The New Rodney King
"He came, he saw, he conquered," is the headline of the Washington Post's article on President Obama's much heralded visit to Notre Dame. In a particularly stupid exercise in leftwing wishful thinking, Thomas Reese, S.J.--what a foul order the Jesuits have become--lauds the President as "a different kind of leader, not one who speaks down to his audience, demands strict loyalty and demonizes opponents, but one who addresses complexity with honesty, acknowledges disagreements and tries to bring people together for the common good."
Mr. Reese, S.J. is practically beside himself in revering St. Barry of Boboland's sacred injunction to maintain a ""presumption of good faith" to those who disagree with us. "Because when we do that--when we open our hearts and our minds to those who may not think like we do or believe what we do--that's when we discover at least the possibility of common ground."
Let's see here. You think when mothers kill their own babies, it is just fine, but I think it is murder most foul. What is our common ground? Mutual loathing? Perhaps we can meet in the middle by decriminalizing the issue: Abortionists can get filthy rich on murder, while Christians can use them for target practice. This is not a case of "you say tomayto, I say tomahto" but more like, you say "woman's right to choose" and I say "first degree murder, and you're going to Hell."
Adopting the Clintonian approach, Obama made a stirring appeal to limit abortion: "So let's work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies, and making adoption more available, and providing care and support for women who do carry their child to term." He apparently is not even aware that contraception is rejected by believing Catholics, but let that pass. This is a man who spent his brief and lack-luster political career championing the most obscene forms of abortion and abusing anyone who did not approve of hacking newborns to death on the operating table. Now he wants to get along with the other side, which means, from the liberal perspective, defining the other side and telling people how to think, speak, and act. Sure, you can be pro-life, so long as you do not make it a moral issue.
That Obama's bromides can be taken as anything but what they are--an arrogant expression of his contempt for people who have the effrontery to disagree with his speechwriters' holy writ--is just one more example of what public education has done to the American mind. There is no common ground with these people, no area of fruitful cooperation, no meeting of minds. They don't have a mind. When I was an atheist, I knew, from a apathetic scanning of my freshman biology text, that abortion kills a human being. As an atheist I did not really care what other people did to their babies, but I was shocked and horrified at the thought that someone might do it to mine.
On the other hand, I do not know why anyone without some connection--as student, professor, or alumnus-- to Notre Dame went there to protest. Protests are, for the most part, a complete waste of time. Neither the president of Notre Dame nor the President of the United States has a moral conscience to appeal to, and the well-fed post Christian families who attended the event and applauded the politician who hates the Church are immune to reason and deaf to Christian charity.
Then what to do? You might start by not aborting any babies or countenancing those who do. You can refuse to support any infanticidal politician and cancel your subscription to publications advocating abortion rights. That is just for starters. What about an abortion-free lifestyle? No NPR, no Hollywood movies, no commercial TV. What, a life without Time magazine or CNN or FOX? Isn't it easier to wave a sign or violate good laws agains trespassing? Yes, easier, but is it effective, much less Christian? I understand why Christians, Catholics in particular, want to express their opposition, but why don't they start in their own parishes and schools, where liberation theology is often the most nearly wholesome moral teaching being promulgated?
Obama, like a latterday Rodney King, wonders why we all can't just get along. I wonder why we cannot just get way--from him and 70 million baby-eating zombies who voted for him .
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@48 has a point, albeit a debatable one. Let me engage.
Protesting abortion at its sites is for the purpose of saving lives about to be extinguished. As we know, there is no greater love (and, yes, protesters are putting themselves in potentially mortal danger). Even one life saved from an abortuary is an accomplishment beyond measure.
I know personally of individuals and organizations that publicly protest in front of "adult" bookstores, strip bars and the like, including taking pictures and recording license plate numbers of patrons. They are surely witnessing not only against indecency, but also implicitly, at least, against "irresponsible/unmarried coupling."
I encourage Jack to expand his scope of observation to include the whole playing field.
Actually, I believe the Post's headline was, "He came, he SPOKE, he conquered." [emphasis added] Remember that, according to the media, this man's prowess is always verbal, never martial. Caesar's legacy is evoked only to be eclipsed by that of their even greater word-wielding emperor. Swords are so 2nd amendment, don't you know? - except when it comes to the unborn child: then Obama can cut and thrust with the best of them!
Seeker is absolutely right. To say that there is no moral dimension presented to abortion in "Juno" and "Knocked Up" is obtuse in the extreme. In Juno, the girl is talked out of her abortion by an encounter with a protester outside of an abortion clinic, for heaven's sake!
Grumpy, smug dismissals of everything you don't watch or understand don't do you any favors or win your cause many converts. Which is why Chronicles writers and readers seem increasingly to have become an irrelevant, self-congratulatory clique of haughty scoffers.
Evidence has already been presented showing Seeker to have made a statement of fact that is partially incorrect. That evidence has not been refuted. Yet Mr. Nowicki starts by describing him as "absolutely right." Not just right. Not just right in the main. But absolutely right. Then, in a wonderful bit of parallelism, he expanded from, por arguendo, a valid criticism of SOME Chronicles writers or readers, to a smear of ALL --albeit with that lovely word "seem." Nice touch that.
Ever since Vatican II the Church was effectively killed off by liberals, as it was tailor made to fit in with post modern culture. The same goes for just about every mainline Protestant denomination in America. Christianity in the Western World is a hollow husk anymore, a Potemkin village of what is once was. Is there any going back? Probably, but it won't be in our lifetime, unless we do see the Second Coming.
Liberals have won in the sense that Christians, along with everyone else in the world, desire to impress them and their governments at the expense of their own traditions and faith. So now civility, meaning passivity, has become the new and only cardinal virtue. Liberalism has stolen the fire from Christianity. No man can go to war anymore over his faith or his family or his church, but everyone can work themselves into a violent frenzy over promoting “freedom” and “democracy” and “equality.” A man who advocates the brutal slaughter of children can now be lauded for his sincere devotion to this same cause. What monsters we have become.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Being accomodating, means being a self contented wussie, while the left takes over and trashes any specks left of tradition/ Western Civilization. This is unfortunately what Christianity has become as the left has used the Christian philosophy of turning the other cheek into a call for total complacency, thus rendering Christianity utterly useless almost. Christians(especially white Europeans) in support of these leftist causes are actually putting the noose around their necks and have there own hands on the lever that will break the neck of Western Civilization for good!!!! I think it is time to really think about dumping it and go back to the basics of pre Christian Classical Western Civ.