Sharpton to deliver on campaign promises immediately
Boca Raton, FL – In the worst case scenario of worst case scenarios voting machines across the country have returned preliminary results declaring that the next President of the United States will be Rev. Al Sharpton.
Sharpton, who briefly ran for the Democratic Party Nomination earlier in 2004 was shocked by the news, but reportedly “thrilled” at the prospect of running a country. “They told me that you couldn’t run on a platform of ‘Chicken and Biscuits for Everybody’, boy I showed them,” said the Reverend via cell phone. “It just goes to show, everybody likes a big piece of chicken.”
The news that the results were only temporary did nothing to deter Sharpton’s enthusiasm. Already, both incumbent George W. Bush, and Democratic Nominee John Kerry were filing papers with the Supreme Court that challenged the legitimacy of the results. Court papers obtained for this report cited numerous reasons for the preliminary outcome to be thrown out, among them that (1) “the Reverend Sharpton is not actually even on the ballot”, (2) “evidence of voter fraud was found at the many polling booths, namely that several machines were installed upside down”, and (3) “the millions disenfranchised white people's faith in partisan politics will be lost for ever”.
The situation is made more chaotic by the recent health problems of Chief Justice William Rehnquist. If and when these challenges go to trial, all nine Supreme Court Justices must preside. A panel of eight Justices could very well end up divided, so an odd number is required. Matters were complicated by the announcement of Justice Clarence Thomas who is already on the record saying that “there ain’t no way ya’ll are making me sit this one out.”
While the legal wranglers sort out the details Al Sharpton, or “Reverend 44” as he is asking to be called now, continued to comment on the situation via cell phone. “Didn’t ya’ll learn from ‘The Terminator’? These electronic voting booths is too complicated. Now, if they looked more like slot machines, and instead of George Bush you got to pick out the double cherry or something, now that would be easier.” Sharpton predicted, “Technology is going to be the death of white people. Ha Ha!”
While the nation sat in stunned silence, representatives from the Sharpton camp began to plan for the future. The Reverend was late to a hastily thrown together victory press conference because “he was getting his hair did”, but he did send on a message of hope through his press secretary and second cousin Willy. “Keep hope alive America”, the statement read. “The chicken is in the mail!”
Reason #1: Feel Better About The Result. No matter who you vote for, and no matter the result of the election-day poll, George W. Bush will be named president. If for some reason the election itself doesn’t do this, then the Supreme Court will. >>> Reason #2: Make The World Even Safer The world is a safer place since George W. Bush came to power. Anyone can see that. Sure there was 9/11, and this did happen on George W. Bush’s watch, but remember there were terrorist threats during the Clinton administration too. >>>
Reason #3: Be Richer, or At Least Look It Yes, under George W. Bush many of us have got to be much richer than before. Tax laws have reduced taxes for some, and restraints on big business have made some investments soar. >>>
Reason #4: Leave Some Children Behind The Democrats keep harking on about the “No Child Left Behind” program leaving kids behind. They have promised to fix the program, but do you really want them to? >>>
Reason #5: More Jobs For The Poor In the bad old days of the Clinton administration analysts and media watchers used to analyse the US employment statistics alone to decide whether the government was doing it’s job. In an era of global economies and overseas investments this was narrow minded and dumb. >>>
Reason #6: Media Leaves You Feeling Good. With a Republican owned and dominated media, Democrat administrations can be confusing. Every time the government does something the media feel obliged to offer and independent critique and point out the possible negative aspects of the governments latest actions.>>>
Reason #7: Get Better Movies. There have been some great films during the Bush years. We’ve had Michael Moore’s bowling for Columbine, and Fahrenheit 9/11 all directly criticizing the Bush administration.>>>
Reason #8: Daily Terror Alert Levels. Can anyone remember life before the daily Terror Alert Level? Can anyone remember when the weather forcast was followed by nothing but pollution levels? Remember how dull it was, leaving the house for work without your daily dose of terror?>>>
BIGfib says, "Vote Bush or stay at home"
Always independent, always objective and truthful, BIGfib isn’t in the habit of telling it’s readers which way to vote, but this once, we’ve made an exception. Why? We hate to tell you this, but the world is on the brink of disaster and we’re the only ones who can save it.
Never before have the people, and the pets, and the Democrats of the USA been faced with such a stark choice. Vote for a fundamentalist Christian state in a permanent state of war against the dark forces of evil, or go back to the old boring hypocrisy of “getting on with anyone”.
Vote for a country made to measure so that American big business can get bigger and bigger and rule the world, or go back to the sad old days of monopolies commissions and boring moderation. There are hundreds of fabulous reasons to vote for George W. Bush and a hundred more not to vote for that dreadful liberal John Kerry. This issue contains just some of them, please read.
And if you don’t agree, well don’t worry. You don’t even need to bother voting. The polls, the media, and past experience consistently show that no matter what happens on Nov 2nd, John Kerry cannot win. Democrats can save themselves the pain of participating in a pointless ballot by staying at home and watching George W. Bush win on T.V. BIGfib is Bush's friend, BIGfib says, Vote Bush or don't vote at all.>>>
ELECTION 2004
ELECTION 2004
Reason #9: George W. Is Better Looking It’s clear that George. W. Bush Is better looking than John Kerry, especially once he’s had his makeup done. He doesn’t look bad even now, but when he was younger Bush was positively sexy. >>>
Reason #10: Get To Carry On Hating The French Under Bush things remain clear. Tony Blair is our ally. The rest of the world is our enemy, especially the French. It’s easy to grasp and choosing holiday destinations is much, much easier. >>>
tolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal," the highly contested anti-Kerry documentary, should not be shown by the Sinclair Broadcast Group. It should be shown in its entirety on all the networks, cable stations and on public television.
This histrionic, often specious and deeply sad film does not do much more damage to Senator John Kerry's reputation than have the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's negative ads, which have flooded television markets in almost every swing state. But it does help viewers better understand the rage fueling the unhappy band of brothers who oppose Mr. Kerry's candidacy and his claim to heroism.
Sinclair, the nation's largest television station group, reaching about a quarter of United States television households, backed down this week and announced that it would use only excerpts from the 42-minute film as part of an hourlong news program about political use of the media, "A P.O.W. Story: Politics, Pressure and the Media.'' That's too bad: what is most enlightening about this film is not the depiction of Mr. Kerry as a traitor; it is the testimony of the former P.O.W.'s describing the torture they endured in captivity and the shock they felt when celebrities like Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden visited their prisons in North Vietnam and sided with the enemy.
The former prisoners - now old and graying - are not just talking about their sense of betrayal by fellow Americans. They also seize the Kerry candidacy as a chance to recall their experiences: the kinds of torture they endured and the ruses they invented like tap-code communication between cells to boost morale. Illustrated with black-and-white film clips of prisoners in the "Hanoi Hilton" and sepia-toned re-enactments of starving men being led through dank, dark prison corridors, those recollections resemble the slow-paced, detailed documentaries that fill the History Channel.
But the History Channel tends to focus on the heroic moments of World Wars I and II. The Vietnam War is almost always revisited through its moral and strategic ambiguities and its effect on American society in the 1960's and 70's.
This film is payback time, a chance to punish one of the most famous antiwar activists, Mr. Kerry, the one who got credit for serving with distinction in combat, then, through the eyes of the veterans in this film, went home to discredit the men left behind. The film begins with dirgelike music and a scary black-and-white montage of stark images of soldiers and prisoners as a deep voice sorrowfully intones, "In other wars, when captured soldiers were subjected to the hell of enemy prisons, they were considered heroes." The narrator adds, "In Vietnam they were betrayed."
The imagery is crude, but powerful: each mention of Mr. Kerry's early 1970's meeting with North Vietnamese government officials in Paris is illustrated with an old black-and-white still shot of the Arc de Triomphe, an image that to many viewers evokes the Nazi occupation of Paris. The Eiffel Tower would have been more neutral, but the film is not: it insists that Mr. Kerry "met secretly in an undisclosed location with a top enemy diplomat." Actually, Mr. Kerry, a leading antiwar activist at the time, mentioned it in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971.
The film's producer, Carlton Sherwood, a former investigative reporter and a Vietnam veteran, gives his own testimony, explaining that even though he has uncovered all kinds of misdeeds in his career, the history of Mr. Kerry's antiwar activism is "a lot more personal.'' He recalls listening to Mr. Kerry's testimony in 1971, saying, "I felt an inner hurt no surgeon's scalpel could remove.''
That pain is the main theme of the documentary, which can be seen in its entirety on the Internet for $4.99. One former P.O.W., John Warner, lashes out at Mr. Kerry for having coaxed Mr. Warner's mother to testify at the Winter Soldier Investigation, where disgruntled veterans testified to war crimes they committed. Calling it a "contemptible act," Mr. Warner, who spent more than five years as a prisoner, tells the camera that Mr. Kerry was the kind of man who preyed on a mother's grief "purely for the promotion of your own political agenda."
The documentary shows Mr. Kerry's 1971 Senate testimony, in which he famously reported that fellow soldiers had "cut off ears," among other atrocities. But the filmmakers were not able to dig up more indicting material from homemade movies or news clips from the era. The picture from an antiwar demonstration, where Mr. Kerry stood a few rows behind Ms. Fonda, is blown up portentously, but there are no shots of them together. The only candid shot of Mr. Kerry gathering material for the Winter Soldier hearings shows him solicitously asking a veteran why he felt the need to speak.
Instead, the film shows lesser-known young, long-haired antiwar activists preparing witnesses to testify to war crimes. In the film these men seem to be prompting a fellow veteran to describe a massacre he did not witness. But one of the veterans, Kenneth J. Campbell, a decorated marine who is now a professor at the University of Delaware, recently sued the filmmakers, claiming the film was edited to take out clips in which Mr. Campbell made clear that only soldiers who witnessed the atrocities firsthand would be allowed to testify.
Those kinds of distortions are intended to hurt Mr. Kerry at the polls. Instead, they mainly distract viewers from the real subject of the film: the veterans' unheeded feelings of betrayal and neglect.
Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal
Excerpts from this program will be shown on various stations, but not in the New York metropolitan area; elsewhere check local listings. The entire program can be seen on the Internet on a pay-for-view basis and its audio can be downloaded online, both at www.stolenhonor.com.
Carlton Sherwood, producer. A Red White and Blue Productions Inc.
All the good things they never tell you about today's Iraq
The other day, the BBC interviewed Kofi Annan. Don't ask me why. But, in the course of the programme, the United Nations Secretary-General said that the liberation of Iraq did not conform to the UN Charter and therefore was "illegal".
The best response to that comes from George W Bush, after Gerhard Schroder made a similar point last year: "International law?" said the President. "I better call my lawyer. He didn't bring that up to me."
As the Australian Prime Minister John Howard (not to be confused with Michael Howard, ever) observed, the problem with the UN is that it's "paralysed", and that paralysis favours the bad guys, whether in Iraq or Iran, where perpetual International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitoring seems to be barely a hindrance to the full-steam-ahead nuclear programme.
In Sudan, the civilised world is (so far) doing everything to conform with the UN charter, which means waiting till everyone's been killed and then issuing a strong statement expressing grave concern.
As for Iraq, the UN system designed to constrain Saddam was instead enriching him, through the Oil-for-Food programme, and enabling him to subsidise terrorism. Given that the Oil-for-Fraud programme was run directly out of Kofi Annan's office, the Secretary-General ought to have the decency to recognise that he had his chance with Iraq, he blew it, and a period of silence from him would now be welcome.
He's not the only voice from the lost world of September 10, 2001 weighing in.
John Kerry, the doomed Democrat, has abandoned any talk of "victory" - in Iraq, I mean; he's still hopeful of holding New Jersey. But instead he is promising to let America's troops "come home", which is another way of saying "surrender".
Then there are the naysayers at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office who, as we now know, were claiming before the war that nothing could be done, nothing would go right, patently absurd to think Iraq can ever be a democracy, old boy. Topple Saddam, install his replacement, and pretty soon Iraq would be reverting to type. "Military coup could succeed coup until an autocratic Sunni dictator emerged who protected Sunni interests. With time he could acquire WMD."
I have no problem with that. If the best-case scenario is that Iraq winds up as agreeable as my beloved New Hampshire, the worst case was laid out by yours truly in this space three years ago, on September 27, 2001, when I acknowledged that a post-Saddam Iraq might wind up merely with "a thug who's marginally less bloody.
But a new thug is still better than letting the old thug stick around to cock snooks at you. If Saddam had been toppled, the nutter du jour would have come to power in the shadow of the cautionary tale of his predecessor".
That's still the bottom line. It is the stability of the Middle East - the stability of the Ba'athists, Ayatollahs, Sauds, the Arafats and Mubaraks - that has enabled it to export its toxins. At a bare minimum, we need a kind of Sam Goldwyn Doctrine: I'm sick of the old dictators-for-life. Bring me some new dictators-for-life.
But in Iraq we are already way beyond that. After the predictions of hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and a mass refugee crisis and a humanitarian catastrophe and wall-to-wall cholera and dysentery all failed to pan out, the naysayers fell back on predictions of imminent civil war. But the civil war's as mythical as the universal dysentery.
There is a problem in the Sunni Triangle and in certain Baghdad suburbs. If you look at the figures for August, over half the 71 US fatalities that month died in one province - al-Anbar, which covers much of the Sunni Triangle.
Most of the remainder were killed dispatching young Sadr's goons in Najaf or in operations against other Sunni Triangulators in Samarra, with a couple of isolated incidents in Mosul and Kirkuk. In 11 of Iraq's 18 provinces, not a single US soldier died.
Do you remember that moment of Fallujah-like depravity in Ulster a few years ago? Two soldiers were yanked from a cab in the wrong part of town and torn apart by a Republican mob. A terrible, shaming episode in the wretched annals of Northern Irish nationalists. But in the rest of the United Kingdom - in Bristol, in Coventry, Newcastle, Aberdeen - life went on, very pleasantly.
That's the way it is in Iraq. In two-thirds of the country, municipal government has been rebuilt, business is good, restaurants are open, life is as jolly as it has been in living memory. This summer the Shia province of Dhi Qar, south-east of Baghdad, held the first free elections in its history, electing secular independents and non-religious parties to its town councils.
The Kurdish North, which would be agitating for secession if real civil war were looming, is for the moment content to be Scotland. The Sunni Triangle, meanwhile, looks like being the fledgling Iraqi federation's Northern Ireland for a while to come.
That's a pity. But, if you can quarantine it, the difference between it and the rest of the country will become starker, month by month.
The "insurgents", meanwhile, so admired by Michael Moore, John Pilger and Tariq Ali, are rather short of supporters closer to home, which isn't surprising given that they are killing many more Iraqis than Americans.
But the beauty of handing over "sovereignty" to Ayad Allawi is that the new Prime Minister has more freedom of manoeuvre than Paul Bremer ever had, and, as he doesn't have to give press conferences on CNN every morning, there will be fewer questions afterwards.
What I find odd about the gloom'n'doom crowd at the FCO is that, for all the condescending cracks about how these blundering Yanks haven't a clue about this colonialism business, it is the Foreign Office wallahs who seem to have lost their collective imperial memory.
The Malayan "emergency", to take one example, lasted from 1948 to 1960, and at the end of it Britain midwifed what can reasonably claim to be one of the least worst Islamic states in the world. The nellies briefing Jack Straw seem to have lost all historical perspective.
That is not to say there are not serious questions about both short-term tactics (Fallujah, Najaf) and long-term goals (a democratic Iraq). But neither the newly parochial post-internationalist Left, unable to get past its "BLAIR LIED!!! PEOPLE DIED!!!!!" nursery rhymes, nor the snob Right - the Max Hastings/Douglas Hurd/Crispin Tickell crowd - has any useful contribution to make to this debate.
Instead, all the discussion is within factions of the American Right - between the "neocons", with their plans to democratise the Middle East, and the more traditional "assertive nationalists", whose hopes for a foetid region are a little less ambitious. That's worth arguing over, but it is not an argument you can enter if you have got no useful proposals of your own.
And, in the end, the reality is this. A few weeks ago, Prof Bernard Lewis, the great historian of the Muslim world, told Die Welt that "Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century". That seems demographically unavoidable.
Given that much of what we now know as the civilised world will be Muslim, it seems prudent to ensure that what is already the Muslim world is civilised. And, for those who say that Islam is incompatible with democracy, we might as well try to buck that in Iraq today than in France, Scandinavia and Britain the day after tomorrow.
This is a letter from Ray Reynolds, a medic in the Iowa Army National Guard, serving in Iraq
As I head off to Baghdad for the final weeks of my stay in Iraq, I wanted to say thanks to all of you who did not believe the media. They have done a very poor job of covering everything that has happened. I am sorry that I have not been able to visit all of you during my two week leave back home. And just so you can rest at night knowing something is happening in Iraq that is noteworthy, I thought I would pass this on to you. This is the list of things that has happened in Iraq recently (Please share it with your friends and compare it to the version that your paper is producing.)
* Over 400,000 kids have up-to-date immunizations.
* School attendance is up 80% from levels before the war.
* Over 1,500 schools have been renovated and rid of the weapons stored there so education can occur.
* The port of Uhm Qasar was renovated so grain can be off-loaded from ships faster.
* The country had its first 2 billion barrel export of oil in August.
* Over 4.5 million people have clean drinking water for the first time ever in Iraq.
* The country now receives 2 times the electrical power it did before the war.
* 100% of the hospitals are open and fully staffed, compared to 35% before the war.
* Elections are taking place in every major city, and city councils are in place.
* Sewer and water lines are installed in every major city.
* Over 60,000 police are patrolling the streets.
* Over 100,000 Iraqi civil defense police are securing the country.
* Over 80,000 Iraqi soldiers are patrolling the streets side by side with US soldiers.
* Over 400,000 people have telephones for the first time ever.
* Students are taught field sanitation and hand washing techniques to prevent the spread of germs.
* An interim constitution has been signed.
* Girls are allowed to attend school.
* Textbooks that don't mention Saddam are in the schools for the first time in 30 years. Don't believe for one second that these people do not want us there. I have met many, many people from Iraq that want us there, and in a bad way. They say they will never see the freedoms we talk about but they hope their children will. We are doing a good job in Iraq and I challenge anyone, anywhere to dispute me on these facts. If you are like me and very disgusted with how this period of rebuilding has been portrayed, email this to a friend and let them know there are good things happening.
Ray Reynolds, SFC Iowa Army National Guard
234th Signal Battalion
P.S.
From www.snopes.com I found this response to the letter.
In regards to the question of authorship, it is true that SFC Ray Reynolds, a firefighter in civilian life, is a National Guardsman whose 234th Signal Battalion unit was called up to active duty, and that he wrote this piece. As Sgt. Reynolds responded to inquiries about his message: I did write it and I am in Kuwait now on my way home. I wrote it while at home because I felt that too many people were exploiting the violence in Iraq to sell papers and gain votes. Sometimes the silent majority need to be awakened to respond to the bad things in our world. I am passionate about our President's decision and support this rebuilding whole heartedly...Yes legit..I am a fire fighter in Denison, Iowa and to verify, call Mike McKinnon of the Denison Iowa fire department
"Now a pro-Bush 527 is launching an ad that reminds the American voter of how the President acted in the aftermath of 9/11. A pro-Kerry 527 is running a despicable ad arguing that blacks will have their votes suppressed as in the days of the civil rights movement, and uses a picture of a fire-hose turned on blacks. Voters can see the choice between Bush and Kerry in the choice between these two ads."
Hugh Hewitt, October 19, at www.hughhewitt.com
"John Kerry wasn't nominated because of his sparkling personality. He wasn't nominated because of his selfless commitment to causes larger than himself. He was nominated because he's a fighter. At the end of every campaign he comes out brawling. This was the guy who could take on Bush. So nobody could imagine how incompetent, crude and over-the-top Kerry has been in this final phase of the campaign. ... The truth, however, is that voters are not idiots. They are capable of independent thought. If you attack your opponent wildly, ruthlessly, they will come to their own conclusions."
David Brooks, New York Times, October 19.
Just for the record, I agree with David Brooks. I am utterly confident that the American people are quite capable of figuring out when a candidate is dishing out dirt; when an office seeker is substituting character assassination for a defense of his own position; and when a politician, cornered by his own inadequacies, is lashing out blindly.
I've watched electoral politics since 1960. In all the tumultuous years since the razor-edge victory of John Kennedy over Richard Nixon, I have never seen the "mainstream media" so blatantly in one candidate's corner. And, when you think about it, that's quite a mouthful.
In contrast to Kerry's no-dirt-left-unslung approach, I want to talk about something that appears in a book review that ran in today's Washington Times. Ronald Reagan's pollster, Dick Wirthlin, has written a new book titled, "The Greatest Communicator: What Ronald Reagan Taught Me about Politics, Leadership, and Life." It sounds like a delightful look back at one of the three greatest Presidents of the 20th century, and I fully intend to read it ASAP.
There's a line in the review, written by Robert M. Smalley that really snapped me to attention. Smalley observed, "Mr. Reagan put long hours and meticulous care into the writing, wording and preparation of his major speeches. He never lost touch with his own guideline: Persuade through reason and motivate through emotion."
I would add that there are emotions and there are emotions. A major part of Ronald Reagan's greatness, and the primary reason he was such an incredible communicator, was that the President unwaveringly appealed to our nobler emotions. And what makes this even more significant is that Mr. Reagan did so not as an expression of unbridled personal ambition, but in service to the nation he loved so dearly.
Which leads me to what is among the most maddening features of how this election is being covered: the inability, or unwillingness, of most reporters to make elementary distinctions. The unfortunate result is to embolden Kerry and Edwards in their campaign of smears and vilification.
How do reporters hide the sleaziness of Kerry's campaign? With the exception of a few writers, such as Brooks, by indulging in moral equivalency with a vengeance.
For example, they take after Mr. Bush for supposedly harping unduly on this or that quality of Sen. Kerry. And if both sides are guilty....
Consider what is going on. If Bush talks about Kerry as a flip-flopper or a liberal, we are told that this is no different than implying--or stating outright--that Bush is (in no particular order) a liar, a racist, a closet Nazi, and a man whose core supporters (evangelical Christians) are the ideological soul mates of the terrorists who destroyed the twin towers and who behead helpless victims in Iraq. (This latter accusation is courtesy of a vicious hatchet job in last Sunday's New York Times magazine.)
On a much higher plane, the quote from Hugh Hewitt that begins this column refers to a television ad that began running today. Paid for by The Progress for America Voter Fund, it tells the true, unembellished story of Ashley Faulkner's remarkable encounter with President Bush.
To quote USA Today, "The ad was inspired by a photo of Bush hugging Ashley Faulkner, who is now 16, while campaigning in Lebanon, Ohio, on May 4. The photo, taken by the girl's father, Lynn Faulkner, was widely circulated on the Internet." Ashley's mother died in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.
I will not spoil the power of this meeting by going into any further detail. You can see the ad for yourself online at www.ashleysstory.com.
When you see it, you will understand precisely why there are so many stories circulating that underscore President Bush's deep reservoir of compassion and caring. The next time you hear the President's character assassinated, remember that Americans have in the White House not a phony-baloney who manipulates the emotions of others for his own benefit, but a man who is genuinely able to feel the pain of others.
Again, the site is www.ashleysstory.com. View it and please pass the web address along to all your friends.
by Steven Ertelt LifeNews.com Editor October 14, 2004
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- In an editorial column on Friday, Fr. Michael Reilly, a NewsMax.com opinion writer, says he spotted a contradiction in Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's use of his Catholic faith vis-a-vis public policy.
When it comes to issues like abortion, John Kerry has said he can't use his Catholic faith to legislate policy against abortion. As a result, he has voted six times against a ban on partial-birth abortion and 25 times during his twenty year Senate tenure in favor of using taxpayer funds to pay for abortions.
During Wednesday night's debate in Arizona, Kerry said, "I believe that I can't legislate or transfer to another American citizen my article of faith."
"What is an article of faith for me is not something that I can legislate on somebody who doesn't share that article of faith," Kerry added.
However, during his closing remarks in the debate, Kerry said, "My faith affects everything that I do."
"And I think that everything you do in public life has to be guided by your faith, affected by your faith," Kerry said.
Kerry said his faith guides him to "fight against poverty," "to clean up the environment and protect this earth" and to "fight for equality and justice."
"All of those things come out of that fundamental teaching and belief of faith," Kerry concluded.
In his NewsMax.com column, Father Reilly noticed the contradiction in the two statements.
"So for Kerry, it's not appropriate for faith to influence his views on abortion ... but it's the driving force behind his positions on poverty and the environment," Reilly wrote.
Father Reilly said science should show Kerry the obvious point that life begins at conception.
"The truth is, for Sen. Kerry, neither faith nor science has much to do with his position on abortion," Father Reilly wrote.
Reilly said Kerry votes the way he does because he is beholden to special interests in the Democratic Party, namely abortion advocates. Kerry has the endorsement of NARAL and Planned Parenthood, the NewsMax.com writer said.
"In short, while claiming a Catholic heritage, he has used every opportunity to undermine Catholic values," Reilly concluded.
His lust for power knows no bounds. Kerry is tryin' ter slap senior citizens wiv lies about their Social Security benefits. Over the bloomin' weekend, Kerry told seniors that President Bush 'ad a "January surprise" ter privatize Social security.
Kerry also claims current senior benefits will be reduced 30% ter 45%. The democrats even put out a new television ad wiv the bloomin' same false claims.
Here's wot "factCheck.org" 'as ter say about Kerry's new ad: "A Kerry ad claims "Bush 'as a plan ter cut Social Security benefits by 30 ter 45 percent."
That's false. Right. Bush 'as proposed no such plan, and the bloody proposal Kerry refers ter would only slow dahn the bloomin' growff of benefits, and only for future retirees. It were one of free possible "reform models" detailed by a bipartisan commission in 2001."
"The chuffin' plan the Kerry ad refers ter don't affect benefits for current retirees at all, right, and Bush 'as said consistently that wotever plan 'e proposes won't cut benefits for them now drorin' them, or them nearin' retirement. Statin' that Bush plans ter "cut Social Security benefits" will be 'eard by many seniors as a plan ter cut their benefits, wich ain't true."
President Bush, right, from 'is speech at the Republican National Convention: ""We will always keep the bloomin' promise of Social Security for us older workers. Wiv the bloomin' huge Baby Boom generation approachin' retirement, many of us children and grandchildren understandably worry weffer Social Security will be there wen they need it. We must strengffen Social Security by allowin' yunger workers ter Chas'n'Dave some of their taxes in a personal account--a nest egg yer can call yor own, right, and government can never take oray."
Kerry should be tellin' America wot 'is PLAN is for Social Security. Durin' debate free Kerry 'ad this ter say: "I will not privatize it. I will not cut the benefits. And we're gonna be fiscally responsible. And we will take care of Social Security." Kerry tells us nuffink about 'OW 'e will "take care of Social Security." The bleedin' folks at FactCheck.org 'ave this ter say about Kerry:
" Kerry, on the bloody uvver 'and, hasn't said 'ow 'e would preserve the current system. Social Security's finances are unstable, and its trustees stated in the bloody most recent annual report that by the year 2078 it will require a payroll tax increase of nearly 50% ter maintain the currently scheduled rise in benefit levels, right? If taxes ain't increased and no uvver changes are made, benefits would 'ave ter be cut 32% that year."
Kerry and the democrats should be ashamed of this "let's-scare-ffe-seniors- so-they-will-vote-for-us" tactic. Unfortunately, this is so common wiv democrats because they 'ave no core beliefs, right, no moral auffority, and no new ideas ter take America forward.
In a population that loves sports as much as most Americans do, it's only natural that metaphors from football, basketball, baseball, and the like work their way into political analyses. The shorthand question that holds the most potential for being both the most useful and the most idiotic is, "What does Candidate `X' have to do to win?"
The competing paradigms are "getting your base out" [those who are already in your camp] and "appealing to swing [undecided] voters." The CW [Conventional Wisdom] is that while both candidates have used the three debates to reassure their respective bases, Kerry more than Bush reached out to voters still making up their minds.
I would argue that this is wrong, both in general, and as relates to our concerns specifically. In continuing to demonstrate that he is the pro-life champion, the man most dedicated to and most supportive of creating a "culture of life," President Bush has done a far superior job of reaching out to people who are still calibrating how much this issue will affect their vote. Let me explain why.
Given the dynamics, which change slightly from election to election, the lens through which the public sees the candidates on the life issues this year is tax-paying funding of abortion, parental notification, and partial-birth abortion, on the one hand, and the [abuse of] embryonic stem cells, on the other hand. We'll talk about abortion today and embryonic stem cells tomorrow.
As we've discussed this week, the normally sure-footed Mr. Kerry stumbled on abortion. This is hardly surprising for he had to defend very unpopular positions, beginning, in the second debate, with his long support for using tax money to pay for abortions-- which even the Supreme Court says is not required.
His clumsy and incoherent response is that if he fails to make you and me pay for abortion, somehow that would be imposing an "article of his faith" on the public, as if only Catholics opposed subsidizing the killing of the unborn. Advantage Mr. Bush, not just with pro-lifers, but with 70%+ of the American people.
Likewise on parental notification, Kerry found himself trying to explain to the average American why parents shouldn't be told when their minor daughter is contemplating a life-and-death decision. His strategy?
Flagrantly lie about how such laws are written. Pretend that there are not provisions written into that allow the minor to go to a judge when there is suspected abuse at home.
Mr. Bush refused to be diverted, to chase down a diversionary rabbit trail. He cut right to the chase: "My answer is, we're not going to spend taxpayers' money on abortion." Advantage President Bush.
A couple of times Kerry found himself backed into a very uncomfortable corner-those six votes in favor of the brutal partial-birth abortion technique. After listening to Kerry's convoluted don't-hold-me-responsible answer, Bush replied, "Well, it's pretty simple when they say: Are you for a ban on partial birth abortion? Yes or no? And he was given a chance to vote, and he voted no. And that's just the way it is. That's a vote. It came right up. It's clear for everybody to see. And as I said: You can run but you can't hide the reality." Big Advantage Bush.
In last night's third and final debate, moderator Bob Schieffer asked Mr. Kerry "about unnamed Catholic archbishops who are telling people it's a sin for them to vote for candidates like Kerry because of their support for abortion rights and embryonic-stem-cell research," as Mark Brumley described it at www.nationalreview.com this morning. After rambling around, Kerry finally said, "What is an article of faith for me is not something that I can legislate on somebody who doesn't share that article of faith."
But "What article of faith was Kerry talking about?," asks Brumley. "That abortion kills an innocent human being? That's not a peculiarly Catholic belief or `article of faith.' Plenty of people who aren't Catholics think abortion entails taking an innocent human life. President Bush does, and he's a Methodist, not a Catholic. So too many Lutherans, Baptists, Nazarenes, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians agree with faithful Catholics and President Bush. Then there are non-Christians, including many Jews, Muslims, and Hindus, for whom abortion is the killing an innocent human being. Indeed, some people with no religion at all or who deny God's existence take the same position."
Last night's concluding debate, and the response to it, reaffirms two truisms.
First, this will be a very, very close election. Second, Mr. Bush continues to be seen as the far more likeable candidate. This is an indispensable asset in a race that will be decided by the equivalent of a handful of votes in every precinct in America.
A large part of that sentiment is because he is a genuine human being. Another reason is that most people instinctively recoil when Sen. Kerry uses gutter tactics, as he did again last night.
The cynical cruelty he employed didn't work last night, as the responses of a number of focus groups revealed. It won't on November 2 either.
Jim McCrea is one of my favorite bloggers, google his name for many other great topics.
Jesus said, "If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own." (John 15:18, 19).
The "world" here is not the world as created "good" by God, but is, rather, the Biblical concept for that which exalts sheer power, pleasures for their own sake, and material goods above all spiritual realities, and which is opposed to the spirit of Christ, His charity, humility, and self-sacrifice. Alas, it would appear that some particularly hate Catholic Christianity and exercise a vehement form of persecution towards it, as is evident to any with eyes and ears in our time.
For example, there have always been scandals of exceptional human weakness or even wickedness in organizations which consist of human beings . But of all the things that a myriad of other organizations or religions might do wrong, we mainly hear about those in the Catholic Church in the mainstream media. We don't often hear of scandal in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism or but, rather, much respect is given to them by the mainstream media. It is mainly the Catholic Church that is presented as unreasonable - whether they report something done wrong in Her name, or simply present a half truth which puts something out of context. When the media notes that the Church differs with the zeitgeist on a particular issue, often it is framed as "Catholic Church is furious..., " "Church mad as Hell..."
These are tricks which are both ancient and new and are used when someone wants to demonize an 'other'.
We turn now to events more recent. Sexual abuse happens in all denominations, but it has been almost exclusively reported as happening in the Catholic Church in recent times. (Insurance companies know differently). This was done deliberately to give the general public the impression that abuse is a problem particular to Catholic priests. It is a strategy that has worked well, since so many have swallowed that lie (not lying in saying the abuse happened, but lying in giving the impression that it is mainly Catholic priests who are abusers by the emphasis given). One can hardly be blamed for not knwowing that far more teachers in the United States sexually abuse children than clergy. The mainstream media highlights what it wishes and downplays what it wishes. This fact suggests the agenda.
The reason why the mainstream media, along with liberal elites in general, wish to discredit the Catholic Church is that only the Catholic Church hits the bull's eye of Truth. To accept this Truth requires a deep humility where pride and concupiscence must be mortified. No other religion makes as great a demand on the deepest center of man as Catholicism. That is why other religions are much more tolerated by the movers and shakers in society. The mainstream media has much more tolerance for harsh legalistic religions than for the benign authority of the Catholic Church. When a Catholic falls, he falls from the highest principle of his religion. The Truth does not fall. And a fall says nothing against the Truth.
It is true that most other religions encourage virtue and have commandments against vice, but there are some concessions to fallen human nature within all religions except Catholicism. For example, Protestantism does the right thing in exhorting one to live by the ten Commandments and to accept Christ as one's Lord and Savior. However, Protestantism in its essence concedes to man's proud independent nature. It prefers private judgement and will not recognize Christ's authority in the the successor of Peter and in the bishops united to the him (the Magisterium).
Hinduism is perhaps well-tolerated for a similar reason. In Hinduism (especially corrupted forms of it in the west), the transcendent moral law does not exist in the same way that it does in Christianity. In Christianity, we submit to a God who is "totally other" and who is completely independent of the ego. In Hinduism, on the other hand, we attain to a pleasant harmony with "what is" through "enlightenment" and discover that God is our deepest self. This sometimes give generous room to subtle pride and sensuality, leading the devotee to think that these are the motions of the divine within----at witness western pop versions of Hinduism. If a person is his own standard, then it is possible to justify anything. If we are "one with the cosmos," then the cosmos may be the ego inflated to infinity. That would appeal to modern secular man, and the world would love rather than hate such a concept. That would appeal to fallen man's desire to be God.
Of course, Evangelical Protestantism is despised by the liberal elites, right behind Catholicism. This is because "the world" and Christianity have two diametrically opposed goals for human life. The aim of life for the non-spiritual is to conform all things to one's pleasure and to the padding of one's ego. For the Christian, the goal is to conform oneself to Christ. This Christian way may require that one accept all sorts of things that are unpleasant to the self. For the unbeliever, the goal of life is to inflate the self, and all other things and people may be a means to that. For the Christian, the goal of life is to conform oneself to the "other" - to find salvation in a Savior who is Other, who is Christ, rather than being one's own savior and pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps, as "the world" does.
One of the highest phases of this spiritual process, of being conformed to Christ, as it appears in the writings of the saints and the true Catholic sages, is in the acceptance at times of many difficulties (even unfair attacks) which are hard to bear. This is one of the hardest things for human nature to bear, and it is that which a person apart from Christ strives to avoid at all costs. However, the humiliations that God allows in His providence go to the deepest root of our pride and effect a radical purification of our soul, according to the saints. This radical purification is necessary because only when one has been purified, can one enter heaven (see Rev 21:27). Because of this, our cooperation with purification is the work of a life-time. It is the highest wisdom to "turn the other cheek" and accept such non-violence (see Matt 5:38-42), for that is love, and the shortest route to perfection and to heaven (one resists only when some principle or positive value is a stake, never when it is only one's ego at stake -- be glad to have an opportunity to have the ego killed). Such purification is the route to true happiness and peace even in this life, for it is precisely the impurity of sin that makes people unhappy and destroys peace.
It is the Cross, particularly the cross of humiliation, that the world does not comprehend. Many Catholics experience that their non-christian acquaintances find the idea of mortification and self-denial baffling and irrational. To the fervent Catholic, such a thing is a means to make the 'old' man of sin die, in order that Christ rise within him or her. To the unspiritual, on the other hand, mortification and self-denial contradict the "evident" purpose of life which is to make all things conform to one's own pleasure.
It would seem that most persons unconcerned about spiritual realities are not consciously aware of the metaphysical roots of their antipathy to Christianity and to Catholic Christianity in particular--that it is the values of Christianity, registering mainly on the subconscious level of the unbeliever, which provoke such a negative reaction. Often this reaction can be seen in human interactions in day to day life. Much communication takes place on the subconscious level. We "click" with some people and not so easily with others - and usually we don't know why. At every moment we are broadcasting our perspective of reality and personal values with many elements of communication per minute. And we communicate in a multi-dimensional way with others in our social environment, and most of this takes place below the threshold of our conscious understanding. There is a whole series of expressions, body language elements, comments, tones of voice by which information is exchanged between people. Most of this is transferred from the subconscious of one person to the subconscious of another.
What we are mainly aware of on the conscious level is whether we are comfortable or uncomfortable with the person with whom we are interacting. It is these elements of communication that help determine whether we have something in common with the other person or not. Often a Christian will "click" with a Christian, the unspirutal with the unspiritual, but a Christian will often not click with the unspiriual in the same way as with the spiritual, precisely because of their deeper affiliation with Christ Whom they want to share. When we are with some people, the words flow with great ease and pleasure, and we feel validated. With others, we feel that there is a sad wall, and we may experience some kind of loss of energy and / or self-esteem.
There is a fundamental reason why some groupings of people "click" and others do not. It is their basic ethical stance towards reality. Whether people get along or not may largely depend on whether they have a Christian or a worldly stance towards life. Although people sometimes talk about whether they are Christian or anti-Christian, that is often communicated on the subconscious level as discussed.
What is it that is being communicated that makes the difference between the "world" and the Christian Comunity? What does each type of person broadcast and accept or reject on mainly the subconscious level? Even when the Christian is not talking about Christ and Christianity in particular, they communicate on topics of the good and the true. They communicate the objectively important or what is important in itself, and communicate their reverence towards things other and higher than themselves. Even when Christ is not being discussed explicitly, He is being communicated implicitly because Christ is the supreme Good and True to which all goodness and truth point. Christ is the "other" and the "higher" to whom the true Christian is reverent, and this reverence is reflected in the Christian's attitude to being in general. They do this both in explicit topics of conversation and on the subconscious level.
The non-spiritual person on the other hand communicates elements pertaining to the satisfaction of self. In other words, their communications pertain to the subjectively satisfying. In subtle ways, the person of the world communicates his love of the fulfillment of pride and concupiscence. While the Christian looks up to things in reverence, the unbeliever tends to look down on things in haughtiness. While Christian conversation tends to lift things up, worldly conversation tends to tear things down.
Even a marked difference in humor can be seen between the two. The worldly person engages in mocking "humor" which---because it is a mocking--- Reflates higher realities - especially often traditional virtues and values. The Christian, by contrast, engages in a true humor reflecting the incongruous, or their laughter may be an overflow of joy. The true humor of the incongruous is a reflection of the divine because it is a manifestation of what I will call a suprageometric order which transcends that order normally proper to this world. The joy of honest laughter is a foretaste of heaven.
As a result of this, the Christian and those unconcerned with spiritual things may have little in common. So they must begin to find common ground and build on it. Often when someone converts to Christianity, he finds that he can no longer relate to his former friends and he loses them. There is a strong temptation to go back because he is often made to feel that "something is wrong with" him. Something is out of joint. For a while, he may be in a no-man's land until he feels comfortable with his new state, when Providence allows him to fit into a whole new set of people and situations which seem far more satisfying than before his conversion. Then he may seek to invite others more freely to the process of awakening to the message of the Good News.
As mentioned at the beginning, the mainstream media persecutes Christianity, and particularly Catholic Christianity. This is because those in the mainstream media who determine editorial policy, are mainly "of the world" as Jesus said (statistics show that those who work in positions of authority in the mainstream media have a low level of church attendance). Christians can also persecuted by others on a personal level. As previously stated, even when the Christian does not explicitly discuss Christ and Christianity, we are constantly broadcasting the values of Christ and His Kingdom in expressions, body language, comments, tones of voice, without even realizing it. Those who still "are of the world" pick it up on the subconscious level and may react to it with animosity. As Our Lord said:
"If you find that the world hates you, know it has hated me before you. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own; the reason it hates you is that you do not belong to the world. But I choose you out of the world" (John 15:18-19)
But the good news is, this broadcasting of one's state, on the subconscious level of being a Christian, is a form of evangelization in itself. Without realizing it, the true Christian may powerfully draw people to Christ, simply by being. If others are of good will and are open, they will be attracted to this. Instinctively the conversation may turn to Christ and Christianity in particular (we should never force a discussion of Christ when that is not appropriate, a mistake often made by fundamentalists). When the discussion of Christ is appropriate, and when the discussion of the fullness of Christianity which exists in the Catholic Church is appropriate, the true Catholic has a duty to share the Gospel. For the light of Catholic Christianity is like a fire which first warms others and then makes those others catch Fire of the Spirit themselves. As Catholics, we must always be ready to do our duty to back our actions with an explicit explanation of what we have within us. As St. Peter says:
"Venerate the Lord, that is, Christ in your hearts. Should anyone ask you the reason for this hope of yours, be ever ready to reply... (1 Peter 3:15)
ON EMBRYONIC RESEARCH, PARTIAL-BIRTH ABORTION, and PARENTAL NOTIFICATION FOR ABORTION
EMBRYONIC STEM CELL RESEARCH AND HUMAN CLONING
In response to question regarding the merits of using adult stem cells versus embryonic stem cells in research, Kerry said, "Now I think we can do ethically guided embryonic stem cell research. We have 100,000 to 200,000 embryos that are frozen in nitrogen today from fertility clinics. These weren't taken from abortion or something like that. They're from a fertility clinic. And they're either going to be destroyed or left frozen."
NRLC's disagreement with Kerry's support for federal funding of research that requires killing human embryos created by in vitro fertilization (IVF), and our agreement with President Bush's policy, are set forth in detail elsewhere, click here. We make here this additional key point: When Kerry says "embryonic stem cell research," he does NOT mean ONLY using human embryos who were frozen after being created by IVF to produce pregnancies.
On July 13, 2004, Kerry also cosponsored S. 303, a bill to promote the creation of human embryos by cloning for use in stem cell research. The bill specifically provides that these human embryos must not be allowed to develop past 14 days, which is why pro-life opponents refer to it as a "clone and kill" bill. This bill has NOTHING to do with research using embryos created by in vitro fertilization. Rather, it would advance the establishment of what President Bush has aptly referred to as "human embryo farms." For further explanation of this bill, the blatantly conflicting statements by the Kerry campaign about the bill, and two recent public opinion polls on the issue of using cloning to produce human embryos for research, see this memo: http://www.nrlc.org/Killing_Embryos/kerry doubletalk082404.html" title="http://www.nrlc.org/Killing_Embryos/kerry doubletalk082404.html" target="_blank"http://www.nrlc.org/Killing_E...
PARTIAL-BIRTH ABORTION
Senator Kerry said, "I'm against the partial-birth abortion, but you've got to have an exception for the life of the mother and the health of the mother under the strictest test of bodily injury to the mother."
First of all, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban has (and has always had) an explicit exception to allow the method to be used if it were ever necessary to save the life of a mother. (This is a point that Senator John Edwards directly misrepresented in a press release the day the bill was signed into law by President Bush, on November 5, 2003.)
John Kerry repeatedly voted for "substitute amendments" that would have wiped out the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and substituted "phony bans" that would have (1) allowed partial-birth abortions with NO restrictions in the fifth and sixth months, which is when the vast majority are performed, AND ALSO (2) allowed partial-birth abortion even in the seventh month and later either for "health" reasons -- a term that legally includes mental and emotional "well being" (for example, Feinstein Substitute, May 15, 1997, roll call no. 288, failed 28-72), OR, in another approach, allowed post-viability abortions for any degree whatever of "risk" of serious physical health damage -- a standard that a leading practitioner of late abortions said would apply to every pregnancy (Daschle Substitute, May 15, 1997, roll call no. 70, failed 36-64; and Durbin Substitute, October 20, 1999, roll call no. 335, tabled 61-38).
After these killer substitutes were rejected, Kerry voted against passing the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act every chance he got -- six times.
In response to a statement by President Bush that Sen. Kerry opposes requiring parental notification for abortion, Kerry replied: "Secondly, with respect to parental notification, I'm not going to require a 16- or 17-year-old kid who's been raped by her father and who's pregnant to have to notify her father. So you've got to have a judicial intervention. And because they didn't have a judicial intervention where she could go somewhere and get help I voted against it. It's never quite as simple as the president wants you to believe."
Kerry's answer completely misrepresented his voting record on parental notification requirements. Kerry has repeatedly voted AGAINST parental notification require ments even though they incorporated provisions, as required by the Supreme Court, to permit any minor to go before a judge to waive parental notification, and/or that simply allowed the minor herself to foreclose notification by informing the abortion provider that she is the victim of rape, incest, or sexual abuse.
Moreover, in a statement issued by his campaign on July 15, 2004, Kerry offered far most expansive objections to parental notification requirements, including what he sees as the danger that such requirements put teenagers at "risk" of "unwanted childbirth." The July 15 statement went on, "And that's why Kerry voted for common-sense parental consent measures that encourage young woman to talk to their parents about options surrounding an unwanted pregnancy, BUT still make sure that the young woman's welfare and safety is protected by including BROAD EXEMPTIONS for grandparents, aunts, and uncles to provide consent, [OR] the young woman's doctor to indicate that a medical emergency exists, [OR] a court determines that an abortion would be in the young woman's best interest, OR a licensed or certified professional certifies that parental notification could put the young woman at risk." [capitals added for emphasis]
Regarding Kerry's votes against parental notification, we cite here just two examples.
In 1998 Kerry voted to block the Child Custody Protection Act. This bill would make it a federal crime to take a minor across state lines for a secret abortion in order to evade a home-state parental notification law -- but the bill applied ONLY to the state parental notification laws that had passed federal court approval, all of which include the judicial bypass provisions required by the Supreme Court. (Unsuccessful attempt to invoke cloture on S. 1645, Sept. 22, 1998, roll call no. 282).
In 1991, Kerry voted against multiple genuine parental notification amendments, supporting instead various proposals to codify parental circumvention. For example, Kerry opposed the Coats Amendment (July 16, 1991, Coats Amendment to S. 303). The Coats Amendment would have required organizations that receive certain federal funds to notify one parent before performing an abortion on a minor, but it contained a number of broad exemptions, covering any cases in which the minor "declares" that the pregnancy resulted from incest with a parent OR "declares" that she had been subjected to OR was at "risk" (degree of risk unspecified) of "sexual abuse" OR "child abuse" OR "child neglect." In addition, the Coats Amendment contained a medical emergency exception. Kerry voted against it. Here is the full text of the Coats Amendment, electroni cally copied from the Congressional Record, but with capitals added for clarity:
[No notification need occur if] (2) The physician with principal responsibility for making the decision to perform the abortion certifies in the minor's medical record that she is suffering from a physical disorder or disease making the abortion necessary to prevent her death and there is insufficient time to provide the required notice. [OR] (3) THE MINOR DECLARES that the pregnancy resulted from incest with a parent or guardian of the minor OR that she has been subjected to OR is at RISK of sexual abuse, child abuse, OR child neglect by a parent or guardian, as defined by the applicable State law, provided that in any such case the physician notifies the authorities specified by such State law to receive reports of child abuse or neglect of the known or suspected abuse or neglect before the abortion is performed.
This is a commentary is regarding statements made by Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) during the second presidential candidates' debate on October 8, 2004. For further information, send email to legfederal@aol.com.
The statements below may be attributed to NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson.
EMBRYONIC STEM CELL RESEARCH AND HUMAN CLONING
In response to question regarding the merits of using adult stem cells versus embryonic stem cells in research, Kerry said, "Now I think we can do ethically guided embryonic stem cell research. We have 100,000 to 200,000 embryos that are frozen in nitrogen today from fertility clinics. These weren't taken from abortion or something like that. They're from a fertility clinic. And they're either going to be destroyed or left frozen."
NRLC's disagreement with Kerry's support for federal funding of research that requires killing human embryos created by in vitro fertilization (IVF), and our agreement with President Bush's policy, are set forth in detail elsewhere, click here. We make here this additional key point: When Kerry says "embryonic stem cell research," he does NOT mean ONLY using human embryos who were frozen after being created by IVF to produce pregnancies.
On July 13, 2004, Kerry also cosponsored S. 303, a bill to promote the creation of human embryos by cloning for use in stem cell research. The bill specifically provides that these human embryos must not be allowed to develop past 14 days, which is why pro-life opponents refer to it as a "clone and kill" bill. This bill has NOTHING to do with research using embryos created by in vitro fertilization. Rather, it would advance the establishment of what President Bush has aptly referred to as "human embryo farms." For further explanation of this bill, the blatantly conflicting statements by the Kerry campaign about the bill, and two recent public opinion polls on the issue of using cloning to produce human embryos for research, see this memo: http://www.nrlc.org/Killing_Embryos/kerry doubletalk082404.html" title="http://www.nrlc.org/Killing_Embryos/kerry doubletalk082404.html" target="_blank"http://www.nrlc.org/Killing_E...
PARTIAL-BIRTH ABORTION
Senator Kerry said, "I'm against the partial-birth abortion, but you've got to have an exception for the life of the mother and the health of the mother under the strictest test of bodily injury to the mother."
First of all, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban has (and has always had) an explicit exception to allow the method to be used if it were ever necessary to save the life of a mother. (This is a point that Senator John Edwards directly misrepresented in a press release the day the bill was signed into law by President Bush, on November 5, 2003.)
John Kerry repeatedly voted for "substitute amendments" that would have wiped out the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and substituted "phony bans" that would have (1) allowed partial-birth abortions with NO restrictions in the fifth and sixth months, which is when the vast majority are performed, AND ALSO (2) allowed partial-birth abortion even in the seventh month and later either for "health" reasons -- a term that legally includes mental and emotional "well being" (for example, Feinstein Substitute, May 15, 1997, roll call no. 288, failed 28-72), OR, in another approach, allowed post-viability abortions for any degree whatever of "risk" of serious physical health damage -- a standard that a leading practitioner of late abortions said would apply to every pregnancy (Daschle Substitute, May 15, 1997, roll call no. 70, failed 36-64; and Durbin Substitute, October 20, 1999, roll call no. 335, tabled 61-38).
After these killer substitutes were rejected, Kerry voted against passing the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act every chance he got -- six times.
In response to a statement by President Bush that Sen. Kerry opposes requiring parental notification for abortion, Kerry replied: "Secondly, with respect to parental notification, I'm not going to require a 16- or 17-year-old kid who's been raped by her father and who's pregnant to have to notify her father. So you've got to have a judicial intervention. And because they didn't have a judicial intervention where she could go somewhere and get help I voted against it. It's never quite as simple as the president wants you to believe."
Kerry's answer completely misrepresented his voting record on parental notification requirements. Kerry has repeatedly voted AGAINST parental notification require ments even though they incorporated provisions, as required by the Supreme Court, to permit any minor to go before a judge to waive parental notification, and/or that simply allowed the minor herself to foreclose notification by informing the abortion provider that she is the victim of rape, incest, or sexual abuse.
Moreover, in a statement issued by his campaign on July 15, 2004, Kerry offered far most expansive objections to parental notification requirements, including what he sees as the danger that such requirements put teenagers at "risk" of "unwanted childbirth." The July 15 statement went on, "And that's why Kerry voted for common-sense parental consent measures that encourage young woman to talk to their parents about options surrounding an unwanted pregnancy, BUT still make sure that the young woman's welfare and safety is protected by including BROAD EXEMPTIONS for grandparents, aunts, and uncles to provide consent, [OR] the young woman's doctor to indicate that a medical emergency exists, [OR] a court determines that an abortion would be in the young woman's best interest, OR a licensed or certified professional certifies that parental notification could put the young woman at risk." [capitals added for emphasis]
Regarding Kerry's votes against parental notification, we cite here just two examples.
In 1998 Kerry voted to block the Child Custody Protection Act. This bill would make it a federal crime to take a minor across state lines for a secret abortion in order to evade a home-state parental notification law -- but the bill applied ONLY to the state parental notification laws that had passed federal court approval, all of which include the judicial bypass provisions required by the Supreme Court. (Unsuccessful attempt to invoke cloture on S. 1645, Sept. 22, 1998, roll call no. 282).
In 1991, Kerry voted against multiple genuine parental notification amendments, supporting instead various proposals to codify parental circumvention. For example, Kerry opposed the Coats Amendment (July 16, 1991, Coats Amendment to S. 303). The Coats Amendment would have required organizations that receive certain federal funds to notify one parent before performing an abortion on a minor, but it contained a number of broad exemptions, covering any cases in which the minor "declares" that the pregnancy resulted from incest with a parent OR "declares" that she had been subjected to OR was at "risk" (degree of risk unspecified) of "sexual abuse" OR "child abuse" OR "child neglect." In addition, the Coats Amendment contained a medical emergency exception. Kerry voted against it. Here is the full text of the Coats Amendment, electroni cally copied from the Congressional Record, but with capitals added for clarity:
[No notification need occur if] (2) The physician with principal responsibility for making the decision to perform the abortion certifies in the minor's medical record that she is suffering from a physical disorder or disease making the abortion necessary to prevent her death and there is insufficient time to provide the required notice. [OR] (3) THE MINOR DECLARES that the pregnancy resulted from incest with a parent or guardian of the minor OR that she has been subjected to OR is at RISK of sexual abuse, child abuse, OR child neglect by a parent or guardian, as defined by the applicable State law, provided that in any such case the physician notifies the authorities specified by such State law to receive reports of child abuse or neglect of the known or suspected abuse or neglect before the abortion is performed.
Reuters News Service Editor Stirs Controversy With Angry E-Mail About Unborn and President Bush; Reuters “Pipe Bomb” Story Also Questioned
WASHINGTON (Sept. 5, 2004) – When a news editor for a major wire service read a National Right to Life press release about partial-birth abortion, he was outraged, and he decided it was time to express himself.
The release, issued by NRLC on August 26, commented on a federal court ruling that the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act cannot be enforced because it conflicts with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on partial-birth abortion.
Among the hundreds of journalists who received the release by e-mail was Todd Eastham, North American news editor for Reuters Limited, a major national and international news service. On the morning of August 27, Eastham hit his e-mail “reply” button and sent his thoughts back to National Right to Life. In total, these were his words:
What’s your plan for parenting & educating all the unwanted children you people want to bring into the world? Who will pay for policing our streets & maintaining the prisons needed to contain them when you, their parents & the system fail them? Oh, sorry. All that money has been earmarked to pay off the Bush deficit. Give me a frigging break, will you?
NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson, who wrote the press release and who directs the department that received Eastham’s reply, said that Eastham’s angry message came “out of the blue.”
“As far as we can tell, we had never before received any communication from Mr. Eastham – he was on an e-mail list for press releases only because he was listed by the Reuters Washington bureau as a news editor,” Johnson said. “After receiving his provocative e-mail, we did a little research and found that Mr. Eastham was listed as Reuters’ North American news editor. We also found that he both edited political stories and had reported under his own byline on many different subjects, including political stories and stories about the Catholic Church.”
Regarding the substance of Eastham’s comments, Johnson commented, “It appeared that Mr. Eastham felt very strongly that abortion is necessary to prevent the birth of children who will otherwise snatch some bread from his mouth. I have four children, three of them adopted. Two of the four already pay taxes, and so far none of the four seems headed for prison.”
(A collection of other comments on Eastham’s e-mail appears here.)
Later on August 27, Eastham’s e-mail was reported on the popular website nationalreview.com by Romesh Ponnuru. Soon it was being reproduced, and commented on, by many other publications and websites, including a large number of the so-called “blogs.” “Blogs” are websites, usually maintained by private individuals (“bloggers”), that feature frequent journal-like commentaries on current events.
On August 30, Howard Kurtz, who covers the news media for the Washington Post, reproduced Eastham’s e-mail in his widely read “Media Notes” column.
Kurtz quoted Johnson as saying it was “sad” to see “such blatant hostility” toward the Bush administration and unborn children. He quoted Reuters spokesman Stephen Naru as saying it was “unfortunate” that an editor “chose to offer his personal opinion.”
Kurtz also reported, “But Eastham, saying he doesn't usually edit stories involving abortion, responds that he read the release ‘as a personal political solicitation and was not responding in my capacity as an editor. I didn’t intend this as a professional communication.’”
Johnson commented to NRL News, “Since Eastham sent the e-mail from his official Reuters e-mail account, I wonder how we are supposed to distinguish between a news editor in his ‘professional communication’ mode and the same editor in his ‘unprofessional communication’ mode.”
Johnson dismissed as “ludicrous on its face” Eastham’s claim that the press release – which was headed, ‘Statement by National Right to Lifeon the future of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act’ – was “a personal political solicitation.”
Eastham’s e-mail was reported in many venues as well, including The Weekly Standard, christianitytoday.com, Family News in Focus, and LifeNews.com. On August 30, Cybercast News Service ran a story which was picked up by the popular website www.drudgereport.com. On August 31, Fox News Network Washington bureau chief Brit Hume reported on Eastham’s e-mail in his daily “Political Grapevine” feature.
On the same day, the Reuters e-mail was the subject of a critical commentary by James Taranto in his “Best of the Web Today,” a popular feature on www.opinionjournal.com, a website associated with the Wall Street Journal.
Two days later, on September 2, Taranto reported, “Our item Tuesday about Reuters editor Todd Eastham’s angry e-mail to the National Right to Life Committee prompted an e-mail from Reuters spokesman Steve Naru, who relayed a statement from David Schlesinger, the ‘news’ service’s global managing editor, which reads in part: ‘I personally was appalled by the incident and I can assure you it has been handled robustly through our internal disciplinary process.’ We wrote back to ask what ‘handled robustly through our internal disciplinary process,’ means, and Naru replied that this information is confidential. He did reveal, however, that Eastham ‘is not employed in the same capacity. We are making appropriate adjustments to his duties.’”
On September 3, Schlesinger also sent an e-mail to Johnson, in which he said, “I was personally appalled by Mr. Eastham’s lapse; it has been handled through our disciplinary process and he understands the seriousness of what happened.”
Schlesinger did not explain the nature of the “disciplinary process,” but he wrote, “Freedom from bias is integral to all that Reuters represents, and I intend to keep it that way.”
Johnson said that Schlesinger’s statements were welcome, but added, “I have to wonder about the culture of a newsroom in which such sentiments would be so casually conveyed by an editor, whose job presumably includes reviewing reporters’ stories for bias and distortions.”
Johnson also sharply questioned Reuters coverage of a pipe bomb that exploded in a biotech laboratory near Boston on August 26. No one was hurt, but the lab suffered an estimated $250,000 in damage.
A Reuters dispatch the next dayleft the clear impression that the attack might have something to do with opponents of embryonic stem cell research. But reporters for other news outlets who actually checked the facts quickly ascertained that Amaranth has nothing at all to do with embryo-based research. Indeed, the firm is engaged in adult stem-cell research, a type of research that is constantly applauded and promoted by virtually all people who oppose embryo-destructive research.
For example, The Scientist Daily News reported on August 31, “Police in Watertown, Mass., said yesterday that they don't believe that the unknown person who blew up a pipe bomb in a biotech laboratory there last Thursday (August 26) was protesting stem cell research, as has been broadly suggested, because the company uses only adult cells in its research -- not controversial embryonic cells.”
That story and others said that authorities were focusing on a former employee of another firm in the same building. who was out on bail while awaiting trial for allegedly trying to burn down the same building in 2003.
On August 31, that individual was arrested for the bombing. On September 1, Reuters sent out a new dispatch, which ran in many newspapers across the nation, that actually compounded its original error.
The lead sentence for the September 1 storywas, “PoliceWednesday arrested a man in connection with last week’s pipe bomb explosion at a Boston-area laboratory specializing in stem-cell research,” without distinguishing between research that requires killing human embryos and other types of stem cell research. Fully one-third of the story was devoted to references to a “national debate” over “stem cell research,” references to restrictions adopted by President Bush, and the concluding observation, “Democratic candidate John Kerry has said he would reverse Bush’s actions.”
NRLC’s Johnson commented, “Reuters never told its readers that the lab was in fact engaged only in precisely the sort of ethical stem cell research that is strongly supported by President Bush and other opponents of embryo-destroying research, and it strongly implied just the opposite. The reader could leave the story only with the strong impression that the crime probably had something to do with opposition to embryonic stem cell research – why else devote a third of the story to that subject? Yet, the contrary facts were easily ascertainable and were reported by many other news outlets.”
Johnson concluded, “The Reuters dispatches on the bombing were laden with misinformation that was inserted without any evident effort to check the facts, apparently on the basis of sheer assumption -- which is a textbook symptom of journalistic bias.”
An individual member of the species homo sapiens who is fully expelled from his or her mother, and who is breathing or shows other signs of life, is properly referred to as:
a. a baby
b. an infant
c. a newborn
d. a neonate
e. a fetus
According to the editors at the Associated Press Washington Bureau, the correct answer is "e."
Kerry Was One Of Only 14 Senators To Vote Against 1996 Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA), Which Banned Federal Recognition Of Gay Marriage And Same-Sex Partner Benefits. (H.R. 3396, CQ Vote #280: Passed 85-14: R 53-0; D 32-14, 9/10/96, Kerry Voted Nay)
Kerry Praised Massachusetts Civil Unions Ruling, Saying It Called On MA Legislature To "Ensure Equal Protection For Gay Couples." "I have long believed that gay men and lesbians should be assured equal protection and the same benefits - from health to survivor benefits to hospital visitation - that all families deserve. While I continue to oppose gay marriage, I believe that today’s decision calls on the Massachusetts state legislature to take action to ensure equal protection for gay couples. These protections are long over due." (John Kerry For President, "Statement From John Kerry On Massachusetts Gay Marriage Ruling," Press Release, 11/18/03)
Kerry Supports "Access To Pensions, Health Insurance, Family Medical Leave, Bereavement Leave, Hospital Visitation, Survivor Benefits, And Other Basic Legal Protections" For Same-Sex Couples. "John Kerry believes that same-sex couples should be granted rights, including access to pensions, health insurance, family medical leave, bereavement leave, hospital visitation, survivor benefits, and other basic legal protections that all families and children need. He has supported legislation to provide domestic partners of federal employees the benefits available to spouses of federal employees." (John Kerry For President Website, "A Record Of Working On Behalf Of Gay And Lesbian Americans," www.johnkerry.com, Accessed 1/27/04)
Kerry Said Vatican Should Not Instruct Catholic Politicians, Calling It "Inappropriate." "The Vatican’s call for Catholic politicians to fight gay marriage is an ‘inappropriate’ violation of the separation of church and state in America, U.S. Sen. John Kerry said Friday. ‘I believe in the church and I care about it enormously,’ said the Democrat from Massachusetts, a Catholic who is running for president. ‘But I think that it’s important to not have the church instructing politicians. That is an inappropriate crossing of the line in America.’ Kerry’s comments came a day after the Vatican announced a campaign against gay marriages and gay adoptions, stating that Catholic politicians have a ‘moral duty’ to oppose laws granting legal rights to gay couples. Kerry opposes gay marriage, but has said he supports civil unions, such as those allowed in Vermont, which grant gay couples most of the rights and benefits of marriage." ("Kerry Scolds Catholic Church For Pressuring Lawmakers," The Associated Press, 8/1/03)
Kerry Expressed "Moral Outrage" With Vatican’s Statement On Gay Marriage. "[Kerry] said political concerns are secondary to his moral outrage over Thursday’s Vatican statement on gay marriage. ‘Our founding fathers separated church and state in America. It is an important separation,’ he said. ‘It is part of what makes America different and special, and we need to honor that as we go forward and I’m going to fight to do that.’ Catholics were stunned at the broadside from Kerry, saying he’s sure to draw the ire of some 65 million voting Catholics." (David R. Guarino, "Kerry Raps Pope," The Boston Herald, 8/2/03)
"Minutes before the debate, Time correspondent MattCooper said of the Kerry comeback scenario: 'Everyone inthis room wants to write it. They're aching to write it.When the polls close up, you'll see more of it.'"
From "A Changed Political Landscape, or an Isolated Peakin the Polls?," by Howard Kurtz, in this morning'sWashington Post.
"13. Does anyone in the dominant media 'root' for Cheneyover Edwards? (If you can't list the reasons the press willbe rooting for the Tar Heel, you have been asleep for atleast four years …
"15. Do those who remain unswayed by [former CBSnewsman] Bernie Goldberg [who argues there is pervasivemedia bias] need any more evidence than gained bycomparing the press' coverage of Zell Miller (almostuniversally negative, typical of what conservativeDemocrats get ) to today's New York Times slobberingover Lincoln Chaffee (who gets the normal glowingcoverage afforded moderate, heretic Republicans)?"
From ABC News' "The Note," this morning.
Having been both an activist and an observer ofresidential politics since 1960, I'd like to offer a fewobservations that might help put the post-debate mediameltdown in perspective.
First, in terms of style points, Sen. John Kerry performedwell. Did his performance rate the 'ten' so many punditsgave him? No, but the desire to write a story that says hehad seized the "momentum" meant that reporters wouldinevitably ratchet up his verbal handiwork.
Overlay that reality with what even ABC's "The Note"concedes is a decided tilt toward Kerry/Edwards and wecan expect a barrage of hostile Bush/Cheneyarticles comparable in number to what we know will be atsunami of gushy pro-Kerry/Edwards accounts.
Second, we won't know how much real change, if any, thedebate caused until at least after the second debate laterthis week. I suspect it will prove to be relatively small. Ineither case, the essential truth of this election will remainin tact: the outcome will be very, very close.
Third, be sure to download the comparison piece thatdocuments how pro-life President Bush and pro-abortionSen. Kerry have totally opposite positions on whetherunborn children deserve legal protection.
Switching topics, I'd like to offer a brief update in theongoing case of Terri Schindler-Schiavo. As we reportedlast week, the Florida Supreme Court overturned "Terri'sLaw," which the legislature passed in 2003 to empowerGov. Jeb Bush to reinsert the feeding tube through whichTerri receives her only nourishment. It did so on the grounds that the law violated the separation of powers between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.
On Monday Gov. Bush asked the Florida High Court to reconsider its unanimous decision. While stating that he respected the “role and judgment of the Florida Supreme Court,†Gov. Bush said in a statement that the doctrine of the separation of powers shouldn't be used to undercut the due process rights of governors or lawmakers, according to the AP.
''The court's ruling appears to violate these rights and we have asked for a rehearing on those grounds,'' Bush said.
Burke Balch is director NRLC's Robert Powell Center forMedical Ethics. In the October issue of National Right toLife News, Mr. Balch outlines a legislative response to thehigh court's decision.
S.B. 692 is a bill that would address denial of food andfluids not only to Schindler-Schiavo, who is severelybrain-injured, but also to other persons with disabilitieslike hers. A link from www.nrlc.org allows Floridaresidents, by entering their zipcodes, to get contactinformation for their state senators and representatives.
There has been an additional front opened in the battle tosave Terri from death by starvation. According to theAssociated Press (AP), last week the lead attorney forRobert and Mary Schindler, Terri's parents, argued "thatshe would have been profoundly affected by new Catholicteachings on end-of-life issues."
"Our case is pretty simple," said David Gibbs. "I say thepope would have changed her mind." Gibbs was referringto the address Pope John Paul II delivered last March inRome to the International Congress on "Life-SustainingTreatments and the Vegetative State: Scientific Advancesand Ethical Dilemmas."
In those remarks, the Pontiff said, "The administration ofwater and food, even when provided by artificial means,always represents a natural means of preserving life, not amedical act . . . and as such [is] morally obligatory."
Gibbs' argument is that prior to 1990, when for reasonsthat remain shrouded in mystery Terri stopped breathing,Terri had been a practicing Catholic. In light of the Pope'sremarks it would violate her religious beliefs to removeher feeding tube.
Michael Schiavo's attorney argued this is only a delaytactic. But Pat Anderson, who recently stepped down asthe Schindlers' lead attorney, told the AP, "Thereligious-liberty motion goes to the heart of the case. Theengine that is driving the judge's decisions is that Terri'swish is to die. It is our contention that Terri, as a Catholic,raised in the tenets of the Catholic Church, would choosenot to defy the pope."
You have to give Sen. John Kerry credit, in a backhanded sort of way. He is to straight-shooting answers what Dan Rather is to bias-free reporting. Yet, for the most part, the media choose not to insist that Kerry straighten out his meandering answers.
NRLC devotes most of its attention to Kerry's catch-me-if-you-can answers on abortion for the simple reason that's the area of our concern about which he has rambled the most. But he has commented ever so briefly on another important dimension of our mission.
An article in yesterday's 'Best of the Web Today' (written by James Taranto for the Wall Street Journal) reminded me that Kerry was at least once asked about the case of Terri Schindler-Schiavo. For those few of our readers unfamiliar with Terri, she is the severely brain-injured woman whose husband is determined to remove the tube through which his wife receives her food and fluids and whose parents are every bit as resolute that their daughter continue to receive nourishment.
Last week, citing the National Organization on Disabilities, Taranto remarked that Kerry's once hefty lead among people with disabilities had vanished.
Based on a poll conducted by Harris Interactive, the National Organization on Disabilities press release said, 'Among U.S. adults with disabilities who are likely voters, 48 percent said they were either likely to vote for, or leaning toward voting for President Bush, while 46 percent said the same for Sen. Kerry. Three percent favored Ralph Nader.' A month prior, in another Harris Interactive poll, Kerry led 50% to 40%.
Last Thursday Taranto voiced his own explanation. Yesterday, Taranto cited a blogger by the name of Ed Jordan who “has a different theory: that the disabled fear for their lives under a Kerry administration.â€
Jordan posed the question this way: “What else has happened in the last month [besides the explanation Taranto offered] to highlight the different attitudes that Bush and Kerry hold toward the disabled?â€
Jordan referred his readers to a stinging rebuke to Kerry--an August 30 article written by Lucy Gwin that appeared in “Ragged Edge Online,†a disability-rights magazine. (Jordan is editor of “Mouth,†also a disability-rights magazine.)
The title of Gwin’s article was, “Where does John Kerry stand on our right to remain alive?†It was prefaced with this summary: “Mouth magazine's Lucy Gwin asks Democratic candidate John Kerry why the disability rights take on the issue seems of so little interest to him.â€
Gwin, who is a Democrat, graphically outlined the fate awaiting Terri.
“Her estranged husband seeks permission to disconnect the tube through which she receives food and water," Gwin writes. "Terri is conscious, and has been heard to say ‘Pain!’ and ‘Help me!’ Long before she starves, she will dehydrate. Her tongue will turn black. Her eyeballs will crack. Many say she's too brain-damaged to feel it, but we all know even a goldfish would feel it.â€
What is President Bush’s position? “The disabled know that President Bush is in their camp on these ‘right-to-live†™ issues,†Gwin writes. “Last year when the Florida legislature passed and Gov. Jeb Bush signed, the law to re-insert Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, President George W. Bush said, ‘I believe my brother made the right decision.’"
How about Sen. Kerry?
“Last November when Terri was news, you [Kerry] begged the question, telling Tallahassee reporters, 'There are some very thorny, legitimate issues,’†Gwin writes. “What's so ‘thorny’ about some guy forcefully dehydrating the wife he's replaced?â€
Gwin’s conclusion is devastating.
“Between the two Harris Interactive polls in which the shift of disabled American voters to Bush occurred, Terri Schiavo has come back into the news. The Florida Supreme Court overturned ‘Terri's Law,’ and there is once again real danger that Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube will be removed.
“Disabled Americans may or may not be sensitive to Kerry's cynical use of disabled veterans as campaign props," she continued. "But there is good reason to believe they are sensitive to the fact that liberals like Senator Kerry want to give them the right to die, while conservatives like President Bush want to give them the right to live.â€
Once again, the more people learn about Sen. Kerry, the less likely they are to find him acceptable.
Be sure to download the one-page Bush/Kerry comparison flyer found at www.nrlc.org.
As those who've had him as a nemesis know, pro-abortion Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) is a formidable foe. Referring to his staunch and tenacious opposition to Republican proposals, the Wall Street Journal once dubbed the Senate "Daschle's Dead Zone." Daschle is up for re-election this year and is in the midst of as competitive a Senate race as any in the country.
Pro-lifers know him for his utter ruthlessness in foiling a number of pro-life initiatives sponsored by Congressional pro-life leaders and President George W. Bush. When Daschle was majority leader during the 2001-2002 session, for example, he killed five bills which had passed the House of Representatives by denying them votes in the Senate, according to NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson.
These were the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act ("Laci and Conner's Law"), the Human Cloning Prohibition Act, the Child Custody Protection Act, and the Abortion Non-Discrimination Act.
"The first two measures became law only after Daschle lost the Majority Leader status at the beginning of the current Congress and was no longer able to prevent them from coming to the floor," Johnson explained.
Daschle is an object lesson in how pro-abortion politicians simultaneously finesse their role in furthering the cause of abortion and in deflecting criticism that they have changed their position-a.k.a. flip-flopped. (When he was first running for Congress in 1978, Daschle described abortion as an "abhorrent practice.")
Former Congressman John Thune is Daschle's Republican opponent. When Thune pulled out a fund-raising letter Daschle wrote for NARAL two years ago, it became far more difficult for Daschle to hide his leadership role in fending off pro-life legislation and electing pro-abortion members to the Senate.
Like many established pro-abortion politicians, Daschle's response to Thune (and reporters) blends remarks that challenge the reader's intelligence with a stunning arrogance. The opening paragraph from a story that appeared this week in the Rapid City Journal shows readers just how brazen Daschle has become: "Two years after Sen. Tom Daschle sent out a fund- raising letter for the National Abortion Rights Action League saying he had `stood up for a woman's right to choose,' Daschle refuses to say whether he is pro-choice on abortion."
But to get the full flavor of Daschle's chutzpah, you have to read a couple of paragraphs further into reporter Kevin Woster's story. [Woster is referring to the letter sent to NARAL supporters asking for donations to NARAL "Save the Senate" campaign.]
"When reminded that he had said in the Oct. 29, 2002 letter, that the `Senate's pro-choice leadership' was being threatened by `anti-choice force,' he still refused to say whether he considered himself pro-choice."
And (get this)"Daschle also questioned the appropriateness of the question."
But, in some ways, it gets even worse. Presumably with a straight face, Daschle tells Woster, "That letter was not intended to be a fund-raiser for NARAL whatsoever."
However, as several people have noted, the letter was nothing but a NARAL fundraiser. It was addressed to "NARAL supporter," e-mailed to the NARAL list, and contained six active links that went directly to the donation forms on the NARAL website, one of which still works!
Daschle also suggests the letter was merely to help one colleague running for the Senate. But, in fact, as Worster points out,"The letter was written under a headline that read: 'Last chance to keep pro-choice leadership in the Senate.' Those words were near a picture of Daschle where he was identified as the majority leader in the Senate."
If that weren't enough, in that breathtakingly dishonest fashion pro-abortion politicians have perfected, Daschle insists, "I am against abortion."
Pressed to square the circle, Daschle's maneuvers are classics in misdirection. We learn from Woster's story that Daschle "avoided making a direct response to the question several times Monday during a telephone interview from Washington, D.C. Rather than address the pro-choice question directly, Daschle stated his long-standing personal view that each abortion is a tragedy but that the solution lies in finding better options rather than criminalizing the act itself."
But just a moment's look at the pro-life legislation Daschle killed proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no law--no matter how commonsensical, no matter how much it is overwhelmingly supported by Americans, no matter how much support it enjoyed in the Senate--that he won't attempt to stop dead in its tracks.
"The NARAL letter, I think, removes all doubt about where his position is," Thune told the Rapid City Journal. "I'm just shocked that he doesn't own up to his position. How can a guy call himself a leader when he can't decide his position on an issue like this that is so clear cut.
"He wants to be pro-choice for the people who are pro-choice, then he describes himself to the voters as anti-abortion. That's the disturbing pattern with Daschle."
It all reminds you of that scene in the "Wizard of Oz" when Oz tells Dorothy and her friends to "ignore that man behind the curtain." After enduring 26 years of blue smoke and mirrors, we can hope that South Dakota voters will ignore the bluster and trust their eyes.
The British Government yesterday washed its hands of all responsibility for the submarine, HMCS Chicoutimi which they sold to Canada less than a month ago.
HMCS Chicoutimi is now drifting without power in poor weather after having experienced a fire while at sea off the west coast of Ireland. Canada was claiming yesterday that the British have sold them a dud, but the British Government was quick to wash its hand of the affair, stating that the guarantee registration has still not been received at Whitehall.
“If they haven’t bothered to fill in the warranty form and get it stamped by the store then the guarantee is null and void.” A spokesman told BIGfib. “Even if it’s in the post and does eventually turn up, reports that we have received that the users have opened the engine, would, if they turn out to be true completely invalidate the warranty.”
You and I deal literally with life and death issues like abortion. It is very hard not to get angry when you are witness to shameless lies whose purpose it is to mislead the public and thereby further the anti-life cause. Yet, if only to keep yourself going, you have to pick and choose.
There's only so-much psychic energy, and if you get disturbed every time you run across another instance of lies, distortions, exaggerations, doctoring, runs-around, evasions, and/or all-purpose phony baloney, you're not going to last long. But today's example definitely merits anger, although exasperation may be the more dominant emotion.
It's no revelation to our readers that Sen. John Kerry will say anything. But in particular the ways he uses and abuses the stem cell issue make my blood boil. He is preying on people whose serious illnesses and desperation for a cure makes them exceedingly gullible.
The Kerry campaign has a new 30-second ad that features actor Michael J. Fox. (Fox, as you may know, has Parkinson's.) The script reads as follows:
MICHAEL J. FOX: "John Kerry strongly supports stem cell research. George Bush is putting limits on it. Stem cell research can help millions of Americans whose lives have been touched by devastating illnesses. George Bush says we can wait. I say lives are at stake and it's time for leadership. That's why I support John Kerry for president."
Combine this with Kerry's accusations Monday that Mr. Bush is guilty of "sacrificing science for ideology and playing politics with people who need cures"--and then add to that slander Kerry's evidence-free promise that, were it not for "the stem cell ban," treatment "could be right at our fingertips"--and you have demagoguery at its rankest.
As Vice President Dick Cheney said this week, when responding to one of Sen. Edwards's non-sequiturs, "it's hard to know where to start. There's so many inaccuracies there." Inaccuracies and distortions.
1. Not one word even hints that Fox is talking about embryonic stem cells, the securing of which claims the embryo's life. Why is this important? When people are asked, "Do you support or oppose using tax dollars to pay for the kind of stem cell research that requires the killing of human embryos?," 53% say they oppose. By contrast, when asked if they support using tax dollars "for the kind of stem cell research that does not require the killing of human embryos?," 74% say support.
2. Not one word that even alludes to the fact that the stem cells in every experiment to date that has shown promise in humans have come from sources other than the unborn. Progress is NOT dependent on harvesting human embryos. (See below.)
3. President Bush has not counseled-or promoted-"waiting." As Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, writes in an op-ed that appears in this morning's Washington Post, "The Bush policy takes very seriously the potential of stem cell research to provide cures for chronic diseases and disabilities."
In August 2001 the president made federal funding for embryonic stem cell research available for the first time, limited to those embryonic stem cell lines already in existence, and thus would not require the killing of human embryos. The President's policy (in Kass's words) refuses to "be complicit in or to reward future destructive and coarsening practices."
Helpfully, Kass places the policy in context. He reminds his readers that the Dickey Amendment, first passed in 1995 and re-enacted each year with bi-partisan support, forbids federal funding of research in which human embryos are harmed or destroyed. That amendment shows "respect for early human life," Kass writes, and the president's stem cell policy "upholds not only the letter but also the moral spirit of that law."
In addition, the current policy, Kass writes, "offers abundant federal support for promising, morally unproblematic research using non-embryonic (adult) stem cells."
What about Kerry's charge of "playing politics?" Let me quote a particular trenchant observation by Dr. Kass.
"It is not the president but his critics who are playing politics with the people who need cures. It is cruel to suggest that stem-cell-based therapies are `at our fingertips' when our best scientists have made it clear that it will be at least several decades before anyone's disease or disability might be cured by this means. It is cruel to suggest that a reversal of the current Bush policy -- dishonestly labeled a `ban' -- is all that scientists need to enable the wheelchair-bound to walk again, and soon."
For me, adding insult to injury, is a piece that appeared Wednesday in Kerry's personal PR machine, the Boston Globe, reporting on a town hall meeting Kerry held Tuesday in New Hampshire. The only thing possibly more unconscionable than Kerry's remarks was the puff job story that painted a picture of Kerry as a cross between Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa.
Various people, young and old, with many debilitating diseases came to the town meeting, to praise Kerry for his "stand." Obviously looking for straws to grasp, they had been sucked in by Kerry's unprincipled promise of cures the day after tomorrow.
As I read the Globe story, what came to my mind were scenes from old movies, where a huckster comes to town.The traveling "medicine man" tells the unsuspecting audience, "Just buy this elixir, folks. A couple of swigs of this here patent medicine and your troubles will be over."
What a jerk!
Be sure to watch the debate tonight. You can be sure Kerry will be peddling more snake-oil, as he trolls for additional easy marks.
“The lunatic is on the grass. The lunatic is on the grass.”
It was an hour before midnight. Ten-year-old James was in his bedroom, alone, when he was suddenly gripped by terror. A Pink Floyd song rang out through the empty room. The radio turned on by itself.
“The lunatic is on the grass. The lunatic is in the hall.”
James lay paralyzed, locked in that helpless state that is itself as terrifying as whatever causes it. He wanted to move or cry out but couldn’t. So he just listened.
“The lunatic is in my head. There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.”
This was James’s first direct experience with evil, but it wouldn’t be his last. “That would become something that would be common,” he remembers. “I’d have a feeling of something scary being present. Then something weird would happen.”
First the presence, then the strange thing. It would recur that way throughout his life.
This is the first phase of demonic activity, the devil’s first tentative steps into a life. For all the victims of demonic activity I spoke with, this sort of thing is common. And like James, they all wished to remain anonymous.
One victim felt the evil presence as a physical weight; another saw a grotesque person. One saw nothing—literally—in one part of a room, “like a pitch-black sheet had been pulled down.”
Another victim—a well-known Catholic leader respected for his pragmatism—said, “My most frequent encounters involve black shadows and figures that I see out of the corner of my eye…. I’ll see something in my peripheral vision. It’s almost always in motion. When I turn my head, the figure will melt quickly into a fluid-like shadow and then flow away through the edges of the room or along the ceiling. I see these things frequently, almost every day.” His encounters are cinematically frightening, involving infestations of crows, carpets of spiders, cats gathering to stare at him from his front porch, objects flying through rooms in his house, and inhuman figures standing in darkened hallways.
The evil presence manifests itself through senses other than sight, as well. “I occasionally hear things, voices sounding far away and choppy,” one victim said. “I sometimes get overwhelmed with a sulfury smell,” described another.
A friend of one of the victims listed these manifestations: “He’d get an oppressive feeling. Sometimes he’d see a grotesque, impish figure, a short, really nasty-looking demon. When he described it to Rome’s exorcist, Father Gabriel Amorth, he said, ‘Oh, that guy.’ Other times, he’d just hear screaming. Deafening noise. I don’t know what you’d want to call it. The wailing of the damned.”
But there was one phenomenon that all the victims have experienced: “I could feel something there, looking at me.”
James felt that presence again on a visit home from college. He was awakened at 1:30 a.m. with the feeling that someone was approaching the front door. He went downstairs, and soon one of his sisters walked in, drunk. He talked to her in the living room, warning her about drinking too much.
That’s when the presence came. Then the strange thing.
The phone rang, and he picked it up. A female voice said, “Don’t even try to talk to her. Just leave her alone.”
He hung up and talked to his sister anyway. But, before long, the presence returned.
“I knew the phone was going to ring,” he said. He reached for it. “Then it rang.”
It was the same voice, but distorted, “like she had marbles in her mouth.” Emphatically, the voice commanded, “I told you not to talk to her!”
He cut his lecture short.
James’s parents consulted the Jesuit Rev. John Hardon about his case.
“He told me that there are three orders of reality,” said James, whose family confirms the account (Father Hardon died three years ago). “There is the divine existence. Just below that is the preternatural world, the world of spirits, angels good or bad. Then there’s the natural world, where we live. But human beings also participate in the preternatural.”
Father Hardon told him that some people are more attuned to the preternatural world. “They kind of sense things better,” James said. “Things like what I just explained to you.”
Things like demons.
He Wants to Be With You Forever
When I agreed to do a story about demonic activity, possession, and exorcism for Crisis, I thought it would be fun—a spooky thrill. I’d write the article, warn about being too preoccupied with the subject matter, and be done. Instead, I got sleepless nights, horrifying conversations with those who have been involved in exorcisms, and a new point of view on the demonic world.
Skeptics have fought a losing battle against belief in the devil for years. “What are the Church’s greatest needs at the present time?” Pope Paul VI asked in November 1972. “Don’t be surprised at Our answer and don’t write it off as simplistic or even superstitious: One of the Church’s greatest needs is to be defended against the evil we call the Devil.”
There’s an age-old battle between philosophers and poets about the nature of evil. The pope sided with the poets. “Evil is not merely an absence of something but an active force, a living, spiritual being that is perverted and that perverts others. It is a terrible reality, mysterious and frightening.”
The Vatican has issued updated norms of exorcism as recently as 1999.
Demons are an inescapable part of the Old Testament. They are named there: Lucifer in Isaiah, Asmodeus in Tobit, Satan in Job. And the New Testament can almost sound like the story of Christ the Exorcist, come to earth to end the reign of that strongman, Beelzebub. In St. John’s words, “The reason the son of man appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.”
Some manner of belief in demons is part of every religion in every age, and the diabolical world haunts moderns with no religion, too. Most horror movies work by suggesting that there’s another layer to the world—one we don’t often see—that is filled with darkness. Puncture it a little, and chaos pours out.
Some of the stories I’ll tell involve contorted bodies, glowing eyes, levitation, and other Hollywood aspects of demonic activity. But I decided to focus on James’s story, which is terrifying in a more typical way. It’s filled with ambiguity, punctuated occasionally by bursts of darkness. And it has left him spiritually weary. Because the truth is, the victims of demonic activity don’t live in carnival haunted houses. They exist at the edges of a malaise. They’re anxious or depressed, disoriented in their spiritual lives or slowly losing their minds—always wondering if the thoughts filling their heads are really their own.
“I don’t experience them as clever ‘fallen’ angels,” said one of the victims I spoke with. “I’m not sure I sense a great deal of intelligence there, at all. It’s like they’re working on some kind of animal instinct.”
Catholic writer Mark Shea has pointed out that the devil, in rejecting the ultimate good that is God, rejected secondary goods, like intelligence, as well. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t clever—the late exorcist Malachi Martin once said that the one thing an exorcist must never do is try to reason with the devil. But as a conversationalist, he’s probably not like the demons in the Screwtape Letters. He’s more like the captured alien in Independence Day: a highly developed insect who answers the president’s careful negotiations by saying, simply, “Die.”
So why dwell on the diabolical world at all?
Paul VI explained, “This matter of the Devil and of the influence he can exert on individuals as well as on communities, entire societies or events, is a very important chapter of Catholic doctrine which should be studied again, although it is given little attention today.”
In three different ways, I found that to be true.
First, the stories I collected add up to a giant neon sign saying “Stay away from witchcraft” and other occult practices. When I asked exorcists if witchcraft is a gateway to more serious demonic activity, they were incredulous. Gateway? It’s directly dealing with the demonic! Nearly everyone they treat has been exposed in some way to Ouija boards, spells, hexes, “white magic,” or tarot cards—the stuff your local chain bookstore fills its shelves with because it sells so well.
Second, even if you’re never tempted by witchcraft, recalling the nature of the demonic world can be a moral “Scared Straight” lesson. Try this: The next time you face a temptation, remind yourself that you’re cooperating with the malevolent will of a highly developed insect that hates you yet wants to be with you forever. You’ll find your old reliable sins lose a little of their allure.
And third, I found that these aren’t simply horror stories. Horror stories work by attacking hope. But we aren’t helpless when we face the devil. “The power of Satan is, nonetheless, not infinite,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. “He is only a creature, powerful from the fact that he is pure spirit, but still a creature.”
Modern-day saints like Blessed Mother Teresa fought the devil and won. The devil tried to possess Mother Teresa when she was sick in the hospital, Father Amorth told the National Catholic Register. An Indian exorcist kept him at bay.
We can take comfort in the fact that God never allows more for a soul than it can handle and that it’s only after we invite demons in that they cause us serious problems.
Or when we leave ourselves wide open to them by spending time with witches, like James did.
Because if the first phase of demonic activity—the presence of evil—comes at the devil’s initiative, the second phase comes at our own.
There are two common ways the devil enters a person, one exorcist told me. “The basic one is through sin. The person turns away from God and commits sin frequently. The devil finds a willing victim. He finds a friend. Conversely, there’s the person who is good, and the devil goes after him. The devil tries to wear the person down.”
‘He’s Ready to Meet You Now’
“This is not a pleasant story,” James began.
He was 20, at home near St. Louis on winter break from college, when he had a frustrating experience at a meeting of a Catholic community (in charity, we’ll keep its name out of it; it’s not a well-known group). He felt out of place and unfulfilled at the meeting, so he left early to go to his friend Vanessa Jabali’s house and take her out to a movie. But when James arrived, he found her mother had other plans.
James had known Vanessa since the fifth grade. The Jabalis were an all-female household—Mrs. Jabali and three daughters—who seemed wealthy even though the father was absent. If you asked their religion, the Jabalis would tell you that they study their ancestry and then would refer to the “Yahwist” accounts in the Old Testament, the stories of animal sacrifice and scapegoats.
Mrs. Jabali told James to wait while she made cookies. Vanessa’s sister, Isabel, joined them. “She spent 20 minutes preparing them, but they were not warm,” James said. He ate them, though no one else did.
“She started talking to me about Moses and how he was a woman, and how Moses had horns like in the sculpture, and all kinds of really weird stuff,” James said. At one point, Mrs. Jabali put both of her hands in front of her face, palms out, not touching, and said, “All of the sudden you open your eyes and you see what’s going on.” She waved them apart.
“I was sort of entranced,” James said. To this day he doesn’t know if the cookies were drugged. “She keeps talking this stuff, and I’m getting confused and disoriented.”
Vanessa planned to drive James to the movie. But they did not go to the movie.
“We went to a house,” James said. As he sat in the strange building with Vanessa, he felt a strong presence of evil. Soon Mrs. Jabali and Isabel arrived, and James was in the same company he had been in before, only ten miles away, in an unfamiliar house.
Mrs. Jabali turned to James and said, “He’s ready to meet you downstairs if you want.”
She didn’t explain who “he” was. James tried to pray, but couldn’t. His mind was distracted. But he said there was no way he was going downstairs.
They sat longer, making small talk. Mrs. Jabali looked at ease. But she would occasionally repeat her invitation, more insistently.
“He’s ready to meet you downstairs if you want, James.”
“Finally, after about five more invitations to go downstairs and meet ‘him,’ we left that place and went to a movie,” James said. But he doesn’t remember the movie at all… except for one part, “where they cut a goat’s neck and started dancing around it.”
At the end, he stumbled into the car. “Did you like the part about the goat?” asked Vanessa, laughing. Then she said, “We’re going back to that house.”
That was too much for James. “I had an inspiration to order her, not ask her, but tell her, ‘Vanessa, take me home.’”
“No,” she said.
“Vanessa, take me home,” James repeated.
Vanessa turned to her sister and, as if James wasn’t even there, asked, “Well, what do I do now?”
“You have to do whatever he says,” Isabel said.
“Well, what do you do when this happens with Joel?” Vanessa asked, refer-ring to her sister’s husband.
“I just beat him with a bat,” Isabel said. They sounded utterly serious, as if they were trying to scare James.
Vanessa took him home. But the strangest part of the night was still ahead for James.
‘Forget God’
As soon as James got home, he decided he would drive back to the religious community where he had started out, on the other side of St. Louis. “It was late at night,” his sister, Caroline, told me. “He said goodbye, and it was the sort of goodbye that seemed to mean, ‘Goodbye forever.’”
James was barely in a condition to drive. “I don’t know if I was drugged or cursed,” he said. “Cars were whizzing by me. I was just trying to drive straight. By the time I got there, I was really scared.”
He woke the priest and laypeople who lived at the community and told them, “I think God wants me to live here.” The priest explained that people don’t receive vocations out of fear and left to get some clothes for James to change into: He had wet his pants.
James sat staring at a crucifix on the wall, getting more and more agitated. Finally, he shouted, “Forget God!,” and ran out into the hall. He pushed past three men and headed toward the chapel.
There, several men of the religious house witnessed James stand on a pew and do a back-flip. They called for others to help them. And they called the police.
James made a dash toward the sanctuary, breaking the chapel’s Epiphany statues on the way. The men intervened.
“I went after the tabernacle,” James told me. “I wanted inside it. I just wanted to get to Jesus in the Eucharist.”
He never did. Six men held him down. He broke free from them. They held him again. Soon, a police van arrived. James was put in a straitjacket and thrown into the darkness of the vehicle.
“In the paddy wagon, I was certain I had died and gone to hell. That was the deepest, worst psychological thing I’d ever experienced. It was so heinous and evil,” he said.
“But I could still hope. And I could pray.” His Catholic education told him that would be impossible if he were really in hell.
The next thing he remembers is the psychiatric ward, sitting in front of a blue light. “They put some drug in me and said I’d be asleep within ten seconds. I spent that night in a rubber room. I didn’t sleep at all.” Usually in such a case, a patient will spend months in the hospital. But a Catholic doctor interviewed him and gave him a clean bill of mental health—a diagnosis that Father Hardon would soon affirm. James was in the hospital for only a week.
Possession
I shared these and other details of James’s case with Rev. Herman Jayachandra.
Father Jayachandra, 59, is pastor of St. Martin de Porres parish in Boulder, Colorado. A priest and exorcist from India, Father Jayachandra is quick to point out that he is not the official exorcist of the Archdiocese of Denver, but that he only helps victims of diabolic activity with the knowledge of the archdiocese or at its request. The archdiocese vouched for him as a priest in good standing.
Diabolic activity generally falls into one of four categories, he told me. The mildest forms are infestation (as in haunted houses) and obsession (when a person is harassed by the devil either by intense temptations or in a particular area of a person’s life). Oppression—an external attack by evil spirits on a person—is worse. “The spirit could cause discouragement or weariness,” said Father Jayachandra, “or it can put up external shows to frighten the person, such as shaking a person’s bed during his sleep at night.”
The rarest and most serious form is possession. “Partial possession means in a certain part of the body,” he said. “Full possession means the devil takes control over the consciousness of the person. It uses the mouth of the person to speak. It uses the hands and legs of the person to do violence. It uses the mouth of the person to abuse and blaspheme.”
There are three kinds of exorcisms. First, there’s the liturgical exorcism that is incorporated in every baptismal ceremony. Second, there is so-called private exorcism, or simple exorcism. It can be performed by any of the faithful and can be as simple as the words, “Be gone, Satan.”
The third kind of exorcism is the solemn, “public,” or formal exorcism. This ritual is only carried out with the specific authorization of a bishop. It’s a serious matter, but it’s a sacramental, not a sacrament. That means its effect is not infallible, and it may have to be repeated more than once.
One internationally known exorcist spoke with me but asked that his name not be used. His is a scary line of work. He told me he does a lot of research before suggesting a formal exorcism. “If the psychiatrists and the medical doctor have all said the same thing and given the person a clean bill of health,” the priest said, “I will do what’s called a provocation. I’ll provoke the devil into manifesting himself, if he’s there.”
He has a few chosen methods of provocation.
“Most commonly, I’ll put the Blessed Sacrament in a pix,” he said. “When I go into the room to see the person, unbeknownst to them, I will carry the Blessed Sacrament. If the person is possessed, they know right away that I have it. They’ll say, ‘No, no! Go away! I can’t go near you! He won’t let me! He won’t let me!’ Or, with a prayer, we’ll sprinkle holy water. The person will react and say, ‘Stop that! Stop that! It burns! It burns! Don’t do that! Don’t do that!’”
James was never possessed. After all, he went toward the tabernacle, not away from it. He was probably oppressed by a demon, Father Jayachandra said, and it was likely caused by witchcraft. James’s case reminded him of one exorcism he performed on an intermittently possessed person.
“It became very violent at a certain point. The possessed person jumped into the sanctuary and pushed down the statue of the Blessed Mother,” he said. “I ended up putting iron grills around all the other statues.”
James was exorcised, too. Many years after the incident with the Jabalis, and after other episodes, James’s brother brought him to a priest who performed a simple exorcism on him. Without ever mentioning the devil, or using the word “exorcism,” the priest asked James questions, gave him some tests, and then, almost as if it were an afterthought, said some prayers over him, including prayers in Latin. Father Amorth pointed out that since an exorcist doesn’t want to encourage dark thoughts in a subject, he’ll often perform his work in an almost casual way that won’t alarm the victim.
I also talked to Andrew Walther, who has brought two different people for treatment to Father Amorth, author of An Exorcist Tells His Story. He told me about one of them, whom we’ll call Leonard. Father Amorth thought Leonard’s case was brought on by a witch’s hex, too.
Walther knew Leonard as one of the many college students abroad that he was working with. But Leonard started reporting strange incidents.
“He told me he was having a nightmare, and when he awoke he was completely unable to move, because there was a demon sitting on top of him, with glowing eyes.”
Leonard prayed, and the demon went away. But eventually, it returned. Leonard called it “an aggressive, depressing presence.”
Walther brought him to Father Amorth, and with Walther present, the exorcist performed a solemn exorcism.
“Father Amorth removed a bottle of holy water, a St. Benedict cross, a vessel of oil, and a stole from his briefcase, then, touching Leonard with the stole, he began to pray in Latin.”
The prayers included the litany of the saints. At one point, the exorcist demanded that the demon reveal itself. The rite lasted about ten minutes, and Leonard felt greatly relieved afterwards.
“Father Amorth told Leonard he wasn’t possessed, but that he might be afflicted by a weak hex and that he should come back the next month,” Walther said. “He wanted to know if there was witchcraft in the family. He said not to be distracted by the devil’s harassment, but to pray before the Holy Eucharist—especially if he could find it exposed—to pray the rosary, and to go to Mass and confession often.”
According to exorcists, possession often happens through some form of witchcraft.
In India, Father Jayachandra said, “I had many cases of witches casting spells and hexes over people. People became obsessed, and some became possessed.”
He was eager to point out that witches have no real power over the devil, though.
“The devil, after using a witch to the best interest of both, eventually will kill her indirectly,” he said, driving her mad so she’ll die quickly in an accident or slowly from not being able to care for herself.
Rev. Charles Carpenter, 58, a priest in Alamos, Mexico, told me he used to be very skeptical about claims of demonic activity. But 25 years in Mexico changed his mind.
“People frequently consult what are called ‘adivinos,’ and ‘brujos.’ At first, I gave very little credence to the power of these persons,” he said. “But then, over the years, I saw the effects in certain persons who consulted them.”
‘Am I Crazy?’
Shaking beds, shrieks from the underworld, glowing eyes. Exorcists have seen it all. But they haven’t seen it often.
Usually, they encounter patients like James. Harassment and oppression are the most common form of demonic activity and, in a way, the most frightening. The devil doesn’t enter at some definitive point in time and then make a clean departure.
He hangs around, untiringly, for months—or years.
After James’s back-flip incident, his sister, Caroline, was working as a dispatcher for a security company, sitting up late by a phone that never rang…except when James was talking to her on one line. Then, she got interrupted frequently by calls on the security line, strange calls—adults laughing like children, nonsense words in weird voices, or ominous noises that are hard to describe.
Father Jayachandra told me of victims he treated who answered the telephone to hear, “I am with you.” Or, in a deep, odd voice: “I’m going to help you.”
“Perhaps the devil uses a human person under its control” to make the calls, he said.
Demons hound the victim, never letting him rest. Never letting him forget.
James (and a witness I spoke with) described how, months after his incident, a grotesque person, a homeless woman with blank eyes, approached him.
“I have a message for you,” she said ominously, then relieved herself, making a puddle under her dress.
James took it as his tormenter reminding him of what he did that horrifying night.
James’s life is filled with such stories. They are frightening but nonetheless leave a doubt: They could be explained without any reference to the demonic world. Is he hexed, or is he paranoid? Is he being harassed by demons, or is he losing his mind?
He’s not sure. That’s the kind of triumph the devil usually claims: not destruction, but the misery of self-doubt.
Mental illness is not diabolical activity. Yet there is a relationship between the two, Father Jayachandra said.
“Smaller psychological problems, if not taken care of, can cause mental illness,” he said. “But in my experience, demons could aggravate somebody’s psychological problems to cause mental illness.” And vice versa. “Mental illness, in my experience, leaves someone more likely to be oppressed, though not necessarily possessed.”
Each of the victims I spoke with said the same thing: “I thought I was crazy.” And in each of the cases—I admit—I wondered the same thing, too.
All the same, one exorcist told me, “I’ve never found a person who needed an exorcism in a psychiatric hospital.”
James’s sister Caroline wanted to be sure I pointed out that most people who know James see nothing at all wrong with him. But James suffers greatly, she told me. “There are times when he’s very angry at God for letting this sort of thing happen to him,” she said. “He’s wanted to be a priest but figures there’s no way.”
James’s case shows the devil’s true nature. The devil is an oppressive, energy-draining weight on the spirits of those afflicted by him. He isn’t into artful repartee, he doesn’t play the fiddle, and he can’t make you a rock star. He won’t keep his promises. And he hates you beyond imagination.
How to defend against him? “Grace is the decisive defense,” Paul VI said.
Perhaps the best approach is the one James’s brother Glen takes. He allowed James to take shelter one night at his house. All the doors were locked, then appeared to unlock on their own. Didn’t that scare you?, I asked him.
“I never had any fear,” Glen told me. “I know that, basically, as long as you’re in a state of grace, God’s going to give you anything you need to get by.”
AN EXORCISM IN INDIA (Sidebar)
The following is a transcript account of an exorcism Rev. Herman Jayachandra performed on a twelve-year-old girl at Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Kolvel, India, in 1984.
1. There were about seven men and women assisting me. We all fasted for a day and a half. We wanted to fast for two full days, but we couldn’t do that kind of severe fast.
2. We all went to confession to another priest. One day before the exorcism we spent time before the Blessed Sacrament in prayer: one hour in the morning, more than two hours in the evening. We got ready with crucifix, rosary, Bible, and the relic of St. Anthony.
3. I said Mass before the exorcism with my helpers present. I put on a surplice and a purple stole. The evil presence in the room was oppressive. I stood in front of the possessed and asked the helpers to tie down her legs and hands. Then I invoked protection on the possessed and my assistants, making the sign of the cross and sprinkling Holy Water. Then we knelt down and recited the Litany of the Saints.
4. Many prayers followed that. Then I summoned the spirits to come out. I asked the names of the Evil Spirits. They said their names were Kali, MallankarunKali, and Patrakali. I asked why they came to her. They said they were sent by a magician to disturb her and possess her so that the girl would never get married. They were sent by the enemies of this family. At a certain point the girl levitated toward the statue of the Blessed Mother. We pushed her down. Eight people could not match the strength these three demons had.
5. Then we had many Scripture readings and sang powerful songs of praise and worship. Then we laid hands on the possessed. Once, it got hold of the crucifix, using the girl, and was about to break it into pieces. One of the rules of exorcism is to take care that no holy article is desecrated by the devil. I commanded in Jesus’ name to give it back to me. It gave it back. There followed the Profession of Faith, then prayers enjoining and commanding the evil spirits, then reading some psalms, prayer to St. Michael the Archangel, then rosaries and then singing.
6. We repeated the same process twice a month. Then the spirits got weakened gradually. Even then it took six months for all three to leave. They shouted and yelled before they left. They hopped in front of the tabernacle and made promises they wouldn’t come back again in front of the tabernacle. All three demons did the same thing. You remember Our Lord said this kind of spirit will not go without great fasting and prayer. This was the same type.
Some time ago, my kids got a computer game called Myst. It’s a very curious game—there are no instructions, no rules, and no commentary offered at the beginning. You find yourself plunked down into a strange environment on a mysterious island. You don’t know where you are or why you’re there. As you look around, you discover various things that were put there before you by some unseen intelligence. There are rocks, trees, buildings, books, and many other things, and each is invested with a mysterious, disjointed, and elusive significance. Push this button, and a map appears, but you don’t know what it portrays. Open that door, and there’s a strange machine that hums and “works” at the flip of a switch, but you have no idea what it does. You open various books, and the books tell fragments of stories, but you don’t know what the stories are about. You go to different buildings and examine pieces of furniture and other objects. You know what they are, and you even know that they must mean something, but you have no idea what that meaning might be.
As you keep playing, you begin to discover connections between the strange paraphernalia you stumble upon. You find a book showing a piano keyboard and giving instructions to play a certain sequence of notes. Then you discover just such a keyboard elsewhere on the island. So, of course, you play the notes to see what happens. (I won’t tell you in case you haven’t played the game.)
As you can imagine, in such a mysterious world everything becomes charged with great significance. There’s no telling what some seemingly trivial thing might signify, and there’s the constant sense that you’re moving in the precincts of a great mystery. You become increasingly convinced that there’s some master key that can make sense of the connections between things in this world. And you come to realize that the connections—though mysterious—are not random.
In a curious way, what the Church calls “natural revelation” proceeds in a way similar to the game of Myst. We don’t start out as adults with Bibles giving us a full set of instructions for the rules of the game, but as children with eyes, ears, noses, tongues, fingers, heads, and, especially, hearts. And through these portals come the first streams of light by which the “dawn from on high shall break upon us” (Luke 1:78).
It was the same in the childhood of the world. The earliest civilizations didn’t have the benefit of a written revelation. God permitted most of humanity to muddle along for quite a while simply “feeling for him,” as St. Paul said (Acts 17:27), on much the same basis as a non-Christian or a child today might do. He is not afraid to allow Himself to be revealed in the childhood of the world (and to the childlike heart today) through what He has made. And so, we come to know things about God first of all by looking around.
Some people are surprised to discover that the Bible itself teaches this. St. Paul tells us that God’s primal revelation comes not through prophets or holy writings or mystical visions, but simply through the created stuff we see every day.
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. [Romans 1:19-20]
That is, God has made it possible to know that He exists, that He is almighty, and that He is Creator of all things, not by “blind faith” but just by looking around at things with an unprejudiced heart. It is well to understand this, for such “mere theism” revelation sets the stage for biblical revelation. So let us consider it briefly and note that the natural (as distinct from supernatural) evidence for God is presented to us every day in the form of two basic things: the physical world and the human person.
The Cause of All
Babies come from mothers and fathers, cars come from builders and engineers, and trees come from acorns. And though little children may simply rest content with that explanation, adults inevitably ask, “Where do the parents, builders, and acorns come from?” And so we find that everything participates in a “Great Chain of Being” back to the Big Bang itself. Absolutely nothing in Nature is unhooked from that chain. Everything in this universe is caused by something else in this universe that is caused by something else in this universe, and so on.
Our awareness of this is so fundamental that when something does break that Great Chain of Being (as, for instance, the miracle of the loaves and fish does in John 6:1-14), we have to find an explanation for it by either saying, as Catholics do, that the God who exists outside nature added some links to the chain, or else we must say, as skeptics do, that it has some sort of natural cause (i.e., people sharing lunches or a big lie by the apostles who were yanking our Great Chain of Being). The one thing nobody believes in is what philosopher Peter Kreeft calls the “Pop Theory”—that things like loaves and fish just pop into existence by themselves. They must have a cause, either natural (i.e., bakers and fish eggs) or supernatural (i.e., direct creation by God the Creator). Nothing in this world can cause itself to exist. Every created thing relies on some created thing ahead of it to pull it into being, just as a boxcar relies on the car ahead of it to pull it uphill.
Very well then, if existence is like a big train going uphill, we have to ask, “What is the engine?” We can’t say that there is some break in the chain—that some natural thing just popped itself into existence 15 billion years ago—just as we can’t say that loaves and fish just popped themselves into existence 2,000 years ago. Hence, appeals to the Big Bang don’t explain away God. They just say that some unthinkable supernatural Power that is not the universe itself caused the universe to exist (because nature—like the tiny things that comprise it, such as the loaves and fish—doesn’t have the power to make itself exist). Therefore, there must be some sort of Uncaused Cause beyond nature. And that, as St. Thomas says, is what everybody means by “God.” So from looking around, we can infer that God exists, just as St. Paul says.
The Invisible Designer
Likewise, from looking around, we can infer that God designs. So, for instance, when we see a microcomputer, we say, “The hand of a designer was here.” When we see the fathomlessly greater complexity of the human brain that made the microcomputer, we similarly respond, “The Hand of a Designer was here.”
A Christian man I know who worked at Boeing had this simple point confirmed recently when he e-mailed a diagram of the molecular “motor” that drives a paramecium flagella to some of the engineers in his department. Before doing so, he stripped off the description and the source of the diagram (Darwin’s Black Box, Michael Behe’s book on Intelligent Design and irreducible complexity). The result? Engineer after engineer wrote my friend back asking the musical question: “Who designed this?” They assumed it was some sort of nanotechnology being proposed by somebody in the company.
Of course they did. Why? Because when we see “specified complexity,” we very sensibly think “Intelligent Design.” Indeed, this tendency to connect specified complexity with an Intelligent Designer is so strong that one has to work extremely hard to brainwash oneself out of it. Some attempt to do this by repeating over and over that this is all just the “appearance of design.” Others solve the problem by appeals to visits by ancient astronauts who seeded the earth with life of their design (though this simply takes us back to the very Thomistic question: “Who designed the ancient astronauts?”).
But for people without such dogged faith in materialist dogma, the specified complexity and the vastness of creation betokens God’s “eternal power and deity,” as St. Paul says. This is exactly why most of the world has always been religious, not atheistic. Like any good Myst player, the average man, woman, and child can connect the dots. They’re not so arrogant as to suppose they know much about the mysterious Power that made the world. But neither are they such fools as to gaze upon a cosmos pregnant with such meaning, design, and sheer wonder and attribute it to nothing.
A Personal God and the Human Person
But, of course, being religious can mean almost anything. Indeed, based on the data we have looked at so far, many people can and do conclude that the power behind the universe is something impersonal, like the Force in Star Wars. Such a view of God (technically known as pantheism) is an ancient opinion that is particularly popular in the West these days because it’s a bit like a spiritual methadone treatment: It gives you the pleasures of religious faith without any of the troubling demands. In the words of C. S. Lewis, “An ‘impersonal God’—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness inside our own heads—better still. A formless life force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all…. The Pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf. He will not pursue you.” Pantheism essentially tells us that God is identical with Creation. And, of course, if God is everything, then we’re considerably relieved of the burden of having to choose between right and wrong.
The trouble with pantheism is that it tries to make God something “beyond personal” but instead winds up calling God something less than personal. Many people harbor in the back of their minds the notion they are being “truly spiritual” when they say, “We must get rid of the crude fancies of the puny human mind with its primitive agricultural images of shepherds, sheep, vineyards, and all the rest of it. We must instead thrust our spirits into contact with a realm beyond the imagination!” Usually, what this means in practice is abandoning older and more nourishing religious symbols for newer and more impoverished ones. It typically involves picturing God as an invisible gas or energy field, to cite enormously popular sci-fi imagery. And the explanation for this is simple: It’s not that the energy field devotee has a higher religious consciousness. It’s simply that he or she has—like most people in a technological society—known things like magnetism or electricity as their closest experiences of invisible power.
But the reality is that neither gas nor electric sparks nor magnets are terribly interesting conversationalists. A long chat with a magnet will yield few wise insights, whether we are pantheists or Christians. And this is our clue that we’ve made a wrong turn in shooting for something impersonal as the Ultimate Reality. For it turns out that we contemplate magnets and gases far more often than they contemplate us. In short, the average human being seems to have a much more vast and varied mind, heart, and soul than most magnets, gases, and electric sparks. And for this reason, we can say there exists something in this world that is more than mere “Creation,” though it is certainly a creature as well.
That something is the human person, and every attempt to reduce humans to equality with mere nature is doomed to failure. Some who try to do so note, for instance, that humans share many common physical traits with the beasts—as though this made humans equal to beasts. The problem with this argument is that humans alone in all the cosmos are aware of and interested in the fact of our similarity with our fellow creatures. Not one other creature in the world recognizes it because not one other creature in the world is capable of reason as human beings are. Cats do not rhapsodize about their brotherhood with mice. Oak trees seldom hug environmentalists. And great apes do not concern themselves with tracing the evolutionary evidence of their common ancestry with us. These are purely human activities, conducted by human beings who, alone in the natural world, can see and reason about such matters—because only they are endowed with reason in the natural world.
Likewise, humans are distinguishable from all of natural Creation in their ability to see and create beauty. In the words of G. K. Chesterton, “Art is the signature of man.” We do not find rough studies of a wildebeest swinging its head sketched in the dirt by chimpanzees. Those creatures biologically nearest to us in the great dynasties of the animal kingdom—the primates—are still so remotely different from us that there exists an unbridgeable chasm between our capacity to create and theirs. Such creativity and love of beauty doesn’t square well with the attempt to claim that there’s no real difference between humans and other creatures. It does, however, make a remarkable amount of sense in light of the biblical account of humans as somehow being made in the image of the God who creates. And so, looking not merely at Creation-in-general but at the strange creature called Homo sapiens, we can begin to glimpse not only that God is but that if man and woman are any reflection of Him, He may just be more like an artist than an energy field or a gas.
Morality and Justice
Looking at the human person shows us other things as well, particularly because we are human beings, not just “impartial observers” looking at human beings. When we see this, we begin to notice something besides creativity: namely, morality.
Modern readers sniff at this word. If human beings are so moral, why do they act like such dirtbags so often? The problem, however, only highlights the central point. For though we complain strenuously that a man is evil if he dismembers and eats a child, we do not similarly complain if a crocodile does this. In both cases, the same thing happens, but in the former case, we recognize that the man is acting contrary to his true nature as a moral agent while in the latter case the crocodile is not a moral agent but simply a creature of instinct. The crocodile is not “to blame” as a man is to blame for his act. The moment we recognize this (and only those lobotomized by trendy philosophical fads do not recognize it), we see that there’s a component to human makeup not present in other creatures: the awareness of justice. Indeed, the essence of the complaint against “dirtbags” is that they treat others not like people but like lesser created things. That is, they are unjust, and we know it.
And so we complain of the man who treats a woman like a “sex object” and not a person. We fault employers who treat their employees “like dogs” and not persons. And we rightly condemn the Nazis for butchering Jews and Slavs “like animals” and not respecting them as persons. In all this, even human evil shows that humans are different from the rest of Creation and that it is wrong to treat them as simply unusually clever pieces of meat. Even when we do evil, we exhibit something new that cannot be seen by contemplating the rest of the created order. For the demand of conscience shows, both in the breach and the observance, that humans are aware of some higher demand enjoined upon them for justice.. When that demand is honored by human beings, they take care to respect and even love their neighbors in ways that could never occur to beasts. On the other hand, when they are determined to ignore this demand upon conscience, they create evils no animal would ever think to perpetrate. Our race is related to other creatures on this planet like a race of gods, Chesteron says, and “the fact is not lessened but emphasized because it can behave like a race of demons.”
Now it is nonsense to speak of human beings as “higher” than the rest of Creation or morally “better” or “worse” than one another if there is not some Standard of Highest and Best against which we are, either consciously or unconsciously, measuring them. If we say a Jew in a concentration camp should not be spoken of as a “bacillus” to be killed, we inevitably mean that his human dignity really does make him higher than a bacillus. If we say that Francis of Assisi was a better man than Heinrich Himmler, we are inevitably comparing both of them to Someone, not merely Something, who is Best. For to speak of being morally Best or “righteous” or “good” is to speak in personal terms. And this Best is, again, what everybody means by “God.”
The Evidence of Personal Experience
This fact that God is more, not less, personal than we are has implications for the way in which we argue for mere theism. For revelation is personal, not abstract. To illustrate, let me tell you about a woman I worked with about 15 years ago. We’ll call her Mary.
Mary was diagnosed with diabetes and had to be hospitalized in Seattle. They got her insulin under control and kept her in the hospital for a day or so to make sure all was well. She was at that stage where she was well enough to be bored but not quite well enough to be released. As she was lying around in her bed one Sunday morning, listening to what she took to be a radio in the next room, she focused on the noise and realized she was listening to a Mass. Mary was an ex-Catholic, but having nothing else to do, she listened. She heard the readings, the homily, and the prayers of the faithful, including a prayer for the repose of Father So-and-So and, finally, a prayer for her own recovery—by name. Mary’s mother was associated with St. Martin’s College (a Benedictine school about 50 miles south of Seattle), so Mary figured she was hearing a Mass being broadcast from there.
The next day, Mary’s mom showed up for a visit, and she thanked her, saying she’d heard the Mass and appreciated the prayers. Mary’s mom was dumbfounded. The Mass had not been broadcast. They checked with the celebrant. Nope. No broadcast. Yet Mary was able to describe the homily, the prayers, everything. Now the funny thing was, Mary was very concerned that I not think she was crazy. Yet she remained an ex-Catholic, even after this. “If God really loved me, why do I have diabetes?” Mary said. I thought, “Sheesh, lady! Whaddaya want? An engraved invitation?”
All this confronts us with three things about arguments for the existence of God that I think we should pay attention to. First, such arguments are divisible into something like the distinction between public and private revelation. Public arguments such as First Cause or Design have been the understandable choice of most people who argue for theism since the most common and publicly accessible arguments are the ones that can reach the most people. If I see an angel, that does not constitute much of an argument for the existence of God or angels unless you know and trust me. But everybody can see the data and logic of St. Thomas’s Five Demonstrations of the Existence of God.
On the other hand, private encounters with the living God are not to be sneezed at. If you do know me and I make a claim to a miracle and show myself obviously to believe it, such evidence can constitute one of the most powerful arguments for theism. This personal aspect of revelation is important to grasp, because we are not, in fact, creatures who typically respond to mere theism. People seldom become worshipers of the Ground of Being. But people constantly become worshipers of the Living God.
Or, as Mary’s example shows, they don’t. And that brings us to our third point: Mere education and evidence is not enough. People can indeed follow St. Thomas’s chain of logic or have an experience like Mary’s and still refuse to accept what their reason tells them. All you need to be a mere theist is the sense God gave a goose. But the problem is that we’re not always able to have even that much sense. In the words of Pope Pius XII:
The human reason is, strictly speaking, truly capable by its own natural power and light of attaining to a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God, who watches over and controls the world by his providence, and of the natural law written on our hearts by the Creator; yet there are many obstacles which prevent reason from the effective and fruitful use of this inborn faculty. For the truths that concern the relations between God and man wholly transcend the visible order of things, and, if they are translated into human action and influence it, they call for self-surrender and abnegation. The human mind, in its turn, is hampered in the attaining of such truths, not only by the impact of the senses and the imagination, but also by disordered appetites which are the consequences of original sin. So it happens that men in such matters easily persuade themselves that what they would not like to be true is false or at least doubtful.
Thus, in the discovery of our capacity for sin, we necessarily discover the flaw in the “instrument” through which we look at God: namely, the cracked and dirty lens of our own fallen human existence. There’s something wrong with us, which is why we snort and complain about humans being “dirtbags” (and why we ourselves hang back reluctantly at the ominous words “self-surrender” and “abnegation”). We can see some things about God through this dim and damaged reflection of Him in our natural humanness, just as we can see some things reflected in a broken mirror. But there are other things about God that our own brokenness makes very confusing and hard to sort out (not to mention distasteful). Moreover, our status as creatures puts us in a very difficult situation if we wish to meet the Creator.
Here’s why: Suppose Hamlet is looking around at his world. He would discover much to indicate that there was some sort of Mind behind his world—some Shakespeare out there—but there would also be a great deal to confuse and baffle him about the nature and purpose of that Mind. If he wanted to, he could try to get to know that Mind better by puzzling about the order of the world it has created. He could wonder why certain things happen. He could guess from the fact that he’s able to speak beautifully that the Mind that made him must have something of Beauty about it as well. And he could discern a demand on him and everybody to be good and just.
We are to God as Hamlet is to Shakespeare. We can infer that God exists and that He’s more like a person than anything else we know. But we also suffer with having our world and ourselves as distorted by sin as Hamlet’s is. The mirror that should reflect Shakespeare clearly is broken and Hamlet cannot fully understand him based simply on reason and looking around at his environment. Moreover, Hamlet cannot, under any power of his own, leave his world to enter Shakespeare’s. So if Hamlet is to know a good bit more detail about Shakespeare—much less meet him—it is up to Shakespeare to make the first move and tell Hamlet about himself.
And that is why mere theist arguments—though an invaluable bedrock foundation on which to build the Temple of Faith—are not enough. Natural revelation requires supernatural revelation in our fallen world. And the Christian revelation is the story of how God provided exactly that. It is the tale of how God made a good world, how that world rebelled against Him, and how—in the call of Abraham and Israel, and supremely through the incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension of His Son, Jesus—He set about winning back a fallen humanity to participate in His divine nature after we threw away it all away. That Temple’s spires soar very high indeed. But the Temple never leaves its foundation
As an advocate of the Intelligent Design movement, I’m very often confronted with the following rather pointed criticism: “Well, if the world is designed, then we’ve got to blame the designer for all of the evil in it, don’t we? Backaches and headaches, cancer, cats playing with mice, parasites, floods, Nazis, slavery, starving children—the whole mess would have to be laid at the designer’s door.”
Indeed, the presence of evil has been used, time and again, as a kind of trump card thrown down in debate against theists in general and design proponents in particular as the unanswerable objection, a lock-tight logical proof of atheism. In slightly expanded form, the logic runs as follows: If God exists, He is all-powerful and benevolent. If He is all powerful and benevolent, He wouldn’t allow _____. But _____ exists; therefore, God does not exist.
We must understand, however, that this is not a mere debating tactic on the part of the atheist, but a formalization of a very human cri de coeur: “I can’t believe God exists. There is so much evil in the world.” Simply put, evil is a real problem, and odd as it sounds, we need to keep it that way.
Keeping Evil as a Problem
Keep it that way? As tempting as the above syllogism might be, either to our hearts or our heads, if we are to take evil seriously, it must be rejected because it is self-devouring and, hence, self-defeating. If God does not exist, then there is no evil in the world. We can illustrate this seeming paradox by watching how quickly the cri de coeur is undermined in the most thorough and powerful denial of design: Darwinism.
Charles Darwin himself famously complained in a letter to Asa Gray, “I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [parasitic insects] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.” Rather than such apparent natural cruelties being the result of divine intention, Darwin chose to hang them on the vagaries of natural selection. As a result, the presence of evil was rendered unproblematic because we could only expect a mixture of good and bad results from evolution’s ongoing natural lottery.
Witness, however, the jaws of defeat already devouring the victory: If the universe and all things in it are the unintended result of the purposeless ebb and flow, expansion and collapse, explosion and fusion of matter and energy, then we have lost the grounds for complaint about all the evil in the world. The dust cannot complain to the cosmic wind that blows it recklessly hither and thither.
The irony, then, is that, while the “misery in the world” helped to confirm Darwin’s belief in a world without design, consigning the cause of the misery to evolution meant, ultimately, giving up the existence of evil. As the Voltaire of contemporary Darwinism, zoologist Richard Dawkins, has rightly noted, from the perspective of evolution, while such parasitism as Darwin complained about may seem “savagely cruel,” the truth of the matter is that “nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent.” For Dawkins, this is “one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn.” In a cosmos in which a creator is absent, things are “neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous—indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.”
Paradoxically, then, eliminating God because of the existence of evil means embracing an impersonal, que será será cosmos utterly indifferent not only to our complaints but even to the distinction between good and evil itself. And the same goes for those who retain a distant God who, for some strange reason, gives free reign over nature to the blind, careless demiurgic powers of natural selection. In either case, the outcome can only be an object of complaint if it was initially an object of intelligent intention.
In one sense, this is very helpful, for it provides the proper response to the all-too-frequently served atheist’s platitude that the presence of evil is the coup de grace that finally and decisively puts theology out of our misery. As it turns out, the only victim of the coup de grace is the cri de coeur. But thankfully, the cry of the heart is so deeply human that we cannot embrace cosmic indifference. We are repelled by a heartless universe and cannot shake our conviction that evil really is a problem. The solution to the problem of evil cannot simply be the dissolution of the existence of evil. Therefore, we had better look more carefully at evil as a problem.
The Problem of Deciding What Is Evil
Understanding evil as a problem is not an easy task, however. In debates about the existence of evil, we often overlook the unpleasant but illuminating fact that while we all agree that evil exists—and I do believe, in his heart of hearts, even Dawkins knows that it exists—we don’t all agree on the particular evils we would include in our list of complaints. That is no small point.
One might think, for example, that we all agree that disease is evil and that its elimination is an unambiguous good. For Darwinism, however, the elimination of disease itself becomes a problem because disease and other hardships help weed out the unfit. As Darwin noted in his Descent of Man:
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health…. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination….. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.
Or to take an even more interesting example, even though Dawkins rightly concluded that evolution removes God and hence considerations of good and evil from the cosmos, he has also released a jeremiad against religion as an evil we’d all be better off without. Just after the horrifying destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, Dawkins railed against the “faith-heads,” each equipped with an “after-life–obsessed suicidal brain,” a brain of the “Abrahamic kind” that “teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.”
To be fair to Dawkins, the horror of the attack may have driven him momentarily to extremes of passion. (At least we can be thankful that his passion drove him back into the realm of sanity again, where he was willing to affirm publicly that evil is real and a real problem.) But there is an important lesson here. The crises and consequent passions of the moment often skew our more balanced assessments both of what things are evil and, further, what we would do about them if suddenly we were granted omnipotence to treat the problem. Unfortunately, human beings are more fickle than farsighted, and their judgment undulates even upon the waves of headaches and hormones, let alone the larger shocks of events like 9/11. So the problem of identifying what is evil often depends upon when we are asked.
There is yet another difficulty in defining evil, one that was implicit in Darwin and Dawkins but which we need to make explicit. As radically different accounts of happiness and the human good become more pronounced and sharply defined, we shall find that more and more, one person’s joy is another’s sorrow, and one group’s victory is another’s sign of impending darkness.
For example, recently the news came of the first baby born from sperm bought over the Internet. And just who was doing the peddling? A lovely organization called Man Not Included (MNI) that caters especially to lesbian couples (and to a lesser degree, single-by-choice women, whatever their nuance or persuasion). Once the registration fee is paid, lesbians can search the MNI database for donors and click on those with the desired characteristics. They need never get closer than a mouse to a male.
To frustrated lesbians, who may now have sperm delivered right to their front door for home insemination, this news offered a golden ray of hope. For others, however, the news was bleak rather than bright, one more oppressive sign that the sun was setting on modern civilization.
The result of this increasing divergence is that the very same thing is seen to be both dawn and dusk, a cause both for celebration and lamentation. To drill in the point, for Planned Parenthood and NOW, the legalization and increasing availability of abortion worldwide over the last 25 years is a great sign of hope, an unprecedented shimmer of light finally bursting forth after countless millennia of oppression by men, a joyful release from the slavery of biology. For those who oppose abortion, however, the last quarter-century has been the darkest on record, a remorseless slide into the depths of a barbarism previously unknown.
Thus, if we dig below the surface of the universal cri de coeur that “there is so much evil in the world,” we soon find its actual referent is all too frequently not universal. It can mean, as we have just seen, both that abortion rights are not yet universal and that abortion exists for anyone at all. The problem of evil, then, resides not merely in the presence of evil. In no small part, evil is problematic because we do not agree upon what things actually are evil.
Further, such divergence about good and evil has a ripple effect that distorts more particular levels of seeming agreement, especially in regard to what should be done once &nb sp; the evil has been identified. Show a picture of a malnourished, deformed two-year-old orphan from Ethiopia, and a sad, pained expression steals over the faces of all. “Ah, yes,” one would say, “there is so much evil in the world.” Yet, the harmony turns to cacophony once we ask what should be done about it. If you still doubt, imagine throwing the picture into the center of a table around which are seated representatives of the United Nations, Planned Parenthood International, the Vatican, and the government of Ethiopia.
In sum, the vexing problem of evil is, if anything, even more frustrating than we thought. We cannot opt for a solution, like evolution, that simply eliminates the problem by eliminating the distinction between good and evil. Nor can we take for granted that there is real agreement on what things are actually evil, or if we find such agreement, what should be done. Alas, the contradictions even extend to the individual, who often changes his mind with his mood. Of course, the ramifications for theology are immense.
The Problem of Evil and God
Given all of the above, it is not very clear exactly how we could get from “There is so much evil in the world” to “I can’t believe God exists.” Not only does the denial of God undermine the reality of evil, but since we cannot agree on what things actually are evil or, if some semblance of agreement exists, what to do about it, it is difficult to see exactly what we expect of the divine.
To illustrate, if we were all suddenly given the power to eliminate evil and make the universe right again, each in accordance with his or her own list, we would very quickly end up in a chaotic and destructive free-for-all far worse than the condition we were trying to escape. The only way to avoid such chaos would be to lay aside all our differing opinions and figure out exactly what things are evil.
But here we run into yet another problem. Not only are we confused about what is evil. We are also unaware of how much of a problem evil is; that is, we don’t truly see how deep and pervasive are the evils that actually afflict us.
Imagine the following: We, bemoaning all the evil in the world, cry out that we cannot believe God exists. No sooner has the conclusion escaped our lips than God abruptly appears. Of course, being God, He is not only all-powerful and so can remove all the evils, but He is all-knowing and so can see all the evils.
“Do you wish me to remove all the evil from the world?” God asks.
“Yes! Yes! Please do!” we cry.
“ALL the evil?” He asks again, leaning forward and looking straight through our eyes and into our hidden depths.
Well, we don’t really know about all the evil, do we? We begin rummaging around nervously within. Oh dear! Unkind words, unfulfilled promises, nagging resentments, and a thousand other failures in everyday charity. Sins of our youth, sins yet to be committed, sins of omission. The new clothes, new car, theater tickets, baubles, and toys we bought even while we knew that the money could have saved a thousand lives or made the poverty of a thousand more lives bearable. Even more frightening, what of the sins hidden even from us?
“ALL the evil?” He repeats yet a third time.
Under the omniscient gaze, we are made rather keenly aware that somehow all the evil in the world is not out there, and that we hadn’t really considered, in our cry of the heart, the evil within the very heart that cries. The problem with suddenly getting rid of all evil is that (at least in this imaginative exercise) we are making such a request to an all-powerful, all-knowing Being, and hence we’re likely to be caught in the very dragnet that we bid God to cast. This is all the more frightening given that we are often oblivious to the faults in ourselves that others find so painfully obvious.
In attending to omniscience, we’ve stumbled upon an oft-neglected aspect of the problem of evil. We generally focus on the problem of evil as if it were merely a problem of power. That is, we look to the heavens and cry, “Why don’t you do something?” or we look dejectedly down at the earth, shake our heads, and mutter, “If there were a God, he would have done something about this. And you wonder why I’m an atheist!”
But the problem of evil is not one that could be solved by power alone. Power exercised in the elimination of evil devoid of the penetrating knowledge that can accurately identify evil, root and branch, is either chaotic or ineffective. It is chaotic if it is governed by confusion about what is evil; it is ineffective if it does not get to the hidden roots of evil.
Again, we see the necessity of God insofar as we have discovered the necessity for divine wisdom. As we have seen, our disagreements about evil can only be settled by determining what things actually are evil. But that would take a divine-like mind, a mind that adheres unerringly to truth by its very nature and is not swayed by the passion-driven storms of human partiality. Further, we must admit that evil must be eliminated at the very roots, and for this, once again, we will need an omniscient being who won’t let us hide the evils within us, evils that would have to be eliminated if the world is to receive more than an ineffective whitewashing.
The Problem of Not Being God
We have seen that a good part of evil is human in origin, what we usually call “moral evil,” and that moral evil often involves distortions in our judgment that in turn cause us to disagree about what actually is evil. We must also recognize another, more subtle aspect of the problem of evil: Human judgment is not only distorted, and hence entangled in disagreement, but human—that is, not omniscient. This fundamental lack of omniscience, independent of the distortion of sin, makes our assessment of “natural evil,” the kind of evil that so disturbed Darwin, problematic as well.
As it is often such natural evil that turns men away from theology and to an atheistic mode of science, I shall use science to make the point. The history of science is littered with the grandest claims of omniscience. I say “littered” because all-encompassing theories rise and fall like so many civilizations, displacing each other at fairly regular intervals. The reason for this pattern is simple: The universe is nearly mind-numbing in its complexity, from the farthest reaches of the most distant galaxy to the densely intricate subatomic microcosmos and everywhere in between.. The gap between our human capacities and the awe-full immensity of the universe accounts for the cyclic pattern of scientific discovery and revolution.
This pattern allows for a humble recognition of the actual circumscribed realm of human intellectual competence. The order of the cosmos from the eye-view of omniscience is something we strive for, not something we have attained. Human reason is competent but not omni-competent. The problem is not that the universe is unintelligible; it is that the intelligibility of the universe lies within but also exceeds our human intelligence.
It is fair to say, then, that we do know many things, but that we do not know the overall design of the universe and how the myriad particulars fit in. We see some aspects of it quite clearly; others we find confusing or utterly confounding. Our efforts yield both victories and humilities. After much hacking through a set of difficulties, scientists break into a clearing and gaze happily upon a suddenly illumined landscape, but soon enough new difficulties arise, and they see how small a clearing actually was gained and how much lies dense, entangled, and unknown beyond it.
If we did comprehend the design of the cosmos, then of course we would have achieved omniscience and therefore would be in the best possible position to judge its design. But that is an important admission, for in it, we recognize that only the perspective of omniscience could judge the design, both in whole and in regard to any of the parts. Simply put, distinguishing between things that are actually evil, things that only appear to be evil, and things that are harmful or painful but necessary or beneficial to bring about a larger good would take an omniscient eye, not a merely human one.
With this in mind, we may return to Darwin’s statement: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.” Again, such parasitism cannot be called evil if it is the result of evolution. To call it evil, both Ichneumonidae and Caterpillars must somehow be understood as intentional results of God. But if that is the case, then knowing we are not omniscient, and God is, we cannot properly judge His designs or their beneficent order and intent. The best we can say is that we don’t know how such parasitism—what appears to us to be a natural evil—can fit into God’s designs.
The Answer to the Problem of Evil
It might seem at this point that the problem of evil has been solved and that, as it turns out, evil is not really a problem after all. Once we realize that there is so little agreement on what is evil or what to do about it, and that our merely human judgment is either stunted or partial, then we must confess that our complaints are without merit. Only God could know the big picture, and into that picture backaches and headaches, cancer, cats playing with mice, parasites, floods, Nazis, slavery, and starving children all somehow fit..
But such a conclusion seems to commit the same kind of error as evolution. We cannot solve the problem of evil by dissolving the reality of evil. We seem to be caught in a trap. On the one hand, the oppressive weight of evil leads us to deny the existence of God, but if we deny God and pin evil on the mindless and indifferent lottery of evolution, then evil itself disappears. On the other, if we recognize that in order to retain evil, the cosmos and its contents must be the intentional result of an intelligent creator—a creator whose ultimate designs are beyond our merely human reach to fathom—then evil seems to disappear into the inscrutable depths of omniscience. What could release us from this trap?
The trap is all the more excruciating because, even after all of the above is taken into account, there seems to be a great excess of suffering, especially in regard to the innocent. We still want to cry, Job-like, to those inscrutable depths, “Who are you to orchestrate everything around us puny and pitiable creatures, leaving us shuddering in the darkness, ignorant, blasted, and buffeted? It’s all well and good to say, ‘Trust me! It’ll all be made right in the end,’ while you float unscathed above it all. Grinding poverty, hunger, thirst, frustration, rejection, toil, death of our loved ones, blood-sweating anxiety, excruciating pain, humiliation, torture, and finally a twisted and miserable annihilation—that’s the meal we’re served! You’d sing a different tune if you were one of us and got a taste of your own medicine.”
What could we say against these depths if the answer we received was not an argument but an incarnation, a full and free submission by God to the very evils about which we complain? This submission would be a kind of token, a sign that evil is very real indeed, bringing the incarnate God blood-sweating anxiety, excruciating pain, humiliation, torture, and finally a twisted and miserable annihilation on the cross. As real as such evil is, however, the resurrection reveals that it is somehow mysteriously comprehended within the divine plan.
With the Incarnation, the reality of evil is absorbed into the deity, not dissolved into thin air, because God freely tastes the bitterness of the medicine as wounded healer, not distant doctor. Further, given the drastic nature of this solution, we begin to recognize that God takes the problem of evil more seriously than we could ever have taken it ourselves.
At the same time, it’s not just a question of God’s submission to our condition. In order to solve the problem of evil, we also need to be delivered from our ignorance, our confusion, our shortsightedness, our willful distortion of truth, and our weakness in the face of evils we recognize but choose nonetheless. We need to be cured of imperfections and led by and to more than human wisdom, and all this must be done in a way that is, as it were, fit to the capacities of human nature. We need, that is, to have the very wisdom and mercy of God made flesh.
And finally, since we are burdened by the presence of natural evil, the very evil about which Darwin complained, all the world must somehow be redeemed. That is, in our cry of the heart, we not only wanted things made right in regard to human beings but also a new heaven and a new earth, released from the current ambiguities and cruelties.
This is the full answer given by Christianity, an answer to the entire problem of evil. Of course, this answer can only and ultimately be grasped as the answer by the gift of faith. The most an essay such as this can do is remove the obstacles and prepare the ground for the seed to be dropped. But that, I hope, is no small thing
Had you ventured to Washington, D.C.’s L’Enfant Plaza Hotel one day last February for the second meeting of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics, it might have struck you that the man in the chairman’s seat—the one governing this illustrious body that will lead the nation’s thinking on everything from cloning to euthanasia—seemed very unlike the person portrayed in many of the nation’s newspapers and magazines.
The afternoon’s topic happened to be cloning, perhaps the most controversial of the many issues the council will examine in the next two years. Leon Kass sat down, took a sip of water, twice adjusted his microphone, folded his hands on the papers before him, then opened the discussion with this announcement: The panel would first explore the merits of cloning.
The remark was startling, because it is well-known that Kass denounces not only reproductive cloning—creating genetically identical humans—but also creating stem-cell lines from fetal tissue, which holds possible promise for treating spinal cord injuries and diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes. Kass has written that the first robs humans of their humanity, while the second, often referred to as "therapeutic cloning," promotes medical advancement at the cost of the weak and voiceless. For that reason, Kass’s appointment to lead this 18-member council—which will delve into the ethics of euthanasia, in vitro fertilization, genetic screening, gene therapy, psychoactive drugs, and brain implants, among other issues—came with plenty of criticism. According to some, Kass’s agenda may prevent him from governing the presidential panel with an even hand.
Others consider the 63-year-old University of Chicago professor an ideal pick for the chairman’s job. Kass can look at the delicate issues before the council through several lenses. His medical training, his stint as a surgeon for the Public Health Service, and his research for the National Institutes of Health help him appreciate how such issues bear on the world of medicine. His Harvard Ph.D. in biochemistry and a past position with the National Academy of Sciences allow him to empathize with fellow scientists. His renowned writing and teaching on bioethics—first at Georgetown University in the mid-1970s and now at the University of Chicago—establish him as one of the nation’s foremost thinkers on the moral and ethical issues arising with recent advances in medicine and science. His byline is frequently seen in the New Republic, the American Scholar, Public Interest, and First Things.
"I consider him a first-rate scholar and one of the really prominent people in the field,’’ says Edmund Pellegrino, a Georgetown professor of medicine and medical ethics. "He’s very fair-minded. On the other hand, he’s a person who forms his own opinion and stands by it.’’
Gertrude Himmelfarb, a historian who writes about many of the issues that interest Kass, agrees: "Obviously, he has a point of view, which he expresses very well. But he also is wonderfully open-minded. He’s quite a brilliant teacher because he can receive different points of view and respect them and integrate them with his own.’’
Clearly, Kass’s writings and speeches establish him as a conservative in the classic sense. The man in the chairman’s seat that February afternoon is as much noted for his writings on the Bible, Aristotle, and social mores as he is for his thoughts on the ethical questions that accompany advances in medical technology. Some even say Kass’s views cast him on the fringe of medical, scientific, and social consensus: He has questioned the use of cadavers for medical research and teaching, drugs designed to alter brain chemistry, and medicine’s efforts to prolong life. Kass has spoken against affirmative action and complained that women in their 20s are putting off having children as they build careers. He has written that the concept of safe, promiscuous sex is delusional, because even if contraception can prevent venereal disease and unwanted pregnancies, promiscuity remains dangerous spiritually and culturally: "Sexuality itself means mortality—equally for both man and woman," Kass has written. "Whether we know it or not, when we are sexually [promiscuous], we are voting with our genitalia for our own demise. ‘Safe sex’ is the self-delusion of shallow souls." He has also criticized society’s turn toward feminism, gay rights, divorce, single parenthood, sex outside marriage, and children born outside marriage.
In addition to his opposition to cloning and stem-cell research, Kass opposes abortion and euthanasia, noting that doctor-assisted suicides exacerbate "the worst tendencies of modern life." He once objected to in vitro fertilization, but in 1979 he said that he saw no harm in the procedure for infertile married couples. Some of his critics wonder at this transformation. Kass explained that the procedure has since proven relatively safe for women and their children.
"Nobody knew in advance that in vitro fertilization would be, by and large, safe,’’ Kass says. "It’s not that I think the activity is absolutely innocent [in moral terms], but on balance, one could justify its use for infertile couples. And having known some such children myself, one is simply delighted they are here."
Kass is indeed highly opinionated and unlikely to be swayed from his views, but he earns high marks from associates for his open-minded approach to the stickiest moral questions. These people point out that some of Kass’s views on issues dear to conservatives tend to be more moderate than conservatives might like: Kass is not interested, for example, in pushing for bans on legal abortion. He was lukewarm about the Church’s effort two years ago to promote legislation that would have prevented doctors in Oregon from prescribing federally controlled drugs for assisted suicides. And he doesn’t describe early-stage embryos as "people," as most pro-life advocates do.
"If pushed to the wall, he would say it’s a human organism that has some claim on our respect," says Richard Doerflinger, an official with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. "But he would not say this is a full person.’’
A Stacked Bench?
The most common critique of the Council on Bioethics is that, no matter how diverse the views of the scientists, academics, and ethicists on the panel, Kass’s views will prevail when it comes time to advise Bush. The council’s first meeting might have confirmed these misgivings. Days before the gathering, the chairman gave his colleagues a reading assignment: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s "The Birthmark,’’ a tale about a scientist who obsesses over the tiny mole on his wife’s cheek, creates a potion to erase it, and instead kills his spouse.
"Nobody should operate under the assumption that this...council is as open to all views as maybe an advisory commission should be,’’ says Sean Tipton, spokesman for the Society for Reproductive Medicine, whose 8,500 doctor-members run the nation’s fertility clinics. The society opposes human reproductive cloning but supports cloning for research purposes.
But Pellegrino thinks this criticism is unfair: "Any other credible person who would be appointed would have views on these issues. [Kass speaks] with very careful consideration and a moderate tone. He’s very willing to listen and evaluate ideas, suppositions, and presuppositions, whether they agree with his [own thinking] or not.’’
Another concern is the council’s lack of any representative to speak for the patients who might benefit from research on human embryos.
"We’re talking about the development of treatments and cures that would help people with diseases," argues Kevin Wilson, director of public policy for the American Society for Cell Biology, which represents 10,000 biologists who generally support therapeutic cloning. "I think their voices should be heard."
Wilson, whose society has one of its own—biochemist Elizabeth Blackburn—on Kass’s council, notes that when it came time for members of the public to speak before the council at its first meeting last January, most council members had already left.
"Mr. Kass said he wants to be open to dialogue and all that, and I hope that is true,’’ Wilson says. "But I don’t necessarily see a lot that proves it is true."
But Kass’s supporters see no benefit in having patient advocates on board.
"I don’t know offhand what patients would bring to it,’’ notes Robert Bork, who works with Kass at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank. "They could say they’re suffering, but I doubt they’d have the background or expertise’’ to contribute to the debate, he says.
As for Kass, he doesn’t believe he’s obliged to hand the president a consensus on cloning or any other issue. Instead, he expects to present Bush with the prevailing opinions from the council and to elevate public knowledge about the ethics of cloning and other matters.
"Contrary to what many people said at the beginning—that this was a stacked panel and all you had were rabid, right-wing Republicans bordering on the Taliban—this is a diverse group of people," Kass observes. "You have serious scientists whose major goal is the attainment of knowledge that might be humanly beneficial, and you have serious moralists whose major concern is that the weakest among us not be sacrificed even for the greater good.
"My job here is not to see that my view prevails. My job here is to see to it that we provide the president with the richest possible consideration, so that he knows what is at stake in whatever decision he makes."
In this respect, Kass is approaching the chairman’s job much the way he has approached bioethics throughout his entire career: He tends to view a topic less in terms of the immediate public policy question and more in terms of the ramifications for the future of science, medicine, and humanity.
"He is a very deep thinker of a kind that you do not usually see in Washington,’’ Doerflinger says. "He goes beyond individual issues to talk about how they relate to human dignity and the human condition."
Kass expects to give Bush the council’s report on cloning this summer. The panel will then move on to other issues.
Those who embrace cloning for human reproduction are a distinct minority, but opinions are far more diverse about whether it should be used to advance medical research. The National Academy of Sciences has issued a report urging that any attempt to clone a human being be banned because it poses a high risk of injury or death to the clone and to the woman who carries it. But it supports disease research involving the cloning of human embryonic cells. The predecessor to Kass’s panel—a national bioethics commission that operated under President Bill Clinton—made similar recommendations in 1997.
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives has passed a sweeping ban on cloning for any purpose, including research. The Democrat-controlled Senate must now decide whether to embrace the House version or craft a more limited ban that would focus on preventing the implantation, gestation, and birth of a cloned baby.
As for Kass, his position on the subject closely follows that of the Church: He writes from a natural-law perspective, which rejects research involving the loss of human life, even if its purpose is to alleviate suffering. He would ban therapeutic cloning on the grounds that once scientists have carried out the mechanics necessary to clone, they will have given the world all the ingredients for reproducing a human being.
"My concern is that once you put human life in human hands, you have started on a slippery slope that knows no boundaries,’’ Kass argues. "The fact that we have started down this road [of] having life in human hands outside the human body seems to me to be crossing a kind of moral boundary that will lead to places most people won’t want to go.’’
Beginnings
One of Kass’s first writings on bioethics was in the late 1960s. While still a young student at the University of Chicago—he entered college at age 15—he read a newspaper commentary by eminent scientist Joshua Lederberg. Scientists had just cloned tadpoles, and Lederberg was speculating about the possibility of human cloning. Kass was appalled by the notion and wrote a critical letter to the editor. In subsequent years—as he completed his biology and medical degrees at Chicago, then his biochemistry Ph.D. at Harvard—Kass saw many of the ethical dilemmas that were arising from bold new laboratory procedures. He raised concerns about the emergence of organ transplants, which he considered "fancy medical technology that wasn’t going to benefit a lot of people and [would] lead to a trade in human spare parts,’’ says Harvey Flaumenhaft, a classmate of Kass in college and now dean of St. John’s College. Later, Kass raised objections to in vitro fertilization and to fetal research. When scientists first cloned Dolly the sheep, Kass began an inquiry into the ethical consequences. In 1996, he testified before Congress against doctor-assisted suicides, an issue he had written about for years.
Some say Kass grew discouraged by his inability to influence public policy on these matters. To some extent, he also gave up trying to argue against legalized abortion. "I think he felt the secular culture was going in a direction he could not prevent by himself,’’ Doerflinger says. "He’s been a bit of a fatalist on public advocacy because...he didn’t see that he was doing a great deal of good. So he devoted himself to just trying to do good work academically and trying to get some of his students thinking clearly on the issues."
"There have been times when I’ve sort of pulled out of [the public and political arenas] because it seemed to me that bioethics questions were going to be largely influenced by cultural questions," Kass concedes. "It’s very hard to make arguments about the effects of cloning on family relations if family relations are in tatters. If you don’t really see that there might be some wisdom in the bond between sexual procreation, erotic love, and marriage, then certain kinds of arguments about the dangers of manufacturing children just won’t register."
Last year, however, when a company called Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts, announced that it had successfully cloned embryos for research, Kass saw a chance to make a strong case against the practice before it became acceptable in the public mind. On Capitol Hill, Kass testified against cloning and lobbied for a comprehensive ban on the practice, which the House of Representatives recently passed.
"I do believe that the decision about human cloning represents an opportunity for us to decide whether we are going to be the victims of a kind of technological determinism—in which what can be done will be done—or whether we will try to shape the direction in which these new technologies will go," Kass says. "This would be a major step down the road to the Brave New World. The public is, by and large, against it. Yet there are certain cowboys out there who threaten to do this for the sheer pleasure of being the first to do it."
Kass’s advocacy on the Hill caught the attention of the White House, and an invitation soon followed: Would Kass meet with the president to discuss his views on research using stem cells, which, because of their ability to replicate all the body’s tissues, are believed to hold promise for treating several debilitating diseases?
Bush’s dilemma was political as well as moral: How could he satisfy conservatives without seeming heartless toward those whose diseases might be cured or treated through advances in stem-cell research? Ultimately, Bush struck a compromise, allowing continued research on cell lines already taken from discarded human embryos but banning the destruction of more embryos for experimental purposes. While Kass has called stem-cell research a "deeply vexing and serious moral question," he reportedly embraced Bush’s decision as a workable solution to the current dilemma.
"This is not like the war against terror, where it is a fairly clear case of battles against evil,’’ Kass notes. "Here we are confronting a situation where there are competing goods and the question is how to make sure that everyone who has to make a decision knows what these goods are.’’
Kass’s appointment to the bioethics commission followed shortly after the president’s statement about stem-cell research. In general, Kass avoids television and newspaper interviews because he objects to "being forced to reduce my thoughts to sound bites.’’ He still remembers when former Colorado Governor Dick Lamm—in a now-notorious speech—took one of Kass’s writings out of context and suggested that senior citizens had a duty to die and make way for new generations. Kass was flooded with calls from journalists. Today, he refuses to speak to reporters unless they agree to tell him which of his quotes they plan to use.
"I don’t want to be placed at the end of the teeter-totter against some person with a more liberal voice so the journalists can look like they’re doing their balancing,’’ he says.
Religious Values
Kass was raised on the south side of Chicago by parents who ran a clothing store and embraced socialist values. Yiddish culture and language were emphasized at home; religion was not.
Over the years, Kass retained that strong social conscience and concern for the underdog. He also began studying traditional religions and wrote extensively about the Bible. Today, Kass adheres to a conservative, though not strictly orthodox, Judaism. He attends synagogue and fasts on Yom Kippur.
"The things he valued in secular Yiddish culture—concern for the poor, for character, for family values—have roots in religion and spirituality," Flaumenhaft says. "One would not now think of him as a socialist, but many of his concerns about science, medicine, and technology stem from his concern for those who are not the elite.’’
When Kass walks, he leads with his chest—his shoulders set back, his arms behind him. A single, gleaming line of silver runs along his brow and highlights his black-gray hair, parted far to the left of his scalp. His glasses turn up slightly at the corners, giving him a bookish appearance.
But while Kass’s friends say he’s a serious man, they insist he’s by no means glum or reclusive. Kass is a great storyteller and loves to collect jokes, which he often transforms into a Yiddish dialect humor. He and his wife of 40 years, Amy, are avid birdwatchers whose vacations have included trips to the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific. They have two daughters and three grandchildren.
"There are really two sides of him that it’s hard for people to grasp," says Daniel Callahan, a director of the Hastings Center who persuaded Kass to join the center’s team when it began delving into bioethics in the late 1960s. "He’s got a lot of very firm, hard views...on a lot of things, and if he were given his head, he might have a lot of bans and tough regulations. On the other hand, there’s this teaching side that is very good about talking about the issues. People who totally disagree with him find him a wonderful person to dialogue with."
These two very different aspects of Kass’s personality were on vivid display at February’s council meeting. On the one hand, Kass was at pains to let his 17 colleagues have their say. On the other, he frequently seemed impatient to interject a thought as other council members were speaking.
Council members agreed that the use of cloning "for baby-making,’’ as Kass put it, was undesirable. But just how undesirable depended on the member. One council member called it "a degradation," arguing that such artificial reproduction robs a child of the "lineage of affection" that naturally born children experience with their parents, grandparents, and other relatives. Another tempered that view by noting that, to some degree, adopted children are also robbed of this experience and that it might be more prudent to find other ways to explain the council’s objections.
Kass, who clearly had a thing or two to say about the subject, opened his mouth three times to interject a thought—and three times checked himself, choosing instead to take copious notes and acknowledge his colleagues’ remarks with quick nods. As he listened, one hand went to his hip and the other to his chin, and when he finally did open his mouth to speak, it was with the grace and equilibrium of a diplomat: "That might be the way we go,’’ he said, "but let’s work on it."
"Leon has been thinking about human cloning longer and deeper than anybody else in that room,’’ Doerflinger notes. "That may be part of the impatience. These people are saying things that he thought through and realized the flaws in years ago. But as chairman of a bioethics council, you have to let other people have their say."
This is the Kass who has learned, from years of university teaching, how to keep his own strong views from closing off a discussion. The Kass who is determined to win the argument waits his turn.
Janet Gail was used to looking at mammograms and finding bad news. As a hospital technician in Pennsylvania, that was her job. But she was unprepared for what she found in her own mammogram when she did a routine screening at age 42.
"I immediately recognized a suspicious area on the films," Gail—who asked that her real name not be used because her children don’t know her history—says. "We returned to the X-ray room to take more specialized views, which only confirmed my suspicions. I knew at that moment that my life was forever changed. I knew I was a breast-cancer patient."
Gail was changed. She knew what breast-cancer patients suffer—the cancer can go to your lungs an
d make you suffocate. It can get in your bones and make them so brittle that you can break a hip turning in bed.
Then there’s the debilitating treatments she knew lay ahead, the surgery that, victims say, strikes at their very identity as women. If you survive the disease, you worry constantly about relapse. But often you don’t survive the disease.
Surgeons helped. Gail realized that radical mastectomy was her only choice. "My emotions were raw and tender," she says. "I was so angry! Angry at God, angry at my new body, angry at the world. I sought counseling and tried desperately to understand why God would put me in this situation.
"It was at that time that I plunged head-first into the research, trying to find a cause for my own cancer," she says. She checked off the risk factors that she didn’t have: no family history, no abnormalities with her menstrual cycle, no estrogen treatments. But then she remembered one she’d read about before, one that she was trying hard not to think about.
Gail had an abortion when she was 18.
A Deadly Combination
Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women, other than skin cancer. It’s the second leading cause of cancer death in women after lung cancer.
And it kills more women in Gail’s age group (40 to 59) than almost anything else.
Meanwhile, abortion has become the most common surgical procedure for young women. National Right to Life estimates that there will be 1.3 million abortions in the United States this year.
According to the American Cancer Society, breast cancer has been detected in women at a dramatically increased rate since 1972. In 1962 there were 63,000 cases; in 1972, 90,000; in 1982, 120,000; and in 1992, 180,000. The year 2002 will see some 203,500 new cases of invasive breast cancer. An estimated 39,600 women will die from it.
True, detection methods have improved dramatically in that time span, and the number of women tested has increased. But so have abortions—and the evidence linking them to breast cancer.
Troubling Discoveries
Angela Lanfranchi, M.D., a New Jersey breast surgeon, came across the abortion/breast-cancer link in much the same way Gail did—only she was the surgeon, not the patient.
In the early 1990s, Lanfranchi began to notice that young women were coming into her office with breast cancer and that they all had a history of abortions, often in their teens.
"I began to change my intake form to ask about births, miscarriages, and abortions," she says. "In the first month, I’d had two women with many abortions."
She had gone through medical school in the 1970s, when there were still relatively few women in the profession. She considers herself a feminist, she says, but quickly adds, "Not a NOW [National Organization for Women] type."
She wasn’t the first to notice a correlation. Studies had found the same thing—findings that somehow had not gotten into the clinicians’ literature.
It made her mad. "I just couldn’t stand seeing those 30-year-olds in the office, with breast cancer, with little toddlers," she says. "These children weren’t going to have their mothers."
In 1996 she read a metanalysis of the relevant studies by Joel Brind, Ph.D., a biology professor at Baruch College in New York, who had put the pieces together. According to his article, the first study that showed a link between breast cancer and abortion had been published when Brind and Lanfranchi were children. It appeared in 1957 in the prominent English-language Japanese Journal of Cancer Research. Japan was one of the few places where abortion was legal in those days (importantly, for abortion/breast-cancer link activists, Denmark was another). The study found that breast-cancer patients were three times more likely to have had abortions than the general population. If abortion was a contributor to breast cancer elsewhere, it went unreported. At that time, though abortion was becoming prevalent in the West, it wasn’t mentioned in polite society or on medical charts.
Everything changed with the sexual revolution.
In the 1970s and 1980s, evidence began to mount that abortion was putting women at risk. Today, there have been 37 studies on the abortion/breast-cancer link. More than 75 percent of them—28—show that abortion is a risk factor for breast cancer.
Many of these studies were funded, at least in part, by the National Cancer Institute. At the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute in Seattle, veteran cancer researcher Janet Daling and a team of scholars found that, in her words from this 1994 study, "[a]mong women who had been pregnant at least once, the breast cancer rate in those who had experienced an induced abortion was 50 percent higher than among other women. Highest risks were observed when the abortion was done at ages younger than 18 years...or at least 30 years of age or older."
Most troubling of all were the statistics on teens with a family history of breast cancer who had gotten abortions. In the study, this deadly combination (though found in just twelve of the women studied) seemed to guarantee that a woman would get breast cancer.
The Clueless Culture
Lanfranchi and Brind, via the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute in upstate New York, deserve much of the credit for publicizing the link outside the medical world. In a way, they’ve been committed to the cause since childhood. Lanfranchi said she learned to do the right thing from her father, a surgeon who fought back when his Akron, Ohio, hospital was doing illegal abortions. Brind has been a medical crusader since he went to get a haircut as a ten-year-old: "My local barber had run out of Archie comics," he told me. "I read an old well-worn Life magazine instead." The story he read was about biochemistry’s great promise to the world of medicine, suggesting it might someday find the cure to cancer. Brind wrote himself a letter that day, which he discovered years later, that said: "I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but I will become a biochemist." Nineteen years later, he did.
How do they explain the abortion/breast-cancer link? Lanfranchi points to two factors: estrogen—the hormone that grows breast tissue and that increases 2,000 percent in pregnancy—and lobules—the cells in that tissue that grow at puberty, mature in pregnancy, and produce milk after childbirth.
In the natural course of events, estrogen and breast lobules work in tandem—the estrogen grows the lobules, which differentiate and mature into full-fledged cells during the third trimester of pregnancy. But if the lobules’ development is interrupted while estrogen levels are high, then the extra estrogen may cause mutated cells to grow and multiply into a cancerous tumor.
This estrogen flood and breast-cell growth explain many of the recognized risk factors for breast cancer. A girl who gets her first period early or a woman who has a late menopause are at a higher risk for breast cancer because they have more estrogen exposure. Nuns who have no children have a higher risk than women who have many children, because their breast cells never mature into the protective type-four phase. Birth control pills—which work by tricking a woman’s body into thinking it’s pregnant—increase estrogen and, therefore, the risk of breast cancer. (There is one recent study that claims they don’t, but this study also claims that a family history of breast cancer doesn’t increase the risk—a giant red flag.)
Miscarriage doesn’t increase the risk of breast cancer because miscarriage usually happens when estrogen levels are abnormally low.
Tell most people about the abortion/breast-cancer link and they’re incredulous. That’s because modern lifestyles and pop culture have left Americans clueless about breasts. From the move away from nursing in the 1950s and 1960s to the sexual revolution and the contraceptive age, sex has filled the culture, and having one or two children has become the norm for families. In such a culture, the abortion/breast-cancer link sounds preposterous—because the link between the femininity of women and their childbearing capability is all but lost.
Reasonable Doubts
The culture may be clueless about breasts, but clinicians aren’t. So why are so many clinicians skeptical of the abortion/breast-cancer connection?
To begin with, many doubt that the statistical evidence, however strong, justifies the conclusions. "Some of my colleagues call epidemiology a pseudoscience," Brind observes. Lanfranchi explains why: "Epidemiology shows associations. If you did a study on lung cancer, you would find that people with lung cancer have more matches in their pockets than people without. Are there emanations from the matches? Or is it something else? You need to show a biological basis." At any rate, breast surgeons either don’t read the epidemiological journals that show the link, or they take them with a grain of salt when they do.
Others say the research doesn’t adequately allow for "recall bias." This is the argument, made on many a pro-abortion Web site, that studies showing the abortion/breast-cancer link get all their information about a woman’s abortion history from the woman herself. But women often misstate their abortion history, meaning many cancer-free women who have had abortions aren’t counted. Conversely, the women with breast cancer are the most likely to report abortions—they’re eager to find reasons for their cancer. "One of the reasons recall bias may sound persuasive is that it is a reasonable hypothesis," Brind says. But he distinguished between underreporting and bias—the idea that the underreporting is different in the two groups. He told me that "no credible evidence of recall bias in abortion/breast-cancer studies has ever been reported. They’ve looked for it and haven’t found it."
If recall bias were a sufficient argument on its own, says the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer (visit its Web site at www.abortionbreastcancer.com; it also looks at alleged bias in particular studies), then we could disregard a number of health concerns: the link between cervical cancer and the number of sexual partners a woman has had, the link between liver cancer and alcoholism, and the link between AIDS and the number of homosexual partners a man has had.
Rotten in Denmark
Deniers of the abortion/breast-cancer link also fight studies with studies. "Right now we can say that there are 28 of 37 studies," says Karen Malec of the coalition, "but these scientists used the Melbye study and the Sanderson study to deny a link. They’ve used two studies to deny 28."
The Melbye study is the mighty "Danish study" that was published by the New England Journal of Medicine in 1997, and it was supposed to put the abortion/breast-cancer link to rest by keeping all recall bias out of the study.
To understand the importance of this study, look at the following quote from the Web site of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League: "Anti-choice forces are impeding medical research and distorting scientific findings to frighten women into believing that abortion causes breast cancer." The emphasis in the next part is from the original: "The largest and most comprehensive investigation of this potential link examined population registry information on abortion and breast cancer for 1.5 million women born in Denmark between 1935 and 1978. This study, recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine, concluded that ‘induced abortions have no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer.’"
Sounds conclusive—unless you’re a researcher who has read the study. For one thing, the study did find a link to second-trimester abortions. Brind also points out that the study’s breast-cancer records start in 1968, but its abortion records start in 1973—even though abortion has been legal in Denmark since the 1930s. Women with breast cancer who had their abortions before 1973 weren’t counted as having had abortions. In fact, Brind says, records of abortions exist for 60,000 women who are counted in the study as never having had an abortion—older women who would have been more likely to have developed breast cancer.
Likewise, women having abortions in the final years of the study could have developed breast cancer after the study was over. But those women would have been counted as having had abortions but no breast cancer. A quarter of the women in the Melbye study were still under the age of 25, Brind says, and these women were being compared with middle-aged women.
Sacrificed for Science
How could scientists countenance such a flawed study?
Lanfranchi answers by telling the story of Ignaz Semmelweiss (1818-1865), the Hungarian physician who noticed that laboring mothers in the care of doctors in Vienna hospitals had much higher mortality rates than those in the care of midwives. Those were the days before germ theory, and Semmelweiss formed a hypothesis: The doctors, who went between morgue and maternity ward without washing their hands, were carrying some sort of odor particle that invaded their patients. To test his theory, he asked the doctors to wash their hands. It worked. The mortality rates went down. In response, the doctors drove Semmelweiss out of mainstream medicine—he died in a mental hospital. Lister soon proved he was right.
We already know that modern-day breast-cancer surgeons aren’t immune to the Semmelweiss syndrome, the blind refusal to make a paradigm shift. Many of them chafed at the suggestion that radical mastectomies weren’t always necessary in cases of breast cancer.
Another inexcusable reason for ignorance of the abortion/breast-cancer link is political ideology. While Catholics have faith, hope, and charity, abortion ideologues have "safe, legal, and rare" abortion. The "rare" part was never really true; activists are clinging for dear life to the "legal" part; but at least the "safe" part was supposed to be accurate.
This political ideology has hardened abortion proponents so that they are insensible to evidence for the link. Pro-abortion bias seems to be at play in mainstream cancer awareness Web sites where cagey language hides the abortion/breast-cancer link. Some sites use Clintonisms (using the term "abortion" in its broadest sense to include miscarriages and stillbirths as well). Some cling to aspects of researchers’ studies that the researchers themselves have abandoned. Many harp on recall bias without showing what studies the criticism applies to. All take frequent trips to the eternal well of Melbye.
Another reason many doctors are unaware of the link is the nature of the disease itself, Brind says. "Women don’t come forward complaining about it, because they’re either too sick, too traumatized, or don’t survive long enough." Even if they did, they wouldn’t find doctors receptive to the information. The reason is simple: money. "Do you want to hear from a lawyer about why you haven’t been telling patients about the abortion risk for so long?" Lanfranchi asks.
There have been a number of lawsuits on the abortion/breast-cancer link recently. No plaintiff has prevailed against an abortion business—so far. In a 1999 case, a North Dakota abortion business was sued for false advertising. In 2000, three California women sued Planned Parenthood for calling abortion safe on brochures and its Web site. Those cases are still in appeals.
How can the truth about the abortion/breast-cancer link become better known against such odds?
The Truth Will Win Out
The fact is, the truth is already coming out.
Two recent lawsuits in Australia ended in settlements, which means that while no judge has looked at the matter and decided that the evidence for the link was strong, nervous abortionists are looking at the evidence for the link and starting to pay women who complain that they weren’t informed. Importantly, unlike the U.S. cases, in which activists were the plaintiffs, one of the Australian cases (the other is gag-ordered) involved a woman who had received an abortion herself. (Similar suits are in the works in the United States, Karen Malec says.)
The link is also showing up in popular culture. Brita Stream is a sign of that. An evangelical Christian, Stream was crowned Miss Oregon on July 13 and the abortion/breast- cancer link is her platform.
She’s not your typical beauty queen. The Miss Oregon competition was her first beauty pageant, and she entered it to talk about the abortion/breast-cancer link. Will that hurt her chances at becoming Miss America this September? "I don’t really care," she told me, smiling. "I won because God wanted people to hear about my platform. I had a duty. It was like I was Esther. If I perish, I perish. If people attack me for it, too bad, because this is what God charged me with."
Television audiences are hearing about the link in San Diego, in an ad that shows a volleyball coach talking to her team, while her voiceover describes her abortion and breast-cancer experience. In a soon-to-air Ohio public TV debate, Lanfranchi and Brind debate an abortion activist.
The message is even being heard in Washington. For years, the Web site of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) included a page about abortion and breast cancer denying the connection. A group of U.S. representatives led by Chris Smith (R-N.J.) changed that, National Institutes of Health (NIH) spokesman Michael Miller says. The page was removed on June 19, he says, because the congressmen questioned its accuracy.
What Comes Next
What does the future hold for the discussion about abortion and breast cancer?
Miller told me that the National Cancer Institute is currently funding one study "looking specifically at the association of induced abortion and the risk of breast cancer," and three other NCI-sponsored studies "are examining a variety of possible breast-cancer risk factors, including induced abortion."
That news doesn’t necessarily cheer battle-scarred activists like Malec. "My fear is that these scientists will practice what Dr. Brind has called ‘outcome-based science,’" she says. "My fear is that they’re beating the bushes for studies that will make them look good."
Serrin Foster, president of Feminists for Life, hopes not. Her reaction to the abortion/breast-cancer connection is appropriate: "This really makes me angry," she says. "I have friends who had abortions at that time when everybody was saying it was just a product of conception, a couple of cells on the tip of a needle. Now they’re asking, what does this mean for them? The NCI and NIH owe them a good answer."
Informing the public about abortion and breast cancer can reduce abortions. As Lanfranchi points out, women who choose abortion are often looking for excuses not to—and parents who choose abortion for their daughters might not if they knew about the dangers.
Gail wishes that she had known before her abortion—and hopes others will find out before it’s too late for them. "Even if the woman won’t spare the life for the sake of the unborn, she may spare the life growing inside her when she considers the consequences of breast surgery years down the road."
At the same time, Foster warns against considering the abortion/breast-cancer link just another arrow in a quiver of pro-life arguments. "This is not a tactic, this is life and death for these women," she says. "Are we not committed to saving these women, or do we only care about the baby?
"Women shouldn’t be put at risk simply because it’s not politically correct to say anything bad about abortion," she adds. "Whether you support abortion or not, you have to take the politics out. Even those women who believe that women should have the right to have an abortion should ’fess up and speak for women."
To his credit, Dr. Stuart Donnan, when he was editor-in-chief of the British Medical Association’s Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, did just that. In a 1996 opinion piece on the evidence linking abortion and breast cancer, he wrote, "[I]t will surely be agreed that open discussion of risks is vital and must include the people—in this case the women—concerned. I believe that if you take a view (as I do), which is often called ‘pro-choice,’ you need at the same time to have a view which might be called ‘pro-information,’ without excessive paternalistic censorship (or interpretation) of the data."
In a most ordinary moment on a normal day at work in the Chicago bureau of a major national newsmagazine, I came to a realization that has bothered me ever since. Everyone knows how much power the press has in shaping the news, how its choice of stories and words influence readers. But one afternoon, talking about a rather silly feature story we were doing on pop culture, someone joked, "You know, we can start a trend just by calling it a trend!"
I stopped dead. It was true. But I was the only one not laughing.
Of course, this was hardly an original insight. Walter Lippman—journalist, military intelligence specialist during World War I, propagandist, political scientist, author, and adviser to the presidents—made the same observation a generation ago. These words from his book, Public Opinion, bear repeating:
Every newspaper when it reaches the reader is the result of a whole series of selections.... In order that [the reader] shall enter he must find a familiar foothold in the story, and this is supplied to him by the use of stereotypes. They tell him that if an association of plumbers is called a "combine" it is appropriate to develop his hostility; if it is called a "group of leading businessmen" the cue is for a favorable reaction. It is in a combination of these elements that the power to create opinion resides.
Why is it so easy to lead people into new behaviors, desires, and attitudes? Why don’t people think more critically and see through some of the airy media stories that have no real substance—the stories that are less news than public relations or marketing? As Lippman noted, it’s the result of "apathy, preference for the curious trivial as against the dull important, and the hunger for sideshows and three-legged calves."
These days, sideshows and curious trivia have actually gained even greater importance in an industry that has become a confusing mix of news and entertainment. Still, there are people who would like to pay attention to the more consequential events and issues that used to be called news. These can be hard to discern when politics itself has become trivialized. Hence the need to become intelligent news consumers: to learn how to pick through massive fields of information for substantive and fair reporting.
This is a tall task. The manipulation of public opinion is of great importance to both the government and the media. And it takes on added urgency in the months before an election.
Shaping the News
Last year, veteran CBS newsman Bernard Goldberg shocked the media world with his book, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News. He minced no words in laying out the fundamental problem. "The old argument that the networks and other ‘media elites’ have a liberal bias is so blatantly true that it’s hardly worth discussing anymore," he writes. "No, we don’t sit around in dark corners and plan strategies on how we’re going to slant the news. We don’t have to. It comes naturally to most reporters.... When you get right down to it, liberals in the newsroom see liberal views as just plain...sensible, reasonable, rational views, which just happen to coincide with their own" (emphasis added).
Consider this exchange from CNN’s American Morning show. The panelists are talking about the quality of the reporting from the Middle East. Anderson Cooper says, "On both sides of this issue, people see this so clearly one way or the other. It’s really fascinating." Paula Zahn: "And it clearly colors their reaction to reporting, and I think it’s, you know, very difficult for people to separate their own personal views from the way they interpret the news." Jack Cafferty: "The news media is [sic] only objective if they report something you agree with." Zahn: "Right." Cafferty concludes: "Then they’re objective. Otherwise they’re biased if you don’t agree, you know."
For these three CNN personalities, the news media themselves are impervious to the predispositions and prejudice that afflict their audience. But contrary to what CNN might have us believe, bias is a real problem. You can see it in all the ways the media interpret, frame, and produce the great issues of our day. They slant the news according to their ideologies and find sources who will back them up. Over my 23 years with a newsmagazine, it often did a good—sometimes very good—job of reporting and analyzing news and its impact. But sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes the editors assigned reporters to a story that had been preconceived in the New York headquarters—a story with a foregone conclusion.
It was the job of the local bureaus to find people who would give us colorful quotes that fit the theory the story would propose. For instance, the New York office once sent to the bureaus an assignment to do a story on experimental and unproven procedures that "cavalier surgeons" were "getting away with" in the operating room. The story concept assumed the worst—that unchecked surgeons were doing all sorts of impromptu experiments with untested medical instruments in order to pioneer a new operation. Unfortunately, the agenda-driven piece only worked by making invalid comparisons, giving inaccurate medical descriptions, and adding misleading explanations.
We at the local bureau had our job cut out for us: to find examples to buttress New York’s faulty premise. We were to hunt down quotes about surgeons who have too much freedom in trying out risky new techniques.
In other words, the magazine had decided there was a controversy and then had to scramble to find evidence to prove it. It was clearly off the mark, and so I reported at length on what I found, with strong quotes from strong sources (including the vice president of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons). The experts I interviewed explained with great clarity the very complicated process of advanced lifesaving surgery—both its risks and its benefits. (The vice president had said: "It’s mind-boggling how low the failure rate is, so we’re kind of looking around and wondering why people aren’t standing up and cheering and saying, ‘You guys are doing a hell of a job!’" Predictably, that quote never got used.)
Happily, the article that appeared in the magazine was substantially different from the tone and original intent of the assignment. Score one for truth. But I can’t say that was always the result. Often, if the reporting didn’t fit the required conclusions and desired slant of the piece, it just didn’t make it into the story at all.
"In the higher bureaucracy organizations—the major media—editors pay less attention because they’re busy doing other things," observes Chicago writer and media raconteur Gary Ruderman, a former colleague who left the magazine several years before I did. "They choose not to be informed, and they don’t do the work to find out the truth behind the rumors and hearsay."
Or as Goldberg puts it, "National TV reporters, as a group, are lazy."
We once had a bureau chief who was deeply engaged in the world of high society and quite adept in the inner circles of Washington politics, where he’d been a diplomatic correspondent. He was, indeed, very busy. But when it came to reporting from the field, at least in this bureau, his research and writing came mainly from the Chicago newspapers. While that fact was well-known, it didn’t matter to anyone in power. Headquarters took him away from Chicago only to give him a plum job in London.
Veteran newsman Jim Hatfield was an exception to the rule, referring to himself as a "Genghis Khan" in the newsroom. He went from newsman for KPIX in the late 1960s to news writer for KNBC, to executive producer for KABC in Hollywood, and then to the CBS-owned station WBBM in Chicago as news director, producer, and executive producer of magazine programming. "It’s more difficult now to get an accurate picture from the news media," notes Hatfield, who does freelance work from his home outside Chicago. "The broad spectrum of media now, especially with the advent of the Internet, has added pressure and forced changes in the broadcast arena. They’ve hired younger, less experienced people and have pushed for the most sensational angles possible. The levels of taste and sensitivity that we always observed, the lines we would never cross, are just about gone now."
"The problem comes in the big social and cultural issues, where we often sound more like flacks for liberal causes than objective journalists," Goldberg admits. "It’s a world where money is often seen as a solution to social problems, where antiabortionists are seen as kooks and weirdos." The major network chiefs take their cues every day from the New York Times, he says, and all reporting derives from that worldview. "It’s scary to think that so many important people who bring Americans the news can be so delusional." Scary because, as Goldberg notes, "It’s not just that so many journalists are so different from mainstream America. It’s that some are downright hostile to what many Americans hold sacred." And these are the creators of American public opinion.
Word Games
If you control language, you control thought. In Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, author Joseph Pieper reminds us of Plato’s lifelong battle with the Sophists, "those highly paid and popularly applauded experts in the art of twisting words, who were able to sweet-talk something bad into something good and to turn white into black." Hegel saw sophistry as a distinct danger to any society, believing that "such absolute and unmoored questioning that plucks apart any object and dialectically discredits everything...almost inevitably leads us to the conviction that everything can be justified if we look hard enough for reasons."
Even when challenged, the news elites keep changing the language and their tactics for controlling it. In George Orwell’s 1984, the "Party" replaces ordinary language with "Newspeak," a language of propaganda, euphemism, double-talk, and evasion—a language in which words are evacuated of their natural meaning.
We don’t need to search for modern examples. The advocates of abortion-on-demand do this better and more forcibly than anyone. They eschew phrases like "partial-birth abortion," which accurately describes a surgical procedure. Instead, they use words with a more positive connotation, combining "reproductive" with "rights," and "pro" with "choice." They label those who oppose the killing of life in the womb as "antichoice," preferring not to mention what the choice is.
During the Clinton impeachment hearings, there were almost too many biased news reports to keep track of. But here are a few I noted. CNN’s Jeanne Meserve, while interpreting a poll on the country’s supposed reaction to the idea of impeachment, said, "The majority of those polled do not favor impeachment—27 percent said no impeachment—while only a quarter said yes." That’s a virtual tie, given the standard margin for error.
A couple of days later, CNN’s Candy Crowley reported from Capitol Hill on the ugly battles and charges between the two political parties over the Clinton tapes. She concluded by noting that the Senate had just fallen three votes short of overturning the president’s veto of the partial-birth abortion ban. With a smile, Crowley observed that this was the same vote count as the last time around, so "it’s good to see that there’s some degree of normalcy still around here."
Goldberg himself makes some interesting notes about the impeachment coverage. "During the Clinton impeachment trial in 1999," Goldberg writes, "as the senators signed their names in the oath book swearing they would be fair and impartial, Peter Jennings, who was anchoring ABC News’s live coverage, made sure his audience knew which senators were conservative—but uttered not a word about which ones were liberal." He noted that Jennings referred to various Republican senators as "more right than left in his politics" and as "very determined conservative member[s] of the Republican Party," while liberal Democratic senators were just pointed out by name and state.
I was watching CNN during this episode and noticed a brief (almost imperceptible) moment of recognition of personal bias in former studio anchor Frank Sesno. As he watched the Senate Republicans on the screen next to him, he charged that they were not conducting the proceedings in a fair and impartial manner, despite their pledge. In a fit of obvious indignation, Sesno looked into the camera and said that these members of the Senate "took an oath" and, before finishing the sentence, looked down at his desk with what I detected was embarrassment and continued rather meekly, "Well, that’s what this is all about in the first place, isn’t it?" referring to Clinton’s perjury. He seemed to recover from this bout of conscience fairly quickly.
Shortly after the 1992 election, one of our senior editors at the newsmagazine left to take a high-level position in the Clinton administration. No surprise there. I was surprised, however, when I learned of the remarks another former colleague made after she rose rapidly through the ranks and wound up as one of the magazine’s White House reporters. In an interview in Mirabella magazine, referring to former President Clinton, she said: "I’d be happy to give him [oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs."
His baby had seemed real to him from the moment when Rosemary spoke of abortion; but it had been a reality without visual shape—something that happened in the dark and was only important after it happened. But here was the actual process taking place. Here was the poor ugly thing, no bigger than a gooseberry, that he had created by his heedless act. Its future, its continued existence perhaps, depended on him. Besides, it was a bit of himself—it was himself. Dare one dodge such a responsibility as that?
— George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Ebony Smith was once only a street corner away from getting an abortion. Last October, Ebony, 17, was walking to her local Planned Parenthood clinic in the South Bronx. "I was scared and I was just about to finish high school and I didn’t really know what to do," she says, recalling how she was vomiting nearly every day and how she feared her parents’ reaction to the pregnancy. "I thought that [abortion] was my only option."
On her way to the clinic, she eyed a large billboard on the side of a building; it read, "Free Pregnancy Tests." She decided to check it out and went inside Expectant Mother Care, a crisis pregnancy center. The tests confirmed that she was six weeks pregnant. A counselor told her about abortion—how a doctor vacuums the embryo or fetus out of the mother’s womb as you would a stray piece of popcorn on the carpet, and the guilt and bleeding that can ensue. That was one reason she decided not to abort.
The other was later seeing images of the fetus on the center’s 3-D ultrasound machine. The tiny black-and-white images amazed her.
"I didn’t realize that’s something inside of you," she says excitedly. "That’s when I decided I was not going to have an abortion. I could see the hands and the feet, and I could hear the heartbeat. It sounded like horses galloping—da-dum-da-dum -da-dum," she laughs.
Aside from helping her decide not to abort, the sonogram image did something else: It prompted her to work hard to graduate. "I knew I had to finish high school. It motivated me," she says. Less than seven months after she saw the sonogram, Josiah Collado was born. Ebony enrolled this fall at the State University of New York at Binghamton and plans to marry Nelson Collado next year.
In many ways, Ebony’s case is typical. New evidence suggests that ultrasound plays a key role in persuading women not to have abortions. Psychologists say the reason for this is maternal-fetal bonding, the experience Ebony had when she saw and heard the heartbeat of little Josiah for the first time. Prenatal scientists have discovered that ultrasound triggers those feelings even in the first trimester—two to three months earlier than they had thought. And now that 3-D and 4-D ultrasound is going commercial—General Electric now runs a TV ad for its 4-D machine—many think that maternal bonding will have an even greater effect on pregnant women.
In short, ultrasound has become a major force in the country’s abortion landscape. It has galvanized crisis pregnancy centers, which report seeing many more clients since the arrival of the new technology. And it is giving the pro-life cause a new tool to help persuade women to choose life.
Yet the vast majority of pregnant women in this country aren’t as lucky as Ebony. The crisis pregnancy center she went to not only had an ultrasound machine—a service offered by only 341 of 1,800 centers in the nation, according to Heartbeat International, a Columbus, Ohio-based nonprofit—the machine is 3-D, a relatively rare technology. If it hadn’t been for these things, Ebony’s pre-born baby would have ended up like the 1.2 million that are aborted every year. This ought to change. And yet unless government steps in to help, it won’t.
From Stories to Data
For decades, evidence about ultrasound’s impact on abortion was merely anecdotal. In an oft-cited 1983 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Drs. John C. Fletcher and Mark I. Evans found that the viewing of a sonogram image "in the late first or early mid-trimester of pregnancy, before movement is felt by the mother, may also influence the resolution of any ambivalence toward the pregnancy itself in favor of the fetus."
But in the nearly two decades since the appearance of this report, no researchers appear to have followed up on it. Neither Lawrence D. Platt, the past president of the American Institute for Ultrasound in Medicine, nor Delores H. Pretorius, a professor in the radiology department at the University of California at San Diego and a leading authority on 3-D ultrasound, could recall a single study on the topic. The federal government has similarly failed to look at the issue; ultrasound still isn’t listed among the reasons for the decade-long drop in abortions. "Our society doesn’t deal well with abortion. There’s such a divergence between pro-life and pro-choice people," Pretorius explains.
Yet Pretorius, who is pro-choice, acknowledges ultrasound’s power to change minds about abortion. Women find it "harder to abort their baby after seeing the image. I mean it’s harder even for women with Tay-Sachs disease [a fatal genetic disorder that affects the brain]. They don’t know whether the baby has the disease," she says.
Others agree. Eric Keroack, the medical director of A Woman’s Concern, a crisis pregnancy center in Boston, has just completed an unpublished article on the topic. His study compares two 18-month periods in the center’s recent history—before it used an ultrasound machine (July 1998 through 1999) and after it began using one (October 2000 through April 2002). Throughout, the type of clients was the same: women who told staff they were considering abortion. Of the 366 women tracked in the non-ultrasound phase, 58 percent aborted. But of the 434 women tracked in the ultrasound period, only 24 percent aborted. The abortion rate fell by 59 percent. And women were almost twice as likely to give birth to their babies. During the non-ultrasound phase, 33 percent of the women went on to give birth. That number jumped to 63 percent when the center had an ultrasound machine. (Nine percent of the women in the first cohort miscarried, as compared with 10 percent in the second cohort.)
Keroack, who says that he performed 30 to 35 abortions himself during his medical residency at Tufts University and early days as an OB-GYN, is up-front about his study’s chief flaw—it couldn’t follow the 35 percent of clients who didn’t respond. One Washington, D.C.–area ultrasonographer, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said he doubted that 63 percent of women would choose life after seeing the sonogram. He agreed that sonograms persuade women to remain pregnant but estimated that figure was between 20 to 33 percent. Nevertheless, even those figures represent a major step for the pro-life cause.
Even pro-choicers have acknowledged the sonogram’s power to change women’s minds. Francesco Angelo, the medical director of the Family Planning Center in Mineola, New York, was quoted in the February 24 New York Times as saying, "The bottom line is no woman is going to want an abortion after seeing a sonogram."
But others are slower to grasp the significance of the new technology. In a February 2 Associated Press story, Kate Michelman, the president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL), disparaged antiabortion groups that encourage ultrasound use. Such groups, she said, fail to respect "women’s capacity to understand what goes on in our bodies." At least one woman featured on NARAL’s own Web site wouldn’t agree. Shannon Lee Dawdy says that she and her husband "went for a routine ultrasound, and seeing our child for the first time made the pregnancy real for me" (emphasis added). (Dawdy aborted because the fetus had anencephaly, a rare neural tube defect.)
Maternal Bonding
Dawdy’s feelings actually are relatively new in human history. Before ultrasound was used, a woman had less reason to feel attached to her baby during the first 16 to 18 weeks of pregnancy. The in-utero child was still too small to be felt, let alone seen. (Which is why early American law followed English common law in distinguishing this "pre-quickening" period from a "quickening" period.) The maternal bonding phenomenon seemed to begin at about 16 to 18 weeks into the pregnancy, when the mother could feel the baby kick in the womb.
Ultrasound has changed all this. Even during the first trimester, a woman who saw a sonogram image of her unborn child now felt attached to her baby. That is, she wanted to know and protect her child. For the image on the screen isn’t just any tiny human—a generic photo of fetal development could show her that. It is hers, a human life she has helped create, a moving baby with a beating heart. It becomes impossible to refer to the baby as "uterine contents" or "the pregnancy" or a "product of misconception" (the sort of dehumanizing language favored by the New York Times). "There is a personalization of the fetus or embryo. The woman can see a hand and face move," Platt said.
In fact, scientists no longer really dispute the phenomenon. Numerous studies in the United States, Canada, and Europe have all found strong evidence for it. One early study showed that women who saw sonogram images early in pregnancy knew much more about their baby. In a 1980 article in the Journal of Obstetrics, Gynecologic, and Neonatal Nursing, three authors interviewed 100 women at a Pennsylvania hospital. The women’s answers were the same regardless of class or race. Before the scan, the mothers believed their fetuses or embryos were inactive—they described their child as "sleeping," "floating," "growing," and "moving" (in order of frequency). After viewing the scan, they saw that the pre-born child was active—the mothers’ responses in order now were "moving," "kicking," "growing," and "relaxing." The authors termed this change in views "considerable."
Maternal bonding has also been linked to changed behavior among expectant mothers. For example, a 1982 study in the journal Psychological Medicine found that in a randomized control group, women who saw a sonogram image of their fetus at 14 weeks or earlier and were given detailed information about prenatal development were less likely to smoke and drink than those women who had not seen their fetus’s image.
The Vital Two Months
The real problem with ultrasound isn’t the technology. It’s that most women don’t use the technology when it really matters: when they’re deciding whether to abort. Instead of being done during the first trimester, when women are most likely to abort, sonograms are usually done when women are 16 to 18 weeks pregnant, according to gynecologists and ultrasonographers. By that time, it’s too late.
Part of the problem is that ultrasound was long viewed by doctors with suspicion and indifference. The first modern scanner was used in 1966 in Germany, but for years the technology was practically unknown. Roe v. Wade doesn’t even mention sonograms, despite citing such medical advances as artificial insemination and the morning-after pill. Up through the early 1980s, the technology’s medical uses were scoffed at. In the standard textbook on ultrasound, Ultrasonography in Obstetrics and Gynecology, author Peter Callen opens one chapter this way: "When I began my involvement with diagnostic ultrasonography two decades ago, this chapter would have been considered ludicrous."
But around this same time sonogram images were improving, with the advent of real-time scanners and, a few years later, digital scan converters. In 1984 a famous 28-minute film, The Silent Scream, depicted a 12-week-old fetus being aborted. Yet fears of the technology persisted. The National Institutes of Health declined that year to endorse routine ultrasound screening in pregnancy, citing concerns about women’s safety and doubts about its medical values. Both concerns turned out to be groundless, but doubts remained. Only a little more than half of the roughly four million pregnant women who were pregnant in 1990 used sonograms to detect pregnancy, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Since then, sonogram use has steadily risen. By 2000, 67 percent of pregnant women were using it. Ultrasound figures prominently in magazines like Parents, while a woman having a sonogram is today a familiar scene in daytime soap operas. Ultrasound machines have also turned into big business, with the industry reaping $1 billion in profits last year. And 3-D machines, which have been around since the mid-1980s, are finally entering the commercial sphere. They can show a fetus as young as nine and a half weeks with a head, arms, belly, and legs.
But many insurance companies are unwilling to pay for more than one ultrasound scan, which typically costs several hundred dollars, and they prefer to have it done later in the pregnancy. In poor parts of Los Angeles, Platt notes, a woman won’t receive a scan till she’s 25 weeks pregnant. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the industry’s association, doesn’t recommend that all pregnant women undergo an ultrasound scan.
The abortion industry isn’t exactly an enthusiastic backer of the early use of ultrasound either. Clinics don’t require women to undergo sonograms before 14 weeks, let alone to view the image of the pre-born child. The National Abortion Federation, whose members perform half of the nation’s 1.2 million abortions annually, has no mandatory sonogram policy for its 450 clinics in the United States, according to Vickie Saporta, the executive director of the National Abortion Federation.
At least one former abortion-industry worker has claimed that her clinic turned the ultrasound monitor away from women. Jo Ann Appleton, now the president of the Society of Centurions, a pro-life organization for former abortion-industry workers, was the former head nurse at Commonwealth Clinic in Falls Church, Virginia, from 1984 to 1989. She says her clinic performed ultrasounds only when the woman requested it: "We didn’t show it to them [otherwise]. The idea was to keep their anxiety at a lower level."
Does Uncle Sam Want Them?
Pro-life organizations and churches tend to be the only institutions pushing for early sonograms. But since there’s little money to be made in helping the poor and vulnerable, their budgets are absurdly meager; they do as much as they can with the little they’re given. And this appears to be true even of crisis pregnancy centers that use sonograms.
I recently visited the Rockville Crisis Pregnancy Center, outside Washington, D.C. Located just off a bus stop in Rockville, Maryland, the center is on the second floor of a mustard-brown brick building. The counseling rooms are windowless, brightly lit, and painted in bright yellow and pink. The ultrasound machine itself looks unimpressive—a manila-colored EUB-405 Hitachi that weighs 40 pounds: about the size of a 12-inch TV.
Most of the clinic’s clients are poor, from an ethnic minority, or in college, according to executive director Gail Tierney. They learn about the center not through the mainstream media, but via the Internet, the yellow pages, billboards, and word of mouth. Ultrasound scans are generally performed only one night a week, because it’s hard to find a doctor who will work for free. This year’s whole budget is $269,000, Tierney says.
As she talks, I detect a lingering bitterness toward national pro-choice leaders and groups. When I told Tierney, whose center was unfairly maligned in a story by the Washington Post, that one abortion clinic in the D.C. area assured me they perform ultrasounds before and after the abortion, Tierney replied, "Oh, that’s good—show her what’s left afterwards."
And yet Tierney can claim to have saved hundreds and maybe thousands of lives. On her wall she has pictures of past clients with their children. Getting ultrasound "was the best thing we’ve done in 15 years. The majority of the abortion-vulnerable women don’t choose abortion after seeing their baby," Tierney says. The center sees 200 such women every year.
Still, Rockville is one of only two crisis pregnancy centers in the D.C. area with an ultrasound machine. By contrast, there are 15 abortion providers.
One of the major organizations trying to improve the ratio is the National Institute for Family and Life Advocates, a small Virginia-based nonprofit. Its mission is to convert such counseling centers into fully equipped medical offices that would offer ultrasound scans. Of the 789 centers it represents legally, about 200 have operating ultrasound machines, according to Thomas Glessner, the group’s president and founder. NARAL recently named Glessner’s nonprofit institute an "anti-choice organization to watch" in its 60-page booklet, "Choice Action Kit: Unmasking Fake Clinics."
Glessner himself is an unusual pro-life leader. He grew up in a small logging and farming town in Washington state, where his father was a Protestant minister. He inherited from his father a concern for social justice, and this concern led him to protest against the Vietnam War and serve as an officer in the Young Democrats Club at the University of Washington. Now 50, he is still very much a child of the 1960s. He and I met for lunch recently at Pete’s Diner on Capitol Hill. "I Get Around" blared from the radio. Glessner, wearing a green-and-brown-patterned shirt, said, "Yeah, man, cool. The Beach Boys!" and started dancing a quick jig.
The story of how Glessner’s organization became interested in sonograms highlights the precarious nature of the crisis pregnancy center movement. In the early 1990s, a handful of state attorneys general clamped down on pregnancy centers, which were accused of practicing medicine illegally. In fact, many of them had been administering pregnancy tests illegally without a nurse or physician. It was in this climate that Glessner’s group embraced sonograms—not so much because it was thought they’d persuade women to choose life but for political reasons. "It was a defensive posture," Glessner said plainly. "It was done to avoid the claim, ‘You’re illegally practicing medicine.’"
The ultrasound machines ended up attracting new clients. "We saw a twofold increase in the number of women coming in, and there was a huge increase in the number of abortion-minded women who changed their mind," he said.
With impressive figures like that, Glessner is seeking to enlist federal support. He cowrote a bill in Congress, sponsored by Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), that would help nonprofit health clinics to buy ultrasound equipment, authorizing $3 million this year in federal grants.
While that’s pocket change by congressional standards, Glessner believes it could bring down the country’s still-high abortion rate. A basic 2-D ultrasound scanner costs $20,000 to $25,000. If health clinics persuaded state, local, or business leaders to pick up the other half of the cost, they could buy nearly 500 machines. Enacting that bill would also represent an important step by the federal government on behalf of unborn human life. (In April, Alabama mandated that women seeking an abortion must undergo an ultrasound exam, although they are not required to look at the image.)
Stearns’s bill went nowhere on Capitol Hill this year. But with a Republican-controlled Congress next year, its odds of passing are strong. President George W. Bush certainly knows about the power of ultrasound: At the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act signing ceremony in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on August 5, he said, "Today, with sonograms and other technology, we can clearly see that unborn children are members of the human family. They reflect our image, and they are created in God’s own image."
From Debating to Seeing
Indeed if compassionate conservatism is to mean anything at all, it should mean supporting the early use of ultrasound. What better use of government dollars is there? Sonograms not only improve quality of life. Poor women provide better prenatal care after seeing them (this helps explain why three pro-choice black members of Congress, who represent poor districts like Newark, New Jersey, and the south side of Chicago, support Glessner’s legislation). They save lives. Ask any woman who’s faced a crisis pregnancy, if she was lucky enough to have used one.
The manipulation of language has long been one of the hallmarks of the pro-choice position. But with ultrasound, words no longer matter so much: The abstract melts into the concrete and the personal. This powerful emotional appeal will continue to grow as 3-D ultrasound enters the mainstream. Embryos and fetuses, which represent the first of the six stages of human life (followed by infancy, childhood, puberty, adolescence, and adulthood), may at last be recognized—and protected—as human persons.
Reason #9: George W. Is Better Looking
tolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal," the highly contested anti-Kerry documentary, should not be shown by the Sinclair Broadcast Group. It should be shown in its entirety on all the networks, cable stations and on public television. 
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- In an editorial column on Friday, Fr. Michael Reilly, a NewsMax.com opinion writer, says he spotted a contradiction in Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's use of his Catholic faith vis-a-vis public policy.