Pro-life

Catholic MPs were today given a strong
hint by Gordon Brown that they may be allowed to vote with their
conscience over the controversial Embryology Bill.

The Prime Minister pledged a traditional free vote on a bid to lower
the abortion limit, and for the first time suggested he may also give
way to demands from Catholic ministers not to force them to compromise
their religious beliefs over the rest of the Bill.

It is a pretty wacky world we live in when
an article talks about someone
being “allowed” to vore their conscience and to not be “forced” to vote
against their religious beliefs.

Ottawa’s Catholic archbishop says he
will refuse communion
to any politician who “obstinately” supports access to abortion, but
only if
he or she cannot be persuaded to stand down.

Archbishop Terrence Prendergast made the comment yesterday, expanding
on
remarks he made at a recent Theology on Tap question-and-answer session
at
Malone’s Lakeside Grill at the Dow’s Lake Pavilion.

At the event, an audience member asked if the church should invoke
Canon Law
915, which deals with who may or may not receive communion.

He told the crowd: “I think if a bishop is going to involve Canon 915,
he has
to know (the politicians), and speak with them or have the priest speak
with
them.

“As a Jesuit principle, I have to put the best possible interpretation
on my
neighbour’s proposition, then speak to him about it, and only then draw
the
line and say, ‘Look, given your stubbornness on this position, I think
you
should not publicly receive communion until you change your mind’.

The rest of the article
unsurprisingly gives voice to Rosemary Ganley, co-ordinator
of Catholics
for a Free Choice Canada who as you would expect knows as much about
canon
law as she does about the sanctity of life.

“The York
University Student Centre shut down an event entitled
‘Abortion Debate: A Womans Right or a Moral Wrong?’ at York University
only a couple of hours before it was scheduled to take place late
Thursday afternoon.

“Margaret Fung, President of Students for Bioethical Awareness (SBA),
one of the hosting clubs, describes what happened: ‘I was told
in a meeting by members of the York Federation of Students that
debating abortion is comparable to debating
whether a man should be allowed to beat his wife.

“They said that there is freedom of speech to a
limit, and that abortion is not an issue to debate. They
demanded that the event not take place and shut us down.'”

e

Congratulations to the UCLA pro-life
student group Live Action for their latest caper. Maybe you’ve heard
about it.

They arranged for an actor to call Planned Parenthood “development
centers” in seven states and pretend to be a donor asking that his
donation go specifically to aborting black babies to reduce the black
population.

Sure enough, the Planned Parenthood staffers didn’t bat an eye at the
caller’s sickening, overt racism; they were happy to process his
donation. One PP staffer in Idaho even called a racist statement
“understandable.”

This all makes perfect sense to anyone who knows that Planned
Parenthood plants most of its abortion chambers in minority
neighborhoods. PP thinks the way to get rid of poverty is to get rid of
poor babies. They aborted more than 264,000 babies in their most recent
reported year.

L.A. Catholic links to The
Advocate and they have a YouTube video section with the phone
calls made and the replies of Planned Parenthood staffers.

Yvonne Sullivan, 28, lost consciousness suffering from severe blood poisoning moments after being told that baby Clinton had died. Despite grieving for their lost son, her husband Dominic, 37, kept a round-the-clock vigil at her bedside for two weeks as she lay in intensive care.

But when doctors told him they could have to switch off her life support machine, Mr Sullivan took drastic action–by giving his wife a firm telling-off. He held his wife’s hand and demanded: "You start fighting. Don’t you dare give up on me now. I’ve had enough, stop mucking around and start breathing. Come back to me."

Two hours later she started to breathe steadily again.

…She even remembers hearing her husband yelling at her as she lay in a coma and says it gave her the strength to pull through.

She said: "I can’t remember exactly what he said but I never liked getting told off by Dom. Something inside me just clicked and I began to fight again. When I came round I thought he’d been gone a few minutes, then he told me I’d been out for two weeks. It’s a miracle. I owe him so much."

Via Secondhand Smoke.

My daughter came tumbling out of her religious education class recently, shouting, "Mom, I want to go to Washington; they’re killing babies!"

Next to her my 5-year-old chimed in, jumping up and down: "I want to go, I want to go!"

Dread flooded my stomach and chest; the abortion debate had reached my doorstop.

I knew it was coming. Years before when it came time to enroll our oldest daughter in CCD – Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, religious education for Catholics — I thought of the conflicts that lay ahead.

In CCD she’d be taught things my husband and I didn’t believe and, quite frankly, things we didn’t want her to believe.

We don’t believe that homosexuality is a disorder, we don’t believe the use of contraception is wrong and we don’t believe that having an abortion is a sin, or evil.

But the Catholic Church is home for me, and it is more than the sum of the doctrine I ignore, more than the sum of its scandals and newspaper headlines.

It has something important to teach its members – and my children — about right and wrong, about love and commitment, about social justice and compassion.

And I pledged at my wedding and their baptism that any children would be raised Catholic.
" Have faith," I said to myself when I signed our oldest daughter up for CCD four years ago.

"You’ll hear a lot more about it in the coming years, and you’ll have to make your own decision about what you believe," I said, "but what’s important is that you know people have different opinions. The Church believes one thing; Mom and Dad believe another."

…A few days after that CCD lesson my husband and I sat down with our daughter and her science book and turned to the chapter on cells and cell division. We talked about when life begins according to science, and according to the church and talked some more about what this means in terms of an abortion.

She got bored after a while and squirmed away.

But she’ll be back and we’ll continue the discussion adding more of the missing pieces as she grows old enough to hear them.

And then, it’s her choice.

Those who take their faith seriously have a hard time understanding cultural Catholics and exactly why they want to belong to a Church they fundamentally disagree with. Besides the Church exactly what other "organization" that they have problems with and who they see teaching as sins things that are totally fine would they let teach their children. Whatever happened to Isaiah injunction "Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil;" which surely they see the Church as doing? That certainly there are other religious denominations that fall much more in line with what they believe. I guess this is just a fundamental disconnect or a sort of religious patriotism of the sort of "My Church right or wrong." She says that it is important that the Church teaches what is right and wrong and than says that the Church is wrong about what it says is right.

What I also find interesting is the defense of abortion by those who say they have faith and belief in God. It is pretty much always a case of moral relativism and situational ethics. Support of the need for abortion is defended by naming the circumstances; whether it is rape, incest, economic, timing, etc – the situation is used to defend the need for abortion. In this article the same arguments are used and in like in most cases there is never talk of a soul, being created in the image of God, why it is okay to kill the innocent because of circumstances, etc. That a believer strangely makes no arguments in a religious context at all and make statements that are totally secular. For a moral relativist as in this case it comes down to "And then, it’s her choice" which is at least consistent, but extends the idea that the truth is what you choose to be the truth.

Anyone who knows what waterboarding is
could not be unsure. It is a horrible torture technique used by Pol Pot
and being used on Buddhist monks as we speak, said McCain after a
campaign stop at Dordt College here.

That was then and today he voted against the ban on waterboarding and
the bill  that would restrict the CIA to the 19 interrogation
techniques outlined in the Army field manual.   Something he
said he supported before.   The vote was pretty much
along party lines.  If McCain is trying to please the base I
wish he would pick another issue. But unfortunately Republicans are
becoming the party of torture apologists and the ends now justifies the
means.  I was also saddened to see Sen. Brownback do the same.
But there are also plenty of torture apologists among
Catholics also.

Prosecutors say a Gresham man who
claims he killed his terminally ill wife to end her misery was not the
loving, devoted husband he pretended to be. Court documents filed
Monday after John Lyle Roberts was indicted on a charge of murder paint
a dramatically different portrait of the man who claimed to be a
compassionate mercy killer.

For starters, Virginia Roberts wasn’t dying of an illness when she was
shot in the head as she slept Feb. 2. And she wasn’t the only woman in
John Roberts’ life. Although Roberts, 51, told police and family that
his 51-year-old wife was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,
a doctor who examined her in January told authorities she did not have
the terminal disease. Dr. John Ellison determined she was in overall
good health but she may have had carpal tunnel syndrome. That could
have explained weakness in her hands that is also a symptom of ALS,
also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Wesley Smith wonders “why it has
become so fashionable to help kill unwanted spouses and claim it was an
act of “mercy.”” and he has also chronicled similar cases.  I
think it is simply because the Michael Schiavo’s and John Robert’s of
the world have found the society acceptable loophole and that right to
die activists are quite wiling to help them out.  Though we
can hope that in the case of John Roberts that he will not be able to
pull this off.

Jean at Catholic Fire posts on
YouTube pulling an American Life League
video that criticized a Planned Parenthood one for “inappropriate
nature.'”  The ALL video used snippets from the Planned
Parenthood Mile High ad and commented on it.  The Mile High ad
is still on YouTube so I guess the ‘inappropriate nature’ is not the
video material, but the commentary.

Sign ALL’s online petition to send YouTube a message by clicking
here.

Taxpayer funded Planned Parenthood Golden Gate’s online store continues to KY the slippery slope.

Product Detail
Mile High Kit
Name: Mile High Kit
Product Code: MileHigh
Description: Take off with this mobile intimacy kit from our "Mile High" commercial.
Product Detail: Mini mobile intimacy kit with mirror, personal lubricant, whisper-quiet massager, and 2 condoms. (Batteries are included.)
Price: $20.00

Zenit has a good article on condom fallacies that shows even researches who are pro-condom give lots of caveats about condoms and quotes from several studies.

Hat tip to the intrepid Dawn Eden for the story.