Those who persist in denying that the Church is engaged in a culture war, the combatants in which are aptly called the “culture of life” and the “culture of death,” might ponder this June blog post by my summer pastor in rural Québec, Father Tim Moyle:

Tonight I am preparing to celebrate a funeral for someone (let’s call him “H” to protect his privacy) who, while suffering from cancer, was admitted to hospital with an unrelated problem, a bladder infection. H’s family had him admitted to the hospital earlier in the week under the assumption that the doctors there would treat the infection and then he would be able to return home. To their shock and horror, they discovered that the attending physician had indeed made the decision NOT to treat the infection. When they demanded that he change his course of (in)action, he refused, stating that it would be better if H died of this infection now rather than let cancer take its course and kill him later. Despite their demands and pleadings, the doctor would not budge from his decision. In fact he deliberately hastened H’s end by ordering large amounts of morphine “to control pain” which resulted in his losing consciousness as his lungs filled up with fluid. In less than 24 hours, H was dead.

Let me tell you a bit about H. He was 63 years old. He leaves behind a wife and two daughters who are both currently working in universities toward their undergraduate degrees. We are not talking here about someone who was advanced in years and rapidly failing due to the exigencies of old age. We are talking about a man who was undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatments. We are talking about a man who still held onto hope that perhaps he might defy the odds long enough to see his daughters graduate. Evidently and tragically, in the eyes of the physician tasked with providing the care needed to beat back the infection, that hope was not worth pursuing.

Again, let me make this point abundantly clear: It was the express desire of both the patient and his spouse that the doctor treat the infection. This wish was ignored.

Canada’s vulnerability to the culture of death is exacerbated by Canada’s single-payer, i.e. state-funded and state-run, health care system. And the brutal fact is that it’s more “cost-effective” to euthanize patients than to treat secondary conditions that could turn lethal (like H’s infection) or to provide palliative end-of-life care.

. . .

But in Canada, a mature democracy, that utilitarian calculus among government bean-counters wouldn’t survive for long if a similar, cold calculus were not at work in the souls of too many citizens. And that is one reason why the Church must engage the culture war, not only in Canada but in the United States and throughout the West: to warm chilled souls and rebuild a civil society committed to human dignity.

It’s a Culture War, Stupid

Ozymandias

Most of you have probably heard or read the reports trumpeting the “eradication” of Down syndrome in Iceland). The problem is that what is being termed “eradicating” the “problem” actually means that those with Down syndrome are being put to death. The celebratory language is all too similar to the way we once spoke of wiping out malaria by killing infected mosquitoes. But of course children in the womb are not mosquitoes; they are human beings, love and willed by God. Imagine saying that we had eradicated malaria by killing every person who had it!

A low point in the article linked above comes at the end, when a proponent of aborting babies who likely have Down syndrome is quoted as saying,

“We don’t look at abortion as a murder. We look at it as a thing that we ended. We ended a possible life that may have had a huge complication … preventing suffering for the child and for the family. And I think that is more right than seeing it as a murder—that’s so black and white. Life is gray.”

Well, pardon me for considering murder to be so black and white! One minute a heart is beating heart, the next minute it’s not. The “thing” that you ended is a human life. Calling such a child a “possible life” is scientifically dishonest. A beating heart does not exist in something that is possibly alive; he or she is alive. No linguistic gymnastics can legitimately describe the situation otherwise.

Further, “preventing suffering” by killing the patient is an illustration of the twisted logic of the culture of death. Death is the increasing being proposed as the solution to today’s problems. If you—or more perniciously, “we”—decide that your life is not worth living, we will kill you and call ourselves compassionate for doing so.

The greatest tragedy in all of this is that we veto the gift of God. Some of God’s gifts come in paradoxical packages; those with disabilities and special needs have much to teach us and many ways to bless us. Without them we may never reach our full humanity, which is meant to include compassion, humility, reverence, and respect. Not one of us is perfect. All of us have difficulties that require support from others. When we forget or reject this we lose an important aspect of our humanity: interdependence.

Iceland is not alone in this; much of the rest of the world has also refused to accept the disabled into our communities.

. . .

What about those who aborted their babies? We as a Church cannot avoid our responsibility to declare the dignity and worth of the disabled. More than ever, our world needs the Church’s testimony, for this 90% statistic is a startling one. But even as we witness to the dignity of the disabled and to the wrongness of abortion, we must also embrace those who chose abortion and now struggle with having made that decision. We are called to reconcile and to bring healing to all who have faced this crisis and fallen. Many were pressured and felt alone and afraid. We offer this embrace through confession and through healing ministries like Project Rachel, which offers counseling, spiritual direction, support groups, and prayer services. Even as the Church speaks out against abortion, she must also reconcile those who have fallen under the weight of these heavy issues.

Iceland Is Not Alone in “Freezing Out” the Disabled

Culture of Death

[O]ur present culture, which makes war on marriage and the family, is also making war on genuine manhood. In spite of its own braggadocio, modern culture doesn’t really make war on things such as “sexism” and the abuse of women and children because it encourages the machismo that turns men into abusers while simultaneously discouraging the familial and paternal responsibility that turns men into good husbands and fathers. Such a culture does not only make men miserable, it makes women and children miserable too—and all in the name of the pursuit of freedom and happiness! It’s all so pathetically funny. A tragedy that is also a divine comedy because it shows that virtue is the only way of getting to the happy ending.

Beyond Machismo to Manhood: The Challenge of Real Masculinity

Culture of death. Ozymandias

The founder of Planned Parenthood favored abortion as a tool for rooting out society’s ‘undesirables.’ Richard Spencer and his ilk do too.

. . .

[T]he alt-right tends to praise abortion for the same reasons that Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, praised it: It helps to rid the country of “undesirables.”

Richard Spencer, the keynote speaker in Charlottesville and the central figure of the alt-right movement, finds abortion useful. He has explained that abortion will help to bring about his vision of an elite, white America: “The people who are having abortions are generally very often Black or Hispanic or from very poor circumstances.” The people whom Spencer wants to reproduce, he says, “are using abortion when you have a situation like Down Syndrome.” It is only “the unintelligent and blacks and Hispanics,” he claims, “who use abortion as birth control.”

On this understanding, abortion is a form of eugenics, helping to shape the population to produce more desirables and fewer undesirables. This is why Spencer supports the practice — not because he believes that it is a moral good or that women are owed the right to choose, but because he views it as a morally neutral tool that improves the American gene pool by making it whiter and richer.

The Alt-Right Carries on Margaret Sanger’s Pro-Abortion Legacy

The alt-right is part of the culture of death.

New Jersey became the third state in the nation to prohibit the sale of tobacco products to anyone under 21, Gov. Chris Christie announced Friday, saying, “no one should lose their life due to any addictive substance.”

New Jersey already had banned tobacco sales to anyone under 19. But the bill’s advocates pushed for a higher age pointing to studies that show youth who don’t take up smoking into their early 20s will never make it a habit.

Chris Christie just did something he says will save lives in N.J.

NJ joins 2 other states in raising the age to buy tobacco to 21: California and Hawaii

Meanwhile, in New Jersey if a pregnant girl under the age of 18, i.e., a minor, wants to have an abortion, that child is not required to involve their parents….

No parental notification required in California and Hawaii either….

Moral preening and the culture of death

Ozymandias

Islam is a religion, not a race, and, what is more, it is thoroughly multiracial, with all races represented in its ranks. To oppose ISIS and seek appropriate measures to prevent the spread of its influence and power is no more racist or ‘Islamophobic’ than opposition to the terrorism of the IRA in the 1970s was racist or ‘celtophobic.’ Opposition to barbarism and the terrorism it practices is a mark of civilization, not racism.

. . .

Europeans have embraced the culture of death, contracepting themselves out of existence. Europe is not suffering from a population explosion but a population implosion. With a shrinking and aging population, unwilling to reproduce itself, immigration becomes a necessity. One cannot have a sustainable economy, still less a continually expanding economy, if the number of producers and consumers is shrinking. A culture which seeks self-gratification instead of the self-sacrifice needed to raise children is doomed to self-destruction. It has no future. It has no future for the plain and simple reason that it has no children. In this sense, it can truly be said that the future belongs to those who forsake selfishness for the selflessness of parenthood. The meek really do inherit the earth!

. . .

As one who subscribes to–nay, as one who submits to—the Permanent Things, I would say that the “West” is not synonymous with the Permanent Things, nor do the Permanent Things depend on the survival of the “West” for their permanence. On the contrary, the “West” is dying because it has turned its back on the Permanent Things.

The Permanent Things are grounded in a reverence for God and for the Church that He established, and also in a reverence for the traditional family which is the bedrock of all healthy culture and the seed with which it plants itself into the future. When the love for God is gone and the family has been abandoned, there is no future. The secular fundamentalist “West” is decaying because it is decadent, and it is dying because it has embraced the culture of death.

What will be left when the secularist “West” is dead will be the Permanent Things. Christianity is alive and well, and thriving and growing, in Africa, Asia, China–and yes, even in resurrected embryonic form in Europe and other parts of the “West.” Europe and the “West” might be committing collective suicide, but Christendom is always new, as it is always old, because it is the Permanent Thing.

Is the West Lost Forever?

Ozymandias

The fact that some defend abortion as a sacred act should alert us to the depth of the spiritual warfare that is going on. Abortion has never been merely or even primarily a political issue. It is a false religion. When pro-life Christians, for example, pray in front of an abortion mill, it is not simply a matter of pro-life people opposing false medicine. It is the true Church in conflict with a false Church. One former clinic security guard, after being converted, admitted why he was angry at pro-life sidewalk counselors: “You were coming to protest in front of our church. That clinic was where we conducted our worship.”

The “Sacrament” of Abortion

It’s almost as if there is a pattern in how the media treats stories about women and their wombs. “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament,” activist Florynce Kennedy famously said. But the fact is that, as far as the media are concerned, abortion is a sacrament. And keeping the womb empty at all costs during all, or nearly all, of one’s fertile years is the sine qua non of modern American womanhood. Woe to the woman who “chooses” otherwise.

Fecundophobia: The Growing Fear Of Children And Fertile Women

All the talk of “choice” is and always was bullshit, and used by the same people who call children “spawn”. Abortion is part of the culture of death.

#WarOnWomen

The Planned Parenthood Action Fund had sent out a letter saying that “for twenty years, Bob Filner has defended women”. At the rally, attendees were told that he had spent “the last twenty years protecting our rights and the rights of women everywhere.”

But while Filner was protecting women, no one was protecting women from Filner. Filner’s behavior was well known, but not commented on. The California Democratic Party maintained its red wall of silence around the son of a Communist, a Freedom Rider and member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus because he was one of their own.

Even Filner’s disgrace hasn’t changed that. Filner pleaded guilty to three counts and will not serve any time in prison. Instead he’ll spend three months at home, receive some counseling and three years on probation.

He won’t go into California’s 100,000 strong sex offender database; even though if there’s anyone in the entire state who belongs there, it’s him. Filner probably deserves to join the 1 in 375 adults in California on that list more than Donald Honan who was only convicted of indecent exposure.

Meanwhile in Lakeland, California, a 75-year-old man was sentenced to six months in jail for groping a court reporter. If Anthony Duruh had been the progressive mayor of San Diego, he might have also gotten the Filner Justice Special and be spending his time at home with his feet up on the couch.

In the Democratic Party, as with American Express, membership has its privileges. The same liberal political establishment that protected Filner throughout his career is still covering for him.

The liberal protectors of women, like Filner, Clinton and Ted Kennedy, often seem like the exact opposite. But as long as they support abortion—all is forgiven, forgotten and drowned in the deepest waters off Martha’s Vineyard.

Despite the occasional mumbled mentions of economic equality, the liberal idea of social improvement for women now consists of little more than the right to kill. That the right to kill is championed by opponents of war and the death penalty makes it all the more perverse. The only real right of women under liberalism is the right to kill their own children.

Liberalism’s War on Women

Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.

The minivan symbolizes a family too large to fit into a sedan, and that means more than two children. Large families are ridiculed in our society, made the object of punch-lines and stereotypes, and sometimes that ridicule spills over into malevolence and hatred. Don’t think so? Let’s take a look.

The Terrors of the Minivan! Why Popular Culture Wages War Against Large Families

Fertility shaming = Fecundophobia

Continue reading ‘Fecundophobia – Abortion as a Sacrament’ »