Blogger Free Speech, Humanae Vitae – UPDATE

:::UPDATE:::
A blogger who is rebuilding finds his Obama-critical posts uncached and unrecoverable. Hmmmmm…:::END UPDATE:::

So, these Obama True-Believers are an insecure bunch.

It seems to me if you are confident in your candidate, you don’t need to run around doing all you can to silence opposition by shutting down blogs that dare to dislike your guy.

When you act like a jack-booted silencer of dissent, you do your candidate no favors. You (and by extension your candidate, even if he doesn’t know you’re doing it) seem more like “liberal fascists” than like champions of free speech and liberty. And the American President needs to be a champion of free speech and liberty, which is why the current American president – unlike some others, does not silence the endless and noisy dissent in books, mainstream media, films, alternative media, whackadoo media or ironic and paranoid plays, and why he liberates people from tyranny and tumult.

You are not helping people believe that your guy will fight for their right to speak freely or rescue the oppressed by stepping on other voices, and that’s just stupid.

But then again, we’ve been seeing for a while that the “chill wind” that tries to shut down speech it does not like has been blowing from the left.

Instead of just shutting down opposition, why not ask your own candidate about this harsh assessment of his “community” building? Or this other harsh assessment? Not allowed to ask questions? Not allowed to make an observation? That’s downright unAmerican-sounding.

The current president has shown he can take many punches. Can Obama handle one?

Oh, here’s an idea – let’s suggest that John McCain’s war record is irrelevant. That won’t make you look too hypocritical, will it, after you spent 2004 suggesting John Kerry’s turn in Vietnam defined his worthiness to sit in the Oval Office? Nah, of course not.

Perhaps these are all meant to be “distractions,” so we won’t notice that Obama has problems on Iraq?. Or that he’s not really telling talking straight on oil?

Well, I am distracted, or – really – just bored.

In other news, Dr Helen has written an important and provocative piece on whether men can be raped by women and what it means under law. If you have sons, you should read it.

They’re not calling it a schism, but a “realignment” in the Church of England – very interesting stuff to watch:

“…the new body will have its own bishops, clergy and theological colleges, and eventually its own structures, within the legal constraints of existing Anglican institutions.”

Gafcon Churches will expressly be out of communion with the US and Canadian Anglicans, who allowed the consecration of an openly gay bishop in 2003 and have authorized same-sex blessings in the teeth of objections from the Anglican Primates.

Forty years later, making a second consideration – after taking a first read – of Paul VI’s prophetic (and actually very short) encyclical, Humanae Vitae.

Glaring omissions at the NY Times. Perhaps as long as they get all the leaks to AlQaeda right, they feel like they’ve done their jobs.

Yesterday was the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. Since we began this post talking about freedom, free speech and liberty, let us see what happens when you lose those gifts. Deacon Greg wrote a particularly good homily for the day, which I urge you to read, if only to familiarize yourself with the astonishing story of Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, the Archbishop of Saigon:

The Communists saw him as a threat. And on the feast of the Assumption, August 15, 1975, he was arrested and sent to prison. Without ever being tried, or sentenced, he was shipped off to a prison in North Vietnam. He stayed there for 13 years, nine of them in solitary confinement.

During his imprisonment, he couldn’t celebrate mass, or even receive the Eucharist. But he held fast to his faith.

He wrote to friends outside prison, saying he needed “his medicine.” They knew what he meant. They sent him small cough medicine bottles, filled with wine, and bits of bread. Sympathetic guards smuggled him some wood and wire, and he made a small cross, which he hid in a bar of soap.
[…]
He would place drops of wine in the palm of his hand, mingled with water, to celebrate mass. He did it every day at three pm, the hour of Christ’s death.
[…]
He was finally freed on November 21, 1988 – the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lady. Nguyen Van Thaun went into exile, finally settling in Rome. During the Jubilee Year, in 2000, he was invited to preach at the Vatican, and Pope John Paul presented him with a chalice – an immeasurable gift for a man whose only chalice, for so many years, had been the palm of his hand. That same year, he was named a cardinal. Two years later, he died. Just last year, officials began a formal investigation to have him beatified.
[…]
“I am happy here, in this cell,” he wrote, “where white mushrooms are growing on my sleeping mat, because You are here with me, because You want me to live here with You. I have spoken much in my lifetime: now I speak no more. It’s Your turn to speak to me, Jesus; I am listening to You.”

You’ll want to read the whole thing. Then, perhaps, head over to wish Sr. Mary Martha well as she begins her novitiate, and begins her lifelong work of discovering another sort of freedom.