WikiLeaks: US govt considered grants for Mexican pro-abortion groups

Notre Dame gave a honorary doctorate to Pres. Obama.

There is a longish article on CNA which you should look at: WikiLeaks cable: US government considered grants for Mexican pro-abortion groups.

WikiLeaks cable: US government considered grants for Mexican pro-abortion groups
By Kevin J. Jones

Washington D.C., Mar 19, 2011 / 07:39 am (CNA).- A leaked State Department cable shows the U.S. government has considered granting money to pro-abortion groups in Mexico. Critics warned that the grants would fund “radical” organizations seeking to change Mexican society and legalize abortion under the guise of combating violence against women.

The document is evidence of a “quiet yet seismic shift” in U.S. foreign aid priorities, said Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute vice president Terrence McKeegan. Large segments of foreign aid are being given to “activist groups whose main activity is to advocate for radical social changes in national laws,” he charged.

U.S. funding would strengthen organizations that are “far outside the mainstream of Mexican and Latin American society in general,” said Joseph Meaney, director of international coordination at Human Life International, on March 18. “It is clearly aimed at changing their culture in a more liberal direction through outside funding.”

[…]

Read the rest there.

Incredibly, Catholics voted for Pres. Obama.

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31 Comments

  1. CJD89 says:

    This may be a foolish question, but what should we do about this? Who should we write a letter or e-mail to? Should we send President Obama a prayer bouquet (and yes I am serious)? Is there a saint that you would advise we pray to and ask for their intercession for the conversion of our president and for those who voted for him? I would like to put on my spiritual army boots I just need to know where to start marching!

  2. Random Friar says:

    They voted for him mostly because they thought of war as a Culture of Life issue (not saying I agree, but that’s how it was phrased).

    How’s that whole peace thing going?

    @cjd89: St. Thomas More is patron saint of politicians. You can invoke multiple king or emperor saints. St. Louis the King, St. Edward Martyr, St. Edward Confessor. Or, if you want the big guns, the Little Flower packs lots o’ power!

  3. Ellen says:

    It’s interesting reading British and European papers. The luster is off The Won for them. All I can say, is “told you so”.

  4. Geremia says:

    I thought the U.S. already resumed funding abortions overseas ever since Obama overturned the Mexico City Policy within the first week of his presidency.

  5. Brad says:

    O’s executive order in 1/09 showed his absolute top priorities and also who his backers and masters are.

    How shameful that our nation is paying for abortions in the land of our Lady of Guadalupe. We are puppets in this particular way of the one whom she crushed. Talk about very ugly revenge.

  6. Andrew Mason says:

    Random Friar,

    It is a shame that Obama hasn’t stopped our disastrous wars and all, but he has dialed it down a bit in Iraq and considering that a McCain/ Palin administration likely would have doubled down in Iraq and probably would have declared war on Iran by now it’s a step in the right direction.

    I’m not saying that voting for Obama was a good thing, certainly I don’t feel good about it, but eight years of government-enabled looting of the economy by the very rich combined with pointless wars designed to enrich oil companies made some of us wary of voting in another four to eight years of the same. I don’t know how it was where you are, but the Bush years were devestating here and the jobs we lost aren’t coming back because he made it easy for companies to ship them all overseas. Obama’s pretty bad, but McCain would have been too (I seem to remember him being evasive on abortion in 2000, before his Macchiavelian slide to the right, and lest we forget he’s pro-ESCR) and the economy would likely be even worse than it is now.

  7. Andrew Mason says:

    Oh, and war is a life issue. How many innocent people have we killed in two countries that had little or nothing to do with the attack against us? What provocation did they make to justify our actions? What did we gain from these adventures? That’s not even counting the people we’re still killing in Pakistan, which is our (somewhat dubious) ally.

  8. iowapapist says:

    Perhaps if the State Department had hidden the cable with Obama’s birth certificate and law school transcripts, it wouldn’t have been discovered. Mr. Mason, I don’t know what you are smoking, but apparently it is potent.

  9. wanda says:

    Geremia is correct. From day one, this President set out on a course of pro-abortion actions, both here and around the globe. If you visit Life Site News, I believe you can search out Obama’s pro- abortion track record, it’s longer than your arm, and it began on Nov. 19, 2008 and continues through today.

  10. Andrew Mason says:

    iowapapist:

    I’m not sure what this all has to do with “birther” nonsense, maybe you see a connection where I don’t. We’re talking about war and abortion, not satisfying people whose groundless “concerns” about Obama’s place of birth will never be satisfied (where was McCain born? Panama? Maybe we should be concerned about whether he was qualified to run for President. Maybe we should demand that he produce a birth certificate and then complain that it’s not enough when he does so). Obama was born in Hawaii, get over it and focus on the issues that are important.

  11. Clinton says:

    This administration has also spent about $23 million of our tax dollars to fund various
    organizations in Kenya with the aim of enshrining the legalization of abortion in that
    nation’s new constitution.

    Our current president may be ambiguous about America’s role in exporting and promoting
    democracy overseas, but he is absolutely straight-up hungry to export and promote abortion.

  12. Random Friar says:

    @AndrewMason: I’m not entirely sure that it would’ve turned out the way you indicated, partly because the Republicans would’ve seen their base erode all the more and gotten trounced in the mid-term elections. And the whole Libya thing boggles the mind. I actually did not mind President Obama waiting on action. Perhaps he could’ve been a little quicker with his words. But, multinational support against a dictator willing to kill his own people… Iraq or Libya? This whole Libya thing is a mess.

    And yes, I agree that War is a Life issue. I’m just not sure what shipping off the Iraq forces (although 50,000 is one heck of a training force) to Afghanistan means in loss of life. But the other thing that his supporters rightly grilled the Bush administration for was the rather thin excuses for torture/Gitmo/domestic surveillance. I’m not seeing a lot of improvement that way either.

  13. Andrew Mason says:

    Random Friar:

    Bush managed to push through a lot of his agenda even after his party got crushed in the ’06 mid-terms, through a combination of calling the Democrats unpatriotic and using the filibuster to prevent any of their bills from passing. I’m sure that a President McCain would have had the same tools at his disposal. Besides, why would the Republicans have been “trounced” in the 2010 mid-terms? The only reason that the Democrats fared so poorly was because of the Tea Party, and that was entirely a response to Obama being elected President that never would have materialized if he hadn’t won (if their actual concern is the economy, they would have popped up when Bush was running it into the ground and ballooning the deficit with huge tax cuts for the rich). If McCain had won, the Republican operatives and corporate plants that started the Tea Party wouldn’t have had any reason to create a “grass-roots” uprising to try to destroy him and all the people who marched on Washington calling Obama a “communist” (false) and a “Muslim” (false) would have just stayed home.

    There are certainly plenty of things to be disappointed about with Obama, even excluding the social issues like abortion. I certainly didn’t vote for him to continue torturing people in Gitmo and cement our indefinite occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. On the issue of Libya, I think it’s nice that for once we’re trying to depose a brutal dictator in a country whose citizens have asked us to do so. I just don’t understand why it took so long for this to come about, Qaddafi’s forces have been busy over the last few weeks and there may not be much of a resistance left now that we’ve gotten around to supporting it. There is always a disconnect between what a politician says and what he does, and I think that a lot of people (myself included) foolishly believed that it would be different this time. Remember, when Bush was running for President in 2000 he claimed that he had no interest in “regime change” and sending our troops overseas to solve other people’s problems. How did that work out for conservatives?

  14. ckdexterhaven says:

    I still say that Obama is purposely trying to divide the American Catholic church. It’s no accident that he has prominent pro abortion Catholics like Nancy Pelosi,Joe Biden, Kathleen Sebelius, and that guy who went to Malta. Over the last 2-3 weeks, I’ve noticed a lot of anti-war Catholics on blogs defending Obama on the whole abortion thing. Like Andrew here, they’re saying war is anti-life just like abortion. Obama is succeeding. To equate Republicans in 06 with the continuing genocide of abortion here in America is a joke.

    But Andrew, seriously, you do not understand the Tea Party.(or you’re lying about it) “The only reason that the Democrats fared so poorly was because of the Tea Party, and that was entirely a response to Obama being elected President” I take it from your statement, that you say that the Tea party is racist. I’m a Tea Party member who has brought my children to many Tea Party rallies. I’m against big government and for the Constitution, and the rights given to me by God. If the Republicans don’t get their act together, and stop this spending, and government overregulation, I won’t support them either. But I’m not a racist!

  15. ckdexterhaven says:

    Sorry, the rest of my post didn’t get put up.

    There’s no such thing as a pro life democrat. The Obamacare vote proved that once and for all. The Republicans, for all their faults, are always on the side of the unborn. Always. There is no elected democrat who votes against Planned Parenthood, or against Supreme Court nominees who are pro abortion.

  16. Random Friar says:

    @AndrewMason: The reasoning here for President Obama is that he is trying to prevent a genocide, a new Rwanda. But how many brutal dictators have we had recently that violent oppress and kill their own people? (Remember Saddam Hussein gassing his own people). If that were the case, we would have troops all over the map.

    My theory that the Republicans would’ve gotten trounced in ’10 stems from the unpopularity of the wars, and the growing disenchantment with them. A President McCain would’ve been seen as a Republican continuation of President Bush, thus continuing the downward slide for Republicans/conservatives. President Obama does not inherit that baggage, even though he is essentially doing the same thing as President Bush. Anyway, that’s just a theory, and I have no problem with other theories. Just my 2 cents.

    Mind you, I am not advocating one candidate over another, but I do think that many who voted for President Obama became willfully ignorant of what he would do with respect to Life issues (I take this from commentaries I’ve seen from catholics before the election). Whether one is better than another overall? Hard to say. Although I do think with respect to abortion, the keystone of Life, a President McCain would’ve done better (e.g., not repealing the Mexico City policy).

  17. nichols.a.t says:

    Andrew Mason, with all due respect, you are moving the discussion in a direction that had nothing to do with the original post. Fr. Z posted regarding U.S. funding of abortion in a culturally Catholic country. As we know, abortion is an intrinsic, grave evil. The implications of such an action (while not taken by the U.S.) are also insidious – would the United States really trying to subvert national law in another country in a matter that has *nothing* to do with the interests of the United States?

  18. Andrew Mason says:

    ckdexterhaven: I am not excusing Obama’s support for abortion, in fact I said that it was highly disappointing and that if I had it to do over I never would have voted for him. My point is that there are plenty of Republicans who also support abortion among other things. McCain, back in the 2000 election if you remember that far back, gave very wishy-washy answers to whether he would support abortion and in more recent years he has supported ESCR which is just as bad. Even among Republicans who seem to be pro-life, many of them seem to just pay lip service to get votes and have no intention of getting rid of their campaign issue by working to get rid of legal abortion. As for the Tea Party, I never said that it was racist although there are plenty of racists in the ranks (such as the ones who display signs depicting Obama as a witch doctor with a bone through his nose). What I said was that they were a carefully orchestrated “movement” that was founded by a former Republican staffer and supported by such Republican notables as Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich for the sole purpose of blaming Bush’s destruction of the economy on Obama and bringing the Republicans back into power in 2010 and 2012. [Please review the main entry at the top.]

  19. Andrew Mason says:

    Oh, and ckdexterhaven, the idea that “The Republicans, for all their faults, are always on the side of the unborn. Always.” is quite laughable. There are plenty of Republicans who support abortion, and many of them voted to continue funding Planned Parenthood. Why didn’t the Republicans include defunding Planned Parenthood in the recent resolution to continue funding the government, forcing Obama to either defund them or shut the government down? For that matter, how is it that in six years with a Republican president and Republican majorities in both the Senate and the House, all we got on the pro-life issue was a token ban on a rarely-used procedure that even Planned Parenthood admitted was of little concern for their cause? Face it, the Republicans don’t care about life any more than the Democrats (if they did they wouldn’t be starving poor children at home and torturing them abroad) and the only reason they claim to be pro-life is because it brings people like you out to vote for them. If they could get votes by supporting Planned Parenthood then many of them would do so in a heartbeat, the only reason they don’t is because the other party beat them to it. They are not your friends, they are politicians and their only concern is getting elected.

  20. Andrew Mason says:

    Random Friar: We were a little late in attacking Saddam if our motive was to stop him from gassing his people, after all when he was doing that we were best buddies with his regime and President Reagan was sending Donald Rumsfeld over to take pictures shaking the guy’s hand. By the time that Bush Jr. invaded, Saddam couldn’t even reach large parts of his country to harm them and his regime by all accounts had been out of the WMD business for about a decade. Obama may have waited too long to bring Qaddafi to account, but he didn’t wait that long. Besides, the use of WMDs against the civilians of Iraq may be the only thing that Saddam did that we haven’t also done over the course of the last seven years (and not even that, if you consider depleted uranium to be a WMD as many do). We’ve not only killed hundreds of thousands of civilians over there, we’ve also tortured them in the same facility that Saddam used for that purpose. How many innocent Iraqis have “disappeared” since we took power, just to end up at Abu Ghraib or Gitmo or some CIA “black site” halfway around the world?

    As for a President McCain and the 2010 mid-terms, I don’t see how the things you mentioned would make a difference. People certainly didn’t care about Republican mismanagement of the wars when they voted those same Republicans back into power in the House, and frankly it seems that the Tea Partiers who get so much airtime on the “liberal” MSM would love to have a Bush clone in the White House to sink the economy again and get us into more pointless wars. Republicans may not have gained seats in such a situation, since the President’s party never does in a mid-term, but they probably wouldn’t have lost as many either even if the economy did continue to go south.

    I agree that Catholics who voted for Obama tried hard to ignore his record on abortion, certainly I wasn’t focusing on it in my desire to keep McCain out of the White House. I don’t, however, share your belief that McCain would have kept all of Bush’s pro-life stuff intact. As I said before, he’s not as steadfastly pro-life as Bush claimed to be and he may have seen things like the Mexico City Policy as useful tools for bargaining with Democrats for other things that he wanted more. He certainly wouldn’t have trumpeted his repeal of it to the world like Obama did, but I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he either quietly repealed it or else neutered it into irrelevance.

  21. Jenny bag of donuts says:

    Thank you Andrew for reminding us how lousy both presidential candidates were in the last election. I too couldn’t understand all the support for McCain among faithful Catholics. And I couldn’t agree with you more about the lip service that many Republicans give to the Pro-Life movement for votes while not doing squat about it. All the same, too many Catholics voted for Obama, it was an embarrassment. I hope you have repented in confession of your voting for him. The season of Lent would be an excellent time for that.

  22. ckdexterhaven says:

    Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, John Roberts, William Rehnquist- all nominated by (ahem) Republican Presidents, all Pro life. That’s more than “lip service”.

    But hey, they told me if I voted for John McCain, America would be bombing more Arab Countries and keeping Gitmo open…. and they were right!

  23. Jenny bag of donuts says:

    McCain is in an adulterous “marriage” like so many unenlightened individuals in our society today. Who wants to support that? Are we as Catholics going to be serious about marriage or not?

    Former Pres. Bush was very friendly with the Catholic hierarchy and he did make recorded statements for the March for Life. He wasn’t all bad.

  24. Jenny bag of donuts says:

    Getting back to the original topic, it doesn’t strike me as new or surprising that the U.S. is supporting abortions in other countries.

  25. Andrew Mason says:

    Jenny: Whether I went to confession about it isn’t really relevant, that’s between me and God. I already said that I felt bad about it and wouldn’t do it again, let’s leave it at that. I had actually forgotten about the adultery thing, although McCain’s not Catholic and if engaging in unjust war and supporting the death penalty aren’t reason enough to not support a candidate then I doubt that would be either. I’m not sure where torture stands on the continuum of offenses. The Pope has made it clear that, unlike with the death penalty and war, torture cannot under any circumstances be justified, which means that it may very well rise to the same level as abortion when it comes to issues that can make a candidate unacceptable. McCain has been a vocal supporter of “enhanced interrogation” over the last several years, reversing his previous principled opposition to it that came from being tortured himself, so I’m not sure whether he would have been an acceptable candidate either. Of course, for all I know I am wrong about the Pope’s position and he may have said that torture can be one of the things where we are allowed to vote for people who oppose the Church’s position.

    I’m obviously not qualified to pass judgment, but Bush’s support for pro-life always struck me as a political strategy. After all, how can somebody who supports something called “shock and awe” really be concerned about life? Also, if you’re willing to mock a person who you’ve recently executed, you can’t be that concerned about the sanctity of life. As I’ve said before, it wouldn’t be the first time that a Republican politician became pro-life because it was politically necessary.

  26. Andrew Mason says:

    ckdexterhaven: What have those five conservative justices given us since they were sent to the Supreme Court? Roe v. Wade is still quite strong, and Scalia has made comments that seemed to indicate that he considers it established law that cannot ever be eliminated. All we’ve gotten out of them is the ban on partial-birth abortion, which is a procedure that was rarely performed, had at least one (still legal) alternative that was preferred by most abortionists, and did absolutely nothing to disrupt Planned Parenthood or impede their ability to perform abortions. Of course, it looked really good on Republican reelection posters and that’s why it was done. They weren’t put on the bench because of their position on abortion, they were put there (especially the two nominated during Bush’s two terms) because they espouse a view of Executive Branch supremacy that basically allows the President to do whatever he wants and be unaccountable to anyone for it. They’re there because they were willing to interpret the Constitution in ways that suited the Republican Presidents who nominated them. Pro-life may have been a handy way to rally support for them against Democratic opposition, but it wasn’t the purpose for their nomination.

    Also, Iran isn’t an Arab country. I don’t think that anybody thought Bush would bomb Libya, although there is quite a bit of oil there so you never know. As I said before, at least in this case the people of Libya want us to be doing it.

  27. Mike Morrow says:

    Somehow, I seem to have arrived at the “What Does Andrew Mason Really Say” webpages. Sad and sorry.

  28. Andrew Mason says:

    There are several other people here who are commenting just as much as I, Mike, so I don’t think that your comment is correct. I’m sorry if I don’t agree with your worldview, but that doesn’t mean that I have no right to speak it nor does it mean that my comments are somehow more intrusive than those of somebody who agrees with you. [I don’t like it when someone dominates the combox. And I really don’t like when I am ignored. Really don’t.]

  29. Andrew Mason says:

    Father Z:
    I reread the original post and could not figure out what you were trying to tell me. I also didn’t think that I was dominating the combox, since Random Friar and ckdexterhaven have both said as much as I have. If you want me to stop commenting then I will, but that is not what I got out of the first response you made on my comment. I’m sorry that I didn’t understand what you were saying.

  30. And this is what happens.

  31. Random Friar says:

    What we need to do is to investigate and see if this was actually carried off in any way, shape, or form, not just discussed. “Discussed” can easily be dismissed. Perhaps a dogged reporter, through the Freedom of Information Act, can now request relevant documentation.

    The truth needs to come out!

Comments are closed.