Wednesday 30 January 2013

SF Archbishop: Legalizing Gay Marriage Is Like ‘Legalizing Male Breastfeeding’

January 29, 2013

Salvatore Joseph Cordileone, the Catholic archbishop for the archdiocese of San Francisco, Calif. (AP)

(CNSNews.com) – Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, who leads the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco, said that same-sex “marriage” is so contrary to nature that legalizing it would be like “legalizing male breastfeeding.”

In a Jan. 28 interview with Mary O’Regan for the Catholic Herald in England, Archbishop Cordileone cautioned against using the term “gay marriage” because it is a natural impossibility, and to keep using those words only perpetuates a charade. He likened the impossibility of same-sex marriage to another biological impossibility: “Legislating for the right for people of the same sex to marry is like legalizing male breastfeeding.”

He also said, “Truth is clear. Wanting children to be connected to a mother and father discriminates against no one. Every child has a father and a mother, and either you support the only institution that connects a child with their father and mother or you don’t.”

40 Years After Roe v. Wade, Thousands March to Oppose Abortion

Drew Angerer/The New York Times

Pro-life activists made their way down Constitution Avenue toward the Supreme Court during the March for Life in Washington on Friday.

By ASHLEY PARKER

Published: January 25, 2013

WASHINGTON — Three days after the 40th anniversary of the decision in Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court case that legalized abortion, tens of thousands of abortion opponents from around the country came to the National Mall on Friday for the annual March for Life rally, which culminated in a demonstration in front of the Supreme Court building.

On a gray morning when the temperature was well below freezing, the crowd pressed in close against the stage to hear more than a dozen speakers, who included Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council; Representative Diane Black, Republican of Tennessee, who recently introduced legislation to withhold financing from Planned Parenthood, and Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky; Cardinal Seán Patrick O’Malley of Boston; and Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania and Republican presidential candidate.
¶Mr. Santorum spoke of his wife’s decision not to have an abortion after they learned that their child — their daughter Bella, now 4 — had a rare genetic disorder called Trisomy 18.
¶“We all know that death is never better, never better,” Mr. Santorum said. “Bella is better for us, and we are better because of Bella.”
¶Jeanne Monahan, the president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, said that the march was both somber and hopeful.
¶“We’ve lost 55 million Americans to abortion,” she said. “At the same time, I think we’re starting to win. We’re winning in the court of public opinion, we’re winning in the states with legislation.”

Read more at the New York Times.

Tuesday 29 January 2013

San Francisco’s Walk for Life West Coast Draws 50,000 (1412)

Marking the 40th anniversary of Roe, the Walk for Life brings Catholic leaders and pro-life activists, women religious and students together

by JOAN FRAWLEY DESMOND 01/29/2013

Pro-life supporters marching in the 2013 West Coast Walk for Life.

– Paul Ryan/Walk for Life West Coast

SAN FRANCISCO — In 2004, the first year of the Walk for Life West Coast, 20,000 pro-life marchers in downtown San Francisco confronted a counterdemonstration of about 1,000 protesters, drawing a strong police presence.

This year, an estimated 50,000 pro-lifers converged on the city Jan. 26 to mark the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion. They marched through city streets past about 100 opposing demonstrators waving signs and demanding abortion rights. The mood among pro-lifers was enthusiastic and relaxed, energized by the presence of Catholic leaders, leading pro-life activists and a deep-blue California sky.

The sharp increase in pro-life marchers raised spirits after the 2012 campaign season featured partisan battles over federal funding of Planned Parenthood and dire warnings from abortion-rights supporters that Roe could be overturned if a Democratic president was not in place to appoint future justices.

Monday 28 January 2013

A Flood of Suits Fights Coverage of Birth Control

Shawn Thew/European Pressphoto Agency

President Obama, with his health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, offering a compromise on the contraception mandate last year.

By ETHAN BRONNER

Published: January 26, 2013 1086 Comments

In recent months, federal courts have seen dozens of lawsuits brought not only by religious institutions like Catholic dioceses but also by private employers ranging from a pizza mogul to produce transporters who say the government is forcing them to violate core tenets of their faith. Some have been turned away by judges convinced that access to contraception is a vital health need and a compelling state interest. Others have been told that their beliefs appear to outweigh any state interest and that they may hold off complying with the law until their cases have been judged. New suits are filed nearly weekly.

March for Marriage

From the National Organization for Marriage’s Brian Brown:

Not long ago, I sent you an email hinting that NOM was getting ready to launch some major initiatives. Well, after participating in the March for Life last Friday, I am excited to announce that NOM is putting together a March for Marriage.

It will take place in Washington DC on March 26th — the day the Supreme Court will be hearing oral arguments in the Proposition 8 case. You can go to www.MarriageMarch.org and sign up for information and alerts today. . .

When I wrote you about some of NOM’s plans, I was boarding a plane to go to France to spend a week in Paris, offering whatever support and advice I could to the organizers of their recent marriage rally. I had the privilege of being in that town and witness ONE MILLION people gather to tell their government: “Children have a Right to A Mother and Father; Don’t Redefine Marriage!”

And, I have to say, it was incredible!

I was proud to march with pro-marriage brothers and sisters of every background — Catholics, Christians, Muslims and Jews; even some gay individuals who are against gay marriage! — all marching for a single, united purpose: to defend the commonsense truth that marriage is a unique union of a man and a woman, because children need their mother and father.

Join and Donate at http://www.marriagemarch.org/

Home - a vital enterprise

| 28 Jan 2013 | comment

tags : home, Home Renaissance Foundation, HomeMakers Project,

When did you last hear the home mentioned by an economist or politician? Ever? And yet the home is the place where the basic cell of society, the family, does its own essential “work”: giving individuals the security, values and virtues that enable them to contribute to the positive progress of their community, country and the world.

This silence about the essential work of the home seems to be most marked in the Anglosphere, but a globalised economy and media are spreading the blinkered market approach to everything throughout the world.

Read more at Mercator.Net

Saturday 26 January 2013

JAN08

What is Marriage? - Man and Woman: A Defense

Until recently, no society had questioned whether marriage would be anything other than a male-female union. What Is Marriage?identifies and defends the reasons for this historic consensus and shows why redefining civil marriage is unnecessary, unreasonable, and contrary to the common good. What Is Marriage? answers common objections: that the historic view of marriage is rooted in bigotry; that it is callous to people's needs; or that it can't show the harm of recognizing same-sex couplings.

Originally published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, the book's core argument quickly became the year's most widely read essay on the most prominent scholarly network in the social sciences. Since then, it has been cited and debated by scholars and activists throughout the world as the most formidable defense of the tradition ever written. Join us as authors Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George discuss about what marriage is, why it matters, and how to talk about it.

Friday 25 January 2013

How low can they go? 40th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade Advertisement

This NOT NICE. It is creepy. And patronising. And sexist. And elitist. And advocating substance abuse. But, as a "celebration" of Roe v. Wade it is instructive regarding the moral decadence attendant on, and driving, the culture of death.

Thursday 24 January 2013

Why my support for abortion was based on love…and lies

By Jennifer Fulwiler

A version of this post was originally published at my personal blog as How I Became Pro-Life. I wanted to run it here in honor of this weekend's March for Life. (Note: It includes a graphic description of abortion.)

Who is human?

When I was younger, I was always particularly shocked when I heard about societies where it was common to abandon or kill unwanted newborns. In college I once read a particularly graphic description of a family in ancient Greece "discarding" a newborn baby girl. I was shocked to the point of breathlessness. I was also horribly confused: How could normal people be okay with this, let alone participate in it? Nobody I knew would do that! Were people that different back then?!

Because of my deep distress at hearing of things like this, I found it really irritating when pro-lifers would refer to abortion as "killing babies." Obviously, none of us pro-choice folks were in favor of killing babies; to imply otherwise, in my mind, was an insult to the babies throughout history who actually were killed by their insane societies. We weren't in favor of killing anyone. We simply felt like women had the right to stop the growth process of a fetus if she faced an unwanted pregnancy. Sure, it was unfortunate since fetuses had potential to be babies one day, and we recognized that there was something special about that. But, alas, that was a sacrifice that had to be made in the name of not making women slaves to their bodies.

I continued to be vehemently pro-choice after college. Though my views became more moderate once I had a child of my own, I was still pro-choice. But as my husband and I began a religious search that led us to Christianity, we were increasingly put on the defensive about our views. One day my husband was re-evaluating his own pro-choice ideas, and he made a passing remark that startled me. He said:

"It just occurred to me that being pro-life is being pro-other-people's-lives. Everyone is pro-their-own-life."

Divorce Reform Could Save Billions in Government Aid

Now that government belt-tightening has become a national obsession, divorce-reform advocates are making the argument that they can be part of the solution.

Divorce is costly for everyone, they argue, and encouraging troubled couples to try to work things out could benefit the national bottom line.

The average split costs a couple $2,500. A new single-parent family with children can cost the government $20,000 to $30,000 a year. That’s $33 billion to $112 billion a year total in divorce-related social-service subsidies and lost revenue.

The country is “absolutely” ready for divorce reform, said Chris Gersten, founder and chairman of the nonpartisan Coalition for Divorce Reform.

If states pass the coalition’s legislative model that aims at cutting divorce rates by a third in five years, “the savings to taxpayers will be pretty dramatic,” he said.

Even a “modest reduction” in the U.S. divorce rate likely would benefit 400,000 children and save taxpayers significant sums, wrote retired Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears and University of Minnesota professor William J. Doherty, proponents of a new “Second Chances” divorce reform.

“We have to rethink this ‘easy-to-divorce’ strategy,” added Michael McManus, author and founder of Marriage Savers, which promotes a community marriage strategy that has been shown to reduce divorce rates by an average of 17.5 percent.

Americans have consistently supported more restrictive divorce laws. For more than 30 years, the General Social Survey asked Americans if divorce should be “easier or more difficult to obtain than it is now?” The most popular answer is always “more difficult.”

Why Most Men Aren’t Man Enough to Handle Web Porn

: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

All parties, on left and right, believe in freedom. The question is whether there are ways of having too muchfreedom, or of using it in the very wrong way, so that it starts to hurt other things we care about, like prosperity, safety and happiness.

The issue comes to a head with internet pornography. The standard view is that people should be left to look at porn as much as they like, just as they should be left to buy guns, eat unhealthy foods, divorce and remarry eight times and make nothing of their talents: it’s a free country, after all.

But what is freedom? If you listen to the theologian and philosopher St Augustine, real freedom doesn’t mean the right to do anything whatsoever. It means being given access to everything that is necessary for a flourishing life – and, it follows, being protected from many of the things that ruin life.

Wednesday 23 January 2013

Abortion Promises Unfulfilled

by Michael J. New

Forty years after Roe v. Wade, the promise that legal abortion would guarantee fewer out-of-wedlock births, less child abuse, and lower crime rates remains unfulfilled.

In the 1960s and 1970s, abortion advocates used a variety of arguments to advance their cause. Some emphasized women’s liberty and autonomy. Others tried to persuade people that easy access to abortion would benefit society as a whole. Consider just two representative quotations:

“A policy that makes contraception and abortion freely available will greatly reduce the number of unwanted children, and thereby curb the tragic rise of child abuse in our country.” (NARAL, 1978)

“The impact of the abortion revolution may be too vast to assess immediately. It should usher in an era when every child will be wanted, loved, and properly cared for.” (NARAL co-founder Larry Lader, 1974)

Legal abortion, advocates argued, would result in fewer out-of-wedlock births and less child abuse, and would ensure that every child was wanted. Over time, these arguments lost credibility because neither out-of-wedlock births nor child abuse was decreasing.

In the early 2000s, academics Steven Levitt (University of Chicago) and John Donohue (Yale University) published a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, titled “The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime,” claiming that legal abortion unexpectedly lowered crime rates in many American cities during the 1990s. Groups supporting abortion rights generally distanced themselves from this argument, fearing its eugenic implications. Though the findings have received some widespread credibility because of Levitt’s popular book Freakonomics, they have been much criticized by other academics.

In this essay I show that easy access to abortion during the past forty years hasnot benefited society as a whole. Legal abortion has not reduced out-of-wedlock births, child abuse, or crime rates.

Tuesday 22 January 2013

Proposition 8 Case NOM Blog

Prop 8 Case:
http://www.prop8case.com/?REF=EB120122NANT

Forty Years Later: It's Time for a New Feminism

by Elise Italiano

A feminism that promotes abortion as the key to women’s freedom does not help us flourish, preserve our dignity, or protect us from evils. We must support women so that the “choice” between life and abortion is no longer difficult because life is the natural choice.

This past fall, I couldn’t turn on the television, open my web browser, or walk down the streets of Washington, DC, without hearing, reading, or seeing abortion-rights advocates campaigning against the War on Women.

Many of my American sisters solicited me to join them through online ads, door-to-door campaigns, and political commercials. Their rhetoric pitched this as a necessity: We needed to fight the offensive, strategic maneuver of some politicians to repeal a hard-earned feminist victory—namely freedom from any restriction on our reproductive liberties.

I was invited to stand with women who loudly and unabashedly denounced any such “restrictions” in a battle where the weapons were words, and the strategy was to couch the cause in the language of basic civil and human rights.

Though portrayed as defensive, I found it to be an offensive campaign, not merely seeking to hold a line, but to move it forward. This campaign was filled with graphic slogans about the female body, candid confessions of personal sexual experiences to the public, and even ads in which voting was compared to casually losing one’s virginity. It was also a campaign filled with language about the self: my rights, my freedom, my liberties. This campaign struck me as particularly antithetical to femininity, in everything from its crude content to its aggressive delivery.

These women feared to lose not only things around which they have built their lives—access to birth control and abortion on demand—but also an ideology that disassociates sex from love, responsibility, and, of course, children. While birth control and abortion still would have been readily available to them if they lost their campaign, their ideology’s strength certainly would suffer: The door would be wide open to voices that promote a feminism rooted in utterly different grounds.

Perhaps more importantly, these women persuaded the media that all women who call themselves feminists agree with them about what women need to be happy, healthy, and free. They even had the support of Congress and the White House, despite the legislative and executive branches’ rejection of a ban on abortions that target baby girls in the womb.

G. Tracy Mehan III | Tuesday, 22 January 2013

tags : abortion, Roe v. Wade, US Supreme Court

40 years after Roe v Wade, a deadly stalement

Despite recent state restrictions and a growth in pro-life sentiment, more than a million lives are lost to abortion each year in the US.

Americans are a mixed bag in terms of their attitudes toward abortion and the humanity of unborn children. It is an interesting question whether or not the 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, along with its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, actually kept these issues alive when they might have been consigned to ultimate invisibility by cultural regression and political inertia.

Some argue that the states were already moving to liberalize abortion law, thereby clothing the shift with political legitimacy resulting from democratic and legislative processes. This, in the long run, would have enshrined an unchallenged license to abort with barely a ripple, let alone public outcry. But, by clearing the board of all prohibitions on abortion in most of the 50 states, and establishing a new constitutional right for all nine months of pregnancy by judicial fiat, the high court energized an indigenous right-to-life movement without parallel in the world.

The United States still has a vibrant movement resisting the culture of death, a tenacious rear-guard action designed to impose restrictions on abortion providers comparable to those required for other medical providers. Truly, the witness to the sanctity of life is still strong in many parts of the country.

“We will never surrender”

A marriage advocate offers a state legislature about to redefine marriage some advice and predictions.

The following are remarks prepared by Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D., for the Rhode Island legislature hearings on the redefinition of marriage and delivered there last week (January 15). Dr Morse is the founder and president of the Ruth Institute, a project of the National Organization for Marriage.

Almost two years ago, I came to this place to plead with you not to remove the gender requirement from marriage.[1] I predicted that children would have three legal parents[2] and that custody disputes would involve three or more adults.[3] I predicted greater attacks on religious liberty for those who resist your war against the gendered nature of the human body.[4]

I predicted the systematic removal of gendered language from the law. No more husbands and wives, only spouses. No more mother and father. Only Parent 1 and Parent 2.[5]

All of these things have come to pass in other places.

Tonight, I have returned.

You will little note, nor long remember what I say here. The rich people in our country have decided that we are going to have what you call same sex marriage.[6] You will do what you have come to do.

So tonight, I have a few more predictions.

Monday 21 January 2013

Obama hails Stonewall Riots as civil rights landmark in inaugural address

BY BEN JOHNSON

Mon Jan 21, 2013 15:39 EST
Comments (3)
Tags: Barack Obama, Homosexual Activism, Stonewall Riots

WASHINGTON, D.C., January 21, 2013, (LifeSiteNews.com) – In his second inaugural address, President Barack Obama hailed a riot in which homosexual rioters, some dressed in drag, pelted police officers with bottles and attempted to set them on fire for raiding a mafia-controlled gay bar.

“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall,” the president said just after noon today.

Cuomo’s extreme abortion bill creates a civil war with Democrats, Catholics

BY KIRSTEN ANDERSEN

Fri Jan 18, 2013 17:23 EST
Comments (72)
Tags: Andrew Cuomo, Democrats For Life Of America Dfla, New York, Timothy Dolan

ALBANY, January 18, 2013, (LifeSiteNews.com) – By promoting one of the most expansive abortion bills in American history, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has opened a civil war on two fronts: with his church and with elements of his own party.

Cuomo is pushing for a massive expansion of access to abortion in the state, including lifting restrictions on third-trimester abortions, allowing non-doctors to perform the procedure, and enshrining a fundamental right to “terminate a pregnancy” in New York state law.

Democrats for Life of America deemed the proposed bill “the most sweeping abortion legislation in the nation.”

The Democratic governor introduced the bill to cheers during his January 9 State of the State address, shrouding it in the name of “women’s equality.”

“The abortion language would allow late-term abortions, allow non-doctors to perform abortions, and supersede any reasonable restrictions such as parental notification,” the group stated.

“It is out of touch with the views of most Americans, out of touch with the views of most Democrats, and could hamper real reform for women's rights,” the Democratic group concluded.

Particularly “in a state that already has one of the highest abortion rates,” double the national average.

One-third of all pregnancies in the state end in abortion, and in some parts of New York City the abortion rate is more than 60 percent.