More on Obama Stem Cell Deception

And duplicity. This is morally egregious.
The details are here (a good read).

Murder: Error of Intellect, or Error of Will?

Can it be that Bill Clinton and Dr. Gupta (Obama's pick for Surgeon General), don't really know what an embryo is? Watch the clip for yourself. Clinton speaks of embryos as non-fertilized, and said if embryos were ever on their way to being fertilized, they shouldn't be used for experimentation. Surely Dr. Gupta might point out an embryo is an embryo because it has been fertilized, that it is a genetically complete fully fertilized egg. Gupta said nothing.

Could simple ignorance of basic medical science be at the heart of this culture war? Could it be we are seeing mistakes of the intellect, not so much mistakes of the will . . .? Nah. I don't think so either.

Banal Pelosi viz-a-viz Verily Benedict

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi recently became the highest-ranking Democrat to meet with the pope since the election of President Obama.

Unfortunately, their 15-minute private meeting did not turn out to be the photo-op she had desired.

Following the meeting, the U.S. Speaker of the House released a banal statement highlighting the positive aspects of the meeting (though ignoring the Pope’s correction of her support for legal abortion):

It is with great joy that my husband, Paul, and I met with His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, today. In our conversation, I had the opportunity to praise the Church’s leadership in fighting poverty, hunger, and global warming, as well as the Holy Father’s dedication to religious freedom and his upcoming trip and message to Israel. I was proud to show His Holiness a photograph of my family’s papal visit in the 1950s, as well as a recent picture of our children and grandchildren.

In contrast, here is the statement released by the Holy See:

Following the General Audience, the Holy Father briefly greeted Mrs. Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, together with her entourage. His Holiness took the opportunity to speak of the requirements of the natural moral law and the Church’s consistent teaching on the dignity of human life from conception until natural death, which enjoin all Catholics, and especially legislators, jurists, and those responsible for the common good of society, to work in cooperation with all men and women of good will in creating a just system of laws capable of protecting human life at all stages of development.

George Weigel is prompted to wonder: "Were they at the same meeting? or even in the same city?":

Charity requires that one concede the possibility that genuine piety was a part of Pelosi’s (rather boorish, and certainly irregular) insistence on being given a private moment with the pope during her current taxpayer-funded junket to Rome. But her office’s statement on today’s meeting makes it clear something else was afoot: that Pelosi, who shamelessly trumpets her “ardent” Catholicism while leading congressional Democrats in a continuing assault on what the Catholic Church regards as the inalienable human rights of the unborn, was trying to recruit Benedict XVI (“Joseph Ratzinger, D., Bavaria”?) to Team Nancy.

His Holiness wasn’t buying it.

And as the National Catholic Reporter's Vaticanist John Allen Jr. observes, "Seen through the lens of Vatican diplomacy, this combination of public welcome and after-the-fact rebuke covered all the bases":

Pope Benedict XVI’s much-awaited encounter this morning with U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, perhaps the most prominent pro-choice Catholic in America, amounted to a classic Vatican “both/and” exercise, striving to balance the demands of external diplomacy and internal church discipline.

By meeting Pelosi, Benedict signaled that he wants lines of communication to remain open with the new American leadership, even if the Vatican has deep differences with its policies on the “life issues.” The Holy See is a sovereign state with diplomatic relations with 177 states around the world, which, among other things, means the pope can’t always act like the head of a special interest group.

Yet by issuing an unusual public statement after the session with Pelosi -- which insisted that all Catholics, including legislators, are obliged to work for the defense of human life from conception to natural death -- the pope also made clear there will no let-up in the pressure on pro-choice Catholic politicians to change their ways. [...]

Not only was it unusual to issue a statement after a meeting with an official who’s not a head of state, routine Vatican declarations after diplomatic meetings also generally sum up the range of issues discussed rather than concentrating on a particular point.

In that sense, the statement can only be read as a rejection of Pelosi’s statements last summer, and, in general, of her argument that it’s acceptable for Catholics in public life to take a pro-choice position.

In August of 2004, Nancy Pelosi attempted a botched "Catholic" defense of her pro-choice position on abortion, provoking public corrections by individual Catholic bishops nationwide and a formal rebuttal from Cardinal Justin F. Rigali, chairman of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, and Bishop William E. Lori, chairman of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Imagine the Potential

The Secret World of Late-term Eugenic Abortions

This is what we are becoming, aborting viable fetuses because they will not be physically perfect; and, the UK government wishes to keep it all under wraps. From the story:

It centres on mothers who opt for termination because their unborn babies have been diagnosed with conditions such as club foot and cleft palate.

Doctors say such conditions can usually be corrected by surgery. The Information Commissioner has ordered the release of the figures, but the Department of Health is resisting, claiming that disclosing the data could lead to women who have late abortions being identified.

While abortion is only legal in the first 24 weeks of pregnancy if carried out on social grounds, "Ground E" of the 1967 Abortion Act makes it legal to abort a foetus which has a serious risk of physical or mental abnormality, right up to birth. There are continuing concerns that the law is being flouted to weed out "less than perfect" babies.

Prof Stuart Campbell, the leading obstetrician whose 3D-scan images of babies "walking in the womb" at 12 weeks led to calls for a lowering of the 24-week limit for social abortion, said last night: "It is a disgraceful situation for this data to be suppressed." This is not about whether one agrees with abortion. These statistics used to be published, now they are being withheld. Transparency is the essence of medicine. If we don't have that, all sorts of wrongdoing can go on. I am not saying that using abortion is doing wrong, but we need to see the data in order to understand what is happening."

No, we must never say that something is wrong. No, no, no: Can't have that. We are infected with terminal nonjudgmentalism. And so we lamely claim that "transparency" is the answer to everything. But something is very wrong, Professor. And I can tell you precisely what it is; a collapse in our capacity to love.

BTW: did you note the language? One has a "right" to abort a fetus which has a serious risk of physical or mental abnormality; not, one which has a risk of serious physical or mental abnormality? Can any level be sufficient? It appears so . . . club foot . . . !?!

God, Forgive Us

Volition: to make a choice.
This is long, but it could - seriously - be life changing.
Watch it.

They Lie, It Hurts Children, You Accept and Move-On

Stick your head in the sand:

Indiana Planned Parenthood Covers Up Sexual Abuse of 13-year Old - Celebrity bloopers here

Induced Abortions for Oregonians

In 2003: 12,622
In 2004: 11,443
In 2005: 11,602
In 2006: 12,246
In 2007: 11,663

Induced abortion is the intentional killing of innocent human life. Oregonians chose to intentionally kill *at least* (the data is voluntarily reported) 59,576 innocent human beings over the past 5 years, excluding 2008.

A quick scan indicates the majority of these elective killings were chosen by women between the ages of 20-24, with the next highest rate of killing elected by 25-29 year old adults. A vast majority are never-married, non-Hispanic whites.

Adult white women are the mass murderers of our time.

Freedom of choice: doesn't it make you proud?

I wonder how many of these induced killings occurred at Catholic health care facilities? Anyone want to review the data? How about tubal ligation's or IVF procedures?

Held Accountable

My dear Catholic pro-life friends who voted for Obama, insisting an Obama presidency would be better for the unborn and would reduce abortion: you will be held accountable. In four years, it will be your responsibility to prove to the rest of us that your faith in Obama was not misplaced. We will not forget: we will hold you to it. I pray you will be successful.

Our Choice Today Matters, In a Sense

The single most damning objection raised by atheists is this: Why would a loving, omnipotent God permit sin, suffering, and the eternal damnation of souls? And our answer is stark and comfortless: For the sake of freedom. To give our choices consequence and meaning. To make our existence real.

Our reason accepts this. One's frontal lobe can process the logical steps entailed and determine the absence of fallacies. But our hearts aren't always moved. Personally, I don't think it's worth the risk. If God were to offer me Limbo, or certain annihilation after death, in return for the guarantee that I would never spend five minutes in Hell, I would jump on that offer as fast as I could.

But that's not the way things work. As I've explained more than once to Catholics who dissent over birth control: "I don't make the Natural Law, I just explain it."

Likewise in the economy of salvation: We may think what we wish about God's decision to give man a lethal freedom. But wishing won't make it so.

And so we must decide. Readers of this site have heard about the extremes to which Sen. Obama pushes his support of legal abortion. They know that he is likely to appoint enough justices to the Supreme Court to keep abortion out of the hands of democratic lawmaking for 20 or 30 years - in other words, indefinitely.

Failing a campaign promise by another candidate to start a nuclear war that would kill more people than the four million children who face legal execution during an Obama administration, the abortion issue alone should convince every orthodox Christian that voting for Obama is a grave sin - the kind to damn one's soul. Yes, even if you're black and voting for him out of racial solidarity, or white and voting for him out of racial guilt. Apart from simple ignorance, there's simply no excuse.

I want to go further and explain another implication of an Obama victory, one that should convince Catholic voters: I'll tell you one thing, just one, that will happen, if Obama is elected with a large congressional majority - with perhaps enough votes in the Senate to quash a filibuster. And that one thing should be enough.

Senator Obama has promised to sign the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) which would repeal every restriction on abortion in every American state, right up through the ninth month. But then, we knew that about Obama, the whole infanticide thing. But there's more. The FOCA raises abortion to (in its own words) a "fundamental right." According to legal analysts at the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, the act's language is so sweeping that it will snuff out any state's "conscience" clause - the laws allowing hospitals, doctors, and nurses not to take part in abortions. To do so would amount to illegal discrimination, denying a citizen her fundamental right. Christian hospitals could no more decline to perform abortions than they can currently refuse to operate on black people.

So President Obama and his congressional supermajority would force every Christian hospital, doctor, and nurse either to abandon their faith or go out of business. By federal law, believing Christians would be banned from a major industry (and apostolate). This is literally equivalent to a law banning faithful Jews from owning newspapers.

History tells us that steps such as this aren't where religious persecutions end; it's where they begin. Things are already scary enough in neighboring Canada, where Christians are now routinely hauled up before human rights tribunals for repeating what the Bible teaches concerning sex. Who knows what some Obama-appointed judge, 20 years from now, will make of a pastor whose sermons attacked the "fundamental right" of women to kill their children? How many churches and seminaries will face crippling civil judgments and have to close?

It can happen here. It is about to happen here.

What should we make of Catholics who vote for the persecution of their Church and the ongoing killing of millions of unborn children? That's between them and God. I'll just offer this little catechetical reminder: Holy Communion received in a state of mortal sin is itself a still graver sin - one of blasphemy. Perhaps when Obama Catholics see their local Catholic hospitals close, or their Catholic friends in nursing get jobs giving pedicures, they'll throng the confession lines. Let's pray that they do.

By this evening we will have a good idea of whether Christians have any lasting place in this country. In a few months - if FOCA passes, and is applied as the bishops predict - we'll know whether we should continue to participate as citizens, serve in America's armed forces, pay taxes except under protest, or think of our government as anything but an occupier - like the Hungarian or Czech regimes from 1948-1989. We will know if the democracy our military exports to other countries is any better than the tyrannies it replaces. We will know if there is any future, however fraught and fragile, for pro-life laws - or if the Berlin Wall constructed by Roe v. Wade will stand unchallenged for yet another guilty generation.

If the persecutors take power on the anger of voters rightly outraged by eight years of mismanagement, arrogance, constitutional abuse, and unjust wars, we must face the consequences - as the Israelites did when God answered their sins with the Assyrians. Like the Israelites, we will have lost our country. Unlike them, we'll have no Covenant that promises we'll ever get it back. With God's grace, we'll be ignored and tolerated, like the Amish. To assume that we'll always be safe is, well . . . gratuitous.

It will be time to make some choices - the kind that redound to eternity. It will be time, after 35 years of noble effort, to stop expending our energies trying to change abortion laws, or to fight for a vanished public "morality." We should keep on running pro-life pregnancy centers as long as they're legal. We should go on voting against all anti-life candidates and speaking our minds. But our time and treasure should be withdrawn from the bottomless pit of politics and transferred to fighting on the only ground where we have the advantage. Let us turn from the bloodied public square of an illegitimate regime to the care of souls, and focus our efforts on the propaganda fidei - the propagation of the Faith.

Verily Prosaic readers know that I've argued it's in America's national interest to restrict immigration. If America turns to persecution of the Church, I will turn on a dime from trying to save the country from immigrants to saving the immigrants from the country (though this does not mean I will no longer favor immigration restrictions). I hope that other Catholics will drop their various political efforts and do the same - pour their thwarted civic energies into a massive, lay-directed campaign to offer orthodox catechesis to incoming immigrants and evangelizing those of other faiths. (Do they print the Baltimore Catechism in Spanish? In Arabic?) If we showed one-tenth the energy and courage of the underground Church that survives a far worse persecution in China, our work would benefit numberless souls. Made subjects in our own country, we could prove ourselves patriotic citizens of heaven.

I dread this prospect, of course. I wish for a long and comfy, moderately fruitless life - one that peters out in a state of grace and a haze of fine whiskey and wine, in a house full of happy children and dogs, my wife by my side. Like the English Catholics who followed the marital prospects of Henry VIII, I nervously hope for the best - and pray to be spared the worst. Like most of you, I'd rather schlep my way to purgatory than sweat blood storming heaven. But wishing won't make it so.

Just Say No: Obamabortion

Just Take a Look

Really, I invite you: just look.
But look carefully.

The CDC Estimates . . .

When I see a video like this one, I wonder whether I have a moral duty to resist violently. I mean, prayer is one thing - and it is powerful, yes - but stand/sit idly by in the face of a known moral and human holocaust? History will judge me: when will I begin to judge myself?

Make video montages at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Constitution Party On the Republican Party On Abortion

"The Republican Party, when it comes to the life issue, is all rhetoric."

On Pro-Life Obama Supporters

George Weigel has a good article regarding.

On Certain Political Questions

In the latest strong pre-election appeal to emerge from the Stateside bench, Bishops Kevin Farrell of Dallas and Kevin Vann of Fort Worth have told their flocks in a joint pastoral letter that a "vote for a candidate who supports the intrinsic evil of abortion or 'abortion rights' when there is a morally acceptable alternative would be to cooperate in the evil -- and, therefore, [is] morally impermissible."

Elsewhere in the three-page statement, the neighboring prelates underscored that:

"[I]ssues of prudential judgment are not morally equivalent to issues involving intrinsic evils. No matter how right a given candidate is on any of these issues, it does not outweigh a candidate's unacceptable position in favor of an intrinsic evil such as abortion or the protection of 'abortion rights.'" (Emphasis original.)

Dated Wednesday and released early last Friday, fulltext is available (in PDF) on the homepage of the Diocese of Dallas.

Life: The More You Know

For the first time, it is possible to actually watch the initial 24-hours of the life of an embryo at the cellular level. With a newly developed microscope that uses a sheet of light to scan a living organism from many different dimensions, scientists were able to track the complex cellular organization of a zebrafish embryo as it grows from a single cell to 20,000 cells. Imagine what occurs in a human mother's womb:

Satanic and Disgusting

Whither Catholic Spain?
To be ground up in BLENDERS!
My God, please immanentize the eschaton.

Yeah - What He Says

I agree with the critique, at least the part about abortion. But it is also a reminder that politics in America - fear and loathing here - really is often about race.

Obama Health Care: Universal Abortion?

John McCormack on the Weekly Standard Blog:

During a campaign conference call about health care yesterday, I asked Obama-Biden surrogate Gov. Kathleen Sebelius if Obama's health care plan would mandate coverage for all legal abortions.

"I really don’t know the specifics of that," she replied. An Obama-Biden spokesman told me via email that he'd find an answer to my question. But subsequent emails and phone calls in the past 24 hours from me to Obama-Biden spokesmen have gone unanswered.

Apparently the Obama-Biden campaign doesn't think it needs to provide basic factual information about their candidate's health care plan. Will any one in the mainstream media hold Obama accountable?