The only folks who might have missed the fallacious claim that 98 percent of Catholics use contraception are those who have no newspaper or television set around. Lucky folks!
The rest of us must consider the stark reality that whatever the media reports, no matter how wrong it might be, it will grab hold, stick like glue, and all of a sudden become a credible statistic to throw around.
But in this case, it is my suspicion that the weasels behind the claim have a huge axe to grind with Catholic teaching and will do all that is possible to debunk the Bible, the magisterium, and common sense. Fortunately I am not alone. Some very credible sources, including the Washington Post, concur. Glenn Kessler reports that the study used to allege the 98 percent statistic drew on data from the 2006-2008 National Survey of Family Growth as we reported earlier. Kessler further states,
But while the study says that 98 percent of “sexually experienced Catholic women” have “ever used a contraceptive method other than natural planning,” the data shown in the report does not actually back up that claim. In fact, a supplementary table in the report, on page 8, even appears to undermine that statistic, since it shows that 11 percent of Catholic women [are] currently using no method at all. That has led to criticism of the statistic.
The trumped-up percentage won two Pinocchios from the Post—a dubious honor, but well deserved.
Michael Cook, Mercator Net’s founder and an ethics expert, provided analysis as well. Cook points out that the survey
was restricted to sexually-active women, married and unmarried, who were seeking to avoid becoming pregnant. Thus all unmarried Catholic women who were not sexually active (there must be some of them) and all married Catholic women who wanted to become pregnant (ditto) were excluded.
This is called loading the dice. Any way you roll them, the percentage of women who want to use contraception and who subsequently do use contraception is going to approach 100 percent.
And so it goes in Barack Obama’s world of smoke and mirrors. But this is really nothing new. EWTN’s vice president for theology, Colin Donovan, scrutinized the situation and suggests that those who support Obama’s contraceptive mandate—the very ones who plucked the 98 percent gibberish from their bag of tricks—
need to be dragged into the 18th century and . . . need to consider the reasons our nation’s constitutional order was established: to protect, first of all, individual freedom of conscience and its corollary, freedom of speech, from the coercive power of government.
In that century, it was government at the service of the “established” religion, the religion of the monarch. Today, it is government at the service of social engineering or party politics or protecting sexual license.
Donovan strikes at the heart of the matter when he tells us:
The mandate itself is a violation of the freedom of all Americans, even those who in this moment may agree with its social intent.
No majority opinion of Catholics—or of Americans—can ever justify establishing as a principle of government the authority to force citizens to do something contrary to their consciences.
The world, the flesh, and the devil: In all times and places all three tempters are at work. The Scriptures are a record of that history-long battle.
But it is also the record of their complete defeat, first in the desert of Judea, by Christ not entertaining them but rebuking them, and then on the cross, by defeating their pride through humility, their power through weakness.
Motivated with the knowledge that this is so and driven by a fierce sense of protecting our freedoms, each of us must stand up and be counted now, at this critical moment when the stakes are higher than many imagine.
This is about a whole lot more than Obama’s penchant to bait and deceive Catholics while attempting to divide them. He wants control and will do whatever it takes to get his way.
Let us hope America is alert at this hour when the enemy is at the gate, busily cooking the books and planning the deconstruction of the Constitution.
The rhetorical fever pitch over Obama’s latest healthcare fiasco is still swirling, but what I am finding in the dust particles is far worse than what is being publicly decried. There are serious omissions by some claiming to be in disagreement with Obama. But thankfully not all commentators have been remiss. Through the alliances we have forged with some of the most devoted Catholic commentators and researchers in the entire world, we have received more than one disquieting observation.
To wit, the following are a few of the concerns my allies have noted as absent from much of the public outcry.
U. S. Coalition for Life pro-life researcher, author, and fellow troublemaker Randy Engel e-mailed, “Have you noticed that in the current intense ‘debate’ over insurance and birth control, not a single bishop has suggested—not even a peep—that the government get itself out of the life prevention arena altogether?”
She’s absolutely correct. Since 1970, when Title X of the Public Health Service Act, described by Planned Parenthood as “America’s family planning program,” first reared its ugly head, there have been problems. The program doles out tax dollars to PP and its cronies as the USCCB consistently avoids urging a public outcry against it. It is as if the USCCB is lost in the weeds of American politics—the theme of my new book, The Broken Path.
Engel accurately defines such government programs as anti-natalist. In fact, the federal bureaucracy’s disdain for family, children, and procreation is well-documented, having existed for many years prior to Obama’s arrival.
Another friend, Bud McFarlane, whose work with Militia Immaculata inspires fervor among all who love the Lord and His Mother Mary, wrote, “People are totally unaware of the reality that the American Cancer Society and the World Health Organization have officially certified that Hormonal Contraceptives are a Group #1 carcinogenic, and can cause breast cancer, uterine cancer, and liver cancer. [In addition, there are] irrefutable medical/pharmaceutical facts about the abortifacient nature of all hormonal contraceptives.”
Indeed, these insights are accurate and yet sadly left nearly unmentioned this past week. There are political and financial reasons for such omissions. Hormonal birth control is a multi-million dollar business; many political types reap rewards for their avoidance of the clinical data. In fact, the scam is well into its 45th year of existence. Each time an honest scientist sets forth the facts, willing media henchmen bat such people down, replacing evidence with whoppers. And as the saying goes, if you repeat a lie with frequency, it soon becomes the truth.
Additionally there’s the matter of the government’s money, going not only into Planned Parenthood’s coffers, but into many “Catholic” bank accounts such as hospitals, schools, the Catholic Health Association, and the like. The silence becomes quite profitable, or so it would seem.
But the quiet has resulted in countless deaths of preborn persons and the suffering of their mothers. Common sense has been replaced by savvy—or at least I would imagine that is what many are thinking. The argument is made that the public isn’t ready for such talk and, after all, accommodations can be reached if we set aside severe differences in deference to toleration.
It’s gotten so bad that the current “98 percent of Catholic women have taken the birth control pill” deception is showing up in articles from both sides of the discussion. The truth is, as researcher Arlene Sawicki explained to me in an e-mail, the percentage was created by Planned Parenthood’s research gurus at the Alan Guttmacher Institute. Sawicki writes,“I did a little research on the internet—and here is what I found: … Data were gathered using in-person interviews with 7,356 women aged 15–44 between June 2006 and December 2008. So 7,356 women were interviewed by the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Survey of Family Growth], among whom 28 percent were Catholic, and the study concludes that 98 percent of them took the birth control pill—so that means 98 percent of Catholic women have taken the pill! And we call this advanced research science?”
In other words, of 7,356 women, 2,060 identified themselves as Catholic. Whether these were practicing Catholics or not, we do not know. But based on this tiny sample of Catholic women in the USA, it is all of a sudden a fact that 98 percent of Catholic women have used birth control! Wow.
And the fabrications just keep on coming. The bottom line is a tragedy. The bodies continue to pile high, the women continue to suffer from cancers they could have avoided, and the public remains in the darkness.
Doesn’t seem like the proper gift for Valentine’s Day or any day, does it? But then again, lies are never a gift; they are always a curse.
By Walter Hoye II
Part 7 of 7
Dehumanizing the Vulnerable
“Those who control language control thought, and eventually semantic corruption leads to the adulteration of thought itself.” — William Brennan, Ph.D., professor of social work in the Saint Louis University School of Social Work.1
According to Dr. William Brennan, a professor of social work in the Saint Louis University School of Social Work, and Loyola Press bestselling author of Dehumanizing the Vulnerable: When Word Games Take Lives, “The capacity of human beings to justify their behavior, no matter how unconscionable, appears to be limitless. When the behavior consists of harming other human beings, degrading words serve as an extraordinarily effective weapon.”2
This is part seven (7) of a seven (7) part series examining why black leadership rejects the pro-life movement, is helping to perpetrate the genocide of their own people, and what can be done to reverse this horrific reality.
THE SEMANTICS OF OPPRESSION3 [see original article site for chart]
If “truth” is the first casualty of war and “lies” repeated often enough will be embraced by the masses, then Dr. Brennan is right when he says, “The power of language to color one’s view of reality is profound.”4
The Power of “The Big Lie”
“Semantic gymnastics is an exceedingly apt term because it connotes the severe twisting and distorting of language necessary to deny fundamental scientific facts, which include the facts that human life exists before birth and that abortion kills human lives in the womb.” — William Brennan, Ph.D., professor of social work in the Saint Louis University School of Social Work.5
“What is not yet so clearly perceived is that in order to bring this about hard choices will have to be made with respect to what is to be preserved and strengthened and what is not, and that this will of necessity violate and ultimately destroy the traditional Western ethic with all that this portends.” [This is] a portion of the infamous editorial from the California Medicine editorial of 1970 entitled “A New Ethic for Medicine and Society.”6 This editorial proves that while the abortion industry denied that abortion deliberately takes the life of a innocent human being, they were pathologically lying and more than fully aware of what they were doing as they implemented a strategy they described as a “schizophrenic sort of subterfuge” to install a new ethic. However, in light of the 50 plus million lives lost since 1973, Malcolm S. M. Watts, M.D., California Medicine, appears to be prophetic.
“It will become necessary and acceptable to place relative rather than absolute values on such things as human lives, the use of scarce resources and the various elements which are to make up the quality of life or of living which is to be sought. This is quite distinctly at variance with the Judeo-Christian ethic and carries serious philosophical, social, economic, and political implications for Western society and perhaps for world society.
The process of eroding the old ethic and substituting the new has already begun. It may be seen most clearly in changing attitudes toward human abortion. In defiance of the long held Western ethic of intrinsic and equal value for every human life regardless of its stage, condition, or status, abortion is becoming accepted by society as moral, right, and even necessary. It is worth noting that this shift in public attitude has affected the churches, the laws, and public policy rather than the reverse.
Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced, it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra- or extra-uterine until death.
The very considerable semantic gymnastics, which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life, would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices. It is suggested that this schizophrenic sort of subterfuge is necessary because, while a new ethic is being accepted, the old one has not yet been rejected.
It seems safe to predict that the new demographic, ecological, and social realities and aspirations are so powerful that the new ethic of relative rather than of absolute and equal values will ultimately prevail as man exercises ever more certain and effective control over his numbers, and uses his always comparatively scarce resources to provide the nutrition, housing, economic support, education, and health care in such ways as to achieve his desired quality of life and living.”
Hiding Behind “Socially Impeccable Auspices”
“The term ‘nonperson’ has emerged as the most far-reaching and disastrous epithet ever invoked to devalue human life in the womb. When the United Sates Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision (1973) declared that ‘the word “person,” as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn,’ it sounded the legalized death knell for huge numbers of unborn humans.” — William Brennan, Ph.D., professor of social work in the Saint Louis University School of Social Work.7
Personhood is the final chapter in the civil rights movement and is exactly what the pro-life movement looks like victorious. Personhood is the only pro-life strategy that does not embrace exceptions.
Personhood allows the discussion to focus on life instead of death and is a powerful and effective strategy for communicating life in communities of color. In the classroom of race-based oppression, minority communities share a very painful history of lessons learned at the ultimate expense of life itself in this country.
Because we’ve “been there” … we understand what it is like not to be a person and know exactly where the term “nonperson” leads to. Personhood is rooted in truth. “Momma is with child” and only this simple truth has the power to triumphantly contend with those hiding behind socially impeccable auspices such as the pulpit, the bench or the Resolute Desk. Personhood affords us the opportunity to address how words have been used historically to justify the vilest crimes against humanity. Personhood reminds the public that malevolent and worm-wooded words fuel violent human behavior. By design, personhood replaces the lexicon of dehumanization with what Dr. Brennan calls a “nomenclature of life-affirming and exalted portrayals of all human beings despite their status, condition, stage of development, gender, race, age, or place of residence.”8
If the goal of the Fourteenth Amendment was to give legal effect to the Civil Rights Bill of 1866,9 then the goal of personhood is to give legal effect to a definition of personhood that includes all human beings, regardless of how we were procreated, from the preborn, to the senior citizen facing end-of-life decisions, to the disabled war veteran.10 Just as the U.S. Congress felt it needful to protect the fundamental rights of former slaves as United States citizens under Article IV, Sec. II of the U.S. Constitution,11 proponents and those denied personhood understand how needful it is to protect all human beings by love and by Article VI of the U.S. Constitution,12 the supreme law of the land.
If Ezekiel is right, God is looking for leaders who would build up the wall and stand before Him in the gap on behalf of the land so He would not have to destroy it (Ezekiel 22:30).13 Could it be that abortion is still legal in America and the needs of our women and children unmet because the leaders of our socially impeccable auspices are not socially impeccable themselves?
Brothers, we really need to talk.
Reference(s):
1. William Brennan – Dehumanizing the Vulnerable: When Word Games Take Lives. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1995, page 8.
2. Ibid., page ix.
3. Ibid. page 6,7.
4. Ibid. page 1.
5. Ibid. page 8.
6. “A New Ethic for Medicine and Society,” California Medicine 113 (September 1970): 68.
7. William Brennan – Dehumanizing the Vulnerable: When Word Games Take Lives. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1995, p. 202.
8. Ibid., page 225.
9. Monday, April 9th, 1866: An Act to protect all Persons in the United States in their Civil Rights, and furnish the Means of their Vindication (http://bit.ly/p462hu).
10. ROE v. WADE, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). Cf. the Wisconsin abortion statute, defining “unborn child” to mean “a human being from the time of conception until it is born alive,” Wis. Stat. 940.04 (6) (1969), and the new Connecticut Statute, Pub. Act No. 1 (May 1972 special session), declaring it to be the public policy of the state and the legislative intent “to protect and preserve human life from the moment of conception.” (http://bit.ly/q6EKGn)
11. Article 4 — The States, Section 2 — State Citizens, Extradition: “The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States. A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.”
12. Article 6 — Debts, Supremacy, Oaths: “All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation. This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding. The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”
13. “I sought for a man among them, who should build up the wall, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found none.” (World English Bible)
Walter B. Hoye II is both president and founder of the Issues4life Foundation and the California Civil Rights Foundation. God used the premature birth (six months, 2.1 pounds) of his son to teach him that the fetus is a person—a living, breathing human being. In 2008, Walter and his wife, Lori, were the recipients of the 4th Annual Walk for Life West Coast’s St. Gianna Molla Award for “courage under fire” in the pro-life movement. He serves as an incredible leader for the cause of the preborn despite the personal costs, and has even been unjustly jailed for his peaceful defense of the preborn on a sidewalk outside an abortion clinic. His “Letter from the Santa Rita Jail” and California Human Rights Amendment appeal for personhood entitled “Why I Can’t Wait” are now classics. Hoye has also written a book entitled, Leadership from the Inside Out.
This article has been reprinted with permission and can be found at: http://issues4lifefoundation.wordpress.com/2011/10/16/betrayal-trauma-7-of-7-2/.
By Charles J. Chaput
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services refused on Jan. 20 to broaden the exception to its mandate that nearly all Catholic employers must cover contraception, abortifacients, and sterilization in their healthcare plans.
An “accommodation” offered Friday by the White House did not solve the problem. Instead, it triggered withering criticism from legal scholars such as Notre Dame’s Carter Snead, Harvard’s Mary Ann Glendon, Princeton’s Robert George, and Catholic University of America president John Garvey, along with non-Catholic scholars including Yuval Levin, the religious liberty law firm the Becket Fund, and numerous Catholic and other organizations.
Many Catholics are confused and angry. They should be.
Quite a few Catholics supported President Obama in the last election, so the ironies here are bitter. Many feel betrayed. They’re baffled that the Obama administration would seek to coerce Catholic employers, private and corporate, to violate their religious convictions.
But it’s clear that such actions are developing into a pattern. Whether it was the administration’s early shift toward the anemic language of “freedom of worship” instead of the more historically grounded and robust concept of “freedom of religion” in key diplomatic discussions; or its troubling effort to regulate religious ministers recently rejected 9-0 by the Supreme Court in the Hosanna Tabor case; or the revocation of the U.S. bishops’ conference human-trafficking grant for refusing to refer rape victims to abortion clinics, it seems obvious that this administration is—to put it generously—tone deaf to people of faith.
Philadelphians may wish to reflect on the following facts: The Archdiocesan Secretariat for Catholic Human Services spends $278 million annually on services to the community. About 4,000 employees make up our secretariat’s workforce. Catholic Social Services is the largest social-service agency in Pennsylvania and the largest residential care/social-service subcontractor with the Department of Human Services of the City of Philadelphia.
There’s more. Archdiocesan Catholic Health Care Services is the largest faith-based provider of long-term-care services to the poor and elderly in the five-county area, and the seventh-largest nationally. And our Nutritional Development Services ministry serves more than eight million meals a year to schoolchildren, summer programs, and child-care centers. It also provides two million pounds of nonperishable food to needy families and the elderly through its Community Food Program.
Much of the money used by these ministries comes from public funding. But of course, the reason these ministries are trusted with public funding is that they do an excellent job. The service relationship works well without compromising the integrity of either the government or the Church. In fact, in a practical sense, government often benefits more than the Church.
It’s also important to note that many millions of the dollars disbursed are resources directly donated by faithful Catholics to carry out their Gospel mission to serve the needy. For the Church, this makes perfect sense: As a believing community, we share our resources freely and gladly. We’ll cooperate with anyone in service to the common good, so long as we are not forced to compromise our religious beliefs.
But the HHS mandate, including its latest variant, is belligerent, unnecessary, and deeply offensive to the content of Catholic belief. Any such mandate would make it morally compromising for us to provide healthcare benefits to the staffs of our public-service ministries. Moreover, we cannot afford to be fooled—yet again—by evasive and misleading allusions to the administration’s alleged “flexibility” on such issues. The HHS mandate needs to be rescinded.
Many critics are focusing on the details of this or that particular version of the HHS regulation—the narrowness of the religious exemption, the breadth of the mandate, the hollowness of the grace period. As useful as this approach may be, it risks wandering into the weeds. The White House response on these points is ambiguous and weak. The true magnitude of the issue is getting lost as just another debate about details.
In reality, no similarly aggressive attack on religious freedom in our country has occurred in recent memory.The current administration prides itself on being measured and deliberate.
The current HHS mandate needs to be understood as exactly that. Commentators are using words like “gaffe,” “ill conceived,” and “mistake” to describe the mandate. They’re wrong. It’s impossible to see this regulation as some happenstance policy. It has been too long in the making.
Despite all of its public apprehension about “culture warriors” on the political right in the past, the current administration has created an HHS mandate that is the embodiment of culture war. At its heart is a seemingly deep distrust of the formative role religious faith has on personal and social conduct, and a deep distaste for religion’s moral influence on public affairs. To say that this view is contrary to the Founders’ thinking and the record of American history would be an understatement.
Critics may characterize my words here as partisan or political. These are my personal views, and of course people are free to disagree. But it is this administration—not Catholic ministries, or institutions, or bishops—that chose the timing and nature of the fight. The onus is entirely on the White House, which also has the power to remove the issue from public conflict. Catholics should not be misled into accepting feeble compromises on issues of principle. The HHS mandate is bad law; and not merely bad, but dangerous and insulting. It needs to be withdrawn—now.
Archbishop Charles J. Chaput joined the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, St. Augustine Province, in 1965, and was ordained to the priesthood on August 29, 1970. He was ordained bishop of Rapid City, South Dakota, in 1988. Pope Benedict XVI appointed him Archbishop of Philadelphia on July 19, 2011. Archbishop Chaput served on the Board of Directors for The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. (1994 – 2009) and the National Catholic Bioethics Center (1993 – 2006). For the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops, Archbishop Chaput is currently a consultant to the Committee for Pro-Life Activities.
This article has been reprinted with permission and can be found at http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20120212_HHS_mandate_insulting_and_dangerous.html.
The president recently told 3,000 attendees at the National Prayer Breakfast, “We know that part of living in a pluralistic society means that our personal religious beliefs alone can’t dictate our response to every challenge we face.”
This is the same president who is behind an effort to force religious institutions to provide contraceptive coverage in healthcare benefits to employees, even when those benefits contradict the fundamental teachings of the Church with which the institution is associated. So when the president says, “But in my moments of prayer, I’m reminded that faith and values play an enormous role in motivating us to solve some of our most urgent problems,” he is ascribing prayer his motivation to step on the face of Catholics and people of other faiths.
While Catholics have been vocal about this, Obama’s theologian, White House press secretary Jay Carney, has chosen to drive the nail even further into the crucifixion of Catholic moral teaching by allegedly telling a White House press corps, “I understand that there have been objections and that some people disagree with us and we are going to work with institutions that have concerns here. . . . But I think it’s important to note here that we believe these services are important and that American women deserve to have access to that kind of insurance coverage regardless of where they work.”
The sanctimonious Carney, who must be gleeful in his gutter of lies, has consciously chosen to ignore Catholic teaching and natural law theory which are not apart from American cultural and political discussion, but a fundamental part of them. Frankly, when the White House chooses to trample religious freedom, something is tragically wrong, albeit lost on theologian Carney and his boss.
Having said that, it is equally clear that even a stout-hearted Obama-supporting Catholic like Douglas Kmiec is troubled. He says the Obama administration has gone too far. Do statements like this mean we should expect to see a bit of backsliding by the White House and some strong action on the part of the bishops? Hopefully, but indications are not hopeful.
USCCB spokesman Richard Doerflinger has kept his thumb on the pulse of this presidential strong-arming and apparently believes news reports that the Obama administration is considering a religious exemption for employers such as Catholic hospitals and universities. Doerflinger told the Weekly Standard that what is being described as the “Hawaii Compromise” could be worse than what Obama is attempting to shove down Catholic throats right now. Apparently the Hawaii law stipulates that “every religious organization that is eligible for the exemption has to instruct all employees in how they can access all methods of contraception and sterilization locally ‘in an expeditious manner.’”
This is one of those farcical differences without a distinction. Either way the administration would be forcing Church employers to violate Catholic teaching and personal conscience. Let’s face it, it’s like asking a Catholic doctor to sign an agreement that he does not have to kill preborn babies, but he must give expectant mothers a list of abortionists! Complicity is what it is.
As a Catholic pro-life leader who understands Catholic teaching and the meaning of the word infallibility, it bothers me that nobody is talking about the reasons why Catholics cannot be in any way, shape, or form aligned with the dispensation of or coverage of deadly chemicals and devices.
I think it’s time for the Catholic bishops to get moving and threaten to sue Obama right now. Why wait? Why dawdle? Why waste time asking folks to sign petitions or search for information as Cardinal Wuerl has suggested?
I beseech the Catholic bishops: Please lay down the gauntlet. Please get in Obama’s face and vow to fight to the death to preserve Catholic integrity in healthcare and in employment practices.
I ask: Whose dogma will survive the 21st century? It’s time to choose!
