Remembering a Warrior for Life 47 Years after Roe v. Wade

I posted this originally on April 26, 2011, after the death of Phoebe Ann Laub, known to countless fans as Phoebe Snow.  As we stop to remember the grim day when abortion became legal in the United States, and the millions who have died in the wake of Roe v. Wade, it seems fitting to remember a woman whose whole life was a reproach to the culture of death. 

I don't know what Phoebe Snow's political affiliation was, or whether she voted for Obama, or what her views were about abortion on demand.  I can't recall ever hearing that she marched or picketed or made speeches or was otherwise active on the political scene.  

But I do know that she sacrificed everything for her little girl.

Phoebe's classic "Poetry Man" reached the top 5 on the pop charts in 1975.  But when Valerie Rose was born that same year with severe brain damage, Phoebe chose to care for her at home rather than put her in an institution.  Through lawsuits, financial distress, and even desertion by her husband, Phoebe kept Valerie with her -- until Valerie's death in 2007.  Under her mother's care, the baby whom nobody expected to survive more than a few years lived to be 31.  "Occasionally I put an album out, but I didn't like to tour, and they didn't get a lot of label support," Phoebe once remarked in an interview. "But you know what? It didn't really matter because I got to stay home more with Valerie, and that time was precious."

Phoebe Snow's name may not have come up much at pro-life rallies, but she was still a giant in the war for life.  She lived it.  For 31 years, she kept her daughter safe from the vultures of "compassion."  With every fiber of her being, Phoebe Snow beat back the assault of the culture of death.  After so many decades of sacrificial love, it is perhaps not surprising that this devoted mother should not long survive the daughter for whom she poured herself out.

I don't know what Phoebe Snow thought about Roe v. Wade.  But I think I can guess.  R.I.P.

Questions

To all you women who engaged in such shameful conduct over the weekend in D.C., and any similar conduct elsewhere, a few questions*:

1. Why is Madonna, who has spent decades touting herself as a sex object and who offered to administer blow jobs to anyone who would vote for Hillary, one of your spokespersons against the objectification of women?

2. Why, if you want to be thought of as more than a vagina, did you wear big pink vaginas on your heads and/or dress up in vagina costumes?

3. Why, if you want to be thought of as strong and smart and powerful and made of stern stuff, are you melting down over a man's crude remarks from 20 years ago?  Why, if you want to be noticed for your brains rather than your lady parts, did you cheer so loudly over Ashley Judd's utterly incoherent "nasty woman" rant?

4. How many of you, who are now screaming over Donald Trump talking about grabbing pussy, voted for accused rapist, exploiter of White House interns and actual grabber of pussy Bill Clinton?  How many of you voted for him twice?  How many of you continued to support him even after all the disgusting revelations?

5. Why in God's Name did so many of you expose your young children to the visual and auditory obscenity on display at the march?  Why did you make your young children wear vagina hats?

6. How is it that you have not figured out that it is precisely this kind of behavior, which is fit only for insane asylums, that helped motivate so many of the rest of us to use our votes to remove your party from power?

*Not addressed to the mercenaries who swelled the crowds in exchange for filthy lucre.

Random New Year Thoughts

This four-day weekend after a high-octane December seems a good opportunity to regale the world with my ruminations.

-- 2015 is my 20th year living in Idaho.  That is almost half my life.  But, while you can take the girl out of Southern California, you can't take Southern California out of the girl.  We simply did not have winter in SoCal, where 50 degrees is bundle-up weather.  Winter is therefore a great trial for me, even after all these years, many of which were in the Idaho Panhandle, where ice and snow are far more plentiful than in the Treasure Valley.

-- Given which, I would need a damn good reason to venture out in freezing weather for New Year's.  Which brings us to Boise's answer to the Times Square Ball Drop: the New Year's Eve Potato Drop. We do not have a Times Square or a ball.  What we have got is a giant foam potato hanging from a boom crane, lit by two or three blue and green laser lights; a guy in a potato suit; and, presumably, to gin up the applause, a bottomless supply of booze and perhaps other, less legal stimulants.  When I first saw a picture of the potato on the news, I was struck by its almost exact resemblance to the evidence in a prison contraband case I just handled.  Sorry, but this does not constitute a damn good reason sufficient to justify braving the cold on New Year's.

-- Challis, Idaho started out the new year with a 4.9 magnitude earthquake.  It was reportedly felt clear in the North End of Boise.  I live in Boise, but not in the North End.  I did not feel anything.  An earthquake, for those who have never been in one, is quite unmistakable, no matter how weak.  It is qualitatively different from, say, construction in the area or a heavy truck driving by.  If you're not sure whether you have ever felt an earthquake, you probably haven't.

-- My patroness for 2015 is St. Ann, mother of the Mother of God.  Although she is my namesake, I have neglected her most of my life.  I have been thinking about her lately, and at midnight adoration on New Year's I started a novena to her.  While preparing our New Year's Day dinner, one of my lay Dominican sisters showed me a little statue she acquired at a thrift store.  It was St. Ann instructing her immaculate daughter on Scripture.   A sign?

-- As we enter the new year, it is increasingly clear that the majority of priests and bishops in our time are hirelings.  Sorry, but there is no getting around this and it's time to face up to it.  These hirelings -- most of whom were ordained in the '60s, '70s and '80s -- bear the heavy responsibility for having spent the last half-century (a) trying to transform the Church into something entirely unrecognizable from what she had previously been, and (b) propagandizing the laity into thinking this is a good thing.  Like the process by which a tree trunk is transformed into a piece of stone by the gradual replacement of its organic components with minerals, this attempt to re-invent the Church has transformed the hearts of her members into stone by gradually replacing their Catholic faith with the minerals of socialism, pop psychology, materialism, narcissism and a host of other evils, until they no longer recognize their plight.  Fortunately, most of the current generations of hirelings have not got many more active years left; but, absent an intervention by the Holy Spirit -- which we are not close to deserving -- it will take a long time to undo their damage.

-- If you don't know how to recognize a hireling, here are just a few signs: (1) he can't stick to the Missal at Mass, or to the forms of other Sacraments, but must always interject his own comments and/or improvisations.  (2) He preaches errors from the pulpit.  (If you can't recognize errors preached from the pulpit, get yourself a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and get busy.)  (3) He treats being a priest like an ordinary job.  (4) He devotes little time to prayer or actual ministry; he seldom darkens the door of a church or chapel, or makes himself available to administer the Sacraments.  The former deficiency will be harder for the laity to discern than the latter; but if he denigrates or makes fun of popular prayers and devotions like the Rosary, that is a clue.  (5) He has a great love of humanity in general, but little use for human beings in particular; therefore, he treats particular people with coldness and even rudeness.

-- In 2015, Benedict XVI will turn 88.  If he dies while Francis is still the reigning Pope, I fear what will happen to the liturgical reforms he began.

-- Shortly before the close of the old year, I started reading The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War.  Of course, it is a pro-Confederate book, which is what makes it politically incorrect, since conventional "wisdom" has the Confederacy pegged as a bunch of racist neanderthals.  The book makes some good points and gives rise to some considerations that give one pause.  For one thing -- and despite embarrassing sentiments like the one articulated by Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens to the effect that the Confederate government was founded upon the "great truth" that the Negro is not equal to the White Man -- Dixie was not All About Slavery, any more than the North was All About Abolition.  Dixie, for all her faults, was also about a lot of things the world is much poorer for having less of: honor; chivalry; faith; subsidiarity; the worth of the individual and the family.  The North, on the other hand, was already imbued with the pragmatic utilitarianism that now dominates our own age -- thanks in large part to the North's conquest of the the South.  To this conquest we may also, I think, trace the destruction of the several states as buffers and defenses against an overreaching and domineering federal government, to whose influence no aspect of our lives is now immune.  And then there is the concept of total war, as put into practice by Union generals, most notably Grant, Sherman and Sheridan.  The evil, racist, backward, slave-holding South, on the other hand, did not practice total war.  Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee rejected the idea of deliberately making war on civilians.

-- It is worth noting, by the way, that in his celebrated and unabashedly pro-Union series on the Civil War, Ken Burns was careful to make clear the unpopularity in the North of abolition as a cause to fight for.  As for Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation (which did not in fact free the slaves), it was decried in the North, not merely by Jefferson Davis.

-- Speaking of Jefferson Davis, have you never been struck by his close physical resemblance to Abraham Lincoln?

-- And speaking of Lincoln: recall that he said, in his Second Inaugural, that the Civil War was God's judgment on the entire country for the sin of slavery.  About 620,000 American soldiers died in the Civil War -- almost a quarter of a million more than died in World War II.  In this country, we enter the new year stained with the blood of nearly as many aborted babies as the total number of dead from all countries in World War II.  If it is true that 620,000 dead was the price we paid for the institution of slavery, what must be the punishment that awaits us for abortion? 

-- And then there are the micro-conflicts.  A small incident over the holidays got me to thinking about what it really means to win or to lose.  There are times when one wins by losing, and times when one loses by winning.  For example, if you engage in a contest of wills with someone who truly wants the best for you, you cannot win except by losing.  Of course, you must be able to recognize those persons who truly want the best for you; and the key is to know what it means for someone to want the best.  It does not mean what a lot of people think it means.  It means the opposite of what the world means.  Ultimately, it means that person wants you to be eternally happy in heaven, even at the expense of your temporal and transitory happiness on earth.

May your New Year be filled with the best, and may it lead you to eternal happiness.

The Holy Innocents

Salvete flores martyrum, – Hail Martyr Flowers

quos lucis ipso in limine – On the very threshold of the dawn (of life)

Christi insecutor sustulit – Christ’s persecutor destroyed (you)

ceu turbo nascentes rosas. – like the whirlwind does the budding roses.

Vos prima Christi victima, – You, Christ’s first fruits

grex immolatorum tener, – A flock of tender sacrificial victims

aram sub ipsam simplices – right up by the very altar

palma et coronis luditis. – now play with your palms and crowns.

Iesu, tibi sit gloria, – Jesus to you be glory

qui natus es de Virgine, – who were born of the Virgin

cum Patre et almo Spiritu, – with the Father and loving Spirit

in sempiterna saecula. Amen. – unto to eternal ages. Amen.

Translation by Msgr. Charles Pope

Herod the Great ordered the massacre of the Innocents in order to eliminate the Christ Child, Who he feared would deprive him of his kingdom.  Herod was a great murderer in general, particularly of his own children: the Emperor Augustus is said to have remarked that he would rather be Herod's pig than his son.   Not long after the birth of Christ, according to the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, Herod died a disgusting, excruciating death in Jericho -- a city that, in Scripture, symbolizes the world that is opposed to the kingdom of heaven.

Herod -- who was killing people right until the end, and even tried to have the murders continue after his death -- was punished in this life by colon pains, convulsions, terrible itching all over his body, fever, and the putrefaction and infestation by worms of his private parts.  What kind of punishments can we expect, who have outstripped Herod's homicidal assaults on babies in both numbers and brutality, even going so far as to enshrine the murder of the unborn in our laws as a constitutionally guaranteed "right"?  When have we ever hated children more than in this present day?

Holy Innocents, pray for us.

Random Thoughts

-- Today is the 96th anniversary of the Fatima children's vision of hell.  Hell is a place filled with the souls of persons who did not believe that there is a hell.

-- The lower house of (formerly Catholic) Ireland's parliament has voted to legalize abortion in cases where there is a risk to the mother's life.  Abortion supporters are thrilled but already saying the bill doesn't go far enough.

-- I have not followed the gavel-to-gavel coverage of the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin case, but I've followed it enough to see that it is a classic example of a trial that should never have taken place. How do you get a fair trial on charges that should never have been brought to begin with? This was manifestly a case of self-defense.  The law simply does not favor the unjust aggressor; nor does it take the position that the right to defend oneself kicks in only at the point where one is too incapacitated to defend oneself.  It does not even require that the person defending himself be upright and virtuous and of impeccable character.  All it requires is that the defendant reasonably believe he was in immanent danger of bodily harm, and that the action he took was necessary to save him from the harm threatened.

-- Reading and listening to accounts of testimony by the state's witnesses in the Zimmerman trial, I would have thought I was getting an account of the defense's witnesses if I didn't know the state was still putting on its case in chief.  Yet jurors, urged by prosecutors to call black white and white black, can still do the wrong thing.  That is why it's unethical for prosecutors to press charges they know they can't prove.  Let us not forget the Duke Lacrosse case, which resulted in the disbarment of the district attorney who brought those utterly bogus charges.  How can the prosecution's request for idiotic lesser-included instructions on charges relating to the abuse of a minor be understood except as an acknowledgment that they failed to prove their case?  

-- I am tired of having people who know nothing whatever about me tell me how much I hate minorities.  I don't hate minorities.  As a practical Catholic, I try not to entertain actual hatred for anyone, however much they may anger or annoy or hurt me.  I doubt that there are very many authentic racists among American whites.  But there are plenty of authentic racists among minority "leaders" and race hustlers of the sort that turned the Zimmerman case into a show trial.  This is not the Reconstruction Era; but for these demagogues and their allies in the media and the Obama regime, Americans would mostly get along pretty well.  Promoting strife and division and the pursuit of imaginary grievances is the devil's work.  When are we going to stop letting him and his tools push us around?

-- Probably the most pitiful figure to emerge from the Zimmerman trial is the pathetic, illiterate, mendacious "star" prosecution witness, Rachel Jeantel.  Thanks to the welfare state and the liberal-dominated public-school system of which she is a product, Rachel Jeantel is as much a slave in the 21st century as ever any of her ancestors were in the 19th.  In fact, her spiritual penury makes her even worse off than they were.  They were beaten, starved, racked with diseases, housed in hovels, separated from their families, overworked and used as concubines by their white masters; but at least they were under no delusions about their plight, or at whose hands they suffered.  That is why, as soon as blacks were given the opportunity to fight for freedom on the side of the Union during the Civil War, they had the will to do so and nearly two hundred thousand enlisted.  Do the Rachel Jeantels of the world have the will to fight and suffer for freedom?

-- And speaking of the welfare state, it seems that Michelle Obama's "healthy" school lunch program is generating a lot of food wastage and loss of money for school districts.  School lunches have always been notoriously bad; but the First Lady has apparently discovered a talent for improving on badness.  Still, the responsibility for feeding kids lies, it seems to me, not with the government but with their parents.  Hey parents: why not do what my mother did, and pack lunches for your kids?

-- While the nation ogles the Zimmerman trial, the Obama regime's burgeoning scandals -- Benghazi, the I.R.S., the N.S.A. -- go unnoticed and un-dealt-with.  

-- Which is an appropriate segue into Mark Levin's intriguing proposal for legal, constitutional recourse against our bloated, out-of-control federal government.  Did you know that Congress does not have the market cornered on amendments to the Constitution, and that the states can also propose amendments?  Article V of the U.S. Constitution provides (emphasis added):

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article [dealing with powers denied to Congress]; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

Historically, all amendments to the Constitution have originated in Congress; the other method has been attempted on numerous occasions, even very recently, but although the threat of a constitutional convention has indirectly led to amendments, the method itself has never been successfully invoked.  Yet the Founding Fathers included it in the Constitution, foreseeing a time when the federal government could become oppressive and intransigent.  In an age in which the runaway regulatory state leaves virtually no aspect of our daily lives untouched, that time has surely come.  The question may be raised whether a rogue federal government would really feel less free to disregard an amended Constitution than it does the current one; but I think we should consider it our duty to exhaust all legal and constitutional means of bringing the ruling class in Washington to heel.  Levin has some proposed constitutional amendments in his forthcoming book, due out next month.

-- Still, I will see Levin and raise him.  There is something else that must be done if we are ever to restore our country, and without which we can never get our freedom back even if we hold a hundred constitutional conventions.  It is the one thing that few people are willing to try, even though it is the one thing that is certain of success.  We ourselves must begin to lead lives ordered according to natural law and right reason.  We must rein in our own passions and appetites.  We must stop confusing the pursuit of happiness with the selfish and unbridled pursuit of sensual pleasures.  We must resume the use of good manners and courtesy and consideration for others, and teach the same to our children.  We must live up to our responsibilities, embrace traditional Christian morality and lead virtuous lives.  Disordered individuals cannot help but create disordered societies.  

-- And just in case you think I'm some kind of nut, the critical importance of cultivating virtue was not lost on the Founding Fathers.  In a letter to a cousin, John Adams wrote:

Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater Measure than they have it now, They may change their Rulers and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty. They will only exchange Tyrants and Tyrannies.

And it seems well to close with these thoughts that Adams set down in a letter to his wife:

The furnace of affliction produces refinement in states as well as individuals. And the new Governments we are assuming in every part will require a purification from our vices, and an augmentation of our virtues, or they will be no blessings. The people will have unbounded power, and the people are extremely addicted to corruption and venality, as well as the great.

Random Thoughts

-- Bl. Pope John Paul II was often criticized for having cranked out more canonizations than all his predecessors combined.  Yet this week, Pope Francis outdid them all in a single stroke by canonizing the 813 Martyrs of Otranto, who died on August 14, 1480.  Let the standard-issue, '70's-style liberal Catholics with the "COEXIST" bumper stickers spelled out in religious symbols take note of the fact that Pope Francis, who they hope will usher in the Age of Aquarius, has raised to the altar 813 men who were put to the sword because they refused to convert to Islam.

-- And the canonization of the Martyrs of Otranto is indeed timely in an age when the world is increasingly hostile to persons with religious, and especially Catholic, convictions.  Not even children are safe: a tsunami of sewage bears down on them from all directions during all their waking hours, from the media, from the culture at large, from schools, both secular and religious.  The primary aim of many schools is apparently not to educate children, but to stamp out the faith that their parents try to instill and crank out docile little sexualized atheist footsoldiers.  That is why the Church should consider lowering the age at which the Sacrament of Confirmation is administered.  This Sacrament confers precisely the grace that children need to resist the unholy pressures exerted on them even by persons in authority over them.  Perhaps infant Confirmation should be universally adopted in the Latin Rite, even as it is done in the Eastern rites.

-- Arch-abortionist Kermit Gosnell has been convicted, among other things of three counts of murder and one count of involuntary manslaughter.  In order to avoid the death penalty, he waived his appeals in exchange for a recommendation of fixed life (without parole).  Unable any longer to ignore the story, and in an extraordinary display of chutzpah, the abortion lobby spins it into a cautionary tale against the abrogation of Roe v. Wade.  We are solemnly warned (e.g., by Harry Reid, the creepy Senate Majority Leader from Nevada) that Gosnell provides an example of the sort of back-alley butchery we would get if we again made abortion illegal.  Yet we had been equally solemnly promised that if we legalized abortion, that would be the end of coat-hanger abortionists like Gosnell, whose house of horrors emerged at a time when abortion on demand has been enshrined as a constitutional right for decades.

-- As I have previously made the case in this space, we should seriously think about restricting the franchise to persons who own property.  This is not unprecedented, nor is it on a par with conditioning the right to vote on some arbitrary factor like race.  There is a logic to giving the vote to property owners, because they are the ones who pay for government.  A great evil would be removed from society if those who do not pay taxes were prevented from voting themselves largess out of the pockets of those who do pay taxes.  And, by the way, if owning property were required to be able to vote, I myself would be disenfranchised.

-- For the 37th time tonight, the House of Representatives voted to "repeal" Obamacare.  This has no chance of surviving in the Democrat-controlled Senate, and everybody knows it.  Yet the House, with its power of the purse-strings, really could kill Obamacare, by the simple expedient of de-funding it.  That it does not do this proves it is not serious about getting rid of Obamacare.

-- The Obama administration's line on its burgeoning scandals is, in essence, that the scandals are the work of rogue operatives and Obama is too out-of-touch and too ignorant to have known what has been going on on his watch.  The idea was considered laughable that Ronald Reagan did not know about the Iran-Contra affair, yet we are being propped up to believe that Barack Obama did not know about the massive corruption of his own administration until he read about it in the papers.

-- The IRS scandal proves, not that the IRS has rogue employees, but that the entire agency itself is rogue, and needs to be abolished.  

-- And speaking of the IRS, it is the IRS, with its famous bedside manner, that is slated to administer Obamacare.  That should keep anybody with a brain awake at night.

-- At any rate, there is still pistachio almond ice cream from Baskin Robbins, topped with hot fudge.  Even better than booze.  At least until the Obama administration gets around to abolishing ice cream, on Obamacare grounds.  But then, maybe the abolition of ice cream is what it would take to get people to wake up to the fact that the Obama administration is the thing that really needs abolishing.

We Cannot Tame the Spirit of Murder, Part II

Is it possible that the reason for the media's failure to cover arch-abortionist Kermit Gosnell's murder trial is that the details are too shocking and disgusting?  Seems hard to believe in an age when kids spend their days and nights parked in front of gory video games, women regale the United States Congress with details about their promiscuity, liberals bring a peculiar gay sex practice out of the shadows to denigrate the Tea Party movement, and a popular television drama portrays a serial killer as the good guy.  American culture these days sets the bar pretty high on disgusting.

So how has the Gosnell story proven to be too much for a media gluttonous for sensation?  Is it over the top that Gosnell targeted the children of poor women, immigrants and minorities for extermination?  That he plunged scissors into the necks of babies to sever their spinal cords?  That he was in the habit of finishing the job once they were outside the womb?  That he kept chopped-off baby feet around the office?  That he ran his "practice" amid conditions of unspeakable filth?  That he forced patients to undergo abortions after they had changed their minds?  That mothers died or were seriously wounded under his gentle ministrations?  That he employed a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore as part of a school work-study program to assist in actual abortion procedures?  That he got into the abortion industry in the first place?  

Or is it that Gosnell has committed the iniquitous crime of embarrassing the abortion industry by failing to maintain a facade of smiling, healthy, sanitary professionalism?  After all, Roe v. Wade was supposed to eliminate clothes-hanger abortions and put the back-alley butchers out of business.

The ugly truth is that this is what the abortion industry is all about.  An abortion mill can be cleaned and sterilized and cheerful and sunlit, with brightly colored curtains, friendly receptionists and a phalanx of the world's best doctors and nurses; but at least -- at least -- fifty per cent of all those who enter an abortion mill leave it as corpses.  Zero per cent leave unscarred.  Dead, mutilated babies and haunted mothers are what abortion is all about, with or without lab coats, antiseptics and medical degrees.  Abortionists themselves acknowledge that abortion means killing children.

No, the Gosnell blackout probably has to do more with how damaging this story is to the pro-abortion narrative, in which the murder of children in their mothers' wombs is portrayed as a women's health issue.  But it's high time Americans came face-to-face with the realities of this constitutionally protected rite of human sacrifice.

H/T Digital Hairshirt, who also brought us the real face of abortion:

Never forget this face.

The Unseen Holocaust

Since the Roe v. Wade decision 40 years ago, there have been approximately 55,772,015 abortions in the United States.  This is to say nothing of the untold number of babies killed by abortifacient contraceptives and "morning after" chemical abortions like RU-486 and "Plan B."  That translates to roughly 1.5 million abortions per year; over 3,300 per day; 137 per hour, every hour.

Consider:

Total number of people killed in World War II: estimates range from 50 million to 70 million.

Total number of people killed in World War I: 37 million.

Total number of people killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia: 1.5 million.

Total number of people killed by Stalin: estimates range as high as 60 million.

Total number of people killed in Mao's Cultural Revolution in China: estimates range as high as 20 million.

Total number of soldiers killed in the American Civil War, both Union and Confederate: 625,000.

Number of people who have died of AIDS (as of 2009): 30 million.

Think of it.  Since Roe v. Wade, we have had, in our abortion mills, the equivalent of one Second World War.  One and a half First World Wars.  37 Cambodian genocides.  Almost one Stalin regime.  2.7 Cultural Revolutions.  89 Civil Wars.  1.85 AIDS epidemics.  The only distinguishing feature is that the victims are nameless, utterly defenseless, and have never seen the light of day.

As long as we continue unrepentant in this course, we have no right to expect blessings on this country, and every reason to expect nothing but disaster.

We Cannot Tame the Spirit of Murder

As steady readers of this blog know, on the last day of every year, I publish a review of the year's events.  The first time I did this, I didn't actually come up with the idea until New Year's Eve; but since then, I have kept a running draft all year, updating it every few weeks until it's time for it to go up.

Since I have been doing these Year in Review posts, I have noticed one or two societal trends in America.  A particularly disturbing one is the large number of murder sprees that take place in this country every year.  Consider the ones we have seen during the calendar year 2012:

1. February 27th, Chardon, Ohio: a 17-year-old shooter kills three and wounds three at Chardon High School before being apprehended.

2. March 8th, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania: a shooter kills one and wounds seven at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic before being shot dead.

3. April 2nd, Oakland, California: an expelled former student kills 7 and wounds 3 at Oikos University, a Korean Christian college, and later surrenders to authorities.

4. May 15th, Port St. John, Florida: a woman shoots and kills her own four children, then turns the gun on herself.

5. June 10th, Auburn, Alabama: a shooter who later turns himself in to federal agents kills three and wounds three more at a party near Auburn University.

6. July 20th, Aurora, Colorado: a shooter sets off teargas grenades and opens fire inside a crowded movie theatre, killing 12 and wounding 59 before being apprehended.

7. August 5th, Oak Creek, Wisconsin: gunman murders 6 and wounds 4 at a Sikh temple, including one police officer responding to the scene, before being shot by police and then turning the gun on himself.

8. August 16th, LaPlace, Louisiana: in separate incidents, shooters murder two sheriff's deputies and wound two more, before being wounded themselves and/or taken into custody.

9. August 31st, Old Bridge, New Jersey: an employee at a Pathmark grocery store opens fire, killing two before turning the gun on himself. 

10. October 24th, Downey, California: three people are killed and two wounded at a business and a residence two blocks apart.

11. October 30th, Chicago, Illinois: a woman murders her own seven-year-old son and a five-year-old girl she was babysitting, ostensibly out of rage that her husband left her to do menial work she considered beneath her.

12. November 6th, Fresno, California: an employee at a chicken-processing plant shoots four of his co-workers execution-style, killing two, before turning the gun on himself.

13. November 30th, Casper, Wyoming: a killer using something on the order of a bow and arrow murders his father's girlfriend, then goes to Casper College and murders his father, then kills himself.

14. December 1, Kansas City, Missouri: Jovan Belcher, Kansas City Chiefs linebacker, murders his live-in girlfriend in front of his mother, then goes to Arrowhead Stadium and commits suicide in front of his coach and several others.

15. December 11, Happy Valley, Oregon: a shooter opens fire inside the Clackamas Town Center mall, killing two and wounding one before committing suicide.

16. December 14, Newtown, Connecticut: the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.

Consider that the nation recoiled in horror at the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago, when seven thugs were murdered by some other thugs in a gang war between Al Capone and Bugs Moran.  Such was the public outrage over this butchery that the Massacre marked the beginning of the end for Capone.  Now, in addition to the criminal-on-criminal home invasions and drive-by shootings among gang-bangers in cities, we have a massacre nearly every month, sometimes more than one in a month, all over the country, and frequently at random.

We may well ask why.  But the better question is: why not?  In a country where the murder of babies in their mothers' wombs is enshrined as a constitutional right, where embryos are created and frozen and experimented on and mingled with the genes of animals, and where euthanasia is legal in several states, an explosion of violence was inevitable.  Did we really think we could make the spirit of murder our servant, drawing curtains and closing doors on it, imprisoning it inside clinics and laboratories and bending it to our will?  We were deluding ourselves.

Come, Lord Jesus!

Of Onions, Liars and Hypocrites

Did the White House press room smell of onions yesterday, during the lachrymose presidential speech about the events in Connecticut?

Barack Obama supports infanticide.  When he was an Illinois state senator, he voted against the Born Alive Protection Act that would have protected infants that survived abortion procedures.

On Day Three of his administration, Barack Obama repealed the Mexico City Policy, making abortion groups eligible for U.S. foreign aid money.

Under the Obama Administration, Planned Parenthood got nearly half a billion taxpayer dollars in the year 2010.

Meanwhile, the number of abortions in the United States since Roe v. Wade came down in 1973 rivals the total number of people who perished in World War II.

Barack Obama made a show of weeping yesterday for the twenty children who were gunned down in Newtown, Connecticut.  But if an abortionist had destroyed those same children in their mothers' wombs, he'd have been perfectly fine with that.  

Barack Obama is a liar and a hypocrite.

More on the Travesty of "Brain Death"

Nicholas Coke was born in 2009 without higher brain functions.  This is because all he had was his brain stem.  He was not expected to survive more than a few hours.  Indeed Nicholas did die -- two years and 11 months later.  Today, the Solemnity of All Saints, Nicholas Coke breathed his last.  

Nicholas defies the culture of death.  Having no brain, was he not "brain dead"?  Shouldn't he have been aborted?  Shouldn't his organs have been harvested for the sake of "worthier" children?  Yet his heart beat on its own; he breathed on his own; he could take nourishment and medication; he could respond to treatment; he moved; he grew; he smiled.  Persons who are dead can do none of these things, with or without machines, to which Nicholas was never hooked up.  Nicholas could neither see nor hear, but he gave signs of awareness that he was being held.  Clearly, the child had a soul, and was therefore very much alive, even though his faculties were severely impaired.  He had a soul, with all the gifts of the soul, dormant though they were in his frail body, even though he literally had no brain.  That is not supposed to be possible -- yet there he was!  Thank God Nicholas was born into a family that cherished his life.  He was surrounded by love, and touched hearts in his turn.

Nicholas Coke is not only a testament to love and life, but also a rebuke and a warning.  He is a rebuke to the arrogance of a society that purports to redefine death for the sake of convenience.  He is a warning that we have made ourselves the enemies of what God holds dear, and that sooner or later we will have Him to reckon with.

The Party of Civil Rights...?

Gov. George Wallace, Democrat, tries to prevent desegregation at the University of Alabama in 1963.

In the age of slavery, the Democrat Party was the home of those who supported, or were willing to tolerate, slavery.

After the Civil War, the Democrat Party was the home of white supremacists, paramilitary groups dedicated to the disenfranchisement of blacks, and politicians who enacted black codes and Jim Crow laws.

The Democrat Party was the home of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, in 1942, ordered the forced internment of more than 100,000 Japanese and Americans of Japanese ancestry.  (It was Republican President Ronald Reagan who apologized for this action in 1988.)

The Democrat Party was the home of all but one of a bloc of 18 Senators who fought hard to kill the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Some of these Senators -- especially former Ku Klux Klansman Robert Byrd of West Virginia -- continued for decades as respected and prestigious members of the Party.

The Democrat Party was the home of Lyndon Johnson who signed the Civil Rights Act into law with one hand, and with the other hand created the Great Society, and with it the burgeoning modern welfare state, which has destroyed the black family and trapped many blacks in moral and economic servitude for decades.

The Democrat Party is the home of Barack Hussein Obama, fanatical opponent of the right to life of unborn babies, and launcher of perhaps the most blatant and explicit assault on religious freedom in our time.

Yes, indeed...the party of civil rights.

Hypocrisy

I have a question for some of you whose consciences are shocked by the idea of executing persons who have been tried for and convicted of rape.

How can you support executing the untried and unconvicted child who is conceived in an act of rape?

Dining with the Enemy

Sorry, but there is nothing good about this invitation of Obama to the Al Smith Dinner. Of course it is scandalous, and no amount of intellectual gymnastics can make it otherwise. 

This is not the same as pouring hot coals upon the enemy's head by doing him good. Cardinal Dolan is not bringing a starving Obama in off the streets. Nor is it the same as Jesus reaching out to prostitutes and tax collectors. The prostitutes and tax collectors believed the Gospel and repented, whereas Obama has made it quite plain that he intends to continue on his present course. What this is is the extending of a gratuitous and completely undeserved honor to an enemy of the Church. It is the latest in a long line of Catholic clergymen cozying up to unfriendly and even pro-abortion politicians over the last half-century. It is one more log on the bonfire of cynicism, and a source of distress and confusion to the faithful. 

Obama is at war against the Catholic Church, and has proven it by his actions. Why do so many in the Church not believe him? I guarantee Obama and his minions view this as a sign of weakness, and have even more contempt for the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, and the Church, than they did before. This is the way to prolong the war, not to win it. 

 And how can the bishops hope to rally Catholics in the pews against enemies of the Church whom they invite as honored guests at a dinner? William F. Buckley put the problem very succinctly 42 years ago, ruminating about the failure of Catholics to repel the forces of abortion in New York state (Inveighing We Will Go, New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972, pp. 326-328): 

When the time came to rally protests against permissive abortion laws, the troops were simply not there. It is very difficult for a Catholic fundamentalist to go on about Murder, while his Cardinal is photographed speaking amiably to the leader of the Assembly that passed the abortion bill a few months before. How would it have appeared if, let us say, Cardinal Spellman of New York had been seen shaking hands and chatting amiably with Martin Bormann? The answer is that Cardinal Spellman would have avoided doing any such thing. And that Cardinal Cooke’s willingness to traffic with legislators from New York who voted for the abortion bill seems to suggest that New York Catholics must regard permissive abortion policies as something less than the kind of thing that inspires mutinous relations between the subject and the state. 

We are obliged to be civil to our enemies, to pray for them, and to be generous to them in their need. But we are not obliged to be intimate and chummy with them. In fact, when being intimate and chummy saps our will to stand up for the Faith, surely we would be obliged NOT to.

Am I Married to My Brother?

That question must be on the minds of a lot of folks in the U.K. now that it has emerged that the Barton fertility clinic in London, which operated from the 1940s to the 1960s, impregnated about 1,500 women from the sperm of a very select group of donors -- including the co-owner of the clinic, Bertold Wiesner.  In fact, Wiesner may have fathered between 300 and 600 children via sperm donation.

That stunning estimate is the fruit of years of research by Canadian Barry Stevens, a maker of documentaries, and Londoner David Gollancz, a barrister, who turn out to share a father -- Bertold Wiesner.  At the age of 12, Gollancz discovered that his biological father was a sperm donor; DNA tests finally uncovered the truth about his parentage, as well as 11 siblings, including Barry Stevens.  In 2007, DNA tests on a group of 18 people who had been conceived at the Barton clinic between 1943 and 1962 resulted in the discovery that 12 of them were fathered by Bertold Wiesner.  

The co-owner of the clinic, Dr. Mary Barton, was Wiesner's wife.  In 1959, sounding as though she were talking about a program for breeding livestock, she testified that "I matched race, coloring and stature and all donors were drawn from intelligent stock....I wouldn’t take a donor unless he was, if anything, a little above average. If you are going to do it [create a child] deliberately, you have got to put the standards rather higher than normal." The donors consisted mainly in a select group of Barton and Wiesner's family friends, plus -- obviously -- Wiesner himself.  Of course, the difficulties of tracking down the true parentage of all the people conceived in this designer kid factory will be all but insurmountable: Wiesner has been dead since the 1970s; Barton died 11 years ago; and the medical records have been destroyed.

At this point it is worthwhile to look at the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the subject of sperm donation and artificial insemination:

2376 Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple (donation of sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus), are gravely immoral. These techniques (heterologous artificial insemination and fertilization) infringe the child's right to be born of a father and mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage. They betray the spouses' "right to become a father and a mother only through each other."

2377 Techniques involving only the married couple (homologous artificial insemination and fertilization) are perhaps less reprehensible, yet remain morally unacceptable. They dissociate the sexual act from the procreative act. The act which brings the child into existence is no longer an act by which two persons give themselves to one another, but one that "entrusts the life and identity of the embryo into the power of doctors and biologists and establishes the domination of technology over the origin and destiny of the human person. Such a relationship of domination is in itself contrary to the dignity and equality that must be common to parents and children." "Under the moral aspect procreation is deprived of its proper perfection when it is not willed as the fruit of the conjugal act, that is to say, of the specific act of the spouses' union . . . . Only respect for the link between the meanings of the conjugal act and respect for the unity of the human being make possible procreation in conformity with the dignity of the person."

And a thought much ignored in today's society:

2378 A child is not something owed to one, but is a gift. The "supreme gift of marriage" is a human person. A child may not be considered a piece of property, an idea to which an alleged "right to a child" would lead. In this area, only the child possesses genuine rights: the right "to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of his parents," and "the right to be respected as a person from the moment of his conception."

It is clear that, at a visceral level, David Gollancz gets the foregoing teachings.  He has drawn some good out of his situation by rejoicing in his long-lost siblings, but his feelings about his ancestry are mixed.  He says: "It's rather uncomfortable, because artificial insemination was developed on an industrial scale for cattle and I don't like the feeling of having been 'bred.'"  And Gollancz is campaigning for a change in the law to abolish the anonymity of sperm donors.  "Most recipient parents don't tell their children they are conceived this way, meaning they would never know to search for a donor father.  People have a right to know about their own history."

Children have a right to know their own history.  Children have a right to be conceived in love and self-giving, and treated with the dignity due to a human being.  Children have the right not to be treated like a commodity.  And they have the right to know who their close relations are, so as to avoid marrying their own siblings.  That's why the mean old Catholic Church declares sperm donation and artificial insemination to be gravely immoral.  Maybe one of these days, the lesson will finally sink in.  

"I Be Concubining" II: Supercharged

A girl must be like a blossom

With honey for just one man. 

A man must be like honey bee 

And gather all he can. 

To fly from blossom to blossom 

A honey bee must be free, 

But blossom must not ever fly 

From bee to bee to bee. 

-- "Song of the King," from The King and I

Five years ago, we heard from the convicted thief in Avondale, Ohio whose bid for leniency in front of the court included the plea that he had been "concubining" with various women and had six babies on the way.  Like the sentencing judge, we thought that was a pretty big jaw-dropper.

But that was because we hadn't yet met the Grand-babydaddy of Concubining, Mr. Desmond Hatchett of Knoxville, Tennessee.  Mr. Hatchett, who must be like the honey bee and gather all he can, has thirty (30) children by eleven (11) different blossoms.  "I had four kids in the same year.  Twice," he says by way of partial explanation.

But it's turning out that this honey bee, not being as wealthy as the King of Siam, is not in fact as free as all that, or gathering very much either, flying from blossom to blossom to blossom.  He's finding out the hard way that (a) the authorities are not going to let him get away with not supporting his children, but (b) you can't support thirty (30) kids on minimum wage, which means (c) half his wages (the legal maximum) are garnished, and (d) he's in constant trouble with the courts.  Yet (e) he fathered nine of these children within the last three years, proving that (f) it still hasn't occurred to him to keep his britches zipped.

Nevertheless, Hatchett is seeking a break on his child support payments.  Some of his kids -- ranging in age from toddler to 14 years -- are collecting the princely sum of $1.49 a month.

Are the taxpayers going to let these kids starve?  Of course not.  Nor should we.  It's not their fault that they were born to such rotten parents.  But thanks to the wanton irresponsibility of Desmond Hatchett and the idiot women who spread their legs for him, coupled with the immorality of the welfare state that encourages them to continue in their follies, these kids start life at great risk for living in poverty, being the victims of violence at the hands of the other jerks their mothers bed down with, getting involved in drugs and other criminal activity, and generally ending up as losers like their parents.

So what's the answer?  Contraceptives are not the answer.  This guy is the product of a society that has eaten, slept and breathed contraceptives for decades, as evidenced by his willingness to use numerous women as masturbatory aids.  Abortion -- the compounding of sexual abandon with murder -- is certainly not the answer.

The answer lies in the last place few people in today's world are willing to look.  Two thousand years ago, a Man born in a stable and crucified on Calvary gave us the perfect system for avoiding situations like Desmond Hatchett's and the dreadful plight of his thirty unfortunate children.  The only trouble with it, from the point of view of honey bees and blossoms like Hatchett and his concubines, is that it compels one to make sacrifices.  But a little self-denial goes a long way, and living a virtuous life is a great antidote to indentured servitude.

H/T Charleston Thug Life.     

Penance, Penance, Penance!

In what should come as no surprise, Obama has come out in favor of same-sex "marriage."

But not content to prostitute the prestige of his office, he added -- speaking as an alleged "practicing Christian":

[O]bviously this position may put us at odds with others, but when we think about our faith, the thing at root (is) not just Christ's sacrifice on our behalf, but the golden rule, treat others the way you want to be treated.

Are we to understand the current occupant of the White House to be saying that sodomy is a sacrament, equivalent to the Sacrifice of Calvary?

In all the years of our nation's life, who could have imagined that the American people would put a man at the head of our government capable of uttering a blasphemy of this magnitude?  Nor is this an anomaly in a country that for forty years has been steeped in abortion, contraception, promiscuity, concubinage and the celebration of homosexual acts.  How can this country expect to escape divine retribution?

We always have a duty to keep ourselves in the state of grace, but most of all during this time when the forces of hell are on the march.  Now more than ever we need to frequent the Sacraments of Confession and Communion.

Here is where you can order this:

Time for us to order a lot of them, distribute them, and repair with them to the nearest tabernacle.  Time for us to pray the Rosary every day.  Time for us to do penance.  Penance.  Penance.  We certainly shall not escape it.

How to Suffer

This little boy -- shown here a couple of months before his death at the age of 12 -- was never well a day in his life. 

This is an illustration of the profits that can be reaped by means of suffering united to the Cross.  It is far from the picture of squalid, abject meaninglessness the culture of death paints in order to justify murder.  It is just such lives as this that the culture of death, mired in atheism and materialism, says are not worth living.  It is the Garvan Byrnes, who light the way to the world to come, that are targeted for extermination.  


If we go on snuffing out these lights, how can we imagine we will escape retribution?

April 13th: Bl. Margaret of Castello, O.P.

The hippies of the '60s and '70s prided themselves (and some of them still pride themselves) on being "counter-cultural" just because they shunned barbers, smoked dope, wore draw-string pants and primitive jewelry, and could sit through an entire Joan Baez concert without wanting to slit their wrists.  But when it comes to being counter-cultural, the spoiled, disaffected children of middle-class America have nothing on Bl. Margaret of Castello.  Consider:

-- Margaret was short, hunchbacked, clubfooted and blind.  She met no ideals of physical beauty, either in her own time or in ours.  We, on the other hand, write off the physically ugly.

-- Margaret's parents shunned her, isolated her, imprisoned her, abused her, yet she bore it all cheerfully and patiently.  Even after they abandoned her, she would not hear a word said against them.  We, on the other hand, covet "victimhood" status, milking it for all it's worth; we pick constantly at the sores of injuries, real or imagined; we sue at the drop of a hat; we demand "reparations" for injustices of the distant past from the descendants of those who may or may not have had a hand in such injustices. 

-- Margaret sought always to do what was right, no matter what it cost her or what other people thought of her.  We, on the other hand, drop our principles as soon as they become inconvenient, or there is something to be gained by dropping them.

-- Margaret possessed a passionate nature, yet she embraced virginity.  We, on the other hand, embrace immodesty, promiscuity, depravity and even unnatural acts, all while viewing virgins as objects of pity.

Margaret's was a life that today would be considered as worthless.  Had she been conceived in 2012, once her obvious deformities turned up on an ultrasound, she would stand a fair chance of being suctioned out of the womb in pieces in the name of "compassion."  Yet she is a beata of the Church.  How many would-be great saints have we aborted and contracepted out of this world in order not to be "burdened" with them? 

What a fitting patroness of Life, and against abortion and contraception, Bl. Margaret of Castello would be.  Perhaps it is for just such a depraved time as this that she has waited 700 years to be raised to the altar.