Nice to see some good news in regards to the Supreme Court for a change.
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled Thursday that human genes cannot be patented.
Besides I think God could prove “prior art”.
For details see the story by Rebecca Taylor over at Creative Minority Report.
With the verdict finally in regarding the abortionist Kermit Gosnell we can review this horrific case and the reaction to it.
It was good to see how state legislatures and the Federal government moved to make sure nothing like this ever happens again. New legislation in regards to inspecting abortion clinics has swept the country. Oh wait that didn’t happen.
Strange how in most cases legislatures jump into action proposing new legislation before the ink is even dry regarding horrific crimes. An outcry to make sure that such a case could not happen again. To make sure that an abortion clinic could not operate for almost 20 years without an inspection. Yet the usual suspects who would regulate anything that moves are silent here. The same people who are outraged when a pro-life women’s clinic uses an ultrasound and would shut them down because of it will put up with pretty much any outrage in so many abortuaries. As I said before the reaction to Kermit Gosnell shows that for many who support abortion that they care more about keeping abortion legal than protecting women. That any threat regarding regulation of an abortion clinic must be pushed aside.
Groups that oppose legal abortion are using the horror surrounding his clinic, which garnered fresh attention during his murder trial, to push for new state and federal restrictions – even though Gosnell’s acts were already illegal. As CNN spins it.
“Justice was served to Kermit Gosnell today and he will pay the price for the atrocities he committed. We hope that the lessons of the trial do not fade with the verdict. Anti-choice politicians, and their unrelenting efforts to deny women access to safe and legal abortion care, will only drive more women to back-alley butchers like Kermit Gosnell. NARAL
Yes it is an atrocity if committed a minute after the child is born, but if chopped up in the womb any time before it is a right to be protected at all cost. The insanity of the pro-abortion position has always been there, but the emperor wears awesome clothes. NARAL talks about the lessons learned, but will not lift a finger to inspect abortion clinics. In fact they have argued that regulation drove women to use people like Kermit Gosnell. Protection of abortion is kind of like climate change in that no matter what happens it proves your point.
They call him a back-alley butcher now just to use the words back-alley to try to remind women of the fake statistics created by a founding member of NARAL Dr. Bernard Nathanson. The former abortion doctor later admitted how he had created the fake statistic of 10,000 women dying each year from back-alley abortions.
Strangely they don’t call late-term abortionist LeRoy Carhart who was caught on tape comparing unborn baby to ‘mushy meat in a Crock- Pot’ and joking about taking out fetus with ‘pickaxe and drill-bit’ a “back-alley butcher.” In fact NARAL has gone on record supporting him in the past.
Unfortunately regardless of the behavior of so many abortionists this is not going to shock the conscience of most Americans. Once you have bought the lie of abortion not being murder then all the other lies come as a package deal. If you can’t see the horror of dismembering a child in the womb you don’t really see the horror of Gosnell or so many who are equally twisted. If you support abortion you will accept a Gosnell just like assisted-suicide supporters supported an equally twisted Dr. Kevorkian.
Still despite the intentioned blindness of so many, some are removing those wrappings around their eyes. Last Month ex abortion clinic manager Abby Johnson wrote this:
During President Obama’s speech to a group supporting the nation’s largest abortion chain, he claimed that “Planned Parenthood is not going anywhere” now, or in the future.
Guess what, Obama? Neither are we.
Of the 97 original Planned Parenthood affiliates that once stood, only 80 remain. Just in the last few weeks, four Planned Parenthood clinics in Wisconsin are closing down because they have been stripped of taxpayer funding. Clinic workers have left and publicly outed the disgusting Planned Parenthood center in Delaware, noting its dangerous conditions and the fact that five women were hospitalized in a five-week period from botched abortions at this one location. That center has been closed. In 2009, Texas had over 90 Planned Parenthood centers in the state. There are now fewer than 60 locations.
Obama reiterated Cecile Richards’s own words describing Planned Parenthood as “the only organization that she’s ever been at where there are opponents who … ’literally get up every day trying to figure out how to keep us from doing our work.” Planned Parenthood’s work consists of killing over 330,000 preborn boys and girls every single year while raking in over half a billion taxpayer dollars annually.
Since June 2012, 51 abortion-clinic workers have come through And Then There Were None, a ministry I launched last summer to help clinic workers quit their jobs, gain new employment, and find healing from their work in the abortion industry. Our most recent initiative, Exodus2013 — Leave the Abortion Industry Day, yielded much fruit. We had five abortion workers contact us, ready to quit their jobs with our support. Many of these former employees have come from Planned Parenthood centers across the country, and several are ready to speak out about their experiences in the abortion industry.
Sometimes, Planned Parenthood employees send us e-mails they receive regarding our work. Just before Exodus2013, a Planned Parenthood affiliate sent out a mass e-mail describing ATTWN as “a group [trying] to intimidate our current employees.” The fact that they even mentioned ATTWN is a surefire sign that they are terrified of the ministry and the former workers that come to us for help. Planned Parenthood went on to tell their employees that “you will not let these sorts of intimidation techniques sway you from our mission… . We, at Planned Parenthood, are committed to the growth and advancement of our staff. We are confident you will remain with us.” But there is good reason to question that the momentum is on their side. Even former NARAL president Nancy Keenan noticed the youth presence at the Rally for Life in D.C. in 2010, “I just thought, my gosh, they are so young,” she said. ”There are so many of them, and they are so young.”
President Obama and Planned Parenthood can publicly continue to cling to their false sense of security all they like. Their days are numbered, and they know it. They are feeling the pressure of an increasingly powerful pro-life movement, and we are not slowing down.
It is so easy to cringe at Herod’s slaughter of the innocents. This was such an evil man whose lust for power would brook no interference. Where even Caesar Augustus said of him “It is better to be Herod’s dog than one of his children.” A child was seen as a rival and the age of that child was not important, just the threat of the child to his life of privilege.
Yet we have become a society of Herods. Herodian marriages and Herodian relationships. The so-called unexpected pregnancy views the child as a threat. A threat to their current lifestyle. A threat to a financial situation and an individual autonomy that is inward and not self-giving. Children are viewed as a zero-sum game where what they consume of time and money is taken from you with no return. Our openness to new life is dependent on more mercenary conditions that must be satisfied first and if they are not met instead of sending out soldiers for the slaughter we hire the abortionist.
From the bottom to the top of our society the Herodian attitude rules. We have a President that we as a culture re-elected who voted for infanticide rather than to allow any threat to legal abortion. A president who time and time again has seen possible grandchildren as a threat and a punishment for his daughters. We have both Herodian mothers and/or Herodian fathers pressuring for the elimination of a threat. Even those open to life will accept the slaughter of the innocents via IVF as long as one child survives. The Highlander approach to parenthood “That there can only be one” when multiple embryos are transferred to the uterus.
If Herod had known a way to prevent even the possibility of a threat to him he would surely have used it. Sterilization of the people of Bethlehem or injected contraceptives would have been an idea welcome to him if he had enough lead time. We have those tools of manipulation that Herod lacked and we put them to use. First our selfishness demands access to means to prevent life and then we demand that others pay for that means. When children are a financial strain then of course even the prevention of children is a financial strain that must be eliminated. We might point out Sandra Fluke as the cheerleader of this attitude, but the way was paved by the normalization of contraception and the shutting of the door to life.
While our society has many trappings of the celebration of Christ’s birth we also have many celebrations of the Herodian mindset. We have become post-Christian, but not post-Herod.
Mary the Blessed Mother of Christ, pray for us.
Lully, lullay, Thou little tiny Child,
Bye, bye, lully, lullay.
Lullay, thou little tiny Child,
Bye, bye, lully, lullay.O sisters too, how may we do,
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we do sing
Bye, bye, lully, lullay.Herod, the king, in his raging,
Charged he hath this day
His men of might, in his own sight,
All young children to slay.That woe is me, poor Child for Thee!
And ever mourn and sigh,
For thy parting neither say nor sing,
Bye, bye, lully, lullay.
Via Wesley J. Smith
Har de har: The BBC is creating a comedy series called Way to Go about friends who establish an assisted suicide business. “Way to go:” Get it?
I am reminded of the recent The Three Stooges movie homage to the original comic team that had the boys willingly attempt a mercy killing. This is nothing less than the normalization of suicide.
Oh, and by the way, this idea was already proposed for real in Oregon ($5000 for the whole package, including music and flowers), but the psychiatrist would-be entrepreneur lost his medical license for other reasons before he could open the doors. Meanwhile, in Switzerland, suicide clinics rake in the dough.
Culture of death, Wesley? What culture of death?
Msgr Robert Hugh Benson a Catholic convert and son of the then-Archbishop of Canterbury wrote a quite excellent apocalyptic novel called “Lord of the World” where he envisioned in his future world “ministers of euthanasia.”
“He gave no more thought to his exposition of the Christian creed; it was a mere commonplace to him that Catholics believed that kind of thing; it was no more blasphemous to his mind so to describe it, than it would be to laugh at a Fijian idol with mother-of-pearl eyes, and a horse-hair wig; it was simply impossible to treat it seriously. He, too, had wondered once or twice in his life how human beings could believe such rubbish; but psychology had helped him, and he knew now well enough that suggestion will do almost anything. And it was this hateful thing that had so long restrained the euthanasia movement with all its splendid mercy.”
This idea of euthanasia being a splendid mercy is certainly on the upswing especially with the very idea of a “mercy killing” which displays the irony of Satan. But it is more despair than mercy that drives this and it is usually not the despair of the victim, but the despair of the mercy killer towards an actual understanding of the dignity of life. You certainly don’t look at the paintings of the late Dr. Kevorkian and find joy in them.
We can only expect more and more positive portrays of assisted suicide in the media. In the movie Soylent Green we say a portrayal of this and we learned to be more alarmed that “Soylent Green is people” than that the character Edward G. Robinson seeked assisted-suicide at a government clinic in despair at this fact. Whether murder in this form will take the path of the government clinic, faux-religious component, or a combination of the two remains to be seen.
“We should neither of us shrink from the task, awful though it be to contemplate. “Euthanasia” is an excellent and a comforting word! I am grateful to whoever invented it.” — Dr. Seward in Dracula by Bram Stoker
A wonderful letter to be read at Mass in the Diocese of Peoria.
Dear Catholic Believers,
Since the foundation of the American Republic and the adoption of the Bill of Rights, I do not think there has ever been a time more threatening to our religious liberty than the present. Neither the president of the United States nor the current majority of the Federal Senate have been willing to even consider the Catholic community’s grave objections to those HHS mandates that would require all Catholic institutions, exempting only our church buildings, to fund abortion, sterilization, and artificial contraception. This assault upon our religious freedom is simply without precedent in the American political and legal system. Contrary to the guarantees embedded in the First Amendment, the HHS mandates attempt to now narrowly define and thereby drastically limit our traditional religious works. They grossly and intentionally intrude upon the deeply held moral convictions that have always guided our Catholic schools, hospitals, and other apostolic ministries.
Nearly two thousand years ago, after our Savior had been bound, beaten, scourged, mocked, and crowned with thorns, a pagan Roman Procurator displayed Jesus to a hostile crowd by sarcastically declaring: “Behold your King.” The mob roared back: “We have no king but Caesar.” Today, Catholic politicians, bureaucrats, and their electoral supporters who callously enable the destruction of innocent human life in the womb also thereby reject Jesus as their Lord. They are objectively guilty of grave sin. For those who hope for salvation, no political loyalty can ever take precedence over loyalty to the Lord Jesus Christ and to his Gospel of Life. God is not mocked, and as the Bible clearly teaches, after this passing instant of life on earth, God’s great mercy in time will give way to God’s perfect judgment in eternity.
I therefore call upon every practicing Catholic in this Diocese to vote. Be faithful to Christ and to your Catholic Faith. May God guide and protect His Holy Church, and may God bless America.
Most Reverend Daniel R. Jenky, CSC
Catholic Bishop of Peoria
This subject does remind me of something Archbishop Chaput said back in 2007.
I think there are legitimate reasons you could vote in favor of someone who wouldn’t be where the church is on abortion, but it would have to be a reason that you could confidently explain to Jesus and the victims of abortion when you meet them at the Judgment…and we will meet them. That’s the only criterion. It can’t be that we favor a particular party, or that we’re hostile to the war, or so on.
In other news from Thomas Peters at Catholic Vote:
Next Tuesday, America heads to the polls.
But before that, on Sunday, Catholics across the country will go to Mass.
When I go to Mass this Sunday I’ll be using the social app Foursquare to check in and announce via Facebook and Twitter that I’m “celebrating my First Amendment right to religious liberty by attending Mass.”
You don’t have to use Foursquare to participate, simply update your Facebook and/or Twitter account with some sort of announcement this Sunday that you are going to Mass (I think Facebook and Foursquare do this best). The Twitter hashtag we are using is #CHECKINSUNDAY.
Just this week Pope Benedict said our Catholic faith is personal but not private.
I have mixed feelings about this initiative considering that the Obama Administration has tried to redefine religious freedom as meaning the right to go to Mass, services, etc. To actually live out your faith by their redefinition – not so much. Still I am more in favor of this than against it.
You really can’t expect much from an article titled Why isn’t Paul Ryan on Catholic bishops’ ‘wafer watch’?
Mitt Romney and his Catholic running mate, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, while pro-life, allow for exceptions in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother.
That might sound more conservative than Obama and Biden, but it is not in keeping with Catholic orthodoxy, argued Fordham University theologian Michael Peppard in the New York Times last week. Peppard says the sanctity of life is a prophetic teaching — not a political position.
In his op-ed, headlined “Paul Ryan, Catholic Dissident,” Peppard writes that there are no allowable exceptions when it comes to abortion.
None. Nada. Zero.
Therefore Ryan, who was in lockstep with Catholic orthodoxy before becoming Romney’s running mate, no longer is.
Have the bishops put Ryan, as they have Biden, on what’s called “wafer watch,” warning that he better not be taking communion if he continues to support a woman’s right to choose?
Not that I have heard.
First correction is that it is certainly true there is no allowable exceptions for direct abortion, this does not include cases involving double effect such as in ectopic pregnancies which are indirect abortion. Just to make a minor clarification.
Now first off it seems rather odd that a theologian who has written for the Huffington post and Commonweal is really the person who is going to schools people on Church teaching regarding abortion. Kind of the Church says this, but I am willing to write for the extreme pro-abortion organizations and write an article for the NYT proclaiming Rep. Ryan as dissident. Considering he has no track record proclaiming extreme pro-abortion Democrats as such. Besides the theologian who would even use the term “wafer watch” is more concerned with using an offensive neologism than being a truly Catholic theologian.
Michael Peppard had written.
The Catholic stance on abortion is not political but prophetic — a holistic and unyielding defense of the sacredness of life. The church’s staunch position on fetal personhood was on display two years ago in Phoenix, when Margaret McBride, a nun on the ethics board of St. Joseph’s Hospital, authorized an emergency abortion to save the life of a dying woman. Sister McBride was automatically excommunicated by her bishop (though later reinstated quietly). Mr. Ryan’s new position unites him with Sister McBride in defending the threatened life of a pregnant woman.
A theologian who says abortion “not political but prophetic” seems to me not to be a very good theologian. The teaching on abortion is a truth grounded in the natural law. Regarding the truth of Church teaching is not a “staunch position” and he couldn’t even bring himself to capitalize “Church.” Plus the phrase “automatically excommunicated by her Bishop” is so stupid it even makes armchair Canon layer like me chuckle. The Sister was automatically excommunicated by her action and the bishop recognized the fact. As for Sister McBride being later reinstated quietly. The Hospital had emailed the Catholic News Service that she was no longer excommunicated. If this is true (never confirmed by the Diocese as far as I know) then she had repented of her action which is a very good thing. Mr. Peppard is trying to have it both ways here.
But it is always a good idea to look at your dismissiveness of what somebody said for reasons outside of what they said. This article really proclaims a “What is good for the goose is good for the gander” appeal. The so-called Communion wars that broke out with Sen. John Kerry’s Presidential run and that rears its head from time to time now has lead to Democrats wanting to put the shoe on the other foot. Though with Sen. John Kerry this was hard since his foot is often in his mouth.
There has been some outcry against Peppard’s original article, for example by the Catholic League. Though I think some of the critics have missed the point. It does not come down to a question of whether a Catholic may vote for a politician who is much more restrictive of abortion. The real question is would Rep. Paul Ryan meet the criteria under the infamous Canon 915? Here is a bit of trivia for you Canon 915 is the only Canon with its own Wikipedia page.
Those who have been excommunicated or interdicted after the imposition or declaration of the penalty and others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion.
Previously Rep. Ryan had not supported such exceptions and is now going along with them. He basically has promised that the Romney/Ryan team will not act in regards to legislation and these exceptions. Leave off the fact that they will have no way to legislate on this in the first place at the Federal level, I don’t excuse such an attitude as simply being politically pragmatic and we know that he is “personally opposed.” The law is a teacher and what a politician publicly supports is also a teacher to a some extent. A political compromise concerning the moral law is a compromise of the moral law. Does this rise to the level outlined in Canon 915? It doesn’t seem to me to be such a solid case as in Catholic politicians who have voted for the evil of abortion and supported abortion in almost all cases. That being said I would also think it would be a good thing for Rep. Ryan’s Bishop to talk to him about this.
Michael Peppard called for consistency and I would ask it from him as well. He is using this as a gotcha with no real concern with Mr. Ryan’s moral compromise. If what Ryan has said really does rise to the level explained in Canon 915 than it should be applied to him as a medicinal remedy to get him to repent of his support of the exceptions. I would certainly like to see a wider application of this Canon as a way to help Catholic politicians to receive the truth and to fully repent and when the case is just. I don’t care a whit about what political party the person belongs to but first off for their soul and then for the common good.
This brings me to another point. Earlier this week Matthew Warner wrote an excellent article I’m always confused by the “incest” exception for abortion. He brought up a point that had eluded me before. The large majority of cases involving incest are also cases of rape (statutory and otherwise). He certainly makes some good points.
It really is quite creepy how often the President has talked about abortion in relation to his daughters.
— Jeff Miller (@CurtJester) October 18, 2012
Candidate and President Obama has done this multiple times and most recently in the second presidential debate. Most famously he said that he didn’t want his daughters, “punished with a baby.” Equal opportunity has come to mean that women must become like men and not being able to get pregnant. Instead of the “sacred feminine” feminist will talk about it is more like the “scared feminine” where fecundity is a disease to be treated. A pregnancy is only good if it was fully intended with conditions such as right time, economic circumstance, and perhaps a Sun/Moon/Uranus conjunction.
Hearing statements from the President, Vice President, and their allies in the last couple of weeks show that part of the responsibility of a Democratic Party candidate is to proclaim the exceptionalism of Planned Parenthood. The President had previously said ”I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”, but his pride and support of Planned Parenthood is super patriotic in the sense of devotion and support. To be a modern day Democrat is to be a Planned Parenthood apologist.
It does seem that an organization that is so loved by Democrats is the one they seem to know so little about. The President repeated the lie that Planned Parenthood did mammograms – something that has been debunked multiple times. The Vice President even said “And now these guys pledge that they are going to defund Planned Parenthood, which under law cannot perform any abortion.” Well actually it is under law that they can’t perform mammograms since none of their clinics have a license to do so. The President and some ads from Democrats have also lied that a President Romney would reduce access to cancer screenings. Well Planned Parenthood can’t do cancer screenings, but they can prescribe you a class 1 carcinogenic in the form of hormonal contraceptions so that your chance of cancer is higher. Really the President seems to be an extension of Margaret Sanger’s “Negro Project”.
“The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. And we do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” (Margaret Sanger letter – 1939)
Rather odd that the one thing Planned Parenthood does the most of and makes the most money from is abortion and the non-coincidence that this is never brought up when it comes to taxpayer funding.
As I have mentioned before it is interesting that with all this focus on female contraception that “safe sex” is almost never even mentioned anymore. I guess all those sexually transmitted diseases, which are still increasing, are no longer a concern. Maybe if you want to create the narrative that birth control is prohibitively expensive you just don’t want to promote cheap condoms as policy. Though the Obama Administration was quite willing to flood Peru with cheap condoms. The whole safe sex meme was always a bad response and once again birth control was favored over self control as Chesterton reminded us.
The artificial neutering of women as a form of equality reminds me of the Gnostic “Gospel of Thomas” where the Gnostic Jesus says “Look, I will lead her that I may make her male, in order that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself male will enter into the kingdom of heaven.” The same goes for the liberal kingdom of heaven.
Recently a study showing that contraception reduces abortion rates has been much touted. The same people who say there is nothing morally wrong with abortion are saying this is a good thing. In the study they pushed implant forms of contraception along with IUDs. The reason abortion supporters have redefined conception to after implantation is so that abortion inducing products which prevent implantation by physical or chemical means can be ignored as causing abortions. Well I will wonder off the implantation and call this a lie. What the study is really saying is that they can reduce surgical abortions by means that sometimes induce early abortion. Regardless the argument that one intrinsic evil helps reduce another intrinsic evil is just not appealing to me. Just a form of contraceptive consequentialism.
Lydia McGrew at “What’s Wrong with the World” has a good article on the many other problems with this study.
Included in her post is something rather amazing about the timing of the study.
The results were so dramatic, in fact, that Peipert asked the journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology to publish the study before the Nov. 6 presidential election, knowing that the Affordable Care Act, and its reproductive health provisions, are major issues in the campaign.
“It just has so many implications for our society,” he told NBC News.
So if you had a country with 0.497 population growth what would you do?
Well if you were France you would you would have the government totally cover the cost of abortion (though not the moral cost). If you were France and already running a $13 billion dollar health-care system deficit you would also pay for it with a tax on retirees. Death and taxes together again.
From an excellent interview by Mary Frances Boyle of the NCRegister with Sister Constance Veit of Little Sisters of the Poor regarding the HHS Mandate.
How will the Little Sisters of the Poor be affected by the HHS mandate?
For the time being, we are not directly affected by the mandate. We have until the end of this year to provide certification that we meet the criteria for the one-year exemption currently in place. So, most likely, if nothing changes in the law, we will have to face this concretely Jan. 1, 2014.
Cardinal [Timothy] Dolan blogged about the HHS mandate and its impact on Catholic organizations and services. He is very clear about the costs of the mandate. For example, if we were to stop offering health insurance rather than comply with the mandate, we would have to pay a $2,000 penalty per employee. This penalty aside, it just does not seem right to us to stop providing health insurance to our employees.
If we chose to offer insurance without the objectionable services, we would honor our consciences, but we’d have to pay $100 per day per employee. As the cardinal figures it, for an organization with 50 employees, that would mean almost $2 million per year.So if the mandate is still standing in 2014, all of our U.S. homes will be facing serious financial difficulties. To put this in perspective, we already have to make up at least half of our operating expenses through donations, because Medicaid reimbursements cover only about half of what it costs to care for the elderly in the way they deserve. So the potential fines or penalties we’re looking at just make it that much harder.
To put this in perspective the Little Sisters of the Poor with roughly 300 religious would need to pay 30,000 a day in fines. They could of course decide to only help the Catholic elderly so as to actually meet the requirements of the HHS mandate for a religious exemption. After all according to the HHS Mandate “For the gate is small, and the way is narrow that leads to exemptions, and few are those who receive one (unless they are union donors).”
What actions have the Little Sisters of the Poor taken in order to combat the mandate?
At this point, we have not joined in any lawsuits. Our efforts have centered on praying and educating ourselves about the issue.
We issued our own statement back in March — which is highly unusual for us — because we felt that we wanted to support the bishops as much as possible.
As women religious who are grateful to be daughters of the Church, that is very important to us.
That’s why we issued a public statement and, later on, why we signed on to a joint letter sponsored by the bishops and the Lutheran Church.
During the Fortnight for Freedom, we had a lot of prayer initiatives in our homes, like daily Holy Hours with the elderly and speakers. And I was asked to speak about our mission and the need for religious liberty at a congressional reception sponsored by the bishops’ conference during the fortnight.
I have been a Little Sister for 25 years, and I have never seen our congregation so active on a public issue. So that is an indication of its importance. The only other time I have seen a response like this from our congregation was in the early 1990s, when euthanasia and assisted suicide were being debated in the European Parliament, and our superior general at that time took a public stand.
Normally, our lives are very hidden.
Funny how the media is full of stories of the Vatican cracking down on women religious who serve the poor and none about how the Obama Administration is cracking down on women religious who serve the poor. If the LCWR is reformed they will be more able to help the poor, if the President succeeds there will be less women religious able to help the poor.
This must be certainly the first time the USCCB has issued a statement correcting a false assertion in a Vice Presidential debate.
WASHINGTON—The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) issued the following statement, October 12. Full text follows:
Last night, the following statement was made during the Vice Presidential debate regarding the decision of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to force virtually all employers to include sterilization and contraception, including drugs that may cause abortion, in the health insurance coverage they provide their employees:“With regard to the assault on the Catholic Church, let me make it absolutely clear. No religious institution—Catholic or otherwise, including Catholic social services, Georgetown hospital, Mercy hospital, any hospital—none has to either refer contraception, none has to pay for contraception, none has to be a vehicle to get contraception in any insurance policy they provide. That is a fact. That is a fact.”This is not a fact. The HHS mandate contains a narrow, four-part exemption for certain “religious employers.” That exemption was made final in February and does not extend to “Catholic social services, Georgetown hospital, Mercy hospital, any hospital,” or any other religious charity that offers its services to all, regardless of the faith of those served.
HHS has proposed an additional “accommodation” for religious organizations like these, which HHS itself describes as “non-exempt.” That proposal does not even potentially relieve these organizations from the obligation “to pay for contraception” and “to be a vehicle to get contraception.” They will have to serve as a vehicle, because they will still be forced to provide their employees with health coverage, and that coverage will still have to include sterilization, contraception, and abortifacients. They will have to pay for these things, because the premiums that the organizations (and their employees) are required to pay will still be applied, along with other funds, to cover the cost of these drugs and surgeries.
USCCB continues to urge HHS, in the strongest possible terms, actually to eliminate the various infringements on religious freedom imposed by the mandate.
For more details, please see USCCB’s regulatory comments filed on May 15 regarding the proposed “accommodation”: www.usccb.org/about/general-counsel/rulemaking/upload/comments-on-advance-notice-of-proposed-rulemaking-on-preventive-services-12-05-15.pdf
I tuned in to the debates late, but did catch when Vice President Biden said:
My religion defines who I am, and I’ve been a practicing Catholic my whole life. And has particularly informed my social doctrine. The Catholic social doctrine talks about taking care of those who — who can’t take care of themselves, people who need help. With regard to — with regard to abortion, I accept my church’s position on abortion as a — what we call a de fide doctrine. Life begins at conception in the church’s judgment. I accept it in my personal life.
But I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews, and I just refuse to impose that on others, unlike my friend here, the — the congressman. I — I do not believe that we have a right to tell other people that — women they can’t control their body. It’s a decision between them and their doctor. In my view and the Supreme Court, I’m not going to interfere with that.
First off I need some Listerine Mindwash to remove this statement. Now there is no surprise he would say something so morally incoherent; he is only following the bloody footsteps of those before him who used this morally vapid dodge. Even dumber he calls life beginning at conception as a “de fide doctrine” when it is no such thing. Though liberal often try to make something that is in the area of science as an area of theology so they can make it a matter of opinion. They do the same with issues involving the natural law so as to seem to restrict something to just one religious body.
I think the really sad thing besides his statement is that there are many that will swallow the argument about “imposing on others.” This argument is so shallow that even a laser measuring device won’t be able to measure any depth to it. The fact that he would use this excuse while at the same time the Obama administration is imposing directly on Catholics in many areas including the HHS Mandate makes this ironic in the extreme.
As for Rep Paul Ryan’s answer to the same question. I liked how he took it out of the area of theology to that of science and added a personal story to illustrate the humanity of the unborn. He then went on to say:
“The policy of a Romney administration will be to oppose abortions with the exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother.”
Now many will defend him saying this since it is not politically pragmatic to oppose this area of abortion. After all the Executive Branch is not the Legislative Branch and it will take an overturning of Roe V. Wade before any legal movement against abortion will occur. Plus even if it is overturned it will then become a matter for the states and not the Federal government. So practically there really will not be an opportunity to oppose abortion in these circumstances.
So I understand the practical arguments and I thank God the saints were not so pragmatically practical. This viewpoint would say that St. Thomas More should have just gone along and signed away his conscience since it wasn’t politically practical for him to oppose his friend King Henry VIII. Instead we get a statement that an intrinsically evil act will not be opposed even generally. This also continues to enforce that opposing abortion for these exceptions is extreme when it is extreme to murder someone for the sin of their father. In some ways Ryan’s statement parallels Biden’s in that Ryan is personally opposed to these exceptions, but won’t impose it on others.