An "F" for Obama

Discrimination that starts in the womb

From Fox News:

A bill that would ban sex-selective abortions failed to muster enough support to pass the House Thursday following a contentious debate.

The final vote was 246-168. Though a majority voted in favor of the bill, this particular proposal required a two-thirds majority to pass -- supporters of the bill fell 30 votes short.

This debate captures the blindness of the abortion-obsessed left. Even the moderator is taken aback...

Poster Nun for Liberals

Check out this hilarious article/video from CBS:

(CBS News) Sister Maureen Fiedler, host of the public radio program "Interfaith Voices," calls looming moves by the Roman Catholic Church toward a group of American nuns a "hostile takeover."

The moves would follow an accusatory mandate last month

Fiedler, who has been an activist for social justice and racial and gender equality for more than three decades, said on "CBS This Morning," "(The Church leaders) say in their mandate that they're going to send in an archbishop and two bishops who will work with the nuns in order to - get this - revise their statutes, their handbook, their plans and programs, their conferences, their speakers, everything. If this were the corporate world, I think we would call it a 'hostile takeover.'"

The article, and Sister Maureen Fielder, go downhill from there. Striking a JCPenney-inspired lay pose, Sister Maureen is in a tizzy over the Vatican's completely legitimate concern regarding the direction of many female religious orders in the United States. She unwittingly proves the Vatican's point. And for that, we thank you, Sister. Without even knowing it, Sister Fielder is a walking cliché, a paragon of what is wrong with the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and the renegade band of nuns, ever giddy to coquet with leftist, Hallmark Card social justice issues, while giving short shrift to Church doctrine.

Nuns like Sister Maureen love to spin all kinds of empty talking points about what they think Vatican II was all about. I think this modus operandi is intentional. One of the great successes that liberals in the Church have achieved over the past several decades is the creation and perpetuation of a phony, parallel legacy of Vatican II that doesn't at all jibe with what the real Council actually said. They use the protection of the "Spirit of Vatican II" to cover their rogue agenda and dissidence. They believe that if they just keep peddling a line about Vatican II over and over, regardless of its accuracy, conventional wisdom will eventually accept it as fact.

What really irks women like Sister Maureen is the knowledge that their mission, despite its initial successes, is clearly losing steam, just as their watered down religious orders, which embrace a pseudo-lay lifestyle, are dying off. Meanwhile, and this really sticks in their craw, traditional orders that actually embrace the vow of obedience (and the traditional habit) are flourishing, as vibrant young women seeking a serious Catholic religious life and identity respond to God's call.

Nashville Dominican Sisters: young, serious, relevant and faithful

Abortion Vote

From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Legislation coming up for a House vote would make it a federal crime to carry out an abortion based on the gender of the fetus. The measure takes aim at the aborting of female fetuses, a practice more common to countries such India and China, where there is a strong preference for sons, but which is also thought to take place in this country.

The mainly Republican supporters of the bill characterized the vote as a sex-discrimination issue at a time when Democrats are accusing Republicans of waging a war on women. Abortion rights advocates argued that the bill exploits the problem of selective abortion to further limit a woman's right to choose.

This vote really puts the left on tenterhooks. Their conundrum: Liberals have to preserve the myth that they are the authentic defenders of women, and yet this selective abortion procedure is aimed almost entirely at unborn baby girls. The Democrats' macabre obsession with keeping abortion legal is truly chilling. So figure this one out: It's the Republicans who are engaging in a "war on women" because they are trying to ensure that babies, mostly female, are not selectively aborted because of their gender!

Immoral and stupid. That's the abortion-crazed Democratic Party for you.

Persecution

Archbishop José Gomez wrote about the persecution of Catholics in Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century. Here's an excerpt from the National Catholic Register:

The anti-Catholic persecutions in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s are long forgotten, it seems.

The reality is hard to believe. Just a generation ago, not far from our borders, thousands of men, women and even children, were imprisoned, exiled, tortured and murdered — all for the “crime” of believing in Jesus Christ and wanting to live by their faith in him.

So I welcome the new film, For Greater Glory. It tells the dramatic story of this unknown war against religion and our Church’s heroic resistance. It’s a strong film with a timely message. It reminds us that our religious liberties are won by blood and we can never take them for granted.

That such repression could happen in a nation so deeply Catholic as Mexico should make everybody stop and think.

Monks Under Legal Assault

Global Warming

An interesting report from The Register:

A US government-funded survey has found that Americans with higher levels of scientific and mathematical knowledge are more sceptical regarding the dangers of climate change than their more poorly educated fellow citizens.

The results of the survey are especially remarkable as it was plainly not intended to show any such thing: Rather, the researchers and trick-cyclists who carried it out were doing so from the position that the "scientific consensus" (carbon-driven global warming is ongoing and extremely dangerous) is a settled fact, and the priority is now to find some way of getting US voters to believe in the need for urgent, immediate and massive action to reduce CO2 emissions.

The Walker Effect

Scott Walker, hands down, the best governor in the nation

Opinions can change on a dime, but this is looking pretty good. Let's hope it holds for just one more week. From Politico:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker holds a 7-point advantage over Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in the recall contest, according to a poll on Wednesday.

With less than a week to go before the Tuesday election, the Republican governor is leading his Democratic challenger, 52 percent to 45 percent among likely voters, the latest Marquette Law School poll shows. Very little has changed since the previous poll, which showed Walker holding a 6-point advantage over Barrett among likely voters, 50 percent to 44 percent.

Yesterday I heard a small business owner confess that the future success of his business hinges on this election, and Walker winning it. That's how fragile the economy is. No doubt his story is one of hundreds. Thankfully, the majority of Wisconsinites know that they've got a very good thing going in Governor Walker.

The Switch

A Democrat has seen the light. From Politico:

Former Alabama Rep. Artur Davis announced Tuesday that he’s cutting ties with the Democratic Party, and said that he’s considering a future bid for Congress as a Republican.

Davis, who for a time had been considered a rising star in the Democratic Party, wrote a message on his website confirming that he is switching parties. ...

“[I]f I were to leave the sidelines, it would be as a member of the Republican Party that is fighting the drift in this country in a way that comes closest to my way of thinking: wearing a Democratic label no longer matches what I know about my country and its possibilities,” Davis wrote.

A talented black Democrat converts to the Republican Party? Absolutely verboten. Expect most of the media to bury this story.

Obama's War

A provocative article about Obama's ruthless war strategy from Tim Stanley, writing for the Telegraph:

When historians come to describe Obama’s domestic agenda, there won’t be much to write except “a mess.” Fiscal policy has been dictated by events, spending has plunged out of control and his healthcare reforms could well be rejected by the Supreme Court. But on foreign policy, a different picture emerges. The President is a tough SOB without a liberal bone in his body.

A very unpleasant story emerged this week: Obama has a “kill list.” Dozens of advisers nominate terrorists suspects who should be targeted by American forces. The New York Times reports that the chosen few are then discussed at Tuesday meetings in the White House, where the Prez “[insists] on approving every new name on an expanding 'kill list,' poring over terrorist suspects' biographies on what one official calls the macabre 'baseball cards' of an unconventional war.” Some of the names are adolescents; some are Americans. The Times report implies that sometimes whole families are wiped out when a single suspect is targeted by a drone strike. Oddly, Obama’s top political strategist, David Axelrod, is also present at the meetings. Are targets chosen according to electoral impact? Surely not.

Our President and Poland

From Niles Gardiner, writing for the Telegraph:

President Obama has a long track record of insulting the Poles. In 2010 he chose to play golf on the day of the funeral of the Polish President Lech Kaczynski, the Polish First Lady, and 94 senior officials who perished in the Smolensk air disaster. Eight months earlier he humiliated Warsaw by pulling out of the agreement over Third Site missile defence installations in Poland and the Czech Republic. And last night Barack Obama caused huge offence in Poland by referring to a Nazi death camp in Poland as “a Polish death camp” while awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a Polish resistance fighter.

What a disgrace. Americans deserve a better president and the Poles deserve a better ally than Obama.

A follow up on the controversy, from the AFP:

Poland's prime minister said Wednesday that remarks by President Barack Obama erroneously identifying a Nazi death camp as Polish had hurt all Poles and he expected more from the US than "regret".

"I am convinced that our American friends can today allow themselves a stronger reaction than a simple expression of regret from the White House spokesman -- a reaction more inclined to eliminate once and for all these kinds of errors," Donald Tusk told reporters in Warsaw.

Veni, Sancte Spiritus

Pentecost, Jean Restout

The Debate

Last night I caught the debate between Tom Barrett and Scott Walker. I thought Barrett came across as nasty, bitter and hysterical. He was clearly trying to get under Walker's skin with his repetition of lame, t.v. commercial talking points: "You started this civil war" and "You want to divide and conquer" blah blah blah. He made a total fool of himself with his nagging petulance and empty, emotive attacks. He never addressed his disastrous, feckless term as Mayor of Milwaukee, which has seen unemployment, crime and taxes rise. Walker, for his part, was unflappably cool, rattling off numbers and statistics that bolstered his case for reelection. He referred to Barrett simply as "my opponent" and hardly looked at the man. A high point was when he was offered the opportunity to ask Barrett a question of his own. He cooly turned down the offer, as though a waste of his and our time, while Barrett embarrassingly countered with something like, "Great, I'll take twice as long for my question." How egotistical and childish. His "question" then turned into an unending broadside against Walker. Barrett embodies the kind of angry, bitter, and catty qualities that have permanently latched onto the left in Wisconsin. They never seem happy, always surly, always gloomy.

A revealing moment in the debate came with a question on gay "marriage." Predictably, Barrett, the deviant Catholic, said he supports it, while Walker said he will uphold the state constitution, which defines marriage as between one man and one woman. I am very curious as to what the Archdiocese of Milwaukee will do about Barrett's statement. Barrett is an arch-liberal who flouts the Church's teaching at every turn, and he regularly gets away with it. It's easy to fire arrows at the federal government, way out in DC, regarding Obamacare's odious mandate, but sadly, the in-house affairs close to home often get overlooked.

Obama's Failed Culture War Gamble

Obama is looking more like Jimmy Carter. A good analysis of the presidential race from the Telegraph:

The president has tried to distract from America’s economic misery by playing up the so-called culture war. Earlier in the year he decided that he would force Catholic employers to provide contraception to their employees through their insurance plans, and he followed that swipe at social traditionalism by endorsing gay marriage. This embrace of Sixties liberalism has backfired. While contraception and gay marriage often receive popular support in national polls, Americans are far more conservative in the voting booth. Thirty-two states have voted on gay marriage and all 32 have voted to outlaw it – even liberal California. Nor has the culture war rallied his party’s base. In presidential primaries held on Tuesday, 39 per cent of Arkansas Democrats and 42 per cent of Kentuckian Democrats rejected Obama’s re-nomination. In West Virginia, 41 per cent of the state’s Democrats voted for an imprisoned criminal rather than the president.

Enough Is Enough

From Fox News:

The author of best-selling novel “The Exorcist” says he plans to sue alma mater Georgetown University in a Vatican court after the Catholic school invited Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to speak on campus.

The author, William Peter Blatty, says the Jesuit-founded university in Washington has for the past two decades invited speakers who support abortion rights and has refused to comply with orders by the late Pope John Paul II for church-affiliated colleges and universities. ...

“I owe much to the Jesuit fathers and to Georgetown University,” Blatty says on his The Father of King Society website. “What I owe Georgetown, however, is nothing as compared to what Georgetown owes to its founders and the Christ of faith.”

On Virginity

From Yahoo Sports News:

Tim Tebow and American hurdling star Lolo Jones share two things in common: They're saving their virginity until marriage and they get made fun of incessantly for that decision.

Jones, the 29-year-old world indoor champion and Olympic medal hopeful, recently told HBO's "Real Sports" that she was still a virgin. Once that interview aired, she drew immediate comparisons to America's most famous sexual holdout, Timothy Richard Tebow.

In a time when bullying is being justly condemned from every quarter, it's apparently acceptable to make fun of those crazy virgins, I suppose, and for the media to treat it as a harmless joke.

Crusaders No More

From MSNBC:

A Marine fighter squadron challenged on its use of the "Crusaders" name and cross-and-shield symbolism as its insignia has been ordered to reverse the decision, and to return to identifying itself as "Werewolves," the Marine Corps said on Thursday.

The news came a month after the nonprofit Military Religious Freedom Foundation blasted the use of the Crusaders name and logo — citing constitutional and practical objections — on behalf of dozens of soldiers, including Marines in the affected squadron, Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 122...

The squadron, based in Beaufort, S.C., used the Crusaders symbol from 1958 to 2008, when Lt. Col. William Lieblein pointed out that imagery invoking the Christian conquest and colonization of Muslim nations during the Middle Ages was counterproductive to the U.S. presence across the Arab and Islamic world.

"The notion of being a crusader in that part of the world doesn't float," he said, ordering the change to "Werewolves," as reported by the Beaufort Gazette at the time.

From Crusader to Werewolf... This is pathetic and outrageous. Where do these ACLU types get their power? I can only suspect that someone in the president's inner circle, if not the man himself, was responsible for this. Why didn't someone tell those criticizing the name and symbol to buzz off?

"The Christian conquest and colonization of Muslim nations..." Are you serious? This is totally inaccurate. It's a glittering example of historical revisionism. It was the Muslims who played the role of ruthless conquerors, harassing Christian Europe (West and East) for centuries. Someone should ask a Greek Orthodox Christian about the claim that it was the Christians who were the conquerors.

Shoving same-sex "marriage" down the throats of kids

From  LifeSiteNews.com:

As part of its ongoing campaign to increase its characters’ diversity, Marvel Comics will feature X-Men superhero Northstar having a same-sex “marriage” ceremony with his partner, Kyle. 

Northstar became the first openly homosexual comic character in 1992.

This is sad, sick, and depressing. I grew up reading these comic books. This is a genre that is targeted towards young people—are they really going to do this? Marvel Comics has told some great stories and has had the best characters in the comic book world, but this is the worst. This is despicable. 

Everywhere I turn same-sex "marriage"is being shoved down my throat.  I have a message for Hollywood, Marvel, Starbucks, and every other corporation that endorses this farse: 

You can keep trying to shove this down my throat, I will continue to vomit. It makes me sick.

Sign of the Times

From Reuters:

WASHINGTON -- Two female soldiers filed suit on Wednesday to scrap the U.S. military's restrictions on women in combat, claiming the policy violated their constitutional rights.

Command Sergeant Major Jane Baldwin and Colonel Ellen Haring, both Army reservists, said policies barring them from assignments "solely on the basis of sex" violated their right to equal protectio under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

"This limitation on plaintiffs' careers restricts their current and future earnings, their potential for promotion and advancement, and their future retirement benefits," the women said in the suit filed in U.S. District Court.

This is one of those sticky issues that is difficult to discuss in our politically correct world because the opposing view is immediately cast as sexist, patriarchal, etc. An Ad hominem argument, when done in a crafty way, cloaked in the appealing rhetoric of equality and rights, is a powerful tool that can automatically discredit a view and a person as backwards and prejudiced. "You're obviously sexist, so anything you say on the subject is irrelevant." (The pro-lifers face similar, nasty tactics from the pro-abort crowd. "You're anti-choice, anti-woman, and you don't care about girls who are raped.")

The fact is, there are totally legitimate, reasonable arguments for preserving the restrictions on women in combat. Kate O'Beirne penned an excellent article on this subject for National Review in 2003 entitled "An Army of Jessica's: About Women in Combat: Let's fight. Hard." Here's an excerpt:

Overplaying women's exploits permits proponents of gender-integrated combat to discount the masculine traits that the history of warfare shows to be vital to military success. In an article for the Buffalo Law Review, Wayne State law professor Kingsley R. Browne examines the historic link between masculinity and warfare: "Be a man" was the core value by which combat soldiers judged each other, according to Samuel Stouffer's classic study of soldiers in WWII; as Browne notes, Northwestern professor Charles Moskos--America's leading military sociologist--explains that one of the few ways to get men in combat to behave so irrationally as to risk getting killed is to appeal to their masculinity. A study of the Spanish Civil War found that the greatest fear of men facing combat for the first time was that they would turn out to be cowards. Historian S.L.A. Marshall found that a man in combat will overcome his fear and do what's required because he risks losing "the one thing that he is likely to value more highly than his life--his reputation as a man among other men." Browne concludes: "If the need to prove one's manliness is an essential motivator of combat personnel, what motivates women?"

A 1985 Navy study found that large majorities of women were unable to perform any of the eight critical shipboard tasks that virtually all men could handle...In her 2000 book, The Kinder Gentler Military, Stephanie Gutmann recounted how the harsh demands of basic training have been largely eliminated to make the experience more female-friendly. With basic training now gender-integrated in all the services except the Marines, the emphasis is increasingly on self-esteem and positive motivation. Recruits are shown videos that reassure them that "anybody can get through boot camp" and that it's "O.K. to cry." A commission appointed by defense secretary William Cohen...concluded that basic training should be separate because integrated training resulted in "less discipline, less unit cohesion, and more distraction from training programs.

And MacKubin Thomas Owens touched on some excellent points in an article he wrote a few years back:

The presence of open homosexuals (and women) in the close confines of ships or military units opens the possibility that eros will be unleashed into an environment based on philia, creating friction and corroding the very source of military excellence itself. It does so by undermining the non-sexual bonding essential to unit cohesion as described by Gray. Unlike philia, eros is sexual, and therefore individual and exclusive. Eros manifests itself as sexual competition, protectiveness, and favoritism, all of which undermine order, discipline, and morale. These are issues of life and death, and help to explain why open homosexuality and homosexual behavior traditionally have been considered incompatible with military service.

These are all serious, substantial arguments that deserve have a fair hearing in the debate over women in combat roles in the military.