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.
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