 |
||||
about
us/weekly Mass readings
In hope we are saved--NEW papal encyclical Photo by Fausto Fernos |
Abortion
statistics released over Thanksgiving: The Centers for Disease Control released its annual abortion statistics on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, the slowest news moment of the year, as has been the custom since President Bush entered office in 2001. As in the past, these statistics (for 2004) are a poor representation of national trends because they are dependent on reporting to state health departments, and do not include any data from three states (including California, which is responsible for 20-25% of all abortions in the US). No mainstream media carried stories about the statistics during the first five days after they were released. Conservative media trumpeted the results as showing the lowest abortion number since 1973, though statistics gathered at that time were even less reliable since the number of illegal abortions at that time were substantially higher. The 2004 numbers show a slight decrease of 1.1% from the 47 reporting states, excluding New York City and the District of Columbia. But not mentioned is the increased abortion rate, from 15/1000 women of reproductive age in 2003 to 16/1000 in 2004. The decline of 1.1% represents half the rate of decline during the Clinton Administration. The abstract of the study glosses over the increase in the abortion rate in 2004 by stating that it was "relatively unchanged" from 1998 to 2004. No mention is made in the abstract of ethnic demographics, showing that African-American women have abortion rates roughly five times those of white women. Meanwhile, new
data from the World Health Organization and the Guttmacher
Insititute, published in October 2007 in the British Medical Journal,
the Lancet, demonstrated a nearly 9% decline in abortion rates worldwide
between 1996 and 2003. The US rate is substantially lower than the
rate across all developed countries (16 vs 26), but still somewhat
higher than Canada and most Western European countries. Perhaps
most strikingly, the abortion rate in developing countries (29/1000)
remained somewhat higher than in the developed world, despite being
illegal in many of those countries. The authors concluded that illegality
may have no effect on the total number of abortions, while resulting
in substantial morbidity and mortality to the mothers. 26
Nov 2007 Bush
vetoes SCHIP bill: Gov Eliot Spitzer on the illogic (and moral cowardice) of this SCHIP veto ~ ~ ~ LA
Times reports death of innocents: ~ ~ ~ The
real story behind the invasion: ~ ~ ~ Senate discounts Geneva Convention prohibitions on torture, and gives Bush virtually unrestrained power over detainees The Senate approved legislation this week entitled the “Military Commissions Act of 2006” that must be viewed as a severe affront to anyone with Catholic sensibilities. The new law allows the president to identify anyone, including an American citizen, as an “enemy combatant”; to imprison them indefinitely; and to torture them if he chooses, without any oversight by any court. The law gives Mr. Bush wide-ranging power to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, and strips the courts of any jurisdiction to challenge his interpretation. Jesus himself was the victim of this kind of treatment, and people of conscience must stand in opposition to it. The term “enemy combatant” has now been defined down from someone “captured in battle” to anyone who has "purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States." As William Pitt has pointed out, “One dark-comedy aspect of the legislation is that senators or House members who publicly disagree with Bush, criticize him, or organize investigations into his dealings could be placed under the same designation. In effect, Congress just gave Bush the power to lock them up.” The same could apply to anyone who writes a critical letter to a newspaper, protests in public, or advocates Mr. Bush’s impeachment. A very public confrontation between three Republican senators, who refused to allow Mr. Bush to use “waterboarding” on detainees, seemed to be clearly resolved in the final compromise. But many observers expected the White House to reassert in a “signing statement” Mr. Bush’s right to do whatever he wants. The Congress and the Administration essentially ignored calls by the US Bishops’ Conference on September 15 “to reject any proposed legislation that would call into question America’s commitment to Common Article 3” of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits “cruel treatment and torture” as well as “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” Orlando Bishop Thomas Wenski, chairman of the USCCB International Policy Committee, wrote to Senators, “Prisoner mistreatment compromises human dignity. A respect for the dignity of every person, ally or enemy, must serve as the foundation of security, justice and peace. There can be no compromise on the moral imperative to protect the basic human rights of any individual incarcerated for any reason.” He went on to say, “In the face of this perilous climate, our nation must not embrace a morality based on an attitude that ‘desperate times call for desperate measures,’ or ‘the end justifies the means.’ The inherent justice of our cause and the perceived necessities involved in confronting terrorism must not lead to a weakening or disregard of U.S. or international law.”
We support our bishops in opposition to any laws that allow our
government to violate basic human dignity by depriving our enemies—and
indeed even us—of the right to confront our accuser, to expect
freedom from torture, and to appeal one’s case beyond the
authority of politicians whose own professional fortunes are served
by appearing “tough on terrorism” at the expense of
others. Christ asks us to stand with the victims of the world, but
never by becoming victimizers ourselves. 30
Sept 2006 Remembering 9/11, and judging our response September 11 is a day of remembrance that evokes a sense of utter empathy for the suffering of individuals and families, a natural outrage toward the perpetrators, and a wide spectrum of feelings toward our government’s response on our behalf these past five years. President Bush responded to our grief by waging two wars, doubling expenditures on our military, and significantly sharpening public perceptions of the danger of the modern world. Remembrance of 9/11 has been the rallying cry for war, high end tax breaks, and the election of conservatives. But the word “remembrance” means something very special to Catholics. At each Mass the priest repeats, not once but twice, Jesus’ essential words, “Do this in remembrance of me.” He was speaking specifically about body broken, and blood spilled, for the wellbeing of others. Contrast his words with new reports suggesting that a minimum of 62,000 people have been killed by both sides directly as a result of our American “war on terror,” and probably closer to an upper estimate of 180,000. Refugees are now estimated at 4.5 million people. The newest war appropriation this past week by the US Congress has pushed funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan past $500 billion--money that might have been used to develop new energy technology to end dependence on Mideast oil, eliminate global poverty, or provide health security for all Americans. Is all this death and displacement what Jesus had in mind, when he commanded us, “Do this in remembrance of me?” On the domestic front in the United States, life has taken a significant turn for the worse on several fronts. Three recent polls by the Pew Research Center, Peter D. Hart Research, and Lake Research Partners found evidence of deep pessimism among American workers about the likelihood that their wages would keep up with inflation or that their children would do better economically than had they. The Pew poll found that 69% of workers said they suffered more job stress than a decade ago, 62% felt less job security, and 59% said Americans had to work harder just to stay even. The economic response of some in Congress has been to aggressively pursue extension of tax cuts for America’s wealthiest, with a devotion to the idea of trickle down economics that will “lift all boats.” Is this what Jesus meant, when he said, “Do this in remembrance of me?” Violent crime in the United States has increased sharply this past year, according to new FBI statistics showing the murder rate up almost 5% over 2004. Robberies and assaults have also risen around the country. Meeting in August, mayors and police officials from around the country cited the escalating number of weapons on the streets and looser firearms laws as the principal reasons for the new surge in violence. But no fewer than five bills are currently under consideration in Congress to weaken existing gun laws, all being aggressively pushed by the gun lobby and conservative lawmakers who otherwise promote themselves as advocates of “family values.” Is weakening our gun laws, and contributing to increased violent crime what Jesus sought when he said, “Do this in remembrance of me?” As Catholics, we understand that Jesus set an example for us, indeed one which is virtually impossible to achieve—he allowed himself to be tortured to death in defense of those on earth who have no voice. He identified strictly with the victims of the world, and he responded solely with love. “Do this in remembrance of me,” he said. Now as we gather to console one another about what we’ve been through over the past five years as a nation, will we continue to fool ourselves into thinking that more violence can end the current violence? That a greater disparity of wealth in the United States can create a more widespread sense of economic security? That more guns will make anyone safer on our streets? When Jesus
said, “Do this in remembrance of me,” he was calling
us to selflessness like his, to creativity like his, and to love
like his. Catholics and people of true faith will increasingly see
that we can only make progress in our injured world if we seek the
kind of self-sacrificing remembrance to which Jesus himself called
us, when before long the tenth anniversary of September
11 comes around. The culture of death expands: As Israeli and Hezbollah missiles came raining down on innocent civilian populations, the Bush Administration refused last week to help bring the bloodshed to an end. As he did when he took office in 2001, Mr. Bush publicly washed his hands of any responsibility for brokering a ceasefire, largely because the Administration has refused to deal directly with Iran, Hezbollah, or Syria on issues of regional security. Behind the scenes, Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams and Assistant Secretary of State David Welch were dispatched to begin low-level discussions with Israeli and Palestinian officials as the pointless cycle of violence escalated. The question of who started the violence seemed increasingly irrelevant as the real potential rose for a wider conflict across the Middle East. Sunday a Lebanese missile killed eight people in Israel’s third largest city, Haifa, and Israel retaliated by dropping bombs in Beirut and across southern Lebanon that killed at least 40 people. An Iraqi Shiite cleric responded by vowing new attacks on US soldiers in Iraq. The Associated Press quoted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying, “If the occupying regime of Jerusalem attacks Syria, it will be equivalent to an attack on the whole Islamic world and the (Israeli) regime will face a crushing response.” Each Hezbollah missile builds enmity among Israelis toward Iran and Syria, and each Israeli bomb leads to more hatred across the Arab world toward America. As Fr. Bargil
Pixner has pointed out, Christians were the majority population
in the Holy Land for most of the last 2000 years. Now the tables
have turned, and Christians are a small minority, as in the days
following Jesus’ Resurrection. How easily we forget that Jesus
was a Jew, preaching peace among his people and seeking to persuade
his countrymen that no amount of repression was worth taking the
life of another human being. The architects of the militarization
of our Holy Land—President Assad’s Syria, President
Ahmadinejad’s Iran, and President Bush’s America—must
engage one another immediately. The people there are too precious
to allow us the luxury of sitting by idly while hatred extinguishes
their lives with the tools that foreigners have provided.
17 July 2006 Supreme Court Voids Military Tribunals: The court indicated that the Geneva Conventions’ Common Article 3 applies to the Bush “war on terror,” by virtue of the fact that it prohibits torture and even “outrages upon personal dignity.” Under US federal criminal law, violators of Article 3 can explicitly be subject to imprisonment and even the death penalty. While the Bush Justice Department is unlikely to pursue such charges against its own, a future administration could do just that. When the Administration decided to submit the prisoners in its custody to torture, their lawyers knew full well that Mr. Bush may be surrendering any capability to try those individuals in a court of law for the threat they had posed to the lives of Americans. Rather than hold the Administration accountable for this gross error of judgment undermining national security, Republican Senators John Warner and Arlen Specter scheduled hearings to craft new legislation codifying the Administration’s intent to hold military trials. Enabling the Administration’s flawed plan indicated that these senators had completely missed the point of the Court’s ruling. Congress could respond to the ruling by adopting penalties for the 2005 McCain legislation banning torture, which if applied to future detainees would avoid the threat to national security created by the Administration’s use of torture toward these prisoners. As Christians,
we are called to use persuasion rather than coercion to reach for
the Kingdom of the Lamb that Jesus has described for us. The Supreme
Court ruling invites members of the Administration to reconsider
their use of torture and their willingness to operate outside of
US law in confining human beings indefinitely in Guantánamo,
the prison camps of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the CIA’s secret
gulags around the world. “When I was in prison, you visited
me” said Jesus. And no matter how bad the accused in our prisons
may be, we are similarly called in Matthew 25 to treat them humanely.
2 July 2006
The DaVinci Code controversy: Conservative groups have reacted around the world with righteous indignation at the opening of the film adaptation for Dan Brown’s dramatically compelling, but poorly-written novel, “The DaVinci Code.” Calls for a boycott of Sony Pictures are reminiscent of the knee-jerk response to the 1989 Martin Scorcese film, “The Last Temptation of Christ,” when Catholic protests against the film drove up attendance to the great satisfaction of the producers. Catholic conservatives are insuring that more people than ever will see Ron Howard’s film this year. So if their intent is to limit the fallout for the already battered reputation of our Church, the effect of their efforts will be exactly the opposite of their intent. What most fail to realize is that putting up fisticuffs in response to some seeming insult, like a story that uses Jesus as a simple character in a typical Hollywood mystery, plays into their failure to comprehend the central message that Jesus brought to us in the Gospels: love your enemies. The sententious Bill Donohue, who uses the Catholic League to dress up the Heritage Foundation’s pro-Republican agenda in Catholic language, blurted out threats to the film’s director in a press release in advance of the film’s release: “Had he done what other directors have done before him and put in a disclaimer, the risks to his reputation would have been minimal. Now it’s show time for Mr. Howard, and not just his movie.” But Christianity is not
about threats, or beating up on its adversaries, or intimidating
others into believing its message. True Christianity is about living
the Gospel, and letting others judge the power of the message for
themselves. People of Mr. Donohue’s ilk who do not acknowledge
the brokenness of their Christianity, when it fails to grapple with
things like the Bush Administration’s ongoing sponsorship
of murder in Iraq and their un-Christian threats against Iran and
Syria, can only be stuck tinkering around the edges of evangelization
while someone like Ron Howard wins the hearts of Christians with
simple fiction. The belligerence of the conservatives, more than
anything else, makes that fiction ring vaguely true for the millions
who have already read the book.
The immoral devotion to pre-emptive war is alive and well in the Bush White House Christianity in America took a blow to the solar plexus Thursday as the Bush Administration reiterated its commitment to the fundamentally anti-Christian notion of preemptive war. “Love your enemies,” are the three words that all scripture scholars agree were spoken by Jesus himself. But there was no evidence of these important words anywhere in the 49-pages of the new National Security Strategy released in advance of a speech by National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley. Meanwhile, a much-publicized attack on the Iraqi city of Samarra, billed as the biggest air assault since the invasion, turned out to be mostly a publicity stunt. The 101st Airborne Division was said to have launched airstrikes against the central Iraqi city of Samarra and neighboring towns, employing hundreds of armored vehicles and 50 aircraft that included Black Hawk and Chinook transport helicopters and Apache attack helicopters. But in the end, local commanders acknowledged that no munitions were discharged and no rebel leaders were found. This comes as a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed 50% of Americans favor withdrawing all US troops from Iraq in the next 12 months. A vast majority think Mr. Bush is “losing ground” in Iraq, and the word “incompetent” was the most commonly cited descriptor volunteered by respondents in the poll to describe his leadership. In violation of a 1986 law compelling annual disclosure of the National Security Strategy, the Administration finally released its report--four years after the last version proved to be the initial bombshell of a philosophical underpinning for their unprovoked invasion of Iraq. Emblematic of what conservative pundit Kevin Phillips has called "a national Disenlightenment,” the exceptionalism of the Administration’s approach to military intervention is littered throughout the document. “No country should ever use preemption as a pretext for aggression,” warned the statement, despite Mr. Bush’s having used preemption in Iraq as a pretext for his aggression there in 2003. “Under long-standing principles of self defense, we do not rule out the use of force before attacks occur, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack,” continued the document, oblivious to the deaths of more than 100,000 people in Iraq as a result of the Administration’s miscalculations there about weapons of mass destruction and ties to the September 11th hijackers. “The place of preemption in our national security strategy remains the same. We will always proceed deliberately, weighing the consequences of our actions. The reasons for our actions will be clear, the force measured, and the cause just." Some commentators reflected on the inability of Republican leaders to learn not only the lessons of Vietnam, but of the reaffirmation of the law of unintended consequences playing out before our eyes today in Iraq. Preemptive war has brought untold suffering on every child in Iraq, every family of US military personnel there, and all those Americans deprived of the services that would have been purchased with the $300 billion dollars that have been wasted so far chasing the report’s astoundingly naïve “ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." Meanwhile, the religious apologists were busy rewriting the Gospels in defense of President Bush’s moral failures. Fr. Richard Neuhaus, a favorite of right wing Catholic supporters of Mr. Bush and editor of the monthly journal First Things, bent over backwards to defend preemptive killing in an interview on National Public Radio. Speaking of Mr. Bush, he said, “The action that he took is morally defensible in principle,” adding that because the invasion was a result of mistaken judgement rather than evil intent, it may be morally justifiable. “Yes, you can make that case (for attacking Iraq) if one understands preemptive war as a response to a plausibly threatening aggression,” he said. “If you have reason to believe that someone coming into your office intends to do you violence—you think they have a gun in their pocket that they’re pointing at you or whatever—that informs and supplies a moral rationale for the moral response you might make.” But Fr. Neuhaus was flummoxed when the interviewer corrected him and asked if the aggression was still justified if the attacker was sitting in his own living room without having actually done anything provocative. Reflecting now on the two million deaths in Southeast Asia as a result of the mistaken 1960s prediction that communism would overrun all the countries there, one is struck by the nimble moral calculus that makes such destruction on a massive scale morally justified as long as the political leaders thought in good faith that there was some type of real threat. We now know that the political scientists were completely wrong in Vietnam, because the communists won the war and no dominoes subsequently fell. The same lesson should apply in Iraq. Paul Pillar, the former CIA officer who led U.S. intelligence efforts in the Middle East, has written in the current issue of Foreign Affairs (quoted in the Washington Post), "It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized." The multiplying bodies
and charred psyches of today’s combatants testify to the similarity
between the miscalculations in Vietnam and those ongoing in Iraq.
But the Administration blithely blunders along with a new National
Security Strategy that puts in writing its determination to learn
nothing from its mistakes. Perhaps more significantly, it also shows
how blind our government has become to the most poignant legacy
left us by Christ and our Old Testament heritage: those who live
by the sword can expect only the sword in return.
State of the Union hides increased abortion, ongoing torture and killing in Iraq, and budgets hurting the most vulnerable Mr. Bush delivered a State of the Union message that was superficially hopeful, but reinforced all the same policies that have led to continued increases in the deficit, in the deaths of both military and civilians in Iraq, and in the first increases in US abortion rates since 1990. His speech was a stew of contradictions. He referred to the “dark vision of hatred and fear” among America’s adversaries, combated by a “hopeful alternative of political freedom and peaceful change.” But he made no reference to the dark vision of hatred and fear that he and his vice-president perpetrated in a cavalcade of color-coded “terror alerts” that mysterious ended just before the presidential election in 2004. In the daily killing of both American military and innocent Iraqis and Afghanis, it is difficult to see where “peaceful change” comes into the Bush/Cheney strategy. His condemnation of Iran’s nuclear ambitions made no reference to his own nuclear ambitions: to break the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty, by reinitiating nuclear tests, and by supporting the design of two new forms of tactical nuclear weapons that ostensibly are intended for use against Iran. On the domestic front, he advocated permanent unbalanced decreases in the tax rates for the wealthiest Americans like himself and Mr. Cheney, while trivializing devastating cuts in domestic programs for medical research, food stamps, college loans, and healthcare for the poor and elderly. He euphemistically described these cuts as an effort to “reduce or eliminate more than 140 programs that are performing poorly or not fulfilling essential priorities.” He again falsely projected that he would cut the deficit in half, this time by the year 2009. Even allowing for the failure of Mr. Bush’s efforts last year to impose huge new financial demands on government revenues by putting Social Security taxes in private accounts, no serious economist thinks that there is even a remote chance of cutting the deficit in half while making permanent the huge projected tax cuts to America’s wealthiest heirs and investors. On the premier issue that Republicans have exploited to portray themselves as protectors of America’s moral life, Mr. Bush apparently chose to ignore data from the CDC showing increased abortions during his second year in office. He stated, “There are fewer abortions in America than at any point in the last three decades, and the number of children born to teenage mothers has been falling for a dozen years in a row.” He failed to point out that new CDC data now show the first increases in abortion since his father was in office 16 years ago, demonstrating the impotence of the four laws passed in the first Bush term that sought to label the Democrats as being “pro-abortion.” To give him the benefit of the doubt, he may have been alluding to Planned Parenthood-sponsored data released last year that included abortions in California (excluded from the CDC analysis). But depending on continued positive abortion trends in a state led by a pro-choice Republican governor and demonized by Republicans for its liberal political culture is an ironic form of salvation for Mr. Bush’s unrealized promises to “protect the unborn.” The reality remains that the decreases in abortion cited by Mr. Bush in his speech were almost entirely attained under President Bill Clinton’s two administrations. The statement about teen pregnancies served to hide the fact that teen abortions per 1000 live births to teenagers (the abortion ratio) actually rose in each of the two years of the Bush presidency for which CDC data are available (from 363 in 2000, to 368 in 2001, and 369 in 2002). To his credit, Mr. Bush spoke of relieving suffering in the developing world from AIDS and malaria, and he called on Congress to pass funding for the Ryan White Act that would improve accessibility to HIV drugs for infected Americans. But one must be suspicious of the motives here, given the construction of legislation authorizing both the PEPFAR initiative to provide AIDS drugs in Africa and the new Medicard Part D drug benefit for seniors. Both programs have resulted in huge transfers of taxpayer dollars to pharmaceutical companies that played a key role in writing the legislation, and which subsequently hired the Republicans who designed these programs. All-in-all,
the State of the Union message failed to take responsibility for
a legislative program that has resulted in hatred toward Americans
around the world, new threats to peace and stability, huge new expenditures
on the military while cutting healthcare for America’s most
vulnerable, and the first increases in abortions since 1990 despite
all the rhetoric claiming to stand up for “the most vulnerable
among us.” Catholic social teaching urges us to greater compassion
in our public lives, and actions in this regard speak much louder
than words.
The CDC numbers prove the lie of the Republican rhetoric, with abortion now climbing under Bush Published again in the dark of night, on the Friday after Thanksgiving with virtually no press coverage, the verdict is now in regarding Mr. Bush's effect on abortion in America: the number of abortions rose in 2002 for the first time in 13 years (See the CDC report, 11/25/05). The increases were small, representing a clear inflection point in the long-standing trend under President Clinton that significantly decreased the total number of abortions in the US. But the populations that experienced the most significant increases were teenagers and poor women. The teen population has been at the receiving end of information-free sex education classes across America. The number of poor people in the United States has climbed dramatically during the five years of the Bush Administration. Meanwhile, the crowds gathered again in Washington DC, recalling the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision shifting authority on the issue away from individual states. The concern for the unborn is real in the hearts of many, but the focus is completely misplaced. As abortion rates dived below where they were before Roe v Wade, in the vicinity of 20 per 1000 women of reproductive age per year, is this landmark decision really relevant anymore to the abortion phenomenon in America? Surprisingly, law turns out to have little in common with morality, as demonstrated by the fact that none of the Ten Commandments are actually written into law. Even killing is considered acceptable in all sorts of special circumstances: for instance, the state-sponsored killing that has been condemned by our Bishops, or the dozens of people who are being killed every day in Iraq by our military. Drunkeness (the leading preventable cause of mental retardation and of road deaths), divorce, and greed come to mind as examples of sins that no one is trying to outlaw. Mark Harrington, director of the “Center for Bioethical Reform” in the Midwest, wrote last week to his supporters, “Ending legal abortion has always been the main goal of the pro life movement. This battle is about changing hearts and minds on the morality of abortion one person at a time. Outlawing abortion will never ‘zero’ its frequency of occurrence, but it will reduce its frequency of occurrence to the irreducibly minimal level that can be achieved through vigorous enforcement of the law.” Mr. Harrington is apparently unaware of the failures of similar previous crusades, and people like him make four demonstrably false assumptions: First, Republicans have given credence to the assumption that reversing Roe-v-Wade, indeed even making abortion illegal, would have any effect on the number of abortions. But the widespread support for abortion rights makes any legislation against it guaranteed to cause a huge rent in the social fabric. One has to look no further than the Constitutional amendment imposing Prohibition, which was never enforceable because it was never accepted by a large segment of the American population. Anyone who thinks that making abortion illegal, even with tough enforcement, will have any effect on abortion rates is fooling themselves. One has but to look at the ubiquity of marijuana use across the country, despite the hundreds of thousands of people serving in state and federal prisons, to see that law often has little capacity for controlling drug use. And make no mistake, abortion will be an illegal drug problem in any state that succeeds in outlawing it. This is because in the future, surgical abortions will be increasingly less common and will be replaced by abortion-inducing drugs. The easiest to use is the anti-ulcer drug, misoprostol (which costs pennies to make, and is currently sold for hundreds of dollars). Second, illegal does not equal immoral, and vice-versa. The ubiquity of speeding, despite the fact that it kills people, does not equate with immorality in most people’s minds. In fact, most people have an intuitive sense of the immorality of something that seems to have nothing to do with law. Invading other countries and killing scores of thousands of people is apparently legal, but most Christians recognize the immorality of it. Third, there is a widespread assumption that making abortion illegal is the only way to deal with the problem. The fact is that the crusade to make abortion illegal is, practically-speaking, an excuse to do nothing that actually decreases abortions. Republican control of all three branches of government has been associated with more abortions than had been projected during the period of dramatic declines experienced under the Clinton Administration. The Bush Administration will never seek a Constitutional Amendment outlawing abortion, because it would be counterproductive to them politically. Better to harness the passion (and dollars) of people who care about the unborn, while continuing to do nothing about the underlying factors leading to abortion--like poverty, and racial disparities in education and health care access. Finally, to those who think that making abortion illegal is the "moral" solution to the problem—think again. Jesus would never have advocated using the coercive power of the state to compel anyone to a moral decision of any kind. Law may be a practical solution to many problems, like compelling the payment of income taxes, but it is never the “moral” solution for people of faith. And as indicated above, overturning Roe-v-Wade may have no effect on abortion rates at all. Restrictive laws in Mississippi have had no effect on the abortion rates there. When one considers that something approaching half of all current abortions in the world are done illegally, there is no evidence that illegality would have any practical effect on the abortion rates. Thus overturning the decision cannot be described either as a practical solution, or a "moral" solution, to the problem of abortion. Ohio Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan has fashioned legislation that, if enacted, could dramatically lower abortion rates. Republican Congressmen are rushing to join Rep. Ryan in sponsoring this legislation, because of their concern about the unborn, right? Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. The four "anti-abortion" bills enacted during the first Bush Administration didn't even pretend to have any effect on the abortion rates, but were rather all about "labeling" the Democrats as the "pro-abortion party." The last thing Republicans want is anti-abortion legislation that Democrats can support, even if it might actually decrease the number of abortions. But back on the subject of Roe-v-Wade, in contrast, the law of unintended consequences suggests that illegality would lead to dramatic increases in the birth defects associated with misoprostol use, increases in late-term abortions, and increased feelings of isolation and despair among young single women. The statistics now show just how wrong the whole coercion-based Republican approach to abortion has been. Jesus preached a religion of love, one that invites rather than punishes, and those who preach a different religion are misleading themselves when they invoke the name of Jesus to support overturning Roe-v-Wade. 30 January 2006
House votes to oppose Bush position on torture How long will it take President Bush to realize that his immoral assault on the dignity of the individual must be given up? The House of Representatives voted December 14 by an overwhelming margin of 308 to 122 to endorse Senator John McCain’s legislation forbidding all forms of torture by any agency of the US Government. 107 Republicans endorsed the measure, which was sponsored by Pennsylvania Rep. John Murtha. The Senate had previously voted 90-9 in favor of adding the torture prohibition to the $453 billion defense appropriation bill. Mr. Bush quietly responded the following day by reversing his previous threat to veto the defense bill if this amendment was included. But he offered no admission that he was wrong. Indeed, news also emerged the same week that the Administration had launched a secret re-writing of the Army Field Manuel, with specific indications for allowed procedures. Some insiders described it as a preemptive end-run around the McCain/Murtha amendment, essentially allowing torture by redefining it with the lowest possible bar. Why has the Administration clung to a universally condemned position like this on the issue of torture? Perhaps it’s because their whole case for war in Iraq has been slipping away as more and more information comes to light about the ineptitude of their “tough guy” approach to foreign policy. At the heart of the justification was the oft-repeated link between Iraq and the 9-11 hijackers, which turned out to hinge almostly entirely on the torture-elicited testimony of Al Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. He was captured in Pakistan in 2001, subjected to rendition by US authorities, and approvingly tortured by the Egyptian security services. Vice President Cheney and President Bush repeatedly cited the false information elicited in that torture chamber as justification for attacking Iraq. Thus the Administration’s torture policy had the perverse effect of not only failing to make Americans safer, but of causing what Mr. Bush has now acknowledged were the deaths of at least 30,000 Iraqis and more than 2100 American service personnel. Meanwhile, the US Government continues to hold large numbers of people hostage in a string of gulag-like interrogation facilities around the world with no accountability to anyone. December 9 the State Department announced that it would continue to deny any Red Cross access to these people to assess their physical wellbeing or any history of torture. This position is in gross violation of the Geneva Conventions, to which the United States was a founding signatory. The December 14 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine is headlined with an essay by Dr. Susan Okie offering her reflections on a medical mission to the Guantanamo Prison Camp in Cuba. She goes into some detail about the circumstances surrounding the hunger strike by 131 of the 500 prisoners earlier this fall, and forced feeding of 22 of them through naso-gastric tubes. Anyone who considers themselves a follower of Christ and a supporter of this Administration should read this essay and reflect on the central message of our faith this Christmas. The Bush Administration’s treatment of human beings in Guantanamo and in their secret prisons around the world is inimical to everything we believe as Christians and must be brought to an immediate end. The overwhelming approval of Senator McCain’s legislation in the House and Senate shows that Mr. Bush and his advisors were the last holdouts supporting this assault on this most fundamental of human sensibilities. Their reversal on the veto threat will not be credible until they come out and admit that they previously sanctioned torture, and have had a true change of heart. Sunday, Dec 18, 2005
Falsifying the case
for War in Iraq: President Bush spoke publicly after Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announced five indictments of Vice-President Cheney’s closest aide for lying and obstruction of justice. Mr. Bush said, “Scooter (Libby) has worked tirelessly on behalf of the American people and sacrificed much in the service to this country. He served the vice president and me through extraordinary times in our nation's history.” Nowhere in his remarks was any reflection of the fact that two years ago he indicated that he wanted to “get to the bottom of this” outing of CIA agent Valery Plame Wilson, and would personally hold accountable anyone who was involved. What is now completely clear is that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney themselves were fully complicit from the beginning in the effort to humiliate their critic, Joseph Wilson, and then falsely pleaded ignorance when this issue threatened Mr. Bush’s reelection prospects. Like their case for war in Iraq itself, their response to the Plame issue was illustrative of their lack of reverence for the truth. The fact that possibly hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of their dishonesty is what’s really at the heart of this case. The real tragedy is that every Republican in Washington knew that the intelligence was being overhyped to launch a war of greed in Iraq, and none raised their voice in protest. Even now, many of them continue to defend the killing in Iraq, the policies promoting torture (see this week’s Washington Post editorial), and the colonial-style exploitation of that country’s natural resources. These actions are all anathema to Catholics and other people of conscience. Senator John
Kerry spoke for many when he said, “Today’s indictment
of the vice president’s top aide and the continuing investigation
of Karl Rove are evidence of White House corruption at the very
highest levels, far from the ‘honor and dignity’ the
president pledged to restore to Washington just five years ago.”
A Tale of Three Gulfs:
The Catholic Democrats have joined forces with religious leaders across the country in calling on Congress to turn back from pending legislation meant to punish the poor in America for the costs of the pending Gulf Coast reconstruction. Rep. Roy Blunt and nearly 200 of his Republican colleagues in the House have indicated their willingness to gut Medicare (healthcare for the elderly and disabled) and Medicaid (care for the poor), food stamps, and student loan programs in order to pay for more than $100 billion of new tax cuts and the ongoing budgetary black hole of the war in Iraq. The House leadership sought to bypass the normal deliberative process and to rush through these devastating and immoral budget cuts, but were forced to postpone voting due to universal Democratic opposition. Religious leaders across the country have reacted with outrage. Presiding Episcopal Bishop Frank Griswold issued a statement: "Congress and the President must come together and focus on poverty that exists across the nation, and not exacerbate poverty…Nothing could be clearer in the Gospel than Jesus' identification with the poor. 'When I was hungry you gave me food. When I was naked you clothed me, sick you cared for me, truly I tell you, what you did for the least of these, you did (it) for me.' And so for a nation to declare itself under God and neglect the poor in its midst is tantamount in my mind to blasphemy." At its recent meeting, the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church in America passed a resolution calling on Congress “to pass a budget that does not pit one group in need against another and calls for more money overall to care for the country's most vulnerable residents.” The National Council of Churches, representing Baptists, Friends, Evangelical Lutherans, Greek Orthodox, and Presbyterians among others, issued a statement: “As leaders of America's major faith communities, we write to you at a moment of great moral urgency for our nation when hundreds of thousands of our most vulnerable citizens are at risk. We urge you to put aside partisan politics and pass a federal budget that reflects the moral priorities of the wide majority of Americans. We urge you to work for, not against, the common good of all of America's citizens and not just a privileged few.” At a time when the Bush Administration is making threatening statements against Iran and Syria, failing to offer any reassurance that they do not intend permanent military occupation of Iraq, and initiating new programs for the renewal of nuclear testing and the weaponization of space, the idea of stealing funds from poor Americans to pay for all this militarism is the height of immorality. As Catholics, in support of our Church’s significant contributions to care for the poor in America, we denounce efforts in Congress to rush through legislation that mendaciously exploits the Gulf Coast hurricanes to cut the social safety net for all those who have been confined to or pushed into poverty by the economic policies of the current administration. Protesting the evil fruits of the Bush utopianism: US forces responsible for most death, and continued torture, in Iraq People of many faiths are gathering this weekend in Washington DC to protest the ongoing killing in Iraq, with religious services on Sunday and lobbying on Monday. A new analysis has suggested that at least 45,000 Iraqi civilians are now being killed each year. Despite press reports playing up suicide bombings as the primary culprit for all the destruction in Iraq, these calculations suggest that most deaths are still caused directly by American military forces. With 600 traffic checkpoints in Baghdad alone, and the doors kicked down on 2000 private Iraqi homes a day, the daily life of average people in Iraq is unspeakably grim. It is impossible for us as Americans to imagine ourselves and our children living under these kinds of daily threats to our lives and our mental health. But the astounding irony is that it is being done by Americans, who pride themselves in being protectors of civil rights, in the name of freedom from fear, which is unimaginable for average Iraqis in the foreseeable future. Attempts to demonize the opposition have also come under new scrutiny. An article in the Christian Science Monitor cites the Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS) for new findings suggesting that US and Iraqi authorities have knowingly propagated a “myth” that foreigners are fueling the Iraqi insurgency. CSIS suggests that the true number is less than 10% of the estimated 30,000 insurgents. Meanwhile, new allegations have been published of US Military abuse of prisoners in Iraq by officers of the 82nd Airborne Division of the Army. Three former soldiers gave evidence last week to Human Rights Watch and to Republican Senators John Warner and John McCain alleging widespread use of blunt trauma with the intent to break limbs, exposure to extremes of temperature, and malicious sleep deprivation at “Camp Mercury” near Falluja. President Bush’s well-calculated effort to paint his torture policies as the result of “a few bad apples” are now proving that it is George Appleseed himself who bears the full moral responsibility for the inhumane treatment of these thousands of people in their own country. How can we as Catholics tolerate the perpetuation of torture in our name; of killing without end, for purposes of a heretofore unexplained Administration imperative for permanent occupation of Iraq; of military adventurism dedicated to maintaining an oil-based economy that is driving the indisputable fact of global climate change, even as the number and intensity of hurricanes around the world is spiraling upward? The good men and women of the US Military have dutifully complied with orders from the top, and our continued support for the civilian leadership places moral responsibility for all the killing squarely on our own shoulders. Are "preserving our way of life" or "defending American credibility" reason enough to stay one more day in Iraq? As St. Paul writes this weekend so beautifully in Philippians 2, “Do nothing out of selfishness or out of vainglory; rather, humbly regard others as more important than yourselves, each looking out not for his own interests, but also for those of others.” 24 Sept 2005
American casualties pile up in Iraq, while we pay the price at home for ignoring global warming Amidst the disaster of dueling hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, the American public is increasingly numb to the ongoing catastrophe in Iraq. US casualties surged past 1900 this week as a result of another roadside bomb, and virtually unnoticed was the destruction of another Iraqi city--Tal Afar, near the Syrian border. How many civilians were killed there? How many people's homes and livelihoods destroyed? Does anyone have any illusions that this cycle of destruction will result in peace someday? Meanwhile, little noticed amidst President Bush’s rare mea culpas about the federal response to Hurricane Katrina was an acknowledgement of that most fundamental of Christian dogmas: we need each other. Mr. Bush went to the United Nations last week with a desperate plea for others to help the US in Iraq, and to thank all the nations that had come to our assistance in responding to the hurricane. It was a far cry from the unilateralist message brought by unconfirmed Ambassador John Bolton, who sought last minute to ram through hundreds of changes in the reform resolutions meant for the signatures of all the world’s leaders. Most particularly, Mr. Bush was forced to repudiate one of his central strategic aims of just two weeks ago, namely the neutralization of the Millennium Development Goals to significantly impact world poverty. Mr. Bolton had sought to eliminate all references to the MDGs, but Mr. Bush ultimately reaffirmed them in general terms in his remarks to the General Assembly. Remarkably, he said, “To spread a vision of hope, the United States is determined to help nations that are struggling with poverty. We are committed to the Millennium Development goals. This is an ambitious agenda that includes cutting poverty and hunger in half, ensuring that every boy and girl in the world has access to primary education, and halting the spread of AIDS -- all by 2015.” The one huge inconsistency is the Administration’s having sabotaged international efforts to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Bush said Thursday, “We must send a clear message to the rulers of outlaw regimes that sponsor terror and pursue weapons of mass murder: You will not be allowed to threaten the peace and stability of the world.” This remark must be viewed currently as one of total hypocrisy, as the US seeks to weasel out of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, to restart the production of fissile plutonium in Idaho, to design a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons for first use on the battlefield, and to plant such weapons in space. It is our responsibility to take Mr. Bush at his word, and to prevent him from being “allowed to threaten the peace and stability of the world” through all these initiatives. Otherwise, the sentiments now emerging from the Administration this week offer a glimmer of Christian hope, from this often values-free presidency: expressing remorse for hurting people with federal disaster management policies; asking for help and acknowledging our limitations, when he said, “The world is more compassionate and hopeful when we act together”; finally, recognizing that constructive solutions are more productive than threats at accomplishing laudable goals. He dwelt at length on international negotiations over farm subsidies, saying, “The United States is ready to eliminate all tariffs, subsidies and other barriers to free flow of goods and services as other nations do the same. This is key to overcoming poverty in the world's poorest nations. It's essential we promote prosperity and opportunity for all nations. By expanding trade, we spread hope and opportunity to the corners of the world, and we strike a blow against the terrorists who feed on anger and resentment.” After years of belittling and hobbling the United Nations, Mr. Bush began his remarks with the remarkable and unexpected words, “Thank you for your dedication to the vital work and great ideals of this institution.” Perhaps a light has finally appeared in Washington, as a public policy of destruction stumbles briefly aside and for the moment allows a new spirit of constructive thinking to enter in. The proof will be found ultimately in how they back down from all the killing in Iraq, and from the mindless talk of developing new generations of nuclear and space-based weapons. Now that we've seen real threats to our national security, in the form of this cavalcade of hurricanes that must be related to global warming, the real test of national leadership will be to stop killing for oil in Iraq and start conserving energy to arrest global warming here at home. 21 September 2005
How Sept 11 Might Have Been Remembered It is the human instinct to seek revenge. Thus after September 11, 2001, a stunned country found itself in the thrall of a few politicians who played to the nation's lowest instincts. Things could easily have been different. A more mature political response might have been one in which a president stood up and said that the United States would not sucumb to fear and stoop to the methods of terrorists, but would seek to use all of the tools of the modern age for the alleviation of poverty and for the heightening of international understanding. Such would have been the Christian response, as is made manifestly clear in the Catholic scriptural readings for September 11, 2005. Instead, we have witnessed four years of non-stop mutual recrimination and violence. It is worth asking whether the invasion of Afghanistan, which most everyone hailed as a logical consequence of Sept 11, has really made us any safer. The largely unseen consequences include monumental resurgence of heroin production, severe internecine violence, and daily injury to US Military personnel. Meanwhile, the number of international terrorist incidents has escalated four-fold since the US invasion of Afghanistan. If we thought that taking over that distant country would make us safer, we have been proven wrong. The terrorists have also won at a more personal level. The massive redirection of financial and human resources away from problems like the protection of New Orleans is a testament to how much bin Laden has changed our lives. But more profoundly, our population has been hyped into a sense of anxiety over terrorism not seen since the 1950s. Can anyone truly say that the threats we face now as a nation match those of the Cold War, when nuclear weapons constantly targeted all our major cities? The wholesale exploitation of Sept 11 to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq, with the hundreds of thousands of deaths and the resultant catastrophe of psychological injury to the children and adults there, is yet again a validation of Jesus' central message that violence begets only violence. There was a time when American presidents were embarrassed to wear their Christianity on their sleeve. They recognized that the perceived need to use violence in service of the national interest created an intrinsic contradiction with allegiance to Jesus' command of love toward our enemies. Now we have an Administration which, under the cover of the Christian name, has made violence its raison d'etre. As we remember those innocent souls who lost their lives four years ago, let us also remember the more than one hundred people who have since died in the name of each victim of September 11. May we have the courage to awaken as a nation to the realization in Christ's name that the only path to "national security" is, in the words of Pope John Paul II, "War no more." No nation state can hope to achieve this perfection to which Jesus has called us, but all Christians should be able to agree that we should be part of the solution and not the devil at the heart of the problem.
Why are the loudest Catholic voices in the Supreme Court fight from the least Catholic wing of our Church? The death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist is guaranteed to heighten the culture war among an evenly divided electorate. With religious issues at the heart of much of the Supreme Court controversy, it is fascinating how much bile tinges the accusations of both sides—but particularly those who fashion themselves to be more religious by dint of their membership in the Republican Party. Election polling last year suggested that frequent church attenders among Catholics were more likely to be Republican supporters. This has been taken to mean that someone wearing the “faithful Catholic” label, such as Judge John Roberts, will faithfully reinforce the Republican agenda. The Catholic vote is so important to future Republican political success, don’t be surprised if the nominee to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is a Catholic woman. But are “faithful Catholics” truly faithful to our Catholicism? A new study in the journal Foreign Affairs indicates that church attendance is among the strongest single predictors of whether someone supports the Bush War in Iraq, despite our late Pope’s having labeled this conflict “a defeat for humanity.” Gallup polling data also suggests strong support among this group for the death penalty, with 60% of practicing Catholics in favor of it. Catholic women are 40% more likely to seek abortions compared to Protestant women, according to data published in 1999, despite the Bishops’ fervent opposition to abortion. We clearly have a tremendous amount of work to do among ourselves with regard to discovering the central tenet of our faith: that Jesus preached exclusively a gospel of love and self-sacrifice. Defenders of the use of violence, like the Heritage Foundation-affiliated Catholic League, will argue that we need more violence-accomodating people (like them) on the Supreme Court. The jury is still out in this regard on Judge Roberts, who in his last Appellate Court decision enabled the sham trials that are about to commence under military auspices at Guantanamo Bay. Conservative Catholics may hope for someone who shares their harsh and simplistic view of abortion, but will these nominees have the strength of character to combat all the other occasions where fellow Catholics continue to advocate elements of a culture of death? Will they have the courage to stand up to the cruelty of the death penalty, which society imposes almost exclusively on those who cannot afford legal representation? Will they have the courage to compel the Bush Administration to end its policies of hiding tortured detainees from Congress and from the Red Cross? Will they have the courage to hold the Federal Government accountable for its vast underfunding of special education across the country? The simultaneous replacement of Chief Justice Rehnquist compels us to ask some truly important questions of both nominees, in the wake of the dramatically consequential Bush v Gore decision over which Rehnquist presided. Regardless of one’s political stripe, we must all agree that decision-making cannot be allowed that dispenses with the central principal of the Court’s authority, namely the requirement that they provide a meaningful and generalizable rationale for their decisions (missing in Bush v Gore). “Because we say so” simply isn’t good enough. In Bush v Gore, the Court never explained why it had the jurisdiction to stop the vote counting in Florida. The criminal conflict of interest of one justice, himself a Catholic whose wife was an employee of the Bush Campaign, has never been addressed by this Court. Deciding the Florida election for Mr. Bush in a 5-to-4 decision turned out to be one of mammoth consequences, in its empowerment of the advocates of violence who have brought us hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq. Now we are faced with the prospect of possibly hundreds or thousands of deaths in New Orleans because of the absence of needed National Guard troops (many in Iraq) that would have evacuated all the hospitals and poor neighborhoods there after the flood. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the five Supreme Court justices who put Mr. Bush in office in 2000 bear significant responsibility for ignoring the law of unintended consequences that has led to all these deaths. Pope John Paul
II said just before the launching of the failed Bush War in Iraq,
"Violence and arms can never resolve the problems of man."
We really will have accomplished something if we end up with two
new Supreme Court justices who could ratify a judgement like that.
Pat Robertson, President Bush, and the meaning of our Christianity At some level, all Christians understand that God is love. This is why the Rev. Pat Robertson, granted special authority to speak on matters of religion, made news with his televised remarks last month calling for the murder of the democratically elected leader of Venezuela. The loudest voices in American religion, the Heritage Foundation-associated Catholic League and Focus on the Family, were completely silent on this opportunity to explore the central imperative of our Christian faith—the call to love, rather than to hate. Somehow it seems fitting that the Administration’s response has been a similar collective eye-rolling rather than rejection. The White House website says nothing. Mr. Bush and his press secretary have not commented on the matter. A State Department spokesman merely labeled Mr. Robertson’s remarks “inappropriate.” Secretary Donald Rumsfield responded to them by saying, “Certainly it’s against the law. Our department doesn’t do that type of thing.” The fact of the matter, however, is that Mr. Robertson and Mr. Bush share an advocacy for assassination. Mr. Bush's press secretary called in October 2002 for killing Saddam Hussein, stating, "Regime change is welcome in whatever form that it takes." In November that year, Mr. Bush assassinated an American citizen and five other people in their car in Yemen, using a CIA drone-fired missile. On March 19, 2003 Mr. Bush ordered a cruise missile assassination attempt against Hussein and his family, which was unsuccessful. Thus, Secretary Rumsfield’s remarks this week about targeted killing were false; add possibly hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties in Iraq, and killing that putatively advances US petroleum interests appears to have become official US policy. Like the Middle East, Venezuela currently provides a significant chunk of US oil imports, and Mr. Bush's distaste for Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is well-known. In the final analysis, Mr. Bush and Mr. Robertson are both ‘ends-justify-the-means’ Christians, perfectly comfortable with violence and killing when it suits their purposes. But as the Biblical scholar John L. McKenzie wrote, “No reader of the New Testament, simple or sophisticated, can retain any doubt of Jesus’ position toward violence directed to persons, individual or collective, organized or free enterprise: He rejected it.” Pope Benedict spoke in a German synagogue last month about “neo-paganists” who purported to follow Christianity, but had no qualms about killing. The anguished cry of a Cindy Sheehan and 1900 other American families will help us to clarify our thinking regarding the faulty notion that launching wars is the way to solve our problems. But perhaps we need the Robertsons of the world to reveal the hypocrisy that now prevails, and to put the Christ back into Christianity on this most central issue: the value of every life.
New Republican initiative to block Administration torture policies One of the most stunning political realities of the past five years has been the voting cohesion of the Republican ranks in both the House and Senate at a time of truly radical change in the direction of our government. Despite the self-destructive nature and intellectual weakness of so many Bush initiatives—the ‘war on terror’ that makes everyone feel less safe and the private accounts campaign to ‘save Social Security’ that almost completely defunds it, to name two—a whole generation of Republican legislators have gamely signed on. Finally, a glimmer of conscience on the Republican political landscape: Senators Arlen Specter (R-PA), John Warner (R-VA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and John McCain (R-AZ) have proposed amendments to a $442 billion Defense Appropriation Bill in an effort to force the Administration to change course on its torture policies around the world. Senator McCain, a former POW who endured years of torture in Vietnam, has announced his intention to establish legislative standards for the treatment of detainees in order to prevent torture. Senator Graham has been working to define the legal status of enemy combatants being held in Guantanamo so that they cannot be imprisoned and tortured indefinitely without legal due process. Perhaps most importantly, Senator Specter has led efforts to bar the holding of "ghost" detainees whose names are not disclosed to Congress or to international human rights agencies. Vice President Cheney rushed last month to Capitol Hill to try and quash this effort, and threatened to have Mr. Bush veto the whole appropriations bill rather than submit the Administration to rules of law governing the use of torture. Their position on this issue was further illustrated by a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee on the nomination of Timothy Flanigan to be the second ranking official in the Justice Department. He and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales helped author the Administration’s policies on the treatment of detainees prior to the Iraq invasion. Mr. Flanigan was asked about a Bush memo from their Office of Legal Counsel at the White House, which very narrowly defined torture as being only those practices that cause “death, organ failure or the permanent impairment of a significant body function.” He said he was reluctant to comment on whether several techniques, including near-drowning and mock executions, should be proscribed or even whether they represented torture. Even senior military lawyers were opposed to these kinds of practices, according to new documents released this week. They warned in early 2003 that the torture policies outlined by an Administration legal task force could ultimately result in international prosecution of Army personnel for war crimes. The judge advocate general (JAG) of the Air Force advised the task force that the “more extreme interrogation techniques, on their face, amount to violations of domestic criminal law,” according to an account in the NY Times. Meanwhile, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) and other Democrats have been pushing for an independent commission to examine the Defense Department’s and CIA’s ongoing use of torture around the world, an effort that has caused cataplexy in the Bush Administration. In a week that saw the Administration finally win congressional approval of its Energy Bill, handing over billions in tax incentives to oil companies, the real reasons for the War in Iraq and the permanent US occupation there came into further sharp focus. As Bob Herbert wrote last week on the New York Times Op-Ed page, “It’s the oil, stupid!” Approaching 1800 US military deaths, the struggle to control Iraq’s oil reserves is increasingly being played out against a backdrop of stunning $60-per-barrel runaway profits by the oil companies. The ConocoPhillips Company, for example, announced this week that its second quarter profits had soared 51%, with a 34% increase in revenues over the same period last year. As Catholics, we are called to stand up to the prizing of wealth over individual life. This week marked the first meeting of the Catholic Democrats of Pennsylvania, and it was not lost on all those in attendance that their senior Senator Specter has become a ray of hope, while their Catholic junior Senator Santorum continues marching in lock step with the pro-violence policies of Mr. Bush. That Senators Specter, Warner, McCain and Graham have finally said ‘enough’ to the wholly unconscionable torture policies of this Administration is cause for a little celebration at this critical political moment for all people of conscience. 6
August 2005
Moving beyond Roe v Wade in the debate over a new Supreme Court Justice President Bush has nominated Judge John G. Roberts Jr., a Catholic, to replace Justice Sandra O’Connor on the Supreme Court. Judge Roberts attended a Catholic high school in Indiana and completed his undergraduate studies at Harvard in 1976, graduating summa cum laude in just three years. He was an honors graduate of Harvard Law School, clerked under Justice Rehnquist, and worked in the Reagan Administration. His nomination is sure to be opposed by progressive groups because of a legal brief he signed in 1991 as Deputy Solicitor General under the elder President Bush. "We continue to believe that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided and should be overruled," said the brief, which argued in favor of a regulation banning abortion-related counseling by federally-funded family planning programs. The spotlight will certainly be intensely focused on the issue of the legality of abortion in America in general, and the sustainability of Roe v Wade in particular. We believe this is an utter mistake, both for conservatives and for liberals. Those people who have made overturning Roe the litmus test for the morality of one’s stance on abortion have vastly overstated the effect this ruling has had on abortion rates in America. Not even accounting for speculative estimates of the number of illegal abortions that occurred prior to 1973, the national abortion rates now (16/1000 women/year in 2001 according to the CDC) are lower than they were prior to Roe v Wade. One study has estimated that there were 829,000 illegal or self-induced abortions in the US in 1967 alone; the total legal abortions in 2002 were 1.29 million, with a population that was 40% larger. Overturning Roe is no Holy Grail when it comes to decreasing abortion in America. Studies on abortions in Mississippi, which has among the most restrictive laws in the country and only a single abortion provider, have shown that the overall number of Mississippi women having abortions has remained unchanged. Such laws appear simply to have resulted in 60% of that state’s women seeking abortions out-of-state. With the dramatic increases in non-surgical abortions in recent years (up 173% between 2000 and 2001, according to the CDC), any effort to outlaw abortion will likely result in substantial numbers of these procedures being done illegally with drugs like misoprostol that can be produced for pennies and sold for hundreds or thousands of dollars on the black market. No one disputes how poorly federal and state governments have succeeded in combating the use of illegal drugs in the United States. In other words overturning Roe v Wade, with an anticipated change in a few state laws making abortions illegal, may have no effect on the number of abortions in America. It would serve primarily to give some social conservatives the satisfaction of knowing that “someone was being punished” for abortion—with substantial costs in maternal deaths, induced birth defects, and penal system dollars expended—without actually doing anything to reduce or stop the practice. There is no theological basis for using the threat of state power to impose a solution to any moral problem. Jesus never advocated using the coercive power of the state to accomplish what each of us must do in our own hearts. Many Democrats who care both about the wellbeing of women and of their babies have been suckered into believing that Republican leaders are really opposed to abortion. A recent Guttmacher report begins, “With an Administration deeply opposed to abortion…” (http://www.alanguttmacher.org/pubs/ib_5-03.pdf), indicating an assumption that appears to have no basis in fact. The stated Republican opposition to abortion appears to be strictly tactical and rhetorical. Careful analysis of the four major pieces of legislation passed during the Bush years shows that none has had any measurable effect on abortion rates in the United States. The Administration has done no studies to understand why women choose to end their pregnancies. The data gathered by the CDC are typically almost three years late, poorly funded and incompletely gathered, and routinely released with no press coverage the night before the Thanksgiving holiday. This Administration fears that people will recognize what a straw man their expressed opposition to abortion really is. If anything, the evidence suggests that the Republican leadership is addicted to the dollars and political polarity that the abortion debate brings, and have a vested interest in never seeking any real solutions to the problem. The rapid declines in abortion incidence during President Clinton’s Administration were almost certainly a consequence of three factors: changing sexual practices in the era of HIV-transmission, the improved economic status of women, and changing social mores regarding abortion. These declines have substantially slowed under President Bush, according to new data published this summer by the Guttmacher Institute (http://www.alanguttmacher.org/media/nr/2005/05/19/index.html). Furthermore, analysis published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last Thanksgiving (http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5309a1.htm) have shown an increase in teenage abortions in the US during the first year of the Bush Administration. Democratic Party
Chairman Howard Dean said at the 2005 Massachusetts Democratic Convention,
“I don’t know anyone who is pro-abortion.” As
Catholics, advocating for both children and the parents who bear
and raise them, we are working with Chairman Dean to construct a
legislative and social program that truly does address the problem
of abortion. Perhaps the debate over Judge Roberts’ confirmation
will help clarify how little the Republicans have done, by focusing
exclusively on Roe v Wade, to address the angst that many people
of conscience—perhaps especially we Catholics—feel about
the continuing high rates of abortion in America. Perhaps it’s
too much to hope that additionally there will come a new appreciation
of how little our society does to support young mothers today. Senator Santorum equates ideology with morality, and demonstrates how far some Republicans will go to exploit our Church Catholic Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, responding to questions from a reporter, repeated remarks he made three years ago attacking the people of Boston, and its universities in particular, for a supposed role in the national child abuse crisis that came to wide attention in 2002. A fellow Catholic, Senator Edward Kennedy, responded on the floor of the Senate by stating the obvious, namely that the aggressiveness of the people of Massachusetts in responding to this problem was, if anything, a tribute to their moral rectitude. Senator Santorum
responded to these remarks somewhat immaturely, saying, “I
am for proper formation, something I would challenge Sen. Kennedy
to be for. Proper orthodox formation within the teachings of the
Vatican. I don't think Sen. Kennedy would follow that very closely.”
Ignoring what Senator Kennedy had actually said, Mr. Santorum added,
“I don't think Ted Kennedy lecturing me on the teachings of
the church and how the church should handle these problems is something
I'm going to take particularly seriously.” Below are Senator Kennedy's remarks in response to the comments of Senator Santorum and his spokesman: Rick Santorum
owes an immediate apology to the tragic, long-suffering Senator Santorum
has shown a deep and callous insensitivity to the victims Three years
ago, Senator Santorum said “While it is no excuse for this
Apparently Senator
Santorum has never heard of the enormous contributions of Harvard and
MIT have produced 98 Nobel laureates whose work has made an Their graduates
contribute to industries, to government, to our communities Their research
keeps our nation secure. The Pentagon, the CIA, the And their research
into cancer, children's health, housing, community More than a
dozen current U.S. Senators were educated in Boston. Senator Senator Santorum’s
self righteousness also fails to take into account the They started
the Massachusetts Childhood Hunger Initiative, working with Boston's Children's
Hospital has been ranked first in the nation every year The quality
of life for Boston and its families is rated third in America. Massachusetts
ranks in the top ten states in the nation when it comes to Boston gave
birth to America's liberty. The values that sparked our The men and
women of Boston have served honorably in our armed forces. They
The abuse of
children is a horrible perversion and a tragic crime, and I am On behalf of
all of the victims of abuse and the people of Boston and
An eye for an eye until the whole world is blind, says Bush to the FBI about the London bombings The bombings in London have revealed once again how far removed the Rove/Cheney/Bush Administration is philosophically from the Christian creed to which so many of their supporters want to be devoted. Mr. Bush made remarks the beginning of this week in Quantico, Virginia that made clear how little he respects Jesus’ message of love for friends and enemies. Mr. Bush said, “These kind of people who blow up subways and buses are not people you can negotiate with, or reason with, or appease. In the face of such adversaries there is only one course of action: We will continue to take the fight to the enemy, and we will fight until this enemy is defeated.” | |||
