CHD Linked to Pro-Aborts, AGAIN!

Estase has blogged before about Catholic Campaign for Human Development, its partisan background, and its ongoing links to pro-abortion politicians.  Former CHD head John Carr was also associated with Center for Community Change, a progressive group that advocated abortion.  Center for Community Change is associated with the Tides Foundation, a Soros front group. 

The new head of CHD, Ralph McCloud, acted as campaign treasurer for Planned Parenthood-endorsed, pro-abortion candidate Wendy Davis.  (Hat tip to Lisa Graas.)

Real Life Hannibal Lectors

Hat tip to Father Zuhlsdorf, from whom the following comes.  This creature is polluting the internet with his evil, and ask yourself if this pro-abort doesn't sound like a serial killer.

First, never quote Mother Theresa at me--she was an evil hag who worshipped poverty, who did not help people except to encourage them to suffer more for her faith, while she lived in comfort and traveled far and wide to recieve the accolades of the gullible.  I would never find the words of that wicked woman persuasive.  Second, the standard bullying tactics of waving bloody fetuses might cow the squeamish, but I'm a biologist. I've guillotined rats.  I've held eyeballs in my hand and peeled them apart with a pair of scissors.  I've used a wet-vac to clean up a lake of half-clotted blood from an exsanguinated dog.  I've opened bodies and watched the intestines do their slow writhing dance, I've been elbow deep in blood, I've split open cats and stabbed them in the heart with a perfusion needle.  I've extracted the brains of mice. . . with a pair of pliars.  I've scooped brains out of buckets, I've counted dendrites in slices cut from the brains of dead babies.  You want to make me back down by trying to inspire revulsion with dead baby pictures?  I look at them unflinchingly and see meat.  And meat does not frighten me.--PZ Myers

Well, I think that if Dr. Gosdell ever reopens his abortion mill in Philadelphia, PZ Myers would be more than willing to help him collect more baby feet.  "When your daughter is lying on the slab, Senator, what part of you will feel pain?"  Hannibal Lector has nothing on PZ Myers.

Ordered Liberty: Judge John Roll: "greater love hath no man..."

Ordered Liberty: Judge John Roll: "greater love hath no man..."
Estase has been thinking about this situation a good deal. In eighteenth century England, there was hardly unanimity about religion. High church versus low church, Tories versus Whigs; the whole Henry Sacheverell deal. But I haven't seen anything quite as strange as the Tuscon memorial service in a long time. If a public figure in eighteenth century England was murdered, you never would have seen a Druid brought in to worship a tree, which was essentially the kind of religion the White House endorsed two weeks ago. Roll was Catholic, Giffords was Jewish, and they brought in a Native American Shaman to offer the blessing?

But what is Obama's history with religion? Obama described conservatives famously as bitter people who cling to their God and guns. He also declared that America was no longer a Christian nation. To top it all off, he even endorsed the building of Muslim Jihad Land a block from the site of World Trade Center! For someone who has a really poor record of defending the Judeo-Christian tradition, President Obama didn't really make things better in Tuscon.

Metaphysics for Liberals

Last week, someone at Salon.com wrote a really sophomoric piece entitled "Bill O'Reilly:  An Idiot in Search of a Village" in response to a debate Loofa Man had with an idiot from some athiest group.  In the debate, O'Reilly explained that he believed in God, saying, "The tide rolls in, the tide rolls out.  It always happens."

What Loofa Man was obviously getting at was that there is order and regularity to the universe;  something you would never expect if the world was the result of chance or happenstance.

The brilliant soul at Salon, however, claimed this discussion as evidence of Loofa Man's idiocy, saying that THE MOON and not God was the reason for the tide coming in and out.

In Aristotelian Metaphysics, there are four types of causes. (Final, Material, Formal, and Efficient)  Of these four causes, the Moon indeed would constitute the Efficient cause of the motion of the tides;  that is, the proximate reason for water to be pulled in this way is the gravity of the Moon.  In this case, the Formal cause is somewhat irrelevent, as a Formal cause is that which orders the material shape or design of a thing.  The formal cause of things made by men are the minds of their designers.  A Material cause is, in this case, the law of gravity, because in this case that is the "subject out of which or in which the actuations of causes occurs."  (The Philosophy of Being, Smith and Kendzierski, p. 121) This leaves the Final Cause, the reason for all things, which theistic Aristotelians associate with God. 

So of the four causes of Aristotle, the only one that Salon recognizes is the Efficient Cause, leaving blank spaces for the other three.  Salon allowed a variety of comments of the nature of "Right wingers are stupid, and they don't know anything about science," so apparently the only religion tolerated by liberals is Islam.  One of the comments said something snide about "the Pope's invisible friend," but no where did anyone cite Islam as a "stupid" religion.  My previous blog "Obama's Catholic-Bashing Speechwriter" talked about Jon Lovett, who joked that TSA positions were designed to give defrocked Catholic priests a job opportunity.  Mr. Lovett would of course never make a joke about the systematic abuse of women in Islamic societies.  So we see a distinct double-standard, where athiestic liberals hold their fire on Islam, but let Catholics have it with both barrels.  (Estase now expects to be blamed for any incidents where Catholics are shot.)

Pope Appoints Pro-Abort to Pontifical Academy of Science

Hat tip to Rorate Caeli.

A doctor from Communist Brazil, Miguel Nicolelis, who is also a pro-abortion fanatic, was appointed by Pope Benedict XVI to the Pontifical Academy of Science.  Why a pope would want a pro-abort as an advisor escapes me.

Daniel Hannan to the Illinois Republican Party

OK, so he wasn't specifically talking to the corrupt oligarchy that gave us Mark Kirk, but he could have been.  In his excellent new The New Road to Serfdom, he remarks on page 33

"How extraordinary, I thought, to have a system where politicians see their role as being to represent their constituencies in their parties rather than the other way around;  where policy is made bottom-up rather than top-down.  My own electoral division, South East England, is, like Georgia, a pretty right-wing place--certainly in the sense of being fiscally conservative.  But, whereas both parties in Georgia try to reflect the temper of the local populace, Labour candidates in South East England are, if anything, further to the left than in the rest of the country, reflecting as they do the prejudices of tiny selection committees."

Of course, since Illinois' Republicans have been unable to elect the members of the state's Republican central committee since 1979, the direction of the party is by the same sort of clique that Hannan complains of being the bane of the British party system.   When Illinois Republicans are goaded into making a lying pro-abort their Senate candidate, can we really say they have an open primary?  Time can only tell, but it is entirely possible that Alexi Ginnoulias' positions on abortion would have been identical to those of Mark Kirk.  Kirk is Illinois' answer to Aqua Buddha Rand Paul.  Is it a good thing that I can say that about my Senator?

Taking on Huck Haters

This is to all the conservative bloggers who made ridiculous statements about Mike Huckabee being a "big government Republican" because he defended Michelle Obama's anti-obesity efforts--GROW UP! ! ! !

Being reflexively anti-Obama doesn't make you conservative.
Being reflexively pro-Palin doesn't make you conservative.
Being a thoughtless drone makes you identical to the people who make the liberal side so boring, monotonous, and ridiculous.

And who is better than Huckabee?
The undependable Palin (sometimes pro-life, sometimes not)?
The even worse Mitt Romney (pro life before pro choice before pro life)?

The Fifth Column: The AP Is Bewitched

The Fifth Column: The AP Is Bewitched
Leave it to historians to call sacraments "magic". I find many things academic historians teach to be intrinsically anti-Catholic. When Estase was an undergraduate, he used the book Charles II: The Last Rally by Hilaire Belloc to prepare for a debate on the Restoration. My professor, Caroline Hibbard told my not to consult Belloc, sniffing that he was "a victorian." Hibbard found fault with much of what I argued, despite the fact that it was entirely consistent with what Eamon Duffy argued a few years later in The Stripping of the Altars, and with documents in the collection The Stuart Constitution. Anti-Catholic historians? Next you'll tell me journalists like Obama.

Obama's Catholic-Bashing Speechwriter

Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett spoke to a crowd recently, joking that the TSA groping was designed to give defrocked Catholic priests a job opportunity.  Well, which is it?  Either the TSA searches are a proper law enforcement move, or they are akin to sexual abuse.  And why is the same regime that continually tells us that Muslims cannot be offended so quick to make a defamatory joke about Catholic priests?

Once Upon a Time in the West - Exposing the Twenty-First-Century Communist Conspiracy

Once Upon a Time in the West - Exposing the Twenty-First-Century Communist Conspiracy
Golitsyn has a point-- if the Cold War is over, why would the Russians be making nice with Cuba and Nicaragua? If communism really were dead and buried, why would relations with Cuba matter?

Thomas and TEA

Is Catholicism incompatible with the TEA party ethic?  Many prominant churchmen and the usual CST drones say no. Frederick Copleston's A History of Philosophy,Volume Two says of Aquinas,

"If this principle, that the part is ordered to the whole, which represents St.Thomas's Aristotelianism, were pressed, it would seem that he subordinates the individual to the State to a remarkable degree;  but St. Thomas also insists that he who seeks the common good of the multitude seeks his own good as well, since one's own good cannot be attained unless the common good is attained, though it is true that in the corpus of the article in question he remarks that right reason judges that the common good is better than the good of the individual.  But the principle should not be overemphasized, since St. Thomas was a Christian theologian as well as an admirer of Aristotle, and he was well aware, as we have already seen, that man's final end is outside the sphere of the State:  man is not simply a member of the State, indeed the most important thing about him is his supernatural vocation.  There can, then, be no question of 'totalitarianism' in St. Thomas, though it is obvious that his Aristotelianism would make it imposssible for him to accept such a theory of the State as that of Herbert Spencer:  the State has a positive function and a moral function.  The human being is a person, with a value of his own;  he is not simply an 'individual'."

The first remark I would make is that Aristotelianism cuts both ways.  Maybe Aristotle wasn't Ayn Rand or Herbert Spencer, but he was certainly no collectivist either.  Read the Politics, and you will see somebody who thought that spending money on others was praiseworthy, but always saw private giving as a sign of moral worth, and certainly never would have endorsed a monolithic government of spoils and largesse.

The second remark I would make is that St. Thomas also would never have approved of tolerance for Protestant sects, much less the easy access to pornography that distinguishes modern America.  In other words, Thomas's dream of a government that helps us to Heaven is rather inconsistent with the American system.  If government is supposed to get us to heaven, how do public schools and housing projects do that, other than by seperating our bodies from our souls? 

The Fifth Column: Moral Pygmies

The Fifth Column: Moral Pygmies
Kellmeyer is right, once again. Contraception is always morally wrong because God is always the author of life, not us. The church is pandering to modern notions about sex only being procreative when man wishes for it to be procreative. It is crazy to expect Catholics to regard contraception as intrinsically immoral so long as professional theologians keep inventing exceptions to the immorality. It is the logic of the secular world that says that, well, you can commit sins, but prudence dictates that you make it safe for yourself to commit such sins. Isn't that the same logic as "safe, legal, and rare" abortion? If anything is safe to do, it isn't likely to be rare. What the Pope might have said is this: "Using condoms to prevent AIDS may be a good idea, but it is still a sin for the same reason that wearing a mask during the commission of a robbery doesn't change the nature of a robbery. And while wearing a mask isn't in itself immoral, contraception in and of itself is immoral."

From Sinai's Height, Part Two

Catholic Nurse Catherine Cenzon De Carlo, whose horrendous account of being forced by her employer Mount Sinai Hospital to perform an abortion appeared in Q.E.D.'s sister blog Aristotelian Moments last December, had her lawsuit against her employer thrown out by a judge.  Apparently, the judge thinks that, although any other form of emotional trauma can make one extremely wealthy, being forced to commit murder by your employer against your will is something your employer bears no liability for.  Maybe DeCarlo should have just taken the wrong acne medication--that is far more serious than being forced to betray your faith.

The Limits of "Fiscal Conservatism"

There is quite a debate going on in conservative circles right now over whether or not pro-lifers should stuff their principles right now.  The argument is that economic issues are more important.  Social issues are "divisive."  We need a "big tent." Where was all this talk about a big tent during the years when economic conservatives got free trade, and pro-lifers got nothing?  Where was the big tent when Bush cut taxes, and succeeded in doing nothing outside of appointing two pro-life supreme court justices?  I really love it when we social conservatives are fine when it comes to unseating Bela Pelosi, but now that we won, we get to sit back and let the Ayn Rand club rule the roost.  Really?  Don't think so.

Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield

Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield
Great blog.

Representative Driehaus Contra Free Speech

Ohio Representative Steve Driehaus wants to jail Mrs. Dannenfelser, head of the Susan B. Anthony Fund, for stating that ObamaCare includes abortion. 

Common Sense Catholicism: Dr. Smith Issues a Response to Dr. Von Hildebrand

Common Sense Catholicism: Dr. Smith Issues a Response to Dr. Von Hildebrand
Another response to the West cult.

The Fifth Column: Tom Lehrer's TOB

The Fifth Column: Tom Lehrer's TOB
Excellent article about "Theology of the Bawdy."

Caroline Glick :: Latma brings you...Pallywood!

Caroline Glick :: Latma brings you...Pallywood!
I really think Drek O'Hara represents the anti-semetic tone of many Irish people.

What is This?

www.islamoncapitalhill.com

This site describes an Islamic prayer meeting in Washington. The President announced that he would not attend the National Prayer Breakfast this year, also stating that America is not a Christian nation. Allegedly, the event involving Islam is supported by the White House. Estase does not know if this is true.