“Sacred Duty”
Thou shalt not give any of thy seed to be consecrated to the idol Moloch, nor defile the name of thy God. I am the Lord. Lv:18:21: 21
A Planned Parenthood affiliate’s newest president and CEO said in an official statement that she regards her work for the biggest abortion business in America to be a holy profession.
Melaney Linton, who will now oversee Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, is determined to further the Life-ending work of Planned Parenthood:
“I am honored and humbled to be entrusted with such a sacred duty…I pledge to do everything in my power to fight back against the ideological attacks on Planned Parenthood and women, so that no teen will ever say she didn’t know how she got pregnant, no one will ever be denied basic reproductive health care, and no woman will ever be forced to bear children she cannot adequately support.”
Starting March 1st, Linton will manage 13 abortion and abortion-referring centers in Southeast Texas and Louisiana, as well as the largest abortion mill in America, located in Houston, Texas.
Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast alone performed over 12,000 abortions in 2010 and banked over $17 million – 49 percent of which came from taxpayer dollars. Linton will succeed Peter Durkin, who earned over $200,000 in 2010 by performing this “sacred duty.”
Linton is mistaken when she calls her work “sacred.” There is nothing holy about extinguishing the lives of millions of unborn children as a way to line the company pocketbook. The new CEO vows to fight back against Life-affirming measures that have limited the abortion provider, because it cuts into the proceeds Planned Parenthood receives from every abortion committed.
Planned Parenthood, with their money-hungry abortion agenda, has lured women and young girls into their clinics with the promise of putting them first, but Planned Parenthood’s financial standing is all that matters to the abortion giant. The abortion business refuses to acknowledge the physical, mental, and emotional damage abortion causes, thus, abandoning women because they are no longer seen as a profit.
The Planned Parenthood abortion business is a multi-million dollar company which preys on women to drive up their bottom line. This government-sanctioned killing of children must be brought to an end. As members of the Pro-Life community, we are dedicated to ending the horror Linton and Planned Parenthood so fiercely defend. As long as Planned Parenthood remains devoted to ending innocent human life and committing these unjust moral atrocities, we are dedicated to severing the revenue stream that is responsible for the death of innocent unborn children.
http://www.texasrighttolife.com/a/843/Planned-Parenthood-CEO-claims-work-to-be-sacred
The Catholic Church Is Not a Democracy (Thank God)
One of the arguments that the Obama administration has been floating around in defending the HHS ruling is that over 90% of Catholic women have either used or are using contraceptives, and have had abortions. Using this statistic, the HHS is telling the Catholic Church that since so many Catholics are already defying the Church’s ban on both these issues, there really is no conscience problem, and that it is high time the Church steps into the reality of this life and removes the bans on artificial contraception and abortion. It is time for the Church to abandon outdated philosophy and support the very people She purports to serve instead of alienating them.
Trying to push this idea that so many Catholics already defy the Church on abortion and contraception is reason alone for the Church to abandon her mission and role in this world is so astoundingly ignorant that it is mind boggling. Here’s a news flash: The Catholic Church, in upholding and defending Apostolic Tradition and the teachings that have been passed down to us since the first century IS serving her people.
If the Church ever abandoned Apostolic Tradition then She would no longer be the Catholic Church. She would just be another man-made creation that in time would dissolve into obscurity. There is a reason why She has stood for two thousand years and it is precisely because She is not an institution created by man but by Christ, and that is why the Church cannot abandon her doctrines and Traditions. She can’t. It’s that simple. And this is what most of those that oppose the Church’s stance on abortion and contraception cannot or do not want to understand. They clamor for the Church to change, but they do not realize that if Church did change the teaching of the Truth of abortion and contraception, She would be denying Christ Himself, the founder and head of the Catholic Church.
Another thing many non-Catholics and the liberals do not understand about the Church is that it is not a democracy. The Church simply cannot vote away these bans on contraception and abortion. Catholic beliefs are not determined by the vote of the people and they never have been and I thank God for that. What the Church believes and has passed on to Her people through out the ages is what has been taught since the time of the Apostles and the Church cannot change any of that, similar to what Pope John Paul II replied when confronted about the ordination of women, it simply cannot be done. The Church does not have the power or authority to change the Truth and Tradition as taught by Christ to His apostles and the apostles to their successors, today’s bishops.
We may find certain bishops and clerics defying the Church instead of defending her, but the onus is on them, not the Catholic Church. Since the time of Judas Iscariot, there have always been and will always be people within the Church that defy Her authority. Even if all the faithful abandoned the Church, the Church would have no recourse but to continue teaching the Truth as it has been handed down to Her without fail. That is the Church’s divine mission.
From the earliest Church documents of the first century, abortion and contraception were always considered and taught to be mortal sins. This is not something the Church invented when Pope Paul VI gave the world Humane Vitae. He upheld and defended two thousand years of Truth. He simply could not do otherwise. It wasn’t in his power to do so. Even if he had wanted to allow this evil within the Church’s teachings, he could not have done it and the Holy Spirit would not have allowed it. The Holy Spirit, the protector and guide of the Church, would have not allowed any doctrinal error to enter the Church despite all the bad popes and anti-popes that occupied the Chair of Peter.
Progressive Catholics and liberals alike do not understand the role of the Holy Spirit and the Church He protects from the gates of hell. It is for this reason that the ban on contraception and abortion will always stand. We, as Catholics, are taught to obey the Church’s precepts and teachings, and we will always be protected from having to believe doctrinal error if it were possible for it to enter the Church.
There would be no uproar of the HHS ruling, Roe v. Wade and same gender “marriages” etc. if the Church were a democracy because all of these things would be acceptable to the majority and they would vote to allow these evils into the Church. If you don’t think so, look again at the statistic at the number of Catholic men and women using or having used contraceptives. The anchor of Truth that is the Catholic Church is why I am glad She is not a democracy. People waver on Truth: Christ through His Church does not.
There is no backward thinking in the Catholic Church. Yes, she looks to the past, but only to secure the Truth to teach the world of the present and future. There have been about 50 million abortions since Roe v. Wade. How many more women would have had abortions if it were not for the Churches ban? No, the Catholic Church is not a democracy, and I truly thank God for that, for the sake of the unborn and all of us that have faith in Her.
http://petersbarque.blogspot.com/2012/02/thank-god-church-is-not-democracy.html
“What Makes Killing Wrong?”
The conundrum faced by the organ transplant industry, that the removal of vital organs kills the “donor,” can be “easily obviated by abandoning the norm against killing,” two leading U.S. bioethicists have said. In an article titled, “What Makes Killing Wrong?” appearing in last month’s Journal of Medical Ethics, the authors have moved the argument forward by admitting that the practice of vital organ donation ignores “traditional” medical ethics.
“Traditional medical ethics embraces the norm that doctors … must not kill their patients. This norm is often seen as absolute and universal. In contrast, we have argued that killing by itself is not morally wrong, although it is still morally wrong to cause total disability.”
Traditional ethicists have responded, warning that this stream of thought, now common in the medical community, will ultimately undermine the right of anyone to life or the protection of law, and will annihilate public trust in the medical profession.
“If this dreadful doctrine is permitted and practised it is impossible to conjure up the degradation to which it will lead,” said Anthony Ozimic, communications manager of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC). A physician “has but to certify his patients as unproductive and he receives the command to kill.”
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong a Duke University bioethicist and Franklin G. Miller, an ethicist with the National Institutes of Health, the federal health authority in the US, admitted that patients who are routinely declared dead for purposes of organ “harvesting” are in fact alive and that removing their organs kills them.
Pro-life objectors to the practice of “non-heart beating organ donation” have long argued that it is tantamount to murdering helpless patients, reducing human persons to mere organ farms. The article proposes, however, that this is simply not a problem. Killing a patient who has lost all functional “abilities” and autonomy, “cannot disrespect her autonomy, because she has no autonomy left. It also cannot be unfair to kill her if it does her no harm.”
“Killing by itself is not morally wrong,” the authors said, “although it is still morally wrong to cause total disability.” The problem with killing is “not that the act causes loss of life or consciousness but rather that the act causes loss of all remaining abilities.”
Ozimic called the paper “obnoxious” and warned that its authors have “forgotten the lessons of the 20th century,” referring to the utilitarianism-based eugenics programmes of the pre-war Nazi government.
Ozimic quoted the famous 1941 sermon of Clemens von Galen, Cardinal Archbishop of – known as the “Lion of Munster” for his opposition to the Nazi euthanasia programme: “Once admit the right to kill unproductive persons… then none of us can be sure of his life.”
Ozimic said that if it is allowed to continue the concept will spell the end of our current understanding of medicine as doing good for human persons.
“We shall be at the mercy of any committee that can put a man on the list of unproductives. There will be no police protection, no court to avenge the murder and inflict punishment upon the murderer. Who can have confidence in any doctor?”
But the article’s authors admit that the situation is already grave from the point of view of traditional medical ethics. The so-called “dead donor rule,” they say, is already “routinely violated” in transplant practice anyway.
In order to be consistent with “traditional medical ethics” the practice of organ transplants, already a multi-billion dollar international medical industry, would have to be stopped immediately. But stopping organ transplants on the mere grounds that it kills people, they said, would be “extremely harmful and unreasonable from an ethical point of view.”
Ozimic critiqued the paper, saying, “According to some doctor, or because of the decision of some committee, they have no longer a right to live because they are ‘unproductive citizens’.
“The opinion is that since they can no longer make money, they are obsolete machines, comparable with some old cow that can no longer give milk or some horse that has gone lame. What is the lot of unproductive machines and cattle? They are destroyed.” But men and women, Ozimic said, are neither machines nor cattle who can be discarded when they no longer serve someone else’s needs.
“Here we are dealing with human beings, with our neighbours, brothers and sisters, the poor and invalids . . . unproductive – perhaps! But have they, therefore, lost the right to live? Have you or I the right to exist only because we are ‘productive’?”
Shocking as it may sound to the layman’s ears, however, the article’s position is not unusual in the bioethics community. The notion that the value of human life is founded upon the individual’s abilities has become run-of-the-mill in universities and, more crucially, in hospital ethics committees. It was popularised by Peter Singer, the professor of ethics at Princeton University, who infamously proposed that parents have the power to convey personhood upon their newborn children and should be allowed to kill them at will.
The fixation on autonomy, one of the three “principles” that utilitarian secular bioethics regards as the ultimate indicators of human value, has driven much of the international pressure for legalised euthanasia. Around the world, secular bioethicists supported the killing of Terri Schindler Schiavo on the grounds that her “autonomy” was permanently impaired.
Experts have noted that this form of bioethics, as distinct from classical, Hippocratic medical ethics, has since the 1970s become the leading stream of thought in most medical organisations in developed countries. The movement has succeeded in legalising euthanasia in the Netherlands and Belgium and assisted suicide in three US states.
In addition to outright euthanasia and legalized assisted suicide, other means of killing patients are sneaking in under the legal radar in response to the demands of autonomy-obsessed Bioethics. “Terminal sedation” and death by dehydration or withdrawal of life-saving drugs and treatments have become common causes of death among elderly and disabled patients in the UK, Canada and across Europe.
Elites, Excellence and Altruism
We are witnessing a surge of popular outrage and even revulsion against an onslaught of ideologically liberal changes affecting the lives of millions of Americans. This outrage is fueled, among other things, by the following:
• Decisions of activist judges favoring homosexual or private property-denying socialist agendas and showing complete disregard for public opinion;
• Junk science academics whose unwarranted and twisted findings are celebrated in the liberal media and establishment and are subsequently used to justify society-changing legislation and regulation;
• Out-of-touch, liberal politicians using legislation or the raw power of government to intervene more and more inappropriately in the lives of Americans, creating in the process a leviathan Socialist State;
• Ideologically-motivated media run amok, showering notoriety on leftist and opportunistic intellectuals, politicians, and entertainment celebrities willing to trumpet the “politically correct” line on a spectrum of controverted issues.
Do Not Confuse “Liberal Establishment” with True Elites
Undoubtedly, the individuals targeted by this furor can somehow be considered as elites. However, they do not represent true elites. Rather, they represent the latter’s corruption. They act contrary to the mission of all true elites which is based on service to the common good and the positive influencing of others, so as to foster goodness and virtue.
There is therefore a danger of conflating the “liberal establishment” with true elites and, while attacking the evils of liberalism, to play inadvertently the game of the left by favoring social egalitarianism. In sum, if we do not make the necessary distinction, we will “throw the baby out with the bath water.”
Thus, it is imperative to have a clear notion of what a true elite is so as not to confuse it with distortions or caricatures. Since society cannot live without a ruling class, the destruction of natural elites will cause them to be replaced with a new class of bureaucrats forming a nomenclature, as happened in socialist countries.
Elites, Excellence and Altruism
The French word élite was incorporated into the English language in 1823 but has its remote origins in the Latin term eligere, “to choose.” It is employed to designate individuals or groups who stand out in a special way in a certain social setting or activity. Thus, elite is used to designate “a group of persons who by virtue of position or education exercise much power or influence;” and thus we speak of “the elite of the entertainment world” or “members of the ruling elite;” and “the intellectual elites of the country.”
The philosophical Encyclopedie de L’Agora defines elite as “the best of the best.” Littré cites fleur [flower] as the first synonym of elite. “The elite of an army is the flower of the army. In the words of Tocqueville, an intellectual elite is distinguished by a disinterested love of truth; and in the sphere of action, an elite is distinguished by courage, as Plutarch teaches us in his Lives of Illustrious Men.”
Distinguishing Between True and Decadent Elites
According to Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, “countries which have an elite that is conscious of its responsibility are countries that rise in the firmament of history and brilliantly accomplish their mission. On the contrary, however, nations whose elites are unaware of their responsibility and mission are nations that inevitably fail and plunge into the great catastrophes of history.”
The reason for this, the illustrious Brazilian thinker explains, is that if the “elite has the privileges it has” it must not live to enjoy these privileges but rather “to serve society entirely,” which supposes “that the elite be disposed to make the necessary sacrifices to accomplish its mission.” And, he continues, “The main responsibility or mission of an elite individual—whatever may be the area of his excellence—is to dedicate himself to the common good. This donation of self to the common good consists in having a clear concept of what the elite must do.”
And that is why “if the elite renounces its responsibility to be the social class that sets the tone in society—a moralizing and Christian tone rather than a de-Christianizing and paganizing one—it ceases to be a true elite.”
Combat Socialism, Not True Elites
Given the confused state of notions in many minds today, we need to insist that a nation cannot exist, or at least it cannot develop normally, without true elites; because a nation progresses only with the impulse of the best, the most skilled, and the most virtuous.
Because of socialism’s egalitarian essence, it loathes the natural elites that rise thanks to the development and use of talents, free enterprise and the hereditary perpetuation of family values and merits.
What outraged Americans ought to do when corrupted elites favor socialism is not to condemn all elites indiscriminately but to combat the former. In other words, they should target the specific elites that allowed themselves to become corrupted. Without this special care to distinguish between false and true elites, one ends up by inadvertently playing into the hands of the enemy we are trying to defeat: socialism.
Outrage against the liberal establishment has sparked increased talk about America’s Founding Fathers. However, few remember to note, much less ponder on how they were members of the social, cultural, and political elite of their time.
We live in dangerous times that require great clarity of vision and strength in action. Let us eschew all muddled, anti-elitist thinking and rhetoric and remain faithful to America’s principled and battle-seasoned anti-communist and anti-socialist past. Should we do this, the troubles we are going through may well become America’s “finest hour.”
http://nobility.org/2010/10/05/a-society-without-elites-is-a-socialist-society/
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