Save Malta!!

This is a blegging letter, but it's not for me. It's for Malta's only active pro-life and pro-family organisation, formed this summer, to start their work pushing back against the Culture of Death, the Culture of Nihilism and suicidal despair, that has turned its sights on their little Catholic island. We need help to fund a single person (not me) to go there and start running workshops training the Maltese Catholics to defend their home from the Ideology of the New Paradigm.

Read and then follow the link to their PayPal account. They need £250 to cover airfare for this person to fly down from England.

Again, this is not for me. It's for Malta.

~

So, y'all know I've been kind of in love with Malta in the last little while... well, there's problems down there in the little Catholic paradise.

I know we all know that Malta is the Last Man Standing. With the fall of Ireland, there is now not another single EU nation that entirely outlaws abortion for any reason. For many years, we enjoyed covering the news from Malta's interactions withe the gender ideologues, including the pro-abortion feminists at the UN. Time after time, they would dutifully show up at the annual CEDAW meetings and ever so politely tell the UN abortion-pushers where to put their ideology.

But a few years ago, that started to change:

Malta’s MEPs were among a small bloc at the EU who worked against the recent failed proposal by socialists and abortion activists that would have forced member states to consider direct abortion a “right”. But a December 12th op-ed in the Times of Malta warned that the Estrela Report is not going to be the last attempt to impose the rest of Europe’s abortion regime on their country.

“The daily sifting through pro-life articles makes me feel uneasy at the status quo of the pro-life work being done in Malta. Are we doing enough by way of educating our society as regards building a culture of life? Are we getting prepared for the next onslaught by some EU body on Malta,” Miriam Sciberras asked.

As we know, the reason we use the term "totalitarian" to describe it, is that the Ideologues of Death cannot leave a single corner of the world un-converted. There will be no exception made for any little corner, any little Shirefolk who want to just be left alone.

And brother, are they working on Malta! In 2005, the government, seeing the social catastrophe it precipitated everywhere else, said they would never legalise divorce. It was legalised in 2011. Since then the dominoes have been falling quickly. In incredibly rapid succession, (almost as if it had been planned) homosexual "civil unions" were legalised this year. This month, as the first civil unions were legally registered, Helena Dalli, the Socialist government's Minister for Social Dialogue (I'm not kidding) went to Budapest...

Dalli was head of the Maltese delegation to UN’s Universal Period Review, which took place in the fall of 2013. According to the report, Dalli’s delegation affirmed that Malta’s “new Government was fully committed to the protection of the rights of LGBTI persons.”

The document noted that only “a few weeks after being elected,” the Labour Party government, which came to power in March last year, amended the Maltese Civil Code “to allow persons who underwent a legally recognized gender change to be recognized in the new gender acquired, in those remaining areas where it was hitherto not acknowledged.”

Last month, we saw the passage of the "transgender anti-discrimination" bill. This was the fulfilment of a promise by Helena Dalli to a “transgender” congress in Hungary in May that while her government’s focus had been mainly on homosexuals, they would shortly be turning their attention to “trans” people.

“A month ago, we enacted a Civil Unions law with rights and duties on a par with marriage for same and different-gender couples,” she said.

“On the same day, we amended the Constitution in such a way as to provide protection on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity. I am told that we are the first country in Europe to have included an express reference to gender identity in the Constitution.”

As one of the most useful barometers of the homosexualist ideology's advance, Wikipedia's LGBTQI pages, put it:

"Rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons in Malta have improved in recent years. Both male and female same-sex sexual activity is legal in Malta. A bill creating civil unions equal to marriage in all but name, with the same rights and obligations including joint adoption rights and recognition of foreign same sex marriage, was enacted in April 2014."

So rapid has been the advance of the New Paradigm in Malta that it received somewhat surprised praise from no less a source than ILGA Europe who named Malta, with Montenegro, one of Europe’s two “fastest climbers”.

Paulo Côrte-Real, co-chair of ILGA-Europe’s executive board, said in a statement attached to the organization’s Annual Review, “It is very encouraging to see countries like Malta and Montenegro make such huge progress in the space of one year. It shows that so much is possible when there is political leadership, especially when it is coupled with meaningful engagement of civil society.”

The ideologues must be licking their chops, because Malta is ripe for the plucking, their people softened and their leaders distracted and divided. And we know what's coming. The country's slide from the Faith, its adoption of easygoing European hedonism, along with European subsidies, will, as it always does, be inseparably coupled with European materialism, European ant-Catholicism, European anti-natalism, European socialism and, finally, the logical conclusion: European auto-genocide.

Why is it important? Malta's tiny. There are just under 420,000 people in the whole place.

Why was it important to Suleiman the Magnificent to bring the island to heel? Why did the Axis bomb the place to pancakes? Why is it important to totalitarian ideologues to have no tiny little place left in the world willing to stand up to them? Why did ILGA Europe hold their annual general meeting in Valletta last year?

On the whole, the reason the country is under threat is simple: the Maltese have not bothered to do anything to stop it. Indeed, they seem barely to have noticed. They are a Catholic country, and as is common among cultural Catholics of our post-Conciliar times, they have simply assumed that this was enough. In a nation with 95-98% of the population calling itself Catholic, it seems not to have occurred to anyone that they need to defend themselves against the incursions of this foreign ideology. They are Catholics who do not care about being Catholic. Not the laity nor the clergy nor the episcopate. Malta has also adopted Novusordoism without a single twitch of a qualm.

And the results are, as we would imagine, depressingly predictable.

In the last ten years, Malta's rate of Mass attendance has fallen from about 80% to about 50. From my own observations, I can attest that while their churches may be full, it is the usual story of cotton-tops and their grand children, dragged reluctantly along.

And perhaps most tellingly of all, the total fertility rate is barely above the European standard, at 1.45 children born per woman. Contraceptive use is rampant, and, as everywhere else in what used to be called Christendom, has been met in the Church by a determined clerical silence.

At the moment, the Maltese news is full of dark implications that there is a "power struggle" going on within the Maltese Church. Who knows what that means. And, given the general tenor of life in the Catholic Church at the moment, who knows how it is going to affect the situation there.

But in the midst of this unprecedented rise of the Big Dark, there is one little ray of hope. I recently wrote a column in which I said that Malta's third Great Siege is coming. Indeed, is already inside the gates, which the new ideological invaders found standing open and largely unguarded. Well, it turns out someone there was paying attention.

My recent visits to Malta haven't all been about swimming and pastizzi. I met each time with members of the nation's newest, (and as far as I can tell, only) comprehensive pro-life, pro-family, anti-New Paradigm organisation, the Life Network.

I recently spoke on the phone with their leader, who told me that there had been a meeting with the Maltese president, who had "assured us that the government would never legislate for abortion."

Just like the government of equally Catholic Ireland would never legalise abortion?

Just like your own government would never legalise divorce?

I warned her not ever to believe anything a politician says about abortion.

As I said, we had meetings, and we had a few dinners, which were also meetings. And I told them that they are the last ones. That in all the western world, there is no other place who has said no to the Culture of Death, who has stopped them covering the world in their shadow.

I told them that as grim as it looked, there could be a chance in Malta of turning back the tide. They have three things in their favour. However corrupted their Church has become since the Council, the Maltese are still a deeply Catholic nation. They may have been lulled to sleep with promises of soft pillows and a quiet night, but that 98% rating is still meaningful there.

And it's a tiny country. If they wanted to, if they were determined enough, they really could actually go door-to-door and talk to nearly every person in the country.

And third, Malta has them. This little group of people have been woken up. They've heard the drums and have they are starting to understand the threat their ancient and beautiful country faces.

A few weeks ago, the leadership of this group held a small backyard barbeque for pro-life students at the University of Malta with a view to founding a pro-life and pro-family student group. It was in July, and Maltese university students often spend their summers away on work placements, and still 23 students showed up, with about the same number sending a message saying they would be ready to join such a group. There are plans to go ahead with a campus pro-life group in the new academic year, which starts in October.

This group, that meets in a small office every Saturday, told me that they felt they were ready for any fight that might come, but that they needed to be equipped to make the case in the public forum. So, I have put them in touch with a group in England who trains pro-life leaders. This group has arranged for one of their members to go over there. This person has just done a four month training internship in Calgary with the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform to learn to do exactly this work. Their work is to go to other countries to teach pro-life people how to make the case and fight in the public square.

The ticket has been purchased, and the workshop booked.

We just need some help paying for it. They need about £250.

If you want to be a part of the Great Pushback in the world's last pro-life country,

go to their page and donate.



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Burke on graphic images

About “certain images which portray the horror of abortion,” he said, “One must observe that we have a habit in society today to use language which helps us to avoid the reality about which we are speaking.”

“Certainly one must be careful not to use graphic images for the sake of being graphic,” Burke added. “On the other hand, our fellow citizens should know what an abortion actually is. Images of the act of abortion or the results of abortion, when carefully presented to the public, can help the public, in general, to recognize the grave evil which besets us and to take appropriate action.”

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A nice man

I've written before on the subject of "nice evil". I can't take credit for the expression, which I think I remember having picked up from Peter Kreeft. But just today I've been writing a bit again about our old friend Peter Singer and the odd effect he seems to have on the academic mind and it came to mind again.

Here is Dr. Charles Camosy, a "theologian" from Fordham University, describing himself as a "pro-life Christian ethicist" who met for a vegan lunch with Singer:

"I have come to like Peter Singer...I have found Singer to be friendly and compassionate. He is willing to listen to an argument from almost anyone, and is unburdened by any sort of academic pretension is so doing. He is motivated by an admirable desire to respond to the suffering of human and non-human animals, and an equally admirable willingness to logically follow his arguments wherever they lead."

Do modern theologians ever read real theology? Have any of them ever run across the notion that evil is most successful when disguising itself as good?

The Bible mentions it a few times, if I'm not mistaken...



~

Ah, goodie! The good old "rape exception"... my favourite stick for beating pro-aborts

I’m not an American, and though for some reason lots of people seem to think I should have lots of opinions about the US election cycle, I’d like to reiterate that really, it’s not my country and it’s not an electoral or governmental system with which I’m very familiar. Ask me about British politics, Lords reform, EU membership or even the infighting in Canada’s Parliament, and I’m all over it.

But now and then an American poltician says something that wakes me out of my late Italian summer torpor.

Todd Akin, a US politician, said something about abortion, pregnancy and rape recently and has received the usual response from the shrieking harpies.

He said that in cases of "legitimate rape" the woman rarely gets pregnant.

As ever, the fact that it is true has done nothing to stop the shrieking.

I do get tired of making the same points over and over about the "rape exception" but apparently it needs to be said again:

Oh, so now suddenly we support the death penalty eh?

But apparently only when it is applied to the totally innocent children of rapists.

More on this later.



~

OK everybody,

...with your best high-pitched self-righteous shriek...

"GRAPHIC IMAGES DON'T WORK you evil extremist hater!

...Oh, I'm just so offended"

I remember talking to someone who brought the GAP to Canada. She had been all over the place with the nasty pictures and heard every. single. complaint (and it's funny how the people on "our side" almost always make exactly the same complaint as the pro-aborts...)

She thought she'd heard it all until the day, at some university campus in Arkansas I think, when they got a call from the local pro-life pregnancy care volunteer centre. You know those nice woman-friendly places that are all about the nice snuggly warm feelings you get when you give them a package of diapers once a year so you can say you've done your bit? The ones with all the nice pictures of cuddly babies on the walls...

She was told that the GAPpers were causing them all manner of trouble and would they please knock it off with those pictures, for heaven sake?!

They were getting too many calls you see. All those university kids who had seen the pictures had changed their minds about abortion and, instead of calling the local abortion mill, were calling them and they just weren't used to such a high volume of work and didn't have the manpower for it...

Yep. That actually happened.

You can be pro-life, but for pity sake! Don't be that pro-life. Have some moderation!



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The new tolerance

The University College of London students' union has just passed a motion making the campus officially "pro-choice".

Fortunately, the Union is sensitive to the needs of "anti-choice" students. The motion has a clause assuring such neanderthal troglodytes that they will not be forced or pressured by the university to have abortions themselves.

“An official pro-choice policy would not prevent students who disagree with termination on ethical or religious grounds from exercising their right not to seek a termination.”

I feel so much better, don't you?



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The Five Slogans

Some years ago, I started taking pro-life apologetics training courses in which I was taught how to make the case against abortion, staying strictly away from feelings ("feewings") religion or personal preferences.

I've talked before about S.L.E.D. and if you missed it, go here. I'm not going through it all again.

But I post the link to this thing in the Martlet, the student paper of the University of Victoria, (Yaaaaay!) where the Sled thing was used fairly effectively. It is interesting to note how far and how fast Scott's stuff is spreading in Canada, probably mostly due to the work of these two people (and now all their little friends) who founded this organisation (Watch out, scary pics on the opening page of this site). (We all took the course together in ... um... can't remember, maybe about 2000?... and the Canadian org. was formed while we all sat around the coffee table in a cabin on an island in the middle of a lake in New Jersey. It was fun.)

But I thought the most interesting part of the Martlet thing were the comments. A number of people chimed in saying why the argument against abortion is invalid. Fair enough. We believe in freedom of speech around here, (Ha ha!, not really...) and I note that the pro-aborts' arguments have been quite effectively addressed by others writing in. (Which is the point of this post ... which I keep forgetting.)

All the things they said are things that Scott listed as the same things people ALWAYS say in defence of abortion. Scott told us that they absolutely never come up with any other ones. (And the fun bit is that they really, really think they are being great independent thinkers, thinking these things up for themselves. Really!)

But I'm not kidding when I say they always say the exact same things. A.L.W.A.Y.S. and E.X.A.C.T.L.Y. the same things. It's amazing. I've been keeping track. On the few occasions I have been able to stomach reading this stuff, that is. Frankly, in recent years, it has really bored the crap out of me.

But when he told us, I thought Scott had to be exaggerating. It just seems impossible that an entire cultural movement (perhaps anti-cultural), one that has resulted in the deaths of 50 million people in the US alone, and is responsible for putting bajillions of dollars into the greedy blood-soaked mitts of the abortion industrialists.

All those lives, and just five slogans. Five.

- woman has a right to choose

- abortion should be a decision between a woman and her doctor

- woman has a right to bodily autonomy/privacy

- you can't bring unwanted/poor children into the world

- I wouldn't have an/am personally opposed to abortion, but I can't impose my personal beliefs on others (also, when you're standing on the sidewalk with a sign, "How DARE YOU try to impose your beliefs on MEEEE!!!! EVIL FACIST!"...)

All others, or actually "others," are just variations on this. Really. Try it yourself. The "rape exception" thing, the "overpopulation" thing, the "abortion is safer than childbirth thing," the "foetus is just potential life" thing, the "violinist" thing, etcetera, etcetera ad nauseum....whatevs.

One of my all time favourite bits of nonsense is the variation that starts, "if you don't have a uterus, you can't have an opinion..."

Rilly, I'm not even making it up...

"If you do not have a uterus, I don't believe you have any right to dictate what my body can and will be used for in regarding to pregnancy. I am not an incubator, I am a human being with rights to my own body and my own choices..."

blah blah blabbity blahblahblah...

(It's amazing, but even more, she goes on...

"Also, I believe it is most likely safe to assume you don't have a uterus. Therefore, why do you think you should have any say on a uterus bearer's body? I say UTERUS BEARER, because not all women have a uterus, and not all people with a uterus are women...."

Wwwhhheeeeeee!!!!!

Unbelievable...)

Srlsly. They're all on the list. Go check it out. Think of it as a training exercise.



~

A Cry For Help

As you may imagine, LifeSite gets a lot of mail, not all of it friendly. (That's a joke, son.)

Today we had one that was forwarded to me and the rest of the staff that I think it would be a good idea to share.

From, let's call him Jeff, who posted this to our general editorial address:

You pro-life people are so naive - you think everyone wants life. Many of us
living in misery curse our parents for not aborting us. Open your eyes to
reality.

I say nothing but I do ask for my readers' kind indulgence to pray for him.

There are a lot of reasons the Culture of Death has proliferated, but in general, it is that the world is not kind. This is a problem about which we can do something every day.



~

Every child a wanted child

...the unwanted, please take the line on the left.



~

What don't we understand?

I am fearfully and wonderfully made.



When I started becoming interested in the life issues, I made the assumption that all people really needed was to be told the truth. All you have to do, I thought, is point out the obvious thing: where babies come from, and people will change their minds about it.

Of course, eventually I came to see what y'all have already figured out by the time you got finished reading to the bottom of the last sentence.

People already know. That's why it's "the obvious".

What I didn't take into account was human will. People know perfectly well where babies come from. But they want abortion because they've discovered that as long as you have legal abortion, more often than not paid for by the state, you can have as much sex as you want all the time with anyone you want.

This is what feminism has given us, women who behave like men. And abortion so men don't ever have to grow up.

Thanks for making the world a better place, Feminism.



H/T to Ann

Jojo answers Peter Singer

My friend Jojo Ruba, who's been doing this stuff as a long as I have, who took Scott Klusendorf's Pro-Life 101 training seminars and co-founded the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform, answers Singer's nihilistic worldview.

That worldview is the same one that has taken over nearly all medical ethics in nearly all western countries.



~

Let them live

Nearly all babies with Down's syndrome in western countries, and many who are only suspected to have the extra chromosome, are killed before they've taken their first breath, or seen their mother's faces.



~

"As I would for any suffering thing..."

Almost a throw-away line, don't you think?


But it certainly illustrates where the abortion mentality comes from.

It is utilitarianism that looks up on human beings as "things". No different from putting down a suffering dog.

"I think any good mother would..."

Did you notice the little moment of horrified silence there? It lasted for at least three beats. I think even the camera man was too shocked to remember to switch feeds.

The show asks, "Can abortion be a kindness?"

If I were a person who believes in killing people to stop them suffering, I might be inclined to answer yes, but only if we agreed to treat the unborn child with the same amount of kindness as we do suffering dogs.

That is, if we killed them by a painless injection of soporific drugs.

Instead of tearing them apart, limb from limb, with a pair of forceps or burning them to death by saline solution.

Just sayin'.



~

Youth Defence is wicked

Dreadful. Awful people. Controversial. Divisive.

The brother also shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the son: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and shall put them to death. 22 And you shall be hated by all men for my name's sake: but he that shall persevere unto the end, he shall be saved.

23 And when they shall persecute you in this city, flee into another. Amen I say to you, you shall not finish all the cities of Israel, till the Son of man come.

...

26 Therefore fear them not. For nothing is covered that shall not be revealed: nor hid, that shall not be known. 27 That which I tell you in the dark, speak ye in the light: and that which you hear in the ear, preach ye upon the housetops. 28 And fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell.

~

John Smeaton has posted some comments I emailed him the other day on why Catholicism and the pro-life movement go together.

He had to cut things short, since I tend to ramble on when not given a strictly enforced word-count limit.

But I thought it might be worth taking the points along to a conclusion that some in the pro-life world might find uncomfortable. While it is easy to see that the pro-life position must be held by Catholics, and it makes sense that being an atheist would give one some serious philosophical problems with holding the full, comprehensive pro-life position, there are problems that extend in another direction too.

I offer below the rest of my intolerant views on the subject:

Protestantism is uniquely disabled in its fundamentals in giving answers to the abortionist world. The fundamental Protestant principle is that an individual judges for himself what to believe. This is why there are thousands or even tens of thousands of Protestant sects.

Protestantism is a kind of religious entropy, in which the trend ultimately is towards total dissolution, a steady state in which each individual man stands alone with his unique, private interpretation of God. Because of this, a Protestant may take or leave the pro-life position as he wishes. There is no such thing in the Protestant world as a unified, authoritative voice that can say, ‘This and not this, is true.”

Of course, I must add my caveat. I do not say that there aren’t any Protestant pro-life advocates, or that Protestant pro-life advocates are somehow inferior to Catholics as individuals. Indeed, even a brief acquaintance with the pro-life world will quickly disprove such prejudices. But there is no necessity, either logical or juridical, for a Protestant to hold the pro-life position, and no coherent, authoritative voice within Protestantism that tells the individual whether his private judgment on the life issues is correct.

The point is that it can only be as an individual that a Protestant becomes dedicated to the pro-life cause. He has chosen it based on his private judgment that it is a good and worthy thing. No one would ever say, “Protestantism teaches…” in the same way as one would say, “The Catholic Church teaches…”

A Protestant who holds pro-life positions holds Catholic positions. But, because of his Protestant principle of private judgment, he must necessarily hold back on the fullness of the pro-life position when it clashes with his Protestantism. (This is why so many Protestant pro-life groups refuse to answer questions, for example, about contraception. Though we have seen this wall coming down in recent years.)

Catholic teaching on life and family is inextricably connected with its teaching on the Trinity, on the Eucharist, on Mary and the cult of the saints. Nothing can be removed and taken in isolation. This is why its doctrine cannot be changed, as can Protestant doctrine, by committee meetings such as the Lambeth Conference or the Southern Baptist Conventions. Catholicism does not vote on the truth any more than mathematicians vote on axioms.

The pro-life position is one that is based on observation of external moral and physical phenomena. Outside reality, not personal opinion or preference or feelings, must guide, and the Catholic Church’s magisterial authority concerns itself exclusively with this external reality. It does not care what the world says, what its angry, disinformed members say, what the scientific community says. The truth is what it is.

~

No Take Backs!

I'm getting better... I don't want to go on the cart... I feel fine... I think I'll go for a walk... I feel happy! I feel happy...


Just proves the Dale Price Axiom: that there's a Monty Python sketch for EVERYthing.

Pro-Life 101 - "Yeah, but what about rape?"

Today's popular Abortion Slogan is a favourite of young men wanting to look good to the girls in the class.

I won't bother spending the time re-typing it all out. I'll just re-post:

~

Now, I know that the principles of rational thought are not popular these days, equally in schools as in parliaments, but one has to wonder at the willingness of so many to have their intelligence, whether real or imagined, so brazenly insulted, and their compassion manipulated, as it is by the abortion lobby in the case of the "rape exception".

The rape exception is the one argument that most irritates me. Not because of its inherent dishonesty - one expects only dishonesty from people conniving to murder helpless infants - but for the blind, drooling stupidity of the people who buy it, normally without the slightest examination. Or perhaps I should say the willing connivance of the marks. It is said that people who go to carnivals with a few shillings to spend on the ring-toss game, actually want to be swindled. Why else would one to go a carnival?

When I am talking to school groups about abortion, naturally after we have painstakingly gone through and demonstrated the existence of a human being in the womb (don't they tell these kids any more where babies come from? What are they doing in all those sex-education classes in kindergarten anyway?) someone in the back of the room will invariably put his (it is always a he) hand up and say "Yeah, but what about rape?"

He says this for two reasons: he has been taught that favouring abortion for rape is a mark of deep sensitivity and that "sensitivity" is a sure fire method of getting girls into bed, and that it is a stumper. He believes, in effect, that because the pro-life position is inherently flawed by its hatred of women and desire to oppress and subjugate them, that this is The Big One that will always end the discussion. This, he believes will establish his feminist political cred...which is also a sure fire method of getting girls into bed.

He expects me to have no answer, and sadly, this is the case with most of the people who consider themselves pro-life.

What is saddest, and most ironic, about the eagerness of most of our progressively-minded modern people, as well as many "pro-life" people, to defend the rape exception, is that they love it because it is held up as a model of compassion and toleration towards the victimised. This is especially tempting to pro-lifers who are possibly tired of being called EVIL FASCISTS. They long to be included in the ranks of the tolerant and compassionate. The same people will, with precisely the same earnest expressions, tell you all about the evils of capital punishment. They have such strong feeeeelings, you see, for the downtrodden, the oppressed, the victimised.

But who has told them that abortion is a requirement in cases of pregnancy due to rape? And what are their motives?

But these goodthinkful people will not question the motives or origin of the received wisdom. That's why we call it that. When you ask them why they support the death penalty for the children of criminals, they simply look at you with a fullwise goodthinkfully blank expression and you can almost see their grey cells desperately rushing to batten down the hatches and close the sea doors.

I once had a conversation with a Parliamentary Aid who had great ambitions. He was a member of the the-Canadian Alliance party and was clearly keen to Go Places. He had an idea, generally, that abortion should be curtailed, but of course, with his skinny under-dressed girlfriend on his arm, was very quick to say that the exceptions should include rape.

I asked him why he supported the death penalty.

He jumped like he had been stuck with a pin. "What?! I don't!"

"Oh good," I said. "For a second there, I thought you wanted to bring in the death penalty for the children of criminals."

Once again, the application of a few pieces of objective reality, connected together with the indestructible ties of rational thought, will create a Logic Grenade that will blow the feathery traces of the "rape exception" to smithereens.

In a discussion with someone who supports the death penalty for the innocent children of rapists, the following questions are often helpful:

Where do babies come from?

Who should be punished for the crime of rape? The woman? Her children?

Since abortion is a procedure that involves risk to the woman, and can be traumatic, wouldn't it be better to wait until the child is born and kill him then?

Maybe, in cases of pregnancy due to rape, we can keep a loaded gun in the delivery room, and if the sight of the child reminds her unpleasantly of the rape, we can give her the gun and she can shoot the baby right away.

Something to remember about the "rape exception" is that it is a red herring. It is not, in fact, an argument for legalised abortion in the exceedingly rare cases where pregnancy has been caused by rape. It is just a slogan, and a slogan is, as I've said before, neither an argument nor a reason. It is a claxon. A noise meant to end discussion and induce a powerful emotional reaction.

Studies have found that rape frequently does not result in pregnancy. There are chemical changes that occur in a woman's body that tend to prevent it. But the rape exception has been extremely politically useful to the abortion movement. It has been used as an emotional wedge issue to force the door open to legalising abortion in all and any circumstances.

As Scott Klusendorf likes to say, "If I change my position to support legalised abortion in the 0.01 per cent of cases of pregnancy due to rape and incest, will you then drop your support for abortion on demand?"

Its effectiveness can be seen in the fact that even in countries that have retained some legal restrictions on abortion, many of them have not dared to cross the line of the "rape and incest" emotional button-pusher. The fact that the "rape exception" collapses on the application of the slightest logic and medical facts, deters politicians not in the least.

Politicians are mostly men. And, like our high-school friend above looking to use his sensitivity to lever down a girl's trousers, politicians cannot afford to risk the shrieking and hysteria opposition to the "rape exception" would cost them.



~

Suh-WEET!

So, finally someone is getting the right idea.

Marie Stopes ads should indeed never have gone on air, but now that they have brought the subject into the public mind, this is the time to go in for the anti-kill.

and at least one outfit has figured it out:



I was really starting to worry that in all the clamour for the ads to be withdrawn, no one was going to take advantage of the situation.

H/T to Fr. Finigan, who I don't talk to enough lately.

How come people don't get this?

“Throughout the two-and-a-half hour interview, he fluctuated wildly between being downright combative and hostile to being sweet and fatherly.”

The journalist also mentioned Kevorkian’s “crazed rants,” “often about the Ninth Amendment to the Constitution, complete with a defense of James Madison and trashing of Thomas Jefferson.”

"Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the journalist conducting the interview, confessed that the remark left him speechless"

Yes, this is because people who think euthanasia is a good idea are what we used to call "crazy".


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I've got a better idea

Y'all remember that thing last week when the greatest living philosopher sickening freakjob Peter Singer suggested that the solution to human misery is to sterilise the whole race?

He was responding to a book by David Benatar, another tenured psychopath head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Cape Town, "Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence".

Yeah. Not making it up.

Benatar's schtick is that existence is bad no matter how happy you might be in life, so it is always morally wrong to create more sentient beings. Benatar says that the solution to human misery is to have absolutely no humans at all.

Ah, right.

Of course, the first thing that is popping into your head right now is the same thing that I thought: "You go first, Indy. We'll be right behind yez."

But if we are into making ridiculous suggestions to increase human happiness, I've got one that will be even easier to execute (haw!) than mass sterilisations or building global death camps.

How about we give both Singer and Benatar a deal. In exchange for a promise that they will never EVER publish anything ever again, they get a free lifetime supply of Prozac.

...and transport to a secure island in the middle of the Atlantic.

Heck, we can throw in a box set of all the Calvin and Hobbes comics too, just to show how nice we are.

H/T to Zach