Poor Judgment

Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Rod Blagojevich, (Bill Richardson?)...

The list of shady and criminal individuals with whom Mr. Obama has chosen to align himself and whom he has (at least in the past) chosen to support goes on. It seems a new name is added to that list every month. The tying of any one of these names to a conservative Republican politician would cause months-long scandal, if not ending his career outright. But the media has chosen to look past these scandals since they involve not a Republican, but the ultra-liberal Democrat they adore and idolize, Barack Obama.

Whether Mr. Obama himself was involved in such corruption and criminal activity remains to be seen. I'll even give him the benefit of the doubt and say he just chose to befriend the wrong kind of people. But, at the very least, this shows an astounding lack of judgment and a blind spot for those close to him, not good qualities in the leader of the free world.

On Human Dignity

The Catholic Church's decrees on the morality of sexual activity have always been closely tied to human dignity. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's new instruction Dignitas Personae ["The dignity of a person"] details a number of issues regarding bioethical morality in areas such as in vitro fertilization and the adoption of frozen embryos. The Catholic Church holds that both of these processes are morally wrong, and while this might at first seem hard to accept, the Magisterium has got it right.

Not only is IVF (in vitro fertilization) wrong in the sense that it involves the abortive destruction of any left-over embryos after successful implantation, it is wrong on another, more basic level with respect to the dignity of humans and of human acts. Paragraph 16 of Dignitas Personae puts it thus: "The Church moreover holds that it is ethically unacceptable to dissociate procreation from the integrally personal context of the conjugal act: human procreation is a personal act of a husband and wife, which is not capable of substitution." This is the reason why not only IVF is wrong, but also frozen embryo adoption, as well as contraception and abortion.

The "conjugal act" of human marital relations is closely and irrevocably linked to procreation. This is to say that marital relations do not necessarily have always to be for the purpose of procreative conception, but this option must never be denied the conjugal act. Because of the inherent dignity of the human and his actions, the conjugal act must always be linked to procreation, and vice versa.

Because contraception and abortion deny the procreative aspect of sex, they are morally wrong (abortion being wrong on other levels as well). IVF and frozen embryo adoption are also morally wrong because they deny the sexual aspect of procreation. (Traditional adoption is not rendered immoral here because it is not procreation.) These are two sides of the same coin; human dignity makes the separation of the procreation-conjugation link morally untenable.

Fight FOCA

''Dear Friend,

I'm writing to let you know about a terrible piece of legislation called "The Freedom of Choice Act" (FOCA).

FOCA would establish the right to abortion as a fundamental right (like the right to free speech) and wipe away every restriction on abortion nationwide.

It will eradicate state and federal abortion laws that the majority of Americans support and prevent states from enacting similar protective measures in the future.

Please read the expert analysis by Americans United for Life (AUL) and sign the Fight FOCA petition at:
http://www.FightFOCA.com

Thank you!''

Gethsemane

With the election of Senator Obama as President and with his party receiving majorities in both houses of Congress, we just may be in for a load of suffering in the next four years, or at least the most vulnerable among us will be- as Obama and the Democrats ran on a platform that is terribly and extremely anti-life and pro-abortion.

As the statement of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops released after Obama's victory stated: the Democrats must not see their victories as vindication for the most extreme planks of their platform, which most of America does not support. These victories were likely more a result of the hard times economically and militarily that so often these days seem to lead to their success in elections.

But I have a feeling the Democratic Party will see this as a kind of Mandate of Divine Right (since modernism says vox populi vox dei), and so, as James Francis Cardinal Stafford recently said regarding the next four years: "Gethsemane will not be marginal. We will know that garden."

Think Beyond Rhetoric

neverfindout.org

Let's never find out

What will happen to this country (especially the least powerful of us, the unborn) if America elects the man judged the most liberal senator in 2007 to the Oval Office, with Democrats controlling both houses of Congress? Please, let us never find out.

Both Bush and McCain have their problems, but neither of them was ever judged the most extremely conservative in anything. How can Americans expect the Senate's most extremist Democrat (farther left than even his running mate Biden) to reach across the aisle?

May we all pray for protection from the liberal extremists and their culture of death and division.

Sen. Biden steps into the circus ring

Another pro-choice Catholic politician shows his true colors on the abortion issue. When asked by Tom Brokaw what he would answer to a hypothetical question from Obama, Biden said the following:

I’d say, "Look, I know when it begins for me." It’s a personal and private issue. For me, as a Roman Catholic, I’m prepared to accept the teachings of my church. But let me tell you. There are an awful lot of people of great confessional faiths—Protestants, Jews, Muslims and others – who have a different view. They believe in God as strongly as I do. They’re intensely as religious as I am religious. They believe in their faith and they believe in human life, and they have differing views as to when life – I’m prepared as a matter of faith to accept that life begins at the moment of conception. But that is my judgment. For me to impose that judgment on everyone else who is equally and maybe even more devout than I am seems to me is inappropriate in a pluralistic society.

How absurd it is to hold a position like this, especially in a time such as ours. We have seem time and again of late fundamentalist Muslims who feel it is an integral part of their religious truth to kill infidels. In such a pluralistic world as ours, do you step back and say "They're intensely as religious as I am religious" and that "to impose [my] judgment on everyone else who is equally and maybe even more devout than I am seems [to be] inappropriate"?

The only result of living out pluralism in politics is anarchy. Each political person is always trying to advance what he or she thinks or knows to be true. To ask anything else is to ask something fundamentally different from our established political system.

Also, as Catholics, we recognize the virtue of charity. Sen. Biden: if you personally know that life begins at conception, don't you feel that it's necessary to be charitable and to open the eyes of people who aren't fortunate enough to know that truth? Let alone the fact that you should devote every waking hour to saving the fetuses that you know are human and that you know have souls and God-given rights that are daily being denied them as they are stabbed and poisoned out of existence.