April 23, 2001
Flattery is a violation of the Eighth
Commandment. The flatterer offends against truth by offering excessive
— and frequently undeserved — praise to another in the hope
that such praise will motivate the recipient to act in a certain way,
usually to the flatterer’s benefit. In other words, flattery is a way
to distort the truth in order to derive a benefit from doing so. But many
instances of flattery are not just distortions but simply outright lies
designed to create an impression in the minds of others that is patently
untrue.
Many in the pro-life establishment
(including the National Right to Life Committee and its various state and
local affiliates) have used flattery to stroke the egos and promote the
careers of politicians who do not support the absolute inviolability of all
innocent human beings from the moment of fertilization through all
subsequent stages until natural death without any exceptions whatsoever.
Those pols have been garlanded with praise, feted at dinners and banquets
as pro-life champions, and given all manner of awards and certificates
testifying to their “courageous defense” of life — which
usually involves nothing more than their saying that they are
pro-life — even though they have made and continue to make
exceptions to the inviolability of innocent human life.
The flattery creates veritable
Frankenstein’s monsters, as men and women are told over and over
again that they are pro-life champions and thus come to believe that any
and all positions they take on matters of public policy are correct, no
matter how those positions fly in the face of the binding precepts of the
Divine positive law and the natural law. At the same time, anyone who
dares to point out how the careerists are not pro-life at all is denounced
as an extremist and member of some fringe organization. It could not
possibly be the case that a committed disciple of the Crucified and Risen
Savior, Jesus Christ, had the positive obligation to give voice to the
fullness of the truths the God-Man deposited in Holy Mother Church, could
it?
Such a Frankenstein’s monster
has been created in Tommy Thompson, former Wisconsin governor and
George W. Bush’s secretary of health and human services. For years
the National Right to Life Committee has praised Thompson as a
“pro-life” champion. Sure, he makes exceptions to the
sanctity of innocent human life. However, as I pointed out recently, the
NRLC itself supports the slicing and dicing of little babies in instances
where it is alleged that a mother’s life is at risk.
Thompson’s support for pro-abortion politicians within his own
political party has done nothing to diminish his luster as a pro-life
champion in the eyes of the NRLC. Nor has his standing as a pro-life
champion been diminished by his enthusiasm for embryonic stem-cell
research — whether those cells are culled from aborted babies or
from embryonic babies conceived in petri dishes for the purpose of killing
them for their cells. One wonders whether Thompson’s insistence
that the human pesticide, RU-486, is safe for women will be the straw
that breaks the back of his undeserved reputation as a pro-life hero.
RU-486 — the French abortion pill — is a weapon of murder
against unborn children, of course, but medical studies have revealed that
it also produces adverse effects on women’s health.
Tommy Thompson is a man who does
not know very much about the life issues. He is advised by secular medical
experts and scientists who do not view the critical issues of life and
death through the prism of the true Faith. Our Lord really did mean it when
He said, “You can do nothing without Me.” Nothing means
nothing. There is not one aspect of our own individual life or of our social
life that is meant to be untouched by the standard of the Holy Cross. All of
our decisions are meant to be made in the context of serving the Triune
God faithfully through His true Church, something that Thompson, who
is a Catholic, obviously considers to be an extremist position
taken by religious fanatics desirous of violating the Americanist and
Masonic concept of the alleged separation between Church and state.
Thompson cannot possibly understand the radicalism to which we as
Catholics are called in eschewing human respect and mere naturalism in
order to view ourselves and the world clearly through the eyes of the true
Faith. The Faith is meant to permeate everything — education,
government, politics, law, science, medicine. Everything.
Thompson’s insistence that
RU-486 is safe for women is akin to President Clinton’s insistence
that the numbers of children executed each year by means of partial-birth
abortions was in the neighborhood of six hundred to seven hundred. Clinton
continued to insist that was the case even after The Record,
a secular New Jersey newspaper, revealed that in the mid 1990s a single
abortuary in northern New Jersey, in a single year, had slaughtered more
than 1,500 children by means of partial-birth abortion. Facts never
bothered Bill Clinton. The pesky little things — they must not bother
Tommy Thompson, either. Or perhaps he simply lacks the courage to
declare bluntly that the abortion pill is inherently unsafe for women and
absolutely deadly for innocent children in their mothers’ wombs.
Cheer up. The news gets worse.
Thompson doesn’t just ignore right principles and the binding
nature of Christ’s unchanging truths as they relate to embryonic
stem cell research and RU-486. He ignores the application of those truths
to the transplantation of human organs, too. Thompson has said that people
should list themselves as organ donors, oblivious to the evidence provided
in a number of sources (and most recently summarized by Judie
Brown’s American Life League) that medical personnel have
admitted carving up living human beings to harvest their body parts before
they died naturally. Thompson lives in a world of relativism and
utilitarianism. Can anyone show me in what meaningful way he differs
from his predecessor, the overtly pro-abortion Donna Shalala?
Incidentally, she is also a Catholic.
Pope John Paul II noted a few months
ago that human organs can be transplanted morally. However, doctors
cannot morally take positive measures to expedite the deaths of those
whose body parts have been deemed as possible matches for recipients.
The Holy Father warned doctors not to start carving up living human
beings who are nearing death in order to save others. However, a world
that ignores the Vicar of Christ when he explicates the truths of the
Divine Redeemer on contraception and abortion is not going to listen to
him on the issue of organ transplants, which is why we should
not list ourselves as organ donors. At present there are zero
safeguards against the abusive practices associated with organ
transplants that the American Life League listed in a news release of
April 20. Tell that to Tommy Thompson.
Unfortunately, the
“pro-life” Thompson is only one part of a bogus
“pro-life” administration. President Bush has retained Title X funding for
Planned Parenthood in his proposed 2002 budget, which means that our
taxpayer dollars will continue to subsidize the chemical deaths of
innocent babies here and abroad by means of contraceptive pills and
devices. It still appears as though Bush plans to nominate White House
Counsel Alberto Gonzales — who in March 2000 voted to strike down
a mere parental-notification bill when serving on the Texas Supreme Court
— to fill one of the first vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court. A
homosexualist has been hired to recruit civilian employees for the
Department of Defense. And on and on and on.
It is time to stop flattering and
feting phony pro-life politicians. Men such as Tommy Thompson and George
W. Bush are oblivious to their duties before the Triune God to conform
civil law to the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural
law. How in the world can we expect them to change if we keep lionizing
them as pro-life champions? We should be pushing them to embrace the
fullness of Christ’s Holy Truths as the basis of both personal
sanctity and all social order. We do the babies and the cause of
fundamental justice founded in the splendor of Truth Incarnate no favor by
flattering and feting men and women who are ignorant of First Causes and
Last Ends. Flattery has gotten the babies nowhere. I say, let there be no
more awards for any politician who supports even one abortion as a
matter of principle. And no more honors for those in public life who have
demonstrated a woeful lack of understanding of the most pressing moral
issue of the day.
Once again we come face to face with
the reality of a secularized world. Those of us who are baptized into the
Mystical Body of Christ have the obligation to Catholicize the world in
which we live, planting the seeds in our own era for the rise of a
Christrocentric world, just as the Apostles did following the Ascension of
our Lord and the descent of the Holy Spirit upon them on Pentecost Sunday.
The graces available to the Apostles is no less powerful now than it was
then. Why are we so unwilling to do the work of the Apostles in
proclaiming that there is only one Name by which men by can be saved,
Jesus Christ, and only one true Church in which He has deposited His Holy
Truths for our sanctification and salvation?
May our Lady, the Seat of Wisdom,
pray for us to have the courage to resist flattering the powerful and to
insist always that no one who opposes the truths of her Divine Son has
anything to offer civil society except chaos and disorder.
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