May 23

What is ‘wrong’ at the IRS?

Culture, Law, Media, Politics, Society No Comments »

It’s like asking congressional interrogators to define the meaning of ‘is’. In the growing IRS scandal under congressional investigation, the IRS chief who has the most to say refuses to say anything other than that she did nothing wrong.

Which made me wonder if she really believes that, in the increasingly hostile political climate in which, for some, the end justifies the means, and the end is to advance an agenda by means of targeting and crushing opponents of it. The question of what behaviors are ‘wrong’ in this culture is certainly treated with aggression because relativism prevails. But saying something is not wrong doesn’t make it right, it’s just a denial of a truth.

Congressional investigators are trying to get at the truth of the IRS targeting scandal, and they’re growing increasingly frustrated.

As the House Oversight Committee commenced its hearing on the IRS Scandal Wednesday, it was clear that Democrats, visibly angered by the decision of IRS Exempt Organizations director Lois Lerner to answer questions, turned on the agency. Lerner invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

In a fiery statement, Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA), cited the State Department’s annual human rights report, and the practice of tyrannical regimes that enact human rights on paper but fail to honor them in practice. He compared the conduct of the IRS in singling out Tea Party and conservative groups to those regimes.

The witnesses were then sworn in. Lerner read an opening statement in which she denied providing false information to the committee or any other body: “I have not done anything wrong,” she said defiantly.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) demanded that Lerner be made to testify, arguing that she had waived her Fifth Amendment rights by telling her side of the story. In a courtroom, he said, she would have been regarded as having waived her rights–and, he pointed out, Ranking Member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) had said he wished to conduct the hearings like court proceedings.

Actually, Lerner showed some of her sense of right and wrong by starting to tell her side of things in that opening statement, and then claiming the Fifth so as not to have to tell more. Which means she not only likely waived her Fifth Amendment rights as Gowdy and others claim, but she may have exposed herself to contempt charges, says noted legal expert Alan Dershowitz.

Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz said Wednesday that Lois Lerner, the IRS official who oversaw exempt organizations during the admitted targeting of conservative political groups, could be held in contempt and even go to jail after her appearance at a congressional hearing earlier in the day.

Lerner made a brief opening statement — insisting she had “done nothing wrong” — before invoking her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself. Some legal scholars, including Dershowitz, have said that in giving the opening statement, Lerner may have waived her Fifth Amendment protections.

“She’s in trouble. She can be held in contempt,” Dershowitz told “the Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV. “Congress … can actually hold you in contempt and put you in the Congressional jail.”

Dershowitz, who helped advise O.J. Simpson’s defense team, said Lerner “should never have been allowed” to make her opening statement.

“You can’t simply make statements about a subject and then plead the Fifth in response to questions about the very same subject,” Dershowitz said. “Once you open the door to an area of inquiry, you have waived your Fifth Amendment right… you’ve waived your self-incrimination right on that subject matter.”

That’s clear to someone who knows right from wrong.

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May 20

“Obama’s campaign to silence”

Media, Politics, Society No Comments »

That, by the usually Obama friendly Christian Science Monitor, is a pretty apt description of what’s going on lately.

The article is about the Monday revelation that Fox News Washington correspondent James Rosen was targeted in a sinister way, a questionably legal one, for investigation by the Obama Justice Department. The same one that targeted the Associated Press for…what?…following a White House request to hold a scoop for a week before publishing it, only to add more time so the White House could get it out first. After complying with the request for the week’s wait, the AP wisely went with their instincts and published. Then the Justice Department seized their telephone records for a two-month period, in what the AP described as a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into news-gathering operations.

The latest revelation about Fox News correspondent Rosen just builds on suspicions that after last week’s outburst of scandals, more would come to light. It has. It is chilling, and I wonder why some headlines put that word in single or double quotes, as if to distance themselves a bit from the statement while still reporting it. Maybe it’s because the Fox News chief called it that. But who in the media can deny that it is that?

The Christian Science Monitor reports:

This time, it’s new details about a 2010 Justice Department investigation into a Fox News correspondent who reported government secrets on North Korea. The twist is that in the Fox News case, the government is suggesting that the reporter broke the law and criminal charges could result.

The news points to how the Obama administration is going to unprecedented lengths to defend secrets – prosecuting more government leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined.

There is significance in that notation. First of all, the government suggested the reporter  is involved in a ‘criminal conspiracy’ in order to gain access to his phone and email records without having to notify him or his employer about the investigation. And second, note that Obama is not going to lengths unprecedented by the administration prior to his, or another particular administration, but “all prior administrations combined.” Consider the scope of that.

Administration operatives have been busy using the same talking points on many media outlets saying things that are finally as transparent as Obama claimed his administration would be in his 2008 campaign. It’s no coincidence that some of the assaults on basic freedoms started in that year, and these investigations go back to at least 2010. But it’s disingenuous at best to resort to claims that other administrations ‘did the same thing,’ or that the IRS chief involved was appointed by former president George W. Bush. I find that only slightly less reprehensible than Catholics who claim that charges about the abuse crisis also apply to clergy in other churches, or other heads of organizations where young people are involved. But still intolerable as a response to such abuse of authority.

I’m glad the outrage is bi-partisan. It should be. This is not American, nor just nor excusable. This is so far beyond the pale that it calls for special investigation. Look at what Nixon did and was impeached for, justly. This goes beyond breaking into the headquarters of the opposing political party to steal secrets. Without the qualifying quotation marks, this is chilling.

Anecdotal evidence suggests the crackdown is having an effect, with AP saying some of its sources are falling silent. But that success could come at the expense of the newsgathering and investigative-reporting process that the Founding Fathers saw as a crucial check on federal power.

The Fox News case, in particular, suggests the “criminalization of investigative journalism,” writes Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian, a British newspaper.

Okay, attribute it to a foreign newspaper if you want distance from the story. But shame on you if you do.

At least the most recent White House press conferences have shown some correspondents willing to, finally, ask tough questions. It only took them four plus years. At least this Yahoo news report doesn’t qualify the term chilling.

The Justice Department spied extensively on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, collecting his telephone records, tracking his movements in and out of the State Department and seizing two days of Rosen’s personal emails, the Washington Post reported on Monday.

In a chilling move sure to rile defenders of civil liberties, an FBI agent also accused Rosen of breaking anti-espionage law with behavior that—as described in the agent’s own affidavit—falls well inside the bounds of traditional news reporting.

It’s a play on words, changing language to form people’s opinions. Only it’s not working this time.

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May 16

IRS targeting scandal grows, among others

Abortion, Law, Media, Politics, Society No Comments »

There is bi-partisan outrage over the widening scope of the revelation that the powerful Internal Revenue Service has been targeting groups said to be conservative for the past couple of years. But the IRS target list was much wider than that, and the agency’s treatment of these groups and citizens is both shocking and disturbing.

Even the president said so. That NBC News article asks five very good questions, most of which are as yet unanswered.

The president’s claims of not knowing what the IRS was doing until he heard it in the news was surreal, but so is this whole drama. By the time he addressed it, the president said “if this is true…” when it was actually admitted to by the IRS the previous Friday. He’s got some catching up to do. Like what the IRS was putting these groups through in information gathering, such as records of all direct and indirect communications that group had made.

“‘Direct and indirect communications’ is profoundly chilling of First Amendment rights, ” said David French, senior counsel for American Center for Law & Justice, which has been representing 27 conservative organizations met with IRS inquisitions. “It’s so vague as to be impossible to comply with.”

They wanted to know everything about all members of the organization, present and past employees and their relationships. They wanted documentation of any interaction with the press, any, whether interviews, press releases or letters to the editor, among others. Read the whole post itemizing only some of the unbelievable and harassing demands of the federal agency, with screen shots of their menacing forms.

At first, it was allegedly Tea Party and other conservative groups singled out for this harsh treatment. Then others started coming to light. This pro-life group claimed they were targeted.

Shinn launched Cherish Life Ministries, a separate organization, to offer help to a coalition of churches that supports mothers struggling with unexpected pregnancies, promotes abstinence and advocates for an end to abortion in the community, state and nation.

“Our goal is to assist churches, organize and support a life ministry in defense of life and help function as an outreach to people struggling with unwanted pregnancies in the local community,” the site states.

Education materials are offered.

But Shinn said the IRS contacted him regarding his application for nonprofit status, and was told he didn’t qualify.

“The representative was telling me I had to provide information on all aspects of abortion, I couldn’t just educate the church from the pro-life perspective,” he said. “Every time I pressed her on this issue and asked her to clarify her position, she would state that it wasn’t what she was saying, and then, she would repeat it almost the same way.”

And it went on.

On to a prominent Catholic professor who was afraid to share her experience publicly until now.

In the midst of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) scandal, individuals and groups, alike, are continuing to come forward with ever-startling allegations. On Wednesday, Dr. Anne Hendershott, a devout Catholic and a noted sociologist, professor and author, exclusively told TheBlaze that she believes she may have been one of the IRS’s targets.

According to Hendershott, the IRS audited her in 2010 and demanded to know who was paying her. While they did not ask directly it seemed as though the agent wanted to know about the leanings of these particular organizations.

It all started with a phone call she received at her home in May of that year — a call during which Hendershott was told she would be audited. A letter that followed on May 19, 2010 solidified the IRS’s request to meet her in person two months later in July. While IRS investigations are certainly not uncommon occurrences, the professor believes that the situation surrounding hers was more-than-curious.

“The IRS calls my house and says … ‘I just wanted to let you know that we’re going to be auditing your business’ and I said ‘My businesses?’ and he said, ‘You know the expenses you take off for writing,” the academic recalls.

Her story gets more and more bizarre as it goes, but that call should have been a flag. The IRS does not call to notify people of their scrutiny. It comes in a letter. But that’s a small detail in such an onslaught of information coming to light about what that agency has been doing to people for years.

This all came out, by the way, just after the congressional hearing on Benghazi, another growing scandal for this administration. Former senator Fred Thompson is one of many voices calling for a special committee to investigate. Attention on that hasn’t gone away, but it has certainly been diverted by that IRS revelation.

As this breaking news continued getting breaking updates, other breaking news broke in on it to reveal more scandals. Like the Justice Department seizing phone records from the Associated Press, without the AP knowing about it.

The Associated Press on Monday said the U.S. government secretly seized telephone records of AP offices and reporters for a two-month period in 2012, describing the acts as a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into news-gathering operations.

AP Chief Executive Gary Pruitt, in a letter posted on the agency’s website, said the AP was informed last Friday that the Justice Department gathered records for more than 20 phone lines assigned to the agency and its reporters.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” Pruitt said in the letter, which was addressed to Attorney General Eric Holder.

And this has all continued to grow.

There’s so much to say about this breach of public trust, the breach of federal powers and authority and of constitutional rights. There’s much to say about responsibility and transparency, which the American people were promised in this administration. And about its odd habit of disclaiming any knowledge of these things until they hear it from the press.

But sometimes comedians find a pithier way to say things, like The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart did here.

And citizens who take to the Facebook forum to express their concerns. Like this man, after hearing enough about the abortionist’s ‘house of horrors’ and the government scandals rolling out on the heels of that abortion trial verdict.

I don’t want revenge, I want justice. Justice in the Benghazi case, justice for SEAL Team 6, justice in the IRS scandal, justice in the Gosnell case, justice for all the babies killed in their mother’s womb. I want the truth to prevail. I am so tired of the lying, cheating and stealing. What has happened to our humanity? I know who wins in the end, but how bad does the battle have to become before we get there?

It seems pretty bad right now to a lot of people. But the good news is, it’s coming to light.

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May 13

Gosnell convicted, Castro charged: murder of babies

Abortion, Culture, Law, Society No Comments »

Mother’s Day just passed with fair weather and loving celebrations in much of the country. But it was surrounded by a perfect storm.

I was already saying that about the five week trial of notorious abortionist Kermit Gosnell and the grisly details of his ‘house of horrors’ revealed in the grand jury report, along with the Live Action undercover videos of other abortion clinics doing late-term abortions, together with the president’s untimely and ill-advised address embracing Planned Parenthood and pledging his fidelity to the abortion giant.

But that was before the three young women held captive for a decade were discovered and rescued, and the horrific details of their captivity became known. So while the Gosnell jury was in the second week of deliberation over such inhumane treatment of women and their babies, the facts about Cleveland abductor/captor Ariel Castro and his own house of horrors started coming out and we learned about his inhumane treatment of young women and the babies they conceived by him, and it was all more than any civilized person could get their mind around.

Which pushed the idea of brutality against innocent human life to the front of our minds and the front page of the news. It’s about time. And especially timely in the week leading up to the celebration of Motherhood.

The CNN report that Ariel Castro repeatedly punched one of his pregnant victims in the stomach to force the miscarriage of an ’aborted fetus’, and that this happened over several different pregnancies, was breathtakingly shocking. That it would lead to murder charges was jaw-dropping. Such a charge meant the declaration, much less recognition, that  ‘terminating a fetus’ is murder. Even though it hinged on the will of the mother, or maybe especially so. Because it focused the attention on what it means to end a human life, and it was a watershed moment.

As we awaited the jury’s verdict in the Gosnell trial, the newly incarcerated Castro faced aggravated murder charges for terminating pregnancies.

Based on the facts of the case, authorities said they intend to seek charges not only for the sexual assaults endured by the victims, but also “each act of aggravated murder he committed by terminating pregnancies.”

That alone is a startling statement. Think about what “each act of aggravated murder he committed by terminating pregnancies” means.

We were already thinking about the idea of murdering babies in the Gosnell trial before this news broke. Monday, the Gosnell trial jury returned their verdict.  Guilty, of murdering babies.

A 72-year-old doctor whose abortion clinic was described by prosecutors as a “house of horrors” was convicted of first-degree murder in the deaths of three babies born alive.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell was acquitted of killing a fourth baby during a late-term abortion in a dirty clinic that served mostly low-income women and teens, and went years without a state inspection.

There’s a saga contained within those two sentences. The horribly filthy clinic required that the grand jury visiting it prior to the trial wear Hazmat suits. How was it not shut down by authorities a long time ago? Because a long time ago state authorities stopped inspecting it, a nationwide problem with abortion clinics. And note that this ‘house of horrors’ served mostly low-income women, minorities and minors. It was far worse than despicable.

Prosecutors said Gosnell delivered the babies alive and killed them by cutting their spines with scissors.

He was also convicted of manslaughter for the death of one of the women who suffered terribly at the hands of this abortionist.

The verdict does not satisfy all critics. Some time before the decision was announced, Pastor Luke Robinson, who was keynote speaker at the 2012 March for Life, told The Washington Times, “The whole health department of Pennsylvania should be on trial for allowing these atrocities.”

Law enforcement officials raided Gosnell’s abortion business in 2010, believing he merely ran a “pill mill,” dispensing prescriptions for narcotics to make a quick buck. What they found shocked and nauseated them.

Inside his “house or horrors,”…they found unsanitized equipment that transmitted STDs between patients, urine- and blood-soaked recliners for post-abortion “recovery,” and dismembered fetal body parts…

The violations filled a 250-page Grand Jury Report.

During his closing argument, Cameron dramatically asked Gosnell, “Are you human?”

The atrocities unfolded with the tacit permission of numerous levels of authority in the government, as well as within the health care and abortion industries.

It has caused some prominent or high-profile ‘pro-choice’ advocates to reconsider their beliefs, starting from their very premise, and the idea of what abortion is.

And then there are entrenched abortion defenders, as this CNN piece reveals. They admit the Gosnell case is terrible…

But that doesn’t mean it sets a precedent, CNN legal analyst Paul Callan said.

“The testimony in this case was so graphic and so horrific. It was described literally as a house of horrors taking place in this Philadelphia clinic,” Callan said. “So I think that most objective observers will say that ultimately this will be an isolated case, hopefully, and that it’s simply a case where prosecutors had to act. It had nothing to do with being pro- or anti-abortion.”

Yes, it did. And no, it wasn’t an isolated case. The two are related, as the recent Live Action undercover videos from several abortion clinics reveal. Gosnell was no aberration.

We have arrived at a point where we’re not only reconsidering the reality and terminology of abortion, but the realities of human life itself. And the importance of maternity to a woman’s identity.

Some mothers have become used to apologizing for “just” being stay-at-home moms. At social gatherings, a woman can be introduced as a mother only to receive the stunningly obtuse follow-up question, “Do you work?”

Women representing different strands of feminist thought, including those who distance themselves from any type of feminism, struggle with this tension. I had a unique experience of this several years ago, attending a conference on maternal feminism at Barnard College in New York. Participants were challenged to see if they could agree that, for many women, maternity is a defining part of their identity.

We are at a defining moment. The civil rights movement has extended into today’s pro-life movement and it just gained more ground by fate or providence than it could have by addresses and marches and witnesses, as much as they have continued to advance the cause of human life and dignity. That it happened by horrible high profile crimes against humanity was astonishing and unforeseen. But not unimaginable after forty years of experiencing the logic of abortion carried out, and what it really was all along.

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May 06

Gosnell uncovers what Roe wrought

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And undercover videos show Gosnell is no ‘aberration.’ Some honest advocates of ‘choice’ are seriously reconsidering their whole premise and belief system in light of recent news. While some ‘abortion rights’ activists are coming unglued over these revelations.

Here’s the latter case in point. Watch the video. Listen to the video exchange, and the studio exchange, which isn’t really an exchange at all. There’s no disputing what the Gosnell trial reveals about the logic of abortion. There’s no disputing what the Live Action video reveals. But Tamara Holder disputes alright, though not with reason and logic and the art of debate.

Over the past few years, I’ve seen Tamara Holder on television news shows many, many times engage in lively and sometimes heated panel discussions of politics and policy, and she tends to be very committed to liberal causes and positions. Which is fine. Let there be reasoned debate of each position.

But in this video with Lila Rose of Live Action, Holder comes undone in every way, visibly in her demeanor and body language  and verbally in the language she used to flail at the revelations coming out about abortion clinics and a more- widely-prevailing-than-we-knew attitude toward babies who survive abortion attempts as something less than human life worthy of rights and protection.

Even when Rose simplifies it to the fundamental question of whether they couldn’t find common ground agreement on protecting tiny infants who emerge still squirming and struggling for life, Holder devolves to the angry ad hominem attack on Rose and not her argument, nor on the content of her undercover video. It was ugly, and revealing.

That was after the second video was released. There’s a new one since then, and some call it more shocking. How can we measure such degrees of inhumanity?

For weeks now, during and after the Gosnell trial, ‘Democratic strategist’ and ‘liberal news contributor’ Kirsten Powers has been writing about the trial in USA Today and The Daily Beast agonizing over what we have allowed in social policy on abortion and facilitated by the language of choice, and covered up by a complicit media unwilling to report on any news story that runs counter to the narrative that abortion on demand at all times is what women want, need and deserve.

Thank God Kirsten Powers was noticed by some big media people who were willing to start paying attention earlier than the rest, and follow an idea through to its logical conclusions. Here’s her latest column.

Abortion rights advocates have argued that there is nothing to see here. Move along. This is what illegal abortion looks like, they say.

But Gosnell’s clinic was not illegal. It was a licensed medical facility. The state of his clinic was well known: there were repeated complaints to government officials and even the local Planned Parenthood. He wasn’t operating under the radar but in plain sight, and he received referrals from abortion clinics up and down the East Coast. Gosnell performed plenty of abortions within the 24-week limit in Pennsylvania and worked part time for a National Abortion Federation–accredited clinic in Delaware.

The woman Gosnell is on trial for allegedly killing, Karnamaya Mongar, perished during a legal abortion while she was 19 weeks pregnant. Gosnell was not forced to operate in the dark because of anti–abortion rights regulations. It’s the opposite: he was able to flourish—pulling in $1.8 million a year—because multiple abortion rights administrations decided that to inspect his clinic might mean limiting access to abortion. It’s all in the grand jury report, if you don’t believe me.

I’ve linked to that grand jury report multiple times, and hope people will confront it, especially people who consider themselves pro-choice.

One of the bodies discovered in the raid of the clinic was of a 22-week-old baby with a surgical incision on the back of her neck, which penetrated the first and second vertebrae. The only thing that would make her death illegal would be if Gosnell failed to finish her off in her mother’s womb.

Does that statement make you uncomfortable? Good.

What we need to learn from the Gosnell case is that late-term abortion is infanticide. Legal infanticide. That so many people in the media seem untroubled by the idea that 12 inches in one direction is a “private medical decision” and 12 inches in the other direction causes people to react in horror, should be troubling. Indeed, Gosnell’s defense attorney Jack J. McMahon has relied on the argument that Gosnell killed the babies prior to delivering them, therefore he is not guilty of murder. His exact words were: “Every one of those babies died in utero.”

Gosnell is accused of aborting infants past the 24-week limit in Pennsylvania. But those same deaths – if done in utero – would have been perfectly legal in many states with sometimes abused health exceptions, which can include the elastic category of “mental distress.

The New York Times reported that MacMahon argued: “Because the women were given injections of the drug digoxin, which causes ‘fetal demise,’ any postdelivery movements were involuntary spasms.” The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney, who attended the trial, reported that McMahon argued: “The purpose of the shot…is to kill the baby so that it will not be a live birth.”

This is, finally, where the rubber meets the road. Keep going.

I cannot legitimately say I am a person who cherishes human rights and remain silent about our country legally endorsing infanticide.

Which, listeners of mine on radi have pointed out to me in emails, is too remote a name for what it is, the murder of an infant. True.

We live in a country where if a six-months-pregnant woman started downing shots of vodka in a bar or lit up a cigarette, people might want her arrested. But that same woman could walk into an abortion clinic, no questions asked, and be injected with a drug that would stop her baby’s heart.

Just watch those Live Action undercover videos to see what drugs are injected into a pregnant woman to stop her baby’s heart. And other ways they do procedures that assure ‘fetal demise.’

I’ll put my cards on the table: I think life begins at conception and would love to live in a world where no women ever felt she needed to get an abortion. However, I know enough people who are pro-abortion rights—indeed, I was one of them for most of my life—to know that reasonable and sincere people can disagree about when meaningful life begins.

I will, respectfully, take issue here with Kirsten Powers on the subject off “when meaningful life begins,” starting with ‘who decides?’ and ‘what do you mean by “meaningful life”, much less the question of when that begins.

They also can disagree about how to weigh that moral uncertainty against a woman’s right to control her body—and her own life.

I take exception to this as well, since the woman’s body is one thing, but when she is pregnant the doctor has two patients, and she is carrying within her womb a separate, unique, whole and complete human being with her or his own DNA, already fully in existence. So a woman can do with her body what she morally decides is best, but another human being is present by design of human procreaction, and her decision over her body affect the well-being of that other human body and her or his own life.

I have only ever voted for Democrats, so overturning Roe v. Wade is not one of my priorities. I never want to return to the days of gruesome back-alley abortions.

In case you missed this in an earlier post, Kermit Gosnell was a back-alley abortionist, who Roe ensconced in his own clinic. The clinic Pennsylvania authorities dubbed a ‘house of horrors.’

So this gets down to the anguish of reasoning through the obvious which forces confrontation with accepted beliefs.

But medical advances since Roe v. Wade have made it clear to me that late-term abortion is not a moral gray area, and we need to stop pretending it is. No six-months-pregnant woman is picking out names for her “fetus.” It’s a baby. Let’s stop playing Orwellian word games. We are talking about human beings here.

Finally. The awareness comes. Prof. Robert George helps focus that reasoning process.

I just finished watching the Fox News special “See No Evil” on abortionist Kermit Gosnell, who is on trial in Philadelphia for multiple murders and other crimes. Gosnell can’t understand how it can be that he is facing prison and possibly even the death penalty for killing the babies whose necks he snipped after they “precipitated” (i.e., emerged from the womb.) The women who came into his clinic came in to have the babies they were carrying killed. That was the point of the exercise. “Terminating” the babies’ lives was the service he offered and performed. Had he killed the babies while they were still in their mothers’ bodies (by, for example, inserting a needle to inject a poison into their tiny hearts) that would not have been a crime. He merely would have been assisting his patients in exercising what the Supreme Court deems a constitutional right. So why, he would like to know, is he being prosecuted for killing the same babies moments later after they precipitated?

I must admit that I am no less puzzled by that question than Gosnell is. How can it be that killing a baby inside the womb is perfectly acceptable while killing the very same baby (or even a baby that is a few days or even weeks younger) outside the womb is first degree murder? Of course, in my view we should not permit the killing of babies inside or outside the womb. A baby’s status as a precious member of the human family, possessing profound, inherent, and equal dignity, does not depend on something as morally arbitrary as his or her location. But if we permit the Gosnells of the world to kill babies inside the womb, it seems odd to charge them with murder for killing them outside the womb. This is especially true in view of the fact that inducing delivery and then killing babies marked for “termination” eliminates the risk to women involved in the common abortion practice of dismembering babies inside the womb and removing their severed body parts.

The whole state of abortion and reality of what Roe wrought becomes clearer with the Gosnell trial revelations, and those coming out of the Live Action video series from abortion clinics around the US.

We’re finally talking about abortion, what we’ve legalized, what we’ve accepted, what we’ve told ourselves and come to believe as a society. Let’s be honest, for crying out loud.

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May 01

Big Abortion gets exposed

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Revelations about the abortion industry are coming out at a new pace now and in greater detail than ever. It’s forcing a very public confrontation with the truth about abortion and getting people talking as some never have before. The cover-ups are getting uncovered, and Big Abortion is getting unprecedented exposure.

They got plenty of that at the Democratic National Convention last summer, which celebrated abortion as we’ve never seen in American politics. But that’s the kind of exposure the industry wants. What’s going on now is new for them and the American public and the connected global universe tuned in, and nearly 40 years after Roe, we’re finally talking about and looking at abortion in its raw reality.

It’s been sort of a perfect storm, what’s happened in the past few weeks to precipitate an unprecedented public and even media confrontation with the whole issue of abortion. The trial of infamous abortionist Kermit Gosnell finally made the news when Kirsten Powers, a “Democratic strategist” and liberal commentator started calling out the media on it, and savvy pro-life people launched a grassroots social networking campaign to shame the media into paying attention to crimes against humanity they’d known about for years now on full display in court.

This case took years to come to trial. To call that a travesty is a ridiculous understatement. The authorities in the state of Pennsylvania passed off on checking this and other abortion clinics for years and years. This Atlantic article details it all, from the grand jury report.

Members of Congress heard from their constituents about why Congress was doing nothing to address the abortion scandals and horrors, and a coalition of those members acted on it.

A Planned Parenthood lobbyist testified that the fate of a baby born alive after an abortion attempt is still at the mercy of the woman and doctor who started the process, which is admitting acceptance of de facto infanticide.

The president of the United States addressed Planned Parenthood’s national conference, promised them his fidelity, micharacterized women’s healthcare, and and ended by invoking God’s blessing on the abortion giant.

And then the amazing Live Action investigative team began releasing their new series of undercover videos showing the practice of late term abortion in some clinics, and their inhumane attitude towards what an abortion terminates and what happens if a baby survives still alive. We’re talking about abortion alright, and we need to keep talking about it.

One of the things the Live Action videos showed is that Gosnell is not the exception the abortion industry claimed when they finally couldn’t avoid addressing the horrors of his particular clinic. He’s not an outlier as Planned Parenthood claimed.

Abortion rights advocates have asserted that Gosnell was an “extreme outlier” and opposed legislation to increase regulation of Pennsylvania abortion clinics as they have in other states. But how could they possibly know that this is an aberration?

Last week, Ohio officials shut down an abortion clinic after inspectors found that a medical assistant administered narcotics to five patients, that narcotics and powerful sedatives weren’t properly accounted for, that pharmacy licenses had expired and that four staff members hadn’t been screened for a communicable disease.

This month, a Delaware TV station reported that two Planned Parenthood nurses resigned in protest over conditions at a clinic there. One nurse, Jayne Mitchell-Werbrich, said, “It was just unsafe. I couldn’t tell you how ridiculously unsafe it was.”…

Last month, Maryland officials shut down three abortion clinics, two for failings in their equipment and training to deal with life-threatening complications.

Last year, an Associated Press investigation found that Illinois hadn’t inspected some abortion clinics for 10 to 15 years. After state health officials reinvigorated their clinic inspections in the wake of Gosnell, inspectors closed two clinics, including one fined for “failure to perform CPR on a patient who died after a procedure,” according to AP.

Such problems wouldn’t be a shock to Pennsylvania state Rep. Margo Davidson, the only member of the Democratic black caucus to vote for the abortion-regulation bill passed there. She told me, “We don’t know how many (Gosnells) there are. I’m not trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, but if a woman makes this difficult choice, she should at least be afforded the highest level of care.” She said the choice community knew what was going on and did nothing.

Take note of that. The so-called “choice community knew what was going on and did nothing.” That shouldn’t slip by too easily.

Indeed, the grand jury found that the National Abortion Federation inspected Gosnell’s clinic, refused to certify him, but didn’t tell anyone. Pennsylvania Planned Parenthood representative Dayle Steinberg has admitted that its officials knew the clinic was unsafe after women complained. What did they do? “We would always encourage them to report it to the Department of Health.”

Davidson concluded that for the choice community, “the institution was more important than the individual lives.” Davidson knows firsthand what can happen when people choose to look the other way: Her 22-year-old cousin died after an abortion at Gosnell’s clinic. (emphasis added)

What can happen “when people choose to look the other way.” Choice has consequences. They have to be reckoned with at some point.

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Apr 29

Kermit Gosnell: the back-alley abortionist Roe ensconced

Abortion, Culture, Law, Media, Politics, Society No Comments »

But that’s giving away one of the punchlines of a very lengthy, gut-wrenching, soul-searching article in the Wall Street Journal the other day that, taken together with the commentaries and articles linked within it, is filled with punches to the gut. It may be the best handling of the worst abortion news we’ve heard publicly since the news that the Supreme Court made abortion legal with its Roe decision.

The headline on James Taranto’s article in the WSJ was succinct and apt: From Roe to Gosnell. There is a direct line if you follow the logic of abortion.

This pull quote pretty well sums up the article:

“The reductio ad absurdum of the pro-abortion side is Kermit Gosnell. That is why the Gosnell case has crystallized our view that the current regime of abortion on demand in America is a grave evil that ought to be abolished. It is murderous, if not categorically then at least in its extreme manifestations. Maintaining it requires an assault on language and logic that has taken on a totalitarian character. And it is politically poisonous.”

Don’t think this is some pro-life screed of triumphalism using the horrors committed by notorious Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell as a launching point to vent nearly 40 years worth of pent up angst over fighting the pro-abortion movement.

It’s an alarm bell set off by a former “pro-choice libertarian” journalist from what he himself calls “the mushy middle” on abortion issues. A journalist who’s been making the transition for many years from one position to another, although one who sees the full pro-life position as “a bridge too far” but found in the Gosnell case and subsequent trial the most damning evidence that Roe was really wrong all along.

Using the editorial ‘we’, he explains:

Our path was more cerebral and less visceral. It started with our education in constitutional law. Although we thought abortion on demand was a good policy, we knew how to read, and the Constitution had nothing to say about the matter. We came to view Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that declared otherwise, as a gross abuse of power by the Supreme Court, notwithstanding that it was in the service of a cause we agreed with.

A funny thing happens when you dissent from Roe v. Wade: You come to see that there’s not much else by way of intellectual content to the case for abortion on demand. Roe predates our own political consciousness, so we have to assume there were once stronger arguments. But these days the appeal to the authority of Roe is pretty much all there is apart from sloganeering, name-calling, appeals to self-interest and an emphasis on difficult and unusual cases such as pregnancy due to rape.

Among other things to get from this is the point that a former pro-choice libertarian is writing it and wrestling with the logic of abortion and the truth of following that logic through to its consequences.

When you dissent from Roe v. Wade, you notice that people committed to the pro-abortion side almost never acknowledge that the question of abortion poses a conflict of rights or of legitimate interests. Try to pin them down as to where they’d draw the line–at what point in fetal development does abortion become unacceptable? It’s pretty much impossible.

Right. That is true time and again.

Now here’s an important line that shouldn’t be missed:

Our own moral intuition is that an early-term abortion, or the use of an abortifacient to prevent implantation, is different in kind from a late-term abortion or infanticide.

This is an opening to a good discussion or debate, though Taranto is already open to that. But virtually nobody who considers themselves ‘pro-choice’ will talk honestly about abortifacients at all, much less their role and goal in preventing the implantation of the de facto beginning of a new human life already present at fertilization. Different in ‘kind’ from abortion or infanticide gets into a debate over the difference space and time make in the life of that unique, separate, whole, living human being already present at the moment of conception. Justifying it at one end extends to justifying it at some other end along the human continuum depending on cognitive ability and vulnerability and dependence, etc.

Taranto said as much.

But we concede that intuition is irreconcilable with the scientific fact that the difference between a zygote and an infant–or, for that matter, an adult–is one of degree: All are the same human being at different stages of development…

Any line one could draw between acceptable abortion and homicide would be an arbitrary one.

In fact, he goes on later to say…

The most jaw-dropping example of pro-abortion Orwellianism is the one we cited last week: the fierce objection to the assertion that life begins at fertilization. As we noted, that is a simple statement of scientific fact–a tautology.

Look…

We live in a free society. People have an absolute right to form opinions about matters of public concern, and a nearly absolute right to express those opinions, individually or in concert with others of like mind. “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The Supreme Court, by interpreting (or misinterpreting) the Constitution, has the capacity to impose vast and sweeping changes in the law, as it did when it decided Roe v. Wade. What it cannot do–what it lacks not only the authority but the slightest ability to do–is control people’s thoughts.

The media and politicians and the abortion movement have done that over the decades since Roe. But they are losing their grip. The truth has been coming out. The old arguments aren’t working anymore.

One of the strongest practical arguments in favor of the Roe regime is that abortion has been around since time immemorial and outlawing it only drove it underground, leading women to endanger themselves by seeking out the services of back-alley quacks. The Philadelphia grand jurors recounted a powerful example from their own city’s history.

Pay attention to this.

It was called the Mother’s Day Massacre. A young Philadelphia doctor “offered to perform abortions on 15 poor women who were bused to his clinic from Chicago on Mother’s Day 1972, in their second trimester of pregnancy.” The women didn’t know that the doctor “planned to use an experimental device called a ‘super coil’ developed by a California man named Harvey Karman.”

A colleague of Karman’s Philadelphia collaborator described the contraption as “basically plastic razors that were formed into a ball. . . . They were coated into a gel, so that they would remain closed. These would be inserted into the woman’s uterus. And after several hours of body temperature, . . . the gel would melt and these . . . things would spring open, supposedly cutting up the fetus.”

Nine of the 15 Chicago women suffered serious complications. One of them needed a hysterectomy. The following year, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. It would be 37 more years before the Philadelphia doctor who carried out the Mother’s Day Massacre would go out of business. His name is Kermit Gosnell.

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Apr 22

Gosnell: “The logic of the abortion license”

Abortion, Culture, Law, Media, Society No Comments »

Not every abortionist, nor even most, nor maybe even any other abortionist commits the horrific violations of human life that Kermit Gosnell did, the details of which are on the public record in his ongoing trial. But the fact is, every abortionist ends a human life.

That is the truth underlying the law that became a movement and an industry, and along the way a culture of abortion. Once the logic is accepted that an entire class of human beings can be deemed ‘unworthy of life’ at the discretion and ‘choice’ of another class of human beings (this is the essence of the whole thing), that logic by extension will grow into disregard for the sanctity of human life itself and the dignity of individual persons no matter what their state or class or race or ethnicity or sexuality.

This is the public debate we should have been having for a very long time, but weren’t. People were too dug in to their beliefs and causes, pro-life or ‘pro-choice,’ and we weren’t having a robust public debate.

And why designate ’pro-choice’ with single quotes? The language around this topic and issue has been so emotional and political and agenda-driven for decades, media style manuals even changed their terminology so that pro-life advocates would always be referred to as something like ‘anti-choice activists’ or ‘abortion opponents,’ so as to define them by what they oppose (the taking of human life) rather than what they defend (human life). But the playing field hasn’t been level, because the prefix ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ have been disingenuously applied.

However, the trouble with ‘pro-choice’ is that every time a state has advanced legislation to pass informed consent laws for abortion clinics, the abortion industry – usually Planned Parenthood and NARAL – fight it immediately and vigorously. Informed consent is required in medical facilities for every other procedure, why not abortion? Only when the woman is given full information about the procedure and risks can she honestly be given a choice. Otherwise, there’s only one conclusion validated by the abortion movement, and that’s not necessarily a choice.

When Abby Johnson left her position as executive director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in 2009 after seeing an ultrasound guided abortion, and wrote about it in her book UnPlanned, we learned more about what goes on inside abortion clinics. The pro-life movement has revealed much over the years already, as have women who have suffered consequences from their abortions without being informed in advance that they might. We’ve had lawsuits, books, ‘Silent No More’ and other awareness initiatives, but have not generated a robust public debate with abortion activists about the heart of their movement as they advanced it successfully, even getting the highest and most powerful politicians to promote and defend their cause.

Now we have the indefensible. Abortionist Kermit Gosnell has been well known to the pro-life world for the past three years at least. His Pennsylvania abortion clinic had been raided on suspicions of specific charges but authorities found what they dubbed a ‘house of horrors’ and it was so much worse than a civilized mind can or should be able to fathom. Two weeks ago, in the fourth week of what has been a notorious trial, the media still weren’t paying attention, which had to be for politically loaded, ideological reasons. There was so much at stake for the cause of abortion to let the public know how horribly wrong the abortion license had gone. By Friday of that week, the pro-life media launched a social media effort to shame big, elite media into covering the story. Some did.

Like CBS.

The gruesome trial of an abortion provider resumes in Philadelphia Monday. The doctor, Kermit Gosnell, is charged with killing a female patient and seven babies.

Gosnell’s name may not be familiar, and that makes some abortion rights opponents angry. The case has suddenly become a political firestorm.

This week, prosecutors will continue to call witnesses as they seek the death penalty against Gosnell. So far, several patients and about a half dozen former employees have testified about the conditions at his clinic.

I’ll get back to the call for the death penalty. But first, what were those conditions at his clinic?

Horrific.

…inside Gosnell’s Philadelphia abortion clinic, law enforcement encountered a grisly scene. The clinic has been described as a “house of horrors,” filled with stray cats and animal waste, with 47 fetuses piled into a freezer. Prosecutors say that this routine drug raid became something much more serious.

The doctor has been charged in the murder of a woman during a botched abortion, as well as the murder of seven babies born alive.

The allegations stunned the city. An established clinic, operating for more than 30 years and drawing patients from across the country, was, prosecutors allege, a “house of horrors” where Gosnell performed illegal late-term abortions after 24 weeks and murdered babies who survived the procedure.

The conditions inside the clinic — graphically detailed in the grand jury report — were squalid: unsterilized equipment that infected women with venereal disease and untrained workers performing procedures and sedating patients.

Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams said, “The grand jury went to the scene wearing Hazmat suits.”

 This deserves more coverage, says Chicago Tribune columnist Dennis Byrne, and he gave it some.

“(T)he truth was evident to anyone who stepped inside. The clinic reeked of animal urine, courtesy of the cats that were allowed to roam (and defecate) freely. Furniture and blankets were stained with blood. Instruments were not properly sterilized. Disposable medical supplies were not disposed of; they were reused, over and over again. Medical equipment — such as the defibrillator, the EKG, the pulse oximeter, the blood pressure cuff — was generally broken; even when it worked, it wasn’t used. The emergency exit was padlocked shut. And scattered throughout, in cabinets, in the basement, in a freezer, in jars and bags and plastic jugs, were fetal remains. It was a baby charnel house.”

The indictment by the Philadelphia district attorney’s office described how Gosnell often did late-term abortions on “live, breathing, squirming babies. By 24 weeks, most babies born prematurely will survive if they receive appropriate medical care. … Gosnell had a simple solution for the unwanted babies he delivered: He killed them. … He called it ‘ensuring fetal demise.’” He ensured that by “sticking scissors into the back of the baby’s neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that ‘snipping.’”

The indictment called his practice “murder in plain sight.” “Boy A” was nearly 6 pounds, the son of a 17-year-old mother almost 30 weeks pregnant. Presented with a living, breathing infant after inducing labor, Gosnell, as was his practice, severed the spine and “put the body in a plastic shoe box for disposal. The doctor joked that this baby was so big he ‘could walk me to the bus stop. ‘” Baby Boy B’s body was found frozen in a 1-gallon spring water bottle. Baby C was moving and breathing for 20 minutes before an assistant cut the spinal cord.

Here’s the grand jury report. Read it if you can. If you can’t and you’re ‘pro-choice’, consider the ‘abortion rights’ position and license. That’s a difficult but necessary exercise for people who hold those views.

Here’s some for pro-life people. Because this is a case where the rubber meets the road, and Dr. Robert P. George knows how to challenge thought processes in an exquisitely unique way.

Abortionist Kermit Gosnell is facing the death penalty if he is convicted of the murders for which he is being tried in Philadelphia. Surely, the heinous acts of which he stands accused are depraved. They probably meet the criteria for capital punishment under Pennsylvania law. However, in the event that Gosnell is convicted, which seems likely, I am asking my fellow pro-lifers around the country to join me in requesting that his life be spared.

Now there’s a test.

Someone might make the case for mercy by pointing out that Gosnell merely carried out the logic of the abortion license that is enshrined and protected in our law. One might note that there is no moral difference between dismembering a child inside the womb (which our jurisprudence, alas, treats as a constitutional liberty) and snipping a child’s neck after he or she has emerged from the womb (potentially a capital offense). How can our legal system impose the death penalty on Gosnell, given the arbitrariness and irrationality of the underlying law?

But that is not the fundamental reason for our asking for Gosnell’s life to be spared.

Kermit Gosnell, like every human being, no matter how self-degraded, depraved, and sunk in wickedness, is our brother—a precious human being made in the very image and likeness of God. Our objective should not be his destruction, but the conversion of his heart. Is that impossible for a man who has corrupted his character so thoroughly by his unspeakably evil actions? If there is a God in heaven, then the answer to that question is “no.” There is no one who is beyond repentance and reform; there is no one beyond hope. We should give up on no one.

If our plea for mercy moves the heart of a man who cruelly murdered innocent babies, the angels in heaven will rejoice. But whether it produces that effect or not, we will have shown all who have eyes to see and ears to hear that our pro-life witness is truly a witness of love—love even of our enemies, even of those whose appalling crimes against innocent human beings we must oppose with all our hearts, minds, and strength. In a profoundly compelling way, we will have given testimony to our belief in the sanctity of all human life.

He knows a lot of pro-life people won’t agree with this request in this case.

I do not expect my request to be met with universal acclaim. Given the horrific nature of the acts of which Gosnell is accused, it is understandable that some, perhaps many or even most, will believe that this is not a case where mercy is appropriate. They will not want to join me. I understand.

However, I ask everyone who reads these words to consider the matter carefully and prayerfully. In 1994, I had the honor of representing Mother Teresa of Calcutta as her Counsel of Record on an amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court of the United States asking the justices to reverse Roe v. Wade. In connection with that project, I learned that this was not Mother’s first intervention in American courts. On a number of occasions, she had asked judges to refrain from imposing the death penalty on a defendant convicted in a capital murder case. She did not question the defendants’ guilt, or even the justice of the death penalty. Her plea was always a plea for mercy.

By asking for mercy for Kermit Gosnell, we defenders of human life in all stages and conditions have the opportunity to follow the example of the greatest pro-life witness of the 20th century.

We’ll see where this goes. It’s potentially a watershed moment.

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Apr 21

Boston Strong: Grace under relentless pressure

Church, Culture, Media, Society No Comments »

The day after last Monday’s Boston marathon bombings, the former mayor who embodies the great big heart and soul of that great city was defiant and determined. They not only responded to the terror with great humanity that day he told me on Tuesday, they would come back stronger and in greater numbers for next year’s Patriot’s Day landmark event. Nobody could have yet known what the week would still hold for Bostonians, and how drained they would be by the end of it. But, thank God, it ended.

It began at the marathon’s finish line, where former Mayor Ray Flynn enjoyed the day with his daughter and grandchildren as an annual event that went back to his younger days of running the marathon himself, when his own children waited at the finish line. Several of his grandchildren were near the explosion, thankfully uninjured physically. But it took a toll on everyone in other ways, especially little children. His family’s story probably speaks for everyone’s in and around Boston in some way.

Ray Flynn wrote that “cowards with bombs tried to spread hate in our city. Our children — and my grandchildren — are answering with love.”  

Here’s his account:

Like 8-year-old Martin Richard, who can’t have been too far away in the crowd, they were eating an ice cream and enjoying a great event for kids. You look at the photos from that day, and the crowd is full of children.

Their innocent world took a sudden ugly turn when two deadly bombs exploded, and the streets were filled with the screams of terrified and injured people, and the sight of blood, people down, and people running.

I had been there earlier, but left before the blasts. When my daughter Maureen Foley called me, I raced back to Copley Square and found my grandkids running down the street with hundreds of other frightened people. The look on their faces was not something I ever want to see again.

They couldn’t stop crying, “Did anybody die, Papa?”

There were a lot of kids there, they told me. It was difficult to calm them down or even begin to try to explain how anybody could do such a cowardly thing.

The kids had a very difficult Monday night, still asking my daughter Maureen if any kids had died.

When they heard about Martin Richard, like everyone who heard that news, they were all very upset.

But kids believe in doing something, and it didn’t take long.

“Mommy, can we sell lemonade and cookies and give all the money to Martin’s family?” one of the kids said. “All my friends at school, all the kids who play sports with us will help us.”

They began texting their friends. Hundreds of calls and texts from young kids in their town, Braintree, began pouring in.

The result? (Friday, at a public school) in Braintree, you will see a lot of caring young children and their parents — love growing where cowards had hoped to plant hate.

The Braintree Patch, a local community newspaper, found out about it ahead of time and published this.

On Marathon Monday, the Foley family sat in the bleachers near the finish line, cheering on Uncle Patrick, who was running for CarePacks, an organization that sends basic necessities to our troops, when the bombs went off.

That’s just one more important aspect of all this to point out, that many runners participate in the grueling training and race itself on behalf of some charity. That’s a big part of the annual race and celebration.

Maureen Foley and her four children – Michael, 10, Ava and Julia, both 8, and Flynn, 5 – have decided to take that experience and turn it into a positive, helping raise money for the Richard family, who lost their 8-year-old son Martin in the attack. Martin’s mother and sister were both injured.

“Thank God they were unharmed physically, but to have witnessed such a horrific scene is devastating for anyone,” Foley said of her kids in an email. “They were determined that something positive was going to come out of this experience.”

The paper reported that the Foleys would have a lemonade stand in front of their school at mid-day Friday, “with all proceeds sent to the Richard family.”

“Please come by, show your Braintree pride, and let the Richard Family know that we share their pain,” Foley said.

Friday evening, Ray Flynn told me that over 2,000 people came and the children raised over $6,500 and donated it all to the Richard Family.

We talked about the message of his good friend Cardinal Sean O’Malley, Boston’s Archbishop, at the ‘Healing Our City’ interfaith service at the cathedral the evening before. It can be seen here on Cardinal Sean’s blog and is well worth viewing and hearing. Every bit of it.

He shared the message Pope Francis sent for the occasion.

The Holy Father prays that we will be united in the resolve not to be overcome by evil, but to combat evil with good, working together to build an ever more just, free and secure society for generations to come.

And Cardinal Sean said the horror of “an act of senseless violence that has caused all of us great shock and pain” was “a start reminder of the darkness that can lurk in the human heart and produce such evil. ”

And yet the same tragedy brought us together as a community like nothing else ever could. The generous and courageous response of so many assures us that there resides in people’s hearts a goodness that is incredibly selfless. We saw that when summoned by great events we can be remarkably committed to the well-being of others, even total strangers. We become a stronger people, a more courageous people, and a more noble people.

So much of this brief reflection Cardinal O’Malley gave spoke deeply to the way we live our public lives in America today, and Ray Flynn recalled growing up when messages like his were in the air he and his siblings breathed, the Fulton J. Sheen messages about sacrifice, prayer, pride. What Patriot’s Day has always represented, though the culture has gone off that track over time.

This Patriots’ Day shakes us out of our complacency and indifference and calls us to focus on the task of building a civilization that is based on love, justice, truth and service. We do not want to risk losing the legacy of those first patriots who were willing to lay down their lives for the common good. We must overcome the culture of death by promoting a culture of life, a profound respect for each and every human being made in the image and likeness of God, and we must cultivate a desire to give our lives in the service of others.

He had just returned from the Holy Land and referred to the Sermon on the Mount they had reflected on while in Galilee, which was recalled in prayer at the interfaith service last Thursday. And Cardinal Sean made a strikingly good point right then.

Often in the Gospels, we can see the contrast between the crowd and the community. The crowd is made up of self-absorbed individuals, each one focused on his or her own interests in competition with the conflicting projects of others. A community is where people come to value each other, and find their own identity in being part of something bigger than themselves, working together for the common good.

This is such a good message for us now. No matter what faith or creed of those assembled at that service or any of us considering these words, people of goodwill would probably agree…

The Sermon on the Mount, in many ways, is the Constitution of the people called to live a new life. Jesus gives us a new way to deal with offenses, by reconciliation. Jesus gives us a new way to deal with violence, by nonviolence. He gives us a new way to deal with money, by sharing and providing for those in need. Jesus gives us a new way to deal with leadership, by drawing upon the gift of every person, each one a child of God.

This is a soft and gentle challenge, or an encouragement if you will.

In the face of the present tragedy, we must ask ourselves what kind of a community do we want to be, what are the ideals that we want to pass on to the next generation. It cannot be violence, hatred and fear. The Jewish people speak of Tikkun Olam, “repairing the world.” God has entrusted us with precisely that task, to repair our broken world. We cannot do it as a collection of individuals; we can only do it together, as a community, as a family. Like every tragedy, Monday’s events are a challenge and an opportunity for us to work together with a renewed spirit of determination and solidarity and with the firm conviction that love is stronger than death.

He ended with the famous prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi known as the ‘peace prayer,’ and Ray Flynn laughed when he told me that somebody in the media remarked to him afterward “what a wonderful speech Cardinal Sean gave about peace.” Flynn enjoyed heartily that the media person had no idea those were the words of the famous Franciscan priest. The saint, in fact, who inspired the current pope to take his name.

It was probably the best laugh Ray Flynn had all week, and possibly the only one. It was “relentlessly unnerving,” in the apt words of the Washington Post. One of the little girls at the lemonade stand was wearing a ‘Boston Strong’ T-shirt, already out before week’s end. That was the rallying cry of the week, and remains so.

And the week ended with Cardinal Sean calling for reconciliation.

“Forgiveness is part of our obligation as disciples of the Lord,” O’Malley said. “It’s only a culture of life and ethic of love that can rescue us from a culture of violence.”…

Richard Paris, 54, a Boston firefighter and president of Local 718, came with his wife, Eileen Paris, 53, and their son, Michael Paris, 14. The family had many friends, including first responders who were on the scene when the bombs went off.

Both husband and wife said O’Malley’s message hit home and reminded them of the importance of faith and compassion — even for the suspects.

“The world’s got to get on one page,” Richard Paris said.

Boston has started writing it, eloquently.

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Apr 15

Another senseless act of violence: Boston marathon

Culture, Media, Society No Comments »

Acts of violence never make sense, no matter how this one turns out to be explained. Every one of these random attacks assaults our sensibilities and rattles whatever semblence of security we still have in our daily lives. We can’t live in fear, so soon after these things happen, we go back to busy life as usual. But with a little more dis-ease. What else can we do?

Among my first thoughts is that we compartmentalize violence. What I was going to blog on today first is the ongoing trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell, and I’ll get to that, because it’s major news and the media finally realized that (because they were forced to…more on that to come). What has that to do with Monday’s bombs in Boston?

Answer a question with a question: How do we view humanity? Last week was the 50th anniversary of Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris, Peace on Earth. It talks about order in the universe, order in human beings, rights, duties, responsibilities, truth, justice, charity and freedom. And God.

Pope Benedict often warned societies today that we are living ‘as if God did not exist.’ There are consequences to that, whether individuals believe in God or not. In the absence of a moral code, whose values are any better for people in communities and socieities than any others?

Pacem in Terris says the foundation for order in society…

…is truth, and it must be brought into effect by justice. It needs to be animated and perfected by men’s love for one another, and, while preserving freedom intact, it must make for an equilibrium in society which is increasingly more human in character.

Love for one another? How are we doing with that? A society that’s increasingly more human in character?

But such an order—universal, absolute and immutable in its principles—finds its source in the true, personal and transcendent God. He is the first truth, the sovereign good, and as such the deepest source from which human society, if it is to be properly constituted, creative, and worthy of man’s dignity, draws its genuine vitality…This is what St. Thomas means when he says: “Human reason is the standard which measures the degree of goodness of the human will, and as such it derives from the eternal law, which is divine reason . . . Hence it is clear that the goodness of the human will depends much more on the eternal law than on human reason.”

How much less does the global community depend on “the eternal law” and more so on reason informed by one’s own lights?

Anyway, this is also the anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s  ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, which also quoted  Thomas Aquinas.

How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.

What does this have to do with the violence in Boston? Probably the disregard for the life of human beings, even children, women, the elderly, anybody in the area of the bombs. Anybody who is the ‘Other’ from whoever set the bombs to kill and maim.

At Massachusetts General Hospital, Alisdair Conn, chief of emergency services, said: “This is something I’ve never seen in my 25 years here … this amount of carnage in the civilian population. This is what we expect from war.”

Conversely, Monday was also the 101st anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. How is that related? Catholic priest Fr. Thomas Byles was on board and offered the chance to escape on one of the lifeboats several times. He refused, determined to stay on deck to administer last rites to the doomed passengers, assuring his own fate to go down with them.

Terrible things happen. We can’t live in fear. When it’s an act of terror, that’s just what attackers target and how they succeed. I read several news stories on the AP, Reuters, CNN, like this one in the WSJ that talked about the elaborate increased security plan the federal government swiftly put in place after the bombings in Boston. Airspace was shut down over key areas, the security perimeter around the White House was widened and tightened, people were urged to stay in their Boston homes and hotels and colleges in the immediate vicinity cancelled classes for at least 24 hours, and of course that’s understandable.

But it’s also likely what attackers intended.

As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it’d be easy to be scared. It’d be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something — anything — to keep us safe.

It’d be easy, but it’d be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators’ hands — and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don’t have to be scared, and we’re not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there’s one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.

It’s hard to do, because terrorism is designed precisely to scare people — far out of proportion to its actual danger. A huge amount of research on fear and the brain teaches us that we exaggerate threats that are rare, spectacular, immediate, random — in this case involving an innocent child — senseless, horrific and graphic. Terrorism pushes all of our fear buttons, really hard, and we overreact.

But our brains are fooling us. Even though this will be in the news for weeks, we should recognize this for what it is: a rare event. That’s the very definition of news: something that is unusual — in this case, something that almost never happens.

“Don’t be afraid.” It’s a message repeated throughout the Bible, and even before Jesus Christ repeated it often. Those were the first words of Pope John Paul II when he emerged after election by the college of cardinals to a world that didn’t know him. It’s spoken often by loving clergy and lay ministers and kindly village elders and family members and friends, to calm and to soothe. No one can take from you your peace. But you first must have it.

Pacem in Terris. Peace in the world starts with peace in your own heart.

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