 SHATTERING THE SHIBBOLETHS OF MOLOCH 1 All Essays Copyrighted by Pauly Fongemie "I just had an abortion. It was our second child, but three months along I came down with measles, and the doctor said my baby was damaged. We couldn't face a less than perfect baby, so I agreed to it." Shocking, almost anyone would think! Even more startling was that it was uttered several years ago during a friendly bridge game, without any sense of shame. The woman who made this declaration, almost casually, was my partner. Shortly we will parse the paragraph above; for now let us examine what have become the standard clichés for justifying infanticide in the womb. We take them up in no particular order. We begin with the term, abortion itself, while not a cliché, serves to mute reality. Abortion. The sound of the word seems phonetically sterile, matter-of-fact and ordinary, natural and non-violent, compared to manslaughter, homicide, rape, armed robbery: we are told it is a procedure, the removal of a blob of tissue containing potential life. The designation slips past us so quickly that the average person fails to notice, that if the life is potential, and not actual, then why does it have to be killed? Non-living tissue is extracted, not put to death with poison or mangled. In fact, the operative word is aborticide, that is, to kill an unborn baby in the womb. When a woman suffers a miscarriage, everyone says "the baby died" or the "fetus didn't survive" [medical personnel]. We know a death happened. Why should a forced "miscarriage", if you will, alter the facts of what happens? It can't. Can't survive the scrutiny. Abortion supporters say that the Church accepts the non-personhood of the miscarried baby because it does not require Baptism of the baby. Christ's scripture is "Unless you be born again ...". A dead person cannot be Baptized, whether born or not. Until the baby is born there is no way to Baptize, by definition, and Christ does not demand the impossible. Whenever someone foists this maneuver on you, it is obvious he knows very little about the Sacrament of Baptism. Abortion is a monstrous crime not only because it kills an innocent person, it robs him of Baptism! Innocent babies do not go to Hell, but they do not reach the highest beatitude they might have achieved, which diminishes the glory of God! Christ warns those who would scandalize His little ones about the millstone around their necks; what is the punishment for those who slaughter His little ones for profit! Pro-lifers are single issue voters, while no one else is; meaning single issue voting is unAmerican, suspect, almost evil if the tone of castigation is an indicator. At the very least the defenders of the sanctity of life are thought to have an invalid motive for voting, unlike everyone else. The defamation and exclusion are insidiously subtle as many loaded phrases of three little words often are. The right to life appears to be the only matter about which one is not permitted to be "single-issue". Of course, those who are pro-infanticide and so fanatic about it that they strangle the English language in order to maintain their stance, are never, never "single-issue". Never-neverland. And like the word, abortion, "single-issue" slips by in the shape and sound of a silver-coated slogan and those hearing the phrase do not detect the molten, liquid, legerdemain at work. The issue is not whether one votes single-issue, but rather whether one holds a conviction so deeply and firmly that it transcends all other matters under consideration, and whether it is morally and politically licit to hold such convictions under ordered liberty, even morally binding, and whether it is only pro-lifers who hold such reputed illegitimate positions. We are supposed to pretend that this sophistry is wisdom incarnate. Today one may be single issue about saving the whales and trees, "gay rights", "hate crimes", global warming, nuclear energy, and "reproductive" rights, except for the courageous, stalwart soldiers fighting for the inalienable rights of those who cannot speak for themselves and who have less of a fighting chance than the whales. No other lobby is singled out [pun unintended] and criticized in this manner. Favoring abortion isn't single-issue politics, just opposing it is! Talk about single-issue finger-pointing! Our natural response to this unnatural, unjust claim ought to be to those who proffer it as a way of disenfranchising us in the eyes of our fellow citizens is this: What issue is so vital to you that you could not compromise, would not compromise? The carefully concocted myth is soon blown sky-high! A liberal politician tried to pull this fast one on me, smug and confident that I had no rejoinder. I turned the tables on him, asking him this very question. He saw the trap he had set for himself, the lie I was supposed to swallow and feel marginalized by, rendered unworthy; he tried to squirm out of it by re-lying, "I don't have any." 2 I pressed him further knowing that he was only fooling, maybe, himself. "What do you mean you don't have any such issues?" He answered that he always had various matters that were of equal importance to him. I agreed that this was the case as most people have many issues that could be thus characterized. He thought he was home free and the satisfied look reappeared. He forgot that someone willing to be slandered, to go to jail, to be taunted, kicked, and deliberately maimed, wrenched to cause pain by a local "officer of the peace", [who admitted as much in anger-frustration]---in hopes of rescuing an innocent baby condemned to death, is precisely the sort of person who does not take this kind of patronization lightly. I persisted: "Okay, I stipulate that all the issues you referred to [he had provided a short list of examples] are all equally important. But are all candidates for office, even within the same party and the same wing of the same party equal?" "Of course, not." "Right. And part of that inequality is that not every candidate has precisely the same platform, which is why you are running." "Yes, you can say that. Yes." "Well, you are going to vote for several candidates in the primary and then in November, not just for the seat you want to fill, is this not true?" "Yes." He was sweating by now as he knew where we were headed and it did not bode well for the prince of thieves, dealing in dodges. He tried to make his exit. I edged determinedly closer, and asked: "Well, then, what if one candidate holds all your opinions except one, and the other holds all of them? Are you telling me that you would not decide on that one issue?" "I have to vote for the one who is most qualified." He was still trying to wriggle free. "I grant you that, but what if they were equally qualified, what then?" "No one is equally qualified." "Yes, this is sometimes true, objectively speaking, but what if they were both two-term Senators running for Governor from districts of proportionate political exigencies? Are you telling me that you would vote for neither one?" "You've got me. Well, all things being equal, I would have to vote for one over the other and chances are I would select the one who fitted closest to my agenda." "Only natural, isn't it! Now, what if the differences were quite distinct as to qualifications, but one candidate, the less qualified one, favored abortion rights, but only three of the rest of your agenda. What then? Are you telling me that you would support the less qualified, using your standards, who was pro-abortion, rather than the more qualified candidate who held all your views but one, and who was instead pro-life?" "When you put it like that, I would have to." "Ah, then, this makes you a single-issue voter. Why am I "disqualified" from basing my vote on a singular conviction but you are exempt from the rule?" He shrugged and slunk away as fast as his kind of peculiar slug is able. Remember folks, abortion-aborticide has no right to be a right, it is murder, cold-blooded murder and it is big business and big politics. And it requires a big lie to make it seem less sleazy than it is. Just because you think you may not be able to outwit these black beards and blue bloods, remember the power of one sincere Hail Mary said silently in the recess of your heart to inspire confidence. The rest is overcome, you see, because we have truth on our side and truth is its own unfailing logic; reason has its own infallible reasoning, despite this age's preference for the irrational and the indefensible. Bullies operate under the cover of night, e.g., employ language manipulation designed to intimidate without blinking an eye. They don't want you to blink [think] either. The single-issue ploy is part of their arsenal. They cannot stand before the impeccable beauty, the awesome power and precision, the order of reason itself. The natural law and reason are allies and devoted cohorts of one another. Whenever the natural law is abandoned, reason follows its beloved into exile, and depravity, unreason and disorder of thought move in. Nature abhors a vacuum. So should you; recognize the opening, welcome it as a golden opportunity. Never forget that those who wish to abrogate common sense have the burden of proof. Always. Shine the light and expose them---to themselves. If they swat you a lob ball, acknowledge it, meet it high on and slam it right back down to them, always put the ball or onus of argumentation in their court. In tennis, love means zero, in life the love of life, its sacredness, means all. In truth and in common sense practice---experience---everyone is a single-issue voter when the stakes are high enough. It is every voter's prerogative, no matter who is inconvenienced by this reality. In fact the pro-death party and its adherents consider the unfettered "right" to aborticide so paramount, so single-issue, they are willing to lie boldly and without compunction to achieve their hegemony on homicide by another name. The above candidate will never attempt to use the single-issue contrivance again, but being relentlessly single-issue he will devise other strategies to convince us we ought not oppose his efforts. We ought to be ever vigilant, eager for combat. Our cause is not only supremely just, it is noble. Rape and incest make abortion necessary. When the going gets tough for the advocates of infanticide this canard is brought out, after the back alley abortion ruse fails [see below]. The polemics are so centered on its claim that one seldom stops to consider if there are ever any "easy" cases. Many a Catholic has been seduced by its utilitarian blandishments, or as one Catholic writer put it, "Hannitized", meaning a Cafeteria Catholic, after Sean Hannity of FOX News. In law there is a saying, based on ruinous unintended consequences, that hard cases make bad law. Rape victims who believe in abortion have easy access to medical emergency care that prevent pregnancy, in all but Catholic hospitals, and given the apostasy of the majority of the US Bishops, in those quarters sometimes, too. I am not advocating this as morally licit, merely stating reality. And it is not as if every rape victim finds herself with child a few weeks later. And as with rape, incest is a felony. The victim knows the aggressor. Killing the child is a form of evidence tampering and it is the death penalty for the child who is punished capitally for the crime of his "father". Instead of eliminating victimhood we intensify it by adding to the numbers, instead of one, now two. In what other crime do we deliberately destroy key evidence? Or those who could give testimony, silent and otherwise? Every crime wounds the victim beyond the moment of the crime itself and its immediate aftermath. Women who have been raped never forget it, there is a kind of grieving process or diminishment that takes up its abode. No matter how horrible the wound, how unjust, we become inhuman and more grievously wounded if we do not forgive, even if we never forget, otherwise we are never made as whole as is possible. The law is not equipped for this restoration, only God's grace can and will. Women who have aborted their children conceived other than from rape, unless belonging to the group of the politically indoctrinated die-hards or completely dead souls, eventually grasp the enormity of what they did and mourn the loss of their children through their actions, even if committed in invincible ignorance or under extreme pressure, which greatly reduces moral culpability, even negates it. The advocates of aborticide do not really care about women so much as they care about uprooting tradition, destroying the pure idea and ideal of the Christian family and vanquishing the natural law from our midst. Pregnant women in various circumstances are the means. Abortionists and their allies loathe the natural law because it is the Divine law written in the hearts of men by God, and it is God they hate most because He is sovereign and has rights above those of the ones they arrogate for themselves. Since they can't actually kill God, Who is Eternal and Omnipotent, they use the next best thing available, His dominion through the natural law. If they actually had the best interests of women who have been raped by incest or the other kind they would not want to add to their burden when they realize what they have wrought in the name of choice or rights. Not every woman who conceives through rape seeks an abortion; those who have not only given birth, but kept the child are often asked why. Sometimes they respond that they were not sure why at the time but they had no regrets. I ask the abortionists among us, go to these children and tell them face to face, which of them should not be alive, has no right to live. The most hardened killer in America dares not such audacity. 3 But they then say, "We are for choice and some women choose not to abort." This, too is a lie, because they do nothing to promote adoption, [they think there are too many children being born period] and they refuse to denounce Red Chinese policy a la Kate Michelman and Company. Moreover, ask them why if they are so much for "choice" the choice begins and stops at the abortuary or the hospital. If the mother brings the child to birth, then they turn their backs on her and do their best to deny her choice in education, choice in medical care for her child when he or she is in a government school. In fact the child is used to countermand the rightful authority of the mother and the father by using public policy to deny parental rights over many decisions that minors are not mature enough to make, cannot consent to. If you do not believe me, take an "I am for Choice" button and attend a NOW meeting in your vicinity. When you introduce yourself, point to your button and say the choice is for education. You will be an instant pariah with a communicable disease. Abortion rids us of unwanted children. This is the one truth abortionists tell us, although only a half truth at that, but the rationale is irrelevant and indefensible. Killing thieves or those we deem potential thieves rids us of the crimes of larceny and theft. Would anyone actually want a public policy that says if the victims of theft choose, the thief can be executed and without due process? At the very least he would have a trial with an advocate weighing in against the death penalty. The argument that should be posited is why are children unwanted, and if this is true, in what sense is unwanted defined, and does this mean our right to life, which is inalienable, provided we are innocent, that is are not a determined unjust aggressor, can be abrogated because somebody who feels imposed upon for a period of time would rather not be? Actually no child is unwanted; it is that some mothers do not want the responsibility or because of circumstances beyond their control, cannot take it; the baby is in fact wanted by others, often by the father who is denied the right to save his own child from slaughter. This brings us to the opening citation, which I repeat here: "I just had an abortion. It was our second child, but three months along I came down with measles, and the doctor said my baby was damaged. We couldn't face a less than perfect baby, so I agreed to it." The woman is from an upper middle-class family: Note the pejorative word, "damaged". Property can be damaged as in "damaged goods". People are not property, they have living, eternal souls beyond physical incapacities or intellectual limitations. People who call human beings damaged, are "damaged" in spirit, truly. We couldn't face a less than perfect baby. Except for the Mother of God who was conceived without Original Sin, all men are imperfect, and never more so when they think they have the authority to decide which children ought to be allowed to live and not to live. Actually she did not say the baby [not fetus] had no right to live, she merely said, "We couldn't face ..." Right. To spare her suffering a little person must be executed. She was arguing not by rights but by inconvenience. The last I checked everyone is an inconvenience for someone, usually another family member who would prefer not to be bothered by so and so. And sometimes it lasts a long time, an entire lifetime to be exact, and at great inconvenience and expense. Children who are "wanted" at birth can end up being disinherited later and worse. "Wanted" is a loaded term designed to elicit sympathy in order to skew the debate. In fact the concept of "want" is not a stable, long-perduring one. How often we obtain something we thought we wanted only to discover later that we have changed our minds. If you do not think so, just ask any divorced couple, especially those who separated after only two years of marriage or less. This puts things in perspective. Then ask parents who unexpectedly conceived a child late in life, what some call "a bonus baby". Not one of them says the child should not have been born and some of them admit to reluctance in the beginning. Perspective? It is a matter of mere, fleeting time and an authentic understanding of rights versus responsibilities. Now in what exactly does a "perfect child" consist? Apart from the young Christ with a human nature---He was never a human being---and His holy Mother, there never have been any and never will be. I suppose by perfect the woman meant physically attractive, without disease or malformation of limb and a normal intelligence. This is what most people mean by desirable, and not actually perfect as in perfect. For the sake of argument let us assume this is what she meant. Where in the law, natural, Divine and positive human law do we find a right to a "perfect" child? There isn't even a right to any child per se, let alone a "perfect" one. If there were, the government would have to provide children for those who cannot conceive or adopt. At least a claim could be established by extension, based on the warped notion of "rights" as promulgated today. The woman eventually bore another child. Did she hover over the two of them so they would not be seriously injured while skiing or swimming and diving? Did she have their IQs tested and measured on a regular basis to make sure they were as perfect as can be? Perfection of the physical and pyscho-social is in the eyes of the beholder. Under her set of rules the mother does the measuring so any child can be executed essentially for any reason, precisely what we have now, only we pretend it is something else. Perfection in the metaphysical and ultimate sense is to be found only in God. At best we can only approach it according to our cooperation with His grace. In practice human perfection is found in the measure that nature and grace are joined by love for God and our neighbor because God has so loved us. This ultimately entails sacrifice and self-denial, as all those who love as He wills experience. Love is measured by how much we conform to the set of instructions He has given us, all of mankind, the most elemental form of which is the natural law, recognized by our Protestant founders. Like it or not there are boundaries or limits under the natural law beyond which we may not trespass without bringing utter chaos into society. If a mother can decide to kill her unborn baby because she thinks he is "damaged" or not "perfect", why stop there? If children must be perfect, should not parents be also? Are we now going to begin speaking of licensing all parents? I wonder if she could pass muster. Oh, probably, she is a worldly, sophisticated liberal, just the kind to be preferred. She would not taint her children with the "wrong" kind of religious upbringing. But why not give children the right to judge the perfection of their parents and have them exiled, if not executed, if found wanting? Children are already doing this without official sanction. More and more the young are killing their parents for imagined and real abuses. The twisted logic of the law is lost on them, for they have learned their lessons well in so many words. Life is no longer sacred, but is merely an option to be chosen if one so desires. Choice is the end, not choice for what. A second aspect of this rationale or imperative, is that compulsory motherhood is inherently evil, but that compulsory death isn't, or is at least less evil. We have been repeatedly assured that fewer unwanted children would lower the incidence of child abuse. Yet it seems that the destruction of one's child in order to protect it from harm is paradoxical, as well as the cruelest of abuses. Saline abortions are excruciating painful procedures. This is not to say that if the baby were sedated killing him would be tolerable enough so that we ought not to object. Studies have shown that most parents do not anticipate abusing their children, and most child abusers would not have procured abortions, given the choice, since they do not realize their proclivities at the time. Since 1973, when abortion became legal, child abuse has grown. I am not declaring a direct correlation, only that the purported reasons for aborticide have not produced the intended results. The very notion that the right not to have an unwanted child is superior to a child's right to life, is a complete reversal of centuries of the meaning of parenthood: Obligation. In the past our culture was exact in its expectations that parents make sacrifices. In those cases where a "deformed" child was born, it was never proposed that parental care was no longer required. Love is an act of will, not a mood or impulse that something or someone is lovable because they are convenient. That does not even necessarily require love at all because it is so conveniently convenient. Clive Bell, the historical essayist, once noted that no great civilization ever placed comfort ahead of other values. It is only now, in the "age of compassion and tolerance" that it is suddenly too much to ask that parents provide for the welfare of their children, when it is a great burden; the rest of us ought to assist, each according to our own means and ability. No man is alone. You are referred to the following web site, SAINT GIANNA, which honors a valiant woman who sacrificed her life to save her baby's life. Some would argue that the mother ought to preserve her life instead as she has other children at home to raise. What they are saying is that some children are better than others, that their rights are more important than those of other children. Saint Gianna did not think so, and neither does God. She taught her family the nobility of sacrifice and that she would never choose one child over another. She loved them all equally in law and truth, and if God so willed that she as mother could not raise them, He would provide. He certainly did! Ironically this woman who aborted eventually was diagnosed with an incurable, debilitating disease. At some point she will "be a burden" to her children and most imperfect by her standards. Since she has but two, the burden will be especially heavy. I hope she has had a change of heart by now. When we do not repent we more than reap what we sow. We become the very thing we fear or hate most. Life has its own scales for weighing justice, and it is not as blind as we sometimes are. She may have need of us pro-lifers yet. We cannot determine when life begins. Until recently, pregnant women have received special protection in law, able to acquire damages for harm resulting in the death of their unborn children. Even now in some jurisdictions a woman with child is held to be two persons, which is truly the reality and the murderer can be tried and convicted of double murder. Article 6 of the United Nations document, The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states that the sentence of death "shall not be carried out on pregnant women". Why? Because a child who is not guilty of a capital crime would be executed. The United Nations is pro-abortion, but even it recognizes the truth, albeit hypocritically. Test tube babies, while immorally conceived, are still human beings and clearly not part of a "woman's body", [just as in natural conception] which is a place of protective residence. Had Louise Brown been implanted in a cow's uterus, she would be no less human. The problem seems to be to find reasons to protect human life. Fetus, child, adult are stages of a continuum in one human life. Is a person ever too insignificant to need legal rights? It is that some of us want to pretend that one second before birth a baby is not a person in law but the very next second he is, only if the mother chooses. And the lies we tell ourselves so we actually believe it in order to salve our consciences and have matters that contradict one another somehow rendered compatible! Only those with actual guilt need undergo such a torturous rationalization. And thus we reveal our guilt despite all the rhetoric. It isn't that we do not know when life begins, for every biological text I have had for biology courses says medical science knows---at conception---we do not need the Church to tells us here, which is kind of interesting. The truth is that we do not want to believe this anymore and so have arbitrarily assigned various legal rights to particular places of residence, in utero, ex utero, thinking we can have things both ways. It isn't our responsibility, it's the woman's choice. Oh, but it is, when we stand before almighty God. We live in a democratic, Constitutional Republic and this makes us all responsible, unlike Red China. No government has the right to abolish the natural law and every citizen with a voice has the duty to oppose such a government. In another era we used to call it "crimes against humanity" or genocide. What is aborticide a million or so every year in a single country, but genocide of generation? In our rise to greatness and glory, as "the greatest nation" on earth, how far we have fallen. If we do not have the right to life, of what use is any other right which depends on the first right? Our pernicious, persistent elites know this and this is why the courts are curtailing our rights more and more, in the name of rights. Since we refuse to engage in the conflict necessary to fight for the first, they reckon we will surrender ground slowly on the others. Human nature, human logic. If a baby can be evicted from the womb like so much garbage, we can be evicted from our homes when an economic argument is given precedence. After losing our homes everything else is up for grabs and eventually will be. The right to life, property, meaningless. Then the pursuit of happiness, meaning religion to some of us. As Judge Napolitano writes, we are "A Nation of Sheep". And not Christ's. If you do not think so, study Communist Russia from 1915 to 1935. Human nature, debased and corrupted beyond recognition supplies its own reasons and destroys anything and everything in its path to an utopian Hell on earth. Sometimes it does not even bother with contrived reasons, nihilism, anarchy are their own ends. Abortion opposition is a Catholic issue of a minority that wants to impose its views on the majority. Most civil rights issues result in precisely that. The majority is prevented from unjustly treating a minority. So in truth it is the minority doing the imposing, if we can put it like that. Actually the majority imposes it upon itself for the sake of conforming to the natural law, knowing that only a part of the so-called majority would do so on its own without being shamed into it. It has to be the majority because the minority simply has not the numbers, literally. Already the lie is exposed. See what I mean by the reason of truth? Most of us would rather the speed limit be much higher on the turnpike, but we consent to the law as it is because we know it is the safest course. We know we need to be preserved from our worst instincts as drivers although some of us, many in fact, speed from time to time. We still want the speed limit imposed because we know that we know ourselves. Some Catholics have been in the forefront of the peace movement and nuclear waste debate, but no one has suggested that these are Catholic issues. Not only is this charge blatant demagoguery, but it is also false. Catholics have historically voted in greater numbers proportionately than the more mainline groups. They are one fourth and more of the voting majority, enough to elect pro-life candidates. French Catholics are one fourth of the population, but one third of the Maine voters. Both nationally and statewide, pro-life candidates have lost in most races. So we know that Hannitized Catholics are hardly imposing anything but liberalism run amok on the rest of us. In other words, if only the charge were true, oh if only! The charge is leveled to demoralize those few Catholics who have not apostatized. This is what I mean by fanatic. Not content that over 50 percent of the population wants Roe v. Wade upheld [for cases of rape and incest, etc.], the purveyors of death want it to be 100 percent for any reason. Aborticide is a civil and human rights issue, about which some Catholics feel strongly about, like most other issues that center on humanity. Catholics in great numbers have joined the vast apostate conspiracy. A more perverse aspect of the "Catholic issue charge" is that it permits the accusers to take advantage of anti-Catholic bias that still persists, without also having to appear bigoted. Clever. All of law is someone's morality being imposed on the rest. If not mine, why yours? If not mine, then definitely yours. We ought to at least be grown-up enough to admit this. This is one Catholic who refuses to be disenfranchised! Abortion is not killing. Wrong. Its purpose is to destroy a living being. We can kill bacteria, kill a bill, kill the snail darter, kill time, but we can't kill in abortion. Hence the euphemism, abortion, like stopping a space launch or military coup. Nice, safe, eugenic word. There is a legitimate use for the word abortion, one that is not murder, but that is another discussion for another time. We have no need for euphemisms when we discuss rape and incest, and other premeditated violent crimes. If abortion is so good for social justice, we should proclaim it without needing "termination of a pregnancy" etc. I repeat, for emphasis, the woman in my opening quote said, child, baby, not "It was our second fetus or embryo." Like it or not, the doctor still says things like "You are going to have a baby." The pregnant woman does not come home and say, "I am with fetus, or the fetus kicked or I am with potential life." She uses baby or child. It has occurred to me that our instincts are smarter than our educated excuses are. Fetus [Foetus] is a perfectly good Latin word used in medicine, but this is not we are talking about. You ask why not? Because when a commentator talks about a murdered woman who was with child, he or she uses with the rarest of exceptions, the word baby. When the commentator believes in the right to an abortion and the issue is abortion, he or she uses fetus, precisely because the inference is different among the vast majority of people who are not in the medical profession. In former times when 90 percent of the populace was literate, fetus as terminology would not be an inferential problem as it is now. In fact, once in a while when pundits slip and say baby in the second case, they immediately correct themselves and force the word "fetus." Every time. PC is so tediously obvious. Legalized abortions prevent the medical abuse of back alley abortions. This is one of the most absurd of the claims made by the abortion lobby. Why? Oh let me count the ways: I present but three here, see the link below for more. 1. Abortion is the most under-regulated "medical procedure" in the nation. The media tries to cover up the sordid details of lax regulations, shoddy conditions and the countless deaths and other permanent harm done to girls and women by just not looking into it, even when they receive credible evidence. Human Life International has this link for reference: http://www.abortionviolence.com/ I need say no more here. 2. Why does anyone think that the same doctors who were willing to kill babies for profit when it was illegal, change their approach to "medicine", hone their skills, when the killing is "legalized"? All they do is start advertising publicly, get a more respectable address in some cases. Nothing else changes but one major aspect. If they now work for Planned Parenthood they are subsidized with our tax dollars. And they enjoy other privileges as well, they can wear the mantle of special victimhood, you know, from being hunted down by all of us violent, murderous pro-lifers according to the media. I repeat, changing the address from the back alley to the main avenue only changes the city tax revenues. A butcher is a butcher. If you do not believe me, ask all the Jews who were "legally" persecuted in the Holocaust by Nazi doctors who did experiments on them. Government sanctioned killing and maiming is still killing and maiming. 3. When "back alley" abortions were the norm, there were only a few thousand abortions a year as estimated by one of the prominent doctors of NARAL, who later converted to Catholicism, Dr. Bernard Nathanson. After Roe, in the millions. Which do you think was worse? To ask is to answer. Dr. Nathanson said that they deliberately skewed the data on back alley abortions to gain the media's cooperation; moreover they cycnically, with malice aforethought played the "Catholic card". The rest is history and I need say no more here either! History is not over until the end of the world when time will cease to exist within the conceptual measure of such things. The culture war has largely been lost as Pat Buchanan astutely observes. The sanctity of human life is not just one of many issues as the neo-conservative Catholic leaders insist. It is the only issue, once surrendered, it guarantees the loss of civilization itself and countless souls in Hell for all eternity. We must press forward, counting not the cost to ourselves, our reputations. Sacrifice, if it is noble must be undertaken with a grasp of reality and the essential, necessary things, or it is vainglorious folly, an affront to Almighty God and the road to perdition for those who are so cavalier. An honest assessment of the times in which we live includes our admitting that the general populace is content with the status quo unless it affects their immediate circumstances. By nature's distribution of temperaments and its inclinations, most people are followers, who prefer to believe a big lie rather than disrupt their own lives to any degree. They would rather go along in order to get along. This is why we keep electing year after year the same sort of scalawags as before, party and name not important. Politics it is said is the art of compromise, and surely it is, but it is also big business among other things, such as the art of artifice or deception. The vast apostate conspiracy? Oh it is real, alive and growing exponentially as people desert the ship of statesmanship, abandoning the ark of the natural law, too blind to see the lighthouse of reason. Representatives who deny the natural law exists or pretend it does not matter if it does, are not inclined to defend the imperatives of our national charters, the US Constitution and Declaration. They simply lack the will to apply the powers reserved to them to limit the jurisdiction 4 of the federal courts. Until and unless they do so, the Courts rule imperially, apart from the natural law and in all moral illegitimacy. We do not have to win the hearts and minds of all men, only those who control electioneering rules and those who have the power to restrict the hegemony of the Court. One of the greatest of the greatest thinkers of the 20th and 21st centuries is Joseph Sobran. I cite from his eminent work, SINGLE ISSUES: "The Court has now adopted, in opposition to the Declaration, the great heresy of the twentieth century: that government has not the duty to recognize and protect ("secure") innate human rights, given by God, but the arbitrary power to create and/or destroy positive rights---including the very right to live---at its whim. "The Court, I repeat, is at war with the American tradition, with the whole Western tradition. It would be strange on the face of it if the Court had somehow discovered the real meaning of the Constitution after two hundred years---a real meaning that had escaped that Constitution's authors and the people who had inherited and lived the constitutional tradition over those two centuries. "It surely begins to look very suspicious when that alleged "real" meaning turns out to coincide with the ideology of today's left-wing intellectuals. Yet the Court asks us to accept its word for it that only the Court speaks for our authentic tradition. It could hardly ask this, or expect our obedience, unless it felt its ideology commanded widespread assent in powerful institutions. "When I reflect that only seven men have foisted such a position on more than 200 million people---not to speak of some 10 million unborn people who have died since 1973, and millions more who will soon die---I can hardly believe my ears when I hear it charged that the anti-abortion movement ... is bent on imposing its views on the majority. "No majority ever sanctioned the Court's view." [pp. 113-114.] "Surely not even a contemporary court would expect such deference as this: that our metaphysical convictions should depend on its hasty rulings. This must indeed be a court of last resort, if not only events but truths hang on its words. "It is strange how many people, professing general skepticism about all creeds and institutions, are willing to pay total submission to the judiciary, as if it were a kind of oracle. In fact it is rather striking that so many who "grow up" to abandon the Bible and the Church seem eager to let the Constitution and the Court serve as functional substitutes. Perhaps this is because Constitution and Court offer to provide an unfolding revelation of Tendency. "At any rate, they can hardly deny that they want the Court's recent declarations, particularly on that basic constitutional and human right of abortion, to enjoy the veneration of all citizens. And they regard attempts to limit the Supreme Court's jurisdiction as a kind of secular sacrilege. "This is surely odd. They admit that the Constitution no longer means what it meant in 1789; in fact they say that part of its glory is to have changed, to have followed the great stream of tendency. And it is especially the latest meanings divined by the Court, not the earliest meanings intended by the Framers, for which they desire our reverence. When one leading constitutional scholar demonstrated that the Supreme Court had wilfully misconstrued the plain original sense of the Fourteenth Amendment, another leading (or misleading) scholar arose to cry out that we must not be tyrannized by 'the dead hand of the past.' "The answer is obvious; in fact there are so many obvious answers that it is hard to make them all. One is that there is hardly any point in writing law down in words if those words are not going to have a fairly constant meaning. Another is that since all words are written by the hand of the past, we would be grateful to know at what point that hand can be safely pronounced dead. Are we to be forever tyrannized by the dead hand of Earl Warren? The Court's 1973 finding that abortion laws violate a constitutionally guaranteed right of privacy was preposterously ahistorical, depending for any slight plausibility it had on a congeries of earlier interpretations so controversial that it would be a fluke of probability if all of them were sound. In fact the Court's recent corpus of "activist" rulings follows the contemporaneous liberal/secularist agenda so closely that it is impossible to take seriously the Court's claim to be a politically neutral interpreter of the American constitutional tradition. A spate of recent research has shown how badly the Court has misunderstood the Constitution's original meanings. The Court and the votaries of Tendency may not care much; but among people of a different cast of mind, the Court's prestige depends heavily on its fidelity to historical meaning. "The long and the short of it is that the Court now exercises political functions without facing political restraint or responsibility. Despite its rhetoric of checks and balances, it has become a grave anomaly in a system of self-government, not to mention a government of laws not men. It has the very quality that should be absent from law itself: unpredictability. It tells us (sometimes to our surprise) what the Constitution means today; we have no idea what the Constitution will mean tomorrow. "A branch of government that can order sweeping social changes, without answering either to the voters or to the other branches of government (short of the drastic remedy of impeachment), simply cannot be described as 'an independent and equal branch" of our government. It is far too independent to be equal. It is so independent that it is, truly, supreme." [pp. 140-142.] Only a president still in possession of his faculties of the natural law of reason vowed to sign a bill limiting the jurisdiction of the courts and only a Congress man enough, morally intrepid enough to do so can forestall our total ruin as a nation, among men and under God. Until then Moloch reigns and we are an idolatrous nation, prefering an idol over the only God, the one true God Who is from the begining, is now and ever will be! 1. Moloch was an idol worshipped by the ancient Canaanites [Phoenicians], an integreal part of which was infant sacrifice. 2. Sometimes a pro-abortion advocate will attempt to avoid the trap he thinks he is setting for you by responding, "I do not answer hypothetical questions." He knows he is stuck and is trying to buy time. Then you simply say, "I do not also, which is what the question that you put to me was, strictly hypothetical, because you did not actually mean it the way you conveyed." He will then say, in all probability, "What do you mean?" Then you restate the hypothetical to him, saying "that you will answer his if he will first demonstrate goodwill as the candidate by answering mine." Usually the candidate does, admitting he could not in "good conscience" support such a pro-life, otherwise liberal on other issues candidate. He has to because the logic is so clear even to a charlatan who makes his living with deception. Of course, I answer the same and the sleight-of-word is exposed. The rabid pro-abortion candidate who has sold his soul a little at a time may not change his allegiance, afraid to lose "human respect" but if he is just a bit human----and they are----he will have to work at quelling his conscience on the matter of the moral licitness of voting single-issue. He will be reluctant to intimidate a voter with this nonsense again! Once in a while a candidate just dodges the issue because he foresees the trap he has placed himself in, chicanery being its own reward. He will still protest that he does not answer the hypothetical and then attempt to press on thinking he has evaded the issue he raised in the first place. You only have to persist, insist, inform him that all politicians have to deal with hypotheticals since this is a crucial part of the work of governing, such as hypotheticals about the consequences of legislation. Since he insists that he can't and or won't answer a hypothetical, you tell him that you cannot vote for such a candidate, all other things being equal because such a candidate does not have the character it takes to lead and govern. 3. In France, some do, unbelievably. Parents of Downs syndrome children are known to have been publicly taunted because they gave birth to these sweet lambs of God, and who are considered unworthy of life and support by madmen who have dehumanized themselves. 4. Article Three of the United States Constitution establishes the judicial branch of the federal government. The judicial branch comprises the Supreme Court of the United States along with lower federal courts established pursuant to legislation by Congress.
Vesting ClauseThe Vesting Clause grants to the federal courts the "judicial Power," which is the power to hear and decide cases within its jurisdiction.Federal courts are courts of limited jurisdiction, and not courts of general jurisdiction. Courts of limited jurisdiction can hear and decide cases that involve only certain subject matter. For federal courts, this limited "subject-matter jurisdiction" extends to:
Article Three is not self-executing with respect to the subject-matter over which federal courts can have jurisdiction. The Congress decides, from among the subject-matter specified in Article Three, what jurisdiction the federal courts will actually have.  Contact
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