They’re picketing the picketer Saturday night at the Holiday Inn on (Merchandise) Mart Center Drive.
Make my day, says Joe Scheidler.
Scheidler on the pan?
Tag: Abortion
Wind shifts in abortion camp
Pro-choicer Frances Kissling urges retrenchment for tactical reasons.
Writing Feb. 20 in the opinion section of The Washington Post, Kissling said abortion rights advocates can no longer pretend the fetus is invisible. … We must end the fiction that an abortion at 26 weeks is no different from one at six weeks. … We need to firmly and clearly reject post-viability abortions except in extreme cases.
More more more at NCReporter.
There’s a long history of such message-changing. Birth control advocates once urged eugenics reasons, switched to women’s rights.
Losing black residents
This Chicago Census Roundup: Why Is Chicago Shrinking? probably does justice to the housing-stock issue but like other analyses treats the black-loss matter in terms solely of migration. But what about the black abortion rate?
Blacks . . . have much higher rates of abortions than whites or other minority groups. In 2000, while blacks made up 17 percent of live births, they made up more than twice that share of abortions (36 percent). . . . . The comparison with whites and other minorities is striking. Whites made up 78 percent of live births, but only 57 percent of abortions. Non-black minorities had 7 percent of live births and 5 percent of abortions.
In other words, there are fewer blacks in general, especially in big cities:
. . . black flight isn’t solely a Chicago phenomenon. New York’s black population declined as well, while the black populations of major Southern metropolises grew.
Unreasonable?
Red State magic
A little publicity is a dangerous thing, as Erick Erickson explains:
Late yesterday RedState broke a significant story, found in this morning’s Morning Briefing, which points to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nations premier public health organization, making a conscious decision to stop publishing the only federal report on abortion.
To briefly recap, for 40 years the CDC has published the Abortion Surveillance Report. For 40 years that report has appeared in the last November or first December issue of CDCs journal, the Morbidity and Mortality Report Weekly Report. This year it didnt. A RedState tradition has been to use this report for our annual retrospective on abortion. When it didnt appear in November or December or in January we decided to ask why.
That inquiry and its response led to our article yesterday.
The internet is an amazing thing. After weeks of checking and phone calls and emails no report. Then one blog post at RedState later, and suddenly the CDC is falling over themselves to produce something. Funny how that works. Two hours and six minutes after the post went live we had an official response from CDC.
What did Jefferson say, embedded in concrete at the entrance to the Chi Trib Tower on Boul Mich, about the relative importance of free government and a free press? (Help me here, someone.) Believe it, people.
Erickson:
According to the CDC we should move along because there is nothing to see here. Really? Were not so sure. It’s never the action, it’s the cover up.
They would prefer that, would they not?
says Erick E., who is editor at RedState.com
Catholic bishops buck Democrat dominance
If you don’t start with respect for life, you are off on the wrong foot, say bishops of Wisconsin.
Wisconsin? Where the Big O. raised four times the money McCain raised in ’08? Them bishops rock.
The cap’s the thing . . .
. . . Wherein I’ll catch the smart voters.
Beautiful day, sat outside Bread Kitchen for coffee and millet slice while paving crew chewed up North Blvd. a few steps away. Luckily, the wind blew east, so I didn’t have to swallow pavement dust with my millet. Fenwick students debarking from eastbound train on way to school bus had to walk through the cloud, however. Looked like a British movie scene, 1940s smoke-filled train station, you know, the school children on way to the countryside, removed from German bombs.
Pavement crew straw boss spotted me, came over, asked where I got the hat. My NoObama 68 cap, of course, which has drawn at least five such responses since I began wearing it a few weeks ago. The tee-shirt shop down the street would make one for you, one guy was told, he told me. Can’t be too obvious about this, said a woman, who also liked it, this being Oak Park, you know. “I like your hat,” said the young man carrying stuff to the auto repair (or other) shop in the alley west of OP Ave. between Lake and N. Blvd. And not a word but a thumbs-up kind of grin from the very button-down business man cycling to the station on Forest Ave. at Ontario.
Various more or less malevolent glares also, and a startled look from a black business-man-looking guy, but only one voiced negative response, from the counter wench at U.S.A. Liquors, at Harlem & Madison, where the elite meet to buy by the bottle. She spotted me roaming her aisles looking for something white and “affordable” (by me, that is) and stared. “You a Republican?” she asked as I plunked my wine on the counter. She asked in a fairly detached manner but was truly speaking for the multitudes to whom Democrats make their redistributist pitch. Finally, “Barack’s gonna win,” she said.
Is he? Charles Krauthammer and the gang at Fox think so — barring an unforeseen intervention. Rush Limbaugh and James Carville are not so sure about that. Rush is a great coach for the team. James darkly hints at riots if he does not win. Many others, of course, see racism in Obama’s opponents.
Meanwhile, there’s the anti-Palin phenomenon, riding side by side with the Palin phenomenon. She’s good, no doubt about it, and she rubs raw the sores of discontent among Dems. A Knoxville TN blogger says she’s smug. Not even that she looks smug, but she is. I think this inaccurate judgement reflects the common resentment of looking sure of oneself. You’re not supposed to. You’re supposed to sprinkle your talk with worried you-knows, repeatedly trolling for affirmation.
If you’re smart, don’t look smart. But above all, don’t look sure of yourself. Be apologetic or at least tentative. Look a little harried too. Don’t look confident. Above all, don’t be too Christian about it all, and don’t hold your Down syndrome child so comfortably, especially while you look so good.
They know she’s right
Speaking of people coming together, the truly maverick Pat Buchanan has returned to the fold, from which he strays now and then without quite jumping ship. It’s Palin:
Positive polarization has been achieved. The Republican Party has been united and invigorated. The enthusiasm gap with the Democratic ticket has been closed. And the issues upon which the base loves to fight — the Culture War and Right to Life — are back on the table.
Yes. Gauntlet thrown to zap-a-kid-a-day bunch. Issue joined. As the dashed MSNBC woman announced grimly, the war has begun.
Nancy tries morality, flunks
These prelates know the score:
Now the full weight of the Catholic Church is coming down on Nancy Pelosi. Bravo to Cardinal Rigali and Bishop Lori who join Archbishop Chaput in setting an example for their fellow Church leaders. Now, how about the Bishop of San Francisco? The story:
It’s about Nutty Nancy telling the clue-free Meet the Press man what’s RC teaching and what isn’t, in the cause of her man the Big O., the deucedly clever chap whose pay level doesn’t cover human rights for little people. She cited Augustine in support of a three-month rule. The prelates:
In the Middle Ages, uninformed and inadequate theories about embryology led some theologians to speculate that specifically human life capable of receiving an immortal soul may not exist until a few weeks into pregnancy. While in canon law these theories led to a distinction in penalties between very early and later abortions, the Church’s moral teaching never justified or permitted abortion at any stage of development.
Oh. In other words, Peggy Noonan is right:
We know when life begins. Everyone who ever bought a pack of condoms knows when life begins.
To put it another way, with conception something begins. What do you think it is? A car? A 1948 Buick?
The prelates continued:
These mistaken biological theories became obsolete over 150 years ago when scientists discovered that a new human individual comes into being from the union of sperm and egg at fertilization. In keeping with this modern understanding, the Church has long taught that from the time of conception (fertilization), each member of the human species must be given the full respect due to a human person, beginning with respect for the fundamental right to life.
It is about time someone called her and other Catholics on it who trade on their being Catholic for political gain.
Wall St. Journal’s Market Watch has the Rigali et al. text. Catholic News Service is working on it. Rush L. beat them all to it:
[T]his is just embarrassing. As I’ve often wondered, is she genuinely this uneducated, uninformed, silly, stupid, whatever — and I’ve concluded there isn’t a word to describe the status of her brain. The Catholic Church doesn’t know? The Catholic Church hasn’t stipulated?
Well Rush, you can hit many a Catholic church on Sunday and be unsure in the matter.
Big O. throws gauntlet with Big B. pick
Catholic wrinkle here, maybe of moment:
“Sadly, Joe Biden’s tenure in the United States Senate has been marked by steadfast support for legal abortion” [said Fidelis president Brian Burch in a news release].
During the recent Democratic primary campaign Biden [called himself] “a long-standing supporter of Roe v Wade and a woman’s right to choose.”
Thing is, will he be refused Communion?
Is O’s pick
of pro-abortion Catholic Joe Biden to be his V.P. running mate “. . . a slap in the face to Catholic voters” and [does it pose] a major challenge for American Catholics[?]
as Burch says, having
declared that Barack Obama has “re-opened a wound among American Catholics” by picking a pro-abortion Catholic politician like Joe Biden.
He’s a “committed Catholic,” O. said Saturday in Springfield at the unveiling, and there’s a weasel phrase, having multiple meanings in today’s religio-spiritual market.
For instance, I’m committed, but not to alleged “social justice” teaching as purveyed in papal encyclicals, most of which goes far beyond one’s Christian obligations to do anything and is bad policy to boot.
Read Thomas E. Woods, Jr.’s The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy — come along with me — for a spirited refutation of various aspects of Rerum Novarum of 1891, Quadragesimo Anno 40 years later, and even JP2’s Laborem Exercens 50 years after QA, all of which veer into statism or least assign considerable blame to employers who don’t pay a “family wage.”
The amount of nonsense sold as Catholic belief in these matters is amazing. As Woods notes on p. 78,
To be sure, the popes themselves have never claimed that a favorable attitude toward coercive labor unionism [to name one economic issue] constitutes an infallible moral teaching, but it is easy to come away from much popular exposition of Catholic social teaching with that impression.
Direct killing of the innocent is another matter, also to be sure. A privileged position is assigned anti-abortionism, therefore, in the Catholic hierarchy (of values, not prelates).
In any case, Biden as Catholic pro-choice running mate for the decidedly pro-abortion born-alive-bill-killer Obama is bound to raise hackles on fish-eaters coast to coast who are not stuck in spurious social-justice considerations and can’t get around that protection-of-the-innocent business that undergirds anti-abortionism.
Wait for a very hot story, in any case, when Biden goes for Communion and gets a blessing instead. On the other hand, don’t wait, because it won’t happen.
============
Reader D:
Yes, you’re right — Biden will pick an open-thinking church where Holy Communion is a right, not a privilege. Remember Kerry went to some “downtown Paulist Church” in Boston, I believe, where all God’s chillun can “take” Communion.
On the other hand, Reader B, who hates to capitalize:
by the guys in missouri for sure…. the same thing that happened to kerry will happen to him, i suspect.
Yes, Archbishop Burke of St. Louis, now in the Pope’s cabinet at Rome, nixed Kerry’s receiving, but K. did not test him, to my knowledge.
Zorn defends O.
Chi Trib’s Eric Zorn defends Obama in the matter of protecting aborted but born-alive infants, arguing that (a) O. voted against protecting them if it risked abortion rights in general and (b) he did so with fellow Dems as a matter of course.
[Republic Sen.] Winkel asked Obama’s committee to add that same “neutrality language” [that made it palatable to U.S. Senate Democrats] to his bill. In accordance with legislative tradition, the 10 members present voted unanimously to approve Winkel’s amendment. And then, after some discussion, they voted 6-4 along party lines to kill the bill.
“The feeling of the majority was that the bill still created great uncertainty about whether it would compromise abortion rights” in Illinois, said Sen. Jeff Schoenberg of Evanston, one of six Democrats, including Obama, who voted no. [Emphasis added]
Z. would seem to consider it irrelevant that O. acted this way, effectively making safety of the born-alive dispensable for what he sees as the greater good of abortion rights. Crass pragmatism, that. Chilling.
And O’s going along to get along in Springfield? How would that sit with hundreds of thousand undecided voters? Need we ask?
Blithe Spirit 