The Evil Party Rides Again
There are many reasons to criticize the the Republicans as the Stupid Party, and I have often done so. But we need to remember that, in Sam Francis' dichotomy, the other major party is the Evil Party. And some of what the leader of the Evil Party is doing has no real precedent in American history.
On January 11, 2012, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the Obama Administration, which had argued that the government had the right to sue the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod for violating anti-discrimination law in terminating one of its ministers. At oral argument, the Obama Administration lawyer told the justices that it should make no difference for purposes of anti-discrimination law whether an employer is religious or secular. Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits sex discrimination in employment, the Obama Administration's argument was consistent with a claim that churches that refuse to ordain women violate anti-discrimination law.
And on Friday, January 20, just before Obama issued a statement on the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade proclaiming that "I remain committed to protecting a woman’s right to choose and this fundamental constitutional right," his Secretary of Health and Human Services refused to change regulations that will require religious hospitals, schools, and charities that have moral objections to contraception to provide health insurance paying for employees' sterilizations and contraceptives, including contraceptives that act as abortifacients. The Catholic bishops had argued for a regulation exempting religious organizations with moral objections to contraception from paying for such coverage, but the Obama Administration, agreeing with Planned Parenthood, rejected the bishops' argument.Taken together, these two actions by the Obama Administration show a clear desire to use the power of government to control how religious organizations govern themselves. The Obama Administration was willing to take the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod to the Supreme Court, and to pick a fight with the Catholic bishops less than a year before the election, because it is hostile to traditional Christianity. Nothing else explains the Obama Administration's unwillingness to allow Lutherans the right to choose and dismiss their own ministers and Catholics the right not to pay for contraceptives for employees of Catholic institutions, rights that would have been completely uncontroversial just a few years ago, both because most Americans treasure religious freedom and because most Americans are favorably disposed toward Christianity. If Obama is reelected, we can only expect this trend to continue. The Evil Party is certainly living up to its name these days.
Entries(RSS)
Question: who is more evil: the unsurprisingly anti-moral Democratic Party apparatus, or the Catholic bishops who refuse to excommunicate the Catholic complicit within the Democratic Party?
This is indeed a tough question. In speaking with family members, I was surprised when the conversation turned to "cafeteria" Catholics who allegedly comprise the 54% who voted for Obama. I urged reluctance in turning on each other over political duplicity. Although it gets harder and harder to excuse fellow Catholics for voting for people like Obama, there are plenty of arguments that don't support the often assumed alternative of voting for a GOP candidate. In fact, what is a Catholic to do when people like Kathleen Sebelius claim to be Catholic while perpetrating such acts, and our Church leaders only write letters to newspapers? Joe Biden is Catholic in apparently good standing, so how can you blame someone for voting for him? The GOP does next to nothing to seriously oppose anyway.
Underneath the still water is the revelation that 95% of Catholic women have used contraception and 84% favor making such tools available to poorer women who cannot afford the lifestyle. As someone who has recently gone through the sacraments of marriage and of baptism, I can tell you in my opinion our sacraments are in a state of shambles.
It is hard to blame lay people of the Church when the leaders are hardly clear or decisive.
In fact, what is a Catholic to do when people like Kathleen Sebelius claim to be Catholic while perpetrating such acts, and our Church leaders only write letters to newspapers? Joe Biden is Catholic in apparently good standing, so how can you blame someone for voting for him?... It is hard to blame lay people of the Church when the leaders are hardly clear or decisive.
That is precisely what I am referring to. Andrew Cuomo should have been publicly excommunicated the minute he validated AB A08354, as should every member of the New York Assembly and Senate who voted for the measure. Opportunist Kirsten Gillibrand, also ostensibly a Catholic (and as a New Yorker, after watching her evasive pompomgirl antics during her debate with Joseph DioGuardi, I must sadly conclude that her 30 percentage point margin of victory says something about the collective I.Q. of my home state) who has publicly declared her support for such measures, should have been sent a clear warning and an order to repudiate her earlier position. Now it is too late: the scandal has been done.
"But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea."
Mr. Piatak,
Thank you for the good article. It is all very unfortunate and as you say, even evil but also to be expected.When this New Paganism was taking root, long before it branched out to shade the old order, an English historian and MP wrote in 1920 :
"Slavery will be the main social result to which the New Paganism will give birth. That this novel status will bear the name "slavery" I doubt; for it is in the nature of mankind, when they are proceeding to call that good which once they called evil, to avoid the old evil name. In the same way fornication is not called fornication but "companionate marriage."
Probably slavery, when it comes, will be called "permanent employment"; and a century hence, a rich man will say to his friends, talking of his new gardener: "He's a permanent. Paid for him at the Bureau only last Thursday."
In the form of security and sufficiency for the men who labor to the profit of others, and in the form of registering and controlling them in the form of an organized public supervision of their labor, slavery is already afoot. When slavery shall succeed it will succeed through the acquiescence of those who will be enslaved, for they will prefer sufficiency and security with enslavement, to freedom, responsibility, insecurity and the threat of insufficiency.
As yet, during the transition, there is an illogical, and therefore an ephemeral mixture of the old and the new. The old freedom sufficiently survives in the mind of the wage earner to give him the illusion that, while accepting insurance and maintenance from the capitalist state, he can still be a full citizen. He thinks he can have his cake and eat it too. He is mistaken. The great capitalists who procured these regulations from the politicians knew what they were at. They were catching their proletariat in a net, and now they hold it fast. "
I imagine when the most recent health care deal was cut there were big promises to all the movers and shakers of the industry --- especially the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies. Afterall, who else is going to pay for necessary health care?
Recently I heard one of our politicians say he wanted to establish a colony on the moon, another said he didn't mind the government doleing out benevolence but under his administration those on the dole (and presumably on the moon) would be constrained by law to "work for it." I also read where homosexual members of our military are petitioning for government housing allowances for their partners who stay at home and raise kids during long deployments in the Persian gulf.
"The present prince, they're loath it should be said,
The prince doth languish," or "The prince is dead...
T'is all in pieces all coherence gone."
Mr. Moses,
Your question is irrelevant to what the Obama Administration is doing and to what a second Obama Administration is likely to do. It is also beside the point here. Kathleen Sibelius was instructed by the Archbishop of Kansas City that she was not to take Communion as a result of pro-abortion actions she took as Governor of Kansas. So the Catholic primarily involved in this issue had already been disciplined by her bishop. And the bishops are fighting back on this issue. A strong letter was read at all the Masses in my diocese this past Sunday, and similar letters were read in many other dioceses as well.
Obama moves inexorably forward with his agenda, an anti-Christian agenda, meeting no real resistance from the Congress or the courts since those organs are themselves possessed by the Zeitgeist which motivates Mr. Obama and his handlers and meeting no meaningful resistance from the states, cowed by over a century of usurpation by the general government and themselves beset by the maladies of the age. There is little to no chance that there will be a general uprising of the masses since the masses are blissfully addicted to bread and circuses.
At least the Roman Catholic Church has maintained her ability to excommunicate and to discipline. Protestant churches have systematically divested themselves of any such authority and generally attempt to placate the Zeitgeist or retreat with a radical eschatology.
Just by happenstance, I saw and heard via the medium of television Obama speak at the 2004 Democratic Convention, happenstance since I rarely watch any T.V. at all, particularly not a political convention. At the time, I told my wife that we were looking at the future face and voice of the Democratic Party and the forces behind that party - the face of a multicultural everyman who is a dangerous weapon in the hands of those who wield him.
It's questions like that that make sedevacantism look more attractive to me with every passing day.
Yes, Mr. Piatak, I am aware that Archbishop Naumann requested that Kathleen Sebelius stop taking Communion. However, he did not go so far as to excommunicate her outright, saying with regard to the possibility of issuing an Archdiocese-wide order to bar her from the Sacrament: "That's certainly an option that's available. I'll have to evaluate it at that point. I'm hopeful she will be respectful of my request and not put the Communion ministers in an awkward position."
But I digress. I apologize for getting off that topic. I thought it useful to point out that the "Evil Party" gets away with being evil because supposedly wholesome persons are enabling them, though clearly that was not the sort of discussion you had intended. (Although I must confess that there is little more to discuss when you point out that Obama's administration does evil and is likely to continue to do so. No one on this forum would ever disagree with you or have anything to add on that subject alone.)
I should mention, however, that I have seen quite a few (mis)educated Americans I know actually agree, at least a priori, that if religious organizations have the right to discriminate, they shouldn't be allowed to have tax-exempt status. What does this tell us but that Obama is merely the fruit of a thoroughly rotten American edumacation? If Americans nominally "treasure religious freedom" and are nominally "favorably disposed toward Christianity," most Americans, even those who are aware of these attacks, have no idea just how deeply they strike at the root of religious freedom and Christianity. So they don't care to do anything about it.
So yes, a second Obama administration will do a great deal of evil. After all, plebiscite or not, with few exceptions throughout history, people have gotten the leaders they want and deserve.
Mr. Maxwell, I think you have gotten it exactly backwards. There may be a lack of clarity or decisiveness in Church leadership but there are many possible reasons for that, some of which are good, and that clarity will eventually come.
It makes no sense to further divide our flock against each other or against our leadership, and we should be careful not to fall into contests of who is the mostest Catholic-est. The current actions of our politicians take us even further away from a free, public country. We cry out for better Church leadership to aid our decision making, but we do not turn our backs on them or each other.
"Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand:." The forces of secular humanism are fighting a divided foe in their war against religious freedom. Our Lord's prayer "that they may all be one" has practical implications for survival as well as spiritual ones. The spectacle of thousands of denominations squabbling and not agreeing on many theological points is a scandal to the non-Christian world and also gives invaluable strength to the enemy. In addition, the heretics and apostates in all the denominations are a fifth column in their support for abortion, sexual deviancy and heterodoxy in general.
It is very heartening to (finally) see the Catholic hierarchy, with a very special leader in Archbishop Timothy Dolan, finally willing to take the fight on a national forum and not be shackled by decades of accommodation to the zeitgeist and highly publicized clerical scandals. About time.....unfortunately, where are the other leaders of other Christian denominations in support of the Catholic Church in its fight for religious freedom? How will the Southern Baptist Convention react if they are mandated a few years from now to provide abortion services as part of their health plans? This is a Rubicon moment for the supporters of religious freedom. If the enemy wins this battle against the Catholic Church, it will pick off and destroy the rest one by one. If you need a historical example read the history of the Elizabethan police state and its persecutions of Catholics in the 16th century.
Using a 'divide et impera' strategy it would not be surprising if the Obama administration does not try to go around the bishops and appeal directly to the poorly catechized majority of Catholics for their support for contraception and sterilization services in their health plans. Hollywood and the corporate controlled media are already successful in bypassing the teaching authority of the bishops in communicating ordinary Catholics.....why not Washington?.
Mr. McCabe,
You are exactly right. Obama's assault on religious liberty is not limited to Catholics. As I point out in my short piece, his Administration first went after a small Lutheran congregation in Michigan. But the American bishops are standing up to Obama, and they deserve the support of lay Catholics. Here in Ohio, where both Mr. Maxwell and I live, a letter from the bishop denouncing Obama's action was read from the pulpit last Sunday in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, the Diocese of Cleveland, the Diocese of Toledo, and the Diocese of Columbus.
I believe it is worth saying here (I have said it in other forums.) that the American people, not withstanding what Limbaugh, Hannity, and the others say, are not conservative. The great majority are leftists. They believe in state activism to benefit themselves, and causes to which they subscribe. They only oppose such activism when they see no benefit that they enjoy. They work, so they oppose welfare, except when it's called Social Security, or the home mortgage deduction. They believe the law should apply equally to all, except that the rich should do more, pay more, and subsidize their whims. As for Christians, I have met few, especially in churches. People call themselves Christians because that's what their grandparents declared themselves to be. The people I meet are pursuing the Kingdom of this world. No Church teaching interfering with that is acknowledged, or, if it is noted, it is dutifully argued against for one specious reason or another.
Mr. Piatak, I know there are quite a few forceful clerics in the Midwestern Rust Belt. Unfortunately, Siebelius notwithstanding, the worst Catholic enablers of this administration are almost all concentrated around the BosWash megalopolis, and it is precisely in that geographic locality that bishops most routinely fail to issue stringent warnings to the effect that, although the good of the universe is a legitimate end, it is ordered toward the eternal end and certain constraints in public life and image are necessary to keep this end ordered toward the ultimate end. Midwesterners and Southerners can deride New York and D.C. all they like, but those places are where the press feeds originate and the rest of the country drinks it up. Something has got to be done, or the Democratic Party will continue unhinged and still seduce Catholics who still think of it as the party of immigration and religious "tolerance." (Tolerance according to the Obama administration, as you point out here, means a religious congregation is obliged to tolerate immoral or heretical activity on its premises and the interference of cynical agnostics in its internal affairs.)
Mr. Hyams,
You spoke well. The dialectic presented to us today is false and however necessary, it is all liberal -- all the time.
As for our faith, hope or charity ? Well, better men have already noticed .
"Our religion is in peril, There is with us a complete chaos in religious doctrine... We worship ourselves, we worship the nation; other nations, we worship (some few of us) a particular economic arrangement believed to be the satisfaction of social justice...
Yet,Islam has not suffered this spiritual decline; and in this contrast between our religious chaos and Islam's religious certitudes, still strong throughout the Mohammedan world, may lie our peril."
Secular attempts to simply "buy them off" do not seem to be working, nor have the recent attempts to "blow them away", democratise them, inculturate them, modrnize them etc.. But it remains, I believe, false to conclude from this, that the Christian is therefore more willing to sell his soul. Perhaps these early signs of persecution will begin to re-awaken, or at least begin to cleanse us from these deadly sins you so poigantly point to in your post.
Letters are all well and good but then the ink dries and memories fade and in the bureaucracies of government what storm there was has been weathered.
I could suggest a more effective response. Some prominent Bishops, a few prominent laymen, perhaps a Rabbi or two, a few ministers travel to Washington and call a news conference, a bill signing ceremony if you will, only upside down. If there are steps in front of the HHS building, that is where you have it.
Their spokeman has a copy of the regulation in his hand and he says "about this regulation, the Government can forget it. We have no intention of complying. Take us to court."
Mr. Dooley,
This news is really cause for rejoicing for all conservatives. It has perhaps chastened a bit those naive bleeding hearts who invited the President to Notre Dame to extend to their alleged Catholic graduates a proposal to "let us reason together.", who in turn no doubt supported his government in taking over their health care intitutions, who hired an aposotate Catholic to run his health and human services agency to lead this attack, who in turn has done for the President she serves what the GOP could have never done for themselves ----i.e. tilt the election in favor of Romney. Kudos all around and the drinks are on me.
Mr. Maxwell,
Perhaps you wrote this in exasperation and do not mean it seriously. However, in case there are readers of this forum who may be heading that way or are already there, I offer this corrective in charity to them, and to you if needed.
Sedevacantism implies a belief that the pope is infallible in everything. A pertinent example: "if the pope does not remove the bishops who do not excommunicate the "Catholics" in the Obama Administration [or who utter heresy, or who protect predator priests, etc.], he must not be the pope, and therefore the bishops are not validly consecrated and therefore aren't bishops." However, papal infallibility was formally defined at Vatican I, and is actually very narrowly defined. Looked at another way, if the Church has failed, Christ either could not or chose not to keep His promise, either of which is blasphemy. The personal failures of popes and bishops do not translate to the failure of the Church. If that were the case, the Church has failed many times throughout her history, even as early as when Peter abandoned and denied Our Lord shortly after He had named Peter as the first head of His Church.
Pope Pius X called Modernism "the synthesis of all heresies." Manifestly, all of the popes starting with John XXIII have been Modernists to one degree or another. Yet the Church - as Church - has not failed. Not one of these popes has ever formally taught heresy (although they have occasionally informally done so, or implied it in some of their actions, but these instances do not fall within the defined scope of infallibility). Likewise, Vatican II is Exhibit A of the triumph of Modernism in the hierarchy. Yet, despite all the ambiguities and novelties in the Council documents which reflect that Modernism, nowhere do they formally teach heresy or false doctrine. Yes, they are implied in places, but never pronounced formally and directly.
Avoiding the trap of sedevacantism, which really is protestantism by the back door, requires at least a working knowledge of Church history and a willingness to draw the necessary distinctions.