On January 9, the Illinois House deliberated less than 90 minutes before voting 114-1 to impeach Gov. Rod Blagojevich. The case then went to the state senate, where on January 29 he was convicted by a vote of 59-0. Illinois legislators may tolerate some corruption, but they will not stand for the incompetence of being caught red-handed.
Federal authorities had wiretapped Blagojevich talking about selling President Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder. During one recorded conversation, the former governor reportedly said that he was financially hurting and that he wanted to "make money" for his family. He also weighed the option of appointing himself to the Senate, saying he was "stuck" as governor and might have access to more resources as a senator. He even thought that a Senate seat might help prepare him for a 2016 presidential bid. (Read more)
As Washington D.C. geared up (or in my case, hunkered down) in preparation for the unprecedented influx of people expected to attend the inauguration of President Barack Obama today, a telling paradox came to light.
Officials estimate at least 1.5 million people are in town for the historic swearing-in of our nation's first black president. Security is tight, with some 25,000 police officers on duty, all bridges into the city shut down to motor traffic, and enforced attendance cutoffs once parade routes reach capacity. The enterprising people of the D.C. metropolitan area capitalized on booked-solid hotels by renting out their homes for thousands of dollars a night to visitors with cash in hand. To be blunt, this city has never seen anything like what is unfolding today. (Read more)
Last week, startled by the vehemence some Catholics expressed against Israel on her blog in the wake of the attack on Gaza, Dawn Eden noted a vital point about magisterial guidance when it comes to thinking about Israel's right to exist:
As a Jewish convert to Catholicism who desires ardently that everyone, especially my loved ones, should find the salvation granted through Jesus Christ, I am distressed to see, following Israel's attempt to stop Hamas's violence against its citizens, some Catholics claim the true villain in the conflict is Zionism itself. (Read more)
In response to Vice-President elect Joe Biden's erroneous public comments on the Catholic Church's teachings on abortion, USCCB Chairman Justin Cardinal Rigali released a statement asking:
When does a new human life begin? When is there a new living organism of the human species, distinct from mother and father and ready to develop and mature if given a nurturing environment? (Read more)
\The election is over, and the changes are already beginning. For sincere Catholics, the most disappointing prospect is President-elect Barack Obama's complete embrace of the culture of death. He is dedicated not only to preserving the right to abortion, but actually to extending it. Unfortunately, he can make lots of changes quite quickly, and he almost certainly will do so.
Last year, Obama promised Planned Parenthood that his first act as president would be to sign a bill that he co-sponsored in the Senate: the Freedom of Choice Act. This bill will invalidate virtually every state or federal restriction on abortion, even those previously found constitutional by the Supreme Court, such as parental notification laws, waiting periods, full disclosure, and the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Some scholars argue that it could also force Catholic doctors to perform abortions against their will.
Obama also wants to reverse the ban on federal funding of fetal stem cell research. That won't even require legislation, just an executive order. With the stroke of a pen, human embryos will become property. They will be produced for the purpose of harvesting their parts, and federal funding will support the process. President Bush refused to risk "crossing a fundamental moral line by providing taxpayer funding that would sanction or encourage further destruction of human embryos." For Obama, it is a priority.
Obama is also expected to reverse the ban on taxpayer funding for overseas aid promoting or offering abortion (the "Mexico City Policy"). President Reagan instituted this policy in 1984. It was repealed by President Clinton in 1993, but reinstituted in 2001 by President Bush. It will probably be re-repealed by President Obama very quickly.
President Bush's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is also about to undergo a radical change. Bush launched PEPFAR in 2003 to combat global HIV/AIDS. It was the largest commitment by any nation to combat a single disease in human history, with up to $48 billion authorized for the effort. Under PEPFAR health workers are trained to emphasize abstinence and marital fidelity as the most effective ways to combat the spread of AIDS. Unfortunately, that is about to change.
Discussing these issues, Susan F. Wood, the co-chair of Obama's advisory committee for women's health issues, said: "We have been going in the wrong direction and we need to turn it around and be promoting prevention and family-planning services." The Obama team's approach will emphasize condoms, abortion, and the morning-after pill. Referencing Obama's campaign slogan, Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition said, "I don't think many dreamed that this 'change' would mean taking taxpayer dollars to fund abortion around the world." He called the projected policy overhaul of PEPFAR "tragic, a betrayal of social justice and human rights."
Even at the United Nations, things will change. Time after time, in agreement after agreement, advocates attempt to insert abortion rights language into international treaties. Representatives of the Holy See spend a great deal of time combating these efforts. During the Clinton administration, the Holy See was often at odds with the United States over these issues. Once the Bush administration was in place, the Holy See and the United States were on the same side. Unfortunately, that is about to change again.
As Time magazine has reported, "the election of a pro-choice, pro-diplomacy Democratic president is changing the Vatican's game plan vis-à-vis Washington on several levels. Bush was viewed in Rome as a rare ally in the West for his opposition to such issues as abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research." Obama will not be an ally. The United States will now support abortion rights in international treaties, and the Holy See will continue its heroic efforts on behalf of the most vulnerable humans.
This is a lesson about presidential power for now and the future. We all know that the president gets to nominate Supreme Court justices. Too often, the electorate is told that this is the only real impact that the president can have on life issues. (That was the argument set forth by Republican, abortion-rights candidate Rudolph Giuliani in an effort to attract -- or at least not frighten off -- pro-life voters.) In reality, however, the president sets the agenda and affects life issues in numerous ways that we are only just now coming to see clearly.
While he was a state senator in Illinois, President-elect Obama opposed a measure that would have mandated medical treatment for babies who survived an attempted abortion and were born alive. His reasoning was that such a law might suggest that these fully born babies were actually human. Unfortunately, his stated intentions indicate that he is determined to continue denying their humanity. As president, that determination means that many more human lives will be lost.
Printed with permission from InsideCatholic.com. (Read more)
Ordinarily this column is devoted to people I have known. Our current national crisis is an excuse for me to mention three exceptions.
I cannot say I really knew Winston Churchill, but once my father took me to see him when he was visiting Bernard Baruch in Manhattan. He had no idea who I was but I remember his voice: "You are a good little boy." I took the detached protocol as an oracle. On November 10, 1942, after El Alamein, Churchill had said that the North African campaign was "not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." On February 20, 1943, the German-Italian Panzer Army attacked the United States Army II Corps at the Kasserine Pass in west central Tunisia. Our troops were ill prepared and ill led, with poor coordination between air and ground forces and inadequate tanks. One thousand Americans were killed. (Read more)
One of the great strengths of the Roman Republic was its courageous realism. When Hannibal defeated the Romans in the first great encounter between the two armies, a battle in northern Italy, the leaders of the city called the people together to give them the news, and the opening words of the announcement were these: "We have suffered a tremendous defeat." In their heyday, the Romans obviously did not believe in sugar-coating bad news.
Those of us in the pro-life movement need to imitate the old Romans. No sugar-coating. Our movement suffered a great defeat in the November election. The pro-life candidate, Sen. John McCain, was decisively defeated by the pro-choice candidate, Sen. Barack Obama. Further, America's pro-choice political party, the Democrats, won a definite majority in the United States Senate and a lopsided majority in the House of Representative. Not only that, but three state referendums that had been put on ballots by pro-lifers were defeated -- one in California, a second in South Dakota, and a third in Colorado.
This is the worst political defeat for the pro-life movement since the election in 1992 of Bill Clinton and a Democratic Senate and House; indeed, it is probably worse even than that defeat. For Obama has a "mandate," while Clinton, who won less than 50 percent of the popular vote, did not. Further, Obama has much larger Democratic margins in the House and Senate than Clinton had. Again, Obama, though no more intelligent than Clinton (it's not easy to be more intelligent than Mr. Clinton), very probably has a capacity that Clinton lacked, namely a capacity for avoiding stupid blunders. When Obama sets out to do something in Washington, the odds are that he'll succeed.
And when it comes to abortion, what is it he'll set out to do? He has promised that he'll sign FOCA (the Freedom of Choice Act) if it comes to his desk. This would put current abortion rights into federal statutory law -- just in case the Supreme Court ever decides to reverse its Roe decision. But the likelihood that the Court will reverse Roe will almost certainly be greatly reduced during Obama's administration. Two or three justices may well retire in the next few years, and Obama has made it clear that he will nominate only pro-Roe justices to Court vacancies.
The bright side here is that the justices who are likely to retire (Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens, for example) are already pro-Roe. So Obama appointments to the Court won't make it any more pro-Roe than it already is. But the dark side is that these appointees, being much younger men and women than the retirees, will guarantee that the Court will have a pro-Roe majority for decades to come. If you're a pro-lifer over the age of 55, it is now very unlikely that you'll live long enough to see a reversal of Roe.
This suggests to me the need for a new strategy in the pro-life movement. For many years now, the movement has had what may be called a strategy of "politics first." By getting a pro-life president elected, along with winning pro-life control of the House and Senate, the pro-life movement could hinder government support for abortion and even chip away at certain abortion rights -- for instance, the "right" to partial-birth abortion. And by holding on to the White House and the Senate, anti-Roe justices could be appointed to the Supreme Court, creating a realistic possibility of reversing Roe and thereby sending the abortion question back to the states, where at least some state legislatures would seriously restrict legalized abortion.
Now that the reversal of Roe is probably off the table for many years to come, even many decades, a new strategy is needed: no longer a "politics first" strategy, but now a "culture first" strategy. Instead of focusing on the political balance of power in Washington, the focus should be placed on American culture, with an eye toward making it more unfriendly to abortion and more friendly to the right to life.
I don't mean that politics should be abandoned; far from it. If abortion is what we say it is (namely, unwarranted homicide), we can't very well give up the political fight. To do so would be tantamount to admitting that abortion is not really a very serious matter. Besides, even if we take a culture-first approach, one of the most important ways to shape cultural beliefs and values is by fighting for them in the political arena.
So the political fight must be kept up; maybe it should even be intensified. But it should be subordinated to the cultural fight. What does this mean? Well, many things; too many to list them in detail here. But at the heart of our cultural fight should be an unremitting stress on the rationality of our position. We pro-lifers hold (at least most of us do) that natural reason alone leads to the conclusion that abortion is a grave moral wrong. Our pro-life convictions are not simply matters of religious faith, even though it is true that our faith strengthens our rational convictions.
Our proabortion opponents -- most of whom are well-educated and religiously skeptical people from the upper middle classes -- think that we are simple-minded believers in a religion that has no basis in rationality, and that our anti-abortion attitudes are simply a function of this unfortunate superstition. Therefore, our opponents never feel a need to give serious consideration to the arguments we make. We have to change this and find a way to encourage them to take our arguments seriously. We have to convince them that we are not, as they complacently presume, mere boobs and nincompoops.
Printed with permission from InsideCatholic.com. (Read more)
Now that Barack Obama has been elected president of the United States, one hopes he will be able to carry through on his campaign promise of bringing all kinds of Americans together -- red states and blue states, Republicans and Democrats, whites and blacks, liberals and conservatives, men and women, young and old. Heaven knows we Americans need bringing together.
George W. Bush recognized this need eight years ago when he told us he was "a uniter, not a divider." That Bush failed to unite, no one will deny. Partly it was his own fault, but mostly it was the fault of the irreconcilable differences that divide the Americans he had hoped to unite. How can anybody unite the following groups, all of whom are present in today's America in great and well-organized numbers: conservative Christians and secularists, pro-lifers and pro-choicers, those who consider same-sex marriage a fundamental human right and those who consider it an absurdity and abomination? This is not to mention those who are pro and con on the question of gun control, or those who are pro-military and anti-military. (Read more)
Our choices matter. They hurtle before us into eternity, dragging us in their wake. And in this election, more than any in the United States since 1860, they matter desperately. I wish they didn't.
The single most damning objection raised by atheists is this: Why would a loving, omnipotent God permit sin, suffering, and the eternal damnation of souls? And our answer is stark and comfortless: For the sake of freedom. To give our choices consequence and meaning. To make our existence real. (Read more)
As a pro-life Catholic, I wouldn't vote for a politician with radical pro-choice views. And, for the most part, even those who disagree with me respect that position. But people begin to raise eyebrows when I say I believe that raising taxes on the wealthy to benefit the less well-off is wrong as well.
How do I reconcile my obligation to promote social justice and embrace Jesus' teaching that "whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me" with my strong beliefs that high taxation is wrong? (Read more)
