Best Rally Sign I’ve Yet Seen! UPDATES

March 23, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

Photo Credit: Tom Crowe

Grabbed off of Facebook, the best picture I’ve yet seen of the “Stand up” rallies, with the best sign. These are two of the Sisters of Reparation to the Most Sacred Heart — the novice is Sister Mary Joseph and the professed sister is Sister John Mary; they are part of a newish, growing community dedicated to the New Evangelization, and — if you can’t make it out — their sign reads: We fed you; we taught you; we nursed you; we visited you. Keep our conscience free!

Well done!

I snapped this out in front of a Congressman’s office today. There were about 150 people, mostly seniors –it’s hard to rally when you have to be in the office!

Kathryn Lopez is collecting pictures and posting them. If you have any, send them her way!

More pics here

I’m not sure how you gauge the number of participants, but I’m sure it was thousands if not tens of thousands, then again I heard just one venue in Kansas, among several, had over 500 people attending, so…who knows?

I’ll update later this evening with reports and such!

First Update: Okay, I have a photosource and credit for that great picture of the Sisters of Reparation. Sourced at Catholic Vote, picture credit goes to “CV blogger Tom Crowe at the Pittsburgh Rally for Religious Freedom.” I hope Mr. Crowe doesn’t mind my using the picture! It’s a winner!

UPDATES:
Well, from the collections of pictures Thomas Peters has, it looks like it may be “tens of thousands” after all!

Wichita
From Omaha

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Rally at Noon for Religious Freedom! Bring Saints! – UPDATED

March 23, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

It’s a Friday in Lent — what’s better to do on a Friday in Lent than to stand up for religious freedom — peacefully and respectfully, but immovably — in front of your representative’s office!:

The Nationwide Rally for Religious Freedom is being held Friday, March 23 at noon, local time, outside federal buildings, Congressional offices and historic sites across the country. The theme for the Rally is “Stand Up for Religious Freedom—Stop the HHS Mandate!”

Find your best location, here

May I suggest you bring this great priest with you when you go? He knows more than a little about the subject of religious freedom. His cause being promoted at this time is no coincidence! Also bring along Saint Thomas More, who lost his head for it. And also bring with you John Cardinal O’ Connor and Saint Philip Neri, because they are really good company.

And don’t forget Our Lady of Guadalupe (Patroness of the Americas).

UPDATE: Mollie Hemingway with a good piece on how the mainstream media is trying to scare people away from religious freedom. It’s hard to excerpt and includes video so check it out!

Simcha Fisher writes her predictions on what to expect at the Rally:

Also: Preaching the issue with compassion
5 Myths about Christian Persecution

Related:
It’s Free Sterilization, Too!
I wish I could rally: in front of her office
Register: Planned Parenthood Applauds
Obamacare: Funding abortion and no one notices?
US Bishops: welcome Pope’s strong affirmation of religious liberty principles

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“Thank Yourself, Catholic Charities Runs It”

March 17, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

The lie that the church “hates” women and wants to keep them down is an an old one and a lazy one and a convenient one, and — unsurprisingly, it’s the lie the media and folks with an agenda will run with. Reality, of course, is quite different and can’t be explained in a slogan or with a bumper sticker:

The hundred-or-so inhabitants were all ecstatic over the new [Catholic Relief Services supplied] well . . . but the happiest, the leader told me, through the translator, were the little girls.  Why? I inquired.

“Because up to now everyday was the same for them, as it has been for centuries of our women.  The girls are the ones designated to walk the daily two-hour trek to the river, to fill up the buckets with water- – enough for their hut and family – – and walk two hours back.  Each day,  the men go out to the fields; the boys go off to school; the women stay in the village to care for their families . . . and the young girls ‘take the walk.’  They’ll do it until they marry and have a baby.  The survival of the village depends on them.  But this means,” the chief wrapped-it-up, “that they can never go to school.  If they did, who would get the water? But now” he pointed radiantly to the jubilant girls, “they can go to school because we have good water right here because of our new well.”

Episodes like that occur all over Ethiopia, as well as other impoverished, thirsty countries throughout the third world, because of CRS “fresh water projects.”  Villagers benefit; crops flourish; livestock fatten; all the people drink; but the girls are the happiest because they’re free and can now improve their lives.

When it comes to the health of women, their babies, and their children, the Catholic Church is there, the most effective private provider of such care anywhere around.

Another example:

We bishops of New York sponsor an agency called Fidelis, which provides health insurance to low-income folks.  I’m told we’re the largest such private provider in our state.

A recent physician survey of Fidelis showed that we got the highest ratings of anybody else in the area of – – guess what? – – supporting healthcare for women and children.

Here’s another illustration:

A couple years ago, I visited India, and travelled to particularly poor areas.  At one stop my host-brother-bishop asked me to visit a convent nearby.  “The sisters will appreciate your stopping-by,” he told me.  “They’re scared, and they might be harmed, run-out-of-town, or even put in jail!”

“Whatever for?”  I asked.

 “A couple years ago, they opened a residence for young girls.  Nearly a hundred of the girls, all Delats (“untouchables”) from the surrounding villages, live there, and go to school, learn handicrafts and skills, and are loved and cared for by the sisters.

“And that’s earning them threats?” I wondered aloud.

“Yes it is,” the bishop explained.  “Seems as if the wealthy people depend upon these young girls to clean their houses, cook, and baby-sit their own infants.  Now they’re losing this cheap labor source.  They’re mad.  They don’t like this social upheaval.  As one of them yelled at the sisters, ‘You take these girls, who will prepare my tea!’”

You getting a pattern here?  I could go on and on:  if you want to see creative, daring, lifegiving healthcare for women and their children, look at what the Church is doing.

And now understand why Catholics rightly bristle when politicians and commentators characterize the Church as backwards and insensitive when it comes to women’s health.  Yes, the PR experts advise them that this tactic is a proven ploy to take the attention off the current urgent issue of religious freedom.  The marketers advise them that, if they can reduce the issue to one of contraception, stereotyping the Church as opposed to women’s rights, they have a chance of clouding the towering issue of the First Freedom.

But the Church should not be the ones on the defensive here.  We’re on the offensive when it comes to women’s health, education, and welfare, here at home, and throughout the world.  We hardly need lectures on this issue from senators.

We just want to be left alone to live out the imperatives of our faith to serve, teach, heal, feed, and care for others.  We cherish this, our earthly home, America, for its enshrined freedom to do so.  Those really concerned about women’s health would be better off defending the Church’s freedom to continue its work.

A couple of years ago I visited a woman’s prison. The warden asked me if I wanted to visit the expectant and new mothers’ healthcare center. It then dawned on me that, of course, some women would enter prison pregnant. I was so happy to see the expectant moms, getting good health care for themselves and their unborn babies, and to see the moms with babies under two getting classes in childrearing and parenting skills, with the babies receiving tender care right next to their moms. When I told the warden how grateful I was to see such excellent care for these women and children, he replied, “Thank yourself. Catholic Charities runs it.”

For now, anyway. If only the bishops and the church would do good stuff like this, and shut up about their politically incorrect consciences and teachings, the world would just love them, right? But then, with the fickle love of the world assured to them…what would remain as a sign of contradiction?

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Springsteen, Sex Strikes and Shut Up, Stupids!

March 15, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

I have doctors appointments all afternoon, so let’s just do a quick lookaround:

Springsteen’s Phoniness finally clear: I’ve never bought his “working man” schtick, and his mot recent “big” songs have been lazy three-note drone-fests (Philadelphia, Secret Garden). Now the botoxed, hair-weaved, fake “everyman” who summers in the Hamptons (where his children showcase their equestrianism) is writing some pretty irresponsible lyrics that appear to advocate violence against the fatcats and bankers with whom he rubs elbows while munching arugula at the Classic.

Maybe he’s looking to be the new Che shirt. He was ever a phony and is a phony still.

A Sex Strike: brought to you by the same perpetual adolescents who have spent the last 40 years declaring that the sex drive is so powerful it cannot be resisted — voluntarily or not — and that life lived without sex was abnormal.

Withholding sex for manipulative gratification: the last refuge of insecure, immature and thoroughly miserable women.

“Just shut up, no one cares”: Lame, defensive and disappointing schtick from Jon Stewart, whom I usually like; he’s smarter than “shut up.” What happens when all a movement and ideology has to fall back on is, “shut up! And you’re not getting sex, either!” Sadly, with the entire Mainstream Media at its beck-and-call, the only option left may be precisely the violence Springsteen is crooning of, and — if the goal is simply to keep the power — lockdowns.

NOTE: For the record, I don’t think anyone should “shut up.” Not Limbaugh, not Bill Maher, not anyone. Let people speak, even if you find them tiresome or annoying. Roll your eyes, and laugh at them — that’s perfectly fair — but no “shut up.” That’s just dangerous.

People are stupid, voters are stupid: Politico Editor John Harris is calling voters “stupid”.

Hmmm…let me think: in 2004, voters who re-elected Bush were called “ineducable” by Susan Sontag. Then, in 2004, voters who elected Obama were called “smart.”

If voters are being called “stupid” again, that can only mean Obama isn’t polling too well.

Chris Matthews: “This isn’t as funny as I’m making it…”: Oh, honey, get help. Your bigotry and self-loathing is not funny at all, just troubling and sad. And your panel is pathetic.

The Underperforming Steven Chu; remember when he wanted us all to paint our rooftops white, to save the planet? By the way, did you know that George Clooney and Brangelina took a private jet for the two-hour drive from LA to Palm Springs? Saving the planet is for little people. Big people like Clooney get to sit next to Michelle Obama at official dinners, where the wine is so expensive the “transparency-obsessed” White House chooses not to talk about it. We 99% do not need to know that. It will just make us feel bad while we’re drinking our box wines. Shut up. No sex for you. You’re stupid.

Let’s remember where all of this troubling stuff started: With a president who told people to get in their neighbors face, who turned to the loyal opposition at their first meeting and arrogantly (insecurely) informed them “I won”; with a speaker who looked at the OWS movement and said “they are ours”; with a theatrical, gavel-carrying walk through an “threatening” crowd yelling n-words no one could hear and “spitting” in a manner that was the equivalent of Chris Matthews getting excited on any given night; with an over-empowered HHS secretary with an ax to grind, insisting that first amendment freedoms did not matter and that churches should be forced to violate their consciences or get out of ministry — no matter how long they’ve been at it and how effective they have been — altogether; with a hasty and phoney construct about a “war against women” with its latest version of Cindy Sheehan (Cindy2.0) in the form of a 30 year-old law student who can’t afford to have sex. Which, we have just learned, she should not be having anyway, because she should be on strike or something.

So now, it’s “shut up; no sex for you, stupid, women-haters who are not actually trying to ban contraceptives, but we want everyone to think so. And stop praying” All served up with a chaser that may be a call for (or promise of) violence.

A LOOK BACK: Peggy Noonan in 2005:

You’re a lobbyist or a senator or a cabinet chief, you’re an editor at a paper or a green-room schmoozer, you’re a doctor or lawyer or Indian chief, and you’re making your life a little fortress. That’s what I think a lot of the elites are up to.

The Mandated $1 Abortion Contribution of Obamacare: Reality or not? If the MSM ignores it, does it cease to go into effect?

“We are just days away from fundamentally transforming America as we know it”. They’re certainly redefining the meaning of the words human rights violations. Don’t roll your eyes; the press will take this seriously and give it credence. Freedom to vote without showing ID? That’s a right. And for all I know, it may well be. Freedom to live your conscience? Not so much. Go shut up, now and pray. But keep it to yourself. That’s freedom of worship, which is just as good as freedom of religion, whaddya mean we hate religion? You’re stupid. And sexually repressed.

Coming soon: No free speech for you! Only for you.

The Obama Flag: Never have we seen a cult so eager to slap a president’s face everywhere. Forgve me if I suggest that these very same idolators would have been (quite rightly and justifiably) outraged and concerned if they’d seen such a display of presidential affection in, say, 2003.

Smart Diplomacy scores another victory.

Releasing strategic oil reserves for political expediency. Because we’re too stupid to understand that our supplies must be reestablished at higher prices, or — worse — when we really need it, it won’t be there.

“We’re drilling all over this country; privately, anyway.

UPDATE: I didn’t mean for this post to seem as bitter as it does. But I am really tired of fakery and double standards, when things are as bad as they are, and yeah, I know it comes from both sides. But it’s always more troubling when it comes from a place of power.

Filed Under: The Constitution, The Fourth Estate, The Pelosi, The Perpetual Adolescents, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Dear Press: The Seniors Don’t Believe You Anymore

March 5, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

Yesterday we talked a little about the dialogue between David Gregory and Newt Gingrich, and I wrote:

Our “free press” is no longer free. It’s becoming more like Pravda — the house organ for the party to which it is enthralled — every day. If you look at the Gingrich/Gregory exchange from that perspective, then that was a pretty remarkable segment. Sometimes, what someone in the press does not say, or where they do not interrupt is as telling as what they bellow.

I don’t know if the press even realizes (or cares) how much of their credibility they used up in the election of 2008, and basically every day since then. But no one believed and trusted in the press more than the senior citizens, and — if remarks from our parents this weekend were any indication — they now see the press very differently. They believed and got fooled into voting for Obama in 2008. They won’t be doing it again. And they are absolutely disgusted by the press’ willingness to take the HHS Mandate story and try to turn it into a sob-oomp fest over birth control.

The Democrats and the press are accustomed to being able to scare the older people into line — the GOP is going to take away your Social Security! You’ll be eating dog food! You’ll freeze to death for lack of home heating oil!

But the seniors have heard enough, and they’ve seen enough. These folks still believe in freedom of speech and freedom of religion and freedom of the press, and they can see with their own lying eyes that this administration (and its lackeys in the press) are straight-out manufacturing a “contraception crisis” that is really a “constitutional crisis”; that the White-House-Media tag-team is attempting to both manipulate them against their church and distract them from the truth that their grandchildren will not have the chance to live as they did — in broad freedom, with opportunities to work hard and make their own way.

They’re not having any of that.

This piece, written last September after a family celebration where many frustrations were aired by the seniors who felt snookered, seems worth pointing you toward:

. . .The general consensus was that our president is a failure, the congress is a wreck, and there is no authenticity or originality in our leadership, nor in our press. A majority in attendance—both Democrats and Republicans—had voted for Barack Obama (a few grudgingly, as they had supported Clinton) but while everyone expressed disappointment (there was not a single voice raised in support of the president) the senior citizens confided a deep sense of betrayal—of their trust being shattered. When I asked one of them, a former “Reagan Democrat” who had voted for Dole, then Bush, then Kerry why she had pulled the lever for Obama, she threw up her hands helplessly, “all I knew was what I heard! That other guy seemed too hot-headed and that Sarah Palin; she just wanted to play dress-up!”

And that was the general response from that side of the room: “I paid attention; I read all the papers—they all loved this guy!”

“He was new! We needed change!”

But not, as it turns out, the kind of change we are currently experiencing. Asked if they regretted their vote, to a one they said “yes.” Most of them said they wished, in retrospect, that they had voted for Hillary Clinton who “at least understood that the economy…it’s the economy, right? Stupid?”

None of them will be cast a second vote for this president, nor will they be so quick to listen to a press that—absenting an Obama abdication—will cast the flop-sweat from its brow and once again lift him to their shoulders, chanting new slogans and dire warnings about the opposition, but no longer singing songs from The Student Prince.

Anecdotal, sure, but the genie is out of the bottle and it’s not going back in. Once you’ve given up your credibility in order to work an agenda, it’s over.

You can read the rest here

Filed Under: 'Remaking' America, The Fourth Estate Tagged With: , , , ,

No, David Gregory is not a Hack

March 4, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

I’m seeing a lot of remarks on Twitter about this exchange between Newt Gingrich and David Gregory this morning.

YouTube Preview Image

I’m seeing people saying Newt “schooled” David Gregory; that he “took it to” Gregory and so forth, but Gregory lets Gingrich speak for nearly two full minutes, uninterrupted, and in doing so he allows Gingrich to point out all of the issues that are going undiscussed, everyday, while the Democrats and the media promote the absolutely false narrative that anyone is trying to ban the use of contraceptives. Gingrich brings up the economy, gas-prices, unemployment, the president’s assault on the free exercise of religion (as opposed to “freedom of worship”); he brings up Obama’s support of infanticide and more.

And Gregory doesn’t sputter or get loud and try to turn the subject, as Chris Matthews or George Stephanopoulos or any number of genuine hacks might.

In fact, even though he returns to his talking points, to me his heart doesn’t seem to be in it. I imagine while Gingrich was speaking, some producer was screaming in Gregory’s ear to cut him off, to interject something, to “change the subject, get him back on Limbaugh and Fluke and Contraception” because it’s all the Democrats have right now. It’s all the media has, and I suspect they are convinced — not without reason — that their non-stop talk about the bishops “taking away women’s rights” is working among the unthinking and those quick-to-embrace-victimology.

I don’t think Gregory is a hack, and I don’t think he got “schooled.” Gregory has talked about the importance of his Jewish faith to him and his family. As a person of faith, he has to be concerned about what he sees going on in the country and within his party and profession — which has abandoned its own freedom for the sake of ideology and political enthrallment.

Our “free press” is no longer free. It’s becoming more like Pravda — the house organ for the party to which it is enthralled — every day. If you look at the Gingrich/Gregory exchange from that perspective, then that was a pretty remarkable segment. Sometimes, what someone in the press does not say, or where they do not interrupt is as telling as what they bellow.

I hope I have not outted Gregory for possible targeting. I’ve never much cared for his style, but I have to defend the guy. I don’t think what we’re seeing here is hackery. I think it’s quite the opposite.

Filed Under: The Fourth Estate, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

The Busy Servants of Moloch – UPDATED

March 1, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

When the “learning opportunity” of the Susan G. Komen/Planned Parenthood debacle was taking place, I wrote:

[the past day's high drama had given] me a mental image of Moloch, enraged and stomping and roaring because there was a threat of less meat coming to his fire.

Today, Moloch is appeased; the media’s heartbeat and respiration are returning to normal. They and their pals in DC can take a nice, deep cleansing breath and sit back and smile, understanding what they have just demonstrated to themselves, their enemies and the world: you don’t have to fall in love; just fall in line, or you will fall, altogether.

Recall the Komen story was breaking just as people were beginning to react to the Obama administration’s announcement on the HHS Mandate (before his later “accommodation”) and the media non-coverage of the annual March for Life on Washington DC. Quickly on the heels of those stories, the Democrats and the press began to pretend that Republicans, Christians and Catholics were conspiring to ban contraception, which (according to this 2009 CDC report (pdf)) 99% of American women can easily and affordably access.

Since then, it has seemed to me that the servants of Moloch have been very, very busy assuring their god that his feedings will continue unabated. In congress and elsewhere, we have performance art suggesting that life is a tragic and burdensome thing that must be relentlessly beaten back via sterilization, abortifacients and difficult-to-obtain contraception.

As our president likes to say, “let’s be clear”: Life is formed on the breath of intention — a breath that always utters “yes” because nothing is created from “no.” When a new life comes into the world, with it is delivered a renewal of old love, and the creation of wholly new love, shared, developed and grown between parent and child, child and grandparents, and so on. It is, at its most fundamental, the continual re-emergence and action of God — who is love — into the world.

To hate life, especially new life, is to hate God. To distrust it or dissuade it is to distrust and try to dissuade God. To destroy it is an attempt to destroy God. To obsess on preventing the possibility of life to-a-manic-extreme is to try desperately to hold God at bay, to contain him, to make God obedient to oneself, or to order him away. To slaughter his loved-into-being new life is to nourish emptiness and death on its blood; it is to worship an illusory freedom one thinks comes from saying “no.”

One can be confused or ignorant and not realize that when one rejects life one rejects love, and thus rejects God. Invincible ignorance counts. But true evil understands what it does, and how it moves and who it uses. And not everyone it uses minds being used.

Interestingly, 2012 appears to be shaping as the year in which life-hating, love-hating, God-hating evil has come very much to the fore, seeking out a head-on collision with the God who is love. Perhaps it believes it is winning something. Perhaps it is feeling encouraged by recent demonstrations that government bodies harbor a profound misunderstanding of the concept of human moral conscience, which as become a narrowly-defined, expendable thing:

. . .two senior midwives from Glasgow who have a conscientious objection to abortion. The midwives have been told that they must accept the decision of their hospital management that they must oversee other midwives performing abortions on the labour ward.

The messages being spelled out both in Britain and in the United States is, “you God-botherers will either put aside your consciences, or you will be put aside, all-together; your choices are capitulation or complete social and economic marginalization.”

Or, of course, it goes without saying: battle.

Message received. Battle it is.

A few weeks ago, during a debate New Gingrich brought up a 2002 piece of Illinois State legislation meant to provide medical service to babies born alive during a botched abortion. Senator Obama, a faithful defender of abortion in any and all circumstances, argued against it (pages 32-33 [pdf]) thusly:

. . .[the] fetus or child – however you want to describe it — is now outside the mother’s womb and the doctor continues to think it’s non-viable but there’s, let’s say, movement or some indication that, in fact, they’re not just coming out limp and dead, that, in fact, they would then have to call a second physician to monitor and check off and make sure that this is not a live child that could be saved . . . my impression is that the Medical Society suspects as well that doctors feel that they would be under obligation, that they would already be making these determinations and that, essentially, adding a – an additional doctor who then has to be called in an emergency situation to come in and make these assessments is really designed simply to burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion.

Yes, if the killing has failed, “if they’re not just coming out limp and dead”, then the job must be finished; Moloch must be served, because there is nothing we might learn, nothing love might heal, if it is not.

Since that issue was resurrected, we’re suddenly hearing from death-apologists who suggest not only that a baby born of a botched abortion is killable, but that any infant can ethically be slain. Why, after all, should the baby live?:

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

There it is. The inevitable and deviant cheapening of life that Pope Paul VI predicted in his encyclical Humanae Vitae. And things are only just starting to heat up.

I for one, am glad to see these servants of Moloch reveal themselves so completely. You have to declare yourself and display your standards in battle. Here’s ours:

Or, perhaps, even better yet, this one:

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey, What if the Bishops aren’t bluffing?


In California: a move to allow nurse practitioners, midwives and others to perform abortions Moloch must be served.

Dr. Gerard Nadal wonders if Darwin was the architect of the Culture of Death, but no, I don’t think so. Its author and architect preceded him by many, many years.

He is as old as Eden. And a slitherer, still.

[As an aside, I have come to believe that Humanae Vitae is going to eventually be seen as a powerfully unifying document between Evangelicals and Catholics, but that's for another post - es]

On Ethical Infanticide:
Professor Tim Muldoon
Wesley J. Smith
Jonah Goldberg

More:
Obama’s faith council fades quietly away

and some snark

Related:
Lenten Reflection for the post-abortive
Our Daughters Dreams Arise from this Glad Slaughter

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