God Made In My Image

January 31, 2013 By 17 Comments

I want God; not my idea of God. C.S. Lewis

My god doesn’t …

I don’t believe in a god who …

How many times have we heard this?

I ask you, if God is God; if He made everything, everywhere, including us, then what does it matter what we think of Him? All these quippy little assertions are at base the expression of an underlying belief that God is the clay and we are the potter. They lead directly to what George Barna jokingly described as a nation of “310 million people with 310 million religious expressions.”

I believe this is the root of the “I don’t believe in religion; I believe in Jesus” phenomenon. If you can subtract Jesus from 2,000 years of Christian teaching, why then, you can create a Jesus who fits you and your prejudices, your wannabes, and your wannados right down to the ground. You can create a phony, basically useless Jesus who doesn’t demand conversion, never asks for repentance and would not think of chiding you for your “understandable” little sins.

You can create your own personal feel-good Jesus, who inevitably will be a Jesus without the cross. The only problem with that, of course, is that this jesus is not god. He is not Christ. Jesus without the cross is not Christ. Jesus without the cross was a First Century itinerate preacher and miracle worker who died 2,000 years ago. He’s the shorn and nonsensical little nothing that the film-flammers who attack Christianity try to make Him out to be.

Dietrich Bonnhoefner had a phrase for this. He called it “cheap grace.” Here’s what he said:

“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession…. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

The Christian culture in which so many of us live is a sham and a flam, a product of cheap grace gone wild that is drummed into our minds by the steady beat of media promotion. Today, we not only have cheap grace, we have competing cheap graces whose followers are focused on defeating one another in the culture wars rather than following Christ.

We have the cheap grace purveyors of the right who tell us that all that stuff Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, and indeed, throughout the Gospels, doesn’t mean what it so plainly says. They create a morality-free zone surrounding anything to do with business and commerce, exempting the most egregious assaults on the common good from any application of 2,000 years of Christian teaching.

Then, on the other side of the cultural divide, we have the cheap gracers who proclaim that any standards of personal morality are in fact violations of personal freedom and assaults on tolerance and love. They carry this to the point that simple disagreement with such actions as abortion, serial marriage, same-sex marriage, and the commodification and sexualization of women and children is attacked and labeled “hate,” “homophobia,” and, bizarre as this sounds, sexism.

These competing versions of cheap-grace, god-made-in-my-image faux christianity have become the public face of Christian teaching. Their followers attack one another with a ruthlessness worthy of Caiaphas, and a pragmatic amorality that would be the pride of Machiavelli. Their total lack of respect for Jesus Christ and the Gospels is only equaled by their pretentious self-righteousness.

These are mean people. They are mean with the meanness that any thinking person would expect of someone who has turned their back on Christ in order to twist His message into a club to beat their political opponents with.

Why they do it is obvious: To gain power, fame and money.

How they manage to succeed at it is more subtle. Anyone who honestly read the New Testament would pick up on the fact that what these people are giving us is the stone, not the bread; a snake rather than a fish. Yet millions upon millions of “Bible believing” Christians not only fall for this crass twisting of the Gospels in the name of self-justification, they abandon the real Gospels to follow and teach it themselves.

Why?

Are they that stupid? Can’t they read the Bible for themselves and see that these are lies?

I think the answer rests in the fact that they can read the Bible; they just don’t like what it says.

The story of the Gospels is not built around some “follow me and I’ll make you into little Ceasars” sort of promise. It is in fact quite the opposite. When Satan tempted Jesus, he offered Him all the kingdoms of this world and Jesus turned him down. What Jesus did instead was set Himself on the path that led to the cross.

These sham teachers of phony gospels of their own devising are offering us the same deal that Satan offered Jesus. The difference being that many of us are taking the deal. Follow them, and you can have any kind of sex you want with whomever you chose. Follow them and you can kill your own children, reduce other human beings to things to be destroyed for your pleasure and feel holier than thou for doing it.

Set your foot on the broad and smooth path of the phony jesus these liars give us and you can lie, steal, cheat, hoard, destroy whole economies for your personal gain. You can push most of the world into death-dealing poverty and back it up with armies you supply from your factories and go to church on Sunday and be honored as great people of a phony god.

Wide is the way that leads to perdition, and it seems that in today’s world it is most often paved by the self-righteous hypocrisy of following false gods of our own creation that we have cast in our own image.


This is cheap grace, and it always seems to end up giving those who choose it a license to kill.

Bonnhoefner also talked about another kind of grace. He called it “costly grace.” I tend to call it “real grace,” but that’s just me and my simple-minded way of looking at things.

Here is part of what he said:

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: “ye were bought at a price,” and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.

Cheap grace is a sham and a phony. It is a lie we tell ourselves. Costly grace, the grace that comes from following Jesus even if it’s unpopular, even if it means picking up your cross and following after Him, is what can and will heal our culture and save our world.

According to a survey conducted by the Barna Institute, America is drifting more and more toward the cheap grace of God Made in Our Image; the ultra personal god who follows our teachings instead of asking us to follow his.

God made in our image will never ask us to do anything costly. He will always understand our transparent justifications, even of the most heinous crimes. What he can never do is cleanse us, re-orient us and change us into what we were meant to be when God first made us. What we will never see by following him is eternal life. There is no redemption in making an idol out of yourself, in worshipping a self-made, all-agreeing comfortable little kitchen god that you create out of your longing to never be wrong, never sacrifice, never make a tough choice.

Only God, the real God, can redeem us, make us new and lead us into life everlasting. The price of following Him is the same now as it has always been. It is the costly grace of the cross.

Filed Under: Christianity, Culture, Faith, Following Christ, Same Sex Marriage, Uncategorized, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , , , , , 17 Comments

Will Legalizing Gay Marriage in Britain Result in Coercive Attacks on Freedom of Conscience?

January 31, 2013 By 11 Comments


Great Britain’s government will vote soon on gay marriage. Christians have expressed concern that such a change in the law might result in attacks on freedom of conscience.

Supporters of the measure have rushed to assure the public that such fears are groundless.

Now, where have we heard things like this before?

Oh yes. It was President Obama, promising that Obamacare would not infringe on religious freedom and individual rights of conscience.

That was only a few months before a hand-picked committee of the Health and Human Services Department “passed” the HHS Mandate, which the same president who had made these promises signed and then misrepresented to the American people as being about “women’s health care.”

Good luck, British Christians. Judging by what has happened elsewhere, you’re going to need it.

A Christian Post article concerning the upcoming vote on same-sex marriage and freedom of conscience in Great Britain says in part:

UK Government Source: Teachers May Face Firing for Refusing to Teach Gay Marriage
Katherine Weber (“The Christian Post,” January 25, 2013)

As Great Britain’s government prepares to vote on a bill legalizing same-sex marriage, an official from the Secretary of State for Education’s office reportedly has expressed trepidation toward the bill, arguing that primary school teachers in the country could possibly lose their jobs if they do not teach about gay marriage in the classroom.

One unnamed senior source from the office of Michael Gove, who serves as the country’s current Secretary of State for Education, has recently said that ultimately the U.K. government is not in control, should a teacher lose their job for refusing to teach same-sex marriage, and the case would ultimately go to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, where the European Parliament is located.

“We have had legal advice, the problem is that there is this inherent uncertainty about such matters,” the source told The Telegraph in a Jan. 25 report.

“These are all under the control of nine guys in Strasbourg, it is just fundamentally uncertain because Britain isn’t in control of this,” the source added.

Additionally, those critical of the upcoming same-sex marriage bill argue that hospital chaplains and other people in authority may be faced with difficult decisions when their conscience conflicts with their work protocol.

These statements come after human rights specialist Aidan O’Neill of the Queen’s Counsel argued on behalf of the Coalition For Marriage, a group that opposes same-sex marriage legalization, that he believes teachers, hospital or prison chaplains would be negatively affected by the legalization of the bill.

However, in response to these worries, Maria Miller, Secretary of Culture and Great Britain’s equalities minister, recently stated that teachers and the Church of England will not be put in a compromising position due to the same-sex marriage bill.(Read more here.)

Filed Under: America, Calling Evil Good, Catholic, Culture, Family, Following Christ, Health Care, HHS Mandate, Marriage, Politics, Pro Life, Religious Freedom, Same Sex Marriage, Uncategorized, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , 11 Comments

What’d I Say?

January 31, 2013 By 2 Comments

One of the neat things about writing for Patheos is that there’s no censorship here. I am free to write what I want and say what I think. That goes for the other writers. We go off in different directions all the time. There is no “official” Patheos position on what we say. Our thoughts are our own.

Take, for instance, a post that I recently wrote in which I referred to a small town here in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area called Valley Brook. I’m sure that the various Patheos writers would have taken many different positions on this issue.

Here’s part of what I said,

We have a whole town, called Valley Brook, here in Oklahoma that makes its revenue from prostitution under the guise of strip clubs. Nobody anywhere gets police protection like the strip clubs of Valley Brook. It appears on the outside that the Valley Brook Police work for the strip clubs.

I want to be clear about what I meant. I did not mean that the Valley Brook Police get direct money from the strip clubs that line the main street of Valley Brook. What I meant is that there are people who think that the police may be too zealous about protecting those strip clubs because it appears that the clubs are a major source of revenue for the town.

The Valley Brook police have a history of troubles, including a former police chief who pled guilty to drug charges last November.

While I want to state emphatically that I have no personal knowledge of prostitution occurring in the strip clubs at Valley Brook, and I certainly don’t want to make people think that I do, the town is the subject of jokes and discussion like this, this, this, this, this, and this about what many people say happens there.

There also have been arrests made by the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Department (not the Valley Brook Police, whose offices are a few blocks away from this club) for “lewd behavior” at the clubs in Valley Brook. For that story, go here. Based on these kinds of comments, conversations, and arrests it is my opinion that the stories about Valley Brook are probably true.

Filed Under: America, Calling Evil Good, Culture, Misogyny, Politics, Uncategorized, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , 2 Comments

Real Men Don’t Kill Their Children

January 29, 2013 By 99 Comments

“It’s surprising how human they look.”

My many dealings with pro-abortion liberal males has convinced me over and again that they are at heart unreconstructed misogynists.

I knew this long before I was converted to the pro life viewpoint. I knew it when I was the Oklahoma Director for NARAL. I knew it back when I was killing pro life bills as a young pro choice legislator.

All you have to do is hang out with them for a while, listen to their self-contratulatory talk about how they are the only men on the planet who “support women’s rights” (abortion.) Couple that with the contempt for women, the personal mistreatment they mete out to the women in their lives, the misogynist, sexualizing way they subtly degrade women and support the degradation of women in everything from porn to prostitution to rent-a-womb pregnancy surrogates.

Put the self-proclaimed “feminism” of these men alongside their actual behavior, and what you see is a hypocritical lie. They are misogynists who have been empowered by a corrupted feminist movement that has devolved down to nothing more than a pro abortion movement.

Abortion is the cad’s best friend in his treatment of women. Abortion allows misogynist men to pick and chose which of their children they will cherish and which they will encourage their women to kill. Abortion helps the rapist hide, and encourages the lothario to dump the woman he’s involved with at one of the most vulnerable times in her life; when she is pregnant with his child.

I ran across a video essay on NBCNEWS by Toure Neblett, in which he declaims proudly, “Thank God for abortion.” His reason? Abortion on demand allowed him, along with a woman he describes as “just not the right one,” to kill his first child. Abortion relieved him of the monstrous responsibility of fatherhood at “the wrong time.”

He tells us that he “would not be the person” he is today without this freeing experience of putting his baby to death. You get the feeling that he believes that this would be a loss of incomparable proportions for all humanity.

He goes on to admit that “family building is society building” and claims that the death of his first child has allowed him to go on later with “the right” woman to have “the right” child. He recounts how he accompanied her on her doctor’s appointments and felt a little distressed by the sight of this wanted baby on the ultrasound, by “how human they look.”

But he bounces back from this momentary lapse into something bordering conscience with assurances that it would be “misogynist” for him to regret the fact that he helped murder his own baby.

Watching this video saddens me. This unashamed and absolute lack of empathy by one human being for another human being is mind boggling. This is a man telling us with no doubt or regret that he helped kill his own child and that killing his child was the moral and right thing to do. Why? Because killing the child was the “best thing” for him, his career and his future.

I think he is right when he says that he wouldn’t be the man he is today if he had chosen differently. A man who choses to inconvenience himself by accepting the responsibilities of fatherhood, who actually loves all his children and not just the one who fits the self-indulgent, self-centered, self-deifying game plan he has worked out for his life, would not even resemble the man Toure is today.

“Thank God for abortion,” Toure tells us.

All I can say is Thank God for real men, like my husband and my father, who wanted and loved their children from the moment they began to exist. Thank God for men who do not choose to kill one child and cherish another, but who love, support and raise every child that God gives them.

Maybe I should just shorten that down to the actual point.

Thank God for real men.

If you want to see Toure’s essay, go here.

Filed Under: America, Calling Evil Good, Culture, Family, Health Care, Marriage, Misogyny, Politics, Pro Life, The War on Girls, Uncategorized, Violence Against Women, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , 99 Comments

Don’t Take Government Money. Don’t Kiss Caesar’s Ring

January 28, 2013 By 32 Comments

“Do not take government money.” 

I have said this to every religious ministry who has given me a venue to speak ever since I came back to public office in 2002.

The only people who give you free money are people who love you, like your parents. The government does not love anybody.

Government money hooks you into government policies, including those that are anathema to you. Religious groups that take government money — and it does not matter which party is in power — will eventually face the requirement that they bend their knee to Caesar and kiss his ring.

I’ve seen leaders of whole Protestant denominations abandon things they have fought for like pro life in response to political pressure.

I remember a few years back reading that national Catholic Charities had received a huge grant from the federal Health and Human Services Department.

I was appalled.

I knew that this money would lead to demands that the Church compromise its teachings. Based on what I’d seen Protestant groups do, I assumed that the Catholic Church would accede to these demands. I thought the money would buy the Church’s moral and prophetic voice, the way I’d seen it buy other religious voices.

I knew that you can not be true to Christ and take government money. You. Can. Not. Do. It.

You can not be an authentic Christian leader and toady to secular power. You. Can. Not. Do. It.

I wrote a post Saturday in which I talked about our personal allegiances; our friendships. I said that sooner or later, you have to chose. You cannot maintain deep intimate friendships with anti-God people and follow Jesus. You have to chose.

This is a parallel post addressed to religious leaders. My point is the same. You cannot base your efforts to bring the Kingdom of God on politics and supporting politicians and political parties. You cannot follow a political party and follow Christ.

You have to chose, and I don’t mean sooner or later when the politically powerful rub your nose in the fact that you “belong” to them and demand that you abandon your beliefs for them. I mean from day one. You cannot bend the Gospels to fit the platforms and the behaviors of either political party and preach Christ.

You will either preach politics.

Or you will preach Christ.

But you cannot do both.

Many Catholic priests are just as guilty as their Protestant brethren of bending the Gospels to suit their politics. You find both Republican and Democrat apologists in their ranks.

They will spout Canon Law and attack good people who oppose the death penalty because, somehow, that isn’t being “pro life” enough about abortion. Not, mind you, that the people they attack support abortion, but that they aren’t focused on it to the exclusion of every other possible sin. Others will try to make us believe that ignoring abortion is the necessary price for concern for the poor.

This is bending the Gospels so they don’t discomfit the politics of one political party or the other. It is not preaching Christ. Both types of priest lead people astray from following Christ and teach them to follow politicians, instead.

The Church itself, however, has been amazingly faithful.

It didn’t take long for what went around to come back around concerning those federal grants. Before you could say three Hail Marys, the Church was embroiled in lawsuits and broadsides, demanding that it refer the women it was helping for abortions or lose the money.

“While the Catholic bishops were entitled to their beliefs, freedom of religion does not mean imposing religious doctrines on others with the use of taxpayer dollars,” said Sarah Wunsch, an ACLU staff attorney.

She was referring to a lawsuit to end a federal grant to Catholic Charities for work aiding victims of human trafficking. A few months after this lawsuit, the federal Department of Health and Human Services revised its guidelines for human trafficking grants to require all recipients to refer for abortion.

The Church could have done as so many others have and simply “wink-winked” its way through this. All it would take was a 3×5 card listing “abortion providers” tucked, ever so casually, into a pile of intake forms. Just touch your lips to the ring. It will be over quickly, and it won’t hurt for long.

Besides, “it was the law.”

That’s what the Church could have done. It’s what everyone else has done. It was the wide and easy way.

I’m sure the government coffers would have opened and rained down gold on the Bishop’s heads if they had just done this. It would have been money, money, money for whatever they wanted.

But they said no. They took the narrow road, the hard way.

The price is that the federal government is now attacking the Church with broadsides like the HHS Mandate.

There is nothing in the Gospels that says you must first acquire a government grant to help the least of these. Following Christ’s teachings means, among other things, that the Church must reach out to people like victims of human trafficking, regardless of what the government wants or does.

The Church has responded to this situation with a new ministry called Amistad.

“We lost a contract, but we’ve not gone away,” said Nathalie Lummert, special-programs director at the USCCB’s Office of Migrant and Refugee Services (MRS). “We’re taking a decade of experience and now are rolling out a new program that brings communities directly into the fight against human trafficking.”

I am so proud of my church for standing for the Gospels in the face of the federal government. I am just as proud of them for their concern for trafficked women and children.

The fact that the Catholic Church refuses to kiss Caesar’s ring on the one hand, or abandon the least of these on the other is, in my opinion, the single best hope we have.

A National Catholic Register Article concerning Amistad says in part:

WASHINGTON — A new innovative weapon in the fight against human trafficking and sex slavery is coming this year from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, more than a year after abortion politics led the Obama administration to kill federal funding for the Church’s top-rated outreach effort.

“We lost a contract, but we’ve not gone away,” said Nathalie Lummert, special-programs director at the USCCB’s Office of Migrant and Refugee Services (MRS). “We’re taking a decade of experience and now are rolling out a new program that brings communities directly into the fight against human trafficking.”

The new initiative of the U.S. bishops’ Anti-Trafficking Program is “The Amistad Movement,” an MRS program that puts the USCCB back in the fight against human trafficking in a major way.

Until 2011, the USCCB had directed a highly regarded, $15-million anti-trafficking program that networked victims with services offered by local interfaith groups, including the Salvation Army, Catholic Charities and Jewish Family Services, as well as secular nonprofits.

The USCCB program came to a sudden halt, however, when the Department of Health and Human Services announced that “strong preference” would be given to groups that would refer all victims to family-planning services, including “the full range of legally permissible gynecological and obstetric care.” A Washington Post investigation revealed senior HHS political appointees threw out the strong recommendations of an independent review board to renew the USCCB’s contract and disqualified the USCCB over its refusal to reimburse groups that referred victims for abortion and birth-control services.

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/u.s.-bishops-bring-new-weapon-to-human-trafficking-fight?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NCRegisterDailyBlog+National+Catholic+Register#When:2013-01-28%2007:05:01#ixzz2JIFe2mvP

Filed Under: America, Calling Evil Good, Catholic, Christian Persecution, Faith, Following Christ, Health Care, HHS Mandate, Politics, Pro Life, Religious Freedom, Slavery, Uncategorized, Violence Against Women, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , 32 Comments

Walk for Life West Coast Videos

January 27, 2013 By 3 Comments

The Walk for Life West Coast was a huge success.

I wish I had been able to go. God willing, I will go next year.

In the meantime, I thought you might enjoy viewing videos from the walk. I know that Public Catholic readers attended the walk. If you did, feel free to add your own experiences and photos in the comments section.

 

YouTube Preview Image

Filed Under: America, Culture, Following Christ, Politics, Pro Life, Uncategorized, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , 3 Comments

Stop Slogan-Voting. Stop Hate-Voting. Stop Being Manipulated. Part 5. Women’s Health = Slogan Voting

January 25, 2013 By 22 Comments

I am a Jesus-loving, Catechism-following, pro-life feminist. 

It appears that by simply being my own contrary self, I have done something most people regard as impossible. I have brought the polar opposites of our cultural divide together.

The polar righties see pro-life feminists in much the same way bumper stickers describe pro-choice Catholics: as Vegans for Meat. The polar lefties agree with them. To polar lefties, feminism is abortion. In their myopic view, abortion equals human rights for women in an exact and all-encompassing equation that admits no exceptions.

I am a feminist, and I am pro-life. I believe what my Church teaches. I love God and Jesus and I have yet to find anything in that which requires me to hate myself because I was born female.

It would follow that I must, by definition, be in favor of “Women’s Health.” What kind of feminist would not favor women’s health? In fact, what kind of Christian would oppose women’s health?

The truth is, I do favor women’s health care. It took me two years to pass a bill requiring insurance companies to cover pap smears for women. I spent five years passing another bill to make it a crime to beat up a pregnant woman. I got yelled at by members of both parties for advocating prenatal care for illegal immigrants.

I could go on. And on.

However, none of these things qualifies as “Women’s Health” according to those who have taken this noble concern and co-opted it for their own purposes. I believe their misuse of the term is deliberate.

It took decades for “I Vote Pro Life” to become just another way for party power brokers to encourage blind allegiance to a political party, even when that party killed pro-life legislation. Most pro-life people side-stepped into it because they felt morally blackmailed; unable to see any alternative. I think that the people who push for “Women’s Health” knew what they were doing from the get-go and actively chose it.

“Women’s Health,” as they use the phrase, never meant women’s health. It never pretended except in the most obvious we-don’t-care-if-you-see-what-we’re-doing way to be anything more than what it is: A synonym for abortion on demand and a funding slogan for Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood has become one of the most avaricious of the big-money Welfare Queens. Any attempt to reduce funding for Planned Parenthood is met with wild and inaccurate claims that these moves are, in fact, an attack on women and “Women’s Health.”

This article from Huffington Post is an example. It describes a vote in the United States House of Representatives to cut funding for Planned Parenthood. Rhetoric similar to this is routinely used against those who try to de-fund Planned Parenthood. It says in part:

House Republicans voted on Friday to strip federal funding from Planned Parenthood, cutting money for contraceptives, HIV tests, cancer screenings and reproductive health services as part of an attempt to weaken the abortion provider. Planned Parenthood does not currently spend federal money on abortion services.

… In a statement, Planned Parenthood called the amendment “radically out of step with mainstream American values” and called on the Senate to restore their subsidies “Ensuring that millions of women can obtain health care from their trusted provider … (emphasis added)

I will write other posts talking about whether or not I think the claims concerning Planned Parenthood’s services are accurate. The point here is that the article equates government funding for Planned Parenthood with preserving “Women’s Health,” and that it implies that the only possible way that the government can make contraception, cancer screening and HIV tests available to the public is by funding Planned Parenthood. I believe that both these claims are untrue on their face.

“Women’s Health” as a slogan rather than a concern for actual women’s health took a major step forward with the Affordable Health Care Act (i.e., Obamacare) and the HHS Mandate attacking religious freedom that came from it.

In my opinion, the Affordable Health Care Act could be re-named the Planned Parenthood Government Dole Act. The only flaw in that name is that the word dole brings to mind the caricature of a welfare recipient; someone living in government housing, watching tv all day and eating junk food. Planned Parenthood, on the other hand, is a powerful organization whose board members are usually drawn from among the most wealthy and powerful members of our communities. The “dole” that it’s on amounts to 100s of millions of dollars, all flowing into coffers that are linked to abortion on demand.

The Affordable Health Care Act provides funding for Planned Parenthood in many ways. One of the most lucrative for the organization will almost certainly be the provision for grants of government monies to “health care providers,” including grants for health care education. I believe it is inevitable that this will funnel hundreds of millions of tax-payer dollars into Planned Parenthood coffers. This greed for more and more government money on the part of Planned Parenthood appears to be one of the driving forces behind the HHS Mandate.

Many people do not understand that the HHS Mandate which attacks our religious freedom in this country is not a law. It was not passed by any legislative body. I do not believe that a majority of elected officials in any legislative body in this country could have been persuaded to vote for this mandate.

The HHS Mandate is an agency rule which was promulgated by the members of a committee of the Health and Human Services Department. The members of this committee were appointed, not elected, and as such were not answerable to the people of this country. Many of the members of the Health and Human Services committee that gave us the HHS Mandate are supporters of Planned Parenthood. It is, as most things in politics ultimately are, about money.

If this mandate succeeds in forcing the Catholic Church to close its hospitals, universities and social welfare clinics, that will inevitably lead to a huge rise in “need” for money-hungry organizations to target and then demand funds for. It is standard practice for corporate welfare queens to go to legislative bodies and demand “reforms” that will force their small business competitors to shut down. I view this mandate as something akin to that. The only snag in the plan is the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

As usual, the organizations and the politicians who are backing the HHS Mandate claim that all they care about is “women’s health.” How shutting down hospitals, forcing the closure of many of our finest institutions of higher learning and closing the doors to social welfare agencies who aid women will accomplish this, they do not say. After all, in their narrow lexicon, “Women’s Health” is Planned Parenthood, and little else.

Planned Parenthood and their allies in the media and politics have so warped the issue of women’s health that they have cast the debate entirely around what is good for Planned Parenthood. Anything that is deemed bad for Planned Parenthood is immediately characterized as an “attack on Women’s Health.” In fact, in the current presidential election, this has been broadened to mean that anything that is bad for Planned Parenthood or that even disagrees with one of their objectives, is part of a “War on Women.”

I am not a Republican. I emphatically do not agree with the way that the Republican Party has sold out to corporate interests. In fact, I think Republican corporatism is a danger to our Republic. But I think the so-called “War on Women” is a bogus accusation. I am starting my 17th year as a pro-woman legislator and I can tell you that both parties are indifferent to women’s concerns. However, if anybody is waging war on women, it’s the group of people who have decided that anything that is done to women in the name of funding for Planned Parenthood and the preservation of the “right to choose” is, in fact, “women’s rights.”

When you have people who claim that they own the whole question of “women’s health” but who don’t report sexual abuse and rape of minor children or human trafficking, you know you are dealing with a callous and deliberate lie. When you see people who won’t “judge” attempts to buy an abortion to kill a baby simply because she is a girl, then saying that anyone who wants to reduce their government funding is “waging war on women,” you should be able to see that the real issue is not women and their well-being but government money.

I know that there are good people who support “the right to chose” out of a humanitarian concern for the welfare of women. I believe that many of the issues they raise, such as the horror of rape, legal discriminations against pregnant women, and the health and security of children in our society are actually well-taken. Where I disagree with them is in their assumption that abortion is the best, and maybe even the only, solution for these problems. The answer to legal and social discrimination and violence against women is NOT to give women the right to kill their own child. The answer is to address those problems as the evils that they are and do something about them.

However, an approach like that would also shine the light of reality on the argument that organizations that make huge amounts of money from abortion are in fact the guardians of “Women’s Health.”

The truth of the matter is that Planned Parenthood has become the sole voice for “Women’s Rights” within the Democratic Party, despite the fact that it was never a women’s rights organization. From its founding to the present day, Planned Parenthood has focused on issues of population control to the exclusion of what is in the best interests of women.

While the ability to limit family size clearly can benefit women, Planned Parenthood has focused on methods of contraception that are often dangerous or, in the case of abortion, dehumanizing to women. Dangerous birth control includes drastic chemical interventions in women’s normal body processes such as depo provera, dangerous contraceptive devices such as IUDs and the mass marketing of large-dose hormone interventions such as the so-called morning after pill.

Here in Oklahoma, some of the most vociferous supporters of Planned Parenthood’s so-called “Women’s Health” are former Planned Parenthood board members who also engage in making money by farming women’s bodies for eggs. The fact that these are prominent people is, in my opinion, why the Chamber of Commerce in Oklahoma has played a large part in killing pro-life legislation in the Republican-held legislature.

Real women’s health issues are subverted and essentially buried in a focus on funding things that can destroy a woman’s reproductive health in real life. I have a cousin (now deceased) who suffered repeated blood clots as a result of taking birth control pills. I have personally talked to women who forfeited their own fertility to egg harvesters, and I know women whose menstrual periods ceased and did not re-start after taking depo provera.

Where in any of this is women’s health? And why is the government required to spend hundreds of millions of dollars funding a single organization in order to provide for “Women’s Health?”

I think one of the reasons why is that if they don’t, they will be accused of waging “war” on half the electorate.

I am a feminist. But I believe that “Women’s Health” as it is being used in today’s electioneering is nothing more than slogan-voting. As slogan-voting, it not only doesn’t make women healthier, it endangers their welfare.

The equation is:

Women’s Health = Slogan Voting

 

 

Filed Under: 2012 Election, America, Catholic, HHS Mandate, Misogyny, Politics, Pro Life, Uncategorized, Violence Against Women, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , , , , , 22 Comments

Katrina Fernandez: Courage with a Word Processor

January 20, 2013 By 2 Comments

Katrina Fernandez

Katrina Fernandez, who blogs at The Crescat, has courage.

She also has wit, enormous talent and a great, big, loving heart.

I love Katrina’s blog. She has this ability to touch my girl side, the female giggly part of me, and get it rockin’.

Yesterday, she touched that other girl side, the one that has given life; the mothering, maternal, deeper than bone totally female part of me. Katrina wrote about her abortion, the experience and the grief afterwards. Good people grieve when they have harmed someone else. Katrina is a good person who grieved much.

She is also a wonderfully gifted writer who has the courage to let her own sorrows become beacons of truth and honesty for others. Who knows how many babies this post will save, or how many grieving young women will read it and find their own healing in Christ.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from How the Nine Days of Prayers Comforted Me While I Fought Demons. You can read the rest here.

What happened next was sheer panic. I never wanted to have an abortion, I was just stupid and believed there was no other choice. No other way. And it was just a clot. A big menstrual clot. That’s what they told me. Yet that glass container told me otherwise. And I suddenly felt every urge to run from the room screaming, but I was frozen in place. When a staff member came back into the room she found me still standing there clutching that sheet and staring at the vacuum.

Something inside me clicked off and I mentally shut down. I allowed her to guide me to the table and the procedure was started. When the abortionist [I will never call them doctors] came into the room he didn’t even acknowledge me but when he wheeled that vacuum over toward the table and switched it on I sat upright and tried to jump off the table. No hell no, I thought. But it was too late.

Filed Under: America, Calling Evil Good, Catholic, Culture, Pro Life, Uncategorized, Violence Against Women, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , , , 2 Comments

Ten Reasons The Catholic Church is Cool

January 13, 2013 By 19 Comments

 

Ten reasons Catholic Church is cool

1. It was founded by Jesus Christ. It was founded by the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son of God, the Word of God made flesh.  Ladies and gentlemen:  Jesus Christ.

2. We don’t conform to society. Ahem:  Chastity, Modesty, Pro-life, traditional marriage, care for the poor, disenfranchised and vulnerable, defense of the right to private property and a just wage. So basically, the exact opposite of Hollywood/MTV/the media in general/and trendies on both sides of the political spectrum everywhere.

3. Jesus rose from the dead.

4. Sacrament of Confession:  We don’t have to spend the rest of our lives feeling guilty about sins, because once we go to Confession, in the eyes of God and of the Church those sins NEVER happened.

5. St. Francis of Assisi proclaimed peace and revolution before the hippies did.  And he did it without drugs.

6. The Catholic Church has preserved the Creeds and Christian teaching in the face of every opposition for 2,000 years.

7. The Church supports women. 

Mary is honored more than any other saint (and no, we do not worship  her.  We worship God; we honor Mary as His     mother.) After the Mass, the Rosary is the most popularly encouraged prayer/devotion.

St. Therese of Lisieux, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Catherine of Sienna: Doctors of the Church.

The first person to whom Jesus revealed Himself as the Messiah was the woman at the well.

In the Parable of the Lost coin, Jesus used a woman as the metaphor for God.

The first person to see Jesus after his resurrection was a woman.

St. Joan of Arc: Led France (like, in battle and in armor) to freedom in the name of God.

In the words of Flannery O’Connor, “the Catholic Church would as readily canonize a woman saint as a man.”

8. Traditions that go back to the year 33 a.d. (when Christ founded the Church.)

9. The Communion of Saints: We can ask the saints to pray for us/our intentions when we aren’t able to. There are times when we aren’t able to pray, but the saints are spending eternity in union with Christ!

10.  And finally, we can touch the Living Christ in the Eucharist and be healed at every mass. 

Filed Under: Catholic, Pro Life, Same Sex Marriage, Uncategorized, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , 19 Comments

Justice Department Loses Case Against Pro Life Demonstrator

January 10, 2013 By 2 Comments

Attorney General Eric Holder and his wife Dr Sharon Holder

A rather obvious case of the Justice Department mis-using the law to harass a peaceful pro life demonstrator has been settled. David Hamilton was handing out literature at EMW Surgical Center when he and a clinic employee collided. No one was injured.

The United States Department of Justice subsequently charged Mr Hamilton with a violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. The government sought $15,000 in fines and another $5,000 in penalties from Mr Hamilton.

Even though the case is over, the atmosphere of intimidation it created remains. I would guess that this was a harrowing experience for Mr Hamilton and that it has had a chilling effect on others. I also think that was the real reason the government filed this claim.

It’s worth noting that the Attorney General of the United States has monetary links to the abortion industry through a building owned by his wife, Dr Sharon Holder. According to news reports, Attorney General Holder’s wife was part owner of a building where an indicted abortionist had his clinic. You can read about that here.

A LifeNews.com article concerning this case reads in part:

LifeNews.com  In a legal victory, the Obama administration has been stopped from targeting a peaceful pro-life advocate helping provide abortion alternatives to women heading to an abortion facility in Louisville, Kentucky.

In January 2010, David Hamilton was peacefully and lawfully handing literature to women entering EMW Surgical Center, an abortion clinic. He was not only interfered with illegally by abortion facility volunteers who locked arms to block him from talking to women, but he faced legal action from the Obama administration.

The Department of Justice prosecuted him for allegedly assaulting a volunteer who actually assaulted him. The “escort” attempted to forcibly block Hamilton to prevent him from sharing literature with women entering the clinic that explained other options to them.

Over a year after the date of the incident, rather than serving the clinic volunteer with a legal complaint for the illegal conduct, the Department of Justice served Hamilton with a legal complaint, alleging that he violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. The Life Legal Defense Foundation, a pro-life legal group, stepped in to provide Hamilton with legal support in court. The Obama administration lawsuit sought a $15,000 penalty and $5,000 in compensatory damages.

Today, the Life Legal Defense Foundation, a pro-life legal group, informed LifeNews that, three years after being unjustly arrested and then unjustly sued by the federal government, pro-life sidewalk counselor David Hamilton has ultimately won. The case has been settled and dismissed without an injunction and without a fine.

“Metro Police appropriately dismissed the local criminal case but almost a year later, the Attorney General of the United States filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. This lawsuit was part of the campaign of intimidation brought by the Obama administration,” asserted attorney Vince Heuser. “The attorney general has filed numerous lawsuits against pro-lifers for trivial problems that should have been handled locally. Many of them have been lost already or settled for nominal sums. It has been a colossal waste of taxpayer money and an abuse of the rights of pro-lifers across the nation.”

The EMW Women’s Surgical Center in Louisville is the abortion business that was caught on videotape covering up a potential case of sexual abuse of a minor.

LifeNews Note: The case has been settled. LifeNews initially reported a judge dismissed the case. We have corrected this and regret the error.

(Read more here.)

Filed Under: America, Calling Evil Good, Christian Persecution, Culture, Following Christ, Freedom of Speech, Politics, Pro Life, Religious Freedom, Uncategorized, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments