CRAIGSLIST CHILDREN

A Catholic friend recently shared how proud she was of a niece who had agreed to be a surrogate mother for a couple who was unable to conceive. She saw her niece’s willingness to carry a child for another as an act of charity and selflessness. 

Like many Catholics, she either has no clue that her niece’s act is “gravely immoral” (CCC 2376) or believes, as do many Catholics, that she is free, as regards Catholic teaching, to “take it or leave it”, and yet remain a Catholic in good standing.

While dissent from the church’s position on contraception is well known, dissent from its opposition to non-natural conception, though similarly pervasive, is not well known. In fact, because, human life is a good, and human life is what is sought, the laboratory construction of life outside the marital act is even more readily accepted than is contraception.

Until recently, access to reproductive technologies was expensive and thus rare, so it didn’t stir as much controversy as did the debate over contraception. However, cheap sperm can now be ordered off Craigslist and disposable artificial insemination kits picked up at a drug store.

In fact, this is what a lesbian couple in Kansas did recently. The couple had already adopted several children but wanted to have a child of “their” own. They placed an ad on Craigslist for sperm, found a donor, did the “do-it-yourself” insemination, and soon gave birth to a child. 

The couple also did a “do-it-yourself” agreement with the sperm-donor which relieved him of any parental responsibilities. All was well until the couple split and the woman who bore the child became a “single mother”. 

Upon losing her job, the mother sought state aid for the child. However, the state chose to sue the father for child support. Of course the father - or sperm donor (you see the problem) produced the document which he believed relieved him of any responsibilities. However, Kansas declared the the agreement invalid and the sperm donor is now on the hook for child support.

Of course, the donor is contesting this, and lawyers, judges, state officials, the media, and gay-rights folks have all hopped on to a finger-pointing merry-go-round which is reminiscent of the “much ado” in Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing”, except that it’s NOT about “nothing”, it’s about a child.

This mess allows us to see the wisdom of the church, which centers its teaching NOT on the happiness and rights of adults, but on the well-being and rights of the CHILD who has a RIGHT to be “begotten”, not “made”; and “to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up by his own parents.” (Donum Vitae)

In its insistence on the rights of the child, the church has a curious ally. Not known for aligning its views with Catholic teaching, the United Nations in its Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959) declares in Article 6 that the child “shall, wherever possible, grow up in the care and under the responsibility of his parents.”  In 1959, the laboratory generation of human life was yet science fiction, so by “parents” the U.N. meant the obvious. 

The Declaration further echoes Church teaching on the rights of parents to educate their child: “The best interests of the child shall be the guiding principle of those responsible for his education and guidance; that responsibility lies in the first place with his parents.” (Article 7)

And Article 2 speaks directly to the Kansas situation: “The child shall enjoy special protection, and shall be given opportunities...to develop physically, mentally, morally, spiritually and socially...in conditions of freedom and dignity. In the enactment of laws for this purpose, the best interests of the child shall be the paramount consideration.”

Recently, our nation has demonstrated an infatuation with U.N directives on everything from climate protocols to gun control. Thus, our complete lapse as regards the U.N’s call for the “paramount consideration” of the “interests of the child” is telling. 

In our wholesale stampede to claim a right TO a child, we have vacuously trampled on the rights OF a child, most especially the right OF a child to be treated as “gift”, and not a product.

And speaking of science fiction, the ability to forecast a person’s medical future, and even life-span, through the observance of genetic markers, was probably not even imagined in 1959, but is almost standard science today. 

Such medical progress makes it all the more critical to protect the child’s right, “wherever possible”, to be “begotten” not “made”, “to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up by his own parents”, AND NOT assembled with parts purchased off Craigslist.

CLASS WAR AND THE MAGI: LET US NOT GO BACK THE WAY WE CAME

The first two groups of humans to see the Christ Child - at least according to the scriptural account - couldn’t have been more opposite. 

 Shepherds, in Jesus’ day, were a despised class. Only slaves and prisoners were lower.    

 The Magi, though their occupation and origin isn’t clear, were certainly from an upper-class crowd, given the expensive gifts they bore, the distance they travelled, and their apparent advanced learning.

The presence of two ends of the social spectrum in the Christmas narrative is commonly accepted to demonstrate, as Peter would later say, that God “is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34), and as Paul would elaborate, all are equal before him: “neither Gentile nor Jew, slave nor free, woman nor man. (Gal 3:28)

Fast forward, and today, at least in this nation, those roles appear to be reversing. The “poor” are an increasingly courted class and the wealthy (excluding movie stars, sports stars, and wealthy liberals) are an increasingly despised class. By “courted”, I mean the consolidation of political power through the cultivation of a dependent class which will act as a reliable stable of voters.

Historically, this has been most easily accomplished by vilifying the “haves” and inflaming the envy of the “have-nots”.

Seeding envy between the classes for the purposes of social division and the concentration of power is nothing new. Marx made a science of it. And 20th century tyrants soon employed it to fertilize the earth with human blood. Earlier, it served the French Revolution - justifying the unending basketful’s of severed aristocratic heads. 

Hitler’s use of it is perhaps history’s most profound demonstration of class war as a weapon of propaganda. Recall that Hitler’s “final solution” did not begin with boxcars and gas chambers, but with the objectification of the Jews as the cause of Germany’s economic woes. 

Hitler’s class war gradually conditioned ordinary Germans to no longer see the Jewish people as “the Jewish people” but “the Jewish problem.” Thus were the boxcars able to rumble undisturbed through idyllic German villages, and Dachau’s neighbors, nonplussed as they hoed the steady rain of human ash into their tidy gardens.

The 20th century death toll of class war is a thought we should keep in mind as our nation is further goaded into it through the persistent demagoguery of “the wealthiest Americans”, a campaign Christians sometimes unwittingly join because it looks and feels like social justice. 

No, we need not fear the prospect of box cars and gas chambers. In contemporary America, the ends of concentrated political power can be more neatly accomplished through the direct cultivation of a dependent class, which in 2012 , is now “mission accomplished.” According to the Senate budget office, welfare spending is now at $168 per day, outpacing median “worker” income which is lagging at only $137 per day.  In other words, the dependent class is now larger, fiscally speaking, than the class upon which it depends. 

The problem is that increased dependence wounds human dignity and foments its own revolution. Knowing this, the architects of class war, with the help of the media and much of academia, have, for decades, successfully oriented this foment towards the “haves”, or in today’s class war parlance, “the wealthiest Americans.”

However, even the most liberal experts admit that the president’s proposed increased tax on “the rich” won’t run our bloated government - which is borrowing at the rate of 188 million dollars per hour - for more than eleven days. Thus, we are left to assume that the rhetoric of fairness is a ruse, and “the rich” are simply convenient whipping boys.

But beyond that, and to the Christian point, the much overlooked fact is that class war is rooted in Envy, a capital sin. And as Christians, especially as preachers and teachers, we must be wary of the political machinery crafted to conscript our “preferential option for the poor” in the service of political ends, which, as the once-Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) has said, will end up “betraying the very poor we mean to help “(Instruction on Certain Aspects of the “Theology of Liberation”, 1984).

The rhetoric of justice, equality, and fairness, in their current political concoction, may meld well with a Christian ethos, particularly a sentimentalized one. However, in the service of envy, they mask sin, a mortal one, and help no one.

It is clear from Luke’s account that the shepherds and magi probably didn’t run into each other at the manger. The magi are thought to have arrived a year or two later. However, the presence of both in every nativity scene and story speaks to the absence of caste and class in the presence of Christ. Like the Magi, let us not return the way we came.

A CRY IS HEARD IN RAMAH: THE SANDY HOOK ATROCITY

Much has been said about Connecticut and I hesitate to add to the mountain of words. I have watched my own parents bury a son, and in the end, there are no words, only - as C.S. Lewis said in “A Grief Observed” - “the red-hot jab of memory”. 

But apart from the incalculable pain suffered by those who lost a child or loved one - a pain no explanation will ever assuage, the ensuing culture war over who or what to blame is at once fascinating, repulsive, and perhaps, instructive.

From the Left, there is the predictable war on guns. From the Right there is the attack on a fallen culture and the media which glorifies it. In the middle there is the debate over what to do about the mentally ill. A bit above the fray, amongst religious leaders there are calls for prayer and homiletic revisits to the ancient problem of pain. 

Personally, I was tempted to blame the wicked incident on our nation’s mad embrace of the Culture of Death, and initially summed up the shooting with Mother Teresa’s biting condemnation: “If abortion isn’t wrong, nothing is.” 

And of course, that’s true. In a nation which chops up children in the womb at the rate of 4000 a day, what’s the big deal over twenty more - other than the fact that they were apparently wanted and could audibly cry as they died?

But abortion is not unique to our time and neither is child slaughter. This past week, only a few days distant from Christmas, we celebrated the Feast of the Holy Innocents and were reminded that children were the first martyrs, and parents, from whose arms they were ripped, have always suffered loss like no other.

The response to the massacre at Sandy Hook from many Catholics was uniquely colored by the fact that the horrific news was revealed as the Church prepared for Gaudete (Rejoice) Sunday, a fact which made for many attempts to liturgically contextualize the tragedy. 

My own thought was less about how to reconcile Connecticut with Gaudete, and more about how profoundly the shooting anticipated the Feast of the Holy Innocents wherein we once again hear the Jeremiah-an lament: “A cry is heard in Ramah, sobbing and loud lamentation; Rachel weeping for her children, and she would not be consoled, since they were no more.”

Meanwhile, in the news, the battle raged: gun control, mental illness, the desensitizing impact of relentless media violence, the shooter’s broken home, survivalist mother, and absent father, the need for better school security and greater community vigilance, and so on. 

There is much to say about each of these, but in the midst of a lemming-like rush to “get the government to do something”, we need remind ourselves that the greatest threat to human life is not madmen, but sane men. In the 20th century, “death by government” (democide), surpassed war as the number one cause of non-natural death. 

There are the usual suspects: Hitler (10 million), Stalin (62 million), Chang Kai-shek and Mao (50 million). But there are also 204 other documented cases in the 20th century of genocide, politicide, massacres, extrajudicial executions, and other forms of systematic democidal murder perpetrated by state and quasi-state regimes upon their own peoples.

It is important to recall that each of these monsters began, not as monsters, but as social reformers, as promisers of jobs and a “chicken in every pot”: the Thousand Year Reich (Hitler), the Five Year Plan (Stalin), and the Cultural Revolution (Mao).

Their eventual purges were not motivated by the bloodlust of madmen, but, like Herod, by seemingly sane political policies which necessitated the elimination of opposition and undesirables as an inevitable step in the march to their imagined utopias. 

It is also important to recall that prior to the mechanized slaughter of its own citizenry, each seemingly sane government instituted a seemingly sane policy to disarm its citizens, and for good reason. As Mao said: “All political power comes from the barrel of a gun.” 

One would think that with the brazen attack on the First Amendment by our current government, religious leaders would be wary of ceding even more constitutional ground by caving on the Second. However, the USCCB, in joining the clamor for gun control, has done exactly that. 

But gun control aside, there is the more ominous question of the wisdom of granting ever more power to a government which has already shown that it is willing to crush religious freedom and rule by diktat.

Before inviting more governmental control of guns, health care, or anything else, the USCCB, and religious leaders in general, may want to recall that increasingly centralized and empowered governments eventually turn on their own people, beginning with religious leaders. 

HISSING SOUNDS ONLY

On July  17, 2006, 18-year old Sycloria Williams stood against the wall of an abortion clinic waiting room gasping in horror at the sight of her baby. "She wasn't moving much, Williams later testified. “Twitching, gasping for air. She wasn't crying, just hissing, hissing sounds only."

Sycloria Williams was 23 weeks pregnant when she went to a Miami area abortion clinic. Williams was given “medication” (probably RU-486) and laminaria sticks were inserted into her cervix. She was then sent home and told to come back the next day.

For those who may not know, an RU-486 abortion occurs in two stages. On the initial visit, the woman is given the RU-486 pills which kill the unborn child. But this normally takes several hours. So the woman is usually sent home and told to return the next day. Upon returning, labor is induced and the dead child is delivered.

Williams returned to the clinic as instructed, but the doctor was late. While waiting, Williams was given Cytotec to induce labor and further dilate the cervix. Within a short time, Williams began to experience severe labor pains, but still no doctor.

Quoting from the lawsuit filed in 2009: “...unable to remain seated, Williams braced herself with the arms of the recliner chair she was sitting on. As she lifted herself, her water broke and she delivered a live baby girl onto the seat of the recliner. The baby writhed and gasped for air, still connected to Williams by the umbilical cord.”

Williams was horrified: "I thought it would be a blob thing, not a baby. She was really little, like this," she said, holding her hands about 12 inches apart. "It was like everything inside was coming out at once. There was just no stopping it." 

The sight of a fully formed baby was a complete surprise to Williams. "They never said anything to me that would make me think it was a baby. They only said things like ‘termination of pregnancy’. They cheated me. They didn't tell me everything..."

But the trauma was only beginning for Williams. While her baby writhed and hissed on the chair, the owner of the clinic ran into the room, knocked the baby onto the floor, cut the umbilical cord with a pair of shears, stuffed the baby into a biohazard bag, and threw little Shanice (whom her mother later named) into a garbage can. The doctor then arrived and sedated Williams.

An anonymous caller notified police about the incident and three days later Shanice’s body was found decomposing in a cardboard box in a clinic closet. A DNA test linked the baby’s remains to Williams.

The incident later made news when the Thomas More Society took an interest in the case. The Miami-Dade medical examiner had determined that the baby’s lungs had filled with air prior to her death, proving that Shanice had indeed been alive outside the mother’s body, but blamed the death on “extreme prematurity.”

The Thomas More attorneys insisted that Shanice’s death was a murder. The case dragged on for three years. In the end, the abortionist lost his license, and baby Shanice, whose body had been kept for evidence, finally received a proper burial.

The experience changed Sycloria. In 2009, she told a reporter: "No one should lose their life if you get pregnant. If I got pregnant again I would have the baby. I would tell them not to do it. I’ll say whatever to make them have second thoughts so they don’t do it…”

On January 6, 2010, to prevent abortion survivors from being similarly thrown in the trash, then-Senator Calvo introduced Bill 309-30: THE CHILD’S RIGHT TO LIVE ACT. The bill mandated normal medical care for children who survive failed abortions. 

Such a bill had already been passed unanimously by the U.S. Congress and had been signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002. Proponents of Bill 309-30 were expecting our local legislature to respond similarly. We were wrong.

After an overwhelmingly supportive public hearing on February 11, 2010, the bill disappeared. Despite several inquiries and even public calls for a vote, Senator Frank Aguon, Jr.,  the then-Chairman of the Committee on Health, made sure Bill 309-30 died the same death as Shanice Williams: in a garbage can. 

A few weeks after the public hearing, two people related stories of children who had survived failed abortions. One lived and was adopted by a loving father and mother. The other died despite volunteer medical efforts to save him. How many more abortion survivors have died in Guam’s abortion clinic trash? We don’t know. Chairman Aguon made sure of that.

 See CNN account of the case here

HORROR AT THE BLUE HOUSE AND BILL 52-31

We now know from news reports that the owner of the Blue House not only forced Chuukese women into prostitution, she also forced at least one woman to get an abortion when she became pregnant. 

An informed consent law like that proposed by Bills 54-30 and 52-31 would require a pregnant woman who arrives at an abortion clinic to be given information on the alternatives to abortion, a phone number to call for help, and a 24 hour waiting period. 

Had this woman been able to call for help the Blue House slave ring might have been discovered earlier. But there is no law, and there was no number.

During the debate over Bill 54-30, opponents of the bill argued that we had no business interfering with a woman’s choice, that abortion was a decision between a woman and her doctor. Obviously, this was not the case for the slaves of the Blue House.

In fact, this is not the case for many women. A 2004 study published in Medical Science Monitor showed that 64% of women who aborted felt pressured, and 65% showed symptoms of trauma. In fact, a 1998 report in the Journal of the American Medical Association disclosed that murder is the number one cause of death for pregnant women. 

The report Forced Abortion in America revealed also that post-abortive women have 31% more health complications, a 65% higher risk of clinical depression, a 3.5 times higher risk of death from all causes, and are 7 times more likely to commit suicide compared to women giving birth. Even the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute reported that some 30 percent of women have an abortion because someone else, not the woman, wants it. 

While abortion continues to masquerade as a “women’s rights” issue, abortion is really all about men, and freeing men to use and abuse women without consequence - other than a quick trip to the abortion clinic with girlfriend in tow when there’s a slip up. 

Yet our lawmakers continue to lecture us about a woman’s right to choose and challenge legislation that would force abortionists to advise women of their real rights: the right to require the father to pay for her medical care and financially assist her in raising her child, the right to Medicaid benefits for maternal care if she qualifies, the right to know about alternatives to abortion including adoption, and the right to know of the psychological and physiological risks of abortion.

Do we really think that an abortionist is going to give a paying client the phone and tell her to call a crisis pregnancy center? or CPS so she learn about the availability of adoption? Also, many women who are harmed by abortion do not seek damages from the abortionist because they do not want their abortion to be known. Thus there is need for regulation like that proposed by Bill 52-31. 

Informed consent legislation was first authorized by the U.S. Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992 and has been adopted by more than thirty states. After more than four years of trying, it is hoped that Guam lawmakers will finally see that there is nothing wrong and everything right with ensuring that women have all the information possible prior to an abortion so that their choice can be a true choice.

As of this writing, Senator Rodriguez is once again attempting to report out Bill 52-31 in the hopes of getting it passed before the end of the legislative term. We will be watching.

But back to the Blue House case. The Governor has rightly ordered a deeper investigation into a possible police cover up, but he should also order an investigation into the abortion(s) that may be connected to the case. 

Physicians are “mandated reporters”. They are required by law to report abuse or signs of trauma and they are trained to recognize it. It’s hard to imagine that a pregnant, frightened, enslaved Chuukese immigrant, forced into prostitution, and living under daily threats of abuse of every sort, didn’t raise a red flag the moment she walked into the abortionist’s office.

A PERSONAL NOTE: I am well aware of how hard it is to read about abortion. It’s tough to write about it. But as Fr. Frank Pavonne of Priests for Life says: “Where abortion is hidden, abortion is tolerated.” And it has been hidden much too long on Guam. We are at a crisis point. We are aborting one out of every ten pregnancies with the majority being Chamorro. With a waiting list of adoptive parents at Child Protective Services, let’s see what we as a community can do to at least let those mothers know that there are alternatives to abortion and lifelong regret. Let’s pass Bill 52-31.

ARBEIT MACHT FREI??

A few years ago, what turned out to be a seven-week old human fetus was found floating through a local waste treatment plant. Such discoveries make news, but not so the bodies of the nearly seven dead children per week that pile up in dumpsters behind Tamuning’s abortuaries - or wherever it is they throw them.

According to Guam Medical Records, we abort one child every 1.2 days, or one abortion for every ten live births. Our killing spree equates to a rate of 1.85 abortions per thousand population and ranks Guam No. 17 in the world for most abortions. This is an atrocity beyond compare particularly when one considers that more than 50% of these aborted children are Chamorro.

There is also reason to believe that the abortion rate is actually much higher than reported and may be as high as 1000 annually or almost 3 babies per day. A 1990 article about abortion on Guam reported an estimate of 600 to 1000 abortions per year, and fragments of data compiled by Guam Medical Records prior to the imposition of a penalty for failing to report in 2008 suggests that this is true. (For more info see Esperansa.org)

Amazingly, government officials still think the answer to abortion is earlier sex education and increased access to contraception. It’s “amazing” because we have forty years of data showing that the abortion rate has exponentially exploded in the wake of such policies. It’s a simple formula: more contraception equals more abortion. The FDA’s own data on contraception tells us why. 

As the chart shows, all contraceptive methods have a failure rate. The availability of contraception eliminates the fear of pregnancy and encourages greater sexual activity. Increased sexual activity results in an increased number of contraceptive failures, which lead to more abortions since abortion is the solution to failed birth-control.

The male condom is the most promoted and most available method of birth control. However, the FDA’s own data tells us that its use will result in pregnancy 18 out of 100 times. Yet we are told that using a condom is “safe sex”. How safe is an airplane that is guaranteed to crash 1.8 out of every 10 times it takes off? Yet we are teaching our children how to put these on in grade school.

But getting pregnant may be the least of your worries. If a condom cannot stop sperm 18% of the time, then what in the world are we doing promoting it as a means of stemming sexually transmitted diseases, most of which are spread by bacteria and  viruses many times smaller than sperm? The FDA’s own data admits this, saying only that the male condom is the “best protection” against STD’s compared to other contraceptive methods which provide none.

Last year, Guam’s Department of Public Health reported the largest increase in sexually transmitted diseases in the last 5 years including 900 new cases of Chlamydia, a disease with which nearly 10% of Guam’s population, age 15 to 24, is infected. Yet, this same Department sponsors Prutehi Hao , a program which promotes condom use as if it is a new found cure for cancer. 

Imagine a policy which mandates greater access to guns as an answer to gun crime. Stupid, right? Yet just last week, our Congresswoman announced an Obamacare grant  to Guam DOE to “educate adolescents and young adults on both abstinence and contraception for the prevention of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.” While the requisite nod towards abstinence education is noteworthy, we can be sure it will get short shrift and condom use will be touted as “responsible”. 

 A few columns back I quoted Archbishop Sheen’s ominous observation: “God will forgive. Man may forgive. Nature NEVER forgives.” This stark, inevitable truth is never more mercilessly true than when it comes to the abuse of sex. Sex was designed by God for a reason. Whenever it is used contrary to that reason, ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE...literally: a pile of corpses 50 million unborn children high, a pandemic of sexually transmitted disease, tragic rates of infertility, a black plague of female-related cancers, people crippled by rotting genitals, death of the most horrific sort, and for Guam - the self-genocide of the Chamorro.  

And what’s our government’s answer? More money for more of the same, and obeisance to a soviet-style mandate coercing us to pay for all this death, disease, and destruction under the guise of “preventative care” - a euphemism as deceitful and demonic as the Nazi’s “Arbeit macht Frei” (“Work makes you free”): words emblazoned in iron at the entrance to Auschwitz. There is much to fear.

WHY IS IT SO DIFFICULT TO TALK ABOUT MARRIAGE?

That’s the question posed by the editors of THE MEANING OF MARRIAGE, a collection of scholarly essays examining the societal impact of same-sex marriage. 

Essentially the answer is “because we’ve never had to”, at least not in the way we are forced to discuss it today. 

Though marriage has been at or near the heart of almost every issue of human endeavor, from royal alliances to what to make for dinner, the fundamental male-female nature of marriage has never before been called into question, which is why we find ourselves stammering in defense of marriage after we say “Because....”

In fact, the very fact that we are at a loss for words is sort of an explanation in itself. From the dawn of human consciousness, and quite without instruction other than that which was carved into our bodies, men and women intuited the need to “marry” long before there was a word or a “grunt” for it. It probably went something like this:

Man and woman make baby. Baby can’t take care of itself. Man go hunt and collect berries to feed baby and woman. Sooner or later, man and woman make another baby. Man go hunt more and collect more berries.

It probably wasn’t out of any external sense of moral obligation that the man did his part to provide and protect. Sons and daughters, in time, meant protection and help when the man could no longer protect or help himself. The permanent bonding necessary to raise a child to adulthood simply derived from the will to survive.

In short, marriage is the organic extension of the procreative act. It proceeds from the very nature of our bodies, which are fundamentally ordered towards generation. All of nature is simply designed to make more of itself. And the life-giving, life-nurturing, life-long thing that we have come to call marriage, which some try to tell us is mere social or religious convention, is really a primordial phenomenon that has, through generations of natural selection, proven to be the most effective model of human survival.

True, both society and religion eventually adapted it, codified it, regulated it, and protected it, but they didn’t create it, and never claimed to. And this is why “same-sex marriage” will never achieve the equality it presumes to seek. Same-sex marriage will forever owe its existence to the state. And irregardless of the rights and status the state might concoct for it, same-sex marriage simply has no history, no primordial roots, and no organic connection to human survival.

This is not because history is homophobic. Same-sex unions of any kind, quite apart from any religious circumscription, are, by their very nature, a Darwinian dead-end. And no legislative or judicial machinations can change that fact.

But this is also why we find it so difficult to defend marriage. Long before same-sex marriage appeared on the legal horizon, heterosexual married couples, through chemical, surgical, or mechanical means, had already divorced sex from its procreative end. And, natural marriage, the organically occurring intuitive relationship between the co-creators of a unique and separate being, once intentionally and artificially stripped of its procreative end, simply has no standing. Thus, our appeals to the procreative purpose of marriage ring with a contraceptive thud relative to the increasing din of chants for marriage equality.

In altering its ends, its purpose, we have altered the nature of marriage itself. Empirically speaking, the “good of the spouses” has become the primary end, and child rearing has not only become a secondary end, it has been relegated to an optional marital appendage - something to fit in once educational and career goals are met and before a woman’s biological clock runs out...if at all.

Such a thing is completely new to the human experience. Marriage has never been ultimately about spouses but about progeny. And unintentional sterility aside, everything about marriage is historically, culturally, and socially ordered to support that end. 

That many if not most of us have subscribed to this new ordering of the purpose of marriage, leaves us little ground on which to stand, be it in opposition to same-sex marriage or explaining why couples should marry at all.

Political Parties in control of the U.S. Congress 1955 - 2011

House of Representatives:
Democrats 44 years
Republicans 12 years

Senate:
Democrats: 40 years
Republicans 16 years


House of Representatives
1955 - 1995 (40 years) Democrats
1995 - 2007 (12 years) Republicans
2007 - 2010 (3 years) Democrats
2010 - 2011 (1 year) Republicans


Senate
1955 -1981 (26 years) Democrats
1981 -1987 (6 years) Republicans
1987 - 1995 (8 years) Democrats
1995 - 2001 (6 years) Republicans
2001 - 2003 (2 years) Democrats
2003 - 2007 (4 years) Republicans
2007 - 2011 (4 years) Democrats

BEER SUMMIT: Is Government Too Big? Part 2.

Former Guam U.S. Congressman, and current President of the University of Guam, Dr. Robert Underwood, debates the question with Tim Rohr on a PBS special program.

BEER SUMMIT: Is Government Too Big? Part 1.

Former Guam U.S. Congressman and current President of the University of Guam, Dr. Robert Underwood, debates the question with Tim Rohr.

Gendercide. Women should be appalled

Parental preference for producing sons rather than daughters in a number of societies has led to the aborting of more than 160 million female babies since the late 1970s, an author contends.

Writing about the book “Unnatural Selection” by Mara Hvistendahl, Jonathan V. Last, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, notes that the natural ratio of 105 boys for every 100 girls is “biologically ironclad.”

But in India today there are 112 boys born for every girl. In China, there are 121 boys for every girl, and in many towns the male figure is over 150. In Armenia, the figure is 120.

What is causing the skewed ratio is abortion.

“If the male number in the sex ratio is above 106, it means that couples are having abortions when they find out the mother is carrying a girl,” Last writes in an article that appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

"By Ms. Hvistendahl’s counting, there have been so many sex-selective abortions in the past three decades that 163 million girls, who by biological averages should have been born, are missing from the world.”

What made the skewed ratio possible is the availability of amniocentesis in the mid-1970s, and later ultrasound, to determine the gender of a child before birth.

Last cites an ad put out by an Indian clinic that states, “Better 500 rupees now than 5,000 later,” referring to the price of a sex-determination test versus the cost of a dowry for a daughter.

Skewed sex ratios have had some unpleasant and often violent repercussions through history, Hvistendahl points out, citing the dearth of women along the frontier in the “wild” American West. In 1870, the sex ratio west of the Mississippi was 120 to 100, and in California it was 166 to 100.

“Today in India,” Last observes, “the best predictor of violence and crime for any given area is not income but sex ratio.”

Last also cites the danger that with prenatal sex determination reducing the number of females, “a small but still significant group of the world’s women will end up being stolen or sold from their homes and forced into prostitution or marriage.”

And he goes on to say that “if ‘choice’ is the moral imperative guiding abortion, then there is no way to take a stand against ‘gendercide.’ Choice is choice.”

Reposted from Newsmax.com

The Adoption Argument for Same-Sex Marriage

Following is a letter to a friend who commonly resorts to the needs of parentless children as a justification for same-sex marriage. It's a common, emotional, and seemingly rational appeal. 

Dear XXXXX:

Hope you'll take a minute to consider a few thoughts regarding same-sex marriage. I heard you talking about gay marriage and adoption. As a talk show host, I realize that often times you may be saying things simply to provoke conversation, which of course is your job, so I don't necessarily think that everything you say is what you personally believe. But in case you don't already know....

There is no shortage of heterosexual married couples in the United States, including Guam, who are waiting to adopt a child. Just google the words "waiting to adopt". There are even "waiting to adopt"' support groups. In Guam, since we have no adoption agency or legal entity that keeps track of such things, we have to go to the people who facilitate adoptions to get any kind of data. Kamalin Karidat is the most active organization in local adoptions. I am told that there are at least 20 couples at any one time waiting to adopt and they sometimes have to wait years.

The wait and the complexity is longer in Guam because there is no agency and families are less likely to put a child up for adoption and more likely to farm the kid out to a relative. In addition, the average cost of adopting a child in the U.S. is $33,793 with the attorney getting $31,465 of that. (www.adoptivefamilies.com) The wait and the cost is why many couples go outside the U.S. to adopt children.

I think its wonderful that good men and women who happen to be gay want to take care of a child, however, the question must be what's best for the child. If a heterosexual married couple is available to adopt (and the stats show that they are), should a homosexual couple be treated equally as good a choice or even given priority? What's best for the child? Do children really need a mother and a father or will any arrangement suffice? Irresponsible parenting is certainly a blight but does irresponsible parenting negate or change the true needs of the child? Is it okay for little Johnny to grow up seeing daddy and daddy in bed together?

As regards gay marriage in general I have one question that gay marriage advocates can never seem to answer: 

"If you would not limit marriage to one man and one woman, what would you limit it to and why?"

This isn't just the "slippery slope" argument. We throw people in jail for marrying more than one person at a time. Why? Polygamy has a far greater historical, cultural, and even biblical pedigree than does gay marriage (which has none) or even permanent heterosexual monogamy for that matter. If marriage can simply be reduced to a matter of accessing benefits, then why not let brother and sister marry, father and daughter, and so on? If I work for the government and my wife gets my pension when I die and I would rather that my daughter get the pension, then why not divorce my wife and marry my daughter?

It's too easy to make light of these propositions and call them extreme, but essentially this is the gay marriage proposition. In fact, this is why Bill 212-30 never went anywhere because it proposed such a "reciprocal beneficiary" arrangement analogous to marriage. The boys over at the retirement fund weighed in quickly on that one.

But fiscal minutia aside, perhaps, next time the subject comes up, you can float the question: "If you would not limit marriage to one man and one woman, what would you limit it to and why?" And it wouldn't just be about polygamy, it would be about allowing all sorts of marital arrangements that the law currently forbids, most of which are on the basis of age, consanguinity, and affinity, but in some states, on blood types and sexually transmitted diseases. One state, Alabama, still has a law requiring physical consummation, meaning that impotency would be a legal impediment to marriage. 

In short, the gay marriage debate needs to be engaged on the level of facts and not just feelings or personal religious beliefs - where it so often is. While I am informed by my religious beliefs I never attempt to make an argument against gay marriage from them, simply because it is not necessary. 

I don't really want to call in every time I hear this topic come up. I've said my piece many times. In fact, I'm probably the local poster boy for the opposition - albeit by my own choosing. However, there has never been a forum where the issue can be intellectually engaged in a sustained way. Perhaps you've tried and I missed it. 

Thanks for listening.

MARRIAGE "EQUALTIY" CREATES NEW INEQUALITIES

New York has become the sixth state to legalize “gay marriage”. Catholic lawmakers provided the key votes and a Catholic governor signed the bill into law. Catholic senator, Mark Grisanti, said that though he was raised to believe that marriage was between a man and a woman he could not “legally come up with an argument against same-sex marriage.” 

Grisanti continued: "If I take the Catholic out of me...then absolutely they should have these rights...” Grisanti’s comments invite further comment on: 1) the issue of rights, 2) the legislative imposition of personal beliefs, 3) the legal argument against same-sex marriage.

Rights

New York’s gay marriage bill actually had nothing to do with rights. As Katherine Franke, a partner in a same-sex domestic partnership, wrote in the New York Times the day before the vote, same-sex couples, under New York’s domestic partnership law, already have all the rights of married people. Ms. Franke even bemoaned a possible loss of freedom and flexibility that she now enjoys in a domestic partnership that she would not have within the tighter legal strictures of marriage. 

Legislative imposition of personal beliefs

Grisanti’s metaphysical contortion about taking “the Catholic out of me” is another transliteration of the “I’m personally opposed, but...” that lawmakers will resort to when shrinking from a moral stand. Though raised to believe that marriage was between a man and a woman, Grisanti said he could not legally come up with an argument against same-sex marriage. We must then wonder what else Grisanti was raised to believe that he should not be making laws about: lying, cheating, stealing, murder?

All laws have a moral base.  Politicians decide what’s right and wrong for the rest of us all the time whether its setting a speed limit or outlawing murder. As of June 23, Guam senators have introduced 243 bills! That means that Guam senators are deciding what is best for the rest of us 1.4 times every day including holidays and weekends! It’s only when it comes to same-sex legislation and abortion that certain lawmakers suddenly wax philosophical. Hmmm.

Legal argument

As for the lack of a legal argument against same-sex marriage, this was a senate chamber, not a court room. Senators engage the process which makes things legal or illegal. As a senator, Grisanti did not need a legal argument, he was in a position to make one. But since he didn’t, I will, or at least I will borrow one from Don Browning, Professor Emeritus at University of Chicago Divinity School.

Browning, along with other legal theorists, wonder if giving marriage benefits to same-sex couples “does injustice to other human arrangements where people care for one another...” Such arrangements could include a man or woman caring for an ailing sibling, an adult child caring for an aging parent, or two elderly persons of the same sex in a non-sexual relationship pooling resources. 

Why should they, simply because they are NOT in a sexual relationship, be denied the same rights that New York has now extended to same-sex couples because they ARE in a sexual relationship? In short, if marriage is simply a matter of mutual caring divorced from procreation, then it is an INJUSTICE, as Browning says, “to extend marriage privileges to a particular group of sexual friendships while excluding many other interdependent care givers.” 

But beyond the legal argument there is the official teaching of the Catholic Church which these Catholic politicians chose to ignore at their own peril. Every Catholic needs to know exactly what our Church teaches on this matter and where it can be found. It is as follows:

“When legislation in favour of the recognition of homosexual unions is proposed for the first time in a legislative assembly, the Catholic law-maker has a moral duty to express his opposition clearly and publicly and to vote against it. To vote in favour of a law so harmful to the common good is gravely immoral.” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Considerations regarding proposals to give legal recognition to unions between homosexual persons, June 3, 2003, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect)

A comment for the Beer Summit on Abortion

The following is a comment that was too long to leave on You Tube at the following link:

http://www.youtube.com/user/BeerSummit#p/a/u/1/HppRvvGzF54

Essentially, the abortion issue concerns the question: under what circumstances is it okay for one human being to kill another. The fact that the unborn child (that's the English definition of fetus - which is a Latin word) is a human being is not a question. The "thing" growing inside the mother is in fact a "being" or it wouldn't be growing, and since a human mother is not capable of gestating an ear of corn or baby elephant, the "thing" can be none other than a "human being". Both science and the law (Unborn Victims of Violence Act) have recognized this fact.  That “pro-choicers” elect to use euphemisms such as “termination of pregnancy” and “reproductive health” is evidence that they are quite aware of what is going on here: one human being is electing to kill another. 

Of course it’s all quite legal. An unborn child is denied legal personhood under Roe the same as slaves were denied legal personhood by the same Court 150 years earlier under Scott (Dred Scott decision). The Scott decision did not deny that Black people were human beings, it just denied them (if they were “owned”) legal personhood. Thus it was quite okay for a slave owner to saw off the legs of a runaway slave the same as it is quite okay for the abortionist to saw off the legs and arms or an unborn child in a D&E abortion. 

Of course today we abhor slavery and its cruelties. But public opinion did not turn against slavery until the majority of Americans began to see what slavery looked like. Abolitionist artists captured the inhumane treatment of slaves in drawings and over many years finally forced Americans to see what slavery actually looked like. Pro-choicers criticize pro-lifers for doing the same but advocates for abortion should be able to embrace the photos of a dismembered and decapitated fully developed child if they truly believe and support a woman’s right to choose, otherwise, they are tacitly admitting that there is something wrong, terribly wrong, with such a position. 

Again, the bottom line is the question: under what circumstances is it okay for one human being to kill another? Tina stalwartly approves the choice of one human being to kill another so long as the human to be killed is within the mother’s body. I’d be curious to know if she would also support partial birth abortion where only the head remains inside the mother’s birth canal while the rest of the body has been delivered. The abortionist then stabs the child in the back of the head, inserts a vacuum tube, sucks the child’s brains out, and delivers the child whole. 

I would also wonder if she would support the killing of a child that survives a failed abortion. Would she support Dr. Gosnell’s right to kill living children who survived failed abortions by cutting their spines with a scissors (a current case in Philadelphia - he is being charged with murder). After all, the mother wanted the child dead. It wasn’t her fault that the abortionist botched the job. Why shouldn’t he finish the job....even if the child lies outside the womb squirming and gasping (described by Sycloria Williams in a born alive case in Florida as “hissing sounds only”).

In regard to the pro-life side in this discussion, Ramona is incorrect in her belief that contraception has nothing to do with abortion, and this is not a religious argument. Aside from the fact that the pill in general and the IUD specifically are abortifacient, there is the legal connection. Roe was preceded by Griswold v Connecticut. It was in Griswold that the “right to privacy” which was later used to justify Roe, was first formulated. The Griswold decision made it legal for married couples to use contraceptives. Incredibly (or so it seems to us today) the state forbid contraceptives for married couples back then (1965). Why? Because of the special responsibilities the married couple had to the State to produce the next generation and the special protected status granted marital unions to do so. (More on Griswold here.)

The State (once upon a time) took marriage very seriously. The survival of civilization and society depended on it (as stated in Skinner v Oklahoma and Loving v Virginia). Marriage, in the eyes of the State was never about two people loving each other. The State (and the Court), never says that. For the State, marriage is about the production, socialization, and education of the next generation necessary for the survival of society. In return, the State grants marriages special privileges and protections. 

That the State expected married couple to produce is evidenced by the laws which forbid the use of contraceptives in marriage. In Griswold (who was the head of Planned Parenthood by the way) contraception won the day with the aid of a court-concocted "right to privacy" that paved the way for Roe (and eventually Lawrence v. Kansas).

But aside from the legal connection, increased contraception leads to increased abortion simply due to the law of averages. Those who use contraception use it because they do not want a child. All contraception has a failure rate. Because people believe they are protected from pregnancy, they engage in a greater number of sexual acts leading to a greater number of contraceptive failures which gives us a greater number of pregnancies. And then abortion is simply used as the ultimate birth control. Today, with contraception more available than ever before, Americans dismember, mutilate, burn, poison, scrape, and crush an average of 4000 unborn children every day. 

The only real "common ground" found in the discussion was the desire to see fewer abortions and to that end education, adoption, and contraception were suggested. We've already dispatched the contraception solution. As regards adoption, there's a reason parents desirous of adopting a child are having to go to Russia, China, and other foreign countries to do so. The U.S. doesn't have the babies. This fact deserves more examination for in short, abortion is not about the young girl or the poor woman who is not able to provide for a child (a cliche). Abortion is primarily about covering one's promiscuous backside which is why adoption will never be a solution or even part of it. 

As for education, yes, but the same education that is used to discourage people from smoking. Just as high school health teachers have no problem showing pictures of blackened and diseased lungs and people in their 40's and 50's hacking themselves to death, abortion must be shown for what it scientifically is. Show the procedures. Make sure that the public understands what abortion actually looks like. Watch The Silent Scream. Watch as the child struggles and tries to get away from the abortionist's knife as he slices up his body. Look at the pictures of fully formed children burned and blackened by saline solution. Education? Let's have it. 

To stay informed go to www. esperansa.org.

Sam Harris - End of Faith

Harris (pg 12): "A glance at history....reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion."

Rohr: Harris seems to have "glanced" over the  20th century where religiously motivated "slaughter" is almost incidental to the mega murders of "death by government". Aside from the usual suspects: Soviet Union, Nationalist China, Communist China, and Nazi Germany, each of which killed 10,000,000 or more helpless and unarmed persons, there are (in the 20th century) 204 other cases of "democide" by state and quasi-state regimes, and non-state groups. (Statistics of Democide)

(Democide = genocide, politicide, massacres, extrajudicial executions, and other forms of mass murder)

 The fact that Harris makes this major oversight at the beginning of his argument basically sinks the rest of his thesis. Harris would be correct if he meant by "religion" a system of beliefs (i.e. one could say that Stalin and Mao carried out their purges with a religious fervor). But Harris specifically means a deity driven religion: "it is what we do with words like 'God', 'paradise' and 'sin'. (pg. 12)

Harris: "...most of the people in this world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book."

Rohr: Harris is a rather sloppy atheist. The above sentence references - even acknowledges - a Creator. A good atheist writer would have written: "most of the people in this world believe in a Creator and believe that that Creator has written a book."

But sloppy atheism aside, the only group I know of who believe God has written a book would be fundamentalist Christians. Catholics do not accept the authority of the Bible on its own. They should know since they are the ones who decided what would go into the Bible in the first place. Muslims don't believe Allah wrote the Koran. The Jews know it was their patriarchs and prophets who wrote the "Law and the Prophets".  Hindus and Buddhists have sacred texts but there seems to be no belief that the text came directly from a deity.

Of course what Harris really means to say is that there are many people who believe that their sacred texts are divinely inspired and thus carry or embody a unique authority or mandate.

Governmental Flow Chart

Polygamy advocates in the U.S. have cause for hope

(published in the Marianas Variety (August 2010) as "Matrimonial Chaos)
Justice Vaughn Walker, in striking down California’s ban on gay marriage (Perry v. Schwarzenegger), has opened wide the doors for the much persecuted advocates of plural marriage. A little background:

In 1862, in a response to the Mormon practice of a man taking multiple wives, Congress passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act. The law was largely unenforced. So 20 years later, Congress passed the Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act (1882), which was enforced, and resulted in more than 1,300 men being sent to prison.

Women were initially seen as victims and were not prosecuted directly, but since the Act also abrogated “spousal privilege”, many were found "in contempt of court" and jailed for refusing to testify against their husbands.

The Edmunds Act not only made polygamy, which it called “unlawful cohabitation”, a felony but also revoked polygamists' right to vote, made them ineligible for jury service, and prohibited them from holding political office.

Five years later, Edmunds was at it again with the Edmunds-Tucker Act (1887) which further persecuted the Mormons. The Act disincorporated the Church, allowed the federal government to confiscate its property, disenfranchised women, and removed local control of school textbook choice...and this is only a partial list. (Talk about a persecuted minority!)

In 1892, Congress hammered another nail in the polygamous coffin with a federal anti-bigamy provision which excluded polygamists from immigration into the United States. It remains part of the current U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Code. (Wonder if they are enforcing this on Muslims?)

In 1878, the first challenge to the federal ban on plural marriage reached the Supreme Court in Reynolds v. United States. Reynolds, a Mormon, simply obeying the statutes of his religion and having two wives,  challenged the ban under the First Amendment clause: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...”

The Court responded by stating that the word “religion” was not defined in the Constitution and “must go elsewhere...to ascertain its meaning”.  The “elsewhere” that the Court settled on was a letter by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association wherein Jefferson writes in reference to the Establishment Clause: “...that the legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions”.

In other words, the federal government cannot tell you what to think about religion (opinion) but they can tell you what you can and cannot do (actions), especially when, as the Court deduced, those actions which are “in violation of social duties or subversive of good order.” (This same letter, by the way, is where we find the troublesome reference to “separation of church and state”.)

The Court then baptized Jefferson’s letter (and in effect judicially amended the Constitution) with the following sentence: “Coming as this does from an acknowledged leader of the advocates of the measure, it may be accepted almost as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effect of the amendment thus secured.” (As you can see, the Court’s argument can be reduced to “because Jefferson said so.”)

But the nasty business of defining “subversive of good order” was still left undone. In order to fill in the blanks, the Court resorted to a reasoning that today would be laughable (but still stands): “Polygamy has always been odious among the northern and western nations of Europe, and, until the establishment of the Mormon Church, was almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic and of African people.” Translation: Europe, the U.S., and White People are civilized. Black and Yellow people are heathens. Today, Reynolds remains the law of the land. (Reynolds went to jail for two years.)

But now the Walker decision has produced the first real opportunity in over a hundred years to reverse Reynolds and legalize polygamy. And if I was a polygamy advocate, I would piggy-back on the Perry case all the way to the Supreme Court. For if marriage is only a “union of equals” (Perry pg 113) then not only is gender no longer a limiting factor, but number as well. In other words, “Why only two?” After all, polygamous marriage has a far greater historical pedigree than does homosexual marriage. (Contrary to the Reynolds reference to Asians and Africans, polygamy was an essential feature of the Judaic tradition, a tradition this country claims as part of its foundation.)

The crazy thing is that we already allow a form of polygamy in our country. Quoting the header at Polygamy.com: “A man can have sex with as many women as he likes. But he can’t marry more than one. If we don’t have a good reason to discriminate, then we probably shouldn’t.” And of course men and women can marry as many partners as they want. They just have to do the paperwork.

In addition, while a man is sent to jail for making a legal commitment to the women he has sex with (if more than one), another man is free to disseminate his seed with abandon (with the state often picking up the tab to care for his progeny), so long has he doesn’t legally commit to any more than one.

But aside from polygamy, there are other considerations regarding legal obstacles to marriage the Walker decision has opened up such as: age requirements, consanguinity (blood relations), affinity (kinship by marriage), vaccination requirements, disease testing, physical exams, proof of sufficient mental capacity, waiting periods, impotency, and consummation laws (still valid in some states, e.g. Alabama).

Given Walker’s decision that “same-sex couples are situated identically to opposite-sex couples in terms of their ability to perform the rights and obligations of marriage...” (Page 113), there simply is no reason to prohibit marriages between brothers and sisters, mothers and sons, uncles and nieces (or nephews for that matter) one man and 10 women, 10 men and one woman, etc.

The fact that such a list of restrictions on marriage exist in law is a testament to the state’s foundational understanding and expectation of marriage: to produce and educate the next generation. If this is no longer the case, then none of the civil impediments to marriage have any foundation and either must be struck down or the civil institution of marriage eliminated altogether.