Current Events: January 2010 Archives

Good article on how the pro-life movement is bigger and broader than the media and political focus group stereotypes:

The group most important to contradicting mainstream presumption, in my view, are pro-life Democrats. The progressive liberalism dominating the Democratic Party, which includes a rigid litmus test for being “pro-choice,” is a formidable challenge for the pro-life movement, not to mention, an extreme political calculation on the part of Democrats. The conventional political assumption that people who have pro-life views on abortion are “conservative” is nonsense. If the Democratic Party wants to be successful, it will have to accommodate those with diverse views on this issue.

RTWT. Certain forked-tongued Catholics in public life have claimed that voting pro-life is imposing one's "personal beliefs" on others -- implying that those "personal beliefs" are particular religious beliefs and practices, that protecting unborn life is the equivalent of mandating meatless Fridays and the Apostle's Creed. The broad array of non-Catholic and non-religious groups shows just how silly that excuse is.

Quoth President "Let me be clear" Obama:

The last thing I will say, though -- let me say this about health care and the health care debate, because I think it also bears on a whole lot of other issues. If you look at the package that we've presented -- and there's some stray cats and dogs that got in there that we were eliminating, we were in the process of eliminating. For example, we said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your -- if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you're not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge.

Now, let me get this straight: "some provisions" just "snuck in there" (as opposed to being written and voted on by members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate), and those random "provisions" "might have" broken promises (and statements) that citizens would be able to...

• keep their existing insurance


• make decisions with their doctors without government interference

Which would imply that all those people who were saying that the health care bills, if passed, would eventually force people to give up their existing insurance and face government interference with private medical decisions -- all those people who were called (and are still being called) "obstructionists", "scaremongers", "teabaggers", and who knows what-all else -- all those people were correct.

And President Obama's administration was calling them liars.

So: allowing random legal provisions that violated previous pledges to magically come into existence; insisting that those legal provisions did not exist and that people who insisted they did were dupes or malevolent liars; berating people who voted against the reform bills because of thse provisions and then, in the same weekend, casually noting that well, yes, those provisions exist but are already being taken out (really? when? and by whom?)....

...that does bear on "a whole lot of other issues," doesn't it?

Archbishop Serge Miot of Port-au-Prince among the dead; "hundreds" of priests and seminarians still buried under the rubble of the cathedral.

HT American Catholic