Apr 01

Dear MSNBC: Do a series on Human Life 101

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

I was consideirng making that a question as a header. But there’s no question.

Not when things like this still turn up in what some people still consider ‘mainstream media.’

During a recent MSNBC show on abortion, [host] Melissa Harris-Perry made a comment that will surely make people wonder whether she has any grasp on the science behind fetal development.

Harris-Perry talked about how much it costs “to have this thing turn into a human” when referring to an unborn baby.

During the rest of her talk she “accidentally” breaks a model of a fertilized egg, claims there is no science supporting the notion that unborn children are human beings, and dismissively refers to babies.

Okay, starting with basics, women have an abortion when they discover they’re pregnant and either don’t want the child or are pressured into ‘terminating it.’ And they are aborting or terminating is a fertilized egg, which makes a woman pregnant. Which means the doctor treating her has two patients. 

A charitable presumption would be that the MSNBC host is one of those people who believes that conception, making a woman pregnant with a fertilized egg, means a ‘blob of tissue’ is there, and that by removing it, you can prevent it from becoming a baby. But if that presumption is true, such archaic thinking should exclude any candidate from the position of a major television network host if that network is pursuing honorable journalism.

As the best informed consent law in the country – which stands after multiple court challenges by Planned Parenthood and its affiliates – states explicitly:

…abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.” The law required doctors to disclose that abortion may cause women psychological harm, and that the mother’s relationship with the human being she carries is protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Human life is already present at conception of a fertilized egg. You can call that a person or not consider that a person. Your terminology doesn’t change the reality.  That human being either has rights or doesn’t have rights. But…isn’t that the same argument that raged over slavery?

Can we be honest about this?

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Feb 21

Of Benedict XVI and Andrew Cuomo

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

So there, side by side in two top-of-the-fold articles in the Sunday New York Times the other day, were two stories that are seemingly unrelated, but are totally of a piece. A few days later now, they demand attention.

One was ‘Papal Electors Are Sizing Up A Field of Peers’ by Laurie Goodstein, which revealed a good deal more homework preparation than her piece right after Pope Benedict’s resignation announcement. The one next to it was ‘Cuomo Bucks Tide With Bill To Ease Abortion Limits.’

What to say…

Start with Goodstein’s article about the conclave, although I’d prefer to focus on Benedict while he’s still in office. I will do that in the days to come, and probably for years afterward, frankly. He’s that profoundly important to the global mission of peace and brotherhood and the correct understanding of the human person at the center of it all.

She got to speak to Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George, who is brilliant and practical and right on target with where the church is in the modern world at this moment.

“People are reluctant to speak about themselves,” said Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, who voted in the conclave that elected Benedict in 2005. “So you go to a friend and say, Can you tell me about cardinal so-and-so?”

“The questions are usually about the qualities you want to see in a pope. Is he a man of prayer, is he deeply rooted in the apostolic faith, can he govern, is he deeply concerned about the poor?” Cardinal George said in a telephone interview. “It matters far less where he happens to be living or where he’s from.”

Pay attention, media. Because while you’re absorbed in political thinking about ‘constituencies’ and ‘succession battles,’ the electors who will make this transcendent decision are concerned with humanity at its core.

Goodstein cites Vatican expert Sandro Magister, thankfully, because he’s a longtime trustworthy source of truth about the church and faith. Besides handicapping the papabili candidate, she quotes him on something that receives far too little attention for these times.

The other Italians who are more solid candidates, Mr. Magister said, are Cardinal Angelo Scola, the archbishop of Milan and a theologian who has often addressed the challenges of secularism and Islam in Europe…

Papal biographer and world renowned Catholic Church expert George Weigel makes a point of those challenges and the need to address them in this tribute to the legacy of Pope Benedict XVI, brief as the piece is. Weigel calls Benedict “a hinge man, the pivot on which the turn into the evangelical, mission-driven Church of the third millennium was completed.”…

Why? Because he understood that, for postmoderns uneasy with the notion that anything is “true” or “good,” the experience of beauty can be a unique window into a more open and spacious human world, a world in which it is once again possible to grasp that some things are, in fact, true and good (as others are, in fact, false and wicked).

(more on that in a moment)

He proved an astute analyst of contemporary democracy’s discontents, as he also correctly identified the key twenty-first-century issues between Islam and “the rest”: Can Islam find within itself the religious resources to warrant both religious toleration and the separation of religious and political authority in the state?

There is so much to unpack from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, we will be doing it for decades. Others will for centuries.

But since so much of it is about the ‘new humanism,’ the human person having inestimable dignity and worth, value that pre-exists the State and – because it doesn’t derive from the State cannot be deprived by the State – it relates to all the issues of the day from economics to foreign policy, arms control to sustainable development, digital communications to immigration.

And that relates to the Andrew Cuomo story. Because there’s such a disconnect there involving a Catholic governor using such radical rhetoric to push such an aggressively anti-human agenda, it’s jaw-dropping.

Bucking a trend in which states have been seeking to restrict abortion, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is putting the finishing touches on legislation that would guarantee women in New York the right to late-term abortions when their health is in danger or the fetus is not viable.

Wait…what? Do people in politics and media who talk like this even think about what they’re saying, much less proposing and enforcing? We need to re-set the conversation about what abortion is. Every abortion is the termination of the life of an already existing human being in its mother’s womb.

“Late-term abortions” are acts of infanticide. What qualifies as ‘health in danger’ is so elastic these days, it is not defined or definable in current law. And talking about a “late-term abortion” when “the fetus is not viable” is just incoherent, besides being inhumane. (If it’s “late-term” it’s viable, and it’s a baby no matter how much the term fetus is used to distract from that fact.)

Mr. Cuomo, seeking to deliver on a promise he made in his recent State of the State address, would rewrite a law that currently allows abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy only if the pregnant woman’s life is at risk. The law is not enforced, because it is superseded by federal court rulings that allow late-term abortions to protect a woman’s health, even if her life is not in jeopardy. But abortion rights advocates say the existence of the more restrictive state law has a chilling effect on some doctors and prompts some women to leave the state for late-term abortions.

Read that paragraph again. It’s very revealing of the radical abortion agenda. Right down to the language used for “abortion rights advocates” as opposed to “anti-abortion activists” or other jargon for pro-life advocates.

Mr. Cuomo’s proposal…would also clarify that licensed health care practitioners, and not only physicians, can perform abortions. It would remove abortion from the state’s penal law and regulate it through the state’s public health law.

Okay, two things. Now he proposes going from bad to worse, letting the broad field of “health care practitioners” to perform abortions and “not only physicians.” And states’ public health laws haven’t been equally applied to regulating abortion clinics as they have other medical facilities, in many states. That’s a smokescreen.

There’s so much wrong with this. Which is confirmed by how it’s being received.

Abortion rights advocates have welcomed Mr. Cuomo’s plan, which he outlined in general terms as part of a broader package of women’s rights initiatives in his State of the State address in January.

We need to examine “women’s rights initiatives,” which we will continue to do here.

But the Roman Catholic Church and anti-abortion groups are dismayed; opponents have labeled the legislation the Abortion Expansion Act.

And once again, the Times and other major media outlets revert to their updated, agenda driven style books for reporting that requires pro-life groups to be labeled “anti-abortion groups” and “oppenents,” giving readers the cue to think negatively about…what?…human life? Yes.

I saw a clip from Gov. Cuomo’s press conference in which he firmly declared and then repeated two more times “It’s a woman’s body. It’s a woman’s body. It’s a woman’s body.” And, he said, it’s her choice what to do with it. But the other body, and it may be female as well, is the one inside the woman’s body. It is not her body, she is only carrying that child she conceived. No matter how strongly Cuomo states his refutation of that fact by his single focus on the ‘woman’s right to choose,’ that doesn’t change the reality that the doctor seeing a pregnant woman has two patients. And the abortionist kills one of them.

Pope Benedict has addressed life issues, as Pope John Paul II did, over and over in every message whether spoken or written, on one way or another, because it’s the consistent ethic of life that determines how a society will live. Or not.

In this one, Pope Benedict said “…everyone must be helped to become aware of the intrinsic evil of the crime of abortion. In attacking human life in its very first stages, it is also an aggression against society itself. Politicians and legislators, therefore, as servants of the common good, are duty bound to defend the fundamental right to life, the fruit of God’s love.”

And again:

Life is the first good received from God and is fundamental to all others; to guarantee the right to life for all and in an equal manner for all is the duty upon which the future of humanity depends.

Weigel says Pope Benedict understood and showed the way to “a more open and spacious human world, a world in which it is once again possible to grasp that some things are, in fact, true and good (as others are, in fact, false and wicked).” Whoever succeeds Benedict will need to continue making that robust affirmation.

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Jan 21

To really honor Dr. King

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

First, respect the fact that he was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Reverend first.

Everything he preached and said and wrote was based on the Gospel and the example of Christ. His niece Dr. Alveda King tells me that in every interview. But it’s self-evident in his writings and speeches.

Politicians and social activists who stand on his shoulders today and invoke his name and memory selectively skip over the most siginficant part of his identity.

Martin Luther King Day is a time to promote racial harmony in America and honor the slain civil rights leader who was “inspired by the teachings of Christ,” says the head of the Knights of Peter Claver.

“Considering that so many ‘church-going folks’ were supporting segregation and Jim Crow laws during the civil rights movement, it is wonderful that King dedicated his life to employing Christ’s teachings to resist and counter the very social sins of prejudice, racial discrimination and segregation,” Supreme Knight F. DeKarlos Blackmon told CNA Jan. 18.

He said Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. a Baptist minister, was “a man of faith and deep conviction” who studied Catholic theology and was “particularly impressed” with St. Augustine.

And St. Thomas Aquinas. Kathy Schiffer gives perspective here, starting with a snip from King’s ‘Letter From Birmingham Jail.’

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.

Schiffer continues:

Was Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. a Thomist?

Well, yes. Thomas Aquinas argued that laws bind the conscience—that is, obligate one to obey—only when the laws conform to “eternal law.”…

So Martin Luther King, Jr. is, in fact, a Thomist. In his famed Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he argued that a nonviolent campaign follows four stages:

1. collection of facts to determine whether injustice actually exists;
2. negotiation in order to resolve the matter peacefully;
3. self-purification, in which there is careful preparation for nonviolent direct action;
4. direct action through nonviolent means.

Were the civil rights protestors in 1963 offending God when they broke the law and sat at a lunch counter, or refused to give up their seat on the bus to a white person? No, said Dr. King; and to prove that, he cited Aquinas’ argument. “Any law that degrades human personality,” said King, “is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.”

What King did was skillfully apply Aquinas’ Third Objection—teaching that the South’s segregation laws were unjust because of the moral and physical injury they induced.

Dr. Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., continues his legacy of peaceful protest today—reminding us that her uncle was pro-life. Had King lived to see the dire consequences of Roe v. Wade, the innocent children torn apart in the womb, he would have applied Aquinas’ logic to this most pressing societal ill.

Correct. Dr. Alveda King affirmed that, eloquently, in our discussion today, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. “Uncle Martin was pro-life and would be in the pro-life movement today,” she said. “If you read or listen to his words, you can see that he promoted and respected the life of all God’s children.”

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Jan 21

Obama sworn in

Abortion, Politics, Society No Comments »

On two Bibles, one formerly belonging to President Abraham Lincoln, the other to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Background:

NO VERSES.  Unlike the seven most recent residents of the White House, President Obama has not selected a Scripture verse which he likes, and upon which he will base his presidency.  He will place his hand on the stack of closed bibles, but will not read the words which they contain.

In contrast, when Abraham Lincoln swore on that velvet Bible, he placed his hand on three favorite verses:  Matthew 7:1 and 18:7, and Revelation 16:7.  Those verses are:

Mt 7:1  Do not judge, or you too will be judged.

Mt 18:7  Woe to the world because of its stumbling blocks! For it is inevitable that stumbling blocks come; but woe to that man through whom the stumbling block comes!

Rev 16:7  And I heard the altar saying, “Yes, O Lord God, the Almighty, true and righteous are Your judgments.”…

OTHER PRESIDENTIAL VERSES

And here’s just a peek at some of the verses chosen by earlier presidents as they began their terms of office.  All verses, regardless of the original translation used, are taken from the New American Standard Bible.

George W. Bush had his family bible opened to Isaiah 40:31

Yet those who wait for the Lord
Will gain new strength;
They will mount up with wings like eagles,
They will run and not get tired,
They will walk and not become weary.

William J. Clinton used a King James Bible which had been given to him by his grandmother.  For his first inauguration in 1993, it was opened to Galatians 6:8

For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.

Four years later, for his second inauguration, Clinton used the same treasured bible but rested his hand on Isaiah 58:12

“Those from among you will rebuild the ancient ruins;
You will raise up the age-old foundations;
And you will be called the repairer of the breach,
The restorer of the streets in which to dwell.

And so on. Point well taken that this president went for the symbolism over substance of those Bibles and the men who owned them, though one can hope and pray that in his heart he tries to carry on their tradition of struggling for equality and freedom for all human beings, protection in law, and dignity conferred by God.

His inaugural address was lacking in direction and substance, say even moderate or some liberal pundits who analyzed it all. Not a lot to analyze, but this New York Times piece was interesting, starting with the headline they put on it when it first posted online. Suspecting it would change, I noted it early: “Obama Sets Goal to Broaden Equality.” But he stopped short of full equality, and distorted what that even means.

Mr. Obama went out of his way to mention both gay rights and the need to address climate change in a speech that seemed intended to assert his authority over his political rivals and to define his version of modern liberalism after voters returned him to office for a second term.

Yes, it did seem that.

The president’s second inaugural speech was more forceful than his first, putting the nation’s voters and the political establishment on notice that he intends to use his remaining time in office to push for the America he envisions.

“On notice” is well put.

Mr. Obama honored Dr. King, recalling the time he proclaimed that “our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on earth.”

But the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King included every human being born and unborn, his niece Dr. Alveda King reminded me in an interview today.

Mr. Obama made a point to single out gay Americans — the first time that a president has said the word “gay” in an Inaugural Address — comparing their struggle for equality to the fights that African-Americans have waged. Having offered his support last year for same-sex marriage after years of opposition, Mr. Obama used his inaugural speech to embrace the idea that there should be marriage equality.

“Marriage equality” is political terminology that does no justice to the truth being debated in this country about human rights and the recognition of marriage in law and the state’s interest in marriage.

But that reference sure got a lot of headlines. Like this one in ABC News.

“Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well,” Obama said in his address on the Capitol steps after his swearing in…

“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth,” Obama said.

Mr. Obama should read the Rev. Dr. King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech to which he refers.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The first among these is life, ordered by “the architects of our republic” in their “magnificent words” for a reason.

Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

Born and unborn. Otherwise, you are redefining “all.”

We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity…

And the ultimate such violation is abortion, which this president supports more than any other in American history.

It is inconsistent and intellectually dishonest and unbefitting the office of the presidency of the United States. Especially one who swears on a stack of Bibles, once owned by great leaders and defenders of human rights.

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Jul 23

Cycling champion’s ‘Road to Valor’

Geopolitics, Society No Comments »

With the Tour de France just completed and the Olympics about to begin, many fans around the world are focused on sports celebrities and aspiring champions and stars all too often called heroes for excelling in athlethics. Let’s take a closer look at the true story of a man who deserves to be honored as all of the above.

I discovered it, thankfully, in the masterful book written by the brother sister team Andres and Aili McConnon, about the life and heroism of Gino Bartali.

Let your virtues expand to fill this sad situation: Glory ascends the heights by a precipitous path.

Who would have known of Hector, if Troy had been happy?

The road to valor is built by adversity.

-Ovid, Tristia

What a perfect title, Road to Valor. Anybody fighting the terrain and sometimes hazardous racecourse and natural elements of the three weeks of the Tour or any other cycling championship achieves a certain level of command over adversity. But who has added to that the challenge of secretly saving endangered lives and escaping the dangers of detection except for Bartali?

What a story. The publicist release has to summarize a lot:

Set in Italy and France against the turbulent backdrop of an unforgiving sport and threatening politics, Road to Valor: A True Story of World War II Italy, the Nazis, and the Cyclist Who Inspired a Nation is the breathtaking account of one man’s unsung heroism and his resilience in the face of adversity…

At the age of 24, he stuns the world by winning his first tour de France and quickly becomes an international sports icon.

After Mussolini’s Fascists try to hijack Bartali’s victory for propaganda purposes and as the Nazis occupy Italy, Bartali, a devout Catholic, becomes involved in the Italian resistance and undertakes dangerous missions to help those being targeted. In addition to sheltering a family of four Jews in an apartment he financed with his cycling winnings, Bartali smuggles counterfeit identity documents past Fascist and Nazi checkpoints. Recognizing him simply as a national hero in training, the soldiers never suspect he’s hiding precious papers in the hollow frame of his bicycle, documents that helped save countless Jews hiding in Tuscany and Umbria from deportation to to work and death camps.

But that’s not all.

In 1948, the stakes are raised…Despite numerous setbacks and a legendary snowstorm in the Alps, the chain-smoking, Chianti-loving, 34-year-old underdog comes back and wins the most difficult endurance competition on earth.

Elie Wiesel recommends this gripping true account with these words:

‘Thou shall not stand idly by’ is a powerful Biblical command. In [the McConnon's] book it offers a moving example of moral courage. A simple citizen and great athlete chose to oppose a cruel and racist political dictatorship by saving Jewish victims in Italy. Was it so hard to become a hero then? It was enough–enough to remain human.

Among many other accolades, Cardinal Timothy Dolan added this:

Part sports biography, part real-life action adventure, Road to Valor is the remarkable true account of a man whose Catholic faith inspired his greatest achievements.

And author Fred Plotkin says:

This book is a magnificent ride through the uphill-downhill-uphill story of Gino Bartali. It inspires anyone who tenaciously holds to doing what is just, no matter how difficult, in the face of ignorance and terror. Bartali is a hero for all times.

Having just followed most every stage of the 2012 Tour de France, and about to engage the 2012 Olympics, in the year when the freedom to exercise a religiously informed conscience about social justice is most seriously challenged, I really appreciate the fortifying story and the witness of Gino Bartali.

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May 03

National Day of Prayer and ever present politics

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

This is a dicey year for the president threatening religious liberty to be issuing a proclamation to honor the day called for national prayer. He chose his words carefully.

Let’s look at President Obama’s proclamation:

Prayer has always been a part of the American story, and today countless Americans rely on prayer for comfort, direction, and strength, praying not only for themselves, but for their communities, their country, and the world.

On this National Day of Prayer, we give thanks for our democracy that respects the beliefs and protects the religious freedom of all people to pray, worship, or abstain according to the dictates of their conscience.

Hold on. Right there. That wording reveals a narrow view of what constitutes religious freedom, specifically that it means people can pray or worship, or not, according to…what?…their conscience. So there it is again, another example of this administration morphing freedom of religion into freedom of worship. Which views the participation of religiously informed people in the public and political arena as something to be defined and restricted by government. While those people are welcome to go behind the doors of their home or worship space and do whatever prayers or services they wish.

And “according to the dictates of their conscience” is peculiar wording for a president whose administration is, through the HHS mandate, requiring individuals and religious institutions to do something that violates their conscience.

Back to the proclamation:

Let us pray for all the citizens of our great Nation, particularly those who are sick, mourning, or without hope, and ask God for the sustenance to meet the challenges we face as a Nation. May we embrace the responsibility we have to each other, and rely on the better angels of our nature in service to one another.

May we embrace the responsibility we have to each other? Who constitutes each other? Who is excluded from the class of those worthy of such protection or provision of care? Of course, it’s the unborn, every human being already in existence but not yet completely through the birth canal at delivery. Who in the abortion industry or among its supporters is listening to ‘the better angels’ that by human nature, we all surely have?

Let us be humble in our convictions, and courageous in our virtue.

Yes, let’s.

Let us pray for those who are suffering around the world, and let us be open to opportunities to ease that suffering.

Without attaching to such relief the condition that contraception and abortion be part of the package of aid.

Let us also pay tribute to the men and women of our Armed Forces who have answered our country’s call to serve with honor in the pursuit of peace. Our grateful Nation is humbled by the sacrifices made to protect and defend our security and freedom. Let us pray for the continued strength and safety of our service members and their families. While we pause to honor those who have made the ultimate sacrifice defending liberty, let us remember and lend our voices to the principles for which they fought — unity, human dignity, and the pursuit of justice.

Yes, let us remember and honor human dignity. And the pursuit of justice. And be unified in our defense of the liberty to do so in private and in public.

Amen to that.

UPDATE: Religious freedom expert interprets Obama’s prayer proclamation.

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Mar 21

“The human rights of women”

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

As declared, or addressed, by the 56th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

Particularly, Norway’s Ambassador.

Morten Wetland made an extremely strong statement condemning any religion, morality or tradition that stands in the way of the human rights of women.

For Norway, this essentially means that any group that does not consider abortion (or “sexual and reproductive rights”) to be a human right, is getting in the way of the human rights of women.

Hold on. Human rights cover human beings. One gender doesn’t trump another. And human beings young enough to be pre-born are not only not covered at all (sorry for the double negative, but it is), they’re actually the casualty, the collateral damage, of this trumped up “reproductive right” at the core of “the human rights of women.” As oddly dehumanized as all this sounds.

What is most striking however, is not their verbal attack on the values that cultures “hold most dear” but their irresponsible use of the term “moral hazard”.

After the financial crisis, many of us became frightfully aware of what the term “moral hazard” describes. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, “moral hazard” is the “tendency to take undue risks because the costs are not borne by the party taking the risk”. For example, if you know that the government is going to bail you out even if the risks you take in the financial market would be too risky otherwise, you are more likely to take those risks anyway, especially when you are using someone else’s money.

Good explanation. Who else would notice this but the folks at Turtle Bay?

So, from Norway’s perspective…

…those countries that refused to allow for language supportive of an international right to abortion into the final outcome document or “agreed conclusions”, were compromising a woman’s right to abortion and her well being merely for the defense of their own ignorant beliefs.

Norway would also claim that standing up for such backward values is an easy thing to do, especially when those who defend them have less to lose than the women  kept from a “right” to abortion. But again, that is what they claim.

Sometimes I’m just struck by the inanity of these words, dressed up as official-sounding declarations.

Unfortunately for them, this year it was undeniable that the only countries worried about women and their health at CSW were the countries that fought adamantly for woman’s health care over an invented “right” to abortion.

Okay, now we’re talking.

This past week, it was the United States, Norway, and the European Union that were unwilling to compromise on ideology and to support language that would benefit the health of mothers and rural women, not people of faith. For people of faith, the family is sacred and the mother’s role invaluable. Thus it goes without saying that the health of the woman, and the health care she deserves to receive when she is pregnant, is a priority for countries that support traditional values. Unfortunately, for the EU, US, and Nordic countries, the right to abortion was of even greater importance than these values.

And these are supposedly the most highly developed, intellectually steeped regions on earth, right? Don’t answer that.

Tagged with: • • •
Dec 20

Vaclav Havel’s legacy

Culture, Geopolitics, Media, Politics, Society 1 Comment »

How utterly simplistic to call a blog post to such a task. This does not pretend to do that. It’s merely intended to be a signpost along the way.

It’s a different path. We are coming up to speed on revolutions these days. But we are not attuned to profoundly enduring leaders.

Vaclav Havel was one.

The son of a wealthy developer who toiled as a lab assistant and lowly brewery worker after being denied a higher education, Havel’s works earned him five years in communist jails, where the chain smoking writer fell ill with chronic lung problems that eventually contributed to his death on Sunday at 75.

A playwright whose work was banned following the 1968 Soviet invasion of then-Czechoslovakia, he rose from political prisoner to become a president-philosopher who continued to fight for human rights until the end of his life.

Which is why we’re now hearing the tributes this man has deserved for so long. Like this one by NRO editors, well stated.

Czech Communists were brutal, but temperamentally Havel was not prepared to give way to persecution. His defense was to write plays, comedies of the absurd with humor and vitality within them. Several of the plays had a dissident writer as hero and leader of unofficial opposition like himself. A favorite subject for mockery was Communist language designed to present falsehood as truth.

How familiar. Since the time of the Sophists, in fact, who have their modern inheritors.

Havel caught our attention on the way to becoming an unlikely president of people he personified. Wherever that media fascination went, it returned for worthy tribute now. The CSMonitor:

Friends say he was an unfailingly polite, humble man who was not cowed by the threat of imprisonment.

“Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance,” he wrote in a letter to Czechoslovak President Alexander Dubcek in 1968.

Jailed in the 1970′s for criticising the government’s human rights record and twice later, he eventually led some 300,000 protesters to topple it in the Velvet Revolution…

Known as a freedom supporter, he was fired from a theatre where he worked following the Soviet invasion and became a dissident, organising people who did not support the regime.

In perhaps his most famous work, the essay “Power of the Powerless”, Havel explained why.

“You do not become a “dissident” just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances,” he wrote in 1978. “You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.”

“It begins as an attempt to do your work well…” What a remarkable, fundamental statement. How perfectly (and defiantly) human.

NRO editors continue:

Hundreds of thousands of people at last began to gather in Prague as in other Soviet-occupied capitals and to call for Havel. “I am only on supply, an amateur standing in for a professional politician,” he said in an improvised speech to the expectant crowd. He meant it. Slight and stooping, casually and even slovenly dressed, with a moustache that gave his face a somewhat woebegone expression, a heavy smoker, he wished to be taken then and afterwards not as a president but as an artist and, in certain engaging moods, even as an eternal student. His offices were in the Prague Castle (immortalized by Kafka), and he was known to ride a scooter along its immense corridors. The thrust of his later writings and speeches was that Communism had made everyone morally ill, or “spiritually impoverished,” in another phrase of his, and it was humanity’s task to recover what had been forfeited.

I keep thinking of the similarities to Karol Wojtyla, who became Pope John Paul II, Witness to Hope…

NRO didn’t stop with that editorial. The editors asked contributors for a symposium, and they willingly submitted tributes.

…Havel stood for principles that are increasingly seen in today’s West as quaint and irrelevant to its politically correct, multicultural, and progressively less democratic present — an attitude succinctly summarized by the Guardian in its eulogy of Havel, “whose spirited defiance of Soviet-imposed totalitarianism . . . [has] nothing to offer to the Czech or European experience of today.”

And so what most tributes focus on are Havel’s great literary accomplishments, his moral courage, and the peaceful nature of the Czech revolt against Communism.

This is all true, of course, but Havel was anything but the peacenik these portrayals make him out to be. For Václav Havel was first and foremost a freedom fighter against the totalitarian evil that had descended on Europe after WWII and enslaved his people along with all of Eastern Europe.

Self-deprecating to a fault as he was, this self-proclaimed “confused intellectual,” who believed that “there’s always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side,” never once compromised his firm conviction that evil must be confronted, with force if need be, for freedom to be victorious. And so, at a time when the West was doing its level best to appease Communism through Ostpolitik, détente, arms control, and assorted delusions, Havel called it “Absurdistan” and the sterile culture it had imposed “Biafra of the spirit.”

How incisive…

Throughout his political career and after it, in countless writings, speeches, and interviews, Havel stood in defense of the politically oppressed, whether in Burma, Iran, or Belarus, and never shied away from the struggle for freedom. As late as two years ago, he signed an open letter to President Obama warning him of the threat Russia continued to present and of the danger of appeasing Putin.

It was said of Churchill that upon coming to power during WWII, he “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” Perhaps the most appropriate eulogy to the great Czech would be to say that, alongside fellow freedom fighters Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, Lech Walesa, and Margaret Thatcher, he mobilized the language of freedom and sent it to defeat Communism as the last and greatest curse of the 20th century.

In this past week, three well-known figures have passed away. Christopher Hitchens, Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong Il. I’ve posted on the first, will leave to other media the news out of North Korea, and hope to inspire someone to reflect on the great spark of humanity Havel leaves us in his witness to hope, much like Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II.

My esteemed editor Michael Cook is far better than I at saying what should be said about these things. But let me not miss the opportunity to express appreciation for a life well-lived, a courageous stand for human rights and dignity and grace. Especially at a time when we crave leaders, but identify…at least some of us…less and less with defined political parties.

Victor Davis Hanson says it well enough…

Václav Havel was one of the great men of letters, who, like an Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Mario Vargas Llosa, used his towering cultural and literary stature to war against the fascism of the Communist Left. Therein the rare Havels of the world became veritable men without a country — not only are they hated by the state machinery of totalitarianism and put in mortal danger, but after the storm has passed, the liberal intellectual community never quite welcomes them back, and is privately a bit embarrassed by them, as if there must have been a better way for men of such intellect and caring than adopting a loud and unequivocal rejection of leftist statism. And yet they are not quite conservatives either, or at least conservatives in the contemporary American sense, and so these independent-thinking intellectuals and writers who enter politics with a deep suspicion of the state never really have a home — which makes their courage and candor all the more striking, as they are rare.

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Sep 23

Death penalty in America

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

The fact that there’s a disparity is not the main point. Its existence is the problem, in whatever form it takes.

By now it’s worldwide news that two high profile executions took place in the US this week. The fact that it shocked the world may or may not have shocked American citizens used to this form of ‘justice’.

Troy Davis may be dead, but his execution Thursday in the American state of Georgia has made him the poster boy for the global movement to end the death penalty.

World figures, including Pope Benedict XVI and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, human rights groups and commentators urged the execution to be halted — but to no avail. On Wednesday Davis was put to death by lethal injection for the 1989 killing of off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail despite doubts being raised over the conviction.

The execution sparked angry reactions and protests in European capitals — as well as outrage on social media. “We strongly deplore that the numerous appeals for clemency were not heeded,” the French foreign ministry said.

“There are still serious doubts about his guilt,” said Germany’s junior minister for human rights Markus Loening. “An execution is irreversible — a judicial error can never be repaired.”

Activism mounted in the final days and hours of the campaign to save the life of this man.

A worldwide campaign had sought clemency for Davis, and a number of high-profile leaders raised questions about his guilt, including liberals like former President Carter and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and conservatives like William Sessions, the former head of the FBI under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

After the state parole board denied Davis’ clemency request Tuesday, human rights activists mounted last-ditch efforts to save him. Laura Moye of Amnesty International USA called the board’s decision “an international human rights scandal.”

I happened on the Dylan Ratigan show randomly just in time to hear this. The commentator makes a fervent case for the dignity of all human life, no matter what.

Right.

So here’s an impression I’m left with.

The other night, I tuned into either CNN or Fox News or one of the networks as they were covering the vigil outside the prison where the execution would take place. In one glance, captured on the screen at that moment, I was struck by the line of activists arrayed on one side of the road holding signs and candles in hopes of a last minute stay of execution, that this single life would be saved in the end, though law allowed for that life to be taken. They were going to stay there until the end, hope against hope, on behalf of human dignity. Across the street, arrayed in force with riot gear, was the contingent of forces armed with the weapons necessary to carry out the law as it stands, enforceable with police presence. Nervous news anchors described the scene on the screen, where guards were prepared for intervention if the activists moved to save the life of the person inside.

It was jarring, that moment. And so clear to me an analogy for what takes place all across America on most days at abortion clinics.

It’s exactly analogous. Inside a public institution, human life is at risk of extermination, execution, for no crime other than being targeted as expendable for purposes deemed permissable by society. In that moment on that television screen showing the live shot of activists holding candlelight vigil, who didn’t have the legal right to cross the line to save a life, the commentator said the guards were prepared for any effort those activists may make to move in. They had no right to cross the line. The execution was legal.

The cries about crimes against humanity, and human rights violations, have been fervent and widespread. How many of them support abortion ‘rights’? Violence is violence, and murder is murder. No matter what you call it. As uncivilized and inhumane as it is for even suspected criminals, how much more so…or even arguably the same…for the most vulnerable and innocent human beings being held…not in a cell…but in their mother’s womb?

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May 05

They’re targeting Christians

Church, Geopolitics, Society No Comments »

Though this is not new, it is intensifying.

While they’re dancing in the streets in America and especially college towns, they’re closing schools and hunkering down in Pakistani towns.

Amid security fears, Christian schools and other institutions closed in Pakistan following the announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden. Additional police have been placed around churches in cities across the country.

“They have put us on alert, calling for the closure of our institutions and placing more police personnel in front of churches,” said Father Mario Rodrigues, director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in Pakistan. “Christians in Pakistan are innocent victims, even in this situation: any excuse is good to threaten or to attack.”

In Abbottabad, the town where Osama bin Laden had apparently lived quietly for several years, a small Catholic community was on high alert after the US raid. The pastor of St. Peter Canisius church cancelled several services, and four police were on guard outside the building.

Note that this story opens with the presumption that a Christian was guilty of something, though completely unproven.

Following the discovery of a burnt copy of the Qur’an in a Christian cemetery, 500 extremists attacked a Christian neighborhood in Gujranwala, a city in Punjab province in northeastern Pakistan. Fearing for their lives, numerous Christians fled their homes.

The attack occurred on April 30, one day before President Barack Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden. Three Christians and more than 20 extremists were arrested following the attacks.

Wait…fact check. The report cites that 500 extremists (500!) attacked a Christian neighborhood. Christians fled. Then Christians and a handful of extremists were arrested. Is anybody asking the obvious questions here?

Meanwhile, in Nigeria…

An estimated 14,000 people, most of them Christians, have fled their homes in the north-central Nigerian state of Kaduna following the latest in a series of attacks by supporters of presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari, who lost the April 16 federal election to Goodluck Jonathan.

The attackers…

Buhari supporters, “most Muslims, who make up a small fraction of the population of Kafanchan, launched guerrilla-type attacks against innocent citizens who live in their immediate vicinity,” according to a report from the Diocese of Kafanchan’s justice and peace commission. At least 300 have been slain, and 300 homes have been destroyed.

These are only a few instances of Christian persecutions carried out every day across the world. We have to know this. It’s a human rights issue, for crying out loud.

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