Culture of Death Watch: Losing the Ability to Be Shocked

The Culture of Death grows stronger and stronger all around us and part of that process involves us becoming hardened by the constant refrain of praise for death and killing as the solution to all our problems. We hear a constant drumbeat of propaganda for ideas that are evil and anti-humanistic, but by which we are decreasingly scandalized and ourtraged.

One measure of the morality of a person or a people is what outrages and scandalizes him or them. And, conversely, a measure of the immorality of a person or people can be what fails to outrage or scandalize him or them.

When David and Victoria Beckham (celebrities in Britain, I gather, but they could have been Joe and Mary Smith for all it matters) had their fourth child, a promoter of the Culture of Death named Simon Ross had this to say:

The Beckhams, and others like London mayor Boris Johnson, are very bad role models with their large families. There’s no point in people trying to reduce their carbon emissions and then increasing them 100% by having another child.

(via Jill Stanek)

There are multiple layers of evil in this short statement.

First, the right to family formation is a private matter for each family. No one has the right to prevent anyone from marrying and having a family and that includes busybody moralists like Ross and also the State. Let me be absolutely clear: the Family precedes the State historically and ontologically and is not under the jurisdiction of the State. The State did not create the family and cannot abolish it. The right to marry and have a family is one of the most basic of all human rights and cannot be denied with justice, no matter how much some people would like to do so. Simon Ross should mind his own business.

Second, the population of all Western countries (with the exception of the United States) is well below replacement rates and this will create tremendous social and economic problems going forward. Japan's stagnant economy with fewer and fewer workers to support more and more retired folks is giving us a preview of what is in store for all developed countries (except the US) in the future. The population controllers, who are in the grip of a romantic Utopianism, do not understand the damage they have already done and are continuing to do. If they are not stopped, they will take us right back to barbarism.

Third, in the good old days the post-Christian liberals were merely secular humanists, meaning that they rejected revelation and orthodoxy but still tried to implement a Christian ethic in which love for humanity was central. Secular humanism had no basis and could not endure, but while it lasted at least it was pro-humanity. What comes after secular humanism, however, is truly terrifying. It is anti-humanistic - the will to power - the strong dominating the weak. Eugenics is a big part of this program and the population controllers lust after the day when the State will control the Family and they will control the State. They think they will be like God. It is important to understand that the Culture of Death is so regnant today because we have moved beyond theism and beyond humanism to an anti-humanistic, statist, elitist, amoral, will-to-power ethic in which the strong aim to dominate the weak.

We should not simply dismiss people like Simon Ross as "kooks with funny opinions." Such people are dangerous. Read C. S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World if you need help imagining a world in which people like Simon Ross have seized political power and mowed down Christian opposition.

Sex and Economics: The Engame of the Cultural Revolution of the 60s

Of course sexual immorality was not invented in the 60s. What happened was that the promiscuity hitherto expressed mainly among the "upper" classes and the "intellectuals" was packaged for mass consumption, glorified, and sold to the middle and working classes as "liberation."

In the 60s the theological liberalism of the mainline Protestant churches, which had hollowed out Christian belief for over half a century, began to have wider cultural consequences. If there is no God, or if God is a remote Deity who is uninvolved in this world, then I am "free" to act as I please. And what pleases me? Only those who had already discarded the venerable Christian doctrine of original sin could be surprised when the answer was: "Vice rather than virtue."

The Spirit of 68 is the rejection of virtue and the embrace of vice in the name of human liberation. Naturally, one expression of this was sexual promiscuity. This has been the same pattern throughout human history; the throwing off of the restraints of morality and law was old hat to the writers of the New Testament. By Paul's day it was an age old pattern of behavior repeated in empire after empire and occurring again in his own day in the Roman empire, as he makes clear in his letters to the Romans and to the Corinthians.

But when a post-Christian worldview, whether in a Darwinian, a Freudian or a Marxian form, began to be preached openly to the masses as a guide to everyday behavior, the main take-away was the mainstreaming of lust: "Lust is good, lust is fun!" Lust is of course expressed through our sexual organs, but not only in that way. The other main way it is expressed is through our acquisitive nature - the drive to acquire wealth or luxuries. Lust can be seen as much in our use of our credit cards as in our use of our sex organs. The inordinate desire for sexual pleasure is closely related to the inordinate desire for material luxuries and both represent an attempt to transgress the limits life places on our desires.

If this life is all there is, then we may as well grab for all we can get during the few years of our consciousness between birth and death. The post-Christian worldview restricts our vision to the here and now and the material world. It demeans all visions of eternity and scoffs at the idea of this world as a preparation for the next. It bids us focus on getting a bit more pleasure out of this life than we would be entitled to if we stuck by some absolute standard of morality. In fact, this becomes the standard of success; have we managed to outwit Fate to snatch a few, fleeting pleasures that don't belong to us by right out of the pool before the lights go out?

So the lust for material possessions and luxuries causes us to reject the limitations of virtue and law and to strive to get as much as we can. In a curious moral inversion, the apologists for socialism have attempted to make this kind of greed into a flaw of capitalism, even though socialism is the ideology that encourages and legitimizes greed, envy and covetousness, whereas capitalism preaches hard work and refraining from coveting what is belongs to your neighbor.

Socialism is built on greed. It tells the ordinary man: "If your neighbor is richer than you are, this is unjust. You have as much right to luxuries as he. The revolution will help you take what is rightfully yours. Laws against coveting are just a tool of the rich to keep the poor down." Thus, socialism attacks the Tenth Commandment in particular and Divine Revelation in general.

Socialism is right in its belief that the institution of private property must be undermined if its message of covetousness and greed is to succeed and it is right in its belief that religion and the family must be overturned as well. Engels knew that the family, private property and the state stand in the way of socialist revolution since all three institutions are intertwined. And he and Marx both understood that God, the Bible and the Ten Commandments stand in the way of socialism.

Socialism appeals to the basest aspects of human nature: the lust for possessions and luxury. It basically tells us that all of us have equal rights to enjoy wealth regardless of how hard we work or how smart we work. This is appealing to many, especially if they have weak character in general.

But socialism, in legitimating lust for possessions and luxury is really legitimating lust in general and so it is perfectly understandable that the sexual revolution and the socialist revolution should proceed hand in hand. Breaking down the family is essential to magnifying the power of the State on the political level and breaking down moral inhibitions against coveting and fornicating is essential on the personal level.

What this means is that the sexual revolution, which swept the Western world in the 60s, must inevitably be followed by an economic crisis. We now see this inevitable economic crisis unfolding before our eyes and we need to understand its provenance.

Europe is undergoing a sovereign debt crisis. The Euro is threatened by the high national debt run up by various countries, especially Greece, Spain, Ireland and Portugal, with Italy close behind. The Northern European countries are still benefiting from an old Protestant work ethic left over from when they were Christian and they, especially Germany, are prosperous. But the southern countries have fully embraced the cultural revolution and have surrendered to their lusts both in sexual and financial matters.

In the social democracies of the European Union, the socialist ideals that everyone has an equal right to money has been institutionalized along with the idea that everyone has an equal right to sexual gratification. The problem comes down to this: material goods and services are limited but human lusts are not. Just as the unlimited gratification of sexual lust leads to the destruction of the family, so the unlimited gratification of financial lusts leads to the destruction of the State.

The European Union is threatened by the reluctance of workers and voters in countries that are living within their means (principally Germany) to forever subsidize Greeks in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. For decades now, political parties have been bribing voters with their own money by promising more and more goodies - earlier retirement ages, more vacations, higher wages, the government paying for health care, etc. - and now they can't get elected without constantly promising more and more.

The problem is that taxes are already so high they are choking economic growth and the national debt is also so high that a greater and greater portion of government revenues are going just to pay the debt. At a certain point, the debt becomes unmanageable - as has already happened in Greece, Ireland and Portugal. When the cost of further government borrowing becomes too high, the debt balloons and cannot be brought under control. Then the government either has to devalue the currency and accept high inflation and high unemployment or be bailed out by other countries. Since one country in an economic union cannot devalue its currency (the Euro), bailouts are the only option. The problem is that voters in Germany are showing signs of voting out any government that bails out Greece. German workers, who retire at 65 are naturally rebelling against the idea of sending money to bail out Greeks who retire at 55. When bailouts become impossible, the next stage is for Greece to pull out of the Euro, restore the Drachma and let inflation take its course. The last time this happened in Europe was during the days of the Weimer Republic in Germany during the 1920s and 30s and we know how that movie ended.

So Europe faces economic collapse. My point is that this is not some sort of unforeseeable and uncaused natural disaster that came out of no where. It is an entirely predictable, even inevitable, result of rejecting morality and virtue, embracing libertinism and vice, and trying to be post-Christian. The endgame of the cultural revolution of the 60s is economic collapse, social chaos and ultimately somebody grabbing totalitarian power in order to restore order. What is lost is ordered liberty. Only a self-restrained people can be a free people: both in sex and economics.

The Culture of Death on the Defensive

Trevin Wax has a great list of 10 reasons why he is optimistic about the pro-life struggle against the culture of death here. (via Justin Taylor)

I think the tide may well be turning in the US against legalized abortion and that the necessary groundswell of public support for the pro-life position that would be necessary in order for a change of the law (i.e. Roe v. Wade) to do any good is now building.

Here are Wax's 10 reasons. But you really should read his explanation of each one; he points to a lot of encouraging facts and statistics, as well as stories and quotes.

10. Recent polls.
9. Abortion's treatment on television and movies
8. The Revulsion at sex-selection abortion
7. The exposure of Planned Parenthood's corruption
6. Planned Parenthood's talking points
5. Abortion as a "tragic choice"
4. Young people
3. Ultra sound technology and pregnancy support centers
2. The third wave
1. God hears

I'd just like to comment on what Wax means by the "Third Wave." By "Third Wave" he means the recent surge to the fore of Black and Hispanic church pro-life activism. The Roman Catholics constituted the first wave and the Evangelicals joined in during the 1970s as the second wave. I think Wax is correct that victory will come with Black and Hispanic leadership.

The recent (since 2008) resurgence of conservatism in the US is not something new. The conservative movement has been building its strength in the US since the 1950s and took a great leap forward in the 1980s. Since then the hold on power by the liberal governing elite has become increasingly tenuous. What we are seeing is not so much more people becoming conservative as conservative people becoming better educated, more politically savvy and more influential in the culture generally.

The left-wing 60s radicals have had a good run but they have not been able to solidify their hold on American society in the way in which their European counterparts have been able to consolidate their power in Europe. For this we can only be grateful to God because Europe is in a death spiral with demographic decline and economic stagnation mutually reinforcing one another as the culture of death predominates. The battle is far from over in the US, but the victory of cultural Marxism in the US is increasingly in doubt.

You might think that the battle of homosexual marriage is going poorly for the traditionalists even though abortion is going somewhat better for them. But on that, see the next post.

Barbaric Horrors in Philadelphia: When Will We Awake to the Injustice of Abortion?

Anyone who thinks that our society is advanced, enlightened, progressive and that the left-wing, feminist agenda that is so dominant in our society is a good thing might want to digest the following AP report:

An abortion doctor who catered to minorities, immigrants and poor women was charged with eight counts of murder in the deaths of a patient and seven babies who were born alive and then killed with scissors, prosecutors said Wednesday.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 69, made millions of dollars over 30 years, performing as many illegal, late-term abortions as he could, prosecutors said. State regulators ignored complaints about him and failed to visit or inspect his clinic since 1993, but no charges were warranted against them, District Attorney Seth Williams said.

Gosnell "induced labor, forced the live birth of viable babies in the sixth, seventh, eighth month of pregnancy and then killed those babies by cutting into the back of the neck with scissors and severing their spinal cord," Williams said.

Williams said patients were subjected to squalid and barbaric conditions at Gosnell's Women's Medical Society.

Authorities went to investigate drug-related complaints at the clinic last year and stumbled on what Williams called a "house of horrors."

"There were bags and bottles holding aborted fetuses were scattered throughout the building," Williams said. "There were jars, lining shelves, with severed feet that he kept for no medical purpose."

The clinic was shut down and Gosnell's medical license was suspended after the raid.

This is what all the supposedly "enlightened" and "progressive" and "pro-choice" social policies have led to. A society that does not recoil in horror and rethink the direction in which it is going is a society under the judgment of God.

May God have mercy on this man's soul. The State, however, should give him him nothing but justice. And, to be clear, justice in this case is due punishment for murder.

"Edu-babble" and the Culture of Death

Our Canadian public education has been politicized and taken over by cultural Marxists and so-called progressive educators who are out to destroy traditional metaphysics, traditional epistemology and traditional morality. Since they do not believe in truth or good and evil, they are necessarily more concerned about social engineering and in conditioning children than in empowering them by teaching knowledge. This is not merely a problem in that it gives children an inferior education; it is far worse than that. This kind of education leads to the culture of death.

Here is a story from the National Post by Kenyon Wallace entitled "The Problem with Edu-babble" about a teacher who gets it.

The inklings that much of the educational dogma being taught at teachers' college might not actually work in schools began to form even before Michael Zwaagstra set foot in a classroom of his own.

It wasn't that the young student-teacher felt he knew better than his University of Manitoba faculty of education professors, or that the overconfidence of youth had taken hold. It was more of a feeling that the in vogue, so-called "progressive" ideologies and unwavering but nebulous theories about how best to teach our kids simply wouldn't prove practical when staring at a class full of uninterested teenagers.

"When I took subjects outside the education faculty, it was great because I was actually learning about the subjects in question," he says. "But I remember thinking in my education classes that what we were learning — the de-emphasis on conveying knowledge in favour of becoming more of a 'guide on the side' — just didn't jibe with what I thought would make sense."

Ten years on, Mr. Zwaagstra is now a high school social studies teacher at Green Valley School in Grunthal, Man., a small town about an hour southeast of Winnipeg. He's had plenty of time to test the education philosophies he was force-fed while at university. His conclusion? They don't work, and we will continue to fail our kids if we don't change the way we teach and the way public education systems are administered.

Mr. Zwaagstra has collected his grievances in What's Wrong With Our Schools and How We Can Fix Them, a new book he co-authored with two of his former professors at the University of Manitoba's education faculty, Rod Clifton and John Long.

As its title suggests, the book attempts to provide what the authors call "common-sense solutions" in short chapters designed to provide parents with a crash-course in the contemporary Canadian classroom. The book touches on a number of controversial practices that have made headlines recently, including no-fail and no-test policies, the spread of "edu-babble" in curricula and a diminishing of teachers' authority in the classroom.

The most significant hurdle facing students, Mr. Zwaagstra argues, is a pervasive anti-knowledge bias that resists the teaching of specific, common content. The "child-centred learning" philosophy expects teachers to tailor instruction to the individual needs of each student while making the experience "fun," instead of teaching facts--the building blocks he believes should be in place before higher-level concepts can be taught.

Read the rest here.

The Nature of the Problem
The most interesting part of his critique is his accusation that teacher's colleges are dominated by an "anti-knowledge bias." The irony is just too much to bear: educators biased against knowledge.

I can accept a society in which the media is image-oriented and entertainment-oriented. I can accept that children will have many distractions and hindrances to education in a high tech, wired and image-driven environment like our contemporary society. I can even accept that teaching techniques will need to change in such an environment and that there can be new and non-traditional ways of reaching the goals of education. What I can never accept is educators themselves renouncing the goal of teaching our children knowledge - both the actual content of various subjects and the skills needed to continue learning independently like literacy, numeracy, research ability and logic.

"Edu-babble" arises out of a relativistic, late-modern, constructivist epistemology that is based on a nominalist metaphysics that is demonstrably false and which, if accepted by a society leads inexorably to the culture of death. Modern Western culture is a culture of death because it has lost its grasp on absolute Truth and succumbed to the "dictatorship of relativism." And relativism quickly melts before the tyranny of the will of the strong and the result is that killing comes to be seen as the solution to social problems. Only a rational metaphysics in which the human reason participates in the Divine Logos is sufficient to undergird an epistemology in which we can know truth from error, right from wrong and good from evil.

The Practical Solution
The teacher's unions have been taken over by leftist activists; there can be no solution to this problem until their power is broken. The top-down approach to educational philosophy must be replaced by a bottom-up approach in which the grassroots are empowered to make decisions at the local level. We should settle for nothing less that a voucher system that allows parents to choose the schools that they believe to be best for their children.

Schools should be governed by parents councils which hire principals who are empowered to hire, evaluate and, where necessary, fire teachers. This way various philosophies can compete on a level playing field as far as funding is concerned and the reality-based educational philosophies will quickly become popular and crowd out the "progressive" ones.

This may sound radical but it is very practical and realistic. It could be implemented tomorrow if it were not for the tremendous political power wielded by teachers unions who act in the self-interest of union leaders while pretending to be acting in the best interests of teachers and students. This is why the teachers unions must be smashed to bits. One can only pray that what is going on in New Jersey with Gov. Chris Christie's crusade against the teachers unions on behalf of taxpayers, parents and children will not only succeed but be emulated all over North America.

The Totalitarian Face of Socialist Europe

Christina Odone of the Daily Telegraph has an alarming bit of news from Europe, where the unelected, unaccountable, EU bureaucracy continues to screw down the coffin of culture of death ensuring that the last traces of Europe's Christian heritage are eradicated so that nothing will be left to stand in the way of the soft totalitarianism of equality and security. In a post entitled, "Euro-socialists want to shut down hospitals opposed to abortion and euthanasia. It's time to stop them," she writes

Socialists at the Council of Europe (yes, the same entity that brought you the European Convention on Human Rights) have been very busy lately. A Ms Carina Hagg of the Swedish Socialist Group and Ms Christine McCafferty of the UK Socialist Group are scheming to name and shame conscientious objectors in the medical profession who refuse to carry out abortions, hand out birth control devices or engage in euthanasia. McCafferty even suggests that European governments should set up a register of those who will not cut their conscience to suit the fashion of secular socialists.

Conscience, once regarded as a positive asset, is seen by today’s Euro-socialists as a bigot’s charter to block abortion, birth control and euthanasia. Conscientious objection may be a universal human right under international law, but the right to medical intervention – even when it is to end life rather than sustain it – trumps faith every time.

This is dogma, and it is deadly. Conscientious objectors are not fanatics who want to force their religious views down others’ throats: their principled stands often protect the vulnerable, from the octagenarian to the unborn child.

Do you want to live in a world where a doctor cannot refuse to administer the lethal drug to the elderly patient whose gimlet-eyed heirs want out of the way? Where a doctor cannot refuse to terminate the healthy young married woman’s pregnancy, although she makes it clear the baby comes at an inconvenient moment in her career? Yet this is the new world, amoral and irresponsible, that Ms McCafferty seeks to impose on us.

Read the rest here.

Remember the good old days of tolerance? Those were the days when Christians ran Europe and socialists were underground. These people make the medieval Inquisition look like a bunch of inefficient bunglers.

They seem to be bent on implementing all the worst features of the old Soviet Union in the name of an knee-jerk, ignorant, anti-Americanism. These days the way you show your hatred of the West is by being anti-American, for Western values have yet to be pushed underground there. And to think that Obama's dream is to make America more like Europe!

Want to See the Face of Pure Evil?

The United Kingdom is growing darker every year. Now the mask is coming off and evil people in the service of the culture of death are beginning to show themselves openly on TV. Have a peek at this video in which a grandmotherly woman says that of course she would not hesitate to murder a child who was, in her opinion, suffering too much. Any "good mother" would not hesitate to do the same.

Note the goofy woman in the clerical collar who looks like she can't quite believe what she is hearing. She says nothing in response to the advocate of euthanasia, which makes her a realistic exemplar of the Church of England which seems mildly preoccupied with marches for debt relief or collecting for the food bank as society degenerates into barbarism all around it.



Well, there you have it: pure evil stated openly with a "So what are you going to do about it?" kind of attitude. Hitler told the world ahead of time what he planned to do and nobody did anything to stop him. These people are doing the same. Will anybody respond to their attack on human life and dignity?

Eco-fascism and the Culture of Death

As I reported in an earlier post, the radical Greens in the 10:10 movement in the UK shot themselves in themselves in the foot with that little monument to eco-fascism, the short film "No Pressure." When the history of the Green movement is studied a hundred years from now, this little piece will be to the Green movement what Leni Riefenstahl's "The Triumph of the Will" was to Nazism: a perfect icon of the essence of the ideology.

It appears that corporate sponsors are jumping ship from the 10:10 shipwreck:

It looks like Sony and Kyocera Mita have demanded their removal from all associations with the extremist climate group 10:10.org, which produced that exploding schoolchildren video last week. The corporations' names have been removed from the list of partners, and a lengthy post by Sony's point-person on climate change, Naomi Climer, has been deleted from the 10:10 site.

Not only that, but a huge U.S. environmentalist promoter and partner, 350.org (headed by Bill McKibben), is no longer listed as an organizational partner. Both 10:10 and 350 have been heavily promoting an October 10 (10/10/10) "global workday" to supposedly bring fresh attention to the global warming threat. The message from 350.org's press shop:

We respect 10:10's previous work to encourage companies, schools, and churches to voluntarily cut their carbon emissions 10%. Upon seeing the video, however, we have informed 10:10 that we can no longer remain partners on 10/10/10 or any other initiative. 350.org maintains an absolute commitment to nonviolence in word and deed.

I don't think one has to be committed to absolute nonviolence in order to find ruthless, lawless, arbitrary, murder to be reprehensible.

After the mealy-mouthed non-apology issued on Friday when the 10:10 group took down the offensive film only served to stoke the global rage over the hideous and pornography, yet highly revealing, little piece of Green propoganda, the head of the organization, Eugenie Harvey, today issued a more fulsome apology.

But you might want to have your sick bag at the ready when you come to the part where she proffers her lame excuse is that the 10:10 team is "young and creative." As Jean-Francois Revel puts it in his powerful book, Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era, Marxists (and, let's face it, most Greens have drunk deeply from the Marxist well) are trapped in their ideology and sometimes they forget that the rest of the world thinks murder is unacceptable in the service of ideology. All that is important for Greens, as for Marxists, is that they have "Good Intentions." Everything else is a detail - details like the people ruthlessly blown to bits in the film.

The Green movement is part of the culture of death and therefore they see killing the innocent as part of the solution to social problems. Hence their support for abortion, euthanasia and coercive eugenics. Their promotion of the contraceptive mentality and population control by governments is part of the same anti-humanistic mentality. These people are dangerous and they are powerful. Their propaganda is effective, their fund-raising schemes efficient and their influence is widespread. We need to get them out of our public education system, out of government and out of the administration of universities.

Euthanasia and Contempt for Human Life

Wesley J. Smith has a good post here documenting how legalizing euthanasia leads to an increasingly callous attitude toward human life. Euthanasia was legalized in the Netherlands in 1973 and by 2010 the Dutch Medical Society is lobbying for the complete legalization (i.e. removal of all prohibitions of) non-voluntary euthanasia. It is already widely tolerated and goes unpunished.

Self-delusion is rampant in the euthanasia movement. Most proponents recognize that it is inherently dangerous to legalize killing. But they desperately want to believe that they can control the grim reaper. Thus, they continue to peddle the nonsense that "guidelines will protect against abuse" despite overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary.

Euthanasia has been around long enough and practiced sufficiently enough for us to detect a pattern. Killing is sold to the public as a last resort justified only in cases where nothing else can be done to alleviate suffering. But once the reaper is allowed through the door, the categories of killable people expand steadily toward the acceptance of death on demand.

The classic example is the Netherlands, where doctors have been allowed to euthanize patients since 1973. Dutch death regulations require that euthanasia be strictly limited to the sickest patients, for whom nothing but extermination will alleviate overwhelming suffering — a concept in Dutch law known as force majeur. But once mercy killing was redefined as being good in a few cases rather than being bad in all circumstances, it didn’t take long for the protective guidelines to be viewed widely as impediments to be overcome instead of important protections to be obeyed.

Thus, supposedly ironclad protections against abuse — such as the doctrine of force mejeur and the stipulation that patient give multiple requests for euthanasia — quickly ceased meaningfully to constrain mercy killing. As a consequence, Dutch doctors now legally kill terminally ill people who ask for it, chronically ill people who ask for it, disabled people who ask for it, and depressed people who ask for it.

Euthanasia has also entered the pediatric wards, where eugenic infanticide has become common even though babies cannot ask to be killed. According to a 1997 study published in the British medical journal The Lancet, approximately 8 percent of all Dutch infant deaths result from lethal injections. The babies deemed killable are often disabled and thus are thought not to have a "livable life." The practice has become so common that 45 percent of neonatologists and 31 percent of pediatricians who responded to Lancet surveys had killed babies.

It gets worse: Repeated studies sponsored by the Dutch government have found that doctors kill approximately 1,000 patients each year who have not asked for euthanasia. This is not only a violation of every guideline, but an act that Dutch law considers murder. Nonvoluntary euthanasia has become so common that it even has a name: "Termination without request or consent."

Despite this carnage, Dutch doctors are very rarely prosecuted for such crimes, and the few that are brought to court are usually exonerated. Moreover, even if a doctor is found guilty, he or she is almost never punished in any meaningful way, nor does the murderer face discipline by the Dutch Medical Society. For example, in 2001, a doctor was convicted of murdering an 84-year-old patient who had not asked to be killed. Prosecutors demanded a nine-month suspended probation (!), yet even this brush — it can’t even be called a slap — on the wrist was rejected by the trial judge who refused to impose any punishment. Not to worry. The appellate court decided to get tough: It imposed a one-week suspended sentence on the doctor for murder.

Even such praising with faint damnation isn’t enough for the Dutch Medical Association. As a result of this and the handful of other non-punished murder convictions of doctors who engaged in termination without request or consent, the organization is lobbying to legalize non-voluntary euthanasia. Along these same lines — and demonstrating that the culture of death recognizes no limits — the day after the Dutch formally legalized euthanasia, the country’s minister of health advocated the provision of suicide pills to the elderly who do not qualify for killing under Dutch law.

Read the rest here. Euthanasia breeds pride and contempt for our fellow human beings. It is a deeply corrupting and evil practice and will destroy societies in which it is permitted.

A Majority of Americans are Now Pro-life

From LIFENEWS.com comes this encouraging news:

The Gallup released the results of a new survey confirming, for the third time in the last year, that more Americans call themselves pro-life than "pro-choice" on abortion. That's enough for the respected polling firm to say a pro-life majority is the "new normal" in the United States.

According to a May 3-6 Gallup poll, 47 percent of Americans say they are pro-life on abortion versus 45 percent who say they are "pro-choice," supporting legal abortions.

This is nearly identical to the 47% to 46% division Gallup found last July, which was down from the 51-42 percent split favoring the pro-life position last May.

Because this is the third consecutive time Gallup has found more Americans taking the pro-life position, the polling firm calls the results "a real change in public opinion."

Looking at the Gallup polling data dating back to 1995, the pro-life movement has been successful in changing public opinion on abortion -- as Gallup found a 56-33 percent pro-abortion split in 1995. That 23 percent pro-abortion majority has shifted 25 percent towards the pro-life position to the pro-life majority the movement against abortion enjoys today.

There can be little doubt that the culture war is gong badly for the abortion industry and the political class in the US. In the election year pro-choice candidates are faring poorly and voters are installing one pro-life person after another in public office. Obama and his culture of death warriors won't be there forever because America is not ready to embrace socialism and cultural decline. Thanks be to God.

The "Freedom" That is Only a "Freedom to Die"

Here is a quote from Bertrand Russell's A Free Man's Worship (as quoted by Peter Kreeft in C. S. Lewis for the Third Millennium, p. 172). My question is: "If people really believed this way, how would they live?" My answer would be "Look at Europe. There a whole continent is living out Russell's nihilism."

Such . . . is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforth must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

Kreeft comments:

This is a philosophy but it is also a spell, a spell of black magic laid on the human soul. Philosophical arguments are needed to refute the philosophy, but philosophical arguments alone will not lift the spell. Only a counterspell will. Only good magic defeats bad magic. We need a spell weaver, a magician. When Tolkien's son had to fill out a draft induction form, he filled in the blank for "father's occupation" with the word "wizzard." The same could be said for Lewis, especially in Prelandra.

I agree with Kreeft when he calls the preaching of Russell a "spell of black magic laid on the human soul." It is not science or reason speaking; it is the voice of Hell insisting that there is no God, no immortality, no heaven and no hope. And modern Europe has listened to this snake and has nodded in agreement until it has fallen into the sleep that precedes, and is virtually indistinguishable from, death.

Barack Obama: The European President

The same statist, socialist ideology that has infected Europe and caused its decline has been touted by American progressives, (who are actually socialists but afraid to say so openly), for decades as what "social justice" demands.

This ideology is hostile to individual liberty, free speech, free markets, Christianity, traditional sexual morality, the sanctity of life and the rule of law. It values massive state bureaucracies as the solution to social problems, freedom only of politically correct speech, high rates of taxation and government regulation of business, Darwinism, sexual libertinism, easy access to abortion and euthanasia and rule by administrative law.

Europe is in the grip of the culture of death. Advocates of private killing are loud and dominant, while those who advocate for the poor, the weak and the vulnerable are marginalized. No country in Europe is having enough babies to prevent the population from dropping precipitously. Essentially, Europe is committing collective suicide - which is the end result of collectivism.

Barack Obama is the first "European" president of the United States, which is the only Western country that has so far put up a respectable fight against the culture of death. Obama is trying to turn the US into a European-style social democracy and overcome its Christian culture and he is in a hurry. The mask of centrist pragmatism that he wore during the campaign has fallen off and far left extremism is now plain (for anyone who does not have a vested interest in being deceived) to see.

Nowhere is this Europeanism more clear than in his foreign policy. As Rich Lowry of The National Review Online writes:

"The Obama administration says it won’t tolerate an Iranian nuclear weapon. It has given no one any reason to believe that. The credibility of the administration’s oft-stated intolerance for new Israeli residences, on the other hand, is intact and unassailable.

Over the issue of Israeli settlements, the administration is willing to force a diplomatic crisis. It is willing to berate and belittle. It is willing to give visiting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu a reception at the White House icier than that granted the Salahis, the infamous party crashers. On settlements, Barack Obama is Churchillian, resisting them on the beaches, in the fields, and in the streets.

To call the administration’s reaction to the Israeli announcement of the next stage in planning for 1,600 housing units in Jerusalem disproportionate is a rank understatement. It’s perverse.

The housing is in north Jerusalem, in a historically Jewish neighborhood no negotiations have ever contemplated handing over to a Palestinian state. The Obama administration believes a cram-down of a settlement halt is the necessary first step to a negotiated solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, a doctrinal fixity impervious to contrary evidence.

The administration can’t even get the Palestinians to agree to talk with the Israelis directly, something that occurred routinely in the Bush years. The Palestinians understandably won’t negotiate so long as they believe the U.S. will strong-arm the Israelis into concessions.

It’s appropriate that Netanyahu came to Washington for his ritual humiliation — don’t let the side door of the White House hit you on the way out — simultaneous with the passage of health-care reform. The Europeanization of American domestic policy will proceed in tandem with — and eventually compel — the Europeanization of American foreign policy.

Like the Europeans, Obama is adopting the Arab narrative of the Middle East, wherein Israeli perfidy is responsible for all that ails the region. The administration’s broadsides against the Jewish state could have been delivered by Finnish foreign minister Alexander Stubb, who’s always up for a good chiding of the nasty Israelis."

The first sentence of that last paragraph is particularly disturbing. I am currently reading Bat Ye'or's lucid and disturbing book: Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 2005 ,2006), which describes in great detail the process by which the Arab narrative of the Middle East has been adopted by Europe. In this narrative, Israel is an interloper in Arab territory.

But, one might ask, aren't Arabs from Arabia and don't they dominate Palestine only because of conquest? And does not Israel control its territory by re-conquest since they were there long before the Arabs and they conquered their territory in a defensive, just war against aggressors? So how is it more legitimately Arab land than Jewish land?

The sting in the answer to that question is that Palestine belongs to the Arabs only in the sense that all the earth "belongs" to Muslims since it is their "manifest destiny" or "eschatological mission" to rule the entire world. Europeans appear to be blase to the fact that, by accepting the Arab world's logic for why Israel should not exist in its present form, they are implicitly accepting the inevitable conclusion that Europe can only continue in the future as the "land of dhimmitude," that is, as land ruled by Islam.

America and Israel are demonized in the Arab world because they represent opposition to the Muslim dream of a world-wide empire. They resist bowing before Arab tyrants, or at least they did before Obama's world apology tour got going. Obama is the first European president because he is the first post-American president. In him the decline of the West finds its incarnation.

Euthansia in the Netherlands: A Disturbing Chapter in the History of the Spread of the Culture of Death

Joe Carter over at the First Things website in the On the Square section has an excellent article chronicling the history of euthanasia in the Netherlands. Some of it makes for extremely disturbing reading. Here is how it begins:

"For centuries, the Hippocratic Oath, including the admonition against abortion, assisted suicide, and euthanasia, formed the core of Western medical ethics. While the Hippocratic ideal has been eroding for decades, the most direct challenge has emerged in the Netherlands, with the cultural and legal acceptance of the right to die. The medical community and broader citizenry have so embraced the right to choose death for oneself that the Dutch parliament is currently considering legislation that would allow assisted suicide for anyone who has reached the age of seventy and has merely grown tired of living.

In any other country, such a proposal might be considered radical and shocking. But in the Netherlands—the country that first legalized euthanasia—the change in the law will merely decriminalize a practice that has been occurring for decades. An examination of how this formerly conservative, tradition-bound culture could adopt what the modern Hippocratic Oath refers to as “therapeutic nihilism” is useful for understanding how the other nations will begin to accept euthanasia in the near future.

As occurred in many Western countries during the 1960s, the people of the Netherlands began to reject traditional authority structures in favor of increased individual freedom. While the change led most visibly to a liberalization of attitudes toward sex and drugs, it also carried over into the role of doctors and patients, particularly in the expansion of patient’s rights and patient autonomy."

In the course of the article he notes many turning points and landmarks. One shocking fact emerges in the following paragraph:

"According to the Dutch Ministry of Justice, of the 135,675 deaths recorded in 1995, 3,600 (2.4%) were the result of a doctor-assisted termination of life while another 238 (0.3%) were cases of assisted suicide. The most disturbing statistic, however, is that 913 (0.7%) were terminations of life without the express request of the patient. For every three lives ended at the request of the patient, one person was killed without consent."

So not only is it not necessary for a person to request euthanasia or assisted suicide, consent is no longer required either. Doctors can simply choose to kill those whom they think should die. And they admit to not following legal guidelines:

"A survey of 405 Dutch doctors published in the Journal of Medical Ethics in 1999 revealed that safeguards established by the Royal Dutch Medical Association to control how and when euthanasia is performed were often ignored. Dr. Henk Jochemsen of the Lindeboom Institute for Medical Ethics and Dr. John Keown of the University of Cambridge found that almost two-thirds of cases of euthanasia and assisted suicide in 1995 were not reported."

This means that as many as 7.5% of all deaths in the Netherlands may be caused by doctors killing people, with as many as one-third of those done without consent. And it is not just the elderly. The killing of children is gaining momentum:

"In October 2004, the Groningen Academic Hospital officially proposed a government policy—dubbed the Groningen Protocol—which would allow doctors to legally euthanize children under the age of twelve for conditions in which suffering was “so severe that the newborn has no hope of a future.” The hospital even admitted to administering a lethal dose of sedatives to four newborns in 2003. In the previous three-year period, fourteen other cases had also been reported by various hospitals to the Justice Ministry. No legal proceedings were ever taken against either the hospitals that condoned the practice or the doctors who carried out the killings."

Perhaps the most shocking case is the one described as follows:

"As reported in one Dutch documentary, a young woman in remission from anorexia was concerned that her eating disorder would return. To prevent a relapse, she asked her doctor to kill her. He willingly complied with her request."

Here is how the article ends:

"Over a period of forty years, the Dutch have continued the search for where to draw the line with euthanasia, shifting from acceptance of voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill, to voluntary euthanasia for the chronically ill, to non-voluntary euthanasia for the sick and disabled, to euthanasia for those who are not sick at all but are merely “suffering through living.” While the initial impetus may have been spurred by a desire to give expanded rights to the person who faces extreme suffering or imminent death, the effect has been to concentrate power into the hands of state-sponsored medical professionals. And while the justification for assisted death is usually the supposed well being of the suffering patient, the Dutch have redefined natural dependency into an unacceptable or unwanted social burden.

By conflating the duty to reduce suffering with the perceived necessity to eliminate all suffering, Dutch physicians have increasingly resorted to euthanasia as a novel form of sympathectomy. A sympathectomy is a medical procedure that is sometimes required after a localized trauma or peripheral nerve injury, when a person may feel a syndrome of pain and tenderness that can only be relieved by the excision of a sympathetic nerve. In a similar manner, when faced with the many pains, heartaches, and disabilities that eventually afflict most of us in one form or another, the Dutch are resorting to the excision provided by euthanasia.

In doing so, they are severing more than the cords of life, they are cutting the sympathetic nerves that tie us to our fellow human beings. By perverting the traditional role of the physician, the Dutch are making a mockery of true human compassion, and providing a stark warning to those aging societies, like our own, which might one day be tempted to allow this sympathectomy of the soul."

Read it all here.

Can anyone seriously doubt that Divine judgment will fall on a country that allows these things to go on? Pray for the Netherlands. Pray that Canada may be spared these horrors.

Euthanasia Activists on the March in Quebec

The Province of Quebec, having thrown off the Christian faith, is now in the terminal stages of moral and spiritual decline. The culture of death has taken root so strongly there that the medical association is now leading the charge for Dutch-like euthanasia with provincial politicians playing along. This makes Quebec a treat to the rest of Canada insofar as some of the "death as a solution to social problems" activism is conducted in our national Parliament.

Margaret Somerville, professor of bioethics at McGill University in Montreal, has an excellent article, "Getting the Facts Right about Euthanasia," pointing out that the pro-euthanasia campaigners, tied up in knots by the continual use of euphemisms, cannot speak coherently and factually about the issue. The Quebec College of Physicians and Surgeons does not even know how to define euthanasia accurately!

"The Quebec College of Physicians and Surgeons has “tentatively proposed” legalized euthanasia. The college says that it could be seen “as part of appropriate care in certain particular circumstances.” As a result, the Quebec Legislative Assembly has established a multi-party committee, “La commission de la santé et des services sociaux” (the Health and Social Services commission) consisting of 20 members of the Assembly.

Recently, Dr Gaétan Barrette, the president of the federation of Quebec medical specialists, Dr Yves Lamontagne of the Quebec College of Physicians and Yves Robert, secretary of the College gave evidence before the commission. The first two men are clearly on the public record as supporting euthanasia, and the third appears to hold the same view.

There is a saying in ethics that "good facts are essential to good ethics."

But if Dr Barrette, Dr Lamontagne and Yves Robert, secretary of the College, are accurately reported, none of them had his facts straight in giving evidence before the commission.

Dr Barrette said that in caring for terminally ill people, "doctors are aware they can be charged with murder if they administer a 'palliative sedative' before a patient is on his or her last breath." This is not euthanasia, although, like Dr Barrette, 49 percent of Quebec physicians recently polled mistakenly thought it was.

Palliative means the sedative was necessary to relieve pain and suffering and was not given with an intention of killing the patient. That cannot result in a murder charge, or any other legal charge, unless the patient refused it.

Indeed, unreasonably failing to provide necessary treatment for pain and suffering could constitute unprofessional conduct with resultant disciplinary measures, medical malpractice and legal liability for damages, and, in extreme cases, criminal negligence. It is now also widely recognized that for a healthcare professional to negligently leave a patient in serious pain is a breach of fundamental human rights.

Dr Barrette also said, "We want legislation in tune with the wishes of the public." But just because the public wants something or a majority votes for it doesn't mean it is ethical - or even wise. Democratic decisions and ethical ones are not necessarily the same.

The Montreal Gazette reported that Dr Barrette and Dr Lamontagne "told the committee that doctors do not want to perform assisted suicides."

"We are not there to execute people," Lamontagne said.

This boggles the mind. They are recommending that euthanasia be legalized. What do they think euthanasia involves? And if, as they are proposing, killing patients is acceptable, why is helping those patients to kill themselves not acceptable? At least accepting both would have the virtue of consistency."

Read the rest here.

As any student of Thomas Aquinas knows, sin makes you stupid. And as any progressive or left-wing subversive knows, giving things their proper names hinders social acceptance of proposed "advances" that involve killing human beings.

Watching a Nation Commit Suicide

As a result of legalized euthanasia in the Netherlands over 2300 people are now reported as having been killed by doctors each year. The number rose by 10% last year and is expected to rise again. No one knows how many people actually die in unreported cases. You might think that euthanasia campaigners, having attained their goal of people facing "unbearable suffering" with "no prospect for improvement" being able to choose to die, they would be happy. But of course, they are not - because it is not about suffering people choosing to die sooner rather than later. That was just a talking point to get the public to allow pro-euthanasia legislation to be adopted in the first place. But it was just a wedge, not the endgame.

Now, pro-death activists are calling for legalized euthanasia for anyone over 70 years of age who is just tired of living. Radio Netherlands reports:

"All Dutch people over 70 who feel tired of life should have the right to professional help in ending it, demands a citizens' initiative in the Netherlands called Out of Free Will. It will start collecting signatures on Tuesday in support of this proposed change in Dutch legislation, hoping to place the matter firmly on the parliamentarian agenda. A number of prominent Dutch citizens have come out in support of the initiative, including former ministers and artists, legal scholars and physicians. Under current Dutch law, euthanasia is only legal in cases of “hopeless and unbearable” suffering, which in practice means it is limited to those suffering from serious medical conditions and in considerable pain. Only doctors are allowed to assist in euthanasia. Helping somebody commit suicide who does not meet the qualifications stipulated in the current euthanasia law is illegal. The Netherlands legalised euthanasia in 2001 and is one of the few countries in the world to have done so."

Here is how these pro-death activists envision it working:

"Out of Free Will does not only want to decriminalise these acts, it wants to found a new profession to assist those weary of life in ending it. The group has suggested this task be carried out by specially trained and certified nurses, psychologists or spiritual professionals who could verify the request for assisted suicide in a series of conversations with the patient. Only after a second healthcare professional has confirmed the patient’s death wish, would they be provided with lethal drugs. The same caretaker would finally supervise the patient as he takes them.

The group paints the following scenario: the specialists should ensure that the patient is of sound mind and that their request is explicit, logical and consistent. The assistants must make sure the death wish is more than a rash impulse, the product of depression or the symptom of another illness, and that the patient has considered the consequences of his actions for those who will survive him. Once the patient has taken his own life, the suicide assistant writes a report that can be reviewed by the municipal coroner. The case is then assessed by the regional euthanasia approval commission, which has already been instituted to oversee the application of the current Dutch euthanasia law."

No doctor has yet been prosecuted for breaking the rules under the 2001 legislation and it is unofficially acknowledged that a lot of "looking the other way" goes on. What we see here is the culture of death seeping into the public consciousness and taking possession of the collective mind of the people. Note this comment:

"Former minister and self-described feminist Hédy d’Ancona (72) said arguing for the right to choose one’s time of death was a natural extension of her lifelong battle for emancipation."

So the final act of rebellion and self-assertion against the Creator and Tradition and all the other boogey men that modernist like to conjure up is taking one's own life. Is it any wonder that the Scripture says that "There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death?" (Prov. 14:12)

Modern Western culture is rooted in the assertion of the will of the autonomy of the individual. All else that is specifically modern flows from this - revolution, moral relativism, existentialism etc. What begins with "I think therefore I am" ends with "the will to power." The culture of death, we have to recognize is not an anomaly but the logical outgrowth of the assertion of the will of the individual as higher than natural law, higher than the king, higher than the Bible and higher than God. Yes, the individual can assert himself in this way, but the end result of the process is not life, joy and fulfillment, but rather, despair, fear and death.

If there ever was a society firmly in the grip of the Devil it is that society that believes in death as the answer. This is how the Devil operates. In the Garden, he said "You will not surely die." But Jesus Christ said: "Whoever believes in my shall not die but have eternal life."

When a country chooses to believe the lie, it finds that the slippery slope into a death-dealing, death-loving culture is the result. Strictly speaking, it is a matter of mass psychosis brought on by embracing a lie so long that one loses touch with reality. This is the condition of the Netherlands today. Abortion on demand is not enough. Euthanasia of the incurably ill is not enough. Euthanasia for depressed seniors will not be enough either. Next up is a debate on euthanizing sick infants. I suppose the next logical step might be to euthanize unwanted infants (those the mother changed her mind about too late for abortion or the handicapped.) Then there is the debate over euthanasia for the handicapped and the mentally ill. There is literally no end to the culture of death other than cultural suicide.

America and Europe

The only people who think America is just like Europe are those who resolutely live their entire lives within the bubble of liberal coastal elites which constitute a small (maybe 20%) and shrinking portion of the US population. It is true that the decadent Hollywood elite, big-city Easterners and tenured radicals in the universities still believe believe that America is predestined to embrace the secular, materialistic, socialistic worldview of Europe. But a strong majority of Americans did not get the memo or, if they did, chose to ignore it.

It isn't just Mississippi; it is Massachusetts where they elected a Republican who ran on a platform of opposition to the massive health care reform bill currently before Congress to the seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy. This is bad news for the European elites who gave Barack Obama a Nobel Peace Prize for sounding just like them: America is still a center-right country and is getting more so the longer Barack Obama is president.

Europe, on the other hand, is caught in the culture of death and is committing demographic suicide. Everywhere you look there is a willingness to prostrate oneself before radical Islam, as the show trial of Geert Wilders for "hate speech" against Muslims illustrates.

America is not perfect, but it is not Europe. Mark Steyn, in his colorful style, points out the point of greatest difference between Europe and America during the recent financial crisis:

"I’ve been saying for months that the difference between America and Europe is that, when the global economy nosedived, everywhere from Iceland to Bulgaria mobs took to the streets and besieged Parliament demanding to know why government didn’t do more for them. This is the only country in the developed world where a mass movement took to the streets to say we can do just fine if you control-freak statists would just stay the hell out of our lives, and our pockets. You can shove your non-stimulating stimulus, your jobless jobs bill, and your multi-trillion-dollar porkathons."

There is no doubt that the spirit of self-reliance, religious faith, local community resourcefulness and limited government lives on in America in spite of everything. Victor Davis Hanson points out the irony that European prosperity for the whole period since WW II has been built on reliance on American military protection against Communism.

"After the September 2008 American financial panic, European diplomats and intellectuals lectured Americans on the evils of unfettered capitalism and the superiority of their statist model. The strong euro and steady expansion of the EU had convinced many that their soft socialism was the only way of the future.

But European prosperity was, in fact, heavily subsidized by decades of free protection by the U.S. military. Meanwhile, aristocratic bureaucrats in Brussels were increasingly not accountable to their skeptical continental constituents — and seemed terrified of popular referenda from member states on the EU constitution.

And now? Several EU nations like Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal face financial implosions — brought on by unsustainable government spending, out-of-control pensions, and endemic tax cheating. The euro is falling fast. Bondholders of European debt are jittery. Now, northwestern countries like Germany and France — despite their own budget problems — may have to bail out Greece."

Bashing capitalism and feeling smug about statism has been a trademark of European elite opinion. Obama got the Nobel because he validated, in his person as an African-American and in his liberal policies, this European smugness.

But now, instead of asking "Will America inevitably become more like Europe?" some people are beginning to ask "What would it take for Europe to become more like America?" Simon Jenkins, writing in The Guardian, asks: "Why is there no British Tea Party?"

George Weigel, in a recent speech in Paris, gave his opinion on the question of what it would take for Europe to reverse its cultural decline.

"Pointing to the “demographic winter” gripping much of the continent, Weigel described it as a portent of the future, unless Europeans insist on the place of Christian values in society and combat relativism with truth. . .

The first step in the process of Christian renewal, the Catholic author said, is that “intolerance in the name of 'tolerance' must be named for what it is and publicly condemned.” According to Weigel, Biblical morality is being treated in European culture with “bigotry and intolerance” and this is an “uncivil act that must be named as such.” But the prime example of this intolerance is the European Union and individual states believing that they have the authority to redefine marriage – a human institution that “antedates the state ontologically as well as historically,” he said.

Secondly, Weigel argued that Catholic Christians must speak openly “about the empirically demonstrable and deplorable effects of the sexual revolution on individuals and society.” In addition to this, he argued that Catholics need to bring about a “new appreciation of the dignity and nobility of human love” as illustrated in John Paul II's “Theology of the Body.”. . .

The American intellectual also asserted that the Church needs to be vindicated from the “black legends” that circulate around its history, such as the Crusades, Galileo's trial and the Inquisition.

“I raise these matters of historical record, not to score debating points,” Weigel clarified, “but to suggest that part of the challenge we face today is to recognize, with John Paul II and Cardinal Lustiger, that Europe (and indeed the entire West) is suffering from a false story about itself, and about the relationship of biblical religion to its formation and its history.”

Finally, Weigel advised, the Church must continue to develop a “rich interior life,” and at the same time, find “winsome ways to make the Church's proposal to a post-Christian Europe.” One way to do this, he suggested, is for members of the Church to join with men and women “of conscience,” who may not be believers, to publicly challenge “the ever-more-ominous dictatorship of relativism.”

Weigel is here giving expression to the thought of Pope Benedict XVI, who believes that the Church can be a catalyst for cultural renewal in Europe. Why not? It would not be the first time it has happened. And in the process, Europe will become more like America. Ironically, however, it won't become more like the part of America that is now "Europeanized," but rather, more like Middle America, Christian America, Tea Party America.

It is that or death and while we know that many, confronted with that choice, would willingly choose death, there may be a creative minority that would rather live like conservative Americans than under radical Islamic rule.

Another Reason Why Abortion is Bad for Women

A story in the Globe and Mail today reports that the scientific evidence for abortion being a risk factor for breast cancer is a blow to fanatical and irrational political correctness.

"Conservative MP Maurice Vellacott issued a release this week to say he had been vindicated by the National Cancer Institute for making the controversial claim that there is a link between induced abortion and breast cancer. And Mr. Vellacott may be right.

Three years ago, the Saskatchewan MP helped to bring an American doctor and activist to Parliament Hill to tell Canadian women that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer. It turned out that the doctor, Angela Lanfranchi, was speaking from a defined religious point of view that had little apparent basis in science.

And, at the time, the link between the procedure and the disease had been discounted by the National Cancer Institute in the United States, the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada (and their U.S. counterparts), as well as the Canadian Cancer Society and the Canadian Breast Cancer Network.

But a study released last fall (available here but only for a fee) by the respected Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute in Seattle by a number of distinguished cancer experts including Louise Brinton, the chief of the Hormonal and Reproductive Epidemiology Branch of the National Cancer Institute lists induced abortion as being “associated with an increased risk for breast cancer.” Background documents further suggest that it increases the risk of the disease by 40 per cent."

The story is a fair and balanced one that makes the Liberal Party look like irresponsible fanatics more interested in covering up the truth than protecting women's health. They called the Prime Minister to disavow Vellacott's statements. But since when can a politician alter scientific studies by fiat? Actually, contemporary liberals try to do that all the time, which reveals the anti-reason and anti-science basis of radical feminism, the pro-homosexuality movement and the anti-traditional family group.

Life Cycle News reports it this way:

"U.S. National Cancer Institute researcher Dr. Louise Brinton, who was the chief organizer of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) workshop in 2003 that persuaded women that it was "well established" that "abortion is not associated with increased breast cancer risk," has reversed her position and now admits that abortion and oral contraceptives raise breast cancer risks.

The study found that "a statistically significant 40% increased risk for women who have abortions" exists, and that a " 270% increased risk of triple negative breast cancer (an aggressive form of breast cancer associated with high mortality) among those who used oral contraceptives while under age 18 and a 320% increased risk of triple negative breast cancer among recent users (within 1-5 years) of oral contraceptives," also exists.

This means that women who start using OCs before age 18 multiply their risk of TNBC by 3.7 times and recent users of OCs within the last one to five years multiply their risk by 4.2 times.

"Although the study was published nine months ago," stated Karen Malec, president of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer, in a press release, "the NCI, the American Cancer Society, Susan G. Komen for the Cure and other cancer fundraising businesses have made no efforts to reduce breast cancer rates by issuing nationwide warnings to women."

The liberals who resist all limits on scientific and technological interference in human reproduction accuse conservative of being anti-science and anti-progress. But adjusting the bodies of women for the convenience of men in such a way as to cause them to die young of cancer is not progress. They confuse technology with science and blithely assume that anything a scientist can do should be done just because it is technically feasible. From test tube babies to cloning and surrogate motherhood - if it can be done technically then it is automatically enlightened to do it and anyone who opposes doing it is called anti-science and other names. The reality is that the Pill has contributed to a technological and social revolution that has brought great harm to women, families and ultimately to society as a whole. Both the Pill and abortion hurt women and if anyone is "liberated," it is not women but promiscuous men.

In the future people will look back on this period of history and shake their heads over the way women's bodies had to be butchered, medicated and invaded all in the name of sexual promiscuity. They will wonder why the late 20th and 21st centuries were so dominated by the worst of men and why there were no real feminists to defend the health and bodily integrity of women. They will also wonder why science could be so often suppressed in the name of an irrational and death-dealing ideology, for the sexual revolution is the spear tip of the culture of death.

It is time for men to stand up and take responsibility by not pressuring women to engage in practices like hormonal contraception and abortion that harm them. If men were willing to be responsible in their relations with women, then women would not feel pressured to do what they now feel society expects of them. But women also have the responsibility to say no to the strong social pressure to be sexually available even at the expense of their own health.

_________

UPDATE: You might want to check out this link to a blog on "About.com" which is owned by the New York Times. So it is hardly a "right-wing pro-life organization." Also, Jill Stanek has a good summary of the political fall-out so far from the new NCI study. Women should be up in arms about this manipulation and deceit and they should be burning their birth control pills on the steps of the big pharmaceutical companies that have gotten rich off their exploitation.

Is the Tide Turning on Same-Sex "Marriage?"

We learn today that the vote on legalizing same-sex "marriage" in the New Jersey state senate has been canceled because nine Democrats were planning to vote against it, which would have doomed the bill. A bill to legalize same-sex "marriage" in New York recently was defeated and Maine voted solidly against it in a referendum held in early November. This all follows up on the success of Proposition 8 in California. A recent story by Peter J. Smith in Catholic On-line sums up the situation:

"Thirty-two states in the United States have rejected same-sex "marriage" with 30 states banning the practice through constitutional amendment. In three states, same-sex "marriage" was legislated through judicial fiat, and in only two states - Vermont and New Hampshire - is same-sex "marriage" legal through legislative action."

The figure of 32 does not count New Jersey. In 32 democratic votes so far, same-sex "marriage" has lost every time. It has only been implemented in situations where no election was held on the issue. The will of the people is clear, even after so much propaganda and heavily-funded campaigns by powerful forces including government bureaucracies, the teachers unions, unions in general, major corporations, billionares like George Soros, the Democratic Party as a whole and Hollywood. The sexual revolution has rolled on for six decades but it may have finally run into a wall.

So, apart from top-down judicial activism, it appears that same-sex "marriage" has little future in the US. Much is often made of the idea that younger voters generally favor it, but that is true of many liberal issues and when those younger voters get older and wiser they often become more conservative.

So has the tide turned? The tide of same-sex "marriage" has been sweeping the Western world and had engulfed Europe and Canada. But it may have now crested with the US (which after all constitutes the majority of the West in terms of population and power) refusing to embrace it. If this trend continues and the rejection of same-sex "marriage" is a gain which gets consolidated then we might begin to see traditional marriage strengthened instead of weakened by government policy and social attitudes.

We might actually see more children raised by their biological parents and more couples seek counseling instead of divorce. We might see a reversal of the disaster known as "no fault divorce" and government tax policies that favor married couples with children and do not penalize stay-at-home mothers. We might see curbs on public obscenity and the roll back of the pornography industry's exploitative methods. We might even see schools teaching the benefits of pre-marital abstinence instead of "safe-sex." Imagine a world in which children grew up knowing that the adult world favored traditional marriage and commitment over hedonism and self-gratification. It wouldn't be perfect, but it sure would be better than what we have got now.

If this happens in the US, the citizens of Canada, the UK, Australia and Europe are going to become jealous of the common sense and socially-beneficial policies of the US government and are going to start to put the heat on their own political masters and ruling elites to reverse this massive, dangerous, unprecedented social experiment known as the sexual revolution.

European Parliament Hears Warning of "Demographic Winter"

Zenit new agency reports that the Institue for Family Policies has presented an alarming report on Europe's future to the European Parliament. Here is a snippet:

"The data shows how the indicators of population, birthrate, marriages, family and home breakups have worsened over the last 28 years.

People who are older than 65 already outnumber by more than 6.5 million children under age 14, and every year fewer children are born.

Moreover, according to the IFP, there is "a collapse of marriages, with
increasingly fewer marriages and more broken ones -- one million divorces a year -- and with homes being emptied; two out of every three European homes have
no children.""

So-called private morality issues - sexual promiscuity, abortion, divorce etc. - turn out to have widespread social, political and economic implications:

"The president of the IFP affirmed that this "is causing evident effects, both in the economic as well as the social dimension."

He explained: "In the economic dimension, there is an increase in public spending because of the aging population, with an increase in investments dedicated to pensions and health expenses. Expenses that, added to the effects caused by the fall in public earnings due to the deficit of the birthrate can end by causing the reduction/elimination of social loans and, in the end, the bankruptcy of the welfare state.""

No matter how committed one is to the welfare state, one would nonetheless think that its looming bankruptcy would be a cause for concern.

"If the tendency is not halted, by 2050 the European population will have lost 27.3 million people, one out of every three persons will be older than 65 and only one out of every eight persons will be younger than 15, while the average age will be 46.7.

In regard to abortion, the IFP spoke of an "explosion" -- 28 million abortions in the EU since 1990, making it the first cause of mortality in Europe."

This is a picture of the culture of death in action. The most depressing thought that occurs to me reading this data is that the solution that will undoubtedly be brought forward is - you guessed it - more killing. Euthanasia for the lonely elderly who have no one to speak up for them will lengthen out the time it will take for the economy to crash and staving off the inevitable is apparently all the contemporary European mind is capable of engaging with any more.

Read it all here.

Why Euthanasia? Why Now?

Margaret Sommerville, director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill Universityhas an interesting piece in the Ottawa Citizen today on "Why we're debating euthanasia now" with the tag line: "Deep changes in society have created a growing demand for the legalization of euthanasia -- but that doesn't make it right." She begins:

"Why is Canada's Parliament now considering a bill to legalize euthanasia (a term I use here to include assisted suicide), when we have prohibited it for millennia?

Not one of the bottom-line conditions usually linked with calls for legalizing euthanasia -- that a person is terminally ill, wants to die and we can kill them -- is new. These factors have been part of the human condition for as long as humans have existed. And our capacity to relieve pain and suffering has improved remarkably. So, is some other cause the main one?

She proceeds to give a laundry list of reasons why euthanasia is being debated now. First on the list is the obvious one: Enlightenment ideas of autonomy and extreme individualism.

Second, she mentions the loneliness of dying people due to the medicalization of death:

"In our society, death is largely medical event that takes place in a
hospital or other institution and is perceived as occurring in great isolation.
It's been institutionalized, depersonalized and dehumanized. Asking for
euthanasia can be a response to the "intense pre-mortem loneliness" of the dying
person that results."

Third, she mentions the way the mass media hypes isolated stories of individuals demanding death, which creates the illusion that this is what "everybody" wants.

Fourth, she talks about the "death talk" in our society and the fear that it generates:

"Our extensive discussion of euthanasia in the mass media may be our contemporary "death talk." So, instead of being confined to an identifiable location and an hour or so a week, "death talk" has spilled out into our lives in general. This makes maintaining the denial of death more difficult, because it makes the fear of death more present and "real." One way to deal with this fear is to believe we have death under control. The availability of euthanasia could support that belief. Euthanasia moves us from chance to choice concerning death. Although we cannot make death optional, we can create an illusion that it is, by making its timing and the conditions and ways in which it occurs a matter of choice."

I think she is really on to something here. As fewer and fewer people believe in Christianity, the natural fear of death is not dealt with through Christian hope and so people grasp at straws of control. We can at least pretend to believe that we can control what we choose.

Fifth, she mentions the legalism that characterizes our society as a result of a loss of face to face contact with family and friends and the fact that most interactions now occur between strangers. She also discusses the role of legal positivism, which implies the loss of belief in natural and divine law.

Sixth, she points out that materialism and consumerism end up getting applied even to human beings themselves. In a "throw away" society, even people are disposable.

Seventh, she says that the loss of a sense of mystery leads to a loss of hope: "We convert mysteries into problems in order to deal with them and reduce our anxiety in doing so."

Eighth, she points to the loss of the sense of what it means to be human and the loss of an ability to articulate a difference between animals and people.

Nineth, she mentions the false opposition of religion to science and the use of science to reduce the confidence of the average person in religion. This leads to a passivity - almost a kind of fatalism - in the face of new and dehumanizing technologies.

Tenth, she talks about competing worldviews. She writes:

"Though immensely important in itself, the debate over euthanasia might be a surrogate for yet another, even deeper, one. Which of two irreconcilable worldviews will form the basis of our societal and cultural paradigm?

According to one worldview, we are highly complex, biological machines, whose most valuable features are our rational, logical, cognitive functions. This worldview is in itself a mechanistic approach to human life. Its proponents support euthanasia as being, in appropriate circumstances, a logical and rational response to problems at the end of life.

The other worldview (which for some people is expressed through religion, but can be, and possibly is for most people, held independently of religion, at least in a traditional or institutional sense) is that human life consists of more than its biological component, wondrous as that is. It involves a mystery of which we have a sense through intuitions, especially moral ones. It sees death as part of the mystery of life, which means that to respect life, we must respect death. Although we might be under no obligation to prolong the lives of dying people, we do have an obligation not to shorten their lives deliberately."

Overall, this is a good article, from which several conclusions can, I think, be drawn.

1. Although she never uses the term, her article is a good description of the culture of death. It shows how the death wish is deeply woven into the fabric of our society, rather than being an aberation.

2. If she is even half right, the propsects for stopping the legalization of euthanasia are slim. The culture of death keeps marching along and the only way it can be stopped is if it is replaced by a new culture of life stemming from the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

3. The fact that the illusion of choice is fundamental to modern liberalism and that it leads to death is made plain by this article. We need to pray for the conversion of Canada to Christian faith because the alternative is frightening and dehumanizing.