The Supreme Court rejected the Biden administration’s request to block the Texas Heartbeat Act immediately and scheduled oral arguments for November 1.
The Texas Heartbeat Act remains in effect until the court rules.
This is a great development for the Pro-Life movement because:The law will continue to save an estimated 100 babies per day, and The justices will actually discuss whether these lawsuits are valid in the first place (something the district court ignored). We still have many steps ahead of us and have not yet addressed the main question of the case: whether the Texas Heartbeat Act is constitutional. The motion before the court right now is whether the law can stay in effect in the meantime. DONATEAt the same time as the Department of Justice (DOJ) case, the Supreme Court will consider a similar lawsuit from abortionists (Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson). This is the same case justices considered previously in early September when the high court denied abortionists’ plea to block the Texas Heartbeat Act before taking effect.
The key issue the court will consider November 1 is whether these attacks on the Pro-Life policy are actually valid.
The Biden administration failed to prove in their arguments: Whether they have legal standing to challenge the law; If they themselves have suffered irreparable harm because of the Texas Heartbeat Act; andWhether a federal judge can constitutionally thwart state judges and clerks’ responsibilities. Justices will not address in the November 1 proceedings whether they believe the law is constitutional.
Earlier this month, an Obama-nominated judge ruled in favor of the Biden administration. The anti-Life ruling blocked the law for 48 hours until the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals fully reinstated the Texas Heartbeat Act.
Texas became the first state in the nation on September 1 to enforce a heartbeat policy. The law grants private citizens the ability to sue abortionists who kill preborn babies with detectable heartbeats in Texas. Thus, abortionists in Texas have ceased committing abortions after six weeks’ gestation (the approximate time a baby’s heartbeat can be detected).
We estimate the law has saved nearly 5,000 babies from abortion!
Please pray that the Texas Heartbeat Act will succeed in the end, and forward this message to spread the word! Defending Life with you,
Texas Right to Life
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Flashback: “Spiritual Masturbators,” Madhouses and Prisons
Robert Hale’s recent statement that the “… anti-abortion movement is no longer a movement. It’s an industry.”-made me think of a Crisis Pregnancy Center that contradicted his statement. About two years ago, I spoke with its Texan Director who has saved thousands of unborn babies. We spoke of a “Crisis Pregnancy Center” whose top priority-to put it mildly- was not saving as many babies as possible. He said stay away from that center because they are “spiritual masturbators.”
I love new word combinations, so I researched it to see where it would take me. I found masturbation to be a good metaphor for the spiritual direction our society is taking.
“The ultimate direction of masturbation always has to be insanity” Norman Mailer said.
” If one has, for example, the image of a beautiful sexy babe in masturbation, one still doesn’t know whether one can make love to her in the flesh. All you know is that you can violate her in the brain…But, if one has fought the good or evil fight and ended with the beautiful sexy dame…One has something real to build on.”
Masturbation -as the pornography industry knows -is a profitable lie. For example, if one verbally lies about having sex with a porno star it is a lie. If one imagines having sex with a porno star it is still an untruth. The imagination is used to reach unreality.
On the other hand, the imagination can be used to reach into deep reality. As philosopher Edith Stein showed- truth can be found using the phenomena of the imagination. As Thomas Aquinas, also, demonstrated the mind can grasp the realities of love, truth and God using the phenomena of the imagination and reason.
One only need read Shakespeare or G .K. Chesterton to see the imagination grasping deep truths. Chesterton here shows how the reason and imagination can work together to reveal the philosophical reality of being or Ens:
“A brilliant Victorian scientist delighted in declaring that the child does not see any grass at all; but only a sort of green mist reflected in a tiny mirror of the human eye. This piece of rationalism has always struck me as almost insanely irrational. If he is not sure of the existence of the grass, which he sees through the glass of a window, how on earth can he be sure of the existence of the retina, which he sees through the glass of a microscope… the child is aware of Ens [being]. Long before he knows that grass is grass, or self is self, he knows that something is something. Perhaps it would be best to say very emphatically (with a blow on the table), There is an Is.”
The masturbator who imagines he is with the porno star is in is not. His body and imagination are moving or as moderns would say progressing, but not in the direction of reality.
He is living in what Professor Allan Bloom, writer of the Closing of the American Mind, called the only “self-evident” truth in modern America- the denial of truth. According to the Professor, the only virtue -50 years of public education -has achieved is relativity of truth. Bloom said relativism “is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional ground for a free society.”In other words, once one moves away from objective truth then universal rights will be replaced by raw power. Bloom, for example, showed how the old civil rights movement “relied on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” But, the new Black Power movement considering the Constitution “corrupt” demanded a “black identity, not universal rights. Not rights but power counted.”
Once again, Norman Mailer shows how moving away from natural objective truths such as heterosexuality can lead to debased power struggles:
“ So, yes q [homosexuals] in prison strive to become part of the male population, and indeed – it is the irony of homosexuality – try to take on the masculine powers of the man who enters them, even as the studs, if Genet is our accurate guide, become effeminate over the years. For reminds us: homosexuality is not heterosexuality. There is no conception possible, no, no inner space, no damnable spongy pool of a womb…no hint remains of the awe that a life in these circumstances can be conceived. Heterosexual sex with contraception is become by this logic a form of sexual currency closer to the homosexual than the heterosexual, a clearinghouse for power, a market for psychic power in which the stronger will use the weaker, and the female in the act, whether possessed of a vagina or phallus, will look to ingest or steal the masculine qualities of the dominator.”
This is the end result when universal truths and responsibility toward those truths are denied. The only “currency” left is stealing of power. If our society will not tolerate truth calling it intolerance; then sex will not be about married love, but masturbation and power struggles. Leaving our society progressing towards the unreality of a madhouse and the power struggles of a prison.
Click here for Credit Card and Amazon Order of Fred Martinez’s book “Hidden Axis”:
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church as well as the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Stop for a moment of silence, ask Jesus Christ what He wants you to do now and next. In this silence remember God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost – Three Divine Persons yet One God, has an ordered universe where you can know truth and falsehood as well as never forget that He wants you to have eternal happiness with Him as his son or daughter by grace. Make this a practice. By doing this you are doing more good than reading anything here or anywhere else on the Internet.
Francis Notes:
– Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales totally confirmed beyond any doubt the possibility of a heretical pope and what must be done by the Church in such a situation:
“[T]he Pope… WHEN he is EXPLICITLY a heretic, he falls ipso facto from his dignity and out of the Church, and the Church MUST either deprive him, or, as some say, declare him deprived, of his Apostolic See.” (The Catholic Controversy, by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306)
– LifeSiteNews, “Confusion explodes as Pope Francis throws magisterial weight behind communion for adulterers,” December 4, 2017:
The AAS guidelines explicitly allows “sexually active adulterous couples facing ‘complex circumstances’ to ‘access the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.'”
– On February 2018, in Rorate Caeli, Catholic theologian Dr. John Lamont:
“The AAS statement… establishes that Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia has affirmed propositions that are heretical in the strict sense.”
– On December 2, 2017, Bishop Rene Gracida:
“Francis’ heterodoxy is now official. He has published his letter to the Argentina bishops in Acta Apostlica Series making those letters magisterial documents.”
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church by the bishops by the grace of God.
The Supreme Court today refused a request by Joe Biden and abortion businesses in Texas to block the Texas abortion ban that has saved thousands of babies from aboritons.
The nation’s highest court agreed to review the pro-abortion lawsuits against the abortion ban and set oral arguments for November 1. That means the ban will stay in place for several more days — likely saving anywhere from 50-100 babies each day from abortions.
The court, in its order, said it would consider the following questions: whether “the state can insulate from federal-court review a law that prohibits the exercise of a constitutional right by delegating to the general public the authority to enforce that prohibition through civil action”; and can “the United States bring suit in federal court and obtain injunctive or declaratory relief against the State, state court judges, state court clerks, other state officials, or all private parties to prohibit S.B. 8 from being enforced.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented and said the Texas abortion ban should be blocked while the lawsuit continues. She falsely called killing babies in abortions health care and made it appear that pregnant women are harmed if they can’t get abortions — even though abortion harms women in a myriad of ways and mothers who give birth experience more joy and less harm by keeping their baby.
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“The promise of future adjudication offers cold comfort, however, for Texas women seeking abortion care, who are entitled to relief now,” she wrote. “These women will suffer personal harm from delaying their medical care, and as their pregnancies progress, they may even be unable to obtain abortion care altogether.”
The Supreme Court needs just 4 votes to agree to review a case but five votes to issues a ruling — meaning SCOTUS reached those two thresholds to both review as well as to decide to leave the Texas abortion ban in place. In a prior ruling on the Texas abortion companies’ request to block the ban, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to allow to to stay in place, with Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberals dissenting and saying it should be blocked.
The Texas pro-life group behind the ban celebrated the rule.
“This is a great development for the Pro-Life movement because the law will continue to save an estimated 100 babies per day, and because the justices will actually discuss whether these lawsuits are valid in the first place,” Texas Right to Life Director of Media and Communication Kimberlyn Schwartz told LifeNews.com.
Yesterday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed legal papers with the Supreme Court urging it uphold the state’s abortion ban and deny Joe Biden’s demand that SCOTUS block it.
In its argument, Paxton and his team of attorneys say the federal government has no legal standing in the case and no right to overturn the Texas law because it hasn’t suffered any injuries from it:
Federal courts are not “roving commissions assigned to pass judgment on the validity of the Nation’s laws.”
The United States’ lawsuit against Texas is extraordinary in its breadth and consequence, having an impact on precedents that have existed far longer than any right to abortion has been recognized. Nevertheless, the federal government asks this Court to apply the “ad hoc nullification machine” that pushes aside any doctrine of constitutional law that stands in the way of abortion rights.
Specifically, it asks the Court to ignore (among other things) requirements of justiciability, standing, and a cognizable cause of action—all so that the Court can reach the merits of the government’s challenge to Texas’s Senate Bill 8 (SB 8). The Court should decline this request. Under binding case law, the federal government is not adverse to Texas merely because it thinks a Texas law is unconstitutional. And it lacks standing because it has not been injured by SB 8. The federal government cannot get an abortion, and the Constitution does not assign it any special role to protect any putative right to abortion.
Biden’s administration officially asked the Supreme Court to block the Texas abortion ban, which has saved thousands of babies from abortions. Texas had until today to file its legal papers explaining why the Supreme Court should keep the abortion ban in place while the legal challenge proceeds and pro-life groups expect the nation’s highest court to not block the ban for a second time.
The Supreme Court previously ruled that it would not block the ban when it considered a similar request from abortion businesses.
Texas Right to Life Director of Media and Communication Kimberlyn Schwartz told LifeNews she expects Biden to lose his request to block the ban: “We are excited to continue saving hundreds of lives through the Texas Heartbeat Act. However, the battle is not finished. We are confident Texas will ultimately defeat these attacks on our life-saving efforts.”
As LifeNews.com reported late last week, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Biden’s demand to block the ban. Previously, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman, who was appointed by Barack Obama, sided with the Biden administration’s Justice Department, which sued the state, arguing Texas’ law was unconstitutional because it went against Roe v. Wade.
Then, the 5th Circuit rejected Biden’s demand, voting 2-1 to allow the ban to stay in place as the underlying lawsuit continues. That was the third time it has allowed the law to stay in effect, responding to various pro-abortion legal challenges.
Yesterday, Biden officials called the ban “plainly unconstitutional” even though no right to abortion exists in the Constitution.
“S.B. 8 is plainly unconstitutional under this Court’s precedents,” the DOJ’s filing reads. “Texas has not seriously argued otherwise.”
“Texas’s insistence that no party can bring a suit challenging S.B. 8 amounts to an assertion that the federal courts are powerless to halt the State’s ongoing nullification of federal law,” the DOJ wrote. “That proposition is as breathtaking as it is dangerous.”
Monday’s filing marks the second time that the Supreme Court will weigh in on blocking the ban temporarily. Last month, in a legal challenge from abortion businesses, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to not block the ban while the lawsuit continued. Texas has until Thursday to file its response to Biden’s legal papers.
In its previous ruling, the Supreme Court said the pro-abortion groups did not provide sufficient reasons to justify blocking the law.
“The applicants now before us have raised serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law at issue,” the majority wrote. “But their application also presents complex and novel antecedent procedural questions on which they have not carried their burden. … In light of such issues, we cannot say the applicants have met their burden to prevail in an injunction or stay application.”
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett made up the majority in the decision. The justices who dissented were Chief Justice John Roberts, Justices Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. Kagan, Breyer and Sotomayor also wrote separate dissents slamming the court for allowing Texas to restrict abortions.
If the Supreme Court decides to not block the ban, it will likely stay in place until December, when the 5th Circuit has scheduled oral arguments on Biden’s request to block it. That means thousands more unborn children will be saved from aboritons, as many women decide to keep their baby instead of ending their child’s life. Meanwhile, pregnancy centers that provide actual help and support for pregnant women are also experiencing higher numbers of calls and visit and are saving more babies from abortion.
As soon as Judge Pitman issued his decision putting the ban on hold, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed.
“We disagree with the Court’s decision and have already taken steps to immediately appeal it to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals,” Paxton wrote on Twitter Thursday morning. “The sanctity of human life is, and will always be, a top priority for me.”
Typically, state governments enforce pro-life laws and, when the laws are challenged, judges can block the states from enforcing them in a preliminary injunction. However, the Texas law leaves enforcement up to individual people. So, judges are considering whether they can stop all private citizens from enforcing the law – especially without allowing private citizens the chance to defend themselves in court first.
Pitman’s order prohibited state court judges and court clerks from accepting lawsuits that the law allows. That made it so some abortion businesses continued killing babies in abortions while others worried they would still not be able to do so legally because the law, even if blocked, still allows lawsuits against anyone killing babies in abortions or assisting them.
Attorneys for Texas said Biden’s Department of Justice is being unfair by asking the court to block “absent third parties” from enforcing the law “without letting them be heard.”
The Texas law went into effect Sept. 1, prohibiting abortions once an unborn baby’s heartbeat is detectable, about six weeks of pregnancy. Thus far, the courts have refused to temporarily block the law, and as many as 3,000 unborn babies already have been spared from abortion.
On Friday, attorneys for the Department of Justice argued that the law is unconstitutional and the federal government has an interest in seeing it blocked.
Then, Judge Pitman issued the ruling they were hoping for and endorsed abortion in the process.
“The United States is substantially likely to succeed on the merits of its claims. It is substantially likely that S.B. 8 violates the Fourteenth Amendment,” the judge wrote. “From the moment S.B. 8 went into effect, women have been unlawfully prevented from exercising control over their lives in ways that are protected by the Constitution. That other courts may find a way to avoid this conclusion is theirs to decide; this Court will not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right.”
In comments to LifeNews.com, Texas Right to Life blasted the opinion:
The ruling is wildly broad, preventing Texas state officials from enforcing the law, including the shocking order to block every Texas judge and court clerk from even receiving lawsuits filed by citizens against the abortion industry. The provision blocking lawmakers is entirely unnecessary since the language of the Texas Heartbeat Act already prohibits government officials from enforcing the policy. However, Pitman’s effort to obstruct state judges and court clerks from fulfilling their lawful duties is astonishing.
This is the legacy of Roe v. Wade: Judges catering to the abortion industry, crafting a conclusion first and then searching the depths of legal literature for a rationale later.
Pro-Life attorneys are likely to appeal the decision to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals immediately, in which we expect a fair hearing.
Until a higher court intervenes, the disappointing reality is that Pitman’s ruling will likely stop the Texas Heartbeat Act from being enforced.
Texas Right to Life maintained that abortionists could still be sued for violating the abortion ban, despite the ruling.
However, even with this ruling, abortionists can still be held liable for any abortions they commit in violation of the law.
The Texas Heartbeat Act states that an individual being sued under the law cannot claim as an affirmative defense that they were acting under the protection of a court order that had since been reversed or overturned:
“Notwithstanding any other law, the following [is] not a defense to an action brought under this section… a defendant’s reliance on any court decision that has been overruled on appeal or by a subsequent court, even if that court decision had not been overruled when the defendant engaged in conduct that violates this subchapter;” (Section 171.208(e)(3), Texas Health and Safety Code)Thus, those who aid or abet abortions, even if currently permitted by this ruling, could eventually be sued for their actions today.
“Texas Right to Life is dedicated to holding the abortion industry accountable to the fullest extent possible under the law. We are confident that the Texas Heartbeat Act will ultimately withstand this legal challenge and succeed where other states’ heartbeat bills have not,” the pro-life group concluded.
The pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List also commented to LifeNews on Judge Pitman’s decision.
“The people of Texas speaking through their state legislators acted to protect unborn children with beating hearts, who are as human as you and me,” said SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser. “The Heartbeat Act is estimated to have saved more than 4,700 babies since it took effect over a month ago. Now an unelected judge has interfered with the clearly expressed will of Texans. For two generations, the U.S. Supreme Court has tied the hands of states to enact laws protecting unborn children and their mothers. It is time to restore this right to the people and update our laws.”
Judge Pitman’s ruling came roughly one month after the law went into effect on Sept. 1. The Supreme Court declined to block its enactment, leaving the law in place while litigation against it continues in lower courts.
“Texas has made clear it does not want to follow the Supreme Court‘s abortion precedents,” federal government attorney Brian Netter said during Friday’s hearing.
He asked the judge to issue an injunction blocking Texas and “all of its officers, employees and agents, including private parties” from suing abortionists who violate the law, CNN reports.
“The state resorted to an unprecedented scheme of vigilante justice that was designed to scare abortion providers and others who might help women exercise their constitutional rights, while skirting judicial review,” Netter said.
However, Will Thompson, an attorney representing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Office, told the judge that the federal government is using “inflammatory rhetoric” to attack the law, and the heartbeat law is not the only legislation that allows private enforcement.
“This is not some kind of vigilante scheme. It’s a scheme that uses the normal and lawful process,” Thompson said.
Netter contended that private citizens really are just acting for the state as a proxy to enforce the law. The judge asked Thompson about this claim.
Afterward, Texas Right to Life slammed the Biden administration’s arguments as “maniacal” and “entirely unprecedented.”
Kimberlyn Schwartz, director of media and communications, summarized the hearing: “Ultimately, the Justice Department is asking the court to toss out all logic and judicial precedent in order to cater to the abortion industry. The Biden administration’s case is desperate and far-fetched, and we expect an impartial court to declare the lawsuit without merit.”
The Biden administration has taken multiple actions to thwart Texas’s efforts to save unborn babies from abortion. Along with the lawsuit, it also set aside $10 million – taxpayers’ money – to provide grants to the abortion industry in Texas and make additional Title X family planning funds available.
In 2020, about 54,000 unborn babies were aborted in Texas, and about 85 percent happened after six weeks of pregnancy, according to state health statistics.
While abortion activists say some women are traveling to other states for abortions, they admit that others are having their babies instead.
Texas Right to Life encouraged women seeking pregnancy help to visit its website for a list of resources. Find it here.
Polls show Americans support heartbeat laws. An April poll by the University of Texas-Austin found that 49 percent of Texans support making abortions illegal after six weeks of pregnancy, while 41 percent oppose it. In 2019, a national Hill-HarrisX survey also found that 55 percent of voters said they do not think laws banning abortions after six weeks – when an unborn baby’s heartbeat is detectable – are too restrictive.
About a dozen states have passed heartbeat laws to protect unborn babies from abortion, but Texas is the first to be allowed to enforce its law. Whether the law will remain in effect or ultimately be upheld as constitutional in court remains uncertain, but pro-life leaders are hopeful now that the U.S. Supreme Court has a conservative majority.
You will be shocked when you hear what Ron DeSantis had to say about Biden’s vaccine mandate
October 21, 2021
Joe Biden’s true desire to be a dictator was never more apparent than when he handed down a decree to the private sector mandating they vaccinate their employees.
The Left is pushing for a communist state, and it starts by forcing citizens to get a shot just to keep their jobs.
The American people are pushing back, and Joe Biden has found himself in worse shape than he was two months ago.
After Biden’s announcement last month of an unconstitutional vaccine mandate that would affect almost 100 million American workers, many began to rise up.
People have had it with Biden’s decrees and dictator-style ruling.
Now DeSantis is warning people that not only is forcing workers to get the vaccine completely out-of-line and un-American, but it is also likely to destroy the already ailing economy.
“The fact of the matter is, you take in medical with nurses, even if a fraction of them decide that this is not something they want to do and leave, it will absolutely cause a lot of these health systems to hemorrhage, and then you look at all these other companies that do it and so, I know Biden is trying to force this on everybody,” DeSantis stated during a recent press conference.
“I don’t think you should get fired over this issue, and we want to protect people’s jobs, but two, it absolutely is going to have a negative impact on the economy if you’re causing people to lose these jobs because then you got to find those folks,” DeSantis continued.
Americans have already seen the economy spiral downward since Biden has taken office and these types of actions by the Left will only make it worse.
Of course, if you’re paying attention, you’ll realize that is exactly what Biden and the Democrat Party wants.
If the economy is bad, people will depend on the government to help them and then it’s only a matter of time before the Left has complete control.
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France,We have lost many of our Constitutional rights.Freedom of Religion? Only if you follow the Religion of Public Health.Pastors, Priests, and Rabbis bowed down to the false god of government when tyrannical governors prohibited or limited in person religious events.Free Speech? Not anymore.Controlled and censored speech is the order of the day. Critical thinking is mocked. Doctors are threatened by the medical establishment for asking scientific questions about COVID early treatments and vaccine related illnesses.Free Press? Wiped out.Five corporations control 90% of America’s news outlets: Comcast, Disney, Viacom/CBS, News Corp, and AT&T. The official narrative is parroted verbatim and incessantly. Just like China. Just like North Korea. It is no wonder a recent Rasmussen poll found that over 60% of the American people view the press as: “The Enemy of the People.”Freedom of Assembly? The government is threatening organizations who don’t “social distance,” who refuse to wear a mask, and who won’t abide by limits on the number of people who can attend rallies-groups like America’s Frontline Doctors.Freedom to Petition the Government? I am, for all practical purposes, under house arrest with no formal charges brought against me. Why? Because I petitioned my government—and now I have lost my Constitutional rights. And I am not alone.Fourth Amendment: Right to bodily integrity. This is essentially gone, through coercive tactics to force Americans to accept an experimental treatment they don’t want and don’t need.Fifth Amendment: Due process. Don’t get me started. There are good people, Americans who are languishing in jail as I write you – pretrial – based upon accusations only!Sixth Amendment: Speedy and Public Trial. Gone. No longer will the US government promise to give us our day in court, much less before a jury of our peers for all to see. So-called secret courts.Seventh Amendment: Trial by Jury. Due to lockdowns, the accused are held without a trial by jury for weeks or months.I always thought I lived in the United States of America, not in some communist dictatorship.And what are the excuses for erasing our Constitution? Medical safety, economic security, and religious duty.But we cannot afford to overlook the underlying theme to all three: TYRANNY.The reason the communists decided to use medical tyranny is because it is the most effective: it is silent, stealth, and insidious. It causes great fear, cowardice, and a hyper-reliance on authority. It also distracts people from the REAL enemy: the tyrannical overlords who seek to divide us.The tyrannical overlords pit black against white, male against female, rich against poor. Vaxxed vs. normal is just another exploitable division.Our work, our mission, is reclaiming our Constitutional liberties by blocking those who intend you to live under tyranny.The World Health Organization, the FDA, the NIH, and the CDC are proven liars who have lost all credibility and common-sense, while jeopardizing YOUR health and safety. What disgusts me most is how their failed prescriptions have exposed the most vulnerable: our elderly and our children.The New York Times, CNN, NPR, and hundreds of other news outlets have censored the truth in order to preserve their power.Twitter, Facebook, Google/YouTube, Apple, and dozens of other Tech companies are throttling down content, suppressing information, and de-platforming those with whom they disagree.And the White House, by pitting the vaxxed against the un-vaxxed, has created a scenario whereby they are imposing their imperialism and decrees on both groups.This is madness, and it must stop.Benjamin Rush said, “Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship to restrict the art of healing to one class of Men and deny equal privileges to others; the Constitution of this republic should make special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom.”It begins with you and me. Together, we can beat back the forces of tyranny with your faithful support.Please let me hear from you again with a financial gift of support today.All gifts are tax-deductible and will directly support our lawsuits, media campaigns, and fight for Constitutional guarantees.For Liberty,Dr. Simone Gold, Founder America’s Frontline Doctors
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The Francis Trad’s Francis Litany to “He still bestows Apostolic Blessings. Only one man in earth can do that”
“Well, the fact that he wears white, the fact that his official title is His Holiness, the fact that he actually issues apostolic blessings in his own name. Can you and I go and do that? I mean, no, we’re not the pope. So how can two people in Rome do that?” – Catholic historian Dr. Edmund Mazza [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/10/exclusive-transcription-is-benedict-xvi.html]
Catholic commenter Aqua commenting on the above fact stated by historian Dr. Edmund Mazza gave us the Francis Traditionalist’s Francis Litany:
“Can you or I do that”?
For me that is the essence of why it seems an act of willful disobedience to the Magisterium of Holy Mother Church to ignore Pope Benedict XVI and accept Jorgé Bergóglio in his place.
“Pope Benedict resigned. The See of Peter is vacant”. “But it is not vacant. He is still there”. “He wrote his resignation. He is gone. But he didn’t resign. He is not gone. He is still wearing white. Only one man on earth can do that”. “It doesn’t matter that he wears white. He resigned”. “He still bestows apostolic blessings. Only one man in earth can do that”. “It doesn’t matter. He resigned”. “He still lives in the Vatican under the title His Holiness. Only one man on earth can do that”. “It doesn’t matter. He resigned”. “In 2,000 years we have never seen a Pope ‘retire’ under an Emeritus title. Christ does not allow this”. “It doesn’t matter. The See was vacant. He resigned”.
The visual, spoken and written evidence of what Pope Benedict XVI has done and the spiritual dumpster fire of his fake replacement cannot be denied, yet deny it the vast majority of Catholics, including quasi-trads, willingly and insistently do. It cannot be any more clear, yet how does one get past “it doesn’t matter”.
It reminds me of the greatest proof for the Catholic Faith against the Protestant heresy, in discussions I’ve had with family and friends who remain behind, which is the John 6 Bread of Life discourse of our Lord in which He established Eucharistic Communion with His literal Body and Blood as essential to spiritual life as a Chriatian.
I have had discussions in which my Protestant brethren claim exclusivity in interpreting Scripture “literally” – comparing Scripture against Scripture to derive the Truth of God.
“Ok”, I say, “let’s turn to John 6 and read the literal words of Our Lord”. “*Indeed* He emphasizes, three times, over and over, as His Disciples drift away in horror and incomprehension. Likely, this is where Judas disconnected and internally betrayed Jesus in his spirit. If Christ meant Body and Blood metaphorically …. why did everyone leave if it was just meant as a symbol and a shared commemorative meal”?
“*It doesn’t matter*. He couldn’t have meant that. *You can’t take these words literally*” (after just minutes before claiming exclusivity to literal understanding of Scripture).
It doesn’t matter.
Dr. Mazza makes perfect sense. Trust your eyes, if nothing else. It is so simple. You can have only one Pope. Jesus Christ ordained that at the primal founding of *His* Church. Not two, three (etc, etc). One. Only one. But those who are unwilling to see, who resist the Grace of God to see what can be seen with our eyes, the tragic answer is “it doesn’t matter”.
Well, it does matter. And God demands we do something about it, just as He did just before His great trial and crucifixion. “You too, Peter”? “Where else would I go, you have the words of eternal life” (which had just been condensed down to the Bread of Life discourse as the most essential words of all). You said it, and so I believe. [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/10/dr-mazza-he-benedict-actually-issues.html?showComment=1634823079160#c2586830320933125887]Pray an Our Father now for reparation for the sins committed because of Francis’s Amoris Laetitia.
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church as well as the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Stop for a moment of silence, ask Jesus Christ what He wants you to do now and next. In this silence remember God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost – Three Divine Persons yet One God, has an ordered universe where you can know truth and falsehood as well as never forget that He wants you to have eternal happiness with Him as his son or daughter by grace. Make this a practice. By doing this you are doing more good than reading anything here or anywhere else on the Internet.
Francis Notes:
– Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales totally confirmed beyond any doubt the possibility of a heretical pope and what must be done by the Church in such a situation:
“[T]he Pope… WHEN he is EXPLICITLY a heretic, he falls ipso facto from his dignity and out of the Church, and the Church MUST either deprive him, or, as some say, declare him deprived, of his Apostolic See.” (The Catholic Controversy, by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306)
– LifeSiteNews, “Confusion explodes as Pope Francis throws magisterial weight behind communion for adulterers,” December 4, 2017:
The AAS guidelines explicitly allows “sexually active adulterous couples facing ‘complex circumstances’ to ‘access the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.'”
– On February 2018, in Rorate Caeli, Catholic theologian Dr. John Lamont:
“The AAS statement… establishes that Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia has affirmed propositions that are heretical in the strict sense.”
– On December 2, 2017, Bishop Rene Gracida:
“Francis’ heterodoxy is now official. He has published his letter to the Argentina bishops in Acta Apostlica Series making those letters magisterial documents.”
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church by the bishops by the grace of God.
Last month a couple of the nuns of the Fairfield Carmel were seen attending Mass at the FSSP apostolate, our parish in the ancient centre, Santissima Trinita dei Pellegrini. These are the sisters who have become famous throughout the Traditional Catholic world for their attempt to live the Teresian Discalced Carmelite life in the most authentic and faithful way possible.
Puzzling as it may have been for strictly cloistered nuns to be out and about, it was cleared up a few days later with an article announcing that the Fairfield Carmelites are about to undergo the “trial” of an Apostolic Visitation. On September 23rd, the community authorised a press release to alert the Catholic world, which LifeSite published. Anyone who has paid attention to anything in the last 8 years will know what this means:
This coming weekend, we ask that you pray in a special way for our Nuns. More than ever before, they are in need of your love and your support.
In August, they received the news they would be subject to an Apostolic Visitation and the dates have been scheduled for Sep. 25-28, 2021. A Visitation consists of interviews of each sister and a detailed scrutiny of the Nuns’ daily life. It includes an evaluation of their application of the Carmelite charism and their monastic customs.
It is for this reason, we are asking for your prayerful support as they undergo this difficult and stressful trial. We pray that the Nuns may quickly return to their quiet monastic observance.
Why is This Bad?
For those not in the know, an Apostolic Visitation is a process in which the local bishop or, sometimes, a bishop given the task by Rome, investigates the inner life of a monastic foundation to see if everything is going as it should. A bishop or his delegate will spend a few days in the monastery guest house, inspect the property, take a look at the account books and interview the nuns one at a time. He goes home and writes up a report to Rome or the local authorities and, if there are any issues to be addressed, makes recommendations.
In times past, it was a normal part of the life of any established monastic community in the Church. And as long as the episcopate retained the Holy Faith and had the same general goals as the community – namely, the salvation of souls under the guidance and governance of the approved rule of the community, (“Lex suprema salus animarum”) – there were few worries to be had about it. At worst it was an uncomfortable time, humanly speaking, in which an exalted stranger entered the sanctuary of the cloister and asked pointed questions, and everyone relaxed when he left.https://www.youtube.com/embed/NTUNJ7f0tHU?feature=oembed
Does anyone remember the 1986 film, The Mission? It’s the true story of an 18th century apostolic visitation to the Jesuit Missions in South America where Amazonian Indians had come for shelter from slavery by Europeans. The “good” cardinal, depicted as sympathetic, is dispatched to order the Jesuits to abandon their converts to slavery and death. It gives a brilliant portrayal of how our post-Tridentine concepts (Jesuit inventions, by the way) of “blind” obedience has been distorted and used for evil ends. It’s also a useful and terrifying cinematic lesson in trusting the kind of churchmen – “good” but weak – who smile at you and tell you the kind of things you want to hear until they betray you.
History leaves no room for doubt that an Apostolic Visitation has often been used by bad actors as a weapon against the salus animarum for political reasons, and so it is being used again today.
A Body Totally Corrupt and Dying, Lashing Out
In our times, these ancient political games are being played again by a Vatican that is wholly and manifestly corrupt in every imaginable way. This time the currency is not land or the wool trade of the early monastics, nor the lucrative slave and commodities trade from the early South American settlements. Now the coin is ideology; the “New Paradigm of Church” is being aggressively forced onto the institution by a group of the most morally, ideologically, theologically, sexually and financially corrupt men the Church has had to endure in centuries. It is not going too far to call the Bergoglian Vatican a second “Pornocracy” or “Saeculum obscurum.”
We hardly need to go through the list. For a while I was cataloguing the cases, starting most famously with the Franciscans Friars and Sisters of the Immaculate – nuked by visitators, most likely at the request of the Italian episcopate, who notoriously loathed them for their success, their vigorous growth and their obvious rejection of the Vatican II New Paradigm.
Since then there have been perhaps a dozen-odd communities of priests and sisters in various countries who have had the visitator hammer fall. The things they all have in common: a love of traditional styles of religious life and liturgy plus money or property[1].
Why the Fairfield Carmel? Obviously because they are successful. But most especially that they are successful as traditionalists. They have grown and prospered and are building their beautiful stone monastery. They are popular and have immense support from the laity. All this while very firmly rejecting the Modernist “reforms” of religious life and liturgy, that in Rome are considered the litmus test for acceptance by the contemporary Church. All of this put together is virtually a death sentence in the current Vatican. The real question should be, “Why did it take so long?”
Who are These People?
It’s soon going to be very important for everyone who loves the traditions of the Church to know a lot more about the Congregation for Religious. Pope Francis has abolished the office of Ecclesia Dei and placed all traditionalist groups under this office. What is not widely understood is that the Congregation for Religious is probably the most theologically, spiritually corrupt dicastery of all the grossly corrupt ruling bodies of the Church. With them the issue is more purely ideological than it is with other offices where money and power are mainly at issue.
The Prefect of the Congregation is João Braz de Aviz[2], a Brazilian Liberation Theology man, who is also deeply embedded in the quasi-occult group Focolare – one of the “New Movements,” founded by the self-proclaimed “visionary” Chiara Lubich, that preaches a pseudo-Catholic doctrine of religious indifferentism and neo-pelagianism. Focolare has been decried as a bizarre cult, but, though it is largely unknown in North American, Anglosphere circles, has immense influence among European, especially Italian, bishops[3]. Braz the Focolarino has made the Congregation for Religious into an instrument of Focolare’s weird, New Age, humanistic ideology and is using the “reform” of contemplative life as a tool for promoting its ends.
The second in command of the Congregation for Religious is a man who arguably is only in the job to be sheltered from prosecution for criminal financial activities. José Rodríguez Carballo was appointed Secretary in one of Francis’ first appointments, only weeks after the Conclave. He’s notable mostly for having thus escaped investigation by Swiss prosecutors for having bankrupted the Franciscan Friars Minor – the original Franciscan order – when it was discovered that tens of millions of Euros of the order’s money was sunk in “investments” in drugs and guns[4].
The rest of the Congregation’s staff and members are made up of committed ideologues. The un-habited academic, Sr. Nicla Spezzati, was appointed to the third highest position of undersecretary and was undoubtedly deeply involved in the attacks on traditional religious. She has since moved on. In her farewell letter she gave an un-parody-able soliloquy of incomprehensible bureaucratic Vaticanspeak that, if it reads like gibberish at least gives a hint about the mindset of the people in charge:
I think we can bless the Lord together because he has granted us to serve consecrated life in the Church at a time when the invitation continues to resound as an imperative of the soul: ‘Wake up the world.’ A time in which we are proceeding with good will – despite the complexity of the social, cultural, religious climate – to train eyes of contemplation and prophecy in the ferial days of the day; to live with discernment in life decisions; to inhabit the territories in the human encounter; to ignite processes rather than guarding sterile spaces; to use thought, guts and ways of mercy.
The Bureaucrats’ Attack on Contemplatives
However, the Vatican Pornocrats’ particular attention to cloistered nuns seems to be aimed at Carmelites specifically. It has long been noted that of all the ancient religious orders, it was the cloistered Carmelites who have survived the devastation of the post-Conciliar period the best. In short, there still are some. While nearly all the rest, even the great and ancient Benedictines, are on the edge of complete extinction. But Carmelite survival is soon to end.
The weapon most effective against the Carmelite order, particularly the Teresian Discalced variety, has been federations. Absolutely at the core of the Carmelite way of life is autonomy. An individual Carmel was intended by St. Teresa to be independent of the whims and vacillating – often political – interests of bishops or generalates. The house was to have independent control of its own financial life, to make decisions about whom to accept as vocations and how they are formed and to elect and obey its own superiors. All of these are currently under direct assault by this pope and this Congregation’s recent revisions.
Under the new regulations, laid out in the document from the Congregation, Cor Orans, and Pope Francis’ 2016 Apostolic Constitution “Vultum Dei Quaerere,” contemplative houses of nuns will no longer be allowed to organise formation of their own sisters as they see fit. They will lose control over their finances, and their right to elect and follow the leadership of their own superiors[5].
Death by Federation
But for Carmelites the poison has above all been federations. The idea that all houses of Carmelite nuns be herded into governing groups was enthusiastically adopted among Europe’s houses early on, and the loss of Carmelite autonomy has proven to be deadly. In 2009, the Congregation organised a meeting in Avila, Spain of all the superiors and formators of all the Discalced Carmelite monasteries of nuns in Europe and the Holy Land. The report from that meeting, leaked to me by a Carmelite superior, is horrifying; all but one house (a recent foundation in Croatia) was on the edge of extinction. Every one of these houses was already federated – as part of the post-conciliar “reforms” – long before it was universally mandated from above.
I wrote about it in 2018 for the Remnant:
The reports from each region showed that many of the provisions found in Cor Orans were already in place: federations with broad powers, including financial control and combined formation courses, “religious assistant” priests appointed by the federation and overseeing individual monasteries and superiors giving up their authority to the federations. Given that this was 2009, it is clear that the plans to force all contemplative monasteries in the world into this disastrous European mould were well under way long before Pope Benedict was even considering resigning.
Average ages were 65-80. Half the houses across Europe had already closed and nearly all the rest expected to be shuttered within a decade. Whole monastic communities were living out their last days in state run nursing homes. Some were attempting to merge with “dynamic” new methods of organisation dreamed up by the federations, but were finding even their youngest members were too old to take on the responsibility. None expressed the slightest hope there would be a reversal of the trend. They all just seemed resigned; they had obviously been convinced that merely returning to the traditional observances was impossible, and that extinction was in some way the will of God.
And the creepy part was that this body showed not the slightest interest in attempting a restoration. The Belgian delegation – federated in 1997, average age 73 with one sister in formation for 11 monasteries – offered as “possible solutions” only, “We want to continue along the path we have begun.”
Very little is said of any efforts being made to increase vocational outreach using the internet or through diocesan contacts. And perhaps most telling of all, not one word is offered of applying any systematic religious solutions; no one is suggesting increased prayer or fasting, Rosary campaigns or novenas in what has to be the Carmelite Order’s most desperate hour. Nothing is said of increased intensity of devotion to the charism, study of the foundress or returning to sources, still less of strengthening the Carmelites’ traditional independent self-governance or reconsidering the wisdom of ‘the path taken.’ Indeed, in one case in Spain, the sisters themselves advocate abandoning traditional Teresian autonomy altogether.
And this all seemed very much to the satisfaction of the Vatican officials at the event. Sr. Enrica Rosanna talked about “two great challenges to our contemplative life… the challenge of globalization and the challenge of irrelevancy.” She warned the nuns against bringing vocations from other countries to keep their monasteries alive, and exhorted them to “stay awake to welcome the dawn” of a bright new future.[6] It seems impossible not to conclude from these bizarre comments and the recent total “lockdown” of all contemplative nuns into a regime that has proven totally lethal to religious life, that extinction is in fact the desired outcome.
A Final Note to Carmelites and Other Contemplative Nuns: Resist
The Carmels that have survived and even thrived are those who have maintained at least a modicum of this traditional independence. But this survival is, as always, mainly a North American phenomenon, and it is, as we are seeing with the Fairfield sisters, under direct attack.
If I were being asked by a house of Carmelites what they can do to avoid being sunk by the Roman Pornocrats’ torpedoes I would advise the following:
Retain legal counsel immediately, both in secular and canon law.
Calmly but with absolute tenacity refuse all “invitations” to join a federation.
If you are already federated, start the process of withdrawing formally as soon as possible. (They won’t let you. This is why you need a canon lawyer.)
Transfer ownership of real assets to a legally separate lay-run non-profit entity that has no legal connection whatsoever to any institution of the Church.
Do not accept any financial or material support from the local diocese.
Be prepared to pull up stakes and move.
At the ultimate point, get ready to have to decide between continuing to be an officially, canonically recognised house of Catholic religious and living the authentic charism of your order. Get ready to be forced to decide between 1. disbanding/dissolving, 2. withdrawing from formal, canonical association with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church (“going independent”) 3. applying to the Society of St. Pius X for shelter.
This is a time requiring great courage and determination. There is not the slightest doubt that the aim of the current regime in Rome is to see the total extinction of all traditional forms of religious life in the Church. And they are not going to stop until there is no trace of it left anywhere – they are implacable ideologues who hate the Faith and especially seem to hate contemplative religious life. They will not leave anyone a corner to hide in anywhere. If you are a house of religious, these realities, however difficult, are the most important you will have to face.
[1] It is not to be forgotten that the Congregation for Religious has continued to demand that the founder of the Franciscans of the Immaculate, Fr. Stefano Manelli, hand over an estimated 30 million Euros in real assets, despite Italian courts having already ruled they have no right to it, since it is legally the property of a separate lay association.
[2] Appointed not by Francis but by Benedict, it should be remembered.
[3] If you’ve ever wondered how the bishops got their obsession with “unity” as the highest good, it can be an eye-opening experience to google “Focolare, beliefs.”
[5] I’ve written extensive analyses of these two documents for the Remnant. Here and here.
[6] Something that has finally been banned outright in the recent documents. Significant in Italy especially where nearly all new vocations are from India, Asia and the Philippines.
After two dream-like years living in Norcia, the cradle of Western Monasticism, Hilary moved unexpectedly with her three cats to the area near Perugia, where she gardens a great deal and tries not to worry too much.anglocath.blogspot.com/
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on THE CAMPAIGN OF THE MEN PRESENTLY IN THE POSITION OF ABSOLUTE POWER IN THE Roman Catholic Church TO “RESET” THE CHURCH INTO SOMETHING THAT WILL BE UNRECOGNIZABLE BY ANY CATHOLIC BORN BEFORE Vatican II IS SUCCEEDING
I find myself in the position that I must use an alias for fear of reprisal. Those days may be quickly coming to an end, as hospitals are denying requests for vaccine exemptions with impunity. I will likely soon be out the door, with nothing to lose. Even if I survive this round, if the “pandemic” continues, it won’t be long before I am shelved like a can of spam.
Doctors need to be called out. From early in the pandemic, it was like a mass hypnosis or forgetfulness of everything we had learned in medical school. Immune system knowledge was shelved and replaced by government dictates. The thought of early outpatient treatment with “off label” drugs that could modulate the immune system was forbidden. We essentially told patients that they had to go home and wait until they were sick enough to be hospitalized, then treatment would begin. Imagine telling all diabetics that there is no metformin, Glucophage, or insulin. Would we really wait until patients are in diabetic ketoacidosis, and then treat them only at the hospital? It is medical malfeasance of a grand scale.
We physicians gave up our training and our reasonable medical thought process. The reasons are multiple. First, it was the easy way out. Second, many of us are employed and fear reprisal. Third, despite what the public thinks, we physicians are not bold leaders, we tend to be sheep, and are afraid of having an entire institution ostracize us or our colleagues to think us crazy.
As we got to the point of vaccine rollout, doctors were not using the scientific method, questioning and challenging prevailing hypotheses. They kept their heads down, closed clinics, converted to telemedicine, and pushed only the jab.
I had conversations with doctors who are supposed experts in virology and immunology denying the lasting immunity of natural infection. Conversations about natural immunity:
Lately, it has been all about getting 100% of the population jabbed. For what reason? I am not sure, and some of the more detailed and investigated theories scare me. I shudder to think. But last year’s heroes are being labeled selfish and villainous for not getting the vaccine. Hospital systems have abandoned their community’s health and ignored early successful outpatient treatment in favor of huge government subsidies for inpatient and ICU treatment. The success of these treatments was not great, but that is another article. Now we have the same hospital systems turning their backs on their own employees. Basically, health providers have a choice, get shot, or get fired. How does that help? Both vaxxed and unvaxxed can spread the virus, so it doesn’t help anyone. It only helps the hospital to get more government money by meeting quotas.
I, for one, will remember that when we faced a real crisis, the hospitals and many physicians chose money and profit over their own community’s best interest. Perhaps it is time for groups of physicians to get back to running their own healthcare clinics and hospitals. We used to have a code of ethics. We used to put patients first. Not anymore.
As for physicians, those who are blindly following the government edicts are culpable in a moral atrocity. Bullying and deriding patients who chose to refrain from this still experimental therapy is an abomination. (You will say it isn’t experimental anymore, to which I would say that just because the government broke its own rules regarding approval, doesn’t make it legal or right). Patients have sincere beliefs for making their choice. Respect their thoughts. Do you yell as much at smokers, drinkers, fornicators, drug abusers, etc? No, I think not. I think you chose to fit in because it gives you a sense of righteousness.
And going so far as to encourage vaccination in children and pregnant women is crazy. There is blood on the hands of any physician who does this. With children, there is no benefit to the vaccine, only harm. They would serve themselves and society better with natural immunity. The vaccine hasn’t been studied on women and their babies. It is pregnancy category X (unknown) but being pushed wholesale on these poor women without proper studies. Shame on you, doctors who are doing this. I certainly have lots to answer for when I meet my maker, but this is on another level.
I beg physicians to get back to basics, remember all the epidemiology and immunology that bored us to tears in school. Investigate the real literature and take a stand. Society needs us to do this. Even if you have been vaccinated, help those who are fighting for their lives. Stand up against this forced vaccine tyranny. Support those who have legitimate reasons for declining the jab. If you don’t stand up now, who will stand up for you when you are faced with your choice of yet another booster or your job.
Did comedian Dave Chappelle crack the LGBT edifice?
Citing fundamental facts of biology is one of the greatest offenses that can be committed against LGBT ideology, but perhaps the most dangerous statement made by Chappelle was left almost completely unreported.
Dave Chappelle with Jon Stewart performing at Royal Albert Hall in 2018. (Image: Raph_PH/Wikipedia)
A recent Netflix special starring the comedian Dave Chappelle has sent the biggest names in the American corporate media into a fit of histrionic indignation. The evident reason for this frenzied backlash, which has taken on the tone of panic, is that the reign of “woke” orthodoxy may be under threat. With nothing more than a series of rather tame (if tawdry) jokes and undeniable factual observations, a black comedian has opened up a crack in the edifice of what has appeared until now to be an unstoppable movement: the “intersectional” LGBT juggernaut, or, as Chappelle flippantly calls it, “the alphabet people.”
Crude but true
To merit this outburst Chappelle merely had to cite facts of biology, while simultaneously defending J.K. Rowling, a very liberal and “gay-friendly” author who, nonetheless, has been ostracized by woke elites for having the temerity to denounce the intrusion into women’s bathrooms and changing rooms of men who “identify” as women.
In his comedy special, dubbed, “The Closer,” Chappelle notes with amazement that a figure as famous and influential as Rowling has been “canceled” by the woke mob, merely for noting that gender is an objective reality, rather than a social construct.
“They canceled J.K. Rowling — my God,” said Chappelle. “Effectually she said gender was a fact. The trans community got mad as s**t, they started calling her a TERF,” he added, explaining that “TERF” stands for “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist,” a term of opprobrium invented by transgender activists.
“I’m team TERF,” said Chappelle. “I agree. I agree, man. Gender is a fact . . .Every human being in this room, every human being on Earth, had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on Earth. That is a fact.” The comedian also made an earthy and ironic comment on the unreality of “transgender” sexual organs.
Citing fundamental facts of biology is one of the greatest offenses that can be committed against LGBT ideology, but perhaps the most dangerous statement made by Chappelle was left almost completely unreported in the mainstream media, and that was his comparison of men dressed as women to white people who wear blackface in insulting parodies of black people.
Women “look at transgender women the way we blacks look at blackface,” Chappelle told his audience. “They go ‘oh, this (expletive) is doing an impression of me!’”
Media hysteria
Mainstream media sources, including the New York Times, Esquire, Vanity Fair, the New York Daily News, Entertainment Tonight, and a host of other outlets, immediately launched a sustained campaign of unflattering headlines whose clear purpose was to intimidate Netflix into canceling Chappelle’s comedy special. The impression sought was that Chappelle and Netflix are under siege by an outraged public, and that they are in danger of being tar-brushed with the dread, career-killing epithet of “transphobic.” The media solemnly informed the public that Chappelle was using “hateful language” and that Netflix was suffering a “PR crisis,” facing an “internal uproar,” was caught up in an “ever-widening firestorm.”
In reality, the “firestorm” cited by the mainstream media was little more than a dramatic invention of the media, which has been frantically dishing out quotes from LGBT press releases and Twitter accounts and citing the case of a handful of “transgender” individuals within Netflix who had expressed outrage at the special. The rest of the material, per custom, was bland “woke” rhetoric framed as news commentary. Similar outbursts had worked to silence dissenters and damage their careers a thousand times in the past, and it appears that the media were counting on it to work again.
However, after two weeks of this barrage, Netflix’s executives appear to be unimpressed, and even contemptuously dismissive of a campaign that would have driven a corporate entity to its knees only a year ago.
Although Netflix has allowed employees to express their opposition to the Chappelle special, it has strongly rejected their arguments, particularly those that claim that “violence” will be done to “transgender people” as a result. To add insult to injury to LGBT wokeism, the company has suspended three activist employees who interrupted a meeting of Netflix directors to make a protest against the special, and fired another for leaking private information about it to the press. A threatened “walkout” of “transgenders” and their “allies” at the company scheduled for October 20 has also elicited little concern from Netflix.
Chappelle himself has mockingly dismissed the “firestorm,” telling an audience at a recent, well-attended event at the Hollywood Bowl, “If this is what being canceled is like, I love it,” and unleashing a string of expletives against Twitter, NBC News, ABC News, and “all these stupid (expletive) networks.”
“I’m not talking to them,” said Chappelle, “I’m talking to you. This is real life.”
“Intersectional” ideology
The media frenzy has taken on a particular sense of urgency in this case for two obvious reasons. First, Dave Chappelle’s attacks on LGBT ideology have the potential to undermine the most important seam in the metal of the movement, and that is the “intersectional” joining of black civil rights and gender ideology.
This unnatural union has always been the weakest point in “intersectionality,” which is an attempt to fuse together various and disparate ideological causes within the broad spectrum of neo-Marxist identity politics. It may be understood more simply as an attempt by LGBT ideologues to co-opt racial minorities and their political movements. Comparing black people and other racial minorities whose skin color is a biologically-determined fact, with people who deny their own biology and insist that the rest of the world do so as well, is obviously insulting and demeaning to the former but politically beneficial to the latter. Chappelle appears to be alluding to this with his devastating “blackface” comparison, and his popularity and minority status simultaneously provide him with a degree of protection from intersectional LGBT activists who claim to be “allies” of black civil rights.
Without the false analogy between racial minorities and “sexual minorities,” LGBT would quickly lose the appearance of occupying a moral high ground. However, the movement has even more to lose if its corporate sponsors cut and run, and this is the second reason Chappelle’s Netflix special is so dangerous. Netflix is a massively-influential part of the broad corporate media coalition that has collectively imposed the “woke” orthodoxy of LGBT on the public for the last eight years, with show after show dramatizing the cause. If Netflix bails out, other corporate LGBT “allies” might follow and the movement might lose its grip on power. This fear is being openly expressed by the corporate media entities such as CNN.
“Is this an example of Netflix resisting so-called cancel culture?” asked CNN’s Brian Stelter to Puck founder Matthew Belloni in a recent interview. “Absolutely,” Belloni answered, noting that “a big, Hollywood, institutional entity” is “standing by Dave Chappelle, even amid outrage of its own employees.”
“There’s going to be a walk-out of employees at Netflix who are so upset by the hateful language in its special, yet Neflix has decided that it is in the best interest of its business model to have a free and open platform for this kind of comedy special,” added Belloni.
USA Today is worrying out loud that “Netflix’s support of Dave Chappelle is setting a dangerous precedent,” according to one recent headline. “Netflix purports to be a beacon for inclusion in front of and behind the camera. But growing controversy over Dave Chappelle’s latest standup special, ‘The Closer,’ proves it has much further to go,” stated the article, written by two USA Today reporters.
What adds to the force of Chappelle’s jokes is the simple fact that the absurdity of LGBT ideology remains deeply vulnerable to mockery. The earnest ridiculousness of homosexualism and transgenderism is ultimately powerless in the face of a comedic critique, even a rather unimaginative one by a vulgarian like Chappelle. That’s another reason to seek to shut the comedian up and punish his sponsors once and for all – if gender ideology can’t withstand even the recitation of biological facts, much less can it win in the venue of stand-up comedy.
Europeans also jumping ship
Added to the Chappelle bruhaha is the beginning of an international backlash, led by the French, against American wokery, a phenomenon now being noted by the American media. Although LGBT ideology has swept the globe largely because of a broad support for it by a coalition of Anglophone and continental European countries, the ever-extending extremes of wokeism are beginning to be seen as a purely American phenomenon, one that is fundamentally hostile to France’s still-strong tradition of secular liberalism.
“The logic of intersectionality fractures everything,” French President Emmanuel Macron told Ellemagazine in June, adding, “I don’t agree with a fight that reduces everyone to their identity or their particularity.” His sentiments are increasingly being expressed in French media and in academia.
Last week, Macron’s education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer announced the creation of a new institute, the “Laboratory of the Republic,” to combat the influence of wokeism and other ideas seen as anti-French. “The Republic is completely contrary to wokeism,” Blanquer told Le Monde. “In the United States, this ideology provoked a reaction and led to the rise of Donald Trump . . . France and its youth have to escape that.”
“We need a diverse society where we respect each other and don’t define ourselves by how victimized we are or our supposed identity but simply as a citizen. That’s the beauty of the French Republican project,” said Blanquer.
Macron’s delegate minister for gender equality and diversity, Elisabeth Moreno, who is black, has also expressed her concern that “woke culture” is “something very dangerous, and we shouldn’t bring it to France.”
In these sentiments, France is famously joined by two dissenters within the European Union: Hungary and Poland, both of which have been rather steadfast in their resistance to anti-family ideologies. There are also signs that Britain is becoming fed up with American wokery as well: the Economist, a highly-respected publication that has long sided with LGBT causes, has broken with the American media and is openly defending Chappelle for his “gender realism.”
“Besides torching the pieties of the identitarian left, [Chappelle] has also shown how marginal it is,” write the editors. “His gender-realist views are far more in step with public opinion than his critics. And if the unpopularity of their views is rarely off-putting to the Twitterati, good luck to them taking on an African-American superstar.”
About Matthew Cullinan Hoffman 23 ArticlesMatthew Cullinan Hoffman is a Catholic essayist and journalist, and the author and translator of The Book of Gomorrah and St. Peter Damian’s Struggle Against Ecclesiastical Corruption (2015). His award-winning articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, London Sunday Times, Catholic World Report, LifeSite News, Crisis, the National Catholic Register, and many other publications. He holds an M.A. in Philosophy from Holy Apostles College and Seminary, with a focus on Thomism.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on WAS THAT RECENT EARTHEN TREMOR CAUSED BY COMEDIAN DAVE CHAPELLE???
The bottom line is that whether to get a Covid-19 vaccine is, in the nature of the case, a prudential matter. But fanatics on both sides want to turn it into something more than that.
In a recent post on my personal blog, I argued that a Catholic can in good conscience take one of the Covid-19 vaccines, but also that such vaccination should not be mandatory. In a follow-up post, I expanded on the first point. Let’s now expand on the second.
Thomistic natural law theory and Catholic moral theology are not libertarian, but neither are they statist. They acknowledge that we can have enforceable obligations to which we do not consent, but also insist that there are limits to what government can require of us, and qualifications even where it can require something of us. In the case of vaccine mandates (whether we are talking about Covid-19 vaccines, polio vaccines, or whatever), they neither imply a blanket condemnation of such mandates nor a blanket approval of them. There is nuance here that too many hotheads on both sides of the Catholic debate on this issue ignore.
In order to understand the ethics of vaccine mandates, it is useful to draw a comparison with the ethics of military conscription. Both mandatory vaccination and military conscription involve a grave interference with individual liberty. Both are nevertheless in principle allowable. But the grave interference with liberty also entails serious qualifications.
Military conscription
What does the Church teach about military conscription? On the one hand, there is a recognition of its legitimacy in principle, given the obligations we have as social animals who have a duty to defend our country. Pope Pius XII taught:
If, therefore, a body representative of the people and a government – both having been chosen by free elections – in a moment of extreme danger decides, by legitimate instruments of internal and external policy, on defensive precautions, and carries out the plans which they consider necessary, it does not act immorally. Therefore a Catholic citizen cannot invoke his own conscience in order to refuse to serve and fulfill those duties the law imposes. (Christmas message of December 23, 1956)
Note that the principle here is that it can be legitimate in this case for the state to require something of the citizen even though it involves putting him at grave risk, and despite the fact that he might think his conscience justifies refusal.
But does that entail that every citizen is obligated unquestioningly to take up arms in just any old war that a government claims is justified, and ought to be forced to do so? Absolutely not. For there are two further considerations which need to be taken account of.
First, the obligation to take up arms applies only in the case of a just war, and natural law theory and Catholic moral theology set out several criteria for a war’s being just: the war must be authorized by a legitimate authority; the cause must be just (for example, the aggression being responded to must be grave enough to be worth going to war over); the motivation must be just (for example, the publicly stated justification, even if reasonable considered by itself, must not be a cover for some hidden sinister motivation); the means of fighting must be just (for example, they must not bring about harms that are even worse than those that we hope to remedy through war); and there must be a reasonable hope of success.
Now, a private citizen does not have all the information required in order thoroughly to evaluate any particular war in light of all of these criteria. In a reasonably just society, he therefore has to give some benefit of the doubt to the governing authorities. All the same, he also does have a duty to make at least some investigation to determine whether a war really is just before going along with it. And naturally, the more corrupt a given government is, the stronger are going to be the reasons for doubting the justice of a war that it undertakes. There is, as Pius XII’s teaching makes clear, a presumption in favor of complying with the government’s requirements, but that presumption can be overridden.
That brings us to the second, related point, which is that although appeals to conscience do not by themselves suffice to excuse a citizen from military service, they nevertheless ought to be taken very seriously by the state. As Vatican II teaches:
It seems right that laws make humane provisions for the case of those who for reasons of conscience refuse to bear arms, provided however, that they agree to serve the human community in some other way. (Gaudium et Spes 79)
This basic principle here is this. Though a person’s conscience can certainly be in error, at the same time one ought not to act in a way that is positively contrary to one’s conscience. For one would in that case be doing something that one sincerely (even if wrongly) thought to be immoral, which would itself be immoral. Suppose I sincerely thought that it would be gravely immoral to eat meat. In fact it isn’t immoral, and so if I do eat meat, the eating of it is not itself wrong. But violating my (mistaken) conscience would be wrong. So, for that reason, I shouldn’t eat meat until I come to see the error of my opinion on this matter.
Of course, people abuse this principle all the time. Catholics who want to get abortions like to pretend that they can justify themselves by appealing to conscience – as if the trip to the Planned Parenthood clinic was analogous to Thomas More’s refusing to swear allegiance to the king as supreme authority over the Church. This is, of course, absurd, and not only because the arguments for the legitimacy of abortion are worthless. To swear to recognize the king as supreme authority over the Church is to do something that is intrinsically evil. Merely to refrain from getting an abortion is not to do something intrinsically evil, because it is not to do anything at all. It is not a kind of action, but rather, again, a refraining from action. Hence no one who is prevented from getting an abortion is being made to act against conscience in the relevant sense.
But suppose someone is forced to take up arms in a war he sincerely believes (rightly or wrongly) to be immoral. Then he would in that case be made to act against his conscience, and in that sense be made to do something immoral (even if the war is not in fact wrong). It is out of sensitivity to this problem that the Church allows for conscientious objection.
Naturally, this raises problems of its own. What if a very large number of people decided to opt out of fighting in a war that really was just and necessary? That’s a good question, but one we can put to one side for present purposes. Suffice it to say that even if there is a presumption in favor of the state’s having the authority to coerce citizens to take up arms in a just war, the state should nevertheless allow for exemptions, as far as it reasonably can, for citizens who demonstrate sincere and deep-seated moral reservations about the war, especially if they agree to some reasonable alternative public service.
Application to vaccine mandates
The application of these principles to the case of vaccine mandates is pretty clear. A society might be threatened by a serious disease, just as it might be threatened by an armed aggressor. We can have duties to help do what is necessary to repel the threat in the former case just as in the latter, even if this entails some risk to ourselves. Hence, just as it is in principle legitimate for the state to require military conscription (despite the fact that this entails putting people’s lives at risk in defense of the country), so too can it be legitimate in principle for the state to require vaccination (even if this too involves some risk, insofar as vaccines – many vaccines, not just Covid-19 vaccines – can have occasional bad side effects for some people). Hence, it will not do merely to appeal to a concern for individual liberty as an objection to vaccine mandates, as if that by itself settled the issue.
However, that is by no means the end of the story. For there are, with vaccines as with war, two further considerations. First, with vaccines as with war, the state has no right to impose on the citizens just any old obligation that it wants to. A vaccine mandate, like a war, can be just or unjust. As with a war, the state must determine that there is no realistic alternative way to deal with the threat it is trying to counter. It must have the right motivation, rather than using the health considerations as a cover for some more sinister motivation. There must be a reasonable chance that the mandate will successfully deal with the threat to public health. There must be good grounds for thinking that the mandate won’t cause more harm than good. And so on. And as with war, if a citizen has well-founded reasons for thinking that the conditions on a just vaccination mandate are not met, he thereby has grounds for resisting it.
That brings us to the other point, which is that as with war, so too with vaccination mandates (and for the same reasons), the state ought to be generous with those whose consciences lead them to have serious reservations about vaccination, even if their consciences happen to be mistaken. The state should as far as possible allow those having these reservations to contribute to dealing with the threat to public health in some other way (just as, as Vatican II teaches, those who refuse to take up arms should “agree to serve the human community in some other way”). This is why, in its affirmation that the Covid-19 vaccines can be taken in good conscience, the Vatican also stated:
At the same time, practical reason makes evident that vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary. In any case, from the ethical point of view, the morality of vaccination depends not only on the duty to protect one’s own health, but also on the duty to pursue the common good. In the absence of other means to stop or even prevent the epidemic, the common good may recommend vaccination, especially to protect the weakest and most exposed. Those who, however, for reasons of conscience, refuse vaccines produced with cell lines from aborted fetuses, must do their utmost to avoid, by other prophylactic means and appropriate behavior, becoming vehicles for the transmission of the infectious agent. In particular, they must avoid any risk to the health of those who cannot be vaccinated for medical or other reasons, and who are the most vulnerable. [emphasis added]
End quote. The applicability of the principles I’ve been setting out to the specific case of Covid-19 vaccines is, I think, also obvious. As I said in my initial post, while I think some case could be made for a mandate, I don’t think it is a compelling case. I don’t think state or federal governments have met the burden of proof. I also said that there are reasonable grounds for preferring not to take the vaccines, and that it is also perfectly understandable that many citizens do not trust the judgment of public authorities. Many such authorities today are committed to manifestly lunatic beliefs on other topics – that the police should be defunded, that the distinction between men and women is merely a social construct, and so on. Many governments have earned the public’s distrust, and a wise statesman, knowing this, would strongly urge against heavy-handed actions that are guaranteed only to increase this distrust.
For such reasons, and also because of the general principle that the state ought as far as possible to avoid forcing people to act against their consciences, there should be no Covid-19 vaccine mandates, and where they do exist there should be generous exemptions for those who object to them in conscience.
In all things charity
Some readers of my two earlier posts on this subject have reacted in a predictably unhinged way. One blogger insists that “one’s position on the vaxx is a litmus test,” and avers that I have now revealed “on which side [my] loyalties lie” and joined “the enemy” (!) Another declares that I have “switched sides from that of God to anti-God” (!!) They thereby illustrate my point that too many right-wingers have been led by the very real crisis we are facing to fly off the rails and land in the same paranoid fantasyland mentality that has overtaken the Left. Or perhaps they simply demonstrate that they don’t know how to read. For in my initial post, I explicitly criticized the mandates, explicitly acknowledged that there are reasonable concerns about the vaccines, explicitly said that public authorities have damaged their own credibility, and explicitly affirmed that those who put themselves at risk in resisting the mandates deserve our respect.
But one can say all that and, with perfect consistency, also hold that the Covid-19 vaccines are not connected with abortion in a way that would make it wrong to use them, and that those Catholics who decide to take the vaccine do not sin in doing so. And that was the point I was making in those earlier posts. Contrary to what some Catholic churchmen and writers have been saying over the last few months, opposition to abortion and fidelity to the Catholic faith do not oblige Catholics to “die on the hill” of Covid-19 vaccination. These churchmen and writers have no business usurping the Church’s teaching authority and claiming otherwise. But that by no means entails that there aren’t other reasons to object to vaccination mandates.
The bottom line is that whether to get a Covid-19 vaccine is, in the nature of the case, a prudential matter. But fanatics on both sides want to turn it into something more than that. One side says that as a Catholic, you must not get the vaccine – never mind what the Church says, what three popes have said, and what decades of orthodox Catholic moral theology has said. The other side says that you must get the vaccine, even if this violates your conscience. Both sides gravely offend against justice and charity. Both sides muddy the waters and stir up passions when what the Church and the world need more than ever are clarity and sobriety.
DONATEAt the same time as the Department of Justice (DOJ) case, the Supreme Court will consider a similar lawsuit from abortionists (Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson). This is the same case justices considered previously in early September when the high court denied abortionists’ plea to block the Texas Heartbeat Act before taking effect.
ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP 
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