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No Rational Basis
by Thomas A. Droleskey
March 12, 2001

Although it appears the Devil may be withdrawing his protection from Bill and Hillary Clinton, he is not yet through using them to effect his evil purposes. The continued focus on the corrupt pair means that otherwise rational human beings are not focusing on what President Bush is not doing on the life issue. A number of very rational people have told me, “Well, we just have to hope in Bush.” Excuse me, folks, but there is no rational basis for such hope. None whatsoever.

As his presidency proceeds through its second month, it is becoming very clear that George W. Bush intends to run a typical Republican administration. The fact that he has seen fit to appoint one out-and-out pro-abort after another to key positions is proof positive that the man does not understand the prophetic nature of the life issue. As I have kept pointing out rather doggedly for the past two years, Bush would never say that racism or anti-Semitism was a matter of “opinion” over which “good people” might disagree legitimately. He would never appoint overt racists or anti-Semites to his administration. However, he does consider those who support the slicing and dicing of little babies to be perfectly acceptable to hold positions of trust. Not only that, pro-abortion Secretary of State Colin Powell evidently has won some internecine battles to determine who will represent the United States at the United Nations, and they will include two militant pro-abortion feminist holdovers from the Clinton administration! Wake up, ladies and gentlemen, it is not morning again in America.

More to the point is the fact that the president has refused to take some very simple steps to stop certain types of baby-killing immediately. Bush has done nothing to reverse the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to permit the marketing of the human pesticide, RU-486; we must commend Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, for her singular efforts to hold him accountable for that dereliction. Now, Sen. Bob Smith, the well-meaning New Hampshire Republican, said he would introduce legislation to regulate the distribution of RU-486. (He’s the GOP dropout who, after a committee chairmanship opened up following the death of Rhode Island Sen. John Chafee in 1999, dropped back into the party he once denounced on the floor of the Senate.) Smith issued a statement couched in the belief that limiting the distribution of the human kill pill is all that can be done “as long as [the pill] is legal.” As long as it is legal? Well, then, Senator Smith, why not publicly pressure your president — whom you once considered running against on the Constitution Party ticket — to reverse the decision of the FDA, and not on the grounds of the pill’s danger to a woman’s life and health? Though such concerns are legitimate and well-documented, they are secondary to the fact that the first object of the abortion pill is to kill a human being!

George W. Bush doesn’t want to go there. He doesn’t want to spend political capital fighting that battle. Instead, on January 22 he tossed eager pro-lifers a crumb by signing an Executive Order restoring the prohibition (laid down by Ronald Reagan and George Bush the First) on the use of federal taxpayer funds to support international family planning agencies that perform or promote abortions. That order was a good thing in and of itself, but such “family planning agencies” have more than enough of their own funds to kill babies by means of surgical abortion. Not one child will be saved by Bush’s measure, although Bush’s order gave the multitudes much to cheer about.

In actuality, of course, the U.S. government does fund abortions overseas. Our taxpayer dollars fund the distribution of abortifacient contraceptives here and around the world. We are helping to impose a holocaust of the unborn on a global scale, destroying lives, wrecking families, and consigning large numbers of people to lives of the instability bred by a defiance of the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity of marital relations. The U.S. government is an active agent in the destruction of that Sovereignty, helping ensnare poor and illiterate people into the misery produced by contraception and sterilization. Indeed, the International Planned Parenthood Federation is promoting the distribution of the “morning after pill” around the world. That baby-killing agent is not covered by President Bush’s Executive Order of January 22. George W. Bush has no intention at all of stopping any of that activity.

Judie Brown reports that James Shelton, a physician with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), has said that the intrauterine device (IUD) does not cause pelvic inflammation in women — and hence can “safely” be used to prevent conception. Brown notes: “He does not state the scientific fact that the device aborts tiny persons whose lives begin at conception. COMMENT: Will President Bush stop all foreign support for abortion, including those advocated by Shelton?” (Communique, Feb. 16, 2001) The answer — as Brown knows only too well — is a flat-out, permanent “No.”

What has happened to right-thinking people? They have lost a sense of urgency about the life issue, coming to accept contraception and abortion as regrettable evils that are a part of the “reality” of our social landscape. It is just such good, well- meaning people who actually enable do-nothing, careerist politicians such as Bush when they fail to hold the feet of such men and women to the political fire. No, no, can’t do that. Might wind up electing another Democrat. Can’t have that, now, can we? Go tell that to the unborn children who are dying at the same rate during the Bush administration as they did during the Clinton-Clinton-Gore administration.

In addition to his inaction on RU-486 and on the funding of chemical abortions overseas, President Bush has done nothing to stop the National Institutes of Health from funding research and experimentation by “scientists” who harvest embryonic stem cells for a variety of supposedly humanitarian reasons. “It is an outrage that President Bush has not yet stopped the federal funding of research on stem cells harvested from embryonic babies,” Judie Brown notes in a February 14 news release issued by the American Life League. “President Bush must repeal the National Institutes of Health’s guidelines, which allow funding for scientists who experiment on stem cells harvested from embryonic children, children who have been killed in the harvesting process.”

Brown calls upon the president to introduce legislation “which would outlaw the destruction of embryonic persons, whose lives begin at conception/fertilization. There is never a justification for the wanton destruction of even one human being, regardless of the noble platitudes set forth in defense of such egregious practices. The act of killing these tiny boys and girls is not unlike the forced killing and harvesting of body parts from detainees in Chinese labor camps.”

Brown notes that Bush could end the practice unilaterally and that he could call upon Congress to pass a permanent ban. Again, folks, it’s not on the Bush radar screen. Though he ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to “review” the NIH guidelines, HHS chief Tommy Thompson is a strong supporter of embryonic stem cell research and transplantation. Oh, I forgot. The National Right to Life Committee and its Wisconsin affiliate both call Tommy Thompson pro-life. The fact that he supports the harvesting of embryonic stem cells from human beings who must be killed to harvest their cells does not in the least interfere with his being called pro-life. I forgot. Sorry.

When, oh, when, my friends, are we going to wake up? We do not have a pro-life friend in the White House. No one who supports one abortion as a matter of principle is pro-life. George W. Bush is a typical Republican. Government is about the business of “solving” people’s problems. Remember, one of the perduring effects of the Protestant Revolt is the rise of the purely secular state and the purely secular culture. The business of daily life is the making of money, not the pleasing of God by the fulfillment of the obligations imposed upon us by our freely chosen state-in-life. The business of government is to assist people in the making of money (either through the collectivist policies of the Democratic Party or through the somewhat less collectivist, somewhat more free-market-oriented policies of the Republican Party). The principal business of government is not, therefore, the pursuit of justice according to the standards of the splendor of Truth Incarnate. Oh, no, can’t have that in a secular, pluralistic, religiously indifferentist society. All issues pertaining to the pursuit of fundamental justice founded in the splendor of Truth Incarnate must be subordinated to the pursuit of material success. To dwell on “difficult” moral issues is to unnecessarily divide “good” people and divert our attention from the more- pressing demands that face the nation and the world.

Mark my words. Mark them well. George W. Bush will accomplish as much for the life issue as did Ronald Reagan and Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush. Minor tinkering will be done on the margins, including the unnecessarily conditional ban on partial-birth abortions, which, as I have noted repeatedly, will not save a single child. However, it will all be a show of action, veritable window- dressing that can be erased by the next administration just as easily as a drawing on an Etch-A-Sketch can be erased with a shake of the board. There is no rational basis for investing any hope in George W. Bush and his administration. I will give him credit where credit is due. But I will not place the virtue of hope in a man who demonstrated as governor of Texas and as a candidate for the presidency his utter lack of understanding of the life issue — and his total comfort with appointing pro-aborts to the judiciary and other key positions.

Do we pray for the new president? Of course. We pray for his conversion. He is a nice, amiable man. However, he is also a very shallow, uninformed, unread man. He is a product of his theologically relativistic background. Remember, the Bushes believe in contraception, and the Bush women (except for Jeb Bush’s wife, Columba) believe in abortion. No one who practices and believes in contraception can come to understand the evil he is doing (and how that evil is an abortifacient in and of itself in most instances — and leads to surgical abortions) unless he is converted to the true Faith.

We do not put our trust in the princes of this world. Our focus must be on planting the seeds for the only thing that will serve as the antidote to the poison of all relativism (both secular and theological) and indifferentism: the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ. A nation that does not recognize Our Lord’s Social Kingship or the authority of His true Church as the ultimate arbiter on matters of fundamental justice degenerates into the confusion we find ourselves at present. There is no way out except for the slow, methodical process of cooperating on a daily basis with the graces won for us by the shedding of our Lord’s Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross, in order to convert ourselves so that we may be able to assist in the conversion of this nation.

We must place our trust in Christ the King and Mary our Queen, not the false messiahs of a false world that wants us to believe all will be well if we are silent about the rights of God and the duties of man to obey Him as He has revealed Himself to us through His true Church.


This column is distributed by the Griffin Internet Syndicate.
Copyright © Griffin Communications, 2001. All rights reserved.

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