GUAM'S SACRIFICE TO MOLOCH

By Tim Rohr

Moloch, a Canaanite deity associated
with child sacrifice

In the previous post, I made the case that Guam voters support abortion based on the fact that the person voters have now twice elected as governor is "Guam's most vociferous and powerful proponent of abortion for more than three decades."

Some have argued that it is not that Guam voters actually support abortion but that the issue just doesn't factor largely compared to voters' main interest: essentially access to more government goodies and a governor who will "take care of me."

So functionally we are willing to sacrifice unborn children in return for government benefices and the governor most likely to bestow them upon us. 

Such thinking is not new. From the dawn of time there have been "civilizations" who, in return for rain and good crops, regularly sacrificed their children to the gods. 

Substitute "governor" for gods and "quality of life" for rain and good crops, and we fit right in.

It may be true that Guam voters really don't support abortion when they vote for Lou Leon Guerrero and others like her, and that voters are just doing what most voters everywhere do: vote for the politicians who promise the most free stuff. (Note: There is also the matter that she was very weakly opposed. Something for the Republicans to think about and learn from.)

However, elections aside, Guam's abortion reports - between 2008 when The Esperansa Project first began requiring compliance with the existing reporting law and 2018 when the last abortionist closed up shop - demonstrate that local Guamanians, and specifically those who identify their ethnicity as CHamoru (Chamorro), not only support abortion, but abort their unborn children at nearly three times the rate of all other ethnicities on Guam combined. 

SOURCE

Given that CHamoru's are already a rapidly declining minority on their own island, what could be behind this rush to self-extinction as led by CHamoru's like the current governor who has even dedicated an entire department (Dept. of Women's Affairs) to recruit abortion doctors to come to Guam and abort more CHamoru babies?

Add to the mix that 85% of Guamanians are Catholic and that the majority of CHamoru's are historically Catholic, and the question of the CHamoru rush to self-extinction via abortion becomes even more perplexing. 

By way of attempting an answer, there is first the fact that there is no consequence to Catholic lawmakers who openly support abortion. Archbishop Byrnes did get around to sending the governor a hand-slap letter but she certainly has not been denied communion. (And of course, as we now now, his predecessor was too busy with "other activities" to care, or at least too morally compromised to do anything about it.)

Here we are certainly not alone. For decades radical Catholic pro-aborts from Ted Kennedy to Nancy Pelosi to Joe Biden to many others in between have had it both ways with the Church. And while Pelosi's bishop did recently excommunicate her, at least in her home diocese of San Francisco, it took him ten years to do it and Nancy is free to receive communion in the D.C. diocese along with all the other Catholic pro-aborts in our nation's capital. 

The Rest of the Story

But behind the scenes, there is another story...or perhaps, "the rest of the story."

While the media never tires of vilifying the Catholic Church as the boogeyman in the abortion wars, the Catholic Church, at least in America, is actually mostly nowhere to be found. Go to most Catholic churches and you will hear about poverty, immigration, war, and a host of other social issues. But you will not hear about abortion - other than generic prayers "for life." 

Clergy may object that they are constrained to sermonize only on the day's readings, but that didn't stop pastors (here in Guam) from lecturing us for weeks at every Mass about the evils of gambling a few years ago. Nor did it stop the archdiocese from using the pulpit to push then-Governor Calvo to veto the bill lifting the civil statute of limitations for sex abuse victims. In fact, every church had petitions ready for signature at the back of the church at every Mass.

There have been no such equivalent efforts from the pulpit relative to abortion legislation, not in Guam, and not anywhere in the U.S. Catholic Church. Why?

According to scholar Paul Rahe in American Catholicism's Pact with the Devil, the Church's relative silence on abortion-supporting politicians and abortion legislation is not just an oversight or even due to apathy, it is by order of the Church at the highest levels:

"In the 1930s, the majority of the  bishops, priests, and nuns sold their souls to the devil, and they did so with the best of intentions...At every turn in American politics since that time, you will find the hierarchy assisting the Democratic Party and promoting the growth of the administrative entitlements state." 

In other words, it is for the same reason already stated above: a sacrifice of children to the gods of government in exchange for the goodies of government - or as the governor herself terms it: "quality of life." 

Perhaps this is why Lou Leon Guerrero learned to be a pro-abort at a Catholic school:

"Lou also attributes her becoming pro-choice to her Catholic education…The pro-choice advocates drew strength from the encouragement received behind the scenes from other women, including nuns, who could not express their support publicly…" - Vivian Loyola Dames, in “Chamorro Women, Self-Determination, and the Politics of Abortion on Guam,” (Asian/Pacific Islander American Women - A Historical Anthology, Pg. 375.)

As a Personal P.S. 

I don't think the governor is a baby killer, at least not on purpose. She, like so many Catholics of that era (70's and 80's) and even now, were taught that "conscience" trumped doctrine, and that one could make up one's own mind about whatever he or she wanted to believe. 

This was a natural consequence of Vatican II's emphasis (in its final document) on "religious liberty" - otherwise euphemistically (if not deceptively) titled "Dignitas Humanae" - "the dignity of the human person" - because who could quarrel with the "dignity of the human person?" 

The concept of "religious liberty" was wholly foreign to the Catholic Church up until then. Prior to Vatican II (1962-1965), the Catholic Church held to "religious tolerance" not "liberty," with "tolerance" defined as charitably putting up with something that is wrong. 

Religious "liberty" was about the equality of all religions and to do that then no one religion could have a claim to being the "one, true, faith." It wasn't a very far step from there to individuals deciding "what's true for me." And thus Catholics, like the current governor - and apparently the nuns who taught her, can - "in good conscience" - publicly support abortion and continue presenting themselves for Holy Communion. 

Moreover, abortion for the governor, and like so many Democrats, is simply a Democrat Party badge, or at least a ticket to "the party" - an issue that cannot be compromised even if they can't find anyone to actually do the killing (like in Guam now). 

Nevertheless, actions have consequences. Lou Leon Guerrero, as the afore-referenced Anthology details, (and also here), was behind the legal death of the 1990 "Belle's Law," an action which had such a chilling effect that no one dared address abortion legislatively for nearly the next 30 years. 

Given that at minimum, Guam doctors aborted between 300 and 600 babies per year from 1990* to 2018, that's approximately 13,000 aborted children - 2/3's of whom were CHamoru - who died in the wake of LLG's pro-abortion activism, beginning in 1990 and continuing - thanks to the majority of Guam voters and a mostly silent Catholic Church - to this day. 

*While Guam's abortion reports from 2008 to 2018 support an average of 300 abortions per year, the 600 figure comes from the late Senator Elizabeth Arriola:

"Let me tell you, at the rate Guam Memorial Hospital is aborting children, between 400-600 a year, and most of them are not even reported. Where are the lives that we are going to protect and preserve? Here we go talking about indigenous rights and self-determination. What good is all that if we don't have our followers to follow and enjoy the fruits of our labor, of this generation's labor, of your labor and my labor to fix this island and have autonomous rights to govern our people?" - quoted in: Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology, pg. 372, edited by Shirley Hume, Gail M. Nomura