The Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, today announces a victory in their lawsuit against teacher Johnson McDowell of Howell High School in Howell, Michigan.  Federal District Judge Patrick J. Duggan of the Eastern District of Michigan issued his opinion yesterday.

The Court declared the teacher’s actions in punishing Daniel Glowacki for expressing his beliefs against homosexuality violated “Daniel’s First Amendment rights.”  In its findings of fact—the Court described how the teacher initiated a discussion about homosexuality.  The teacher wore a purple t-shirt and was promoting the homosexual agenda.  In response, the Plaintiff, 16 year-old Daniel Glowacki stated that homosexuality was against his Catholic beliefs.  The teacher, admittedly, became angry and threw Daniel out of class because he disagreed with Daniel’s beliefs.

The teacher in the lawsuit tried to blame Daniel and claimed he caused a disturbance in the teacher’s classroom.  The teacher’s claims were wholly unsupported by all of the other evidence in the case, including affidavits of students in the classroom and the teacher’s own earlier statements.  The teacher also tried to argue that Daniel’s religious statement was tantamount to “bullying.”  The Court dismissed that claim as well, holding that Daniel’s speech could not be silenced because the teacher did not like Daniel’s religious beliefs and viewpoint.

The Court’s opinion echoed the longstanding legal precedent that “students do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”  Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Cmty. Sch. Dist., 393 U.S. 503, 506 (1969).

The teacher argued that Daniel’s speech that his religion did not approve of homosexuality was a bullying statement.  However, Judge Duggan, citing several cases, disagreed (citations and quotations omitted).

While the Court certainly recognizes that schools are empowered to regulate speech to prevent students from invading the rights of other students, people do not have a legal right to prevent criticism of their beliefs or for that matter their way of life.  Relatedly, a listeners’ reaction to speech is not a content-neutral basis for regulation.  While a student or perhaps several students may have been upset or offended by Daniel’s remarks, _Tinker _straight-forwardly tells us that, in order for school officials to justify prohibition of a particular expression of opinion, they must be able to show that this action was caused by something more than a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint. Simply put, the law does not establish a generalized hurt feelings defense to a high school’s violation of the First Amendment rights of its students.

… (source)

Good news considering how often religious freedom takes a hit. With today being the start of the second phase of the Fortnight for Freedom it nice to have at least some positive news. Being an optimistic-pessimist I will take what I can get. Still I only see an increase in this type of persecution and bigotry towards faithful Catholics and generally those enlightened by the natural law concerning this. Although I suspect this small bit of good news will be overwhelmed when the Supreme Court rules on DOMA and Prop 8.

While the history of how Catholics have contributed and maintained the Culture of Death is mostly known. This article in Crisis Magazine by R. Cort Kirkwood summarizes this history .

… But Pelosi’s eyewash aside, the real import of her remarks is that they remind us of an ugly truth: Catholic Democrats played a significant role in the creation of the contraceptive culture that led to the legalization of abortion. A Catholic, for instance, invented the birth-control pill, and it was Catholic clergy in Boston, for example, who cooperated in repealing the state’s ban on the sale of contraceptives. In 1963, Cardinal Richard James Cushing, Archbishop of Boston, appeared on a radio program and suggested that laws forbidding the sale of contraceptives should be repealed because “I have no right to impose my thinking, which is rooted in religious thought, on those who do not think as I do,” a reversal of his publicly stated position in 1948. Cushing was merely repeating what John F. Kennedy told the Houston Ministerial Association in 1960, which also prefigured Catholic New York Gov. Mario Cuomo’s famous “personally-opposed-but …” position on abortion.

The Catholic role in repealing the laws on contraception is only part of the story. As Phil Lawler reported in his book, Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture, the scheme to legalize abortion took place not in a candle-lit basement where Satanists celebrated black masses, but at the home of America’s leading Catholic family, the Kennedys.

In 1964, Lawler wrote, leftist Catholic priests Robert Drinan, Charles Curran and other theologians convened at Hyannis Port, Mass., with the brain trust behind the Senate campaign of Robert F. Kennedy.  They concocted the teaching that abortion could be justified if it were the “lesser of two evils” and that “a blanket prohibition might be more harmful to the common good”  because political leaders might  “impose their own private views on public policy. …The skillful operatives of the Kennedy family would round up the votes to end restrictions on abortion and eventually provide public subsidies. The Jesuit theologians would provide protective cover” and sabotage Catholic teaching in the universities. “Thus, the basic lines of ‘pro-choice’ rhetoric were sketched out by Catholic theologians, at the residence of America’s most famous Catholic family, nine years before the Roe v. Wade decision.”

It was natural and logical for a society that accepted contraception to eventually approve abortion. Firstly, the cultural race to the bottom coincided with the concomitant success of the Sexual Revolution and the population control movements, which flowered in the 1960s. Secondly, the moral decline followed the premise behind contraception: a child, the natural end of procreative sex, is unwanted. If some children were unwanted, legalizing their murder in the womb was a predictable next step. Though appointed by Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, leftist Supreme Court justice William Brennan orchestrated the legal denouement of what was begun by the Hyannis Port mafia. The renegade Catholic not only invented the “privacy” doctrine that invalidated Connecticut’s law forbidding the sale of contraceptives, but also excogitated the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized the slaughter of innocents. Brennan’s reasoning in Roe v. Wade is accoutered in the language of “privacy” and “rights,” but it flows from the same polluted well as Cushing’s: A Catholic does not have the right to “impose [his] thinking” on those who believe differently. And yet, Brennan’s defiance of Catholic teaching was not considered serious enough to deprive him of a funeral mass at the Washington D.C. Cathedral of St. Matthew in 1997.

And then ends with:

… Which invites two questions. First, where does this leave the Church? Answer: In trouble. Second, what can be done about it? Answer: The bishops must step forward and lead, principally by demanding sound catechesis and formation of the faithful, and then by correcting Pelosi and her ilk, if necessary by enforcing Canon 915. They are shepherds. They must feed their sheep.

The rest of us must do our part. Above all, we must pray—without ceasing.

I am sympathetic to this viewpoint at the end. Unfortunately we often wait around for the Bishops to lead us giving many of us an excuse mostly to gripe and not to actually step-up ourselves. My late pastor use to tell me “Holy priests make holy people and holy people make holy priests.” Bishops certainly have an important role in leadership, but the spere of the laity also has an important role. Al Kresta often emphasizes this point-of-view on his show and I have come more and more to agree with it. When the laity does indeed fill its role as we have seen in the pro-life movement and the growth of apologetics as we have seen with Catholic Answers we see partially what the sphere of the laity can achieve. When combined with the role of bishops, and other degrees of Holy Orders, who live out their charism it is once again that mighty both/and that informs so much of our faith.

In an interview yesterday with Archbishop Chaput he said;

If laypeople don’t love their Catholic faith enough to struggle for it in the public square, nothing the bishops do will finally matter. (Via Why I Am Catholic)

President Barack Obama (above), repeated the oft disproved claim that Catholic education increases division in front of an audience of 2000 young people, including many Catholics, at Belfast’s Waterfront hall when he arrived in the country this morning.

“If towns remain divided—if Catholics have their schools and buildings and Protestants have theirs, if we can’t see ourselves in one another and fear or resentment are allowed to harden—that too encourages division and discourages cooperation,” the US president said. (source)

As Father Z says “And this is his business… how?”

Really the President doesn’t want division in their schools because children don’t know division in our public schools. Okay broad swipe, but when you compare most public schools to parochial schools there isn’t much to brag about.

I wonder how upset the President is regarding the private school education his daughters are getting.

The President’s attitude though is totally unsurprising. The fact is the majority of Democrats would rally for forced public school eduction if they could get away with it. The history of public schools in the United States is filled with the idea of bringing Catholics under line. The “Blaine Amendments” passed by many states certainly had this in mind. The Democrat opposition to school choice also falls in line with an opposition to parochial schools.

Public schools have become a way for the Democrat Party to raise up the “Democrat Youth” beholden to a Federal government that gives out party favors to all who are favored by them. The Federal government – Teacher Union loop just keeps feeding on each other as a bureaucratic perpetual motion machine.

The reality is that Democrats should not fear Catholic schools at all or at least not fear most of them. Students might receive a good education, but probably not regarding philosophy, theology, and a understanding of the faith. Maybe things are getting better in this regard, but time will tell.

The article continues:

The US politician made the unfounded claim despite a top Vatican official spelling out the undeniable good done by Catholic education in a speech in Glasgow on Saturday and in his homily at Mass on Friday.

Archbishop Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, told an audience in Scotland that Catholic education provided a rare place where ‘intellectual training, moral discipline and religious commitment would come together’ while giving the presitigous Cardinal Winning Lecture on Saturday to officially launch the St Andrews Foundation for Catholic teacher education at Glasgow University. During Mass at St Andrew’s Cathedral, Glasgow, on Friday night he said that ‘the Catholic school is vitally important … a critical component of the Church,’ adding that Catholic education provides young people with a wonderful opportunity to ‘grow up with Jesus.’

Parishioners from St. Andrew Catholic Church, which has a longstanding commitment to social justice issues, will march in Sunday’s Portland Pride Parade with a banner proclaiming their parish identity, despite the wishes of Archbishop Alexander K. Sample.

At least four Catholic parishes are expected to participate in the parade, according to the Rev. Tara Wilkins, executive director of the Community of Welcoming Congregations. Members of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Philip Neri  and St. André Bessette  (the Downtown Chapel) also are expected to march. In the past, they have carried parish banners, Wilkins said.

Monsignor Dennis O’Donovan, vicar general of the Archdiocese of Portland, called St. Andrew’s pastor, the Rev. Dave Zegar,  on May 31 on behalf of Sample, parishioners say. O’Donovan relayed the message that individuals could walk in the parade but that the archbishop did not want St. Andrew’s members to walk as a community. (Source)

I must say I am shocked. Shocked at such a low turnout from Portland parishes.

First off, what is up with a “gay” pride parade on Father’s Day? Irony there on a couple of levels.

So you can walk in a parade supporting a distorted view of the human person, just as long as you don’t do it as a parish group? So help me out with the moral theology involved since I just don’t get it. Is the difference only that in one case you don’t embarrass the diocese? Still I should not discount that the reportage on this is not accurate.

St. Francis of Assisi was the parish I had my first experience of Catholicism as an atheist teen. A version of Catholicism that put no demands on me since I could believe the same things they espoused as an atheist and a flaming liberal. About the theological density of universalism.

Apparently nothing has changed. I had previously looked to try to find pictures of the interior to jog my memory with no luck. This time around I found one to bring my memories rushing back as a member of the small ensemble choir. An altar on a tree trunk. No Catholic statues, but a banner of Martin Luther King. Not sure if that is a boxy baldacchino or something else. I really wonder what is going on with the pile of rocks where I suppose a high altar use to be. As a cruciform church with a wooden interior it is rather nice and it wouldn’t take too much work to make it into a much more beautiful parish. I would love to have seen a picture of the parish prior to the stripping of the high altar and Communion rails.

When looking for pictures of my old parish I found the Portland Catholic Churches blog from someone who is slowly visiting Catholic churches in Portland and writing up posts describing them and including photographs. This is a rather cool idea for a blog. Part of the description of the Mass for this parish.

The “Our Father” was sung with the entire congregation holding hands across the aisles. The line, “Our Mother, who art in Heaven” was added to the prayer.

I can certainly remember the whole holding hands across the aisles and often an accompanying swaying to the beat. If they did the “Our Mother” then I don’t remember, but I wouldn’t have known it wasn’t correct.

The Battle Begins in Portland, OR a Catholic blog in Oregon reporting on this story.

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 13, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In response to a question today from a reporter about a late-term abortion ban that is being proposed in Congress, Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said that the issue of late-term abortion is “sacred ground” for her.

“As a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when we talk about this,” Pelosi said. “This shouldn’t have anything to do with politics.”

A Weekly Standard reporter had pointed out that the bill was proposed by legislators in response to the horrific case of late-term abortionist Kermit Gosnell, who was found guilty of murder for “snipping” the spinal cords of three babies born alive.

“They argue that there really isn’t much of a moral difference between what someone like Dr. Gosnell did to infants born at 23, 24, 25 weeks into pregnancy, and what can happen [legally] at a clinic down the road in Maryland where a doctor says he’ll perform an elective abortions 28 weeks into pregnancy,” asked the reporter. “So, the question I have for you is what is the moral difference between what Dr. Gosnell did to a baby born alive at 23 weeks and aborting her moments before birth?”

Pelosi responded by saying that what Gosnell did was “reprehensible,” but then said that the bill is also “reprehensible,” suggesting that it shows “disrespect” to “a judgment a woman makes about her reproductive health.” (source)

Whenever Nancy Pelosi refers to her faith it is much like “Bertie” Wooster’s prideful remembrance of his “Scripture Knowledge Prize.” This was kind of a running joke in P.G. Wodehouse’s Wooster and Jeeves novels.

Still once again Nancy Pelosi says more than she intends. When she talks about abortion and sacred ground I am reminded of:

And the LORD said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground. Genesis 4:10

There was a good deal of coverage regarding the recent case of a court awarding a women with SSA $170,000 after she was fired from a Catholic school for using IVF.

The case gained attention partly because opposition to IVF has remained largely a Catholic distinctive. While supposedly the U.S. has become more pro-life in regards to abortion, there has not been the same followthrough in regards to opposition to IVF. The poison of the support of contraception within most of Protestantism led also to IVF hardly being controversial.

I am reminded of this because of Rebecca Taylor’s recent story on New IVF Embryo Quality Control

In manufacturing, quality control (QC) is very important. A manufacturer always wants to put out the best product and eliminate defective merchandise.

The same is true of IVF. With as many as 30 embryos created for every live birth, doctors are always on the look out for ways to separate the robust embryos from the “defective” ones to improve their success rates. Previously this was achieved by preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD.) In PGD, a single cell is removed from the days old embryo and tested for genetic anomalies. The ones that pass the test get a chance at being transferred to their mother’s womb. The others…well they are defective so no need to mention what happens to them, right?

The idea of “30 embryos created for every live birth” is so hard to fathom as something that happens. There is a mighty corruption at work that can transform the natural desire to have a child to allow the sacrifice of 29 siblings for that one child. The idea of life being from conception seems to get lost on people that might be otherwise pro-life when it comes to IVF. Part of this is from the push to make implantation the start of life instead.

I am reminded of the 1973 movie “Soylent Green” where the Policeman played by Charleston Heston wants to spread that word about the food source “Soylent Green”, that “Soylent Green is people!”

Well in this case I want to spread the word that “Embryos are people!” There is an attempt to take a word for a stage of life regarding the human person and to use the term to dehumanize. The false dichotomy between embryo and human person or the same regarding the word fetus.

Embryos are people!

Getting back to the article:

You may think I am being harsh comparing this new technique to manufacturing QC. That is until you read this comment by the chair of the British Fertility Society:

Allan Pacey, lecturer in andrology at Sheffield University and chair of the British Fertility Society, said: “This paper is interesting because we really do need to make advances in selecting the best embryos created during IVF.”

Mass produce, screen the product, choose the best and cull the rest. Above all, NEVER mention that these are actual human beings.

As a side-note, I would avoid the book Soylent Green was based on, “Make room, Make Room” by the recently deceased Harry Harrison. It was motivated by the doom and gloom of the late 1960’s and the chicken little-ing regarding the “Population Bomb” with some anti-Catholicism thrown in. I actually liked the movie much more. It was campy, but added the whole Soylent Green plot and unlike the book did not end in a total lack of hope.

Over and over we are seeing with Pope Francis that some of the more interesting things he says are the things we don’t have transcripts for. What he has to say in public shows his frank style and this is even more so in more relaxed settings.

The latest dust-up is over reports that he said:

"In the Curia there are holy people, truly, there are holy people. But there’s also a current of corruption – there’s that, too, it’s true…. The ‘gay lobby’ is spoken of, and it’s true, that’s there… we need to see what we can do.”

I would highly suggest reading Jimmy Akin’s analysis on this. Jimmy Akin’s guess is that the Pope did indeed say this based on the supposed quotation not being out of character with the way he speaks. Although there is a statement from the group he spoke to that these comments “cannot be attributed with certainty to the Holy Father.” Fr. Federico Lombardi, director of the Holy See Press Office, had previously declined to affirm the accuracy of the quote “(t)he meeting between the Holy Father and the presidency of CLAR was a meeting of a private nature.

There has long been some reportage of a so-called “gay lobby” within the Vatican. It is easy to go all Dan Brown about what this “gay lobby” is doing. If seen as a coordinated group of people within the Vatican pushing for a change in the Church’s teaching they have to be the most ineffective lobby ever. As Jimmy Akin points out:

An obvious long-term goal might be trying to influence Church teaching on homosexual behavior.

If that’s their goal, they haven’t met with a lot of success. The Church has been quite firm on this subject.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has issued multiple documents dealing with this subject and maintaining the Church’s traditional teaching in spite of mounting cultural opposition.

They might also try to influence policies such as, for example, the admission of people with a homosexual orientation to the priesthood.

If that’s what they’re tying to do, they also haven’t met with a lot of success.

Just after Pope Benedict became pope, the Holy See issued a policy that people with stable, fixed homosexual orientations should not be admitted to the priesthood.

A plausible avenue where they might have had some success is influencing the outcome of individual cases—e.g., looking out for each other, seeking to mutually advance their careers, seeking to promote their members to positions of influence, seeking to bring people they know on the outside into the Vatican, and working to promote homosexuals to influential positions outside the Vatican.

Jimmy Akin also gives some analysis on the possible size of such a group.

As we said, any sizable group of people is going to have some within it who suffer from same-sex attraction (SSA), just as any sizable group of people will have some within it who suffer from any given temptation.

If the group is sizeable enough, it will have some who give in to that temptation.
The Vatican City State employs about 2,000 people, and with a group that size, it’s bound to include some people with SSA, including some who have acted or are acting on it.

How many is an interesting question, but there isn’t much of a way to know.

I would add that it is possible for there to be larger distribution of those with SSA at the Vatican then in the the general population percentage-wise. We have seen many reports in the past regarding this in the seminaries of a “gay” subculture with a disproportional number of priests having some level of SSA.

It will be very interesting to see how Pope Francis responds to this situation and to whether it will be a more public cleanup or a diminishment due to a general restructuring of the Roman Curia.

As usual Eye of the Tiber posts a hilarious parody on this news.

VATICAN–Being interviewed via Skype hours ago, Spokesman for the Vatican Press Office Monsignor Bernard Hopkins clarified recent remarks made to a Latin American Church group by Pope Francis admitting the existence of a ”gay lobby” in the Vatican. ”It is true what the Holy Father said about there being a gay lobby in the Vatican, but it is not as many have speculated,” Hopkins told Eye of the Tiber from inside the site of the gay lobby in question. “The Holy Father was literally complaining about the posh, overly-decorated, overly-flamboyant lobby located at the southwest entrance of the Vatican where we meet many foreign dignitaries. As you can see there is just too much pink…too much pizazz, as they say. This has bothered the Holy Father who much prefers pastels and neutrals.” Hopkins went on to point out a couple of examples of dazzling chandeliers, glamorous floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and a painting of Liberace. “Of course he wants to destroy the gay lobby. You know how embarrassing it is for him to greet the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church while standing on a plush pink carpet?”