WE ARE FORCED TO PAY!

A new TV ad from CatholicVote.org features a little girl. "Dear President Obama," she says. "Can I ask you a question? Why are you trying to force my church and my school to pay for things that we don't even believe in?"

It's a good question. Apparently it's not enough that contraception be legal, cheap and available. As The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius illustrates, modern American liberalism cannot rest until those who object are forced to underwrite it.

Keep Christ in Christmas

Richard Dawkins may want to take God out of public life, but don’t try to take the Christ out of his Christmas carols.

In the Christmas issue of the New Statesman, published this week, the eminent zoologist and author of “The God Delusion” began an open letter to Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain by heartily wishing him “Merry Christmas!,” adding that he will accept no substitutes.
“All that ‘Happy Holiday Season’ stuff, with ‘holiday’ cards and ‘holiday’ presents,” is a tiresome import from the United States, where it has long been fostered more by rival religions than atheists,” Mr. Dawkins wrote.
As a “cultural Anglican,” Mr. Dawkins continued, “I recoil from such secular carols as ‘White Christmas,’ ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and the loathsome ‘Jingle Bells,’ but I’m happy to sing real carols, and in the unlikely event that anyone wants me to read a lesson I’ll gladly oblige — only from the King James Version, of course.”
,,, “A depressingly large number of of intelligent and educated people, despite having outgrown religious faith, still vaguely presume without thinking about it that religious faith is somehow good for other people, good for society, good for public order, good for instilling morals, good for common people even if we chaps don’t need it,” Mr. Dawkins writes. “...
NEW YORK TIMESs by JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

Pro-Life Group Worth Supporting at Christmas!

We published this list a couple of weeks ago, but want to offer it again. We also want to include the National Organization for Marriage. A generous donor has offered to match every gift NOM receives through the end of the year dollar-for-dollar, up to $1 million!

To donate, go here. 




Here are some great Catholic and Pro-Life organizations that surely deserve consideration when you make your Christmas donations:

California Catholic Daily. California's only independent Catholic news provider. Not a "company newspaper."

LifeSiteNews. Fearless in defense of life and the family.

First Resort and Alpha Pregnancy Center, both in San Francisco. The city of San Francisco is going after these two crisis pregnancy centers; they must be doing something right.

Catholics for the Common Good. Bill May quietly and relentlessly goes about the business of promoting the Culture of Life.

The Issues4Life Foundation. That's the Reverend Walter Hoye....need we say more?

Immaculate Heart Radio. Broadcasting the faith, everyday.

The Cardinal Newman Society. Tirelessly exposing how major Catholic Universities have been turned from bastions of the faith into enemies of the faith.

Finally, the Salvation Army. Under fire from "gay" groups, they deserve your support.

There are MANY other groups equally deserving of your support, of course, but we wanted to mention these.

Big Victory for Pro-Life New Jersey Nurses!

The great Steve Ertelt at LifeNews has the story:

"A federal court late Thursday gave pro-life advocates a huge victory in the case of 12 nurses being forced to assist with abortions at a New Jersey hospital.

The court held a hearing concerning a motion filed by Alliance Defense Fund attorneys on behalf of the nurses that asks the court to issue a preliminary injunction that would halt any efforts by the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey to coerce the nurses in violation of federal law while their lawsuit moves forward."

Speaking of great, New Jersey's great Republican congressman Chris Smith said:

“Due to the brave voices of these 12 nurses and the diligent work of their attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund, the hospital has finally agreed to respect their rights. The nurses may continue to provide compassionate life-affirming care without being complicit in the destruction of innocent human life...”

LifeNews is wonderful! Please consider donating to support their great work this Christmas. You can donate by going here.

The Most Important Liberty Case in the Past Thirty Years

Freedom of religion means the right of religious persons, groups, and ideas to participate fully and equally in the life of the community and in the marketplace of ideas.

Thirty years ago today, on December 8, 1981, the Supreme Court decided the case of Widmar v. Vincent—probably the most important pro-religious-liberty judicial decision of the modern era. The question at issue was whether the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC), a state university, could bar a Christian student group named “Cornerstone” from using university facilities because the students wished to engage in religious worship and expression. While UMKC allowed other student groups to use its facilities, the university excluded Cornerstone from doing so under a regulation forbidding the use of its buildings “for purposes of religious worship or religious teaching.”

By a vote of 8–1, the Court held that the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause protects religious speech and association by private speakers and groups, just as it protects speech by any other speakers on any other subject, and that the Establishment Clause does not authorize discriminatory exclusion of religious speech....Widmar marked a decisive turning point. Of course, the disposition to suppress private religious expression—to exclude, to hamper, to discriminate—persists even today. But Widmar (with its many successor cases) stands firmly in the way of the view that such suppression is in any way justified, let alone required, by the onstitution. Widmar repudiated such First Amendment ignorance.

Here is what the Court held in Widmar: Freedom of speech forbids government from prohibiting, punishing, or penalizing speech based on its content. This was already an oft-stated principle. The Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment thus forbids government from excluding religiousspeakers and groups from forums for expression—or from any other benefit—on account of the religious content of their expression or the religious nature of their views or association.

...Widmar’s free-speech holding is thus fundamental to the freedom of religion. It is the basis for the right of evangelism: Freedom of religious expression, and the equal status of religious ideas, keep government from suppressing religious discourse and debate. And Widmar’s free-speech principle is closely allied with the freedom to exercise one’s religious convictions in society generally: It is the principle that proclaims the equal status of religious views, religious arguments, religiously motivated actions, religious associations, and religious identity in American public life. Freedom of religion means, at bedrock, the right of religious persons, groups, and ideas to participate fully and equally in the life of the community and in the marketplace of ideas....
Michael Stokes Paulsen is University Chair and Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas, in Minneapolis, and co-director of its Pro-Life Advocacy Center ).

The Third Heaven

At the Winter Solstice, there are cultists who would turn the celebration of Christmas into some sort of light worship, replacing the Son with the Sun

That myopia venerates only what can be seen. In ancient cosmology, the "first heaven" was the easily visible part of the universe, and the "second heaven" was the stellar complex beyond that. But St. Paul said: "I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven – whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into Paradise – whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows – and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter" (2 Corinthians 12:2-4).
It is likely that he was speaking of the third heaven in the third person about himself. He encountered directly the "glory" that God allowed Moses to approach by indirection: "When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen" (Exodus 33:22-23). Peter, James and John bowed before this radiance at the Transfiguration, and the crowd saw it at the Ascension when they "returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and they were continually in the Temple praising God" (Luke 24:52-53).

A reflection of that joy was on the face of the Lady who appeared at Lourdes. In 1863 the sculptor Joseph-Hugues Fabisch interviewed St. Bernadette and made his famous statue from her description, but the saint was deeply saddened by how poorly it matched what she had seen. Our Lord guides us cautiously to glory so that we might not become blinded or made speechless by it. With splendid subtlety, the stars on the robe of Our Lady of Guadalupe are exactly as the constellation was in the Mexican sky when the image appeared on the tilma of St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin on December 12, 1531. Those stars show the lesser heavens, but are hints of the "third heaven" from which the Light of the World came to shine in our darkness first as a baby and then as a man.

At His birth "the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy" (Job 38:7). The night before His death, Christ "looked toward heaven" and prayed: "Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you" (John 17:1). Until then, the heavenly song had been hushed, for as Chesterton wrote: "There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth."
FATHER GEORGE WILLIAM RUTLER

Archbishop Nixes MHR's Homosexualist Advent Speakers

Today's Bay Area Reporter reports that Archbishop George Niederauer has caused San Francisco's Most Holy Redeemer to dis-invite three of their scheduled Advent Vespers speakers:

"At least three gay and lesbian clergy members were disinvited from participating in Advent services at Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in the Castro, the Bay Area Reporter has learned.

The call for the gay clergy not to attend came from the Archdiocese of San Francisco, sources said."

The three were retired same-sex "married" Episcopal Bishop Otis Charles; the openly homosexual Presbyterian Reverend Jane Spahr, and the Reverend Roland Stringfellow, the Director of Ministerial Outreach at the Center for Lesbian & Gay Studies in Spirituality and Ministry in Berkeley. The BAR article continued:

"George Wesolek, spokesman for the archdiocese, confirmed that Archbishop George Niederauer made the decision."

The article then includes this statement, which I find confusing:

"'The basic reason is that Archbishop Niederauer felt the themes for vespers should better reflect the themes of Advent,'" Wesolek told the B.A.R."

But if the objection is not to the speakers, only to the "themes," the implication is that if Bishop Charles and the Reverends Spahr and Stringfellow had come up with better, more Advent suitable themes, they would have been welcome. That can't be right.

I'd say the objection is that Bishop Charles and Reverends Spahr & Stringfellow are engaging in and promoting behaviors that are sinful and wrong.

Posted by Gibbons J. Cooney

Why Go To Church?

A Church goer wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper and complained that it made no sense to go to church every Sunday... "I've gone for 30 years now," he wrote, "and in that time I have heard something like 203,000 sermons. But for the life of me, I can't remember a single one of them. So, I think I'm wasting my time and the pastors are wasting theirs by giving sermons at all."This started a real controversy in the "Letters to the Editor" column, much to the delight of the editor. It went on for weeks until someone wrote this clincher:

"I've been married for 30 years now. In that time my wife has cooked some 32,000 meals. But, for the life of me, I cannot recall the entire menu for a single one of those meals. But I do know this... They all nourished me and gave me the strength I needed to do my work. If my wife had not given me these meals, I would be physically dead today. Likewise, if I had not gone to church for nourishment, I would be spiritually dead today!" When you are DOWN to nothing... God is UP to something! Faith sees the invisible, believes the incredible and receives the impossible! Thank God for our physical AND our spiritual nourishment!

Health Issues?

The Wall Street Journal has an article “The Church of Kathleen Sebelius” by William McGurun which should be read by all believers in life issues and the politics of Obama verus the Catholic Church.

In the church of Kathleen Sebelius, there is little room for dissent. "We are in a war," the Health and Human Services Secretary declared to cheers at a recent NARAL Pro-Choice America fund-raiser. Give the lady her due: Her actions mostly match her words.

Mrs. Sebelius's militancy explains the shock her allies are now feeling after last Wednesday's decision to overrule the Food and Drug Administration on Plan B, a morning-after pill. The FDA had proposed allowing over-the-counter sales, which would give girls as young as 11 or 12 access without either a prescription or a parent. Now the secretary's allies are howling about her "caving in" to the Catholic bishops.
Let’s hear it for Kathleen! But read on:

On this score they needn't worry. Notwithstanding the unexpected burst of common sense on Plan B, the great untold story remains the intolerance so beloved of self-styled progressives. In this Mrs. Sebelius has proved herself one of the administration's most faithful practitioners: here watering down conscience protections for nurses and doctors who don't want to participate in abortions; there yanking funding for a top-rated program for victims of sexual trafficking run by the Catholic bishops, because they will not sign on to the NARAL agenda; soon to impose a new HHS mandate that will require health-insurance plans to cover contraception, sterilization and drugs known to induce abortion.

Alas for her president, her zeal for this agenda has yielded two unintended consequences. Within her party, it is creating a rift between the Planned Parenthood wing and the president's Catholic and religious supporters. Outside her party, it is illuminating the danger of equating bigger government with a more just society.
Thus far, attention has mostly focused on the politics. One reason is that even Catholics who supported President Obama on his signature health bill recognize the contraceptive mandate as a bridge too far. These include the Catholic Health Association's Sr. Carol Keehan, whose well-publicized embrace of the Affordable Care Act gave the president critical cover when he needed it. Others simply question whether forcing Catholic hospitals to drop health insurance for their employees rather than submit to Madam Sebelius's bull is really the image the president wants during a tough re-election year.

Then there are the Catholic bishops. Just two years ago, many seemed to regard ObamaCare as a compassionate piece of legislation if only a few provisions (e.g., conscience rights and abortion funding) could be tweaked. Now they are learning the real problem is the whole thing is built on force—from the individual mandate and doctors' fees to the panels deciding what treatment grandma is entitled to. The awakening has led to a new bishops' committee on religious liberty, and tough, unprecedented criticism.

Pro-Life Groups Worth Supporting at Christmas

Here are some great Catholic and Pro-Life organizations that surely deserve consideration when you make your Christmas donations:

California Catholic Daily. California's only independent Catholic news provider. Not a "company newspaper."

LifeSiteNews. Fearless in defense of life and the family.

First Resort and Alpha Pregnancy Center, both in San Francisco. The city of San Francisco is going after these two crisis pregnancy centers; they must be doing something right.

Catholics for the Common Good. Bill May quietly and relentlessly goes about the business of promoting the Culture of Life.

The Issues4Life Foundation. That's the Reverend Walter Hoye....need we say more?

Immaculate Heart Radio. Broadcasting the faith, everyday.

The Cardinal Newman Society. Tirelessly exposing how major Catholic Universities have been turned from bastions of the faith into enemies of the faith.

Finally, the Salvation Army. Under fire from "gay" groups, they deserve your support.

There are MANY other groups equally deserving of your support, of course, but we wanted to mention these.

Strange Defense of Marriage

Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster has made statements opposed to natural law and Catholic doctrine on several occasions. It seems to me the Archbishop needs to review what he was taught in classes of Moral Theology.

Read his statement: “We would want to emphasize that civil partnerships actually provide a structure in which people of the same sex who want a lifelong relationship [and] a lifelong partnership can find their place and protection and legal provision,” the archbishop said. “As a Church we are very committed to the notion of equality so that people are treated the same across all the activities of life.”

However, the archbishop also explained that the same equality that permits a “partnership” does not allow homosexual “marriage”. It is not clear why the same logic would not apply.

Asked about his statements by the Catholic News Agency (CNA), Archbishop Nichols replied that he was defending marriage but also avoiding “being accused of being homophobic.” Asked whether he was not going against Vatican guidelines, the prelate answered that the bishops have tried “to recognize the reality of the legal provision in our country of an agreement, a partnership, with many of the same legal safeguards as in marriage.”Surprisingly, he also affirmed — as if to justify himself — that unlike marriages, homosexual. partnerships “have no root in a sexual relationship!” Such a statement makes it difficult to determine on what planet the Archbishop of Westminster lives!

This is not the first time Archbishop Nichols has made absurd statements opposed to natural law and Catholic doctrine. In 2010, during a debate on the BBC, answering a homosexual’s accusation that the Church opposes the agenda of the homosexual movement, he said, “That’s not true. In this country, we were very nuanced. We did not oppose gay civil partnerships.”6His answer to the question, “Should the Church one day accept the reality of gay partnerships?” was, “I don’t know.”7 Asked if the Church would one day accept the ordination of women and homosexual unions, he likewise said, “I don’t know. Who knows what’s down the road.”

Thanks for input from Luiz Sérgio Solimeo &The American TFP [tfp@tfp.org]


“

Stephen White on the "Rainbow Sashers"

Stephen White, writing over at the Catholic Vote gets it completely:

"Without rehearsing the arguments about the impossibility of same-sex “marriage,” or the Church’s teachings on the nature of homosexual acts, and without rehearsing the Church’s teaching on the worthy reception of the Holy Eucharist, I simply want to ask: If Mr. (Joe) Murray and the rest of the Rainbow Sashers really wanted to receive communion, why not simply take off their sashes and receive anonymously, like the rest of us?

The answer, of course, is that they refuse to compromise their most fundamental belief. If it’s a choice between The Eucharist and The Sash (and all that it stands for) they choose the latter."

Exactly right, and what we have been arguing for years. From the "Most Holy Redeemer and Ecumenism" page over at our sister site "Homosexual Activism in the Archdiocese of San Francisco":

"At MHR, one's religious affiliation is irrelevant--what matters is one's attitude towards the celebration of homosexuality. That is the issue on which compromises will not be made, where differences will not be tolerated--because that is the real lived religion, not Catholicism."

Do We Have a Pro-Life ‘Good War’ and an Anti-SSM ‘Bad War’?

My friend Tim Dalrymple asks just this question over at Patheos. He shared his observation with Fred Barnes, who put it this way:
Foes of gay rights are now seen by the press as fighting the bad war, roughly analogous to Vietnam. Pro-lifers are waging the good war, like World War II. “You get much less grief fighting against abortion than you do fighting to preserve traditional marriage,” says Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List.

I’ve seen this reality on college campuses. Speak to conservative college students and you’ll generally find enthusiastic pro-life support and deep ambivalence about — if not outright hostility to — preserving traditional marriage. Younger conservatives want to talk about life. They don’t want to talk about sexuality. In the larger culture, support for life is growing, with the percentage of Americans identifying as pro-life now in rough parity (and sometimes exceeding) the percentage of Americans calling themselves pro-choice. And while there’s no question that the media has long exaggerated public support for same-sex marriage (marriage amendments keep winning in state after state), there’s also no question that general polling trends are decidedly negative.

In explaining this phenomenon, Tim sees a number of factors at work. First, the life argument is simply easier to make. You don’t have to appeal to scripture or other holy texts to argue that a child should not be dismembered in his or her mother’s womb. By contrast, marriage arguments tend to be more abstract, especially since there’s no readily identifiable “victim” of gay marriage. Second, the media and liberal establishment relentlessly stigmatize supporters of traditional marriage, often labeling its advocates as no better than the white supremacists of the bygone South. This campaign has had a profound effect. As Tim notes:
Consider this little bit of anecdotal information. As an editor and director for a large religion website now, I can tell you: It’s substantially easier to find Christians and evangelicals to write on the abortion issue than it is to find ones who will write on same-sex marriage. Academics in particular are terrified that anything critical of homosexuality or same-sex marriage will come up before hiring or tenure committees. One of the first subjects we addressed in our “Public Square” at Patheos was the same-sex marriage debate, and nearly every person I approached to write on the topic had to ask himself or herself: “Am I willing to give up the next job, the next promotion, the next award, because of my views on this topic?”

I agree with Tim’s explanations, but I’d like to add another. After more than a generation of no-fault divorce, the very concept of “traditional marriage” is seeping out of our cultural DNA, replaced, sadly, by the core conviction that marriage is no longer a covenant, but a contract — specifically a contract for the fulfillment and enjoyment of adults. Our churches not only acquiesced in this cultural change, many of them continue to facilitate it even as they argue against same-sex marriage. There are many taboos in the modern evangelical church, and one of them is “judging” anyone’s divorce. Even wayward and unfaithful spouses will rationalize their betrayals through long lists of real and imagined slights, and church discipline for adultery and divorce is largely a thing of the past.

What kind of message does this send? Imagine the incredulity of a Christian college student — themselves too often the product of a broken home, where they had a front-row seat to their parents’ contentious festival of self-love — watching a thrice-married fellow congregant rail against gay marriage. It just doesn’t add up.

The battle over marriage, frankly, needs to broaden. We shouldn’t necessarily speak of “defending traditional marriage” when traditional marriage has already been mortally wounded by no-fault divorce. Perhaps we should instead emphasize marriage restoration over marriage defense. What do social conservatives want? To restore marriage to its rightful place and definition in our culture (which includes defining it as a covenant, not a contract) and to repair what is broken. To be sure, making and winning such an argument is an immense cultural challenge, but as the pro-life movement has demonstrated, courage, persistence, and truth can turn the tide.
Fred Barnes - Weekly standard

Cardinal O’Malley, Resisting Gay Pressure, Stands by His Editor

Something is very wrong when priests join forces with gay activists in any cause whatsoever. The presumption must be that the priests in question are sympathetic to gay activism, and this constitutes scandal. That’s why I was glad to see Cardinal Sean O’Malley stand by the editor of his diocesan newspaper when some priests joined gay activists in demanding his dismissal.

You may recall the incident that occasioned the outcry. The editor, Antonio Enrique, failed to catch problems with a column by Daniel Avila which attributed same-sex attraction to Satan. Avila repudiated his column and, unfortunately, ultimately lost his job with the USCCB. I already explained the relevant theological issue in the fourth part of a recent In Depth Analysis, Parsing Beleaguered Words: The Perils of Getting Things Wrong. I also expressed the hope, unfulfilled in the event, that nothing more would be required of Avila than the retraction. Although he did not get things quite right, he was really making a needed effort to refute the common claim that same-sex attraction is given to some by God and so God must intend that they act upon it.

But now, apparently, it is not enough to crucify Daniel Avila for a theological error in treating a difficult question in a hostile culture. Now those who will brook no criticism of the gay lifestyle at all think that Antonio Enrique must go for having failed to prevent the column from being published in the first place. Now it so happens that Enrique has eleven children. One inevitably wonders if this alone is not sufficient to incur the wrath of the sterility lobby.
Look, I tried to be fair-minded. I pointed out that Avila had made a theological mistake in attributing same-sex attraction directly to the Devil when it is more properly discussed as one of a great many disordered inclinations characterizing the state of Original Sin. I pointed out that the issue is so sensitive nowadays that it is difficult to survive this sort of mistake, and that Avila should have had the good sense to realize he was in over his head in the first place.

But please note: It is not as if Satan is not involved at all. Satan tempted Adam and Eve in the events that led up to Original Sin; he tempts all of us—including those of us with same-sex attraction—to act on our disordered inclinations instead of seeing them for what they are and resisting them; and he certainly tempts contemporary apologists for the gay lifestyle to confuse God’s active will with his permissive will so that they can assert something that is always false and damaging to assert—namely, that because God permits us to suffer both disorder and temptation, it must be true that disorder and temptation are really not disorder and temptation at all.

That argument, you see, has all the marks of a Clever Mind. I grant that it is not so clever that we absolutely must designate its author with capital letters. But then I'm not writing in a diocesan newspaper, am I? I answer to my readers, who are smart enough to make distinctions and charitable enough to make allowances.

This is precisely the error which Daniel Avila was attempting to refute. In doing so, he sought to show that the author of same-sex attraction was not God but Satan, an over-simplification with unfortunate theological consequences, and one which needed to be corrected. But to call for the editor to be fired because he permitted a poor theological argument to run in his newspaper is outrageous, especially when it comes from a party of activists who more or less deliberately distort Catholic doctrine and theology at every turn, not in an effort to defend the truth but in an effort to make white black and black white.

Moreover, if anyone suddenly thinks that editors in the Catholic press must be summarily removed for permitting any sort of theological misstatement, I can only say that such a person is very late to the party indeed. Such a one must surely have slept through the Modernist revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s which put actual heretics in charge of much of the Catholic press throughout the Western world. We might welcome, within due limits of course, such admirable zeal. But I wonder what we have seen in the last fifty years that would lead us to think that these particular zealots are truly solicitous for the truth, or that they would make any effort to be even-handed in their punishment for editorial errors across the board.

Happily and rightly, Cardinal O’Malley has indicated that he intends to stand firm. This is a blessing. One can imagine—no, one can remember—a time when this would not have been the case. So let us all permit Antonio Enrique to do his job in peace. The man seems, at the very least, to understand rather thoroughly how God in fact actually did design sexual expression, and for what purpose. Can his critics say as much?

Jeffrey Mirus - President of CatholicCulture.org

Abortion Survivor Movie "October Baby"

The Blaze is reporting on the new movie "October Baby" about a woman who survived a failed abortion. The film was inspired by the story of Gianna Jensen, a real life abortion survivor, and the filmmakers, brothers Andrew & Jon Erwin, may have been further inspired by her testimony at the 2008 Walk for Life West Coast. From The Blaze:

"Hannah (played by Rachel Hendrix), the central character, is a beautiful 19-year-old college freshman. Despite her youth and her good looks, she has always had a sense that something was missing — a sense that she doesn’t really have a right to exist.

Her world is turned upside down when she finds out that she was adopted. While shocking enough on its own, this is the only beginning of her personal tale. In addition to grappling with this new-found knowledge, she also learns that she was the survivor of a failed abortion — a startling fact for the young girl to process. So, she decides to embark on a road trip with her friends in an epic journey to find her birth mother. This, of course, is the premise of 'October Baby.'”

You can watch the trailer for October Baby below, and the film's website is here.




And here is Ms. Jensen's testimony at the 2008 Walk for Life West Coast:

CatholicVote Reports on HHS Hearings

Tom Peters attended last week's congessional hearing on HHS's decision on not to fund the US Bishop's programs to help the victims of human trafficking. From Peters' report:

"Apart from the religious liberty and conscience questions, there remains underlying all of these issues a fundamental disagreement between Democrats + HHS, and Republicans + US Bishops about what sort of care victims of human trafficking deserve, and who is best suited to give them that care.

One thing that became clear during the course of the morning was that, in the eyes of the Democrats and those who made the final decision at HHS, it is more important that a victim of human trafficking (often girls as young as 12-14 years old), it’s more important that they be offered abortion, sterilization and contraception than that they be cared for by a faith-based organization such as the Catholic Church.

Steve Wagner’s National Catholic Register column points out how denying young women who have been victims of sex trafficking the unique care and human-dignity-affirming compassion of the Catholic Church is unconscionable. I couldn’t agree more."