Christian Persecution: Chinese House Church Christian Sentenced to “Re-Education Through Labor”

November 30, 2012 By 7 Comments

One way the Communist government in China attempts to control Christianity is by confining it to government-approved churches. The government then picks the bishops, priests and preachers who work in these churches. That places these “official” churches and their message under government control.

One way Christians in China try to get around this is to worship in “house churches” which are basically underground churches where people can worship the true Jesus found in the Gospels. The government attempts to suppress these house churches by use of criminal punishments, including sentencing people to labor, which is probably just another name for slave labor.

I don’t know, but I wonder if any of these prisoners work in American factories, making the gifts we put under our Christmas trees.

The following article from Worthy News describes the sentencing of Mao Henfeng to “re-education through labor.” Mao Hengfeng is a house church in Shanghai. The article reads in part:

BEIJING, CHINA (Worthy News)– A high profile house church Christian in Shanghai who has been continually targeted for government harassment was just handed an extra-judicial sentence to a forced labor camp.

Mao Hengfeng was sentenced to 18 months of “re-education through labor” for “disrupting public order,” the third such sentence for the 50 year-old Mao, who is in poor health with high blood pressure.

Labor camp sentences were also handed down to others who joined Hengfeng in seeking redress from the Communist government; recently many petitioners have disappeared into official custody, been criminally detained or had their freedom of movement curtailed in the days leading up to the November 8 opening of the 18th Party Congress.

ChinaAid President Bob Fu expressed grave concern for these political detainees as well as others who suffered human rights abuses at the hands of the Chinese government as it prepares for its Party Congress. Fu called upon the international community to seize the opportunity presented by this latest Party Congress and bring about reforms that will protect human rights, the rule of law and freedom of religion. (Read more here.)

Filed Under: America, Calling Evil Good, Christian Persecution, Christianity, Conversion, Culture, Faith, Following Christ, Religious Freedom, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , 7 Comments

Supreme Court Will Decide Whether to Hear Gay Marriage Cases Tomorrow

November 29, 2012 By 38 Comments

WASHINGTON (BP) — The nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court will meet behind closed doors Friday to decide whether to take up several cases that could lead to the legalization of gay marriage in all 50 states.

The public won’t find out what they decided for several days — as early as Monday — but Friday’s meeting is significant enough that both sides in the cultural debate are guessing what will happen. If the court takes up the cases, it could end up being the “Roe v. Wade” of gay marriage.

At issue are two laws: a federal law known as the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and a California constitutional amendment known as Proposition 8.

Technically, only one section of DOMA is before the court — the section that defines marriage in federal law as being between one man and one woman. But the legal arguments the Obama administration’s Justice Department attorneys are using to oppose that section could be used to overturn the entire law, conservative attorneys say. That other section gives states the option of not recognizing gay marriage laws from other states. Courts have been split on DOMA, although the cases before the high court overturned the federal section at issue. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives is defending DOMA in court.

California Prop 8 was approved by voters in 2008 and defines marriage as between a man and a woman. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court ruling that struck it down. If the Supreme Court takes the Prop 8 case, it could do a number of things, including upholding Prop 8 or — in what would be a nightmare for Christian legal groups and evangelicals — reversing laws in any state that define marriage as between a man and a woman. The court also could choose not to take the Prop 8 case, a decision which would legalize gay marriage in California. (Read more here.)

Compiled by Michael Foust, associate editor of Baptist Press. Get Baptist Press headlines and breaking news on Twitter (@BaptistPress), Facebook (Facebook.com/BaptistPress ) and in your email (baptistpress.com/SubscribeBP.asp).

Filed Under: America, Calling Evil Good, Christian Persecution, Christianity, Family, Marriage, Same Sex Marriage, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , 38 Comments

Dorothy Day’s Pro Life Witness Demonstrates God’s Mercy

November 27, 2012 By 8 Comments

Dorothy Day

Public Catholic reader Manny, who has his own blog at J’s Cafe Nette posted a link to this article in the comments on my earlier post, Dorothy Day: The Woman Who Loved Much. I like Manny’s link so much I decided to put it here.

Dorothy Day’s abortion and subsequent conversion and life of sacrifice for human life and dignity are a remarkable are a powerful reminder to women who are abortion survivors that nothing … nothing … is greater than God’s all-encompassing mercy which comes to us through the shed blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The article Manny linked to and others like it can be found at The Catholic Resource Center.  Please pay them a visit and see what they have.

Here is the article in full:

Dorothy Day’s Pro-Life Memories

DAN LYNCH

I wish every woman who has ever suffered an abortion would come to know Dorothy Day. Her story was so typical. Made pregnant by a man who insisted she have an abortion, who then abandoned her anyway, she suffered terribly for what she had done, and later pleaded with others not to do the same.

Dorothy Day

“But later, too, after becoming a Catholic, she learned the love and mercy of the Lord, and knew she never had to worry about His forgiveness. [This is why I have never condemned a woman who has had an abortion; I weep with her and ask her to remember Dorothy Day's sorrow but to know always God's loving mercy and forgiveness.] She had died before I became Archbishop of New York, or I would have called on her immediately upon my arrival. Few people have had such an impact on my life, even though we never met.”

Thus spoke the late Cardinal John J. O’Connor. The remainder of this article substantially contains Dorothy Day’s actual words as edited and sometimes paraphrased by Dan Lynch. The information concerning her abortion was obtained from her biographers and her autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin. Dorothy never publicly wrote or spoke about her abortion. Her writings may be found at CatholicWorker.org.

Dorothy Day: I hobbled down the darkened stairwell of the Upper East Side flat in New York City. My steps were unsteady. My left arm held the banister tightly. My right arm clutched my abdomen. It was burning in pain. I walked out onto the street alone in the dark. It was in September of 1919. I was twenty-one years old and I had just aborted my baby.

Lionel, my boyfriend, promised to pick me up at the flat after it was all over. I waited in pain from nine a.m. to ten p.m. but he never came. When I got home to his apartment I found only a note. He said he had left for a new job and, regarding my abortion, that I “was only one of God knows how many millions of women who go through the same thing. Don’t build up any hopes. It is best, in fact, that you forget me.”

I wrote about this experience in my autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin. In my youth I had thought that the greatest gift that life could offer would be a faith in God and a hereafter. But then there were too many people passing through my life, — too many activities — too much pleasure (not happiness). The life of the flesh called to me as a good and wholesome life, regardless of God’s laws. What was good and what was evil? It is easy enough to stifle conscience for a time. The satisfied flesh has its own law. How much time I wasted during those years! I had fallen a long way from my youthful ideals. When I was fifteen I wrote, “I am working always, always on guard, praying without ceasing to overcome all physical sensations and be purely spiritual.”

But these “physical sensations” allured me. I lived a social-activist Bohemian lifestyle in Greenwich Village, New York City. I think back and remember myself, hurrying along from party to party, and all the friends, and the drinking, and the talk, and the crushes, and falling in love. I fell in love with a newspaperman named Lionel Moise. I got pregnant. He said that if I had the baby, he would leave me. I wanted the baby but I wanted Lionel more. So I had the abortion and I lost them both.

I later wrote in my autobiography,The Long Loneliness, “For a long time [after my abortion] I had thought I could not bear a child, and the longing in my heart for a baby had been growing.”

In 1924 I started a “live-in” relationship with Forster Batterham, an atheist and an anarchist. He believed in nothing except personal freedom to do as you please. We took up residence in a beach bungalow on Staten Island, New York. We foreshadowed the hippies of the sixties and lived a carefree lifestyle living off the land and sea — gardening, fishing and claming. I thought that we would be contributing to the misery of the world if we failed to rejoice in the sun, the moon, and the stars, in the rivers which surrounded the island on which we lived and in the cool breezes of the bay. Like Dostoevsky, I began to believe that the world would be saved by beauty. It was this beautiful, natural world that slowly led me back to God. “How can there be no God,” I asked Forster, “when there are all these beautiful things?”

However, I felt that my home was not a home without a child. For a long time I had thought that I could not have a child. No matter how much one is loved or one loves, that love is lonely without a child. It is incomplete. Soon I became pregnant again. I saw this as a miracle from God because I thought that He had left me barren after the abortion. I wrote in a letter to a friend, “I always rather expected an ugly grotesque thing which only I could love; expecting perhaps to see my sins in the child.”

On the contrary, I gave birth to a beautiful daughter, Tamar Teresa, on March 4, 1926. I remembered that the labor pains swept over me like waves in the beautiful rhythm of the sea. When I became bored and impatient with the steady restlessness of those waves of pain, I thought of all the other and more futile kinds of pain I would rather not have had. Toothaches, earaches, and broken arms. I had had them all. And this was a much more satisfactory and accomplishing pain, I comforted myself.

I thought about famous men who wrote about childbirth such as Tolstoy and O’Neill and I thought, “What do they know about it, the idiots.” It gave me pleasure to imagine one of them in the throes of childbirth. How they would groan and holler and rebel. And wouldn’t they make everybody else miserable around them. And there I was, conducting a neat and tidy job.

The waves of pain became tidal waves. Earthquake and fire swept my body. Through the rush and roar of the cataclysm that was all about me, I heard the murmur of the doctor and the answered murmur of the nurse at my head. In a white blaze of thankfulness I heard faint about the clamor in my ears, a peculiar squawk. They handed my baby to me. I placed her on my full breast where she mouthed around, too lazy to tug for food. I thought, “What do you want, little bird? That it should run into your mouth, I suppose. But no, you must work for your provender already!”

No matter how cynically or casually the worldly may treat the birth of a child, it remains spiritually and physically a tremendous event. God pity the woman who does not feel the fear, the awe, and the joy of bringing a child into the world.

I was filled with awe of my baby’s new life and in gratitude to God I wanted her to be baptized in the Catholic Church. I did not want my child to flounder as I had often floundered. I wanted to believe, and I wanted my child to believe, and if belonging to the Church would give her so inestimable a grace as faith in God, and the companionable love of the Saints then the thing to do was to have her baptized a Catholic. This was the final straw for Forster who wanted nothing to do with any commitments or what he termed as my “absorption in the supernatural”.

I knew that I was going to have my child baptized a Catholic, cost what it may. I knew I was not going to have her floundering as I had done, doubting and hesitating, undisciplined and amoral. I felt it was the greatest thing I could do for my child.

So Tamar was baptized in June. For myself, I prayed for the gift of faith. I was sure, yet not sure. I postponed the day of decision. To become a Catholic meant for me to give up a mate with whom I was much in love. It got to the point where it was the simple question of whether I chose God or man. I chose God and I lost Forster. I was baptized on the Feast of The Holy Innocents, December 28, 1927. It was something I had to do. I was tired of following the devices and desires of my own heart, of doing what I wanted to do, what my desires told me to do, which always seemed to lead me astray. The cost was the loss of the man I loved, but it paid for the salvation of my child and myself.

I painfully described this loss in The Long Loneliness: “For a woman who had known the joys of marriage, yes, it was hard. It was years before I awakened without that longing for a face pressed against my breast, an arm around my shoulder. The sense of loss was there. It was a price I had paid. I was Abraham who had sacrificed Isaac. And yet I had Isaac, I had Tamar.”

I always had a great regret for my abortion. In fact, I tried to cover it up and to destroy as many copies of The Eleventh Virgin as I could find. But my priest chided me and said, “You can’t have much faith in God if you’re taking the life given to you and using it that way. God is the one who forgives us if we ask, and it sounds like you don’t even want forgiveness — just to get rid of the books.” I never forgot what the priest pointed out — the vanity or pride at work in my heart. Since that time I wasn’t as worried as I had been. If you believe in the mission of Jesus Christ, then you’re bound to try to let go of your past, in the sense that you are entitled to His forgiveness. To keep regretting what was, is to deny God’s grace.

After my conversion, I struggled to support my child as a single parent working as a free-lance writer. In December 1932 I was in Washington D.C. covering the Hunger March of the Unemployed. Watching the ragged men marching moved my sense of social justice and I was inspired to go to the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception to pray. I cried out to God in anguish that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor.

When I returned to New York, I found waiting for me an unkempt man with fire in his eyes. Immediately he began preaching to me in a thick French accent his grand vision for social justice. His name was Peter Maurin and together we founded the Catholic Worker Movement.

We opened houses of hospitality for the poor, the hungry, the homeless, and for abused women and pregnant mothers. We practiced the spiritual and corporal works of mercy. One day thirty year old Elizabeth came to us at the end of her pregnancy. Her husband was a drug addict. It was New Year’s Eve, the eve of the Feast of the Holy Family. He came to our house drugged and sat at supper asleep while his wife fed him.

I called the ambulance but he refused their help. He muttered, “She’s my wife. She has to stick to me. She has to take care of me.” Oh, I thought, The distortion of the idea of the Holy Family. She has to take care of him and she’s about to bear his child! But we had a little bed ready for the baby, and a box of pretty garments, and she was happy as she looked at them, and there was even gaiety in our midst as we sat around the fire and had a cup of tea in the holiday spirit.

I’ll never forget the time that I had to literally stand up against birth control. My sister Della had worked for Margaret Sanger, foundress of Planned Parenthood. When Della exhorted me that I shouldn’t encourage my daughter Tamar to have so many children, I stood up firmly and walked out of the house whereupon Della ran after me weeping, saying, “Don’t leave me, don’t leave me. We just won’t talk about it again.” To me, birth control and abortion are genocide. I say, make room for children, don’t do away with them. I learned that prevention of conception when the act that one is performing is for the purpose of fusing the two lives more closely and so enrich them that another life springs forth and the aborting of a life conceived are sins that are great frustrations in the natural and spiritual order.

The Sexual Revolution is a complete rebellion against authority, natural and supernatural, even against the body and its needs, its natural functions of child bearing. This is not reverence for life, it is a great denial and more resembles Nihilism than the revolution that they think they are furthering.

Once I asked a man why he signed a petition for the Rosenbergs who had been convicted of treason in the fifties. “It is because I am against capital punishment,” he said. In other words, he, as the rest of us, is in favor of life — life until natural death.

I was happy that I could be with my mother the last few weeks of her life, and for the last ten days at her bedside daily and hourly. Sometimes I thought that it was like being present at a birth to sit by a dying person and see their intentness on what is happening to them. It almost seems that one is absorbed in a struggle, a fearful, grim, physical struggle, to breathe, to swallow, to live. And so, I kept thinking to myself, how necessary it is for one of their loved ones to be beside them, to pray for them, to offer up prayers for them unceasingly, as well as to do all those little offices one can.

When my daughter Tamar was a little tiny girl, she said to me once, “When I get to be a great big woman and you are a little tiny girl, I’ll take care of you.” I thought of that when I had to feed my mother by the spoonful and urged her to eat her custard. Shortly before she died I told her, “We can no more imagine life beyond the grave than a blind man can imagine colors.” How good God was to me, to let me be there. I was there, holding her hand, and she just turned her head and sighed. That was her last breath, that little sigh; and her hand was warm in mine for a long time after.

[End of paraphrased article]

End Notes

Dorothy Day is the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. She is a model pro-life lay witness and intercessor. She was chosen as the 20th century’s most outstanding lay Catholic. Cardinal John O’Connor of New York introduced the cause for her canonization and said, “It is with great joy that I announce the approval of the Holy See for the Archdiocese of New York to open the Cause for the Beatification and Canonization of Dorothy Day. With this approval comes the title Servant of God. What a gift to the Church in New York and to the Church Universal this is!”

Dorothy Day, Servant of God, pray for us — for us who labor for a culture of life and a civilization of love, for the unborn, for the mothers in crisis pregnancies, for mothers who have suffered from abortions, for the poor and for the dying.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Dan Lynch. “Dorothy Day’s Pro-Life Memories.” Catholic Exchange (September 24, 2002).

Reprinted with permission of the author.

THE AUTHOR

If you would like to order Entertaining Angels, the video tape of her life, Call toll-free 1-888-834-6261 or Write to The Missionary Image at 144 Sheldon Road, St. Albans, Vermont 05478.

Dan Lynch is director of The Apostolates of The Missionary Image and Jesus King of All Nationsand board member of The Association for the Arch of Triumph. He is leading a pilgrimage cruise the Blessed Mother’s house in Ephesus and to Holy Greece and Turkey in May, 2003. Please visit his website for more information.

Copyright 2002 Dan Lynch

Filed Under: America, Catholic, Child Rearing, Christianity, Conversion, Economics, Euthansia, Following Christ, Pro Life, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , 8 Comments

Dorothy Day: The Woman Who Loved Much

November 27, 2012 By 16 Comments

Her sins–and they are many–have been forgiven, so she has loved much. But a person who is forgiven little shows only little love.  Luke 7:47

Dorothy Day sets off controversy, even after her death.

She followed Christ as He called her, often to the discomfort and dismay of other Christians who sought a less radical Way. Does that sound familiar? If you spend much time reading biographies of the saints, it should.

The saints weren’t often people’s people. They were too busy being God’s people. The saints are also often converted sinners who had fallen into the muck and mire of their times and taken a good bath there. It seems that God often makes His saints from the worst sinners. It’s as if He can do the most with these edgy people from the pits of life; people who know that evil is real and who see by contrast that God and His love are the only solution to the evil they have known.

Dorothy Day was a converted sinner. She took her turn at living life in the fast lane of the early 20th Century. She ran with the crowd and followed its ways up to and including having an abortion. Then, as people have been doing for 2,000 years, she found Jesus, or, I would imagine, she let Him find her. And that made all the difference.

Dorothy Day lived her life for Christ after that. She founded a ministry to the poor called Catholic Worker Houses. She published a great deal in support of this ministry and did not step back from the requirement of living alongside the people she was trying to help.

Her wary attitude towards government and stubborn pacifism did not always sit well with people in the depression-ridden, war-bound years of the 1930s and 40s. It found even less support during the Cold War years that followed. I suspect Dorothy Day seemed an embarrassment, an unrealistic fanatic, to a good many of the good, church-going people of her day.

It is only now that she begins to make sense. Corporatism is beginning to take a deep toll on the lives of Americans. We have morphed into a country that is continuously at war with an ever-changing cast of enemies.  The over-weaning power of government has begun to focus on active legal persecution of the Church itself. These are our times. It appears that Dorothy Day, the uncomfortable convert, is beginning to seem less like a nutty fanatic and more like a prophet for our days.

It is in that prophetic role that she continues to set off controversy. Her life is a flashpoint of disagreement for a lot of people today, just as it was in the past. Some people try to cast Dorothy Day as “their” saint, as an apologist for their personal politics. Other people attempt to disregard her and disown her because they see her life as an attack on their personal politics.

But if Dorothy Day was a living saint, then neither of these reactions apply. Saints live their lives in the service of God, not partisan politics. They don’t try to be popular with people. They set their sights on the narrow way and they walk it all the way home.

The American bishops recently cast a unanimous vote in support of the cause of declaring Dorothy Day a saint. There are a lot of potholes in the road ahead of them in this cause. Most saints are undeclared and unofficial. That’s because, hard as it is to be one, it’s even harder to be officially declared one.

For myself, I have no doubt that Dorothy Day is in heaven. I have no doubt that she lived her life for Jesus and that she was a woman of great courage. Dorothy Day was one of God’s warriors in the battle for life and human dignity. Despite, or maybe because, of her rough beginning, she was one of His best works.

Deacon Greg Kandra, who blogs at The Deacon’s Bench, has an interesting article about the new push by American bishops for the cause of sainthood for Dorothy Day.  It reads in part:

Dolan on Day: “I’m convinced she is a saint for our time”
November 27, 2012 By Deacon Greg Kandra

The New York Times takes a look at the latest efforts to promote the sainthood cause of Dorothy Day:
Dorothy Day is a hero of the Catholic left, a fiery 20th-century social activist who protested war, supported labor strikes and lived voluntarily in poverty as she cared for the needy.
But Day has found a seemingly unlikely champion in New York’s conservative archbishop, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, who has breathed new life into an effort to declare the Brooklyn native a saint.
Cardinal Dolan has embraced her cause with striking zeal: speaking on the anniversaries of her birth and death, distributing Dorothy Day prayer cards to parishes and even buying roughly 100 copies of her biography to give out last year as Christmas gifts to civic officials including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
This month, at Cardinal Dolan’s recommendation, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops voted unanimously to move forward with her canonization cause, even though, as some of the bishops noted, she had an abortion as a young woman and at one point flirted with joining the Communist Party.
“I am convinced she is a saint for our time,” Cardinal Dolan said at the bishops’ meeting. She exemplifies, he said, “what’s best in Catholic life, that ability we have to be ‘both-and’ not ‘either-or.’ ”
As someone who was both committed to social justice and loyal to church teachings, Day bridges wings of the contemporary church in a way that few American Catholic figures can.
Day, born in 1897 to a nonobservant Protestant family, dropped out of the University of Illinois and moved to New York to work as a journalist for leftist publications in the bohemian literary world of downtown Manhattan. She converted to Catholicism in 1927, citing a spiritual awakening that was accelerated by the joy that she felt upon the birth of a daughter, Tamar. She said she chose Catholicism for many reasons — partly because it was the religion of so many of the workers and poor people whose cause she fought for as a socialist writer, and partly because she had lived in Chicago with Catholic roommates whose faith had deeply impressed her.
She spent decades as a passionate lay Catholic, devoting her life to the principles of social justice, including pacifism and service to the poor, that she felt were at the root of her religion’s teachings.
Though she was traditional in her religious practices and strong in her love for the church, her relationship with the church hierarchy in her lifetime was not always smooth. Not a single Catholic bishop came to her funeral in 1980, according to Robert Ellsberg, the editor of her letters and diaries. (Read more here.)

Filed Under: America, Catholic, Christianity, Conversion, Culture, Economics, Following Christ, HHS Mandate, Pro Life, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , 16 Comments

Killing Women in the Name of Reproductive Health

November 26, 2012 By 10 Comments

The IUD is making a come-back.

Thirty years after lawsuits concerning deaths, hospitalizations and infections from IUDs forced pharmaceutical companies into bankruptcy, the dangerous contraceptive crowd is back, pushing them at women again.

I just read an interesting 1974 CDC article assessing the risk of IUDs to women back then. The article was written early-on in the debate about the dangers of the devices. One statement stood out for me. The article blandly discusses deaths caused by the IUD and goes on to comment that the numbers were still insufficient to be statistically significant.

Excuse me, CDC. But you weren’t talking about a drug for cancer where the risk that some people with a terminal disease would die of drug complications might outweigh the good of other people living who wouldn’t otherwise. The IUD is an entirely unnecessary, totally elective form of contraception. If no one uses it, no one dies. Given that, even one death, one infection, one hospitalization or “loss of subsequent fertility” is far too many.

This easy acceptance of the idea that it’s ok to risk women’s lives with contraceptives is misogynist. Can you imagine any device that would cause men to cramp in their most intimate areas, give them infections in those areas, maybe make them sterile, or even kill them being bandied about so easily?

Can you imagine whole troops of politicians and medical practitioners calling this an advance in “men’s health” and bemoaning the fact that there aren’t more men willing to avail themselves of all this goodness?

Of course not. The thought itself is ludicrous. But when we do it to women, why, nobody even questions it.

IUDs are part of “women’s health.” The population control people have historically pushed IUDs in what we like to call Third World Countries, meaning, of course, people we patronize and manipulate without any requirements for responsibility or concern for their welfare.

If the misogynists in our medical/political professions don’t mind endangering women in the United States who have access to malpractice lawyers, then we have to assume that they really don’t mind endangering women in “Third World Countries” who can’t fight back. That’s how it seems and also how it plays out in real life.

That’s why we hear bizarre statements about how women in America are finally “catching up” with women in Mexico in their use of IUDs. Our population control people have been dumping these devices on women in Mexico for some time now. They’ve been the lab rats to see if the numbers of women who are injured by the devices will rise to the level of statistical significance.

We’ve turned some sort of corner regarding the use of hormones and devices to shut down women’s fertility. There was a time when we had an actual women’s rights movement who stood up and argued against these things. But now, the women’s rights movement is nothing but the abortion movement. It is so aligned with population control people, pornographers, gay rights advocates and the pro deathers, that it can not and will not speak out against the misogynistic practice of pushing dangerous birth control on unsuspecting women.

We have reached a time when the President of the United States is able to successfully market abortion and free contraceptives as women’s rights and the women’s rights movement supports him in doing this. No wonder the people who push dangerous birth control devices feel free to once again begin exploiting and endangering American women just has they do women in “Third World Countries.”

Between “lawsuit reform” from the right and the idea that women’s rights is nothing more than abortion and birth control from the left, it’s an open field day on American women once again.

LifeSiteNews published an interesting article about the growth of IUD use among American women. It reads in part:

 

November 20, 2012 (pop.org) – A growing number of American women are turning to intrauterine devices (IUDs), reports Lawrence Finer of the Guttmacher Institute. Of all American women using birth control, some 7.5 percent had IUDs implanted by 2009. These numbers were double what they had been a few short years before.

As befits an employee of a population control organization, Finer is pleased that women are choosing “long-acting” contraceptives over “short-acting, less effective methods.” Fertility delayed is fertility denied, as we say in demographic circles.

Most of the increase in IUD use has come from sales of Bayer’s levonorgestrel IUD, a so-called “second generation” contraceptive, which is marketed under the trade name “Mirena.” No surprise here. Since Mirena was approved by the FDA in 2000, Bayer has spent tens of millions of dollars advertising the IUD directly to the consumer.

The Mirena IUD can prevent conception, but it can also prevent a newly conceived embryo from implanting in the uterine wall.

As a result of this advertising campaign, Finer notes, “Women born in the United States appear to be ‘catching up’ to women born outside the United States, who already had a higher level of use, likely due to a greater prevalence of these methods in Mexico.”

The implication here is that women outside of the U.S. are more “advanced” in their contraceptive use than their benighted American sisters, but nothing could be further from the truth. The reason that IUDs are more prevalent in Mexico is simple: the Mexican government coerces women into accepting them. Either accept an IUD or have your tubes tied, new mothers are told. What would you choose?

The same is true of Finer’s factoid about high IUD use in China. The reason that 41 percent of women in China have IUDs is because China’s population control authorities insist that women either wear IUDs or be sterilized after they give birth. That’s not good news for women. Indeed, it’s not good news for anybody, unless of course you fear human fertility.

Bayer’s advertising campaign for Mirena, although expensive, has more than paid for itself. More than a million American women have been convinced to spend nearly $800 apiece buying the IUD. This has generated over a billion dollars in revenue for the German pharmaceutical giant, a good bargain by anyone’s calculation.

Bayer and other abortifacient contraceptive manufacturers also stand to make a lot of money from Obamacare. The HHS mandate will require all healthcare plans to cover the full range of contraceptive methods, including Mirena, at no cost to the patient. In other words, we taxpayers are about to make Bayer shareholders rich.

Finer refers to IUDs, including Mirena, as “contraceptive devices,” but IUDs act by aborting already conceived children, not by preventing their conception. An IUD is, in effect, a tiny abortion machine that prevents pregnancy by physically obstructing the normal process by which a tiny baby implants in the uterus of its mother.

Mirena, it is true, is more than just an IUD. It also contains a synthetic “hormone” called levonorgestrel that some months prevents ovulation. Even when what is called “breakthrough ovulation” occurs, the progestin sometimes still prevents conception by thickening the cervical mucus and preventing sperm from reaching the ovum. Still, when this doesn’t happen, a baby can be conceived and begin its 5 to 7 day journey down the Fallopian tube. But when it reaches the uterus itself it encounters the grim reaper in the guise of an IUD and its life is over. An early-term abortion occurs.

We should not forget the side effects, which fall into two different categories. Many women react badly to having their bodies laced with a powerful, steroid-based drug, levonorgestrel. Others find that having a foreign body lodged in their uterus can be an uncomfortable, even unhealthy, experience.

Finer claimed in an interview with Fox News that IUDs do not increase the risk of pelvic infection and jeopardize women’s future fertility.

But the list of unwanted side effects of Mirena is quite long. These include amenorrhea, intermenstrual bleeding and spotting, abdominal pain, pelvic pain, ovarian cysts, headache, migraines, acne, depression, and mood swings. The Truth About Mirena website contains hundreds of detailed accounts of such side effects by women who have personally suffered from them. It makes for grim reading.

One of the more dangerous side effects is that Mirena may become embedded into the wall of the uterus, or it may actually perforate it. In fact, there have been reports of the IUD actually migrating outside the uterus through a hole of its own making, there to cause scarring, infection, or damage to other organs. If the device embeds in or perforates the uterine wall, surgery will be required to remove it.

With all of these side effects, it is no surprise that the number of lawsuits is proliferating. If you type “Mirena” into your search engine, along with information about the IUD, a number of ads offering legal representation to those harmed by the device will pop up.

In the beginning, Bayer aggressively marketed Mirena to a “Busy Mom” demographic as a hassle-free form of birth control. But in 2009, the FDA issued a warning letter to Bayer after finding its Mirena promotions overstated the efficacy of the device, presented unsubstantiated claims, minimized the risks of Mirena, and used false and misleading presentations during in-home events touting the IUD. FDA berated Bayer for its so-called “overstatement of efficacy”, taking issue with marketing claims touting Mirena’s purported ability to improve a woman’s sex life and help her “look and feel great.” (Read more here.)

Filed Under: 2012 Election, America, Calling Evil Good, Christianity, Culture, Eugenics, Politics, The War on Girls, Uncategorized, Violence Against Women, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , 10 Comments

The Pill: Killing Women in the Name of Reproductive Health

November 26, 2012 By 4 Comments

Remember Yaz?

I’ve lost count of the Yaz commercials I saw. Here are a couple of examples. Notice the lack of warning about side effects and the age of the girls this pill is marketed to in the first one.

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And another ad pushing Yaz, but this time with warnings:

 

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And the FDA finally takes note of the young women who are dying because of this totally unnecessary medication:

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The important thing to remember is that none of this is necessary. Yaz is not being used to treat cancer or any other illness. It is marketed for mild teen-age acne, pre-menstrual emotional upset and to prevent pregnancy. It is an entirely elective medication with fatal side effects, being marketed directly to young women and girls.

After Yaz had been on the market a number of years, and probably damaged the health of many young women, ABC News finally wrote a story about it.

The 2011 ABC News article reads in part:

The blockbuster birth control pill with benefits, Yaz was pitched as the choice for women desperate for relief from severe PMS and acne. But now, new independent studies have found that Yaz carries higher blood clotting risks than other leading birth control pills.

ABC News investigated whether tens of millions of women switched to a more potentially risky pill that, as it turns out, was never proven to treat common PMS.

In 2007, Carissa Ubersox, 24, was fresh out of college and starting her dream job as a pediatric nurse in Madison, Wis. On Christmas day, while working the holiday shift, her boyfriend surprised her at the hospital with a marriage proposal.

Wanting to look and feel her best for her wedding day, Carissa said she switched to Yaz after watching one of its commercials that suggested this pill could help with bloating and acne.

“Yaz is the only birth control proven to treat the physical and emotional premenstrual symptoms that are severe enough to impact your life,” claimed the ad.

It “sounds like a miracle drug,” Carissa said she remembers thinking.

But just three months later, in February 2008, Carissa’s legs started to ache. She didn’t pay much attention to it, assuming, she said, that it was just soreness from being on her feet for a 12-hour shift.

Birth Control Medication Under
Investigation Watch Video

By the next evening, she was gasping for air. Blood clots in her legs had traveled through her veins to her lungs, causing a massive double pulmonary embolism.

Her fiance called 911, but on the way to the hospital Carissa’s heart stopped. Doctors revived her, but she slipped into a coma for almost two weeks.

Carissa’s only memory of that time is something she refers to as an extraordinary dreamlike experience. She said she remembers a big ornate gate and seeing a recently deceased cousin.

That cousin, Carissa said, told her, “You can stay here with me or you can go back.”

But, she recounted, he told her if she goes back she’ll end up blind.

“I just remember waking up in the hospital and I was like, ‘Oh, I guess I chose to stay,’” Carissa told ABC News.

Like her cousin in her dreamlike experience foretold, she actually did wake up blind, and remains blind to this day.

(Read more here.)

Filed Under: 2012 Election, America, Calling Evil Good, Child Rearing, Culture, Economics, Eugenics, Health, Health Care, HHS Mandate, Misogyny, Politics, Pro Life, The War on Girls, Uncategorized, Violence Against Women, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

China: A Growing War Machine Built With American Corporate Greed

November 25, 2012 By 10 Comments

America gave China its industrial base and its technology in exchange for cheap/slave labor. These are the weapons we built.

Reuters/Reuters – A carrier-borne J-15 fighter jet takes off from the Liaoning, China’s first aircraft carrier, in this undated handout photo released November 25, 2012. China has successfully conducted flight landing on its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, after its delivery to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy on September 25, 2012, according to Xinhua News Agency. REUTERS/Xinhua/Zha Chunming

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China has carried out its first successful landing of a fighter jet on its firstaircraft carrier, state media said on Sunday, a symbolically significant development as Asian neighbors fret about the world’s most populous country’s military ambitions.

The home-built J-15 fighter jet took off from and landed on the Liaoning, a reconditioned Soviet-era vessel from Ukraine which only came into service in September this year.

China ushered in a new generation of leaders this month at the 18th Communist Party Congress in Beijing, with outgoing President Hu Jintao making a pointed reference to strengthening China’s naval forces, protecting maritime interests and the need to “win local war”.

China is embroiled in disputes with the Philippines and Vietnam over South China Sea islands believed to be surrounded by waters rich in natural gas. It has a similar dispute with Japan over islands in theEast China Sea.

It has also warned the United States, with President Barack Obama’s “pivot” to Asia, not to get involved.

“We should make active planning for the use of military forces in peacetime, expand and intensify military preparedness, and enhance the capability to accomplish a wide range of military tasks, the most important of which is to win local war in an information age,” Hu said.

China has advertised its long-term military ambitions with shows of new hardware, including its first test flight of a stealth fighter jet in early 2011, an elite helicopter unit and the launch of the aircraft carrier.(Read more here.)

Filed Under: America, Economics, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , 10 Comments

Jesus Christ is King, the Lord of My Life: Slogan or Fact?

November 25, 2012 By 11 Comments

Jesus Christ is King.

That is the summation of our faith. The cross, which absorbs many people, including me, is a stepping stone to the fact that Jesus rose from the dead, ascended into heaven and now sits at the right hand of His Father.

Jesus is Lord of our lives. This usage comes from the days when one’s Lord was also his or her master; the ruling agent in a person’s life to whom fealty was sworn. By saying that Jesus is Lord, people put Him above earthly rulers, saying, in effect, that they were, as St Thomas More put it, “the king’s good servant, but God’s first.”

That understanding of what it really means when we say that Jesus is Lord of our lives has become watered down into a slogan. Given the serious times ahead for Christians, I think it is appropriate to go back to that original meaning and begin using it as a literal expression of fealty once again.

Christianity is always, everywhere, a counter-cultural force. No true Christian can live as God’s good servant, but the king’s first. We must always in everything put Jesus first. If we do that, it will pit us against the world, true. But it will also enable us to become the instruments of His change by which He converts the world.

Before we preach or teach it, we’ve got to start living it. Every day. In every way. Not for others or for the effect we will have on our society. Not even for ourselves. We must do it for Him.

That’s what it means that Christ is King, at least for us in this life. Of course, it has another, eternal meaning as well. Christ is not King of this world. He does not reign here except as He reigns in each of us and our lives.

Jesus Christ is King of all life, everywhere, and all eternity. His Kingdom is the Kingdom of Heaven. We are His subjects in that Kingdom and his representatives of that Kingdom as we live in the here and now. We are also His subjects in His Kingdom throughout eternity. We, like Him, are eternal beings and our Kingdom is not of this earth.

This year, the feast of Christ the King fits neatly between Thanksgiving and Advent. It is the culmination of the liturgical year that is like a wheel, spinning through the Gospels every 365 days, teaching us the story of our salvation over and again.

Today, Jesus is Christ the King, the culmination of what we will look forward to in Advent.

The important thing for us is that we allow him to be King of our lives. Is Jesus your Lord in the sense which the phrase originally intended? Is He the sole arbiter of your actions, the object of your desires? Is he Lord of your life in deed and fact?

That is the challenge of the feast of Christ the King. This challenge is more urgent this year than others. Our faith is under attack from many directions. “Jesus is the Lord of my life” is no longer just a slogan. It is a question demanding an answer.

Is Jesus the Lord of your life in thought and deed? Do you follow Him before all others?

What answer do you give?

Join the Discussions of the Year of Faith

Click here throughout the Year of Faith, as the Catholic Channel at Patheos.com invites Catholics of every age and stripe to share what they are gleaning and carrying away from this gift of timely focus.

Filed Under: America, Catholic, Christian Persecution, Christianity, Conversion, Culture, Faith, Following Christ, Uncategorized, Year of Faith Tagged With: , , , , , , 11 Comments

491 Canadian Babies Survived Abortions and Left to Die

November 24, 2012 By 13 Comments

The grisly logic of abortion is most apparent in the debates and discussions concerning what to do with and for babies who, against all the odds, manage to survive an abortion.

In most places, these little ones are discarded. Left alone, untended and untouched, they die the lonely death of a human who has been deemed less than human by other people.

As one nurse here in Oklahoma described it to me, “No one does anything to keep them warm or give them fluids. No one picks them up or holds them.” She described one baby girl who survived 13 hours like this.

This hardness of heart of medical professionals is equalled by the pro-abortion people and the politicians I have tried to talk to about this. I have been met with indifference from the politicians and one of the coldest statements I’ve ever heard from a pro-abortion person.

“That’s the doctor’s fault,” this person told me, “he should have killed the baby with a lethal injection before the abortion.”

This statement, with its frank acknowledgement that this baby could have survived and assertion that the only fault in the whole thing was that the doctor hadn’t killed it more effectively, still troubles me.

It was one of those dear God what have we become moments for me. What has abortion and this power to kill at will turned us into?

It appears that it has made those who support abortion into people who welcome every aspect of a constantly-expanding culture of death. Euthanasia has become the new abortion; the latest legal hurdle to be jumped in the on-going race toward an absolute culture of death.

People who support abortion always seem to jump on the newest killing bandwagon, whatever it is. They find an argument that makes killing a “right” of some sort for each new murderous idea that the purveyors of death hatch up. They never see the essential wrongness of laws that legalize killing the weak and defenseless.

Their inculturation in the death-dealing logic of killing as a solution for the messiness of life has taught them to regard the lives of needy human beings as an unfair burden on the rest of us. The sanctity of human life is an enemy in a world run by this logic, an irrational barrier to doing what they want with whomever they decide should die. Human life is something to be controlled and wiped out whenever it becomes troubling.

We’ve moved to an all-out commodification of human beings with designer babies and embryonic stem cell research. Women, as usual, are commodities in this brave new world whose reproductive capacities are farmed by egg harvesters and whose uteri are rented by those who want the “services” of a surrogate. This new form of prostitution is destructive to women in ways that previous generations of misogynists could never have imagined.

At the same time, more and more of our young people eschew the joys of marriage. They dismiss the incredible privilege and happiness of forming their own families and raising their own children to chase after transient stuff and nonsense which offers no fulfillment, robs people of their peace and sets the whole of society on a suicidal path.

Is it any wonder, given the utterly bizarre way that our society is tending, that we are indifferent as a culture to the lives of children who are born alive after an abortion? We are a people who will charge someone with a felony for mistreating a cat or dog but who studiously support those who do nothing to comfort or aid a newborn baby we’ve decided shouldn’t be alive in the first place.

I’ve dealt first hand with the indifference of politicians to babies who survive abortions. It was a chilling realization for me. Nice people can zip on their compassion-proof suits and become indifference itself to this crime against humanity. Their hardness of heart is absolute, and it extends to people who try to reason with them about what they are doing.

There is no indifference to suffering like the indifference of someone who has decided that other people are not fully human and they can kill them if they want. There is no anger like the anger of these people when you tell them that what they are doing is wrong.

The killing indifference of abortion depends on the illusion that the babies who die are not babies, are not human, feel nothing, are nothing. This illusion is necessary to maintain the parallel illusion that abortion is a kindness and that we are doing nothing wrong by supporting it.

Maybe that’s why the proponents of abortion on demand are so adamant that this killing rite be extended to any baby that survives the abortion itself. A “failed abortion” with a living child at the end of it is a frightening reminder of what we are doing.

It also, in the logic of abortion, cancels out the decision the woman made when she decided to abort in the first place. Here she’s made her “choice” and gone through an abortion, only to end up with a baby anyway. How gross.

A living child at the end of an abortion is more than an inconvenience. It is an assault on the illusions that sustain abortion as a “right.” Is it any wonder that these little ones are shuffled aside and ignored to death? Any other action would paint a bull’s eye on the entire linguistic edifice that sustains the lies of abortion.

A LifeNews article says that an admitted 491 babies survived abortions and were then left to die in Canada last year. I’m sure the actual number is much higher, for the simple reason that most of these babies don’t make it onto the charts. I’ve heard stories about babies who survived abortions here in Oklahoma from nurses and hospital chaplains. From what I was told, none of these babies were ever officially charted as being alive.

I admire LifeNews and often use them as a source. But I do not agree with the article’s assumption that the Infant Born Alive Act here in the United States protects babies who survive abortions. Based on first-hand accounts from professionals who work in our hospitals here in Oklahoma, I do not believe that it does.

However, the article still provides an interesting analysis of the part of this tragedy that is out in the open in Canada.

The LifeNews article reads in part:

Figures from Statistics Canada, a federal government agency, show 491 babies were born alive following botched abortions during the period from 2000-2009 and left to die afterwards. The numbers have pro-life advocates up in arms.

Andre Schutten, legal counsel for ARPA Canada, noticed the numbers and blogged about themrecently.

The blog Run with Life has reported that, from 2000 to 2009, 491 babies have been born alive following a failed abortion procedure, and subsequently left to die. And those are only the ones that are recordedby Statistics Canada.

The blog explains that “there were 491 abortions, of 20 weeks gestation and greater, that resulted in live births. This means that the aborted child died afterit was born. These abortions are coded as P96.4 or ‘Termination of pregnancy, affecting fetus and newborn’.”

The question that should immediately present itself is, why has there not been 491 homicide investigations or prosecutions in connection with these deaths? Section 223(2) of the Criminal Code (the accompanying subsection to the now infamous subsection that Mr. Woodworth’s motion 312 was examining) reads “A person commits homicide when he causes injury to a child before or during its birth as a result of which the child dies after becoming a human being.” That is to say, anyone who interferes with a pregnancy such that the child dies after it is born alive due to that interference, is guilty of homicide.

So again, why have there been no criminal prosecutions? Why no outcry? And why are the provinces funding this explicitly criminal activity? (Read more here.) 

Filed Under: America, Calling Evil Good, Christianity, Culture, Eugenics, Euthansia, Health Care, Misogyny, Politics, Pro Life, The War on Girls, Uncategorized, Violence Against Women, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , 13 Comments

Why Are So Many of Us Unable to Stay Home, Even for One Day?

November 23, 2012 By 22 Comments

More and more stores are staying open on Thanksgiving.

Black Friday sales were pushed back to Thanksgiving Day in a lot of places yesterday so that eager shoppers could forego the necessity of staying home with their families and go buy things.

What does this say about us and our sense of family, community, and even our ability to just stop for one day and be at home?

The National Catholic Register ran an interesting article on the topic today. More than one priest, including Cardinal Dolan, has weighed in on the subject. From what I read, it seems that they see this trend as another attack on the family.

I think they’ve got the emphasis in the wrong place. I think that rather than being the retailers’ fault, this phenomena of Thanksgiving shopping is another symptom of the deteriorating home lives and interior peace of a lot of Americans.

Far too many of us have lost the concept of home. We don’t even know what home is. We think it’s a house, a place to be furnished and shown off. We have no concept of home as a nesting, resting, sheltering place in the storms of life. We’ve destroyed the concept of home as refuge and resting place by destroying the family.

Our families, with all their dysfunctions and bitterness, have become the last people in the world a lot of us want to spend time with. Our homes and families, rather than being safe harbors in a troubled world, have become just another place where the nuts attack and the few sane ones battle for footing. Thus, we have the growing trend of shopping ’til you drop instead of staying home for one day with your family

We have also created a society where large numbers of people are adrift in the world, living as singularities. Our increasingly fractured families and nomadic lifestyles leave a lot of people without families to go to on Thanksgiving. Meanwhile our traumatic lifestyles create an obsessive need to be constantly in motion and an inability to rest.

So many of our families are scarred by divorce, drugs, alcoholism and a hamster-in-a-cage work/buy/work/buy mentality that we are rapidly becoming a nation of home-induced trauma victims. One of the hallmarks of trauma victims that I’ve observed is that they can not sit still. If they are quiet for very long at all, the demons of their mind start jabbing at them. So they go-go-go and make chaotic jumbles of their lives in the process.

The end result is that we’re developing a national inability to stay home with our families for even one day. That’s why I think the priest who’s quoted in this article has identified the symptom but diagnosed the wrong cause. The retailers aren’t causing this phenomenon. They are reacting to it.

These stores wouldn’t stay open if nobody came to buy. We’re feeding this beast. Not them.

The National Catholic Register article says in part:

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Shoppers wait to enter a Best Buy store on Nov. 25, 2011 in Naples, Fla.

– Spencer Platt/Getty Images

DENVER, Colo. — The expansion of Thanksgiving weekend shopping to the holiday itself has raised concerns among both workers and clergy who worry that the change puts family time at risk.

Father Sinclair Oubre, spiritual moderator of the Texas-based Catholic Labor Network, said the store openings are a “disturbing trend” that is “an assault on the family.”

“We have almost completed the evolutionary process of having two classes of workers: those who get holidays off, and can stay with their families, and those who are forced to work, so that those who have holidays off won’t have to stay with their families,” Father Oubre said.

Retailers such as Sears, Wal-Mart, Target, Kmart, Toys “R” Us and Gap are increasingly opening their stores on Thanksgiving Day. The following day, known as Black Friday, is one of the most profitable shopping days of the year.

Business analysts cite increased competition from Internet shopping and some customers’ desires to shop on Thanksgiving as motives to open stores on what is traditionally a day off, according to The Wall Street Journal.

In 2011, retailers who opened on Thanksgiving Day earned 22% more over the Thanksgiving Day weekend.

Two popular Internet petitions on the Change.org website are protesting the changes.

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/thanksgiving-day-shopping-called-assault-on-family-life?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NCRegisterDailyBlog+National+Catholic+Register#When:2012-11-22#ixzz2D3rr2S6C

Filed Under: America, Child Rearing, Culture, Family, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , 22 Comments