I have been saying for weeks now that the left has been hijacking pro-life language for their own ends. Right now, they are twisting their support for Pres. Obama (against people who “cling to guns or religion”) into a “prolife cause” and their instrument of the twisting is legislation against guns that look scary.
I see that Get Religion (one of those Patheos thingies … they remind me sometimes of the old joke about the Methodist or Jew in heaven who is shown a closed room and is told that Catholics like to think they are alone) has finally awakened to the smell of the coffee to react to some of this lefty twisting in Hell’s Bible, the New York Times. Patheos seemed surprised, but this has been going on for weeks.
The NYT wrote:
Anti-abortion protesters flooded the National Mall in Washington on Friday for the annual March for Life. Many Catholic leaders and theologians are asking why many of those who call themselves ‘pro-life’ have been silent when it comes to gun control.
Please, Catholic bloggers, pay attention. This has been going on for weeks now.
Read THIS
The hijacking of pro-life language for the sake of support of Obama and his drones is not actually about guns.
Über-liberals don’t give a damn about guns. They don’t even know what “assault weapons” are.
The real target of the ban on “assault weapons” are the people who want to own guns.
They hate a certain kind of person. They tie people who own guns to people who are against abortion. You know who I mean, right? Those red-necks? Those Tea Party types? Those mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers who “cling to their guns or religion”?
They are against real pro-lifers. The Under-liberals are just aimed like a dog pack by the Über-liberals and they go yapping in the direction of the guns.
Keep your eye on the target.
For these liberals, high taxes and entitlements are the real pro-life issues. Guns are just the weapon du jour.
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Classic Brahmins vs. Townies where guns are the only real advantage the Townies posses.
You can’t be prolife if you support the “right” to abort.
If you are interested in reading an inspiring and captivating book about the pro-life movement, I highly recommend the memoir “Abandoned” by pro-life leader Monica Migliorino Miller.
I recently finished the book, which is an autobiographical account of her years on the front-lines of the pro-life movement, and I found it to be a life-changing read.
More details about the book can be found here:
http://allhands-ondeck.blogspot.com/2013/01/this-morning-i-finished-reading.html
Obama and his drones? Fr. Z, was that allusion intentional? Because his drones are one of the most violent aspects of his presidency.
Ah yes, they are making sure the populace sees us as terrorists, just as the Marxists labelled Catholics “repressive”. Remember, also, that Marxism is more of a method than a system of orthodox communist beliefs. Therefore, such manipulation of the language serves the process.
I had to study Gyorgy Lukacs a long time ago. Here is a statement which illuminates this horrible twisting of language:
‘It is not men’s consciousness that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness.’…
In other words, the manipulation of society, including language, changes people’s minds about good and evil, to the point of inverting the meanings of such. Good becomes evil and evil become good.
Do you want to get really scared? “It is only when the core of being has showed itself as social becoming, that the being itself can appear as a product, so far unconscious, of human activity, and this activity, in turn, as the decisive element of the transformation of being.”
These liberals who have accepted dialectic materialism are changing the idea of individual so that the definition of a person is no longer a sacred, unique being, but a result of activity without a soul. So, if language is manipulated, it is for the purpose of first, changing the definition of who we are as humans to some creature only determined by historical events, and second, changing society into the cultural hegemony of Gramsci.
Therefore, gun-toting pro-lifers become a threat to the progress of society by holding onto old, outdated ideals which no longer serve the public and reveals those groups who only want the status quo, such as the Constitutional Amendments.
Those who are really the movers and shakers can convince the populace that such conservatives stand in the way of real progress…..
The man in this video is a pro-lifer from the Radiance Foundation. He spoke at the March for Life. He is a product of rape.
He was recently interviewed on MSNBC and the topic was turned from a pro-abortion vs. anti-abortion to pro-life vs. guns by the MSNBC interviewer. The guest did an outstanding job arguing the issues and basically stifled the MSNBC interviewer, I thought. See for yourself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=IAHN1ac-qxg
Living in the communist republic of New York, we are ahead of the rest of the country with regards to the suspension of our second amendment rights. First you ban guns…next will be religion…free speech. Feels like we are the test case for the rest of the country.
Ever hear of the Women’s Equality Act in New York? That is the latest from comrade Cuomo. What a paradox- we will ban your guns to “protect innocent lives” but to preserve “women’s equality” we are allowing abortion on demand, no waiting period, no parental consent. Before long our priests will be saying Mass in basements to hide from the government lynch mob.
Saw this speech from a fellow that grew up in China..listen carefully…it is coming:
http://youtu.be/I6_vCbi0JeI
I think people on this blog are finally waking up as well. Thanks to efforts of Fr. Z.
There’s a simple and good answer to the question, though it’s asked disingenuously. Murderers who use guns kill several thousand people in the US every year. Abortion kills several thousand every day. It is possible in some cases to defend against gun violence. What defense is available to the babe in the womb?
Given those facts, which is more urgent?
Drawing a parallel between gun control and abortion is preposterous. It’s illegal to shoot someone but not to crush his skull with forceps and suck out his brain with a vacuum, provided he still resides within his mother’s womb when you do it (and she consents).
For the sake of the argument, lets say that abortion was as illegal as the other forms of murder, as it should be. Seeking to ban guns would make about as much sense as banning vacuums.
As someone who is pro-life and pro-gun (they’re a defensive weapon to protect against crime, not to commit crime), I would feel sorry for anyone pulling this switcheroo on me. ‘They’ must honestly think we’re stupid.
Hope I’m not dropping a paw into a rabbit hole, but I’ve learned how to easily handle those who attack me for being in support of the death penalty and claiming that I can’t be pro-life at the same time. These tend to be social-justice-only people who disregard Humanae Vitae. So put up dogma (anti-abortion) and an encyclical based on basic timeless Catholic principles (H.V.) against gun control (out of the scope of eccl. authority in terms of policy) and death penalty (which B-16-when-he-was-pre-16 said was ok to have different opinions on), and these people have no intellectual chance.
I just don’t get it. But how annoying nonetheless.
To answer the Times, Many Catholic leaders and theologians are asking why many of those who support gun control and other pet liberal causes have been silent when it comes to abortion.
I must agree with “acardnal” that the interviewee dealt very deftly with the interviewers attempts to sidestep the issue which was being addressed, by moving across to gun control, from speaking about the pro-life issue. Well done that man from Radiance Foundation!
If one suffers a home invasion by 3 or 4 thugs, one needs a large magazine and plenty of bullets to defend one’s self and one’s family.
JARay, unfortunately “the man from Radiance Foundation” will probably never be invited to speak on the MSM broadcast networks again. He makes too much sense in a very eloquent way. Can’t have that.
As Gregg points out, one of the keys is the difference in orders of magnitude. I’m all for discussing possible methods for reducing gun violence, as I think we can all agree that gun violence is bad. However, we then have to discuss what the best ways are to reduce gun violence, and remarkably there’s little agreement. In fact, one might say that its a matter of prudential judgment as to how to best go about reducing gun violence. Even were we to come up with a solution, we’re then talking about a reduction of what, 5-10%? Obviously that would be excellent as that would be hundreds of lives saved every year.
On the other hand, the strategies for reducing abortion should be clear, as the ultimate goal is of course abolishing abortion, which would reduce it to pretty close to zero, thus saving hundreds of thousands of lives. So, we’re balancing discussing prudential judgment of how to address a problem to save hundreds of lives, maybe, versus the clear path to saving hundreds of thousands. We’re talking 2-3 orders of magnitude there, with the increased certainty. Is it any wonder that there is significantly more effort in faithful Catholic circles devoted to one cause as opposed to the other?
I have written a few times about two differences between gun violence and abortion:
– 2 orders of magnitude difference in number of victims
– one is illegal (and is usually vigorously prosecuted), the other is legal
I have been wondering how these good Catholics leaders could focus on one (the smaller, illegal evil) and not the other (the larger, legal evil).
At first I thought that perhaps it was a modern case of the “blind” religious guides “straining out the gnat and swallowing the camel” (cf. Mt. 24).
But it seems to be more than that. Perhaps there is an insidious element of selfishness in this. All of those “Catholic leaders” worried about gun violence realize that, by golly, it might affect them. They could be victims. None of them, however, need to worry about being victims of abortion. So, in a warped “what’s in it for me?” kind of reasoning, sure, gun violence might seem more important than abortion. Perhaps it is the ethos of the “Me Generation,” or fear.
Or maybe their hearts are just so cold, and angry, as a result of decades of radical feminist thinking and theology, that they can just say, in the Spirit of Sanger, “The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it” (Woman Rebel, 1922).
The same government that handed out weapons to criminals via Fast and Furious, and the same government that ordered armed officers to stand-down during an attack on US soil and the US ambassador wants US citizens not to own guns. Ha!
“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” -Chicago Machine Apparatchik Rahm Emanuel
“…the good thing about Newtown is, it was so horrific that I think it galvanized Americans to a point where the intensity on our side is going to match the intensity on their side.”- Comrade Ed Rendell, former Governor of Pennsylvania
Make no mistake about it-the same people who preside over the “legal” murder of millions could care less about the handful of kids who get shot. Never let a dead child go to waste, their deaths help to advance their agenda. They don’t care about “gun violence” or any of the other stuff, its the ideology not the results or objective principle. They want guns gone from private hands because that’s one of the main things that us knuckledraggers out in Flyover Country have that is a big obstacle to their gleeful implementation of whatever stupid progressive garbage they want to foist upon America. Of course, *this time* it will be different from all the other spectacular failures of statism.
Catholic folks who try to make gun control a “life” issue are usually woefully ignorant or just the same progressive Quislings who want to take the heat off of their dismal record on real life issues and are in lock step with their secular handlers. Irony of ironies, the group of Mainliners (now all pretty much just Homosexualist cults that hand out rainbow ponchos, pointy hats and crooked sticks to about anyone/thing/symbol) who gathered in DC for a photo op for more gun control met in the same Methodist building in which Prohibition was ushered in. Well intentioned stupidity then, abject failure of thinking today.
I guess we are supposed to believe that lack of snappy uniforms makes the fascism less fascistic…
Also, I’m disappointed (not really) in the USCCB for their advocacy of “assault weapons” bans and other nonsense. I wish they’d put on their big boy pants and do some real research. Also, if they are going to hide behind the “consistent life ethic” then they should see what that means instead of shoehorning anything into it according to liberal talking points. Cardinal Dolan, what are you thinking? There is no compromising with authoritarians unless by “compromise” you mean capitulate. Do you think POTUS and his minions are going to change their tune on the HHS Mandate or abortion because you are acting the useful idiot to their gun control ploys? Sure…hopefully that’s just him playing the gladhanding jester.
One thing I’ve noticed in my neck of the woods, you will find a pretty strong correlation between gun ownership/support and orthodoxy amongst Catholics. Down at the local trad church, everyone has guns, many have CCWs, etc. Down at St. Hippydippy’s? Not so much.
…watched the video clip posted above in the comment of acardnal at 5:35 p.m. – it’s also daunting to see that the MSNBC interviewer is so well coached; the guest had to be extremely well armed with a breadth of specific knowledge of any related issues, to hold fast to his argument. Well done…
Anything to drown out the noise of 55 million deaths crying out to Heaven from our land of freedom! Some of our progressive Catholics have lost faith in a real, loving God, and have replaced Him with State-worship. If the State is powerful enough it can provide all of our needs, make life fair, save us. The only problem is that no state throughout history, no matter how powerful, has been able to save its’ people from the things that are really scary (death, damnation), and many times these super-power states have become scary things themselves. The Chinese-American man in the video is right. The body-count of a deranged gunman can’t hold a candle to the bodycounts of tyrants and their all-powerful states.
Ryan Bomberger, Radiance Foundation, has provided an”after-action” report of his interview with Craig Melvin of MSNBC above. He points out that the MSM was negligent in its reporting that the anti-gun rally the day, which occurred the day after the March for Life event, involved a few thousand people but the pro-life attendees in the March for Life were in the hundreds of thousands!
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/fact-checking-my-interview-with-msnbc-after-the-march-for-life?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=433b38f336-LifeSiteNews_com_US_Headlines_01_29_2013&utm_medium=email
“Many Catholic leaders and theologians are asking why many of those who call themselves ‘pro-life’ have been silent when it comes to gun control.”
Many pro-lifers are asking why many of these liberals who call themselves ‘Catholics’ have been silent when it comes to abortion.
How many times have you heard a secular lefty say, “If you’re opposed to abortion, then don’t have one. But don’t impose your intolerant values on everyone else.” So why don’t they agree with this: “If you’re opposed to guns, then don’t have one. But don’t impose your intolerant values on everyone else”?
“Be of good cheer!” (John 16:33)
http://www.MerryCatholic.com
This from fvhale is, I think, definitely worth thinking about:
“All of those “Catholic leaders” worried about gun violence realize that, by golly, it might affect them. They could be victims. None of them, however, need to worry about being victims of abortion.”
I suspect this flavors the discussion overall. One of the most important things you have to do when securing power in a nation of millions is give the average Joe a sense of security in his daily life — the trains must run on time, or if they don’t, they must be predictably late. It’s o.k. not to have toilet paper in the stores, as long as the people know how to wrangle getting it off the black market or know which official days to stand in line for hours to get it. People will live with a wide variety of ills, as long as they have a perception that there is consistency and certainty about it.
The random guy shooting you out of nowhere throws that off. The “it could happen to me” factor is disturbing, no matter how statistically unlikely it is. I suspect that’s why we are putting government into health care, look at how much time government puts already into blaming the victims of disease, in order to reassure folks that they won’t get sick as long as they follow the rules. Just do what the administration tells you, and you won’t get cancer or heart disease, like those guys who didn’t take steps.
And too, what about the lives saved by the presence of firearms? The Bishops (and others) should learn to look at both sides of the equation. It’s like having a checkbook where you only record deposits and not checks.
I’ll add my thanks to acardnal for the Bomberger video. (See also the follow-up report.) Ryan is impressive and not easy to shut up–just the sort we need on the pro-life frontlines.
It’s all sobering stuff, but one fact jumps off the page: “The national unintended pregnancy rate, of 49%, hasn’t budged since 1995 reports the CDC.” Half of all babies are “unintended”? That sentence says more than it means (intends?) to: if their standard is “every baby a wanted baby,” most of the living shouldn’t be here. People like Bomberger explode this myth.
Therese, in regard to “half of all babies being unintended,” this goes along with “half of all babies are born out of wedlock” in the US. Clearly, the “contraceptive mentality” does not work in the long-run. I think I saw some statistic recently that a woman who is active and contacepting for 10 years has about a 50% chance of becoming pregnant somewhere in those ten years.
There is now a sort of “culture of death” humor which has sprung up in greeting cards from parents to children with catchy lines like “You know you are only hear because the c*nd*m broke,” or “You are only hear because my Plan B failed.” A society of contraception and abortion seriously damages the parent-child relationships even when the children manage to survive.
And too, what about the lives saved by the presence of firearms? The Bishops (and others) should learn to look at both sides of the equation.
Indeed – not only lives, but great harm prevented, as well. I find it extremely disturbing that the Liberal intelligentsia would label those opposed to ‘rights’ as enemies of the State (e.g. right to abortion, right to so called gay marriage, right to ban all guns).
The USCCB needs to get back on track. ‘Well, we have a policy statement concerning X and how it will help Y.’ (Y most often equaling ‘Social Justice’) Who cares! Does global warming or gun policy directly impact the purpose of saving souls?
Fatherhood and children born out of wedlock is not the subject of this post so I hesitate to post the following. Our beloved host is free to delete.
The Holy Father spoke today at his Wednesday audience of “God, the Father” in his catechesis on the Creed. He mentioned the “crisis of fatherhood in many societies” today and used phrases such as “generous, faithful and forgiving”, “never abandons his children”, and “his loving concern for us embraces even the cross.” I believe the Holy Father was not only describing God, the Father but also what a natural father should be in today’s society.
The abandonment of children by fathers is a something that cries out for justice.
Pope’s video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnyYi9U7gyw&feature=youtu.be
@acardnal – what you shared is quite relevant despite the fact that it’s not the topic. The issue of fatherhood is at the root of pro-life and family issues. I have personally seen how a young woman’s attitude to having babies changes as drastically as night to day simply because the child’s father is at her side to support her.
I have also seen many, many families completely abandoned by their fathers. (In my case, this is the other side of the immigration issue; most young men who illegally enters the U.S. leave a pregnant wife behind. Few ever go back for them; more send money, but children need more than money from their fathers.) Less drastic but still very serious are the cases in which fathers are there but don’t take their fatherhood seriously, don’t take responsibility or leadership, and hardly seem to care. In both cases, the moral foundation of the family tends to be very weak.
I would say what you shared about fatherhood is much more of a pro-life issue than guns.
It would seem that guns are, as envisioned by the Left, more of an, “End of Life,” matter, than a, “Beginning of Life, ” matter, so, properly, one might ask them why they are unwilling to allow someone to shoot an intruder, but they are perfectly willing to allow someone to smother, poison, or dehydrate an innocent person. Is it because they are in a hospital? By that right, should they object, then, to people carrying guns in hospitals? After all, some of those old people might get a bit, “frisky,” and have to be put down, you know.
The Chicken
Masked Chicken, I think you’re forgetting about HIPPA. Unless a silencer is employed, everyone would know. Then there would be more government mandated paperwork and notifications, not to mention the debates amongst the death panels about ‘how.’ Coming back to reality, what is wrong with people that ANY means would be acceptable at end-of-life other than a natural death? Sickening.
After citizens are disarmed, law enforcement will be issued Nerf guns. You know, to be ‘pro-life.’
“Coming back to reality, what is wrong with people that ANY means would be acceptable at end-of-life other than a natural death? Sickening.”
The Left seems to want to be in control of both your coming and going.
Really, shouldn’t we be working on developing force fields? Get those right and who cares what sort of guns you have :) In fact, I wish fetuses could have force fields instead of forceps covering them.
Has anyone noticed (I expect not, since it takes a birdbrain to come up with this) that in the movie, Galaxy Quest, the pro-death position is mimicked exactly by the critters on the planet where they stopped to get the Beryllium sphere? They were all cuddly until someone who was injured or defective approached and then they bared their teeth.
The Chicken
Chicken…birds are especially adept at hiding any injury or illness because other birds will shun them…or worse.
I was listening to my local Catholic radio station in the car last week, to a call-in show about abortion taking calls from, I think, atheists, and one caller, apparently honestly, suggested that human beings are just animals and so any behavior observed in the animal kingdom is valid for humans, including killing the weak, the young, the old, the sick, so that “the strong” might survive.
Just goes to show that the ancient cynicism (etymologically equating men and dogs) of Diogenes is alive and well in our “enlightened” culture. We all just need to return to nature and act like beasts, then we will be happy. And dogs don’t have guns. (They kill with their teeth. Yeah.) I think this also ties into the modern explosion of p*rn on the internet, now that anybody can film themselves or their friends–are we not just animals, like those on television or at the zoo? So thought the ancient Greek cynics, and so, to, do many modern young folks.
So many of the threads of “modern, enlightened culture” are so, so old. The results have not changed. One cannot find happiness without the God who made human beings in His own image and likeness, for His glory.
“…and one caller, apparently honestly, suggested that human beings are just animals and so any behavior observed in the animal kingdom is valid for humans, including killing the weak, the young, the old, the sick, so that “the strong” might survive.”
Jacob Bronowski, in the science documentary, The Ascent of Man, had the prescience to see this in 1972:
“And I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into – into what – into Zen Buddhism; into falsely profound questions about, “Are we not really just animals at bottom”; into extra-sensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself. We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny. Self-knowledge, at last bringing together the experience of the arts and the explanations of science, waits ahead of us.”
I think St. Thomas Aquinas would have gotten along well with Bronowski.
The Chicken
From a bill in the CO legislature:
(h) Therefore, nothing in this act shall be construed to confer
8 personhood, or any rights associated with that status, on a human being
9 at any time prior to live birth;
I noted that the legislature isn’t talking about recognizing personhood, but “conferring” it — didn’t know that my personhood was up to a legislature.
But my sister noted that it can be a human being, but still not a person. Fits well with the humans are animals philosophies.
nykash –
Actually if anything, law enforcement these days is becoming more military. They’re buying rounds of armor piercing ammo, fully automatic weapons and drones and recently are found to be running helicopter military exercises firing blanks on the streets of Miami.
http://youtu.be/ri9ioCbqJCU
So it seems the trend is to disarm the citizens, and inversely fully arm the Homeland Security and the necessary govenrment powers to detain and kill U.S. Citizens and confiscate property and food and vehicles.
Something big and horrible is going to happen in America and it won’t have anything to do with Islamic Terrorists.
For those of you who are or were police or soldiers: how does the government get you to shoot on, turn on, your own people?
“For those of you who are or were police or soldiers: how does the government get you to shoot on, turn on, your own people?”
Man, I’ve got to start drinking coffee or tea. My first reading was:
How does the government get you to shoot on, turn on, your own people?
My instant response was to think of Timothy Leary and his famous phrase:
“Like every great religion of the past we seek to find the divinity within and to express this revelation in a life of glorification and the worship of God. These ancient goals we define in the metaphor of the present — turn on, tune in, drop out.[2]”
Need more sleep…
Just a note for you budding humor writers:don’t make your readers have to think too hard. If I had written this:
Question: How does the government get you to shoot on, turn on, your own people?
Answer: Heroin
It would have taken too much time to process the joke (poor as it is).
We now return you to our regularly scheduled comments.
The Chicken
kat –
“How does the government get the police and military to turn on its own people?”
The answer is:
By slowly getting rid of those who will not follow such orders, and replacing them with those like-minded individuals or cowardly who will.
The reason that the Russians under Communism suffered so cruelly at the hands of their own state police was because individuals bent on violence and had a cruel streak alongside cowards in positions of management who would never dare oppose the leader were all granted these positions, while good men left or were thrown away.
And when you’ve got an insane man running the country, he will attract equally insane people in his party who are all too eager to please and outdo each other in cruelty to show their loyalty least they be suspected of being disloyal and losing their position and privileges. When good men leave refusing to obey unjust orders, it leaves a vacuum that evil men are quite eager to fill.
Johnno,
Precisely. Read C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. The repulsive Chief of the Secret Police, Miss Hardcastle, says that you really can’t get somebody to do her work well unless they get a kick out of it.
Johnno, Thanks.
It’s so hard to picture our young men, whom we honor for the service to our country, being sent into our neighborhoods to arrest us, shoot at us, etc., and actually doing so. Or our police officers who live in our communities and are our neighbors, also doing such things. Blows my mind to think about, but we have seen it in history often enough…SCARY
(I should have added “and young women” and probably also should add the “not-so-young” to the groups of soldies, and police officers)…
acardinal.. thanks for posting that video.
We live in creepy times.. where lies are taken as truth. Pray.
I was just amazed at this photo released by the White House showing the President skeet shooting. It is all over the media.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-02-02/white-house-releases-picture-of-president-obama-skeet-shooting
Apparently Obama also shoots guns!