Archive for August 2008
Personal history matters.
Read this carefully:
Pressuring for censorship
I post this not entirely for the content of this ad but because the Obama Campaign is demanding a criminal investigation into American Issues Project, Inc. (AIP), the non-profit organization that created the ad. The only problem is, AIP didn’t do anything wrong. It doesn’t take a criminal investigation to figure that out. Additionally, below is a letter to the Department of Justice, penned by AIP’s attorney, essentially saying that Obama is demanding an investigation into an issue containing facts he cannot disprove and questioning actions wholly legal.
Sources for reference:
History does not exist; logic does not matter
Nancy Pelosi, on Abortion:
PELOSI: I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, [the question of when life begins] is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is, over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition. And Senator–St. Augustine said at three months. We don’t know. The point is, is that it shouldn’t have an impact on the woman’s right to choose. . . . As I say, the Catholic Church for centuries has been discussing this, and there are those who’ve decided…
BROKAW: The Catholic Church at the moment feels very strongly that it…
PELOSI: I understand that.
BROKAW: …begins at the point of conception.
PELOSI: I understand. And this is like maybe 50 years or something like that. So again, over the history of the church, this is an issue of controversy.
And the CATHOLIC ARCHDIOCESE OF DENVER responds:
ON THE SEPARATION OF SENSE AND STATE
A CLARIFICATION FOR THE PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH
IN NORTHERN COLORADO
To Catholics of the Archdiocese of Denver:
Catholic public leaders inconvenienced by the abortion debate tend to take a hard line in talking about the “separation of Church and state.” But their idea of separation often seems to work one way. In fact, some officials also seem comfortable in the role of theologian. And that warrants some interest, not as a “political” issue, but as a matter of accuracy and justice.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is a gifted public servant of strong convictions and many professional skills. Regrettably, knowledge of Catholic history and teaching does not seem to be one of them.
Interviewed on Meet the Press August 24, Speaker Pelosi was asked when human life begins. She said the following:
“I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time.And what I know is over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition. . . St. Augustine said at three months. We don’t know. The point is, is that it shouldn’t have an impact on the woman’s right to choose.”
Since Speaker Pelosi has, in her words, studied the issue “for a long time,” she must know very well one of the premier works on the subject, Jesuit John Connery’s Abortion: The Development of the Roman Catholic Perspective (Loyola, 1977). Here’s how Connery concludes his study:
“The Christian tradition from the earliest days reveals a firm antiabortion attitude . . . The condemnation of abortion did not depend on and was not limited in any way by theories regarding the time of fetal animation. Even during the many centuries when Church penal and penitential practice was based on the theory of delayed animation, the condemnation of abortion was never affected by it. Whatever one would want to hold about the time of animation, or when the fetus became a human being in the strict sense of the term, abortion from the time of conception was considered wrong, and the time of animation was never looked on as a moral dividing line between permissible and impermissible abortion.”
Or to put it in the blunter words of the great Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
“Destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has
bestowed on this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder.”
Ardent, practicing Catholics will quickly learn from the historical record that from apostolic times, the Christian tradition overwhelmingly held that abortion was grievously evil. In the absence of modern medical knowledge, some of the Early Fathers held that abortion was homicide; others that it was tantamount to homicide; and various scholars theorized about when and how the unborn child might be animated or “ensouled.” But none diminished the unique evil of abortion as an attack on life itself, and the early Church closely associated abortion with infanticide. In short, from the beginning, the believing Christian community held that abortion was always, gravely wrong.
Of course, we now know with biological certainty exactly when human life begins. Thus, today’s religious alibis for abortion and a so-called “right to choose” are nothing more than that – alibis that break radically with historic Christian and Catholic belief.
Abortion kills an unborn, developing human life. It is always gravely evil, and so are the evasions employed to justify it. Catholics who make excuses for it – whether they’re famous or not – fool only themselves and abuse the fidelity of those Catholics who do sincerely seek to follow the Gospel and live their Catholic faith.
The duty of the Church and other religious communities is moral witness. The duty of the state and its officials is to serve the common good, which is always rooted in moral truth. A proper understanding of the “separation of Church and state” does not imply a separation of faith from political life. But of course, it’s always important to know what our faith actually teaches.
Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.
Archbishop of Denver
James D. Conley
Auxiliary Bishop of Denver
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Solzhenitsyn, restless chronicler of labor camps
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian literary giant Alexander Solzhenitsyn, opened the eyes of the world to the brutality of Stalin’s labor camps with searing writings that brought him the wrath of the Soviet authorities and years of persecution.
He went from outcast to hero, in a life whose suffering and triumph reflected the upheavals of 20th century Russia itself.
Solzhenitsyn, who died on Sunday at the age of 89, was a driven chronicler of Russian history, drawing on his blackest moments in dictator Josef Stalin’s camps for his most memorable works.
In a life of extraordinary swings of fortune, he served with the Red Army, endured eight years in the Soviet Gulag, beat cancer and in 1970, still hounded by the communist authorities, won the Nobel Prize for literature.
He spent 20 years of unhappy and forced exile in the West whose materialistic values he never ceased to denounce.
By the time he made a hero’s return to Russia in 1994, it was to a challenging new country that — to his regret — was espousing those same values and which he barely recognized.
The sometimes Messianic figure, with the mien of a biblical prophet, was an icon of resistance to communism in the Cold War.
But his pan-Slav nationalist views, his mystical passion for Russia and fervor for Russian Orthodoxy, and charges of anti-Semitism that dogged him, made him difficult to categorize.
He remained a rebel into his 80s, railing against Kremlin policies in the new Russia and what he saw as the loss of the Russian nation to moral and spiritual decay.
He refused to accept a high state award from Boris Yeltsin, post-Soviet Russia’s first president. He said he could not accept honors from a leader who brought misery to his people.
But he took the award from Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, whom he chided for not curbing the powers of corrupt politicians.
In a television appearance in June 2005, a frail-looking Solzhenitsyn, bemoaned the state of politics in Russia. “We have nothing that resembles democracy,” he said.
ARMY SERVICE, LABOUR CAMPS, CANCER
Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918, a year after the Bolshevik revolution, and raised in Southern Russia. He studied physics and mathematics until Hitler’s forces attacked the Soviet Union in 1941 and he became a frontline artillery captain, twice decorated for bravery.
In 1945 military censors found letters to a friend in which he criticized Stalin. That cost him eight years’ detention in the Gulag camps, where tens of millions people have perished.
Because of his mathematics background he was moved to a secret research institute — recreated in his work “The First Circle” — and in 1950 to labor camps in the Kazakh steppes.
Solzhenitsyn was released in 1953 to start a period of perpetual exile where he was stricken with a stomach cancer. Despite poor medication, he overcame cancer by the time he was released and fully cleared of all charges in 1956.
The swing toward public denunciation of Stalin’s crimes in 1961 initiated by Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev saw the unknown 43-year-old author admitted to the Writers’ Union.
Then in 1962, as part of Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin drive, Solzhenitsyn was allowed to publish “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, a novel based on his camp experiences. A literary and political bombshell, it made the author a household name overnight.
CONTINUED HARASSMENT
But the political and cultural thaw did not last long.
The hardline Leonid Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev in 1964 and Solzhenitsyn’s works including “The First Circle” and the less explosive “Cancer Ward” became a target of the KGB persecution.
His works were withdrawn from public libraries. His name was erased from the history of Soviet literature and even the distribution of his works became a criminal offence.
In 1970 he angered the Soviet leadership for accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature. Three years later he published in Paris “The Gulag Archipelago”, smuggled out despite the best efforts of the KGB.
The epic work invested the international lexicon with a new word — “gulag” (a Russian acronym for ‘Main Administration of the Labour Camps’) — to describe the repressive system.
The communist authorities stripped him of his citizenship and in 1974 bundled him onto a plane to West Germany. His second wife, Natalia, whom he had only just married, followed him.
Solzhenitsyn spent the next 20 years in the United States working on what he saw as his main literary ambition, a vast historical epic on the formation of Soviet society.
HERO’S RETURN
But he always made clear he wanted to die in Russia.
Then a distant prospect, it became a reality when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev launched his liberal Perestroika reforms.
In 1989 his works were allowed in the Soviet Union and 27 million copies were printed of his anti-Soviet pamphlet.
But Solzhenitsyn put off his return to finish a multi-tomed history of the Russian Revolution called “The Red Wheel”. His return in May 1994, more than two years after the Soviet Union collapsed, was fittingly dramatic.
He arrived from the east in Magadan, a northern city at the centre of the most brutal chain of camps. He bowed to touch the earth in a tribute to the millions who perished in the camps.
He went on to the Pacific port of Vladivostok where he was mobbed by thousands and from there, with his family, took the trans-Siberia railway back to Moscow — a journey of more than 5,500 miles and several weeks.
He served notice he would continue to act as Russia’s conscience and be as critical of the new capitalist Russia, in the grip of turbulent economic reforms, social hardship and violent crime, as of the old totalitarian system it replaced.
From his new home near Moscow he called for spiritual and moral regeneration in his homeland. He lamented the plight of Russians in other ex-Soviet republics, attacked the government for policies that he said drove the nation to poverty and scolded his compatriots for greed and venality.
But the man, who as an outcast under communism had been a beacon for thousands of marginalized people, failed to touch the same nerve in the new Russia.
State television soon axed a regular program it had given him because of lack of viewer interest. Russian media noted that his books were far less read than in late Soviet times.
PUNISHING SCHEDULE
He kept up a punishing work schedule regardless, finally producing the heavily-researched two-volume “Two hundred years together”, a history of Jews in Russia.
As he had feared, publication of the massive work inevitably revived old charges that he harbored anti-Semitic views which some critics say they had detected in earlier books.
Solzhenitsyn, an active backer of Israel as his supporters were quick to point out, always rejected these charges as unfounded and said they were often maliciously made.
He said he had for years avoided writing on the subject of Jews in Russia because of its incendiary nature — but that in the end he could no longer avoid it.
On the bright side . . .
I’m posting this because it is healthy to focus our attention on what is good. Any newsworthy item nowadays doesn’t cover good news, nor does any op-ed column, nor any talk-show host.
We live short lives and therefore tend to have a short-term perspective. Blessings and curses in society should be viewed within the context of history.
Thanks to Rebekah A. for digging this piece out from David Bueche, slightly edited.
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Idling behind a Lexus this morning, I saw the latest bit of agitprop from the Obama campaign — a “Got Hope?” bumper sticker. The first question that popped into my mind was, “How bad can it be if you’re driving an ES 350?”
It seems that the racially polarized, economically dysfunctional country our Obama supporter is so keen to change has treated him pretty well. Maybe he’s in it for the other guys: the 95% who keep making their mortgage payments on time, the record breaking numbers of college graduates, the millions of Americans who consume Ipods, flat screen TVs, or hundreds of other accoutrements of a society so wealthy it has no historical parallel.
Regardless of the dystopian bubble that has been persistently inflated during the nightmare known as The Bush Administration, people have never had better food, medicine, and housing than they do at this very moment. A typical home in America today has central heat and air, the cheapest car is a paragon of safety and efficiency compared with its ancestors, and people are routinely treated for — and survive — conditions which were fatal less than half a century ago.
Yes, there is a mortgage crisis — if by crisis you mean a lot of people buying houses far beyond their means while a sub-set of financially myopic lenders goad them on. But looked at another way, for those of us who didn’t purchase radically overpriced real estate so we could use the equity to finance trips to Vegas, what’s so horrible about falling home prices? For many, when speaking of housing, couldn’t we reasonably substitute the word “consequences” for “crisis”?
Yes, there is an insurance coverage crisis, though this should not be confused with medical access (which is available to anyone who presents themselves in a emergency room), or quality, (which no one really denies is still the benchmark for the world). But I do find it puzzling that the majority of the people you see in public emergency rooms can somehow afford cell phones and top-of-the-line running shoes.
The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that 20% of the uninsured can actually afford insurance, and another 25% are eligible for government coverage, bringing the estimated total of 47 million uninsured down to 26 million. This is an issue to be worked on, most definitely. But a country that currently does, or can, provide access to the best health care in the world for 91% of its population, (including a large percentage of non-citizens who significantly skew the statistics), is, by definition, not a country with a health care crisis.
As to the issue of food, do you know what the food crisis looked like in the early twentieth century? It looked like a lot of very thin, hungry people. No talk of banning trans-fats. As Greg Easterbrook points out in “The Progress Paradox”, if you traveled back in time and spoke to your not-so-distant relatives about the crisis of obesity in poor people, they would be completely confused because in their day, being poor meant going hungry. If there is any crisis surrounding food in the United States, it is the result of incredible prosperity and abundance. This is not a bad problem to have.
When you look at these “big picture” issues, you can generally divide society into two opposing world views; the Romantic and the Tragic.
The Romantic looks at the United States, compares it to perfection, finds it wanting, and demands that we start over from scratch. Arguments for moderation and caution are dismissed as greed or indifference. “Obviously anyone who can accept the wretched state of health care in this country is an idiot or a monster”.
Romantics are generally the ones you see with the communist-inspired art advocating one word solutions like Hope or Change. It doesn’t get much more transparent, (or vacuous), than that.
The Tragic perspective takes exactly the opposite approach. Instead of saying, “What a mess, how can I make this better?”, the response is, “Thank God this works so well; let’s be careful not to mess it up.”
When you think about it, there’s quite a lot we can all be thankful for.
Thankfully, I was born here and not in North Korea. Thankfully, I’ve never seen a tank come rolling into my town. Thankfully, there’s so much to eat, so many jobs, and such access to information.
There are many things, even in our “crisis” areas that work very well in the United States. This is not pre-ordained.
It is possible for self-righteous, naïve idealists to destroy an excellent system in the process of “improving” it. For instance, take the imposition of socialism to British health care; Stalin and collective farming; Mao’s Great Leap Forward; Pol Pot.
With proper historical perspective, we must inevitably conclude that there is far more right than wrong about present-day America. The glass is, most assuredly, well more than halfway full.
Next time you feel hopeless and swept up in an emotional desire for change, remember the ultimate conceit in the words: “It can’t get any worse.” It can.
