Get a Grip on Reality

by Thomas A. Droleskey

[This article, published o in the printed pages of Christ or Chaos in February of 2001, is a reminder that there were a few of us who were discussing George W. Bush's pathetic record on the life issues right from the very beginning. His recent betrayals are nothing new. They are a continuation of his entire record as a public official of providing lip-service to "conservatives" while going about business-as-usual, knowing that most people pay attention only to the rhetoric and not to the actual record, which, if brought to their attention is usually denied as secondary to belief that "others" are worse. While I have withdrawn from regular commentaries such as this one, I post it along with The Illusion of Secular Salvation to demonstrate that the "new" betrayals are really new after all. This is all the logical fruit of a world where Our Lord does not reign as King and Our Lady is not honored as Queen.]

More than 4,000 children are butchered alive in their mothers’ womb each day in this country under the cover of law. Each of those children has an immortal soul made in the image and likeness of the Blessed Trinity. Each of those children has done no wrong. Their only “crime” has been to be conceived as the natural fruit of human conjugal relations. Our religiously indifferentist, culturally relativistic, and legally positivistic society, however, sees fit to misuse language as a means of denying the humanity of those slaughtered innocents, content to anesthetize the evil done to them by enticing us with the empty show of bread and circuses. Even pro-life Catholics have learned to live with the evil in our midst in order to convince themselves that it is neither wise nor prudent to talk in plain terms about it. That is largely for fear of alienating careerist politicians who do not understand the necessity of risking political capital by using the forums provided them to subordinate human law to the binding, immutable precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law.

Sadly, the events leading up to the inauguration of President George Walker Bush on January 20 proved the analysis offered in my newsletter, Christ or Chaos, for the past two years to be only too correct. I take no satisfaction whatsoever in that. But what is truly heartbreaking is the extent to which good, honest, decent people are willing to suspend rational thought in order to place something approaching religious faith in a man who has betrayed the pro-life cause over and over and over again — a shallow, hollow man who does not wake up each morning thinking about the carnage American civil law permits to take place in abortuaries and hospitals from one coast to the other, from north to south. Thus, although I have recited endlessly the facts about the new president’s cynical strategy of appeasing pro-lifers with empty slogans (and actions on the margins of the issue that are designed to do just enough to keep pro-life Indians on the reservation), it is important for the sake of the permanent record to calmly and dispassionately use the light of cold reason to try once more to dispel that misplaced religious faith with facts.
 

Words Have Meanings

Words have meanings. It is becoming increasingly clear that many pro-life Americans stand ready to spin for George W. Bush and his administration the way that the Left spun for former President Clinton and his administration of criminals. To do that, however, is to continue one of the most pernicious aspects of Clinton’s sordid legacy: his unremitting warfare against truth in every quarter of his speech and his actions. Truth is what it is. It cannot be sugar-coated. The ends never justify the means. To pretend that something is what it is not is of the Devil, not of our Blessed Lord and Savior. It is critical, therefore, to know what President George W. Bush is, not what pro-life Americans wish him to be.

President Bush is not a man of the mind. He does not read. Indeed, he partied pretty heartily until around the time he was 40. He spent two hours of his day as governor of Texas playing video golf to “relax” after going for his daily run (or exercising on the treadmill in a gym if inclement weather kept him inside). He has surrounded himself with fellow careerists, men and women who have expertise in the business of acquiring and retaining political power, but who want to avoid any issues that might offend voters, especially the life issue. That is why Bush, having been assured of tacit support from the so-called National Right to Life Committee and the Christian Coalition, did not even talk much about the issue of abortion until after he lost the New Hampshire primary last year to Arizona Senator John McCain. Bush became a born-again religious conservative in order to win the South Carolina primary, using empty slogans and promises to secure the support of voters only too eager to follow the political path charted for them by Bush’s apologists in the pro-life and “conservative” religious establishments. Bush paid attention to the life issue only intermittently after that, with now-presidential counselor Karl Rove saying quite publicly on several occasions that Bush would not be discussing it much during the campaign. Never mind that, however; pro-life voters wanted to believe in Bush with the sort of wishful thinking that led young Natalie Wood’s character in the original Miracle on 34th Street to wish herself into believing in Santa Claus.

Anyone (Howard Phillips, Judie Brown, Patrick Buchanan, yours truly) who spoke during the campaign about Bush’s actual record on the life issue was dismissed as an irritant. We were accused of wanting to elect Al Gore. We were accused of not being realistic and pragmatic in the face of the evils posed by Gore. My personal retort was rather simple: the more that we enable the so-called lesser of two evils, the higher and higher the dose of the so-called lesser evil becomes with each passing election.

Indeed, I have been contending for years that the more we enabled career politicians to appease us with empty slogans and hollow gestures, the less visible the life issue would become on the radar screen of electoral politics. Most pro-life Americans fear the evil far more than they love the good, far more than they trust in the power of the graces won for us by the shedding of our Lord’s Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross on Calvary to overcome the evils we face by our proclamation of the truth in love but without compromise. The Americanist mindset has such a hold on good people that we believe that silence on the most pressing moral issue of the day is actually a virtue, that such silence will help to promote the retardation of the culture of death incrementally. What has actually happened, though, has been the incremental institutionalization of the acceptance of the evils of contraception and abortion — and the concomitant rise of the belief that it is deleterious even to speak about those issues openly. As I have said repeatedly over the past six years or so, we have come to believe that someone who is conditionally, partially opposed to a certain form of child-killing in the later stages of pregnancy — but who actually reaffirms women’s “constitutionally protected right” to butcher their unborn child — must be hailed as a pro-life hero. We have lost our grip on reality, ladies and gentlemen.

Last month’s lead commentary in Christ or Chaos, “A Long Four Years,” noted the new president’s penchant for avoiding issues deemed to be divisive, especially if addressing such issues might be costly to him electorally. Bush has the same penchant as his father for wanting to appear above partisan politics, above those things that could divide Americans. That attitude is nothing other than an expression of Protestant religious indifferentism and American sentimentality and emotionalism writ large. It is sometimes necessary to challenge a citizenry on issues of fundamental justice founded in truth precisely to plant the seeds that might force them to reassess their uncritical acceptance of the premises upon which our culture of death is founded. Indeed, the host of an overnight radio program on KMOX Radio in St. Louis, Missouri, said that a guest he interviewed over the telephone prompted two hours of discussion of how to think and speak about abortion after the guest’s own interview had been concluded. The host said that the person interviewed “got people to thinking about abortion” rather than emoting about the issue, one way or the other. George W. Bush is not interested in doing any of that whatsoever.

The reality is, quite sadly, that President Bush is doing just the opposite of what one who has been entrusted with the mantle of leadership is expected by the dictates of the natural law to do. He said in an interview televised by CBS News just hours before his inauguration, “What my agenda will be is to try to reduce abortions, is to work on partial birth, banning partial birth abortion, or to work on helping states with parental notification laws. That’s a practical approach. There’s going to be abortion in America and the fundamental question is are they going to be safe, will they be numerous or not.” How is that significantly different from Bill Clinton’s slogan that abortions should be “safe, legal, and rare”? Each abortion kills a child dead. It is deadly for each child. And it is inherently unsafe of its very nature for a woman. It is never possible to make an evil act “safe” and free from all of its natural consequences, both physical and spiritual. Does not that tell you something about how hollow George W. Bush is? He believes it is important that abortions be “safe.” Words mean things.

(It is important to leave aside the issue of partial-birth abortion, which, as I have demonstrated in the past, would not save a single, solitary child from extermination; there remain two other methods of child-killing in the later stages of pregnancy that would be perfectly legal to use if the ban on partial-birth abortions should be passed by Congress and then upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, which is a problematic proposition in and of itself. Moreover, the life-of-the-mother exception in the bill is a loophole through which the proverbial Mack truck can be driven. For all of the good intentions of those who have sponsored the bill and have attempted to illustrate the horror of this particular form of child-killing, it is likely that the bill as currently written would not stop this method of child-killing from being employed. It has become an emotional red-herring to be used by phony pro-life politicians to curry favor with voters who have lost their grip on reality. Furthermore, we have come to believe — falsely — that killing a child by means of partial-birth abortion is somehow more morally heinous than killing a child by means of suction abortion or saline-solution abortion in the earlier stages of pregnancy. It is not. The deliberate execution of an innocent human is the same crime morally no matter what means are employed to effect the execution.)
 

Tactics of the Bush Clan

Enter Laura Bush, the new first lady of the United States. On January 19, she told Katie Couric on NBC’s Today program that she did not believe that Roe v. Wade should be reversed. She did not say that it could not be reversed, or that it was not possible for it to be reversed at this time, as her husband contended in his CBS interview that aired on the morning of his inauguration. She said that the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that sanctioned the killing of innocent unborn children in their mothers’ wombs under cover of law as a constitutionally protected “right” should not be reversed. All of that is an old trick of the Bush clan that needs to be examined briefly.

There was a time during the administration of President George Herbert Walker Bush when the entire Bush clan was gathered for a July Fourth picnic in the family compound at Kennebunkport, Maine. White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater made it a point to reveal to the media that during the picnic the Bushes had quite a heated discussion about abortion. The men were said to be pro-life, the women were said to be “pro-choice.” It was all quite carefully orchestrated as a means of portraying the Bushes as being just like any other American family: torn apart by this “divisive” issue. However, it also helped complete the portrait that Bush the elder wanted to paint of trying to be all things to all people. The Bush women “understood” how abortion was a “difficult” issue for women. The Bush men were the defenders of traditional “family values,” but more than willing to consider the “opinions” of those who struggled with the issue. I filed that one away in the old cerebral website. Thus, Laura Bush’s proclamation that Roe v. Wade should not be reversed is really not news at all. It is merely a cynical effort to try to let the pro-aborts of America know they have a first lady who, though married to a man who says he is pro-life, understands their point of view and does not want “settled” law unsettled.

Remember, Barbara Bush, the mother of the newly inaugurated president, made a a point of saying that she was “pro-choice,” taking issue with her husband. (Taking that stand, by the way, is evidently a prerequisite for a Republican first lady: Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan were also pro-abortion.) Barbara Bush partly blamed the issue of abortion for the defeat of her husband by Bill Clinton in 1992. And she actually boasted last year about how her husband had appointed pro-abort David Souter to the Supreme Court in 1990, implying that her son would be as open to such a nominee as her husband had been — which, of course, her son had already proved during his time as governor of Texas, appointing pro-aborts to the Texas Supreme Court and to various judicial vacancies in lower courts, most notably the pro-abortion, pro-homosexual Martha Hill Jamison to a district court in Houston.

Laura Bush did not speak on her own authority. She is a shrewd political wife. The new president and his advisors want to cultivate the image that the Bush family is as torn by the abortion issue as many other families are. Her public disagreement with her husband, who says different things about reversing Roe v. Wade at different times, is meant to show her to be an independent thinker, her own woman, not a slave to the way her husband thinks. Her position, however, solidifies the position of women who do indeed believe they have a right to kill the fruit of their wombs, that Roe v. Wade was decided rightly. Words matter. Words have meaning. The things we say influence others, for better or for worse.

Demonstrating his utter shamelessness, George W. Bush said in the CBS interview that while he disagreed with his wife, it was not possible to reverse Roe v. Wade. Well, guess what? It will continue to get less and less possible to reverse it if those in positions of leadership and civil authority refuse to use their bully pulpits to try to change hearts and minds — and to try to make it clear that we do not wait until the last mind has been changed before attempting to conform civil law to the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law. It is a convenient and cynical surrender to the supposed hopelessness of our current cultural situation to say that it is not possible to do those things that are difficult and painful, things that could imperil one’s own electoral survival and popularity. Even the Founding Fathers of this nation, with whom I have outlined a series of profound disagreements, expected that individuals who ran for elected office would be possessed of their own convictions and would be willing to articulate those convictions without fear of electoral reprisal.

An NBC interview with the new president aired at about the same time as the CBS interview. Amazingly, Bush stated that he was pro-life, that he disagreed with his wife, that he would appoint “strict constructionists” to the Court (notwithstanding the fact that his record in Texas belies a commitment to strict constructionism). Bush wanted to appear in that interview as being the pro-life champion. No mention there of keeping abortions “safe and less numerous.” Will the real George W. Bush please stand up? Actually, the real George W. Bush has stood up: he is a man who is inconsistent in his core, does not understand issues of fundamental justice founded in truth, says different things at different times, and wants to be all things to all people. He wants people to read into his statements exactly what he hopes they will, knowing full well that a little bit of wishful thinking on the part of Clinton’s supporters has kept Clinton’s popularity quite high, yes, even after he reached a plea agreement with independent counsel Robert Ray on January 19. As I noted last year, Bush is Clinton with a Texas twang.

Obviously, even the phrase “pro-life” has lost its meaning. Those who support abortion in certain instances — rape, incest, alleged threats to the life of the mother — are deemed to be pro-life, when they are in fact just less pro-abortion than others. Additionally, a person who is truly pro-life understands that no one who supports even one abortion as a matter of principle is qualified to hold any public office, whether elected or appointed, not to mention the highest offices in the Executive Branch of the federal government of the United States.

Look at the bevy of pro-aborts President George W. Bush has appointed to his new administration: White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card; advisors Karl Rove and Mary Matalin; White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, the subject of an article in last month’s issue of Christ or Chaos; National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice; Secretary of State Colin Powell; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a member of the pro-population control Council for Foreign Relations; and Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd Whitman. Those people will have important voices in the new president’s administration, seeming to demonstrate once again that good, competent public servants can pursue the common good even though they are committed to an evil that is fundamentally destructive of that common good.

For example, many commentators, including Rush Limbaugh, have been dismissive of the importance of Christine Todd Whitman’s appointment as EPA administrator. After all, it has been argued, what harm can she do there? What does her support for abortion have to do with her new job? Actually, quite a lot. For a person who does not recognize that a human being is the zenith of God’s creative work — and who does not recognize that God Himself chose to be knit in His Sacred Humanity in His Blessed Mother’s womb — will not understand the proper relationship of the human being to the environment. We are not here for the environment. The environment is here for us. Yes, we must be proper stewards of the Earth. But God created the Earth for human beings to populate, master, and subdue. A person who believes that the life of even one innocent unborn child is negotiable will have no problem with the current EPA policy that subjects the bodies of aborted babies to all manner of texts to determine the impact on the human body of various toxins found in the environment. It actually matters quite a lot that Christine Todd Whitman has been appointed to run the EPA. Of course, it doesn’t matter at all if abortion is just an issue about which “good” people can disagree, right?
 

What About Tommy Thompson?

Secretary of Health and Human Services-designate Tommy Thompson is one of the scores of politicians who have traded for years on an undeserved reputation for being pro-life. As is the case with most supposedly pro-life politicians, he supports the killing of innocent unborn children in certain cases and should not be called pro-life. However, the National Right to Life Committee and its various state affiliates have spun reality so utterly that the average pro-lifer has been convinced that it is permissible to kill the innocent unborn in certain circumstances. Thompson is not pro-life. If anyone doubts that flat statement, consider the proof offered below.

Thompson supports embryonic stem-cell research and transplantation. He has called it vital work and has arbitrarily characterized it as moral and ethical. As most of you know, stem-cell research involves the removal of cells from living embryos for various research and transplantation purposes. The embryos, little human beings, many of whom are conceived artificially in test tubes, are then killed when the cells are removed. That is a monstrous Hitlerian nightmare. However, “pro-life” Tommy Thompson supports that monstrous, barbaric practice. Bush is on record in opposition to federal funding for stem-cell research. However, it is quite telling that he appointed a man who believes in such research as vital and ethical to be secretary of health and human services.

Thompson has also caused a furor over the French abortion pill, the human pesticide, RU-486, which the Food and Drug Administration, an agency within HHS, authorized for marketing in September during the presidential campaign. Speaking during his Senate confirmation hearings on January 19, Thompson promised a review of the “safety” of RU-486. As The New York Times reported on January 20:

“I do not intend to roll back anything unless it is proven to be unsafe,” Mr. Thompson said in response to a question from Hillary Rodham Clinton, the new Democratic senator from New York. But he quickly added, “Safety concerns are something that’s in question.” The Food and Drug Administration, a unit of the Department of Health and Human Services, has determined that RU-486 is safe and effective in inducing abortion. But Mr. Thompson, an opponent of abortion, said that the approval of the drug “was contentious, was controversial.” After the hearing, Mr. Thompson was asked about the safety of the drug RU-486. “It should be reviewed, and that’s what I will do,” he told reporters. He was asked to describe the safety concerns. “I don’t know the specifics,” he said. “People have told me there are some safety concerns. If there are, we want to review them.” Excuse me? “Safety concerns”? Sure, the human pesticide is unsafe for women. That’s been proven over and over again. However, it is more than unsafe for a preborn human being; it is deadly. Why is it so difficult to speak about the actual reality of what abortion does: namely, to kill a human being, whether by surgical dismemberment or chemical poisoning? And I don’t want to hear that a nominee won’t get confirmed if he speaks about such nasty little realities. People listen to confirmation hearings. And those who are steeped in cultural relativism need to have their consciences disturbed by articulate, cogent defenses of the standards of objective justice founded in truth. The reason that a pro-lifer is opposed to RU-486 is that it is a means to kill a human being, a handiwork of God’s love, in his mother’s womb. Moreover, as noted earlier, it is never possible to immunize women from the physical, emotional, and spiritual consequences of killing their unborn children, no matter what procedure or chemical is used to do so.
 

And What About John Ashcroft?

What about John Ashcroft? Yes, what about John Ashcroft? His story is truly, truly tragic.

As I noted in a sidebar in last month’s issue of Christ or Chaos, the attorney general-designate, though rhetorically pro-life, did a number of things as a senator to contradict his rhetoric. He was no different from 99 percent of other allegedly pro-life legislators, to be sure. Remember, only three (count them: three) senators voted against pro-abort Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993: New Hampshire’s Bob Smith, North Carolina’s Jesse Helms, and Oklahoma’s Don Nickles. Ashcroft was not in the Senate then. However, once there, he did vote to confirm a number of Clinton’s pro-abortion judicial nominees to the U.S. District Courts and U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal. And therein lies a very interesting tale.

Ashcroft is partly responsible for the vicious attacks leveled against him by pro-abortion former Senate colleagues. That is, Ashcroft and other “pro-life” senators repeatedly rolled over for Bill Clinton, confirming almost all of his nominees to serve in the Executive Branch and on the federal judiciary. If those senatorial “pro-lifers” had half the zeal and commitment to their position as the pro-aborts had, we might have been spared the likes of Janet Reno and Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer and Donna Shalala. But, no, Republicans are ever eager to appear “fair-minded,” “open-minded,” “cooperative.” Never mind the fact that their strategy of callow appeasement to Clinton got them nowhere with the 42nd president or with the media. It got them nowhere with pro-abortion constituency groups. Clinton knew they would cave in to him over and over and over again. He spat in their eye and denounced them repeatedly for failing to cooperate with him, when the truth of the matter was that they cooperated with him all too willingly and all too frequently, as Howard Phillips has demonstrated with thorough documentation in his Howard Phillips Issues and Strategy Bulletin.

Consequently, the fact that Ashcroft was subject to vicious attacks should have surprised no one. Leftists have been given a free ride by hapless, careerist Republicans. Leftists have an agenda they want to pursue with a perverse kind of apostolic zeal and evangelical fervor. They want to prevent anyone who disagrees with them from getting into positions of governmental power. But the way to deal with those modern-day fascists is not to spin the reality of one’s own positions to cater to their own perversity and positivism. Ashcroft, though a decent man whose record was distorted and whose character was demonized relentlessly in the weeks leading up to his Senate confirmation hearing, did not acquit himself well during the hearings.

To wit, Ashcroft called abortion a “constitutionally protected health service.” It is nothing of the sort. As predicted in last month’s issue of my newsletter, he said that he would enforce the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which has imposed federal prison terms and huge fines upon pro-life Americans who have engaged in nonviolent acts of civil disobedience in front of abortuaries, which civil disobedience is arbitrarily called “violence against women” by the pro-abortionists. One can disagree philosophically with the concept of Operation Rescue. However, those who had the courage to put their lives and liberty on the line to express their solidarity with the defenseless unborn and their mothers should not be subjected to tyrannical federal laws. They were willing to face whatever penalties a state or locality wanted to impose upon them. The fact that it is now a federal offense to engage in an act of civil disobedience is itself a crime against the State, as an unjust law is no law at all. What is truly tragic is that FACE passed in 1994 with the help of Republican legislators in both houses of Congress.

Ashcroft said that Roe v. Wade was settled law and that the Bush administration would not seek to reverse it. Bush himself had used such language during the campaign, albeit in his own typically inconsistent style, saying one thing one day and the exact opposite the next day. Settled law. Words matter. Words matter. Words matter. Civil laws that codify evil acts have to be unsettled. Do you believe that Roe v. Wade is “settled law,” and that we have to “settle” for a situation where abortions are “safe and less numerous,” as the new president said in the aforementioned CBS interview airing opposite his somewhat contradictory NBC interview on the morning of the inauguration?

“But Ashcroft might not get confirmed if he didn’t say these things,” someone might protest. Well, what good will he be as attorney general if he is going to take the view that Roe v. Wade is settled law and that Bush is right to have no litmus test for Federal judges? What good will he be if he enforces FACE and keeps in place the FBI task force that investigates “clinic violence”? And if he makes a distinction between his own personal beliefs and his duty to enforce the laws on the books? How is that last point any different from the position taken by the likes of Mario Cuomo or Edward Moore Kennedy or Joseph Biden? A public servant has the duty to pursue justice and to work to change laws that contravene the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law.

A word about that FBI task force. In 1995, during Attorney General Janet Reno’s watch, two FBI agents assigned to the task force visited a woman in Toledo, Ohio, to warn her that a letter she had written to an abortionist could be interpreted as an act of terrorism against the abortionist. The woman had simply written that she was praying for the abortionist’s conversion. The story was reported in The Wanderer at the time. (I met the parents of this woman, who is married with children, when I gave a talk in Toledo in July 1995.)

Surely, Ashcroft came under fire from the despicable Edward Moore Kennedy, who should have been excommunicated in the 1970s, along with all of the other Catholic pro-aborts in public life. Indeed, we would not have a new generation of Republican Catholic pro-aborts (George Pataki, Susan Collins, Susan Molinari, Rick Lazio, Tom Ridge, Rudolph Giuliani, Richard Riordan) if our bishops had excommunicated the Democratic Catholic pro-aborts when the first one of them switched from being pro-life to being pro-death. But the way to handle the likes of Kennedy is to remind him of his own former pro-life stance. Go back at him. He wasn’t going to vote for Ashcroft in any case, was he? Why do our own people believe that they have to use the language of the culture of death to convince pro-aborts that their pro-life rhetoric is simply that, rhetoric, with no relationship to the actual formulation and implementation of public policy?

Some might protest that Ashcroft was being as clever as a serpent and as innocent as a dove. Think again, friends, think again. It is not being as innocent as a dove to call abortion a “constitutionally protected health service.” And he wasn’t fooling anybody, was he? His pathetic attempt to turn himself into a man who could segregate his private views from his public actions was called by its proper name by California Senator Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein is a militant pro-abort, a senator who once refused to help a refugee from Red China who was about to be deported and forced to have an abortion in her own country. But she saw through what Ashcroft was trying to do. Ashcroft would have done better to speak his mind and let the chips fall where they might, trusting in the Providence of God to bring the result that was most pleasing to Him and for His greater honor and glory.

Consider, for example, a message which was sent to me by attorney, who is the husband of a former student of mine from Saint John's University in Jamaica, New York, during the 1984-1985 academic year:

I’m not a bit surprised at Ashcroft’s cave-in during his confirmation hearings. I pity him. When the alluring power and prestige of the office of U.S. Attorney General was dangled before Senator Ashcroft’s eyes, he lost sight of Truth and Justice. “For all that is in the world, is the concupiscence of the flesh, and the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life, which is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the concupiscence thereof: but he that doth the will of God, abideth forever” (1 John 2:16–17). He could have defended the unborn and the sanctity of human life. I wish he did, for his sake. We have immortal souls. We take our personal earthly histories into eternity with us. The way I see it, he was offered an opportunity on a golden platter to give public witness and glory to God and he declined that opportunity! He was given the opportunity to atone for sins against life through his own suffering. In short, he was tempted by Satan, and fell. I pray for him, for our brother Catholic Tommy Thompson, the Bushes (who are de facto pro-abortion by saying that Roe v. Wade should stand) and all of our leaders. We need heroes for Christ. (I’d better practice what I preach, and I beg God for the grace to do so, and specifically for the grace of martyrdom.)

This wonderful young Catholic [who, it should be noted in 2006, has not been a partisan of my work since I began supporting independent priests such as the late Father Frederick Schell and very much alive Father Patrick Perez in Christ or Chaos in 2002] has a grip on the reality of the Splendor of Truth Incarnate and His Social Kingship over us men and our civil societies. He gets it. The fact that he and his wife Helen are raising four children, three of whom they have adopted out of the generosity of the love our Lord and our Lady has put into their hearts, is one of the signs of hope in the midst of a world where people do not have a grip on reality. For there are many home-schooling parents who understand the flawed nature of the American regime, founded as it is in the framework of religious indifferentism, the Protestant Revolt, and Freemasonry — each of which rejects the primacy of Christ the King and the authority of His true Church to be the ultimate arbiter and explicator of the natural law. This young attorney and his wife and other home-schooling parents know that there is no other solution for the problems we face other than the patient work of planting the seeds of the true Faith in the souls of everyone, especially the young, who will have to take their places in this culture of death before too long. The fact that people such as my former student and her husband see reality clearly means that there will be people in public life, perhaps after many of us are dead and buried, who will speak the truth clearly and in love as a means not of winning office or of being confirmed to a prestigious appointment, but as a means of serving the salvation of souls, the greater honor and glory of the Blessed Trinity, and the establishment of the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ and the Queenship of His Most Blessed Mother.
 

Bush’s Crumbs

President Bush will do just enough around the margins of the life issue to keep pro-life Indians on the reservation. His executive order of January 22 reinstating the ban on federal taxpayer funding of “family planning agencies” that promote or perform abortions in other countries is largely symbolic. Planned Parenthood and related organizations have plenty of their own funds to use for their nefarious purposes in other countries.[See The Illusion of Secular Salvation for the full details about the loopholes Bush incorporated into his Executive Order in April of 2001 that actually implemented the decisio announced in January of that year.] But it can be reversed by another president just as simply as Bill Clinton reversed the original Mexico City policy on January 22, 1993. The principal purpose for the issuance of the order on the day that thousands upon thousands of pro-life Americans were marching for life was to win Bush a lot of support and good will from those eager for a few crumbs. But that is all pro-lifers will get: a few crumbs now and then. Just enough to burnish the record for the next election and to keep people from achieving the grip on reality that my former student and her husband and many other good people have achieved by the grace of God and the love of His Most Blessed Mother.

Indeed, the fact that the new president did not see fit to speak to the thousands of pro-lifers who gathered in Washington on January 22 itself speaks volumes about his lack of commitment to the issue. Even his father, the first President Bush, spoke to Nellie Gray, president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, each January 22, carrying on the tradition that Ronald Reagan had begun in 1981. President George W. Bush did not so, largely because he knows that Nellie Gray is prone to ask questions of the high and mighty, including presidents. The new president is utterly incapable of answering questions about the issue of abortion.

In lieu of an appearance by Bush, Rep. Christopher Smith (R-N.J.) read a statement issued in the president’s name. (Let’s get one thing straight: Bush does not write his own copy.) The statement noted: “The promises of our Declaration of Independence are not just for the strong, the independent, or the healthy. They are for everyone, including unborn children. We share a great goal, to work toward a day when every child is welcomed in life and protected in law ... to build a culture of life, affirming that every person at every stage and season of life, is created equal in God’s image.” However nice the statement may look at first glance, it is at odds with what Bush states he believes. How can Bush say he believes that “every child” should be “welcomed in life and protected in law” when he states repeatedly that he is in favor of the killing of preborn children in the cases of rape, incest, and alleged threats to the life of a mother? The statement issued in his name on January 22 is simply at odds with the real George W. Bush. I do hope the fact that he did not see fit to at least telephone Nellie Gray was not lost on some of the people who were at the March for Life.

The point of this reflection is not to bash George W. Bush. It is our duty in charity and in justice to pray for him and his family, to pray for his conversion to the true Faith. Reality is what it is, however. While Bush is a genial man whom decent people can feel comfortable with, we must remember that those who of us who say we are pro-lifers and disciples of our Lord through His true Church can never grow comfortable or complacent when we consider the simple fact that 4,000 babies made in the image and likeness of God are exterminated each day in this country under cover of law. Until George W. Bush comes to grips with that ugly and horrible reality — and becomes determined to lead courageously in the elimination of the shedding of innocent blood under cover of law, he will be just another careerist politician seeking to please constituency groups rather than use the office he has entered into as a means of subordinating the laws of this nation to the laws of God.

“We must seek to please God rather than men,” Saint Peter wrote. May our Lady of Guadalupe, the Patroness of the Americas, pray for us to seek to please God rather than men by insisting that those who call themselves pro-life view the situation in this country clearly in all of its reality, and not delude themselves into thinking that rhetoric and a genial demeanor are substitutes for leadership founded in a desire to restore all things in Christ, the only sure foundation of civil justice and social order.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!

Viva Cristo Rey!

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us now and at the after of our death.

Saint Joseph, Patron of Departing Souls, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Pope Saint Pius X, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints

The Novena to Maria Bambina

(begins August 30, 2008, and runs through September 7, 2008)

Maria Bambina--Infant Queen of the universe, intercede for all of us who have recourse to thee!  Do not forget us, thy faithful but lowly subjects who await thy response to our constant prayers !  We long to kneel before thy crib and watch thee sleep, dear little Queen! Choose to look upon us with thy loving childlike gaze and through that gaze send graces to us so that we may rejoice with thee and praise that beautiful day that God chose from all of eternity to begin the Redemption through thy most glorious Immaculate Conception!  Amen.