U.S. Catholics: E-mail a big fat 'NO' to Congress

From the USCCB:

Congress has the most pro-abortion members in 16 years—and abortion advocates are newly energized. Their radical agenda goes beyond Roe v. Wade, and seeks to turn abortion into a fundamental “right” that the government would have to subsidize with taxpayer monies.

If the well-funded abortion lobby succeeds, abortion will become—for the first time in our country’s history—a government entitlement.

One such effort was fought back successfully when the bishops mobilized the Catholic faithful in their 1993 postcard campaign against the so-called “Freedom of Choice Act” (FOCA). Recent sponsors of FOCA plan to introduce a similar bill soon…and President Obama has promised to sign it if it reaches his desk.

While FOCA would achieve the abortion promotion agenda all at once, other bills could accomplish the same agenda in a piecemeal fashion. Widely supported pro-life measures in the annual appropriations bills are already at risk.

Recent polling shows that Americans strongly support laws limiting or regulating abortion, including laws honoring parental involvement in a minor daughter’s abortion decision, laws upholding the conscience rights of health care professionals, limits on abortion funding, and bans on partial-birth abortion.

To guard against the erosion of current pro-life measures—and to keep abortion from becoming a federal entitlement—our voice is needed now more than ever.

Add your voice to the millions of citizens urging our government to “oppose FOCA or any similar measure, and retain laws against federal funding and promotion of abortion.” As pro-life messages start flooding in from their constituents, members of Congress will see that they should avoid dividing our nation with policies that offend the pro-life values of the majority of Americans.

Follow this link to the NCHLA site where you can fill out a simple form (takes less than a minute) which will be forward to your US Senators and Representatives.

Catholics : Step Up or Step Aside

I begged. I pleaded. I prayed. I asked Americans to vote for life, and sadly millions of Catholics put life issues back into the deep recesses of their clouded minds. You can make excuses, call me names and pontificate all that you want about how it isn't about 'one issue' - and I will agree with you on the latter. It is about fifty million issues, all infants in various stages of development ripped to shreds from their first home - their mother's womb in the name of convenience.

Now the American Bishops are calling you into service. Are you up to it?

President Obama stated as Candidate Obama that passing the FOCA was going to be a top priority for him if elected to the Presidency.

"The first thing I'd do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act. That's the first thing that I'd do." -- Senator Barack Obama, speaking to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, July 17, 2007

If you believe he is a man of his word, you must act now.

Here is the Senate version of the FOCA. Here is the House version of the FOCA.

Among the more than 550 federal and state laws that FOCA would nullify are:

• Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003

• Hyde Amendment (restricting taxpayer funding of abortions)

• Restrictions on abortions performed at military hospitals

• Restrictions on insurance coverage for abortion for federal employees

• Informed consent laws

• Waiting periods

• Parental consent and notification laws

• Health and safety regulations for abortion clinics

• Requirements that licensed physicians perform abortions

• “Delayed enforcement” laws (banning abortion when Roe v. Wade is overturned and/or the authority to restrict abortion is returned to the states)

• Bans on partial-birth abortion

• Bans on abortion after viability. FOCA’s apparent attempt to limit post-viability abortions is illusory. Under FOCA, post-viability abortions are expressly permitted to protect the woman’s “health.” Within the context of abortion, “health” has been interpreted so broadly that FOCA would not actually proscribe any abortion before or after viability.

• Limits on public funding for elective abortions (thus, making American taxpayers fund a procedure that many find morally objectionable)

• Limits on the use of public facilities (such has public hospitals and medical schools at state universities) for abortions

• State and federal legal protections for individual healthcare providers who decline to participate in abortions

• Legal protections for Catholic and other religiously-affiliated hospitals who, while providing care to millions of poor and uninsured Americans, refuse to allow abortions within their facilities -- Americans United for Life

FOCA would automatically overturn state abortion reporting requirements in all 50 states, 44 states' laws concerning parental involvement, 40 states' laws on restricting later-term abortions, 46 states' conscience protection laws for individual health care providers, 27 states' conscience protection laws for institutions, 38 states' bans on partial-birth abortions, 33 states' laws on requiring counseling before an abortion, and 16 states' laws concerning ultrasounds before an abortion.

Contact your Representatives and Senators NOW before this bill goes any further.

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If you reside in New York, please see this old Ponderings entry on the New York Reproductive Health and Privacy Prevention Act. Eliot Spitzer fell from his post as our Governor amid scandal yet there are many who are fighting for this proposal to become law in our state. Did you know that according to NARAL Pro-Choice New York, New Yorkers were 'trailblazers' in the pro-abortion *ahem*, 'pro-choice' movement? I guess they want us to celebrate that New York had legal abortion three years prior to Roe v. Wade being passed.

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According to NARAL's web site (no, you're not getting a link for that one), seven states (California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Nevada and Washington) have legislation on the books similar to FOCA.

• In Maryland , FOCA-type legislation has been on the books since 1991. According to Planned Parenthood's Alan Guttmacher Institute, the abortion rate in the United States DECREASED nine percent since 2000 to 19.4 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age in 2005. By contrast, the state of Maryland in 2005 produced a rate of 31.5 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age, an INCREASE of eight percent since 1991.
• Other states with similar FOCA laws on the books show abortion rates larger than the national average of 19.4 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age:
• California has a rate of 27.1 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age. Abortions in California represent 17.3 of all abortions in the United States .
• Connecticut has a rate of 23.6 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age. The rate has increased 12% since 2000, when it was 21.1 abortions per 1,000 women.
• Hawaii has a rate of 21.8 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age.
• Nevada 's rate is 27.0 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age.

--- Family Research Council

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I confess to almighty God,

and to you, my brothers and sisters,

that I have sinned through my own fault,

in my thoughts and in my words,

in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do;

and I ask blessed Mary, ever virgin,

all the angels and saints,

and you, my brothers and sisters,

to pray for me to the Lord our God.

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From Blessed Mother Teresa ~ "What is taking place in America," she said, "is a war against the child. And if we accept that the mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another."

"Any country that accepts abortion, is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what it wants."

+Pope Leo XIII - On Socialism

We have addressed the issue of abortion and the US election of 2008. I would like to provide quotes for you to discern in regard to the late pontiff's wise teachings on Socialism and 'spreading the wealth around'. For more, see Rerum Novarum.

To remedy these wrongs the socialists, working on the poor man's envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies. They hold that by thus transferring property from private individuals to the community, the present mischievous state of things will be set to rights, inasmuch as each citizen will then get his fair share of whatever there is to enjoy. But their contentions are so clearly powerless to end the controversy that were they carried into effect the working man himself would be among the first to suffer. They are, moreover, emphatically unjust, for they would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create utter confusion in the community.

It is surely undeniable that, when a man engages in remunerative labor, the impelling reason and motive of his work is to obtain property, and thereafter to hold it as his very own. If one man hires out to another his strength or skill, he does so for the purpose of receiving in return what is necessary for the satisfaction of his needs; he therefore expressly intends to acquire a right full and real, not only to the remuneration, but also to the disposal of such remuneration, just as he pleases. Thus, if he lives sparingly, saves money, and, for greater security, invests his savings in land, the land, in such case, is only his wages under another form; and, consequently, a working man's little estate thus purchased should be as completely at his full disposal as are the wages he receives for his labor. But it is precisely in such power of disposal that ownership obtains, whether the property consist of land or chattels. Socialists, therefore, by endeavoring to transfer the possessions of individuals to the community at large, strike at the interests of every wage-earner, since they would deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his wages, and thereby of all hope and possibility of increasing his resources and of bettering his condition in life.

The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error. True, if a family finds itself in exceeding distress, utterly deprived of the counsel of friends, and without any prospect of extricating itself, it is right that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each family is a part of the commonwealth. In like manner, if within the precincts of the household there occur grave disturbance of mutual rights, public authority should intervene to force each party to yield to the other its proper due; for this is not to deprive citizens of their rights, but justly and properly to safeguard and strengthen them. But the rulers of the commonwealth must go no further; here, nature bids them stop. Paternal authority can be neither abolished nor absorbed by the State; for it has the same source as human life itself. "The child belongs to the father," and is, as it were, the continuation of the father's personality; and speaking strictly, the child takes its place in civil society, not of its own right, but in its quality as member of the family in which it is born. And for the very reason that "the child belongs to the father" it is, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, "before it attains the use of free will, under the power and the charge of its parents."(4) The socialists, therefore, in setting aside the parent and setting up a State supervision, act against natural justice, and destroy the structure of the home. (FOCA anyone?)

It must be first of all recognized that the condition of things inherent in human affairs must be borne with, for it is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. Socialists may in that intent do their utmost, but all striving against nature is in vain. There naturally exist among mankind manifold differences of the most important kind; people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition. Such unequality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community. Social and public life can only be maintained by means of various kinds of capacity for business and the playing of many parts; and each man, as a rule, chooses the part which suits his own peculiar domestic condition. As regards bodily labor, even had man never fallen from the state of innocence, he would not have remained wholly idle; but that which would then have been his free choice and his delight became afterwards compulsory, and the painful expiation for his disobedience. "Cursed be the earth in thy work; in thy labor thou shalt eat of it all the days of thy life."

And if the Pope's words are not enough, I submit wise words from some other famous men in history:

To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Thomas Jefferson

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
Thomas Jefferson

I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on the objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.
James Madison

Property is the fruit of labor...property is desirable...is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.
Abraham Lincoln

When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.
Benjamin Franklin

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been about 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: '>From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.
Alexander Fraser Tytler (1747–1813)

No matter what anyone may say about making the rich and the corporations pay taxes, in the end they come out of the people who toil.
Calvin Coolidge

We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
Sir Winston Churchill

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot lift the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot establish security on borrowed money. You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
William Boetcker

The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.
Bertrand de Jouvenel

To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection, it is plunder.
Benjamin Disraeli

Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.
Will Durant

The mounting burden of taxation not only undermines individual incentives to increased work and earnings, but in a score of ways discourages capital accumulation and distorts, unbalances, and shrinks production. Total real wealth and income is made smaller than it would otherwise be. On net balance there is more poverty rather than less.
Henry Hazlitt

When a self-governing people confer upon their government the power to take from some and give to others, the process will not stop until the last bone of the last taxpayer is picked bare.
Kershner's First Law

To lay with one hand the power of government on the property of the citizen, and with the other to bestow it on favored individuals... is none the less robbery because it is... called taxation.
United States Supreme Court

A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.
Thomas Jefferson

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicity.
Thomas Jefferson

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
Thomas Jefferson

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
Thomas Jefferson