Abortion Advocates Want Americans to Ignore Kermit Gosnell

by Star Parker | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 4/29/13 10:18 AM

The trial of Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, facing the death penalty for the deaths of four infants and one woman in his clinic, is over. America has moved on.

It’s exactly what the pro-abortion contingent wants. They want Gosnell out of the news because they want abortion out of the news. Ongoing discussion provokes thought about the status quo. And pro-aborts want to keep things as they are.

And, they have reason to be confident.

Our president, whom no one can accuse of not being politically astute, showed up this week, despite the Gosnell story, as the first sitting president ever to address Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider.

When Kirsten Powers brought attention to Gosnell, with her USA Today column, she said it wasn’t about abortion. “This is not about being pro-choice or pro-life,” she wrote. “It is about human rights.”

For Powers, the story was about lack of supervision. And, of course, where abortions are carried out legally, clinics should be supervised and inspected.

But to leave the story there is to be content with the tip of the iceberg. And the whole iceberg is a huge story that all of America should be looking at.

The whole iceberg is bigger than abortion itself. It is about how profoundly America has changed since Roe v Wade, in 1973, made abortion an accepted part of American life.

Let’s be clear that pro-aborts and pro-lifers differ on far more than technicalities about when life begins. They differ about what life is.

In the state of Pennsylvania, where Gosnell was doing his dirty business, abortion is legal until the developing child is 24 weeks – 6 months – old. Among Gosnell’s many transgressions was performing abortions after 24 weeks.

But Planned Parenthood, and their guest speaker, our president, oppose that 24-week limit. They believe abortion should be legal until the child is born.

In 2007, shortly after the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, which banned a brutal abortion procedure most commonly used to destroy infants from 15 to 26 weeks old, then-Senator Obama spoke at a Planned Parenthood event and decried the decision. He called it part of a “concerted effort to steadily roll back” access to abortion.

Justice Kennedy, who wrote the decision, included a description of one of these procedures on a 26-week-old infant. It takes a certain deadening of the heart, of the soul to read the description of the little baby clasping his fingers and toes as the doctor jams his scissors into his skull , and still believe this should be permitted.

Since Roe v Wade, we’ve given birth to a new materialistic culture of narcissism where reverence for life itself is gone. Life has become a commodity and people use each other as cavalierly as they destroy innocent young life.

As our reverence for life has diminished, so has our reverence for the institutions that surround and support it.

Scholars at the Brookings Institution observed in 1996 that Roe v Wade contributed to the collapse of marriage and the dramatic increase in out-of-wedlock births. The idea that children were part of a sacred institution called marriage started disappearing.

The sense of honor, the sense of shame disappears in this culture of self.

In 1965, seven years before Roe v Wade, less then 10 percent of American babies were born to unwed mothers – 24 percent to unwed black women and 3.1 percent to unwed white women. As of 2010, this was up to 41 percent of our babies born to unwed mothers – 73 percent to black women and 29 percent to white women.

Sixty percent of our out-of-wedlock births are to women in their 20’s.

Soon, as our resources diminish to care for our growing aging population, we will start dealing with our elderly as we do our unborn.

But if everything is meaningless, who cares?

LifeNews.com Note: Star Parker is the founder and president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education (CURE) and is a leading pro-life advocate within the African-American community. She is also a former candidate for Congress in California.

Back Alley Abortions or at Kermit Gosnell’s Front Door: No Difference

by Amy Sobie | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 4/29/13 3:34 PM

At The Wall Street Journal, James Taranto, a self-described member of the “mushy middle” on abortion, writes: 

One of the strongest practical arguments in favor of the Roe regime is that abortion has been around since time immemorial and outlawing it only drove it underground, leading women to endanger themselves by seeking out the services of back-alley quacks. The Philadelphia grand jurors recounted a powerful example from their own city’s history.

It was called the Mother’s Day Massacre. A young Philadelphia doctor “offered to perform abortions on 15 poor women who were bused to his clinic from Chicago on Mother’s Day 1972, in their second trimester of pregnancy.” The women didn’t know that the doctor “planned to use an experimental device called a ‘super coil’ developed by a California man named Harvey Karman.”

A colleague of Karman’s Philadelphia collaborator described the contraption as “basically plastic razors that were formed into a ball. . . . They were coated into a gel, so that they would remain closed. These would be inserted into the woman’s uterus. And after several hours of body temperature, . . . the gel would melt and these . . . things would spring open, supposedly cutting up the fetus.”

Nine of the 15 Chicago women suffered serious complications. One of them needed a hysterectomy. The following year, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. It would be 37 more years before the Philadelphia doctor who carried out the Mother’s Day Massacre would go out of business. His name is Kermit Gosnell.

Back-alley abortions were indisputably a problem before 1973. That’s no defense of theRoe regime, which failed to solve it.

Women Still Injured and Killed After Legalization

Indeed, the legalization of abortion has failed to prevent women from being exploited, abused, traumatized, maimed, injured and killed before, during and after abortion.

Women and girls still die from abortion, including Tonya Reaves, Jennifer Morbelli, Christin Gilbertand Karnamaya Mongar, to name just a few, but their deaths are no longer automatically investigated by police or even counted in the official statistics.

Research has linked abortion to higher death rates among women in the years following, as well as increased rates of breast cancer, substance abuse, depression, suicide, subsequent preterm birth,anxiety disorders and other problems. Yet abortion clinics routinely fail to screen for known, statistically validated risk factors that increase women’s likelihood of psychological problems after abortion.

Nor are the abortionists usually held accountable for the deaths and injuries they cause. Dr. Lenora Berning, an emergency room doctor who has treated women injured by abortion, notes:

Abortion is one of the most frequently performed surgical procedures in the United States, yet it is the least regulated. It is the only elective surgical procedure that I know of in which the doctor performing the procedure is not responsible for follow-up care, nor does he or she take an active role in dealing with the complications. Not only this, but the very nature of abortion clinics, which practice in isolation from the rest of the medical community, keeps the abortion provider free from accountability for these complications.

Filthy clinics, substandard care, illegal procedures, untrained and unlicensed staff and the other appalling conditions found at Gosnell’s clinic are, unfortunately, not as rare as most people think, nor did they go away with legalization. For example, a Delaware clinic was recently closed and is being investigated over allegations of multiple botched abortions.

Women Are Less Free After Legalization

But risking these hazards is necessary in order for women to maintain their reproductive freedom, right? To the contrary, the legalization of abortion has done nothing to advance women’s freedom. Given research and anecdotal evidence showing that most women who abort are pressured to do so, and that most abortions are likely unwanted, one could argue that abortion has made women less free.

Before Roe, a woman or girl who was being pressured or coerced to abort could resist on the grounds that it was illegal, unsafe and immoral. Legalization has made it easier for those around her to insist that because abortion is legal, it must be “safe,” and because it is “socially approved,” it must be moral. It makes it easier for them to refuse to support her desire to continue the pregnancy and insist that she abort anyway.

For example, when actress Hunter Tylo was fired from the TV show Melrose Place after she became pregnant, her pregnancy discrimination suit quoted a producer as saying, “Why doesn’t she just go out and get an abortion? Then she can work.”

And an article published several years ago on a popular men’s web site offered advice to men about how to pressure their wives or girlfriends into unwanted abortions. The article was taken down after numerous complaints, but not before readers saw Isabella Snow’s advice that men weren’t obligated to support their child “beyond what your conscience and the law expects of you.” Rather than asking men to step up to the plate, Snow suggested they threaten abandonment in order to secure an abortion, regardless of the woman’s wishes:

This was her decision, not yours, and the bulk of the responsibility is now hers. Take a moment to spell this out for her when she gives you her final decision; it just may sway her over to your side.”

The legalization of abortion has not ended child abuse (child abuse rates have increased since 1973) or violence against women. At least two studies of maternal death rates found that homicide was the leading cause of death among pregnant women. Tracking news stories reveals that in many cases, the perpetrator wanted to get rid of the pregnancy and attacked or killed the victim after she refused to abort. For teens and young girls, abortion is often used to cover and up and continue sexual abuse by getting rid of the evidence of the crime — the resulting pregnancy.

Putting Abortion Ideology Before Women

Given all this, one would think that abortion advocates would be fighting to stamp out abuses and improve the standard of care in abortion clinics, as some have recently claimed. But reality has proven these claims to be false.

Evidence of physical and psychological harm to women is routinely dismissed and attacked by abortion advocates and their allies. Nancy Russo, a spokesperson for the American Psychological Association, admitted that a study linking abortion to increased rates of mental health problems among women (a study conducted by a pro-choice researcher, no less) would have no effect on the APA’s position on abortion because “to pro-choice advocates, mental health effects are not relevant to the legal context of arguments to restrict access to abortion.”

Abortion advocates have repeatedly fought efforts to implement common-sense measures  — such as screening for coercion and pre-existing risk factors for post-abortion psychological problems — that would protect the rights, health and lives of women facing abortion. In fact, while abortion clinics claim to protect women’s “right to choose,” they actually don’t promote any other option than abortion.

Gosnell’s clinic advised women to pay more for sedation if “your decision is being forced by your parents or partner,” while a Kansas clinic pre-printed their forms to show that no reports of abuse had been filed for their patients. Former clinic workers have reported that they were trained to hide information from women and pressure them to abort, with one former Planned Parenthood counselor noting that “Planned Parenthood’s mission is to pressure as many women into having abortion as it can.” And women have told, over and over again, about being denied vital information and coercedor bullied into abortion by clinic staff.

Even when problems come to light, they are often not reported — or if they are, they are often ignored by both the regulators and the media.In Gosnell’s case, his clinic had not been inspected in 13 years. Staff members and others who knew about the problems, including an official from the National Abortion Federation (which denied Gosnell’s application for membership based on deficiencies at his clinic), didn’t report the problems.

According to the Grand Jury report, health officials “knew that Gosnell and his clinic were offering unacceptable medical care to women and girls, yet DOH failed to take any action to stop the atrocities documented by this Grand Jury.” Further, the Grand Jury “discovered that Pennsylvania’s Department of Health has deliberately chosen not to enforce laws that should afford patients at abortion clinics the same safeguards and assurances of quality health care as patients of other medical service providers.”

Since Gosnell’s arrest, abortion advocates have continued to fight proposed regulations elsewhere, even ones that could save women’s lives. It appears that political protection for abortion trumps the health and lives of women and girls (to say nothing of the lives of children, including those born alive).

Legal Abortions, Back Alley Ethics

So it seems that the only real difference between getting an abortion before Roe and getting one after is the door by which you enter.* As one researcher pointed out, “While abortion is legal, it is still practiced with the ethics of the back alley.”

In a letter posted at Fredricksburg.com, Eileen Roberts, president of Mothers and Advocates for Mothers Alone, and the mother of a teen girl injured by abortion, wrote:

How can we be so naive to think that every surgical procedure of abortion is safe and use the argument that women would resort to back-alley abortions? Legalizing abortion simply gave the back-alley physician permission to put his shingle on the front door.

… Abortion may be currently legal, but it is anything but safe for either mother or child. In every abortion someone dies.

My 14-year-old was told she was going to the best abortion clinic in Virginia. Her boyfriend and a so-called adult friend, who transported her 45 miles from our home, did not know her as her parents did.

She suffered emotional and physical consequences from a so-called safe, legal abortion.

To add insult to injury, my husband and I were responsible for more than $27,000 in medical costs to repair the damage done by the abortionist.

In my opinion, this was an example of a legal back-alley abortion.

~~~

* Prior to Roe, women seeking illegal abortions at doctor’s offices were often instructed to enter by the back door after regular office hours to allay suspicion — hence the term “back alley abortion.” Most illegal abortions were, in fact, performed by doctors.

LifeNews.com Note: Amy Sobie is the editor of The Post-Abortion Review, a quarterly publication of the Elliot Institute. The organization is a widely respected leader in research and analysis of medical, mental health and other complications resulting from abortions.

Prosecutor to Gosnell: ‘Are You Human?’

April 30, 2013

---

By Elizabeth Harrington

The Women's Medical Society abortion clinic at 3801-05 Lancaster Avenue, Philadelphia, PA. (Grand Jury Report)

(CNSNews.com) – “Are you human?” Assistant District Attorney Ed Cameron asked Kermit Gosnell during closing arguments in the abortionist’s trial on Monday.

Cameron noted that during the six-week trial, “Mr. McMahon (the defense attorney) kept asking the witnesses, are you human?” That question really should be asked of Gosnell, Cameron said, turning to look directly at the defendant: “Are you human?” he asked.

Gosnell stared right back and laughed.

“To med these women up, to stick scissors in babies necks -- he’s the one in this case that doesn’t deserve to be called human,” Cameron said.

The trial of Gosnell entered its final phase on Monday, after lengthy closing arguments from defense attorney Jack McMahon and from prosecutor Cameron. Gosnell is charged with four counts of first-degree murder, for allegedly killing babies born alive during abortions by snipping their spinal cords with surgical scissors.

Cameron ended his closing argument with a plea to the jury to reach a guilty verdict. He quoted Steve Massof, an unlicensed medical graduate who worked at Gosnell’s clinic, the Women’s Medical Society in West Philadelphia:

“I felt like a fireman in hell,” Massof testified about the time he spent doing abortions late at night before Gosnell would arrive. “It was raining fetuses.”

“[Gosnell’s] the captain of that hell,” Cameron told the court. “It’s time for us to extinguish the hell he created.”

Cameron asked the jurors to “use their common sense” in determining whether the babies were born alive. Gosnell’s defense spent the morning arguing there was reasonable doubt that the four babies alleged to have been murdered were born alive.

“Why do you think there’s a hole in its head?” Cameron said.  “It was because that it was an added step to make sure that baby was dead.”

Cameron recalled clinic janitor Jim Johnson’s testimony that the clinic's toilet was constantly clogged up.  “You all know what that’s from, that’s from babies in the toilet,” he said.

“Maybe you’ve been desensitized by this case, but just the thought of using a plunger and having an arm and a leg come up,” Cameron told the jury.  He said Gosnell had no respect for the dead, putting fetal remains in the garbage disposal, the toilet, and the freezer.

Cameron also relayed the testimony of Shanice Manning, who was only 14 or 15 years old when her mother brought her into Gosnell’s clinic for an abortion.  She did not receive the required counseling before an abortion under Pennsylvania law, nor was the 24-hour waiting period applied.

Manning had to go to the hospital after complications, and that’s where the baby was stillborn.

“What she said in the hospital when the baby was stillborn was, ‘Can I see the baby?  Can I hold it?’” Cameron said.

“That is why you have to have counseling,” he said.  “To this day she regrets what happened.”

While still at the clinic, Manning had asked Gosnell what the sex of the baby was.  “Well, if you’re a good girl, maybe I’ll tell you,” Gosnell was quoted as saying.

“It’d be six years old,” Cameron said.  “It was not born alive, but he surely killed it,” he said.

“Baby Boy A” also was referenced. He was estimated to be 29-and-a-half weeks old, or about seven months’ gestation.  The baby was breathing for 10 to 20 seconds before its neck was cut by Gosnell, according to the grand jury report, and was placed in a shoebox.

Kareema Cross, a former employee of Gosnell’s, testified that the baby was moving even after his spinal cord was snipped.

“That baby would be four-and-a-half years old right now,” Cameron said.  “I wish to God it could walk into this courtroom.”  He said a baby that age would have a 70 to 80 percent chance of survival.

“But instead it had scissors jabbed into its neck and slowly suffocated to death,” he said.

“We don’t have to show you that the defendant is guilty beyond all doubt,” Cameron said, as he attempted to refute the arguments made by defense attorney McMahon earlier in the day.

McMahon said digoxin, a drug used to stop a baby’s heart inside the womb, was used in all cases where murder charges were brought.

But Cameron said no digoxin was found at the clinic by Crime Scene Unit Officer John Taggart.

“The use of the digoxin is an imagined doubt,” Cameron said.  “If it was being used, it was being used improperly, if at all.”

Gosnell, 72, is facing four counts of first-degree murder for killing babies born alive after abortions, and a third-degree murder charge in the anesthesia-overdose death of a patient, Karnamaya Mongar.

He also is charged with infanticide, conspiracy, abortion at 24 or more weeks, theft, corruption of minors, solicitation and other related offenses.

Cameron said Mongar was the “epitome of the American Dream,” living in a refugee camp in Nepal for nearly 20 years before finally making it to the United States, only to die “on a rusty table.”

“Or is it worse to be those babies, for months in your mother -- you live and come out into the light, all of that potential, you can survive—you heard the odds, 75 to 80 percent—and you have scissors jammed in your neck.”

“I don’t know what’s worse,” he said.

NORTHERN IRELAND: Same-sex marriage motion is defeated at NI Assembly

from VirtueOnline

NORTHERN IRELAND: Same-sex marriage motion is defeated at NI Assembly

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-22344006
April 29, 2013

A Sinn Fein motion calling on the Northern Ireland Executive to legislate to allow for same sex marriage has been defeated in the assembly by 53 votes to 42

Those against the motion included 50 unionist MLAs and three members of the Alliance.

Those in favour included all 37 nationalists who voted and three unionists.

Read the full story at www.VirtueOnline.org

Fresno Judge Denies ECUSA's Motion for Summary Judgment

from Anglican Curmudgeon by A. S. Haley

There is very good news for the Anglican Diocese of San Joaquin, now under the leadership of Bishop Eric Menees. Last Thursday, the Fresno Superior Court (Jeffrey Hamilton, J.) filed his decision adopting his tentative ruling of March 6 as his final ruling with respect to the Motion for Summary Judgment / Summary Adjudication filed by the plaintiff rump diocese and its bishop, Bishop Talton, and joined in by ECUSA itself.

The ruling denies ECUSA and its totem plaintiffs any summary judgment, because it finds that there are disputed issues of fact still to be resolved in connection with the Diocese's right to withdraw from ECUSA, as it voted to do in December 2007. In so doing, it adopts the "neutral principles of law" approach prescribed by the Court of Appeals, and it correctly applies that approach to find that the plaintiffs failed to show, as a matter of law, that anything in ECUSA's Constitution or canons, or anything in its long history with the Diocese, restricts the right of a Diocese to disaffiliate.

Now ECUSA will have to go to trial against Bishop Schofield on its claims that he was not authorized to lead his Diocese out of the Church. Since there was no canonical or constitutional provision which Bishop Schofield's Diocese could be said to have violated when it voted to disaffiliate, the present ruling will make it that much more difficult for ECUSA to prove its claims at trial.

However, ECUSA is not out of arrows in its quiver yet. It has filed reply papers in the federal court litigation in South Carolina which attempt to make a wholly new argument for its priority in being able to decide, as a matter of federal law under the First Amendment, that Dioceses are not free to leave the Church without the consent of General Convention. But as you might well imagine, that is a very far-fetched and tenuous argument which will require the Curmudgeon to devote an entirely new post to its refutation. So, stay tuned!

It has been going on for years - 1965-present

Seminary Dean Blasts "Myth" of Episcopal Church Decline

from VirtueOnline

Seminary Dean Blasts "Myth" of Episcopal Church Decline
We need to challenge the narrative despair, says Ian Markham

News Analysis

By David W. Virtue
www.virtueonline.org
April 30, 2013

The Dean of Virginia Theological Seminary denounced as "untrue" and a "myth" that The Episcopal Church is declining when he addressed delegates to the Diocese of Delaware Convention recently.

The Rev. Dr. Ian Markham said endless stories, [told] over and over about the fact that we're part of the "mainline" and the "mainline" is getting smaller are not true.

"The picture you get in the media is that we (TEC) are among a group called 'mainline' (a very opaque word) and like other mainline churches we are in decline. The other part of this picture is that it has been going on for years. People talk that it all started in the mid-1950's when we were at three and a half million Episcopalians and we're now down to 1,951,907.

Read the full story at www.VirtueOnline.org

word to pecusa

(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis: A Worldly Church cannot transmit the Gospel

from TitusOneNine by Kendall Harmon

A worldly Church is a weak Church. The only way to stop this from happening is to entrust the Church to the Lord through constant prayer. This was the message at the heart of Pope Francis’ homily during Mass Tuesday morning, celebrated with staff from the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, also known as APSA. Emer McCarthy reports:

"We can safeguard the Church, we can cure the Church, no? We do so with our work, but what’s most important is what the Lord does : He is the only One who can look into the face of evil and overcome it. The prince of the world comes but can do nothing against me: if we don’t want the prince of this world to take the Church into his hands, we must entrust it to the One who can defeat the prince of this world. Here the question arises: do we pray for the Church, for the entire Church? For our brothers and sisters whom we do not know, everywhere in the world? It is the Lord's Church and in our prayer we say to the Lord: Lord, look at your Church ... It' s yours. Your Church is [made up of ] our brothers and sisters. This is a prayer that must come from our heart".

Then, Pope Francis remarked that "it is easy to pray for the grace of the Lord", "to thank Him" or when "we need something." But it is fundamental that we also pray to the Lord for all, for those who have "received the same Baptism," saying "they are Yours, they are ours, watch over them".

Read it all.

Evangelical Alliance—The Confidence in the Gospel Campaign

from TitusOneNine by Kendall Harmon

Is the Church in the UK as confident in the gospel as it should be?

It appears that while mission is clearly at the heart of what many churches are doing, talking about our faith as Christians is proving increasingly difficult.

Our desire is to see churches throughout the UK have a renewed confidence in the gospel and engaged in creative evangelism which is producing lasting results. This timely campaign is not about providing busy churches with more programmes; rather it is about looking at how we can make small changes that will nurture a gospel-confident culture within our churches.

Read it all.

SYA

from Midwest Conservative Journal by The Editor

A while back, a guy named Jason Collins, who plays for the NBA’s Washington Wizards, decided he was a homosexual.  And much of this country’s left, whose historical memory goes back about a month, started making Jackie Robinson noises.

Which is all kinds of stupid.  Jackie Robinson was, well, good.  But if you look at his statistics for this season, Jason Collins is, well, pretty close to the worst player on the Washington Wizards basketball team.

So I guess you can either say that Collins is being honest with himself or he’s trying to salvage what’s left of his basketball career in any way that he can, figuring that Washington will never cut the openly-gay guy because they’re absolutely terrified of having the media hammer drop on them.

Both explanations seem to work.

Protestant Perseverance and Catholic Decline?

from First Things | On the Square by ft@firsthings.com (James R. Rogers )

Protestants with a strong religious identity continue to increase as Catholics with a strong religious identity continue to decline, according to a March study by the Pew Research Center. The proportion of Catholics reporting strong religious affiliation declined by almost twenty percentage points over the last few decades, from 46 percent of Catholics in 1974 to 27 percent in 2012. Protestants reporting strong religious affiliation increased more than ten percentage points during the same period, from 43 percent to 54 percent.

The contrast between Protestant and Catholic trends is not as straightforward as the numbers suggest. The data tell us more about intra -ecclesial changes than they do about inter -ecclesial comparisons. The data on Catholics indeed suggest reasons for some concern, but the data on Protestants are not quite as rosy as they initially appear.



Lets start with the Protestants. The increase in the proportion of Protestants who report a strong religious identity may result not from an overall increase in the number of strong Protestants, but rather from a decline in the number of weak" Protestants. These folks could have dropped out entirely from counting as Protestants-either now reporting no belief or reporting adherence to another religion. Thus the proportion of Protestants reporting a strong religious affiliation will appear larger, even though the absolute numbers have not changed at all.

The Pew Research Center chart below on Protestants as a Share of the Adult Population" seems to confirm this claim. The proportion of the American population calling themselves strong Protestants has remained more or less steady at around 27 percent since 1974. During that time, however, the percentage of less strong Other Protestants" declined by over one-third, from 36 percent of the adult population to 23 percent. While the absolute number of strong Protestants would have increased along with the overall increase in the U.S. population during this period, the decline in other Protestants" accounts entirely for the reported increase in the proportion of Protestants with a strong religious affiliation.



While strong Protestants havent gained in the overall population, despite gaining proportionally among self-identified Protestants, they also havent lost ground in the overall population during this period. The news may not be as good as it seems, but neither is it as bad as it might be-which is to say, as bad as it is for Catholics.

Strong Catholics have lost ground, both proportionally among Catholics and also in the entire population. As can be seen in the chart below, the proportion of strong Catholics in the overall U.S. population has declined about 40 percent from 1974, from twelve percent of the entire adult population to seven percent. While the five-percentage point decline in the proportion of strong Catholics almost mirrors the four-percentage point increase in other" Catholics, I suspect from other reports that the turnover is greater than the General Social Survey numbers pick up, with an increase in the Hispanic population in the U.S. masking the loss among Catholics of Anglo origin because of the relatively greater Catholic identification among Hispanics.



There seems to be some question whether Hispanics will continue as a group to make up for the loss of Anglo members in the U.S. Catholic Church. In a recent cover story, Time magazine reported (drawing on different data from Pew) that while currently two-thirds of Hispanics in the U.S. are Catholic, the expectation is that only 50 percent will be Catholic by 2030. Among young Latinos," Time reports, the drift away from the Roman Catholic Church is even more rapid."

Do Catholics have any reason for optimism? To be sure, a dynamic, vibrant pope from Latin America might excite Catholics about their faith, particularly young Hispanics in both Latin America and the U.S. Further, while strong Catholic identity may be declining overall in the U.S., my impression is that there is a steady stream of converts from Protestantism to Catholicism at elite levels. Some of these converts are Evangelicals; others are from mainline denominations, or even from no religion at all.

A trickle of high-profile converts cannot numerically offset the laity leaving Catholicism for other churches or no church at all, but their conversions-often made with some reference to perceived Catholic intellectual vibrancy-may reflect a strength in the Catholic Church not captured by the numerical measures.

That said, while the movement into the Catholic Church at elite levels is often discussed separately from the movement out of the Catholic Church at the popular level, I wonder whether both are, in part, a reflection of the same cause: the evaporation of much of the traditional social stigma of being a Catholic in the U.S. The effect would be most direct at the elite level. Decreasing prejudice clears the way for conversions among elites, at least at the margin, by decreasing the social and economic penalties.

But likewise, in the more common case of laypeople joining Protestant churches, I wonder whether anti-Catholicism in the past might have constructed a hedge that served as much to keep Catholics in" their Church as a result of their exclusion from fully interacting with Protestants in American culture. This might plausibly have created a psychology of us versus them" that may have helped-again, at the margin-to sustain commitment to Catholicism.

The removal of much of the hedge of prejudice against Catholicism in the U.S. could thereby allow easier entry into the Catholic Church at the very same time it allows easier exit from the Catholic Church relative to earlier times.

The implication of the Pew report seems to be status-quo holding for Protestantism: It is maintaining its core members while losing its more peripheral members (hence core members make up a greater proportion of Protestants, even though core members are not increasing numerically faster than population growth). The implication is more concerning for Catholics: Even though overall numbers are maintaining, core membership is declining.

James R. Rogers is department head and associate professor of political science at Texas A&M University. He leads the New Man" prison ministry at the Hamilton Unit in Bryan, Texas, and serves on the Board of Directors for the Texas District of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. His previous On the Square" articles can be found here.

RESOURCES

Doing the Math on Religious Affiliation," James R. Rogers

Catholics Up (Absolutely) and Holding Steady (Proportionately)," David Mills

Barring Clergy at the Boston Bombing

from First Things | On the Square by ft@firsthings.com (John M. Grondelski )

American Pietà" is considered one of the iconic photographs of 9/11. You've seen it: the photo depicts five men, amid the dust and rubble that enveloped the World Trade Center that day, carrying the dead body of Fr. Mychal Judge out of the ruins. Judge, a Franciscan priest and Fire Department of New York chaplain who had rushed to the scene of the terrorist attacks to administer the last sacraments to the dying, was killed as the building collapsed. People instinctively recognize that at life-and-death moments like this, a clergyman ought to be there. There are no atheists in foxholes.

The April 26 Wall Street Journal carried a commentary by Jennifer Graham, reporting that although local priests rushed to the scene of the Boston Marathon bombing to anoint the dying, police prevented them from reaching victims. They had to stand outside the yellow tape lines.

Boston police did not comment on the no priest" policy, and the reporter even threw local authorities a bone, writing in light of the devastation in Boston, the denial of access to clergy is a trifling thing, and it might even have been an individuals error."

Yet denial of access to clergy"-especially at the hour of our death-is no trifling thing. Have we now decided that clergy are not first responders, that only physical life is worth saving, that spiritual life is a private affair that has no relevance in the midst of a terrorist attack? One might say that priests can pray on their own outside the police cordon, with no actual tangible contact, but for a Catholic, whose tradition is sacramental, i.e., symbolic and physical, such disembodied ministry is alien.

Reading some of the comments on the Wall Street Journal piece, I was struck by the resilience of anti-Catholicism: That nativist prejudice remains alive and well, given a booster shot by the Churchs pedophilia scandal, one of whose epicenters was the Archdiocese of Boston. But, let me suggest, there is another prejudice at work here: the relentless quest to sanitize anything public of any religious presence.

Undoubtedly, there will be those who claim that the need to control a crime or accident scene is such that, with a large influx of clergy, chaos might ensue. Such theoretical images of hundreds of Wiccan, Santería, Satanist, and other exotic religious" descending along with Christian, Jewish, and Islamic clergy on a scene might deter some contingency planners, but in the real world-where people are dying-such unrealistic fantasies deny real people real ministry. The answer is not simply secularizing" the scene of the event.

Yet that is just what Boston did: it de facto marginalized clergy, relegating their ministry to the sidelines as unessential to the real" assistance that the states authorities thought it had a monopoly on. The message is clear: Disasters are Caesars turf, not Gods.

Perhaps the ban on priests at the site of the Boston attacks was a mistaken ad hoc decision. But two things ought to follow: (1) Boston authorities should clarify what happened; and (2) religious groups in Boston (and elsewhere) should immediately demand public clarification of local policies regarding clergy access to sites of accidents or mass casualties. Where those policies are obstructionist, those religious groups need to work to correct them . . . or make an appropriate public stink.

John M. Grondelski is former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey.

AND NOW…IDIOTS

from Midwest Conservative Journal by The Editor

Michael L. “Mikey” Weinstein hates Christians:
Today, we face incredibly well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces. Oh my, my, my, how “Papa’s got a brand new bag.”

Really hates Christians.

What’s Papa’s new tactic? You’re gonna just love this! These days, when ANYone attempts to bravely stand up against virulent religious oppression, these monstrosities cry out alligator tears in overflowing torrents and scream that it is, in fact, THEY who are the dispossessed, bereft and oppressed. C’mon, really, you pitiable unconstitutional carpetbaggers? It would be like the utter folly of 1960′s-era southern bigots howling like stuck pigs in protest that Rosa Parks’ civil rights activism is “abusing” them by destroying and disenfranchising their rights to sit in the front seat of buses in Montgomery, Alabama. Please, I beseech you! Let us call these ignoble actions what they are: the senseless and cowardly squallings of human monsters.

Really REALLY hates Christians.

Queasy with the bright and promising lights of the cultural realities of the present day, those evil, fundamentalist Christian creatures and their spiritual heirs have taken refuge behind flimsy, well-worn, gauze-like euphemistic facades such as “family values” and “religious liberty.” These bandits coagulate their stenchful substances in organizations such as the American Family Association (AFA), the ultra-fundamentalist Family Research Council (FRC), and the Chaplains Alliance for Religious Liberty (CARL). The basis of their ruinous unity is the bane of human existence and progress: horrific hatred and blinding bigotry. However, when the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and others correctly characterize them as “hate groups,” they all too predictably raise a deafening hue and disingenuously bellow mournfully like the world class cowards they are.

Mikey’s screed goes on like that for several more tedious paragraphs.  Aside from marveling at the Huffington Post’s piss-poor editorial judgment, it’s hard for me to get all that worked up about this.  After all, how seriously should you take anything crapped out by an alleged adult who refers to himself as Mikey?  What, you didn’t want to go with “Spider-Man” there, slugger?

But do you know who thinks that this sniveling little douchebag actually has something important to offer?
Barack Obama’s Defense Department:

“Today, we face incredibly well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces.”

Those words were recently written by Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), in a column he wrote for the Huffington Post. Weinstein will be a consultant to the Pentagon to develop new policies on religious tolerance, including a policy for court-martialing military chaplains who share the Christian Gospel during spiritual counseling of American troops.

Living Church Interviews Bishop Tito Zavala, still in broken communion with TEC and Ang C of Can.

from TitusOneNine by Kendall Harmon

In 2003, after the Episcopal Church consecrated the first openly gay bishop within the Anglican Communion, the Province of the Southern Cone severed its relationship with the Episcopal Church. It also broke communion with the Anglican Church of Canada after one of its dioceses in 2002 authorized a rite for blessing same-sex unions. Are you still in broken communion with these two provinces?

Yes. In 2010 when an earthquake struck in Chile, I received many, many phone calls from [the Episcopal Church Center in] New York offering us money. But I said no; not out of arrogance but because we had broken communion with TEC and it would not be right to accept their money.

Did you ask permission of the local Anglican Church of Canada bishop to visit here?
No, because I am coming to another, different Anglican church.

Tim Keller offers Thoughts on John Newton, Change and Grace

from TitusOneNine by Kendall Harmon

For decades Kathy and I have profited immensely from the pastoral wisdom of the converted slave trader John Newton. As an 18th century Anglican minister, Newton was a good preacher, but it was as a pastor, counselor, and advisor that he excelled. His pastoral letters are a treasure chest. In one of his letters (entitled “Some Blemishes on Christian Character”) Newton points out that while most Christians succeed in avoiding more gross sins, many do not actually experience much in the way of actual spiritual growth.

Newton lays out a very convicting and specific example of the kinds of Christian people who coast on their strengths but do nothing about their weaknesses and so rob themselves and others of joy and God of his glory. These blemishes are often seen by their bearers as mere “foibles.” Newton says they “may not seem to violate any express command of Scripture” and yet, they are “properly sinful” because they are the opposite of the fruit of the Spirit that believers are supposed to exhibit.

These “small faults” mean that large swaths of the Christian population have little influence on others for Christ....

Read it all.

Turns out VTS Dean and President drinking too much pecusa Kool Aid

Myth of ECUSA Declining Turns Out to be True

from Stand Firm by Jackie

Facts can be really pesky at times.

Significantly, Dean Markham’s claim that the talk about decline in the Episcopal Church “is all untrue” flies in the face of the Episcopal Church’s own statistics.  Check out, for instance, the Episcopal Domestic Fast Facts Trends: 2007-2011. 

There’s also the sobering data included in the report from the House of Deputies Committee on the State of the Church submitted to General Convention in 2009. 

Be sure to check out the rest of the article at Creedal Christian. 

Fundamentalist Christian Monsters

from Stand Firm by Jackie

In an invective laced opinion piece published in the Huffington Post, Michael Weinstein isn’t shy about exposing his opinion of Christians as monsters.

Today, we face incredibly well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces. Oh my, my, my, how “Papa’s got a brand new bag.”

What’s Papa’s new tactic? You’re gonna just love this! These days, when ANYone attempts to bravely stand up against virulent religious oppression, these monstrosities cry out alligator tears in overflowing torrents and scream that it is, in fact, THEY who are the dispossessed, bereft and oppressed. C’mon, really, you pitiable unconstitutional carpetbaggers? It would be like the utter folly of 1960’s-era southern bigots howling like stuck pigs in protest that Rosa Parks’ civil rights activism is “abusing” them by destroying and disenfranchising their rights to sit in the front seat of buses in Montgomery, Alabama. Please, I beseech you! Let us call these ignoble actions what they are: the senseless and cowardly squallings of human monsters.

Queasy with the bright and promising lights of the cultural realities of the present day, those evil, fundamentalist Christian creatures and their spiritual heirs have taken refuge behind flimsy, well-worn, gauze-like euphemistic facades such as “family values” and “religious liberty.” These bandits coagulate their stenchful substances in organizations such as the American Family Association (AFA), the ultra-fundamentalist Family Research Council (FRC), and the Chaplains Alliance for Religious Liberty (CARL). The basis of their ruinous unity is the bane of human existence and progress: horrific hatred and blinding bigotry. However, when the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and others correctly characterize them as “hate groups,” they all too predictably raise a deafening hue and disingenuously bellow mournfully like the world class cowards they are.

Considering we are bombarded with Fresh Cups of Hell on an hourly basis, you might be tempted to yawn and dismiss as yet another liberal rant against Christians.  You might want to reconsider that when you realize this man has just been hired as a consultant to the Pentagon to develop new policies on RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE.