, is not essential and can be given up in hard times;

-Educational costs can be reduced to almost nothing, and extracurriculars that cost too much can be given up for the duration;

-The family is usually already striving to live a life apart from some elements of popular culture, reducing the children's exposure to various cultural elements which tend to be expensive; the deliberate cultivation of anti-materialist attitudes forms a part of many homeschoolers' lives.

I'm sure there are more advantages in hard times than these, too. But these are some of the immediate ways homeschooling moms can have a positive effect on her family's financial state should such efforts become necessary.

Protesting Abortion in America

Do you know the definition of disorderly conduct in Utah? Apparently, it's standing outside an abortion clinic with a baby in one arm and a diaper bag flung over the other, as you peacefully protest and offer leaflets to clinic victims--but only if they want one:

Julie Bird says she held her baby in one arm, with a diaper bag slung over a shoulder, as she distributed leaflets outside the a Salt Lake abortion clinic. But in February 2007, she says she was accused of assault outside the Utah Women’s Center, and cited by police.

The charge, which turned into a disorderly conduct infraction, finally went to Salt Lake Municipal Court this week, and Julie was found guilty.

Her lawyer, Frank Mylar, says she was ordered to pay a $750 fine and was placed on probation for 12 months. Another woman, also represented by Mylar, received the same sentence for trespassing.

“We were there in a very peaceful, gentle, loving manner,” said Julie, adding her presence was not part of a protest or demonstration. “Our purpose was simply to offer information and whether or not people took it was up to them.” [...]

Julie Bird says she stayed on the sidewalk parallel to the street. The other woman, says attorney Mylar, walked on the walkway toward the business, but did not go inside the building.

“Everyone needs to take note of this case,” said Mylar. “Whoever wants to exercise their First Amendment rights in a public forum, on a public sidewalk, on a public parking lot, wherever the public place might be, or even in a business where it has not be posted 'no trespassing,' they are at risk of being criminally prosecuted."

Take note: this is the case today, in Bush's America. What will it be like under Obama, when protesters are forbidden by federal law to assemble anywhere near abortion clinics, even on public property like sidewalks?

Think that's an exaggeration? Read here; if FOCA is passed and abortion is declared to be a "fundamental right," putting it on the same legal footing as free speech, then one's fundamental right to free speech will not be protected if one's free speech is seen as interfering with someone else's fundamental right to an abortion.

If things can be this bad for pro-life protesters in America today, how bad will they be under the Pro-Abortionist In Chief?

Why It Matters

In the past few weeks we've heard a lot of voices, Catholic, Christian, and other, trying to claim that the abortion issue is no longer or should no longer be an issue of primary importance for people of faith; that in this election, this moment in history, other matters or other issues should take precedence, and that recognizing this reality is not an abandonment of pro-life principles but rather evidence of a dawning maturity and pragmatism that in the end will do more to combat abortion in America than anything we could hope to expect from electing a President who is at least somewhat pro-life, even if there are troubling exceptions in his view of the abortion issue.

I respect many of the people who have taken this position. But my respect for them doesn't stop me from rejecting this opinion wholeheartedly, as being fundamentally misguided and philosophically deficient.

This position comes from a pragmatic standpoint, ultimately. It takes the stance that the only reason to vote or not vote for a pro-life candidate has to do with that person's ability and commitment to ending a certain number of abortions. If it is too late--if the Supreme Court will never overturn Roe v. Wade--if legislators will never attempt to pass meaningful restrictions--then we no longer ought to vote for pro-life presidential candidates. Their opinions on the sanctity of human life are like their opinions on the value of the arts or the importance of post-graduate education: not altogether unimportant, of course, but unlikely to have much more influence on the people of America than that limited influence the president can achieve by using his personal presence or forming President's Councils on the subject. So, laudable though that level of involvement might be, it's a luxury to vote at such a time as this with such pressing matters involving war and economics for an issue that, however personally important it is to us, is really not something the president can do much about.

And I recognize that there might be some merit in arguments like that. But in the end, this sort of argument misses the point completely.

Power is a curious thing. It seems to bend good men and make them bad, and to break bad men altogether in the service of evil. Earthly power especially has this effect; that power corrupts is a cliche, which means that it is true. It is not impossible for a good man of decent character to take upon himself the duties and responsibilities of a high office; it's not even impossible for him to remain a good man when his duties are at an end. But no man carries the burden of power without being marked by it; no man escapes from power's contaminating embrace entirely unscathed. If he has struggled against its temptations and emerged with a victorious soul he has triumphed, indeed, and will have the humility to acknowledge God's grace as his salvation. But if he has let himself drown in power's peccant allurements he will be changed forever for the worse, and may try in vain the rest of his sleepless nights to recapture the untroubled innocence of his earlier years. Worst of all, though, are those whose lust for power have already made them jettison everything of goodness, decency, nobility of character and greatness of soul in the quest for it; they will be tyrants when they finally grasp it, as their ceaseless ambition, having achieved at last its object, begins to starve to death unless more and more power can be fed to assuage its mewling cries.

There are, in America, private citizens who call themselves "pro-choice" on abortion. Many of them refuse to face abortion's ugliness; others would actually put some restrictions in place so long as the earliest abortions remained legal, which leads one to suspect they only fail to recognize the humanity of the unborn before she begins to look like the human being she is and has been from the start. Sometimes their positions are illogical and contradictory, not well-thought out, and not inflexible either. Many of them eventually change their minds about abortion and some become the bravest champions of innocent unborn human life.

But politicians and government leaders who call themselves "pro-choice" don't have the excuse that they haven't really looked into the matter or don't understand it. Most of them actually do, horrifying as that is to realize. Most of them know perfectly well that abortion kills an innocent unborn human child. But they try all kinds of dodges to ease their consciences, using words like women's rights and reproductive freedom and personally opposed and the ever-present choice. In this way they hide the dark reality of what they support, just as all evil hides from the light when given the chance to do so.

Some, like Barack Obama, go further than that. Obama is not "personally opposed" to abortion--I don't believe he's ever said that phrase. Obama supported partial-birth abortion, opposed the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, opposed parental notification, supports FOCA which will tear down all state restrictions on abortion, and has said of his daughters that if they became pregnant he wouldn't want them "punished with a baby." Difficult as it is to fathom the character deficiencies of the "personally opposed" politicians, it becomes mind-bogglingly so to fathom the character deficiencies of politicians like Obama, who has literally voted to let already-born babies die, in the name of their mother's choice.

I want to say this clearly: I utterly and completely reject the notion that any man or woman who supports legalized abortion on demand is in any way qualified to hold any elected office in the United States of America. Please note that this is not a partisan statement; I have never, to my best knowledge, voted for a pro-abortion Republican either, whether they claimed to be "personally opposed" or not.

Why do I believe this? Because I think that anyone whose soul is so depraved, whose character is so deficient, whose mind is so warped and whose nature so perverted as to allow them to accept with equanimity the notion of abortion at all (let alone partial-birth abortion, as many of them do) is not even capable of being trusted with the kind of power we're talking about. The measure of a man's capacity for goodness is often taken by how he treats those who are frequently discarded by society: the widow, the orphan, the unborn, the elderly, the patient with PVS, the person who depends on others for care. Those who shrug at the murder of the unborn will do the same when these lives are threatened; they can't give him any of the intoxicating power he lives for, are worth nothing economically, and are a drain on the resources of society; they are better dead.

Such ideas as these will those who support abortion inevitably embrace; it is their inexorable way, to care only for those who can add to their substance, and to care nothing at all (except perhaps symbolically, in speeches) for those who can't. They should not be trusted to run a nation; they do not conduct themselves honorably, and are indeed incapable of honor so long as they are willing to see an entire class of people as "life unworthy of life."

In the end, the pragmatic arguments are like sand; they shift with each change in one's personal assessments of which candidate will better protect one's own interests, and fail to recognize the bedrock principles that lie beneath. It does not matter whether pro-life candidates can end abortion, now; what matters is that pro-abortion candidates are morally unfit for public office, especially the highest office in the land.

Children, Family, Community

In every state in America there are infant safe haven or so-called "Baby Moses" laws, laws which allow a child to be dropped off at designated safe places when the parent can't or no longer wants to take care of the baby. While these laws have their critics, I believe that they are well-intentioned, designed to give desperate parents a way out, in an effort to reduce child abuse and infant homicide tragedies that so often make the headlines. I can't imagine being a parent in that situation, but I think it would be heartless to assume that these parents don't love their children or don't care about them; there can be many pressures, internal and external, that can lead to a crisis where a baby must be given to others to care for and raise him or her, and the laws make it possible for parents in these terrible circumstances to take their baby someplace safe.

Unfortunately, when the State of Nebraska designed a law like this one, they forgot one crucial detail; they forgot to define the word "child." The consequences have been amazingly sad:

Of the 17 children relinquished since the law took effect in July, only four are younger than 10 -- and all four are among the nine siblings abandoned by a man September 24 at an Omaha hospital.

On Tuesday, a 14-year-old girl from Council Bluffs, Iowa, was abandoned at Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha, Nebraska, just across the Missouri River from Council Bluffs. The case marks the first time a parent has crossed state lines to abandon a teenager in Nebraska, authorities said.

"The few situations we've seen so far demonstrate the need for a change in Nebraska's safe haven law," Gov. Dave Heineman said in a statement Monday. "In the coming legislative session, I will advocate for changes that put the focus back on protecting an infant in danger. That should be our priority." [...]

When it was introduced in the Legislature, the bill had a presumed age limitation of 72 hours, said Todd Landry, director of the state's Division of Children and Family Services.

"The original intent was to protect infants from the immediate danger of being harmed," he said. [...]

The Omaha man who left his nine children, ages 1 to 17, at Creighton University Medical Center was overwhelmed by the sudden death of his wife after the youngest child was born, he told CNN affiliate KETV.

"I was with her for 17 years, and then she was gone. What was I going to do?" Gary Staton said. "We raised them together. I didn't think I could do it alone. I fell apart. I couldn't take care of them."

Staton is just the kind of parent whom safe haven laws fail to help, Johnson said.

"He was grieving, he didn't have a lot of money, and all those children -- he was trying to figure out how to feed them, how to clothe them, and deal with the grief of losing his wife. He needed help," she said.

I think this is the kind of thing we see happen when the sense of community that was once a feature of our nation has unraveled to the point where the safety nets people once had no longer exist. The grieving widower who abandoned his nine children, the woman who could no longer help her nephew--they are symbols of people trying to do alone that great work of raising children which used to require--no, not a village--but a large, extended family, and a thriving community of neighbors who cared enough to lend a hand when someone was in trouble.

The thing is, I still think that kind of community is out there, and our nation is still full of people with generous hearts and loving natures. In the aftermath of 9/11 Americans lined up to help however they could; after Katrina families opened their doors to total strangers. The will to come to the aid of those in need has never vanished.

But so often, we don't know who is in need. We don't know whose life is getting more and more desperate by the minute, or which parent who says "I don't know what to do with him anymore. I'm afraid for him, that he'll end up dead or in jail," really means it. We don't know which kids, indoctrinated since kindergarten to believe that they are wiser and freer and more noble than their parents and thus shouldn't accept their authority, have become the sort of teenage anarchists who expect their parents to feed and clothe and shelter them, to provide everything, to clean up all the messes the children leave behind even when that involves trips to the principal's office or restitution to neighbors whose property has been carelessly destroyed--all without giving anything in return but more trouble and more heartache. We don't know which parents have foolishly or fearfully bought into the notion that discipline equals id-squashing or child abuse and have thus never placed any limits, to the point that the cute boisterous two-year-old has become the surly delinquent thirteen-year old who is rapidly becoming a danger to himself and others.

The answer, as the authorities quoted in the article have said, is not to allow parents to abandon their teens. Safe haven laws weren't designed to take care of troubled young people or parents who have been widowed or divorced and suddenly don't know what to do. There are other ways for these problems to be addressed--but the best way of all would be for us to start saying "Hello!" to the people in our communities, to ask how they are doing and really want an answer, and to be willing to give of ourselves when we can help. It's true that some teens may need far more than this in terms of psychological help, and for that government aid may be necessary; but one of the reasons we have problems like these is that we've gotten used to expecting the government to do what the people are not only better at doing, but uniquely capable of achieving: reaching out to our neighbors in the exercise of brotherly love, letting them know we care, and encouraging them to persevere by helping them in any way we can.

A New Jane Roe

I've been focusing on the abortion issue in terms of the upcoming election; I plan to write about that a bit more later. Like many people I reject the notion that we've already lost the Supreme Court or that our president's ideas about this issue are irrelevant, and while it may be quite true that there are other effective ways to stop abortions from happening that doesn't mean, to me, that we must abandon the political sphere altogether.

That said, though, I applaud the recent success pro-lifers have had in going after Planned Parenthood or other abortionists directly. From helping women who were injured or even raped by their abortionist to pursue legal recourse, to shining a spotlight on clinic health standards or dubious practices, to other efforts of a similar kind these strategies represent relatively new, and often very effective, ways to combat abortion.

This current case in Ohio is the kind of thing I'd like to see happen more and more often--whether or not the plaintiffs share our pro-life views:

In March 2004, the 14-year-old identified as Jane Roe entered the Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio clinic with John Haller, the 21-year-old soccer coach who had impregnated her.

The girl had attempted to evade parental-notification requirements by giving Haller's phone number as her father's, according to court records.

When Haller accompanied her to the clinic, Jane Roe identified him as her stepbrother, court records show, and Haller used his credit card to pay for the abortion.

Haller later was convicted of seven counts of sexual battery.

The fact that Planned Parenthood fell for the ruse suggests that its staff and doctors are willing to overlook evidence of abuse, Miller and Hurley said.

They said that they're looking for records of approximately 200 girls a year who seek abortions from Planned Parenthood in Ohio. The records would omit the girls' names and other information that could identify them, the lawyers said. Only those records would show whether Planned Parenthood neglected its duty to inform authorities of suspected abuse, Hurley said.

The girl's parents are the ones suing; their rights were violated by Planned Parenthood's willingness to overlook both the statutory rape situation and the girl's rather shaky explanations as to who John Haller actually was. In their rush to get the girl's baby killed Planned Parenthood didn't ask too many questions; you could argue that they didn't ask enough, by a long shot.

Not surprisingly, Planned Parenthood is balking, on the grounds that "privacy" is at stake. However, in the state of Ohio any girl under sixteen who is pregnant by any man over the age of eighteen is a statutory rape victim, and Planned Parenthood is required by law to report it, so it's unclear how releasing similar information to lawyers violates anyone's privacy, except for Planned Parenthood's, of course.

And undercover pro-life investigations have turned up a consistent pattern of Planned Parenthood employees failing to report statutory rape and the abuse of minors, so it's not irrelevant to the "Roe's" lawsuit for them to seek this information in their attempt to prove negligence, and possibly even criminal negligence, on the part of Planned Parenthood.

I think pro-life state legislators have an unprecedented opportunity, as cases like these become public, to push for new legislation that will make it a criminal offense for mandatory reporters to fail to report credible suspicion of statutory rape, and that will also consider evidence of pregnancy in a minor under the age of sixteen to be such evidence in any state where any sexual contact with persons below that age is defined as statutory rape. It's the height of hypocrisy for liberals to push for all kinds of state oversight of homeschooling, for one example, on the grounds that child abuse prevention demands such oversight, but then to shrug and look the other way as young girls are victimized by much older men, who then drive the pregnant girls to the local Planned Parenthood clinic knowing they'll most likely get away with their crimes and be free to keep abusing children.

For the sake of fourteen-year-old "Jane Roe," I hope that Planned Parenthood will be forced to disclose their information. Too many parents don't ever learn until much too late that their daughters are being abused by grown men, who groom them and promise them love and affection in exchange for sexual favors. And these poor young women will go on to suffer all the trauma that all child sex abuse victims suffer, compounded by the pain of early abortions and the knowledge that the adults who should have known better and could have stopped the abuse never even asked questions, not even when a girl of fourteen shows up with an adult male and asks for an abortion.

We Can't Compromise on Abortion

Steve Waldman at Beliefnet writes this lengthy and thoughtful post on whether or not Democrats might be able to reduce abortions more than Republicans (HT: Rod Dreher). He asks some interesting--if provocative--questions, including:

Because of the need to preserve the coalition, it's inconceivable therefore that any pro-contraception-pro-life leaders would ever pose this horrific question to the Catholic Church: is it possible that your opposition to birth control over the years has increased the number of abortions? Nor is it likely that they would say to their conservative evangelical compatriots: isn't it possible that your resistance to sex education, has led to more abortions?

I've written here before about the Church's teaching regarding contraception; suffice it to say that the Church's teaching is much more complex and human than people outside the Church generally realize. Moreover, it simply can't be posited that birth control "solves" the problem of abortion; it is birth control, and the "sex without consequences" attitude which accompanies it, that leads to the "need" for abortion in the first place.

But Waldman is raising some other issues that Protestants and other non-Catholic Christians might need to examine, in particular the fact that many Christians don't oppose fertility treatments that can destroy an embryo, such as IVF. It's a good question to ask, especially to those who oppose ESCR but favor IVF, a situation that exists among some Christians.

The real problem, though, is this. We've been down this kind of road before, as a nation, when the moral evil in question was slavery. All kinds of efforts were made to approve it, to allow it to spread, to compromise with it, to overlook it, and so forth. Some of the events which preceded the Civil War were last-ditch legislative efforts to keep slavery contained to the Southern states and not let it spread to the territories--but to keep slavery legal.

But it didn't work. The nation could not, as Lincoln said, remain a nation divided--not when the division was over a grave moral evil that some wanted to allow and others to abolish. Limiting slavery, confining slavery, seeking to remove the rights of freed slaves or those who escaped from slavery to the non-slave territories or states, all of those things percolated below the national consciousness for years until the philosophical and moral impossibility of living in a nation which codified such evil and refused to address it directly boiled over into those things which made the Civil War inevitable.

At our present time in history we know that abortion is an evil which permeates our states and which the Supreme Court's infamous decisions have made ubiquitous. A state that wanted to outlaw abortion couldn't do so at the present time, and that won't change under the Democrats, who think the only way to protect the "choice" to kill one's own offspring in utero is to mandate that the status quo remain firmly in place.

And that is why, despite the clear anguish of so many, Catholics, Christians, and others, who would love to believe that Barack Obama isn't going to make abortion law any worse today than it already is and that they can therefore vote for him with a reasonably clear conscience, it must be said that the answer to the question at hand is, no. No, the Democrats will not reduce abortions more than the Republicans. No, the party of Death will not lead to a greater respect for Life. No, even if you wish to believe that abortions will be reduced under Obama, you must accept the reality that they will not be. At best, more and more abortions will be early, chemically-induced abortions instead of gruesome surgical ones, and the battle for the lives of our tiniest Americans will shift from the ugly, hellish abortion clinics to sanitized pharmacies and the aisles of the banality of evil in our local ShopWalTarStuffEmporiumsMart where currently the dreary hell-tickets boxed up as condoms and similar attacks on our immortal souls and those of our children squat like horned gargoyles that hiss at us as we pass by on our way to buy bread or toothpaste.

There are many things in the political sphere for which it is perfectly reasonable and logical and moral to work out compromises. But just as there was no compromising with the evil that was slavery, so is it true that we can't compromise with the evil that is abortion. It is already eating through the pillars of life and liberty upon which our founding fathers built this country, and if we continue to pretend that the radioactive fallout raining down upon us following the sexual revolution's destruction of the nuclear family is a harmless breeze, we shouldn't be surprised if we wake one day in the not-to-distant future to find that that wind we have sown has become the whirlwind of destruction, poised to claim its harvest.

Knowing Your Audience

I must confess: I'm a homeschooling mom who actually likes workbooks. Workbooks have gotten a rather bad rap among some of the more creative, more motivated, more...er...awake variety of homeschooling moms, the ones who can come up with interesting writing assignments or history rabbit trails (is that right? I don't know all the terms yet) and so on at the drop of the proverbial headgear; but I've enjoyed supplementing our core curricula with the occasional workbook, especially in math and in language arts, two areas where practice makes perfect and practice is a lot easier to take, when you're a child, if there's a neat page with a box and a few lines for you too fill, instead of a terrifying expanse of blank paper and a mother who says with cheerful treachery, "Write about anything you'd like to write about!"

One set of workbooks we use to supplement language arts come from a series called "Spectrum Writing," and I enjoy the way the authors challenge children to go beyond simple narrative or basic fiction writing. Hatchick's book, for instance, has been looking at advertising writing, something which surrounds our children; I like the idea that the book is giving her the tools to look at this sort of writing critically and to learn some of the "tricks" that go into creating it.

After this last lesson, though, I may have to rethink things. Oh, not really; in point of fact, she did rather well, considering the topic of today's assignment was learning to know your audience and tailoring your writing to persuade them to try your product or service. Here's what she wrote--and bear in mind that I'm her "audience" for this advertisement:

Do you like coffee and tea but can never decide which one to have? Well then we have the product that can change that. Cofftea! It's a mixture of coffee and tea. This delicious product might just sound like bad grammar but it's perfect for allergies and sleepiness so try some cofftea today! Found at Walmart (tm), Target (tm) and other stores. Yummy! Comes in different flavors!

Know your audience, indeed. :)

Honk If You Love Babies

The Supreme court has let stand a ruling which will finally let pro-lifers in Arizona obtain "Choose Life" license plates:

An anti-abortion group has won its long legal fight to force Arizona to issue ``choose life'' license plates, and the proposed new plates could be available to the group's members within months.

The U.S. Supreme Court is leaving in place an appeals court ruling in favor of the Arizona Life Coalition.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in January that the state commission on license plates violated the group's constitutional right to free speech by turning down its application.

You'd think this kind of thing would be a no-brainer, wouldn't you? Unless we're going to consider the phrase "Choose Life" to be hate speech, obscene, or otherwise unprotected speech then the pro-aborts out there are just going to have to get used to the idea that they're going to encounter that phrase.

But if you do a search on the "Choose Life" license plate controversy, you'll run into total idiocy like this:

Perhaps some of you readers don't know anything about this ruckus. You might live in some lovely civilized place -- say, California, where both I and the 9th Circuit live -- in which case you've probably never seen one of these plates. Permit me to enlighten you. They're yellow. They have a cute child's drawing of a boy and a girl on them. And they say "Choose Life" in a child's scrawl. Then there are your license plate numbers. As if the state endorses all of this. [...]

We have specialty plates here in California. I own one myself. It says, "Yosemite National Park," and my annual fee goes to the Yosemite Foundation. I had other options, too. Real controversial stuff. There's Lake Tahoe Conservancy. Also, California Coastal Commission (aka Save the Whales). And Firefighters. And the Child Health and Safety Fund, which goes toward child injury prevention. In other words, every California specialty plate offers a message you can be sure that California, as a state, sanctions on some level. You can tell by its offerings that California wants to preserve the health of its whales, its lakes, its mountains, its firefighters, and its kids. What California doesn't do is provide a state-sponsored platform for a moral argument.

When Arizona rejected the Choose Life group's application, it said the state was concerned that people would come to the conclusion that Arizona had endorsed the plate's anti-abortion message. And since the plate is a means to funnel funds to a special-interest group, Arizona can hardly be blamed for wanting to avoid the appearance it had chosen sides in such a divisive debate.

What the liberal author of the above piece of breathtaking ignorance doesn't realize is that the courts were looking at the facts, which were these: the state could either allow all non-profit groups access to these specialty plates, or they could allow none--but what they most emphatically could not do was create the impression that the state approved of some groups over others, or that only state-approved or state-sponsored groups could create the plates. Thus, the very thing the author whines about--what, are people supposed to believe the State approves of life, babies, and adoption?--is exactly the opposite of what the courts were saying: that the state's offering of these specialty plates was in no way an endorsement by the state of each group's message, nor was there any room, from a free speech perspective, for that kind of endorsement even to be implied.

All the state could legally do was set certain standards for the groups applying for the plates; any group that met the requirements could then request a specialty plate under the same procedure that any other group had to follow. Once the "Choose Life" group met state requirements the rest was supposed to be automatic; the state didn't get to decide after the fact that only state-endorsed speech could show up on the specialty plates.

It's enlightening to realize that the very idea of these plates, of life for unborn babies, and of adoption infuriates some people so much that they'd support censorship of the message, especially given that leftists are usually such an anti-censorship bunch. But I think what really burns them is that there hasn't been a successful campaign to challenge the message of these plates; only Montana has Planned Parenthood plates (and they don't sell nearly as many as the pro-life variety) while Hawaii has a Planned Parenthood decal you can affix to your plate (which will save you a lot of time wasted in idle chit-chat at any local sleazy bar, I bet). But in general, no plates with the proposed and incoherent "Choose Choice" design have been offered for sale anywhere, let alone more honest ones like "Choose Abortion" or perhaps a simple design featuring a smiling baby with a big red "X" drawn across her face.

Let's face it: support for moms and babies, support for adoption, and support for life in general is a message a lot of people are proud to put on their cars in the form of a license plate. The radical pro-abortion fanatics out there who are angry that they don't have their own version of these license plates should realize that it's not the fault of the medium, but the message.

Sarah Palin, Dividing Line

This post may ramble a bit; please bear with me. I've just been pondering some things about politics in general and this election in specific, and I wanted to try to get my thoughts down even in an embryonic state, so that later I can try to to develop them further.

I've always been a bit of a political junkie, which isn't exactly a newsflash to anyone who reads this blog. And in the beginning this election and all its associated silliness and pungent inanity was fun to follow, as we entered the every-four-year dance in which lifelong politicians and party hacks worked overtime to convince us that this time, things would be different; that this time, either one man or the other was going to bring us enlightenment and change and hope and break up the Washington logjam and Get Things Done and usher in a new era of peace and tranquility and free candy and good will and bipartisanship. The amusing part was that we knew deep down that they were lying through their teeth as they said all of this, and the entertaining part was seeing just how outrageous the lies would get, how many false promises and convenient photo-ops and carefully staged soundbites would go into the making of this particularly American form of diversion we call an election.

As primaries were held and candidates began to fall along the wayside, as Obama surprisingly beat Hillary and McCain unsurprisingly gained the advantage over the crowded and tangled Republican field, it was still possible to have some fun with it all; sure, we wished we had better candidates, especially those of us who won't vote for the party where "choice" is code for "more dead babies," but even as we wrangled online and in real life with the most mesmerized of Barack-worshipers it was possible to be polite, to avoid taking things personally or trying to cause personal offense, to reflect at the end of the day that God was in Heaven and all was right with the world, so to speak, and that no matter how this election turned out He would still be in charge, and that in the end it might matter more to our souls how kind we were or how much we did for our neighbors or how fervently we prayed than how we voted, or even than who won.

But then John McCain surprised us, and nominated Sarah Palin to be his running mate. And all the dark teeming mass of ugliness and hatred for what is good and noble and human and normal came spilling out from across the aisle like Orcs pouring forth from the gates of Mordor; and we knew that whatever else happened in this election, the arrival of Sarah Palin on the scene made that impersonal amused detachment very difficult to retain.

Why? Is it because she really is the best person in America to be the vice president? I think people can argue that she's not quite ready or not really qualified, and do so without violating that spirit of friendly discussion that makes it possible for Democrats and Republicans to be, if not friends, at least not openly hostile enemies to each other; but unfortunately the argument never quite stops there. Sarah, we're told by many different people representing many different political viewpoints, is "the unexamined life" made flesh, so to speak; she has no greatness in her, no magnanimity, no brilliance, no capacity for excellence, no real promise, no potential, nothing to offer America at all.

And what are the grounds which form these opinions? What evidence have Palin's critics examined that have made them, either gleefully or reluctantly or both, come to this damning conclusion?

So far as I can determine, the evidence is composed of these things:

• Sarah has only been out of the country once. Recently. To visit Alaska National Guard troops stationed in Kuwait.
• Sarah couldn't tell Katie Couric the exact titles of newspapers or magazines she reads daily to form her opinions.
• Speaking of Couric, Sarah did badly in general in her interviews with Couric and with Gibson.
  
• Sarah attended several colleges.
• Sarah speaks with a common accent instead of a polished Ivy-league/East Coast one.
• Despite her two years as Governor of Alaska and her experience before that as mayor of Wasilla, Sarah is not a member of our ruling class, and shouldn't even be in this race.

That's it, really. None of this was unknown when McCain announced his pick; none of it is a surprise to anybody who knew anything about Palin before this year; none of it contradicts her reputation as a savvy executive and government reformer. But all of it is being considered as completely disqualifying now; all of it is held up as proof that Sarah really isn't up to the job.

What infuriates me is that this new media template was manufactured by the exact same people who manufactured the first one, that vicious, ugly, personal attack against Governor Palin and her family that was engineered and executed by our left-leaning media elites--and then abandoned by them when they realized (stupidly, later than they should have) that it wasn't playing in Peoria. That attack was too overt, too obvious; ordinary people in America caught on immediately to the fact that this blatantly hostile effort was being directed as much at us, at those of us who choose things like marriage and family and children and love and sacrifice, as it was at Sarah Palin, so the media had to give it up.

But they quickly got their acts together again, and started the kind of whispering campaing to which they always resort when faced with a viable Republican candidate. Better to call Sarah incurious, provincial, inept, incoherent, uneducated, than to admit that what really bothers them about her is that she's a woman who hasn't sold her soul to the abortion lobby, which is the only acceptable way for a woman to be a political star in the twenty-first century. Better to make Sarah Palin into a Tina Fey-esque buffoon than to show their hands of hatred for so many of us in America so plainly again.

Because for one brief moment we saw the demonic rage on the faces of the nice, friendly people we allow into our homes, our living rooms, even our bedrooms on a daily or near-daily basis. For one brief moment we saw that diabolical fury bleeding through the ink of the newspaper or magazine we take with us to work or read at the end of a long day. For one brief moment we saw with perfect clarity how bitterly and permanently opposed to our values these elites in the media really are--and they saw our shocked faces and heard our angry voices on the phone as we canceled subscriptions or complained to the ombudsman.

And having seen that cold, dead hatred, I think some of us are going to have a very hard time forgetting it--especially if Barack Obama wins this election.

We're being drawn closer and closer to a place in history where it won't be possible for a Christian in good conscience to watch most of these news programs, or subscribe to these papers or magazines, or in any way allow our time or money to go to increase their power. We're being drawn, inexorably, toward that day when we realize that rejecting the culture around us involves greater and greater sacrifices, and fewer and fewer compromises. We're being led away from an Egypt of immorality, and will quite possibly find ourselves being cleansed in the desert's simplicity before we can journey on again.

And when we look back at this point in history, I think that it might be the case that we'll see this election, and specifically Sarah Palin, as the dividing line, the moment when we realized once and for all that the elites in the media and their cousins in our ruling class have nothing but contempt for us, and would prefer to bypass us altogether were it not for that dance held every four years, during which their goal is always to step on our feet as much as possible, and blame us, and the music, for their clumsy ineptitude.

Public Service Announcement

If you live in California and will be getting married sometime in the near future, you may want to see this:

California health officials say the words "bride" and "groom" will reappear on marriage license applications starting next month.

In a notice posted on its Web site, the California Department of Public Health says many couples still wanted the option of identifying themselves in traditional terms.

Apparently, "Thing One" and "Thing Two" didn't fly.

Seriously, though, while the "Party A" and "Party B" designations won't be on the forms, there will be optional boxes marriage license applicants can check off to identify themselves as "bride" or "groom." No word yet on whether both applicants can call themselves "brides" or "grooms." Or on what security precautions county clerks should take in the event that the applicants haven't discussed that issue before arriving to apply for a license.

It simply doesn't make sense to change the wording of marriage licenses to accommodate the tiny handful of same-sex couples who will ever apply for a marriage license. Then again, it didn't--and still doesn't--make sense to change the centuries-old definition and understanding of the word "marriage" to accommodate this extremely small group of people, either.

More on Respect Life Sunday

I want to thank everyone who participated in the Respect Life Sunday thread below this one; it was very interesting to see everyone's different experiences!

A reader emailed me this link to the letter read in the Scranton diocese as was mentioned in the combox; it's very well worth reading. I especially liked this section:

It is impossible for me to answer all of the objections to the Church’s teaching on life that we hear every day in the media. Nevertheless, let me address a few. To begin, laws that protect abortion constitute injustice of the worst kind. They rest on several false claims including that there is no certainty regarding when life begins, that there is no certainty about when a fetus becomes a person, and that some human beings may be killed to advance the interests or convenience of others. With regard to the first, reason and science have answered the question. The life of a human being begins at conception. The Church has long taught this simple truth, and science confirms it. Biologists can now show you the delicate and beautiful development of the human embryo in its first days of existence. This is simply a fact that reasonable people accept. Regarding the second, the embryo and the fetus have the potential to do all that an adult person does. Finally, the claim that the human fetus may be sacrificed to the interests or convenience of his mother or someone else is grievously wrong. All three claims have the same result: the weakest and most vulnerable are denied, because of their age, the most basic protection that we demand for ourselves. This is discrimination at its worst, and no person of conscience should support it.

Another argument goes like this: “As wrong as abortion is, I don't think it is the only relevant ‘life’ issue that should be considered when deciding for whom to vote.” This reasoning is sound only if other issues carry the same moral weight as abortion does, such as in the case of euthanasia and destruction of embryos for research purposes. Health care, education, economic security, immigration, and taxes are very important concerns. Neglect of any one of them has dire consequences as the recent financial crisis demonstrates. However, the solutions to problems in these areas do not usually involve a rejection of the sanctity of human life in the way that abortion does. Being “right” on taxes, education, health care, immigration, and the economy fails to make up for the error of disregarding the value of a human life. Consider this: the finest health and education systems, the fairest immigration laws, and the soundest economy do nothing for the child who never sees the light of day. It is a tragic irony that “pro-choice” candidates have come to support homicide – the gravest injustice a society can tolerate – in the name of “social justice.”

Even the Church’s just war theory has moral force because it is grounded in the principle that innocent human life must be protected and defended. Now, a person may, in good faith, misapply just war criteria leading him to mistakenly believe that an unjust war is just, but he or she still knows that innocent human life may not be harmed on purpose. A person who supports permissive abortion laws, however, rejects the truth that innocent human life may never be destroyed. This profound moral failure runs deeper and is more corrupting of the individual, and of the society, than any error in applying just war criteria to particular cases.

Furthermore, National Right to Life reports that 48.5 million abortions have been performed since 1973. One would be too many. No war, no natural disaster, no illness or disability has claimed so great a price.

I think the good Bishop of Scranton, Bishop Martino, ought to have a talk with Nutmeg's parish priest. Can you believe this:

Our parish priest made no mention of this special day until the end of mass during the announcements, where he made his proclamation that the Church upholds life from the "Beginning to it's natural end."

"Natural end," he kept repeating.

"Natural. end."

He went on to elaborate that this means that not only is the Church against abortion, but it is also against capital punishment and the unjust war. we know what he means, he says, we know what is going on. Of course he does not want to tell us how to vote, just that we need to keep in mind that abortion is not the only issue in politics today that affects the pro-life message. We need to understand that these soldiers and criminals have a right to a natural death too. That since our soldiers usually come from the lower classes... (at this I cringed visibly, since my dearest friend Lisa and her beautiful family were sitting front and center listening to him disrespect her own father and brother and the sacrifices they have made for our freedom!) it is not the higher classes that are paying the price, you know. So we need to protect their rights as well.

My sympathies, Nutmeg; I've had to do the "parish-shopping" thing myself, before.

I've been encouraged, though, to see how many bishops and priests have been speaking out loudly and clearly this election year about the fact that abortion is the single most serious moral issue of our times. Other issues may indeed have moral components, but none of these compares currently to the intrinsic evil of the slaughter of innocent human life by the millions since Roe v. Wade became the law of the land. The Church in America must speak out consistently against this great evil, and must not make the mistake of equating abortion with other evils such as war or terror or poverty or oppression; when the right to live is taken from the innocent unborn, how can we Catholics ignore their silent cries for justice?

There will be Catholics who will vote for the presidential candidate who supports all abortion, including partial birth and even "post-birth" abortion. I believe with all my heart that this is wrong, that the justifications and excuses they have created to allow themselves to do so are not founded on sound Catholic moral teaching and thinking. But given how readily some of the Church's own priests seem to equate abortion with war or other problems, it may be that they really don't know what they do. When the Church speaks with unity and clarity on the issue of abortion, it is incumbent upon all her priests and leaders to do the same, until no Catholic anywhere could possibly imagine voting for a pro-abort politician. I sincerely hope, when I read letters like the good bishop's, that we are getting closer to that day.

Respect Life Sunday Open Thread

Today, October 5, is Respect Life Sunday. Since I may not get back to the blog until later today, I thought I'd open a thread for anyone who wants to share any Respect Life homilies or activities that might have take place in your parishes today. I'm especially interested in hearing about Respect Life homilies: did your priest talk about abortion/life issues today? What did he say?

I hope to update this later--till then, please feel free to share in the comment box!

UPDATE: Well, one of the downsides--if you can call it that! :) --of having a Franciscan priest assigned to be your pastor is that on Oct. 5 you're going to get a St. Francis homily instead of a Respect Life one. Given that St. Francis' feast day was yesterday and that Father had a special Mass last week for all deceased Franciscans I should have expected it.

St. Francis remains a popular saint even among the secular and non-religious--but can anyone imagine dear St. Francis approving for a second of either our rampant materialism or our society's approval of legalized abortion on demand?

We did get a lovely petition in honor of Respect Life Sunday where the Pope's words about the need to protect life were made part of the prayer.

Did you hear anything about Respect Life Sunday at your parish?

When Angels Weep

Can you imagine discussing with a newspaper the fact that your abortion clinic has had a record year? Read this:

FARGO (AP) - The director of North Dakota's only abortion clinic says it could set a record this year.

Tammi Kromenaker is the director of the Red River Women's Clinic in Fargo, which marked its 10th anniversary in July. She said the clinic performs an average of about 25 abortions a week.

"The record for the number of abortions was 1,358 in 2003," she said. "Last year, we had 1,238. But this year, if we continue to see the same number of patients, we most likely are going to see the most patients in one year, a record number of abortions."

The increase is due in part to cuts in money for college health clinics, Kromenaker said.

"Part of it is the economy," she said. "Part of it's the fact that earlier this year, college health clinics had a lot of their funding rescinded. So younger women, college-aged students, can't get subsidized birth control. When you can't afford birth control, when it's $50 or $60 a month instead of $10 or $15, I think that makes a big difference."

What kind of moral monster does a person have to be to be directly involved in the murders of twelve or thirteen hundred people a year, and to speak about it as if it's merely an economic concern?

What kind of a moral monster do you have to be to think that for a college girl the option is to get cheap birth control or line up for abortions, as if there were no such thing as virtue, abstinence, or just saying "no" to the culture of mindless sex that flourishes on college campuses?

You have to be this kind of a moral monster. That link is to a Planned Parenthood site, just so you know, but here's what this woman, this person so steeped in evil that she can't even recognize it for what it is anymore, says about the 40 Days for Life campaign:

The campaign has energized the staff. We've been talking about the issue of choice a lot. Letters and donations supporting us have made a positive impact. Staff members have had very strong emotional reactions - one person said she was so proud to work here it made her want to cry.

When the letters of support arrive in the mail almost daily, it does bring tears to our eyes. It makes us realize again the positive impact we have on women's lives, and the great work we do in the community.

When we make an appointment, we prepare the patient for a possible encounter with protesters. The first day of the 40 day campaign there were about 30 protesters outside of the clinic. The first 6 or 7 patients didn't say one word about it. I think they believe it is normal, when in reality, we generally only have about a handful.

Angels in heaven weep for the souls of such as Tammi Kromenaker, who has no remorse for her work, for her role in seeing to it that more and more babies die from "choice." There are no words sufficient to express how hideous her banal attitude in the face of abortion is, no words that can accurately describe the cloud of darkness and weight of evil that wraps around her as she blithely goes to work each day and sees to it that more and more babies die under her watch. The 40 Days protesters who station themselves outside her clinic are heroes in trying to save such a person from the eternal damnation her "choice" has prepared for her, but if she doesn't heed them she will certainly go down to the eternal darkness she finds a worthy "choice."

Arrogance in the Media

You've got to go over and read this from Matthew Archbold at CMR if you haven't already; make sure you play the short video clip, too:

You've got to watch this video. CNN's Soledad O' Brien ran a focus group of self declared Republicans, Democrats and undecideds during the Palin/Biden debate.

Soledad asked them immediately after the debate, "How many thought Joe Biden won the debate tonight?"

I'd say about half the hands go up. O'Brien then inexplicably says, "So, looks overwhelming." Then she asks who thought Palin won. Again, about half the hands go up and she describes it as "small hands." Then she quickly declares Biden the winner and calls it a day.

We all know that media bias is out there, but sometimes the breathtaking arrogance of those in the media who are quick to put their own political stamp on the stories they're supposedly covering objectively can be jaw-dropping. Kudos to Matthew Archbold for calling CNN on this obvious example of media bias.

A Pet Peeve

While grabbing my links for the post below this one I noticed a rather jarring account of the Pope's message, which included the following:

The rhythm method is an acceptable form of contraception for couples in "dire circumstances" who need to space their children, the leader of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics wrote to participants in a seminar on the 1968 encyclical by Pope Paul VI.

I knew even before looking further that His Holiness Benedict XVI hadn't said any such thing. For one thing, the rhythm method is to NFP and other current natural methods of child spacing what the Apple iPhone is to the first successful telegraph machine, something Pope Benedict is clearly aware of; but then, too, there's that phrase, "dire circumstances," which fits into the media's playbook about how the evil Catholic Church wants women to have as many babies as is physically possible and/or die trying, but which never actually does crop up in any official church documents.

Fortunately, EWTN presents a clearer picture of what the pope actually said:

Benedict XVI recalls how "during a couple's life serious situations may arise that make it prudent to separate the births of children or even suspend them altogether. It is here that a knowledge of the natural rhythms of a woman's fertility become important".

"Methods of observation that enable a couple to determine periods of fertility", he continues, "allow them to administer what the Creator wisely inscribed in human nature without disturbing the integral meaning of sexual relations. In this way the spouses, while respecting the full truth of their love, can modulate the expression thereof in accordance with these rhythms. ... Clearly this requires a maturity in love, ... and mutual respect and dialogue".

The Pope then goes on to thank the Sacred Heart Catholic University for the support it gives the "Paulus VI International Scientific Research Institute on Human Fertility and Infertility for a Responsible Procreation", an organisation that seeks to "increase knowledge of methods for the natural regulation of human fertility and for the natural treatment of infertility".

Don't know about the rest of you, but I kind of see a big huge really important difference between what the secular media said the pope said and what the pope actually said. The first would cause spasms of painful unfounded guilt among many couples who are truly trying to discern God's will for their families and are using NFP or other natural means while doing so; the second makes it clear that Pope Benedict XVI is not giving some kind of grudging, tepid, backhanded support to natural means only for women in dire circumstances but is actually voicing the totally reasonable, truly Catholic way of looking at matters involving parenthood and the need for morally acceptable spacing of births under many different serious circumstances.

The secular media seldom gets the Church's teaching in regard to sexual morality, contraception, and morally licit spacing of births. My pet peeve is that this level of inaccuracy doesn't stop them from rushing to print anyway, and putting their usual spin (Pope Hates Sex!) on every article they write about the Church's teachings on human sexuality.

Abortion and Contraception

I'm always delighted to meet and speak to fellow pro-life Americans, whether they are Catholic or not, and whether I meet them in real life or online. It's good to share our love for human life, our commitment to the unborn, and our passion for reversing the unjust SCOTUS decisions, especially Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, which remove the protection from unborn humans and make it legal to kill them without any due process and for no reason other than that their mother wants them to die.

But sooner or later the issue of contraception comes up--and that's where I find the biggest difference between passionately pro-life Catholics and passionate pro-lifers of other religious beliefs.

It's true that there are lots of Catholic "dissenters" from Humanae Vitae who try to claim that one can be a Catholic in good standing with the Church while demanding that the Church change her teachings on the intrinsic evil of contraception; I've run into lots of these people. But your passionately pro-life Catholics, or at least most of the ones I've met, tend to be faithful to the Church's teaching which opposes all artificial means of birth control as being inherently sinful and an attack against the dignity of the human person and the integrity of the family.

So it can be a bit jarring to be trading pro-life "war stories" with Protestant Christian or other pro-lifers and have one of them ask the question, "But what about contraception? If we're serious about ending abortion, don't we have to keep artificial birth control on the table of options?"

Our Holy Father, Benedict XVI, has issued a message which discusses the importance of accepting the Church's teachings on contraception:

Pope Benedict said technical responses to "the great human questions" such as life and death often seem to offer the easier solution.

"But in reality (a technical solution such as artificial contraception) obscures the underlying question concerning the meaning of human sexuality" and the need for couples to exercise "responsible control" over their sexual desires so that the expression of those desires may become expressions of self-giving, "personal love," he said.

When talking about love between two people, technical responses cannot replace "a maturation of freedom," the pope said.

Reason is not enough for understanding the true meaning of conjugal love, he said, as "the eyes of the heart" also are needed to grasp the demands of true love and "embrace the totality of the human being."

The truth is that once you seek to use technology to close completely any chance of a human life being called into creation by the marital act, you create the environment which makes it possible for abortion to flourish. It is the fact that couples seek to say "No!" when God and nature intend for them to be saying "Yes!" that creates the terrible disconnect between sex and procreation, the disconnect which leads to the objectification of the other, to seeing sex as a form of entertainment, and to the rise of sterile activity like that seen in homosexual activity.

And this technological approach also creates the severance between procreation and sex, which allows such evils as IVF, discarded embryos, and the complete lack of respect for the innate dignity and humanity of children who are called into being not by their parents' loving embrace but divorced from it in a cold laboratory.

So opposition to abortion will always, in the end, become opposition to contraception. Nothing less than the embrace of God's beautiful plan for each of us, whether He calls us to have children or in His mysterious love does not allow us to be biological parents, will ever truly respect and protect the unborn human lives we seek to save.

Winners and Losers

Once the global cooling triggered by a massive surge of Republicans all breathing a sigh of relief last night that their vice-presidential candidate did not embarrass herself or them last night had begun to wane, the question started making the rounds: did Palin actually win the debate?

The MSM is insisting that she didn't, that Biden did, or that Palin won on style but Biden on substance. Considering how much of that substance was inaccurate at best, the MSM may want to rethink that; instead of chuckling about Palin being able to see Russia from Alaska, the people of America are now chuckling about Biden's claim to have visited a restaurant recently that was closed almost twenty years ago. I think M. Night Shyamalan should get right on this, and make a movie about a spooky politician with the uncanny ability...to see dead restaurants!!!

All of that aside, however, I think it's foolish to pretend that nobody won this debate. Somebody did:

Preliminary Nielsen data shows the 90-minute sparring session on Thursday in St. Louis drew an average household rating of 45.0 -- the percentage of all homes that were tuned to the debate -- in the nation's 55 largest metropolitan areas.

Nielsen said it expected to release final national ratings and a tally of individual viewers later in the day. [...]

In fact, if the latest numbers hold up, Thursday's debate will be the most highly rated ever between vice presidential candidates, eclipsing the old record held by the first woman on a major-party ticket, Geraldine Ferraro, and the Republican incumbent at the time, George H.W. Bush.

The Palin-Biden bout also appears likely to stand as the most watched of any nationally televised political debate in 16 years, going back to a three-way match in 1992 that included then-President George H.W. Bush, Democrat Bill Clinton and independent Ross Perot.

So it's clear: the winner of last night's debate was the media, which had created the myth of the bumbling Palin and reminded people endlessly about Biden's gaffe factor in a bid to stir up interest, which has to have succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings.

Of course, the MSM must be kicking themselves, now, for their relentless skewering of Palin up to this point. Sure, it raised interest in the debate, but Palin's even less likely to pay them back with the access they've got to be coveting now than she was before. The MSM has found out, just too late, that Palin is somebody the average American will tune in to watch--and they've gone and made themselves a known enemy to her. So maybe they won--but maybe it was a Pyrrhic victory, after all.

A Nagging Suspicion

In a little while, the Palin/Biden debate will begin. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to watch it live; I might try the experiment of listening to it on the radio to see if it's easier to pay attention to what the candidates are actually saying, instead of how they pose for the cameras.

In any case, I've noticed--I'm sure you have, too--how many conservative writers, bloggers and commentators have completely written off Sarah Palin on the damning evidence--from two or three MSM television interviews--that the Liberals Were Right About Her All Along.

Sigh. I did say conservative commentators, didn't I?

It's a maddening phenomenon I've witnessed in my two decades plus a bit of being eligible to vote and of leaning heavily toward conservative candidates (though like it says in my "About Me" section, that's conservative, not Republican; I'm happy to say that I did not vote for Bob Dole)--there's a definite difference between how conservatives and liberals act when it comes to our candidates.

Suppose that Candidate A is liberal, while Candidate B is conservative. Here is how different groups will react to each candidate--first, Candidate A:

The MSM: We'd like to say that A is practically perfect in every way, but that would interfere with our pretense that you still believe we're objective. Instead, we'll tiptoe right up to the line of bowing down in worship of A without actually committing blasphemy (at least in public).

Liberal opinion writers: It is our dispassionate and careful opinion that A is...practically perfect in every way! He's the Second Coming of Mr. Darcy! Why, in all our years of being serious brokers of opinion journalism we've never, ever, ever seen such perfection! Every utterance, every nuance of A is golden beyond belief! He's so impossibly terrific that if he's elected the whole gosh-darned planet will heal, just like A said it would!

Liberal voters: We love A! We want A! A! A! A! A! A! A! (Hillary!) (Thwack) (Thud) A! A! A!

And here's how Candidate B gets treated:

The MSM: We know that you know that we're not objective. Still, let's keep up the pretense, shall we? B might be just barely adequate in some kind of Neanderthal sense, except (cough) extreme on abortion (cough) out of touch on gay marriage (cough) gravitas (cough) incurious (cough) doesn't read the NYT daily (cough) Tina Fey (cough) not one of US (cough) common (cough) provincial (cough) really, this was the best you could do?

Conservative opinion writers: We were gleeful for three point eight seconds. We're sorry. It was unprofessional of us to make up our minds without realizing that the entire editorial staff of the New York Times has uncovered strong proof that although B is extreme on pro-life issues and anti-gay marriage, B also lacks gravitas, is incurious, doesn't read the NYT, is provincial, and--worst of all--has never ever sipped wine in a Paris cafe at midnight in June, nor--wait for it--expressed the slightest desire ever to do so! In the face of this incontrovertible proof that B is little more than a pretty face, we have to say that we can't support B anymore and will now run a ceaceless succession of anti-B columns to regain our composure.

Conservative voters: B! Well, maybe. If nothing better comes along. After all, A's getting all the attention, and people who vote for B are sort of like people who buy brand X despite the taste test's proof that A was better all along. But we can't support A because A is so extremely pro-abortion, but gosh golly gee whiz we wish he weren't. And some of us won't vote for B because B supports ESCR which means that voting for him is mediate remote material cooperation with sin without proportionate reason. And some of us may hold our noses and vote for B. But A's got the coolness factor, and we hate being the nerdy kids playing D&D in the back of the room for yet another election. So, B, or not. To B, or not to B? That is the question; whether 'tis nobler to vote for an uncool ticket, or to take up pen against a write-in slot, and, by name-posing, fill it? etc.

So my nagging suspicion, referenced above, is that the quote "With friends like these..." is pretty descriptive of those who support--or say they support--conservative candidates. There is no harsher critic of a conservative than another conservative.

Prayers for the Unborn

While surfing the Internet I came upon this lovely website which contains many beautiful prayers for the unborn. I especially liked this prayer:

Our Lady of Guadalupe, we turn to you who are the protectress of unborn children and ask that you intercede for us, so that we may more firmly resolve to join you in protecting all human life. Let our prayers be united to your perpetual motherly intercession on behalf of those whose lives are threatened, be they in the womb of their mother, on the bed of infirmity, or in the latter years of their life. May our prayers also be coupled with peaceful action, which witnesses to the goodness and dignity of all human life, so that our firmness of purpose may give courage to those who are fearful and bring light to those who are blinded by sin. Encourage those who will be involved in the March for Life; help them to walk closely with God and to give voice to the cry of the oppressed, in order to remind our nation of its commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people. O Virgin Mother of God, present our petitions to your Son and ask Him to bless us with abundant life. Amen.

I know that we all do many things for life: we write, speak, march, protest and vote, and all of these things are important. But considering how demonically evil abortion really is, let's remember to pray, first, last and always, that the right to life for unborn children will always be preserved and protected.

Catholics Should All Be Pro-Life

I find it incredible to read articles like this one:

Sister Patricia McCann, a Catholic nun, and Rosemary Horvat, mother of three and grandmother of nine, both believe abortion is wrong and hold strong views on a range of political issues.

Abortion is a significant issue but not the sole determinant in their choices for president, the women say. They work as volunteers in opposing campaigns.

Horvat, 69, of Harrison City pitches in at Republican John McCain's headquarters in Greensburg, rounding up volunteers for the pro-life Arizona senator.

McCann, 72, an archivist for the Sisters of Mercy and retired teacher of church history at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, makes telephone calls from Democrat Barack Obama's Pittsburgh office to solicit support for the Illinois senator, who is pro-choice. [...]

Catholic voters indeed could help swing the election in Pennsylvania, but not necessarily on the energy of the abortion issue, said G. Terry Madonna, a political scientist and pollster at Franklin & Marshall College.

"Catholics are not all pro-life. In fact, they are not much different than Protestants on the issue," Madonna said. "There are culturally conservative and culturally liberal Catholics, but they have become swing voters in recent years -- which is why they are important politically." [...]

McCann, the nun who volunteers for Obama, opposes abortion but said many other "life" issues, such as ending the war in Iraq, make her an enthusiastic Obama backer.

"The Catholic church teaches that abortion is an intrinsic evil, along with euthanasia, murder, war, torture, racism, oppression of people," McCann said. "For me, life means from conception to natural death, so I look at the full range of issues."

I'm afraid the good Sister is a little confused. War, for instance, is not intrinsically evil, and while overt oppression is evil, the phrase "oppression" is often used in America to refer to people who are poor, uneducated, and the like, which isn't really the same thing as direct oppression.

Sad though it is to me that a nun wastes time volunteering for the Obama campaign--aren't there any better works of charity for retired nuns in Pennsylvania to be doing?--the saddest line to me in the whole article was the quote, "Catholics are not all pro-life."

If we are speaking of Catholics who go to Mass every Sunday and participate in the life of the Church, then they should indeed all be pro-life. You can't be a Catholic and support abortion, despite the fact that some have tried to claim that this is possible. You can't have access to the wealth of the Church's teachings on the subject and still think for a moment that abortion might not be a terribly evil, soul-killing, and deeply, mortally sinful act of murder.

When the election is over, I hope that our nation's bishops will realize how important it is for them to teach this truth, that you can't be Catholic and be in favor of abortion. Catholics should all be pro-life; there's no room in the Catholic Church for the culture of death.

Light Blogging Today

And possibly tomorrow, too. Going to be busy!