Whether it is an ailing leader of the free world, such as President Donald Trump, or a suffering infant, respect for life does not embrace exceptions. Malevolence is never a morally sane option!

Posted on October 8, 2020 by abyssum
Trump, Babies, and Malevolence

by Judie Brown


Read online and share: https://all.org/trump-babies-and-malevolence/by Judie Brown


In the wake of the president’s coronavirus diagnosis and the systemic hatred seeping from social media these days, we found it rather ironic that the death peddlers are taking aim at the president in a different way.

Trump recently signed an executive order regarding protection for babies born alive after abortion, as well as other at-risk newborns. The order states: “Every infant born alive, no matter the circumstances of his or her birth, has the same dignity and the same rights as every other individual and is entitled to the same protections under Federal law. . . . Despite these laws, some hospitals refuse the required medical screening examination and stabilizing treatment or otherwise do not provide potentially lifesaving medical treatment to extremely premature or disabled infants, even when parents plead for such treatment.”

In addition, it reiterates: “It is the policy of the United States to recognize the human dignity and inherent worth of every newborn or other infant child, regardless of prematurity or disability, and to ensure for each child due protection under the law.”

The Department of Health and Human Services received the executive order and affirmed it. So far, so good.But just as the media jumped on the president’s diagnosis, predicting gloom and doom, so too the proponents of denial of care for babies born with challenges—some of whom could live for many years—decried the executive order for all the wrong reasons.

Some argued it was cruel, while others such as Jacqueline Ayers, a Planned Parenthood Action Fund vice president, said it was unnecessary.But the worst statements by far came from those involved in palliative care for distressed newborns. These people expressed concern over whether or not palliative care would be denied for these babies who, in their opinion, are doomed anyway.

We are told: “Means of promoting thoughtful care for life-limiting conditions diagnosed either prenatally or in the minutes, hours, days, or weeks after birth have allowed for better pain assessment and management, family-centered care, and much needed time for bereavement.”


But some physicians, like neonatal specialist Paul Byrne, tell us thateven when the unborn baby is accurately diagnosed as having a life limiting or lethal disease, God can heal. Yes the healing that Jesus did, and those who heal in the name of Jesus, do so based on faith in the supernatural power of the Creator. God can always heal. We have faith in the healing power of God. We have hope that God will heal; we love the baby as much and as far as we can in the way that God loves each of us. We must not do harm to the baby, shorten the baby’s life or hasten the baby’s death.

Contrasting these two views—affirming life versus expecting death—exposes a lot more about our culture than simply how to lovingly care for a distressed newborn. Such divergent approaches reflect the reality of two distinct world views: respect versus disdain.

n an e-mail to me, attorney Sara Buscher said it best:Remember when Gov. Ralph Northam said a baby born alive after an abortion would be kept comfortable and not resuscitated. Then, the doctor would discuss withholding life sustaining treatment (i.e., food and liquids) from the baby with its parents.

Recall the outrage? Everyone recognized this was infanticide. Well, Gov. Ralph Northam is a pediatrician who spent 19 years as a children’s’ hospice medical director. No wonder he did not realize how inflammatory his remarks were. If it is wrong for a baby, it is wrong for a child, a disabled adult, and an older adult.Pediatric palliative care aligns with infanticide and discriminatory abortions by supporting parental decisions to “let go” of their disabled newborns.

So once again society is left with two choices.Shall we choose listening to those who believe that imposed death is best, or shall we believe those who realize and respect the vulnerable life of someone who may well die but only in God’s time?Whether it is an ailing leader of the free world or a suffering infant, respect for life does not embrace exceptions. Malevolence is never a morally
sane option



Judie Brown
President
American Life League
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

TAKE A LOOK AT OUR SOCIALIST FUTURE IF THE DEMOCRATS WIN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN NOVEMBER

Posted on October 8, 2020 by abyssum
Our Socialist Future?

By: Victor Davis Hanson

October 6, 2020


Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from a fuller essay, “Our Socialist Future?” by Victor Davis Hanson published by the Hoover Institution as part of a new initiative, Socialism and Free-Market Capitalism: The Human Prosperity Project.


The numbers at the ends of paragraphs refer to footnotes.


After the death of George Floyd last spring while in police custody, protesters demanded the prosecution of those responsible. Quickly, however, the demonstrations devolved into a veritable cultural revolution spearheaded by two groups: Antifa and Black Lives Matter, both with strong socialist origins and agendas. Within weeks, there were widespread protests centered on various demands, including the abolition of urban police forces, multitrillion-dollar reparations, relaxed grading for African-American students, and an end to incarceration for most crimes.

A common denominator in these demands was a socialist theme: those who had more should not have had more, and were obligated to give much of it back to those from whom it was taken.

 1
In the current affluent age of globalization, such popular socialism would seem to have little future, given its long, dismal past and history of failure in governance. Early Greek Pythagorean cult communities, for instance, were based on shared property and resources, but they never became the political basis for city-states. Such philosophical and religious communes were instead often persecuted and driven out of their Italian and Greek enclaves.

The Greek colonizing era of the eighth to the fifth centuries BC sought to divide up new lands along a grid system, allotting equal parcels to colonist farmers. But political philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato assumed that given differences in innate talent, luck, and happenstance, such farms could never stay equal for long. Thus they conceded that some unpleasant means of coercion would be necessary if such egalitarian projects were to last.


Even ancient socialist regimens such as the collective barracks, dining halls, and shunning of coinage at Sparta, or the efforts to limit property aggrandizement and the pushing of massive redistributive entitlements at Athens, never quite did away with private property or, in the classical age, consensual government. And few of the redistributive premises of either Sparta or Athens survived into the Hellenistic and Roman age—other than the cynical “bread and circuses” distributions to the urban poor of free food and entertainment among the major cities of the Roman empire.

 2
The French Revolution, and especially the stirrings of industrial mass production, revived formally the idea of socialism, now a definable political concept, most prominently articulated by the French aristocrat and revolutionary Henri de Saint-Simon. Yet Jacobin socialism in France earned a warranted violent reaction, and Napoleon squared the French revolutionary circle by claiming his self-serving and bloody autocracy was the only way to preserve the ideals of the revolution.


As we saw in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war (1917–23) and in China during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), today’s revolutionary is tomorrow’s sellout. Socialism seems to be a starting point that is quickly overtaken by its cousins communism, anarchy, and nihilism.


Not So Benign

Europe today claims it is a democratic socialist continent, in the sense that votes, not dictators, have imposed redistributive policies on themselves. Indeed, if defined by its high taxes, generous entitlements, and loud egalitarian rhetoric, the European Union is socialist. At the same time the EU must remain nondemocratic, given that any nation that dares to express a desire to leave its utopia will find such an exit difficult.


But more important, aside from proclamations of brotherhood, European nations in extremis have acted in expectedly self-interested fashion. Germany certainly did not wish to share much of its wealth after the 2008 financial meltdown with poorer Mediterranean nations. Eastern Europe did not assume open borders were wise. Indeed, these nations considered suicidal the idea of welcoming impoverished illegal aliens from the Middle East and North Africa and bestowing upon them de facto legal residence and citizenship.


The United Kingdom grew fearful of the idea that the socialism of Brussels would soon trump the hallowed laws of England. Germany does not appear to its ideologically kindred satellites in the European Union to be very socialist but, rather, self-centered in recalibrating the EU to allow Germany pan-European power to implement its continental ambitions in a way that proved impossible after 1870, 1914, and 1939. During the coronavirus pandemic, it has been every European nation for itself rather than a shared European brotherhood . 

3
Such are the supposed benign manifestations of radical socialism. But most socialist regimes are not so benign, at least if we review the litany of the twentieth-century dead. Josef Stalin liquidated twenty million people to create the collective basis for the Soviet Union. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward cost China forty-five million dead. Pol Pot’s back-to-the-land experiment murdered well over one million in Cambodia. Various disasters in Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe turned once-prosperous states into murderous, impoverished socialist dictatorships. 

4
It Didn’t Happen Here—Yet
Other than a few failed, small-scale flirtations with socialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, America never seriously embraced collectivism, despite an array of New Deal resuscitative policies (which mostly prolonged the Great Depression) aimed at diluting more radical competing socialist agendas, popular during the Industrial Revolution and Depression and mostly advanced by Samuel Gompers, Huey Long, and Eugene Debs. 

5
Antiwar socialists in the 1960s and “green” socialists in the twenty-first century have all failed to assume power. So, given long-held and traditional American suspicions of an all-powerful, redistributive state, what then explains the flirtation with socialism by the current generation of American youth?


Apparently, the implied preferred model for millions of Americans has become the all-encompassing French Revolution, which sought to implement egalitarianism of result and fraternity at any cost, rather than the American Revolution’s emphases on individual freedom, personal liberty, and protections of private property. For example, in 2016 socialist Bernie Sanders almost won the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination—a milestone that no prior socialist presidential candidate had come close to reaching. And Sanders, for a while, led the primary candidates again in 2020. Senator Sanders often talked of “revolution,” and his supporters sometimes fancied themselves French-style Jacobins.


In 2011, the journal Jacobin had introduced itself with the stated common values and sentiments of its contributors—“proponents of modernity and the unfulfilled project of the Enlightenment” and “asserters of the libertarian quality of the Socialist ideal.” Its motto, “Reason in Revolt,” deliberately sought to echo the supposedly rational role of Maximilien Robespierre, the catalyst for the so-called Reign of Terror during the cycles of French revolutionary violence, and the influence of his Jacobins on movements such as the Haitian revolution of 1791–1804, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture.

6
Almost all the candidates of the Democratic Party during the 2020 primaries at times embraced an array of issues that could only be called socialist. The agendas variously included a 70 to 80 percent income tax rate, a wealth tax on previously taxed capital, reparation payments to African-Americans, open borders, Medicare for all, free health care for illegal aliens, and radical changes in the US legal system, such as abolishing the Electoral College, packing the Supreme Court, allowing sixteen-year-olds and ex-felons to vote, and transitioning to mail balloting in place of Election Day polling booths.

The common denominator of all of these diverse polices was either government-mandated radical redistribution or the weakening of constitutional or long-held American customs and traditions. Candidates felt there were new socialist constituencies for such issues.


Indeed, a 2019 Gallup Poll suggested that about half of American youths now view socialism as positively as capitalism. And in another poll, seven of ten millennials surveyed said they would like to vote for a socialist. Perhaps given current economic realities, poor education, and the propaganda of the administrative state, it is not hard to see why so many young Americans flirt with socialism. 

7
One force multiplier of socialist unrest has been an absence of upward mobility, coupled with a superficial sense of being educated. Today’s college graduate may feel that while his education has led to few marketable skills, it has at least taught him the innate inequalities of American capitalism which, in his eyes, explain better than his poor choices why he is degreed but otherwise poor and in debt. College-educated Americans collectively owe an estimated $1.5 trillion in unpaid student loans, and many despair of ever repaying the huge sums spent to collect noncompetitive degrees.


Globalization is another force multiplier of socialism’s attractions. Over the past thirty years a vast market has created wealth never envisioned in the history of civilization—at least for many in professions like finance, stocks, high-tech, media, law, and insurance.

At the same time, “free” but unfair trade, especially with China, hollowed out assembly and manufacturing plants in the United States, impoverishing many in the once-solid middle class. As factory and assembly jobs dried up, the unemployed saw an ostentatious elite created by the outsourcing and offshoring that had ended their own prosperity.


Many young people claim to be socialists but are instead simply angry that they were unable to afford a home, a new car, or other nice things, or start a family in their “woke” urban neighborhoods during a decade of muted economic growth (2008–17) and high unemployment. In college, they were not warned about the dangers of statism and collectivism, nor given the skills to look at the world empirically. The combination of non-marketable degrees and skills with burdensome debt helped alter an entire generation’s customs, habits, and thinking.


The New American Socialist

Popular culture and contemporary politics have more or less institutionalized a model of citizenship quite unlike previous visions that were based on the autonomous family. The new American archetype apparently is a single, urban youth, presumably well-educated and glib but dependent on government subsidies and suffering from arrested development. His environment stresses the attractions of government dependency and the alleged lack of upward mobility through the private sector. This view is expansively depicted as the liberation of an everywoman or everyman through cradle-to-grave government reliance—a person thus in little need of marriage, religion, or community and family support.


The modern American citizen is proudly and perennially a ward of the state. She lives in a society that is strangely medieval: a serf, she looks to the lord of the manor in Washington to sustain her. 


Americans usually become more traditional, self-reliant, and suspicious of big government as they age. The reasons for such conservatism have included early marriage, child raising, buying a home, and residence outside a big city. Yet today’s youth are generally marrying later and most have few if any children. And these debt-burdened twenty- and thirty-somethings are not buying homes as quickly or easily as in the past.


All of these national and international trends are the ingredients for a new socialist paradigm that emphasizes the self, blames others for a sense of personal failure, wants instant social justice—and expects the government to borrow or seize the money from others to grant it.


Socialist revolutions do not sprout organically in so-called good times. Instead they are the children of wars, depressions, and natural and manmade upheavals. They are facilitated by “never let a crisis go to waste” opportunism—turmoil during which socialist activists emerge as prophets to condemn systems of free enterprise and constitutional government. Leaders like Fidel Castro, Vladimir Lenin, or Leon Trotsky rarely rise from among the poor. They often have just enough education to connect their own unhappiness with cosmic forces but not enough to explain their own unhappiness in ways that transcend their own self-obsessions.


In the coronavirus crisis and the protests and riots over the death of George Floyd, we witnessed an ideal incubator of socialist ideas which in calmer times would have had little resonance. Elected officials such as California Governor Gavin Newsom saw that the chaos and crisis of the epidemic opened the door for left-wing agendas unimaginable just months earlier. Newsom was particularly candid: “There is opportunity for reimagining a progressive era as it pertains to capitalism. So yes, absolutely we see this [the government response to the virus] as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern.”


8
Midsummer saw the protests take on an expected Jacobin flavor of increasing radicalization. Progressive mayors who had condoned violence often found themselves the targets of protesters who were furious that their elected officials were proving mere radicals rather than revolutionaries.

It was not enough to express understandable outrage. Instead, protesters and rioters were soon calling for the banning of particular movies, TV shows, and books, and a complete recalibration of American life. They characterized their movement as “holistic” and “systemic.” The key catalyst for re-emerging socialism was the substitution of race for class struggle. Income and capital are fluid, but the new socialism sees race as the sole determinant of class, and race is fixed. Thus the struggle against “white privilege” is endless.


9
A socialist paradigm that had been considered eccentric as recently as last year has now gone mainstream. Such is the way socialism always creeps in—more with a parasitic whimper than with a confrontational bang.

1 Peter Beinart, “The Rise of the Violent Left,” The Atlantic, September 2017,
 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/the-rise-of-the-violent-left/534192; Emily Woo Yamasaki and Andrea Bauer, “Black Lives Matter: A ‘Pop-Up Movement’ or One with Lasting Impact?,” Freedom Socialist Party, February 2016, https://socialism.com/fs-article/black-lives-matter-a-pop-up-movement-or-one-with-lasting-impact; Khury Petersen-Smith, “Black Lives Matter,” International Socialist Review 96 (Spring 2015), https://isreview.org/issue/96/black-lives-matter; “Black Lives Matter and Marxism,” in Marxism and the Fight for Black Freedom: From the Civil War to Black Lives Matter (Socialist Alternative, 2018), https://www.socialistalternative.org/marxism-fight-black-freedom/black-lives-matter-marxism.

2 Doyne Dawson, Cities of the Gods: Communist Utopias in Greek Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 14–39.

3 Andreas Kluth, “Why Germany Will Never Be Europe’s Leader,” Bloomberg Opinion, April 29, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-30/coronavirus-crisis-why-germany-will-never-be-europe-s-leader; Jennifer Rankin and Daniel Boffey, “Tensions Mount between EU Members Ahead of Budget Talks,” The Guardian, February 19, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/19/tensions-mount-between-eu-members-ahead-of-budget-talks; Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi, “Will Coronavirus Kill the European Union?,” City Journal, March 27, 2020, https://www.city-journal.org/covid-19-european-union. 

4 Norman M. Naimark, Genocide: A World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocide: A World History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010); Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

5 In general, see Kate Aronoff, Peter Dreier, and Michael Kazin, eds., We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism—American Style (New York: The New Press, 2020); Michael Harrington, Socialism: Past and Future (New York: Arcade, 1989).

6 Matt Ford, “A Thermidorian Reaction,” The Atlantic (July 26, 2016), https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/sanders-trump-french-revolution/493349; David A. Bell, “Why Sanders Should Stop Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution,” Politico Magazine, February 29, 2016, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/bernie-sanders-revolution-donald-trump-2016-213684; Bhaskar Sunkara, “Introducing Jacobin,” Jacobin 1 (January 1, 2011), https://jacobinmag.com/2011/01/introducing-jacobin.

7 Lydia Saad, “Socialism As Popular as Capitalism Among Young Adults in U.S.,” Gallup, November 25, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/268766/socialism-popular-capitalism-among-young-adults.aspx; Morgan Gstalter, “7 in 10 Millennials Say They Would Vote for a Socialist: Poll,” Hill, October 28, 2019, https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/467684-70-percent-of-millennials-say-theyd-vote-for-a-socialist-poll

8 Katy Grimes, “Gov. Newsom: Coronavirus Is ‘Opportunity for Reimagining a More Progressive Era,’” California Globe, April 1, 2020, https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/gov-newsom-coronavirus-is-opportunity-for-reimagining-a-more-progressive-era; Ryan Bourne, “Coronavirus: Beware It Being Used as a Cover for Promoting Socialism and Protectionism,” Cato Institute, March 4, 2020, https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/coronavirus-beware-it-being-used-cover-promoting-socialism-protectionism.

9 Paul Heideman, “Socialism and Black Oppression,” Jacobin 29 (April 30, 2018) https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/04/socialism-marx-race-class-struggle-color-line.


Email Link   https://conta.cc/2SybNr2

Rip McIntosh

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The choice for us is not between the world’s hatred and its love. It is between the world’s hatred and its contempt. We may choose to be timid and contemptible, pretending to meet the world on its own terms. We may choose to be courageous, saying no to the world and its lies, but yes, always yes to the truth, in season and out of season, to honor our God and to serve a world that does not desire that service. What that will require, in practical terms, depends in part on the circumstances. Success or failure lies not in our hands, as courageous and wise as we may be.

Posted on October 8, 2020 by abyssum

OCTOBER 8, 2020

Persecution? Bring It On

ANTHONY ESOLEN

CRISIS MAGAZINE

As our readers must know, Amy Coney Barrett, whom President Trump has nominated for a position on the Supreme Court, was a long-time member of a charismatic and ecumenical Christian group called People of Praise. The women in the group are called handmaids, after the world-changing fiat of Mary: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word” (Lk. 1:38). At that moment, as genuine Christians believe, the Word through whom all things were made (Jn. 1:2) became flesh and dwelt among us (Jn. 1:14). It is the Incarnation, the turning point and center of human history, and that is why Christians used to consider March 25—nine months before the Nativity of Christ—rather than January 1 as the beginning of the New Year.

As for Mary, the first of handmaids, Roman Catholics such as Judge Barrett believe her to be, next to Christ, the most glorious member of the human race. Her obedience is a power. That is why the pilgrim Dante appeals to her at the end of his sacred poem, to pray that God may grant him the ultimate and beatific vision. Hers are “the eyes beloved of God and honored best,” and not even the most exalted of the angels is nearer to God than she:

Then [her eyes] turned to the eternal Light,
wherein, we trust, no creature else can send
created vision with such perfect sight. (Paradiso 33.40, 43-45)

None of this should be any more remarkable than to say, “Christians believe that Jesus is the Son of God,” or “Christians believe in the resurrection.” But because the feminist Margaret Atwood aimed at evangelical Christians a slanderous novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), about religious people in a future dystopia of male domination and no abortion, our great guardians of democracy and all things decent, journalists at such organs as The Washington Post have spoken out in tones of terror about how strange, how bizarre, how misogynistic the People of Praise must be. Why, they even believe that wives should submit themselves unto their husbands, as unto the Lord (Eph. 5:22).https://secureaddisplay.com/i/view/js/?Viewable=0&isMobile=0&AULU=31049420180502T2200289306460AB42454C400A8A16937CB3EB93D7&cb=1602167361334&ccvid=1049436219&pvid=2072695966

That directive from the Apostle to the Gentiles was not controversial at the time, nor for almost two millennia afterwards. It wasn’t controversial in Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus, Alexandria, Carthage, and Rome. It would not be controversial in Paris, London, Hamburg, Stockholm, Kiev, Madrid, and Philadelphia. It would not be controversial among any of the countless peoples to whom Christian missionaries brought the Gospel: Zulus, Incas, Guarani, Sioux, Punjabi, Hmong, Maori, and Tlingit. For them, it was like being commanded to have common sense. The new thing was the commandment to the men, that they love their wives as Christ loved the Church (Eph. 5:25). We are the outliers here. We despise the one commandment and ignore the other.

Some people, a tad nervously, have defended Judge Barrett by saying that “handmaid” does not mean what the enemies think it means. I believe that the defense is mistaken. Certainly, we are dealing with ignorance, as when journalists feel the need to explain, often incorrectly at that, who the Prodigal Son was, or what happened on Pentecost. It gives but a false comfort to consider that the people who govern us, instruct us, and weave the ropes for us to hang ourselves with are ignorant of most of the rest of the western heritage too, so that Percy Shelley is as foreign to them as Simon Peter. It is true that many people hate the foolish cartoon monster they believe the Church to be, so that when we show her to them in her glory, their souls cry out, “Thou hast ravished my heart!” (Sg. 4:9). But it is also true that the very beauty of the Church strikes others with fear and loathing, for she is also, as the same song sings, “terrible as an army with banners” (6:10).

The Lord himself has advised us: “In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (Jn. 16:33). For the world as the Lord uses the term is fundamentally opposed to the truth and to God, so we should expect no praise from it: “If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you” (15:18). This dislocation, this having no real home here, goes all the way back to our first parents, driven by their own sin from the garden where they belonged; to Enoch the pious, who “walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (Gen. 5:24), to Noah upon the waters, whose ark struck ground on Ararat (8:4), to our father Abraham, who left his father’s house in Haran and lived out his days “a stranger and a sojourner” (23:4), to Moses without a nation, neither Egypt nor Canaan, “a stranger in a strange land” (Ex. 2:22). This homelessness does not make the good Christian morose. Rather, as Chesterton says, “Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world.” Imagine the alternative. Imagine the flatlands of Russia or the noise of New York, world without end. But precisely because the Christian does not expect too much from the world, he is set free to love his home as it ought to be loved, cherishing it the more because he knows that it will not endure forever.

We do not seek the hatred of the world. It comes unbidden. We may well ask why.

The world—political action, money-making, licentiousness, sloth in its guise as busyness—must disappoint. Politics is at best a muddle, and at worst an arena of enmity, where people turn common expectation on its head, and do far worse things in public than they would ever do in private. Money slips through the fingers like water, even before the grave relieves you of it all. License enslaves, dulling both body and soul by the devil’s law of diminishing concessions: the sins grow worse as the pleasure fades. Careers are largely the expense of spirit in a waste of time. The idol is hollow. Does man abandon it, then? Not reliably. He cannot break free, but he directs his disappointment and his hatred toward those who have not bowed before the false god. They are the enemies of mankind. The sweeter their lives are, the more obvious the hope they hold out to those who suffer, the more orderly their families, the more ringing the voices of their children playing in the street, the more will they be hated. Satan knew how lovely Eden was. That was why he wanted to ruin it.

In a few weeks I will be voting against the party that is eager to crush, to pen up, or worse, to deform, every faithful Catholic school, parish, and beneficent society in the country. That is no endorsement of the other party. Nor do I believe that the persecution can be staved off for long. It must come. Says Chesterton:

This is the last and most astounding fact about this faith; that its enemies will use any weapon against it, the swords that cut their own fingers, and the firebrands that burn their own homes. Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church.

Witness, disobedient nuns who take consolation when their own orders fall to dust; witness, apostate priests and bishops who misangelize, and prefer a church-burning Turk to a candle-burning Christian; witness, liberal professors who would rather live in a gulag than let a Catholic speak freely; witness, rioters laying waste to their own cities, and tearing down statues not of imputed oppressors alone but even of benefactors and saints.

The choice for us is not between the world’s hatred and its love. It is between the world’s hatred and its contempt. We may choose to be timid and contemptible, pretending to meet the world on its own terms. We may choose to be courageous, saying no to the world and its lies, but yes, always yes to the truth, in season and out of season, to honor our God and to serve a world that does not desire that service. What that will require, in practical terms, depends in part on the circumstances. Success or failure lies not in our hands, as courageous and wise as we may be.

Persecution? Well then, persecution. Bring it on.

[Photo credit: Claudio Santana]

Tagged as 2020 election, Amy Coney Barrett, Christian persecution, Donald J. Trump,Joe Biden, Kamala Harrishttps://www.facebook.com/v2.10/plugins/like.php?action=like&app_id=485814248461205&channel=https%3A%2F%2Fstaticxx.facebook.com%2Fx%2Fconnect%2Fxd_arbiter%2F%3Fversion%3D46%23cb%3Dfc49e93dbc5d3a%26domain%3Dwww.crisismagazine.com%26origin%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.crisismagazine.com%252Ff212b25540cafa%26relation%3Dparent.parent&container_width=660&href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.crisismagazine.com%2F2020%2Fpersecution-bring-it-on&layout=button_count&locale=en_US&sdk=joey&share=true&show_faces=false56Anthony Esolen

By Anthony Esolen

Anthony Esolen, a contributing editor at Crisis, is a professor and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts. He is the author, most recently, of Sex and the Unreal City (Ignatius Press, 2020).

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on The choice for us is not between the world’s hatred and its love. It is between the world’s hatred and its contempt. We may choose to be timid and contemptible, pretending to meet the world on its own terms. We may choose to be courageous, saying no to the world and its lies, but yes, always yes to the truth, in season and out of season, to honor our God and to serve a world that does not desire that service. What that will require, in practical terms, depends in part on the circumstances. Success or failure lies not in our hands, as courageous and wise as we may be.

The media meltdown over President Trump stay in the Bethesda hospital is the logical culmination of a nearly four-year media-generated effort to destroy Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and then his transition and presidency. Almost every story the media have peddled about Trump’s mortal sins and his supposedly imminent demise has been proven false and has insidiously lowered the status of media reporting and writing to well below market-tabloid standards.

Posted on October 7, 2020 by abyssum
Trump, Escaping Wile E. Coyotevirus


Media meltdown over Trump’s COVID case is the latest sortie in a four-year effort to destroy his campaign and then presidency.


By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

October 6, 2020 

Once it was announced that
President Trump had COVID-19, the media almost immediately talked of all the people in the “Trump orbit” who fell ill from COVID-19 — including many on his staff, U.S. senators, and at least three White House reporters.


The surreal subtext was not that the toxic Trump had been infected by someone else. Apparently reporters, in their Trump-obsessed universe, believed in some mysterious Aristotelian concept of spontaneous generation, by which his self-spawned coronavirus germs had sickened all within his deadly circuit. Or perhaps Trump was guilty of catching the germ from one of his staffers, who in turn would never have been sickened if they had never been close to Trump in the first place. The possibility that the White House “positive” reporters might have been careless at times or might’ve infected others was never entertained.


Within a few hours, the usual camps and suspects weighed in. Former Clinton and Obama staffer Zara Rahim prayed for Trump’s demise and celebrated his infection with a terse “I hope he dies.” 


The Washington Post hastily took down an official Twitter feed automatically posting an op-ed column expressing a similar hope for a dead president: “Imagine what it will be like to never have to think about Trump again,” on the realization that running such a headline while Trump was sick “rendered it tasteless”— as if it was not tasteless when he was well. Write that after swapping the name “Obama” for “Trump,” and the FBI would have shown up at their doors.


Within hours of news that Trump had COVID-19, the liberal media were off to the funeral games. They gushed about the inevitable cancellation of the upcoming debates, the necessary delay in the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, the likelihood of a soon-to-be acting president Mike Pence, and the possibility/hope of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s stepping up, as third in line for the presidency, to save the ship of state as our new president. No sooner had the president entered the hospital than the ecstatic media enthused that COVID-19 would certainly not disappoint, perhaps the same way they’d hoped that Robert Mueller (doddering as he proved to be) would save them from Trump. Or, as comedian Chris Rock put it: “President Trump’s in the hospital from COVID, and I just want to say my heart goes out to COVID.” 


During the initial press conference with physicians from Walter Reed, reporters seemed crestfallen to hear the news that, after 24 hours or so of fever, the president, as soon as Saturday morning, was reacting well to his cocktail of medicines and natural vitamins and supplements and that he was for a while at least fever-free. And they were shocked that the president was actually a patient who, like all other patients, retained some right to privacy about his own medical strategies and treatments. I don’t recall any of the media asking exactly what pharmaceuticals Joe Biden might be taking, and whether they have had any side effects given Biden’s frequent lapses of cognizance.


As a result of the good news on Trump’s condition, reporters were left to fixate on “oxygen,” repeatedly yelling the same question about whether the president still “was on oxygen” — in their drill-bill style of “are you a white supremacist?” Their implication was that the White House was hiding the truth that Trump surely was nearly spent and in some sort of Woodrow Wilson–like coma, given that he might have had some oxygen before entering the hospital.


In the end, disappointed reporters were left to grumble that Trump’s use of two experimental or off-label drugs was reckless, or revealed a privilege not afforded to hoi polloi, or proved he was in extremis. They could not determine whether Trump the unscientific dunce was surrounded by quacks, or whether, given his laxity in wearing a mask, he didn’t deserve the top care he was receiving.


Anchors, analysts, and pundits sermonized that Trump’s nemesis was a result of his hubris, of his West Wing pseudo “culture of invincibility” and even “recklessness.” Apparently, amid plague, forced lockdown, recession, and riots, arson, and looting, the commander in chief of the world’s largest military and economy, with the greatest political responsibility across the globe, should easily have gone into the “more responsible” Joe Biden basement mode over the past six months. In the media mind, the idea of an active Trump visiting troops, talking with politicos, giving constant press conferences and ad hoc media meetings, speaking to open-air rallies and generally crisscrossing the country “sent the wrong message,” especially given the apparent idea that his job responsibilities were no different from the tasks of secluded candidate Biden, speaking from a Teleprompter or reading notes on his cell phone.
Fox’s Chris Wallace periodically weighed in on spec, with warnings that we should watch the White House carefully given its inability to convey honest accounts of the president’s health, previously epitomized by a short letter from Trump’s longtime physician in 2015, assuring the nation in superlatives that Trump was in good health. As I listened to Wallace, I wondered whether he had ever speculated about Barack Obama’s stealth smoking in the White House, or about the likelihood that Trump had simply followed the presidential precedent of Barack Obama, whose doctor in a similarly short letter assured the country that Obama was healthy, end of discussion, without releasing any records at all.


We can imagine that today’s journalists would have trashed the portly and late-sexagenarian Winston Churchill, upon whose health and welfare the fate of the United Kingdom hinged between 1940 and 1945. After all, Churchill flew dangerously around the world to visit foreign leaders and British and Commonwealth troops, often through enemy skies, surviving near-death experiences multiple times, taking experimental penicillin to combat pneumonia, and experiencing cardiac arrhythmias. Was Churchill unnecessarily risking all around him, as he put them through primitive air travel to Moscow, North Africa (at least once in direct sight of Hitler’s African Corps), North America, and the liberated European countries? Could he not have played the role of a stationary Joseph Stalin or at least stayed put inside a bunker in his nation’s capital, instead of “inspiring” the troops and getting firsthand knowledge of his Allied partners and the troops under his command by taking 25 wartime trips outside Britain?


One media regret seems to be that the Trump coronavirus story has preempted their campaign script of releasing a new “bombshell” or “walls are closing in” autumn surprise every four or five days.


Over the past three-week script, the myth that Trump ignored Russian bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan led to the yarn that Trump was dismantling the Post Office to sabotage mail-in voting, which led to the fiction that Trump mocked American war dead as “suckers” and “losers,” which was followed by Bob Woodward’s concoction that a callous Trump didn’t care about those who were infected, which led to the illegally obtained Trump tax returns, followed by the secretly recorded phone calls with the first lady leaked by a former staffer and “friend.” And then all that careful planning was abruptly sidetracked by the president’s infection.


A worried Michael Moore, with a nod from Joy Reid, seemed to have noticed that the liberal media’s smear locomotive had gone off the tracks — all because the devilishly clever Trump was faking his illness and by inference had bought off the entire team of Walter Reed physicians: “He’s an evil genius, and I raise the possibility of him lying about having COVID-19 to prepare us and counteract his game. He knows being sick tends to gain one sympathy. He’s not above weaponizing this.”


Amid all the “Trump deserved it” hysteria, note that nowhere did Biden or other Trump critics or the media specify what they would have done differently when the virus first arrived months ago. Would they have declined to implement the travel ban that Biden criticized? Listened more intently to Dr. Anthony Fauci, who initially dismissed the utility of masks, said the virus was not much to worry about, suggested that there was no danger in going on a cruise, and predicted that there was no real threat to the U.S.?
Early on, would Biden have listened to the superior wisdom of Nancy Pelosi (“That’s what we’re trying to do today, is to say everything is fine here”), Bill de Blasio (“If you’re not sick, you should be going about your life”), or Andrew Cuomo (“The general risk remains low in New York”), who all, as the virus reached our cities in late February and early March, were urging Americans more or less to ignore the growing panic and get out to shop in Chinatown or have a drink in Manhattan.


Perhaps Trump should have followed the New York lead and urged rest homes to admit COVID-19 patients? Instead, we get accusations that the U.S. has the worst record in the world on dealing with COVID-19, as if the data of China, India, and Russia are accurate, as if one must ignore the roughly equivalent, or sometime worse, record of major European countries such as Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom, and as if just four northeastern states, with about 11 percent of the U.S. population, did not account for almost a third of all U.S. deaths.


The Left rightly cites the 215,000 Americans who have died of COVID-19 and its co-morbidities to emphasize the severity of the virus. But the likely far greater death toll has not yet arrived from the six-month lockdown. And it could be terrifying when we eventually learn of the hundreds of thousands who were sickened or who died from missed medical treatments and surgeries, or from the stress of the quarantines or the spikes in alcohol and drug use, or spousal and child abuse. Joe Biden has not yet told us what he would have done other than to have people wear more masks, a reasonable suggestion, though scientists still remain divided about whether such protections would have significantly reduced the U.S. death toll.


In defense of Michael Moore and the media, they at least know their audiences. A Morning Consult poll taken after the announcement of Trump’s infection showed that 40 percent of Democrats were “happy” at news the president was ill.


The media meltdown is the logical culmination of a nearly four-year media-generated effort to destroy Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and then his transition and presidency. Almost every story the media have peddled about Trump’s mortal sins and his supposedly imminent demise has been proven false and has insidiously lowered the status of media reporting and writing to well below market-tabloid standards — the doomed and inept Trump campaign of 2016 that would suffer a landslide loss, the fraudulent voting machines in 2016, electors who would surely not follow their states’ legal dictates, the fraudulent Clinton-financed Steele dossier, the first impeachment, celebrities’ blow-up/burn-up/behead, incinerate/shoot/stab anti-Trump outbursts, the Logan Act silliness, the emoluments-clause gambit, the 25th Amendment ruse, the 22-month Mueller “dream team” and “all-star” waste, the saga of Michael Cohen’s flipping against Trump, the Ukraine-phone-call impeachment, and the 2020 writ of Trump as guilty for the recession, over 200,000 American dead, a cruel quarantine, and riots, looting, and arson in the streets.


In that larger context of the past four years, an infected Trump was never going to be about a sick president battling the infection, but either an elaborate conspiratorial cover-up, or an overdue cosmic reckoning for his sins, or an ironic end to his campaign, or the well-deserved death warrant of his presidency. The only drama was how well the anchor or analyst or kindred politician could offer enough qualifiers (“this may not be the proper time to, but . . . ”  “this may be misinterpreted, but . . . ” “let us be very careful here, but . . .”) to mask his loathing of the ill Trump and hide his paranoia that somehow, somewhere the frenetic Road Runner Trump might yet once again escape — even from the deadly grasp of Wile E. Coyotevirus.


Email Link  https://conta.cc/33DfBxz

Rip McIntosh
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on The media meltdown over President Trump stay in the Bethesda hospital is the logical culmination of a nearly four-year media-generated effort to destroy Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and then his transition and presidency. Almost every story the media have peddled about Trump’s mortal sins and his supposedly imminent demise has been proven false and has insidiously lowered the status of media reporting and writing to well below market-tabloid standards.

IF EVER THERE WAS A TIME WHEN VOTING FOR THE MAN AND NOT HIS/HER PARTY AFFILIATION WAS A MISTAKE; IT IS NOW AS YOU ARE ABOUT TO VOTE IN THE 20202 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Posted on October 7, 2020 by abyssum
To All Those Who ‘Vote For the Man, Not the party’

By Dennis Prager


October 6, 2020.

“I vote for the man (or woman), not the party” is what millions of Americans say and what, in fact, many do. It is intended as a noble sentiment: “I am not one of those Americans who votes blindly by party; I measure each candidate and then decide which one to vote for.”If there were ever a time when this was a noble sentiment, it would have been when Republicans and Democrats shared basic moral and American values and differed only on what policies would lead to the two parties’ shared goals.


For example, though they never ran against each other, one might argue that the differences between the Democrat John Kennedy and his Republican predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, were not particularly great. But that was very rare. The fact is that, since the inception of the Republican Party, which was founded to counter the Democratic Party’s defense of slavery, there has almost never been a time when the philosophical differences between the parties were not great.


And since slavery, there has never been a time when the two major parties differed as much as they do today. Therefore, the notion that one should vote “for the individual, not the party” has never made less sense. It would be as if someone in the mid-1800s had said, “I strongly oppose slavery, but the Democratic candidate is a much finer and more likeable individual than the Republican candidate.”


Fine Democrats who defended slavery did as much harm to blacks and to America as disreputable Democrats. And elected officials vote with their party more often than in principled opposition to it, however fine they may be as individuals.


Nevertheless, a great number of Americans still vote for “the individual.”
The most obvious examples are Republican “Never Trumpers.” They say that they would vote for any Republican except Donald Trump because they find his character so objectionable.


My friend, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, is one prominent example. He believes in a strong American defense, supported Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from Barack Obama’s agreement with Iran, credits Trump with the Israeli peace agreements with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, saluted Trump’s moving of the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and presumably supports other Trump policies, such as the president’s extraordinary success with regard to the American economy prior to the lockdowns that crushed the economy.


Yet, he so loathes the president that he will vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.


He and many other Americans (we will soon know how many) who support the president’s Republican policies will vote for the party that stands for almost everything they oppose because they will “vote for the man, not the party.”


I find nothing admirable in this position — morally or rationally. At this time in American history, to care more about an individual candidate than the party is to support the unraveling of America. It is so irrational as to be incredible.


Voting for any Democrat — whether for mayor, district attorney, state legislature, state governor, the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate or president — is to vote for someone who will enable the left to destroy America as we know it. (That is their wording, not only mine.)

The Democratic Party was once largely liberal. But today, it is left, and the left readily acknowledges it wishes to “transform” America, which means to destroy America as we have known it.


To vote for any Democrat is to vote for the party that believes America is “systemically racist,” that it is rotten to the core, vile from its inception (in 1619, they claim, not 1776).


To vote for any Democrat is to vote for the party that will renew the Obama agreement with one of America’s and the civilized world’s greatest enemies, the Islamic Republic of Iran.


It is to vote for undoing every economic policy that led America to its greatest economic boom in memory.


It is to vote for Kamala Harris, the most left-wing member of the U.S. Senate, for vice president (and, given Biden’s age and health, perhaps soon president).
It is to vote for the party that wants to allow millions more illegal immigrants into America and grant them benefits heretofore reserved for Americans. Democrats don’t use the words “open borders,” but they support this country-wrecking policy.


It is to vote for the party that supports the Green New Deal, or something very close to it, which will further ruin an economy already in ruins from Democrat-supported lockdowns.


It is to vote for the party that seeks to nationalize American health care (“Medicare for All”).


It is to vote for the party whose mayors, governors and district attorneys allow violent riots and seek to “defund” police, a policy even most blacks oppose.
It is to vote for the party that supports the unprecedented suppression of free speech by Big Tech and universities.


It is to vote for the party that insists that men menstruate and that biological men must be allowed to compete against biological women in sports, no matter how often the biological men defeat them.


It is to vote for the party with the only anti-Semites, not to mention Israel-haters, in Congress.


It is to vote for the party that, for the first time in American history, openly identifies with socialism more than with capitalism.


It is to vote for the party that Big Pharma, big corporations and radical teachers unions support.


All because many Americans like their Democratic candidate for a Senate seat (as in Arizona) or the Democratic candidate for president more than the Republican candidate. They do not appreciate a likeable Democrat will do as much harm to our country as any other Democrat.


Email Link  https://conta.cc/2Sv4BMt

Rip McIntosh

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on IF EVER THERE WAS A TIME WHEN VOTING FOR THE MAN AND NOT HIS/HER PARTY AFFILIATION WAS A MISTAKE; IT IS NOW AS YOU ARE ABOUT TO VOTE IN THE 20202 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

I WOULD NOT BE SURPRISED IF REPULICANS LIE FROM TIME TO TIME BUT THERE IS MOUNTING EVIDENCE THAT DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES ARE CONGENITAL LIARS AND LIE ALL THE TIME

Posted on October 7, 2020 by abyssum

Washington Free Beacon

David Rutz and Collin Anderson – OCTOBER 6, 2020 4:30 PM

NBC News featured a pair of “undecided” voters during a network town hall earlier this week who had previously declared their support for Democratic nominee Joe Biden on the network’s sister channel, MSNBC.

Lawyer Peter Gonzalez and marketing executive Ismael Llano posed questions to Biden during a town hall on Monday, when he appeared before what the network described as an “audience of undecided Florida voters.”

Both Gonzalez and Llano, however, were featured in an MSNBC segment in August to explain why they support Biden. “If we get four more years of Trump, good luck, and good luck with the future attracting younger voters,” Gonzalez said as an MSNBC chyron noted he was “voting for Biden.” Llano was also identified as “voting for Biden” and offered praise for the former vice president.

On Monday, NBC’s Lester Holt said that Llano “voted for Hillary Clinton four years ago but has voted Republican in the past.” Gonzalez, whose voting history went unmentioned, asked Biden to ease his family’s concerns that the Democrat is beholden to “the radical left.”

“Cuban American and Venezuelan voters here in South Florida are being targeted with messages by the Trump campaign claiming that a vote for Joe Biden is a vote for the radical left and socialism, and even communism,” Gonzalez said. “What can you tell people in my family, my friends—who are understandably concerned with that issue—that would make them feel comfortable voting for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris?”

It is not the first time that television networks have featured Trump opponents masquerading as undecided voters, who are difficult to find and often less publicly vocal about their political views. ABC News last month described several Trump critics as undecided voters, including one who had previously described Trump as a “f—ing moron,” “pathetic,” “pig,” “swine,” and a “punk ass” on social media.

Another “undecided” voter featured in NBC’s town hall, Mateo Gomez, told MSNBC on Sept. 30 that he was leaning toward voting Biden over Trump after watching the first debate.

NBC News did not respond to a request for comment.ADVERTISING

Others at the town hall have displayed a clear preference for Biden on social media. Michelle Cruz Marrero, described as a former Republican, did not appear to be undecided: Several of her Facebook “cover photos” are either pro-Biden or anti-Trump.

Another voter at the town hall, Cassidy Brown, asked Biden how she would protect “women’s reproductive rights.” Biden subsequently tweeted the exchange and pledged to codify Roe v.Wade. But Brown’s social media use also suggests she is not an undecided voter. On Sept. 5, she retweeted an account—with a Biden-Harris logo for its avatar—that attacked Trump for allegedly making derogatory remarks about veterans. In 2017, she shared a HuffPost article on Facebook about Michelle Obama’s criticism of women who voted against Hillary Clinton.

Brown also shared an Instagram post from her sister after the town hall, where she boasted Brown asked the “future president” an “incredible question” about reproductive rights.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on I WOULD NOT BE SURPRISED IF REPULICANS LIE FROM TIME TO TIME BUT THERE IS MOUNTING EVIDENCE THAT DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES ARE CONGENITAL LIARS AND LIE ALL THE TIME

We’re at the end of a generational battle and the heartbreaking thing is, we lost. And that hurts. It’s going to hurt for a long time for a lot of people in ways that could take a while to fully comprehend. But the next battle has to start right now, and it will be long. We didn’t get here overnight, and we won’t get out of here overnight, but we must be willing to fight tirelessly and with every tool and tactic at our disposal.

Posted on October 7, 2020 by abyssum

OCTOBER 7, 2020

Now Is the Time for War

SEAN FITZPATRICK

CRISIS MAGAZINE

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade….
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

— G. K. Chesterton, “Lepanto”

If you ever want to get a glimpse into the liberal mind, just watch a couple episodes of John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight”—if you can stand it. Oliver is the Left, and his rhetoric is a startling slice of what Catholics are up against, and it is significant. John Oliver is a particularly strong litmus test because he is witty, edgy, quick, sometimes funny, smart, slick, data driven, and filled with hate. In a recent episode, Oliver was railing against the long-term situation lining up with the Supreme Court and President Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett and said,

We’re at the end of a generational battle and the heartbreaking thing is, we lost. And that hurts. It’s going to hurt for a long time for a lot of people in ways that could take a while to fully comprehend. But the next battle has to start right now, and it will be long. We didn’t get here overnight, and we won’t get out of here overnight, but we must be willing to fight tirelessly and with every tool and tactic at our disposal.https://secureaddisplay.com/i/view/js/?Viewable=0&isMobile=0&AULU=31049420180502T2200289306460AB42454C400A8A16937CB3EB93D7&cb=1602097837962&ccvid=1047290854&pvid=2069929598

Fighting words, indeed. And there is no place for Catholics to hide or run from this fight and maintain the reality of Catholicism in their lives. There is no way to be a Catholic or work out our salvation if not through fighting the good fight—and with more rigor and resolve than those who bring the fight to us. Our opponents are ready and roaring, as John Oliver makes clear, almost like the sleepless army of Mordor besieging Minas Tirith. There is no flight to heaven without that fight, without spiritual warfare, and to remember, especially in the wake of the feast of the Guardian Angels, that those who march with the angels defending them in battle know that God will be the enemy to their enemies and foe to their foes. Even God does not shy away from the language of warfare, for it is accurate.

October 7 is the feast day of the Holy Rosary and it marks a day of battle, for it was on that day in 1571 that the Rosary was wielded as a weapon against those that would crush the Catholic religion. Don Juan of Austria, bastard son of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, issued rosaries to all the soldiers on board the Holy League and ordered that they march the decks of their ships praying to Our Lady for victory as the day of battle dawned against the undefeated (and seemingly undefeatable) armada of the Ottoman Empire. Through Our Lady’s intercession, the battle was won, and Don Juan showed us how it’s done—with Rosary and joyful fearlessness.

The war goes on, and Don Juan’s example shines true for all Christians nearly 450 years later, even as the victory at Lepanto shone in a vision to Pope Pius V before the battle broke. The foe has not ceased in its conquest for souls, and the call of the Catholic Faith is a call to arms. On October 7, 1571, the Christian world was taught what it means to be a Christian warrior by a twenty-four-year-old knight who went to battle against the unstoppable forces of Islam dancing a jig.

In his poem “Lepanto”—which is arguably the greatest ballad of the 20th century just as the battle was arguably the greatest battle of Christendom—G. K. Chesterton makes clear the spiritual clash that the Battle of Lepanto signified. Chesterton, a wonderful warrior in his own way (who penned this incredible call to arms in his front yard while the postman waited impatiently for it to go to press), brings a galloping, apocalyptic tenor to the battle while lionizing the joyful and sometimes haphazard attitude of the Christian warrior. Don Juan of Austria heeded the Pope’s crazy call to defend Christendom when all the world was ready to succumb with a deeper, infernal insanity.

Besides conjuring up the heavenly and hellish elements that swirl over the works of man, as they did with especial poignancy at Lepanto, Chesterton’s poem reminds us of a now famous personage who was on board Don Juan’s ship, the Real. Miguel de Cervantes, sick with fever and ordered to remain below, burst out fully armed on deck at the first stroke of battle. He was immediately shot twice in the chest while a cannonball sailed away with his left hand. “For the glory of the right,” he used to say.

But Cervantes’s lesson about glory was about something more important than his hand. Cervantes discovered a great truth on that seventh of October: it is never wrong to play the fool for the greater glory of God and in the defense of His Kingdom. Cervantes learned this first from Don Juan, the “the last knight of Europe,” as Chesterton calls him in his poem. Cervantes sensed a new breed of hero in this madcap Don Juan, a hero whose heroism was new because it insisted upon ancient truths rejected by the world, and who ran the risk of ridicule to uphold those sacred forgotten things. Cervantes had found the model for his masterpiece, Don Quixote, that “lean and foolish knight,” in Chesterton’s words, who “forever rides in vain.”

Now this is a warrior that few Catholics would think of turning to for spiritual inspiration when ends become frayed, crosses heavy, and purposes blunted or even broken. Flying with horse, lance, and squire, the mad gentleman, Don Quixote, strikes out seeking knights, wizards, ladies, kings, and castles. But the straggling road in Spain carries him to hard knocks and harder realities. Don Quixote only encounters rogues, goatherds, convicts, chambermaids, and inns. Again and again, his imaginings are denied. His manners are ridiculed. His purposes are foiled. The Knight of la Mancha is beaten and bruised at every turning. But Don Quixote is resilient. He keeps seeing giants disguised as windmills, and challenges and charges them despite falls and scorn.

The battles of Don Quixote are the battles of every Christian: the struggle to bring harmony and order to times that are out of joint. What Don Quixote finds is that the world sundered and senseless, and the work to rebuild among the ruins is treacherous. Though he is trounced time and again, Don Quixote resolutely rides on for the wisdom of bygone days and is upheld by his vision as he battles through the divisions and disconnections of modernity. The epic of Don Quixote as the Christian warrior, as inspired by Don Juan, is beautiful and brutal in its episodic mishaps in the name of chivalry. They are a Passion where the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Chapter after chapter, the Knight of the Sorrowful Face falls, and, chapter after chapter, he gets up again and continues on. It is a book that plays out with all the pain and poignancy, all the humanity and humor, that composes the chivalric call of the Christian life.

John Senior writes in The Restoration of Christian Culture,

The Camino Real of Christ is a chivalric way, romantic, full of fire and passion, riding on the pure, high-spirited horses of the self with their glad, high-stepping knees and flaring nostrils, and us with jingling spurs and the cry “Mon joie!”—the battle cry of Roland and Olivier. Our Church is the Church of the Passion.

“The foolishness of God,” writes St. Paul, “is wiser than men.” It was the “foolishness of God” that inspired Don Juan to laugh and dance on the prow of his ship as the cannonballs flew. Don Juan and Don Quixote may have seen things that were not visible, but only because they looked beyond the veil where a queenly woman watched over them. These knights, the one historical the other fictional, are heroes of the indomitable power of Christian optimism, Christian imagination, and the glorious Christian folly that perceives the highest realities in the lowliest realities. They are icons of the chivalric Christian warrior because they had dreams that were out of reach, but they believed in them still. They were men of great faith, just like the Lady “that God kissed in Galilee.”

When the bristling Turkish fleet came into sight on the Gulf of Patras at dawn on October 7, 1571, the seasoned Admiral Gianandrea Doria approached the young Captain General and informed him that there was still time to retreat. Don Juan looked at the old man and said, “The time for counsel has passed. Now is the time for war.” It is still the time for war. It goes on and it must go on. Miguel de Cervantes learned this at the Battle of Lepanto, recognizing the heroism of one who did not fear foolishness or failure.

Again, to quote Saint Paul, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are.”

When John Oliver says the liberal left must get ready and be ready for a fight, he reallymeans that—and they are. They will fight and they will fight tirelessly. And it is the Catholics who must stop them with our prayers and our cheerful yet hardy resolution to uphold and defend the good, true, and beautiful. “If the world hate you, know ye, that it hath hated me before you.” 

October 7 is a day of Christian knighthood and Christian warfare. It is a day for the men of the Rosary who embrace the Christian condition: namely, the need to charge on; to be seen and mocked as mad; to do what heaven deems right even when the hell calls it wrong; to be a defender; to be principled; to be brave; to be unwavering; to be conquered again and again and keep rising from the dust.

Though knighthood is extinct, that is no reason why chivalry should be dead. Don Quixote’s anachronistic knighthood is a model for all when it comes to rejecting the world when the world is wrong. This course, this straggling road of sudden perils, is given prominence in days of social chaos and political confusion, when Catholics may feel broken, bruised, even beaten. But, like Don Quixote and Our Lord, all are called to pull themselves back up and carry on, to sally forth yet again undaunted by failure, beating down discouragement, and determined to be the enemy of evil. Catholics must learn to ride even if it be in vain; to tilt and be toppled; to be conquered for Christ and called fools for His sake. The likes of John Oliver must continue to lose, while our loss will be laughter when we count the wager worth.

[Image: The Battle of Lepanto by an unknown artist]

Tagged as Battle of Lepanto, Don Quixote, Feast of the Holy Rosary, G.K. Chesterton,Miguel de Cervantes, rosaryhttps://www.facebook.com/v2.10/plugins/like.php?action=like&app_id=485814248461205&channel=https%3A%2F%2Fstaticxx.facebook.com%2Fx%2Fconnect%2Fxd_arbiter%2F%3Fversion%3D46%23cb%3Df376043e5a9121e%26domain%3Dwww.crisismagazine.com%26origin%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.crisismagazine.com%252Ff2b7a18ccb86cf8%26relation%3Dparent.parent&container_width=660&href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.crisismagazine.com%2F2020%2Fnow-is-the-time-for-war&layout=button_count&locale=en_US&sdk=joey&share=true&show_faces=false83Sean Fitzpatrick

By Sean Fitzpatrick

Sean Fitzpatrick is a senior contributor to Crisis. He’s graduate of Thomas Aquinas College and the Headmaster of Gregory the Great Academy. He lives in Scranton, Penn. with his wife and family of four.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on We’re at the end of a generational battle and the heartbreaking thing is, we lost. And that hurts. It’s going to hurt for a long time for a lot of people in ways that could take a while to fully comprehend. But the next battle has to start right now, and it will be long. We didn’t get here overnight, and we won’t get out of here overnight, but we must be willing to fight tirelessly and with every tool and tactic at our disposal.

In Kamala Harris’ America, killing and dismembering unborn babies and marketing their body parts is perfectly acceptable. Reporting on the practice is criminal. If that is not fascistic, I am not sure I know what is.

Posted on October 7, 2020 by abyssum

The Fascist America That Kamala Harris Promises

By Jack Cashill

October 7, 2020


I do not use the term “fascist” lightly, but when even the liberal Los Angeles Times opens an article with a paragraph like the one that follows, I think fascist is apt:“California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris is drawing fire from supporters of an anti-abortion activist whose undercover videos and identity cards were seized by the state Department of Justice this week after Harris’ political campaign sought to drum up support for Planned Parenthood.”


The activist is David Daleiden, 27 at the time of the April 2016 raid on his Huntington Beach apartment. In 2016, Harris was running for California’s open U.S. Senate seat. At the time of the raid, Harris’s campaign website was asking supporters “to take a stand and join Kamala in defending Planned Parenthood.”


In the course of Planned Parenthood’s history, no one had presented a greater threat to the organization’s federal funding than the young journalist whose apartment Harris’s agents had just raided.


In the way of background, Daleiden and his partner Sandra Merritt had gone undercover for two years posing as the brokers in the fetal tissue market.
In July 2015 Daleiden started dropping the undercover videos the pair had shot at Planned Parenthood clinics in several states, including California.


The combination of callow words and cruel images, repeated in one video after another, rocked Washington. The timing was good. The 2016 presidential campaigns were revving up, and many Republicans spoke out about what they saw.
“The out-of-sight, out-of-mind mantra that propelled the pro-choice movement for decades is forever gone,” Kellyanne Conway, then a Republican pollster, told the New York Times. Reeling from the blow, even the Times had to wonder whether “the new offensive will succeed in crippling Planned Parenthood.”


Obama, the first president to speak at Planned Parenthood’s national convention, kept his distance from the hubbub. An indifferent media got no closer to the president than his press secretary, Josh Earnest.


On July 30, 2015, a young reporter asked Earnest if Obama had seen the video that was released on that day. The video in question begins with interview footage of harried Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards insisting, “It’s not a fee. It’s not a fee. It’s just the cost of trans- mitting this material.” The undercover footage that follows undercuts everything Richards said.


A doctor at a Planned Parenthood megaclinic in Colorado is seen explaining the clinic’s traffic in body parts. Aware that it is illegal to transfer “human fetal tissue” for “valuable consideration,” the doctor plays semantic games with the would-be purchasers. “We don’t want to get called on, you know, selling fetal parts across states,” she jokes, unaware she is being recorded. This interview is followed by an on-site review of actual body parts with the doctor and a clinician.
What is impressive is how well Daleiden and Merritt play their roles as buyers. What is unnerving is how casually the doctor and clinician pick through trays of baby parts — a heart, a brain, a lung — while talking about the commercial viability of the “fetal cadaver.”


Running for president at the time, Hillary Clinton could not afford to be so dismissive. Although her first instinct was to attack the video producers, Clinton herself began to waver as each new video dropped.
“I have seen pictures from [the videos] and obviously find them dis- turbing,” Clinton told the New Hampshire Union Leader late that July. No one knew better than Clinton, however, what overwhelming force Planned Parenthood and its allies in the Democratic-media complex could bring to bear against a pair of citizen journalists.
For immediate assistance, Planned Parenthood turned to the well-connected fixers at — where else? — Fusion GPS. The beleaguered organization contracted with Fusion to review the unedited footage Daleiden had posted online.


Armed with a ten-page report from Fusion, Richards went on the offensive. Convincing people they did not see what they saw would not be easy, but the networks made the task possible by refusing to show the actual videos.
As to the newspapers and online journals, they did their bit by leaving the assessment of the videos to Fusion GPS. Faced with real journalists doing real work, the Obama courtiers reflexively turned stenographer. They welcomed this “forensic study” as heartily as they would Fusion GPS’s notorious “Steele dossier” a year later.
To complete the rout, the ambitious Harris had her agents seize Daleiden’s multiple computers and hard drives as well as the materials he had gathered from Planned Parenthood conferences.


Alexandra Snyder, the director of the Life Legal Defense Foundation, told the Los Angeles Times that Harris’s “loyalty to Planned Parenthood” required “her to turn a blind eye to the organization’s criminal activities.” Harris did more than turn a blind eye. “Instead,” said Snyder, “she has launched an inquisition into David Daleiden.”
In 2017, Harris’s successor as attorney general, Xavier Becerra, filed 15 felony charges against Daleiden and Merritt and has tied them up in court ever since.
In May 2020, Daleiden filed suit against Becerra and Harris, claiming Harris violated his civil rights by conspiring with Planned Parenthood to silence him.


In Kamala’s America, killing and dismembering unborn babies and marketing their body parts is perfectly acceptable. Reporting on the practice is criminal. If that is not fascistic, I am not sure I know what is.


Email Link   https://conta.cc/30KIUwh

Rip McIntyre

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The kindest thing one can say about Francis’s new social encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, is that it’s totally incomprehensible. Alas, there’s a great deal more we ought to say about it, but we will not in order to not promote it.

Posted on October 7, 2020 by abyssum

OCTOBER 7, 2020

Towards a ‘Beautiful Polyhedral Reality’

MICHAEL WARREN DAVIS

“I should like a new Papal Bull every morning with my Times at breakfast.” — William George Ward

The kindest thing one can say about Pope Francis’s new social encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, is that it’s totally incomprehensible. Alas, there’s a great deal more we ought to say about it.

I was startled by one particular section-heading: “Liberty, equality, and fraternity”—the motto of the French Revolution. (Just to be sure, I checked the Vatican’s official French translation. Sure enough, it reads: “Liberté, égalité et fraternité.”) Why, I wondered, would the Vicar of Christ appropriate the slogan of the most violently anti-Catholic regime in history? The holy Martyrs of Compiègne must be darting about in the heavens like sparks through stubble.

The Revolution crucified the Church in France. When we hear a Catholic cry, “Liberté, égalité, fraternité!” we can’t help but hear, “I have no king but Caesar… Free Barabbas!”https://secureaddisplay.com/i/view/js/?Viewable=0&isMobile=0&AULU=31049420180502T2200289306460AB42454C400A8A16937CB3EB93D7&cb=1602095925622&ccvid=1047221790&pvid=2069850072

And that’s only the most obvious offense. The document is full of confusion and contradiction. For example, like Pope Pius IX, the Holy Father (rightly) condemns the error of liberalism:

The concept of a “people”, which naturally entails a positive view of community and cultural bonds, is usually rejected by individualistic liberal approaches, which view society as merely the sum of coexisting interests. One speaks of respect for freedom, but without roots in a shared narrative; in certain contexts, those who defend the rights of the most vulnerable members of society tend to be criticized as populists.

He’s right, of course. In fact, you’d almost think he was talking about Donald Trump! The President has championed the rights of Middle Americans whose communities have been hollowed out by globalism.

Yet, in the same breath, Francis condemns those who seek to limit the flow of immigrants into the developed West in order to defend their countrymen from becoming further alienated. To wit:

Still, there are those who appear to feel encouraged or at least permitted by their faith to support varieties of narrow and violent nationalism, xenophobia and contempt, and even the mistreatment of those who are different. Faith, and the humanism it inspires, must maintain a critical sense in the face of these tendencies, and prompt an immediate response whenever they rear their head.

I’m sure Crisis is starting to sound like a broken record, but we’ll say it again: the government of the United States is not obligated to care for the poor of Mexico, or Syria, or any other nation—not at the expense of the American poor. To publish a manifesto for borderless globalism in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, when millions of Americans are out of a job, is cruel. To tar opponents of globalism as violent, contemptuous xenophobes is utterly heartless. It’s not Christian. It doesn’t evince any of the “social friendship” that gives the encyclical its name.

What the Holy Father condemns is not nationalism, but nationhood. What he condemns is not liberalism, but liberty. He doesn’t believe that countries have a right to their own culture and customs, to security and welfare. In this, he is unique in the 2,000-year history of Catholic social thought.

❧

What’s unfortunate is that Fratelli Tutti has some excellent moments. Francis warns against “a kind of ‘deconstructionism,’ whereby human freedom claims to create everything starting from zero, is making headway in today’s culture. The one thing it leaves in its wake is the drive to limitless consumption and expressions of empty individualism.” This is a legitimate pastoral concern, and one that Catholics—of all political stripes—ought to heed.

The Holy Father is also spot-on, as usual, about the dangers posed by modern technology. He observes that, amidst a “frenzy of texting,” a “new lifestyle is emerging, where we create only what we want and exclude all that we cannot control or know instantly and superficially.” That, too, is perfectly valid pastoral advice.

The key word is pastoral. That is Francis’s strong suit. Whenever he veers into politics, the Holy Father completely loses the plot. The few incisive, relevant observations are buried in so much sentimental nonsense about immigration and nuclear war that the encyclical becomes unreadable.

At one point, Francis opines: “Our model must be that of a polyhedron, in which the value of each individual is respected.” I’ve read that section four times and still have no idea what he means. The whole document is littered with such pseudo-poetic, Postmodern jargon.

There’s a broader point to be made here. None of Francis’s social encyclicals do what they’re supposed to do, which is help Catholics come to grips with the important political and cultural issues of our time. They only wind up confusing the faithful, particularly on the Pope’s own priorities.

For instance, the Holy Father has stated on at least one occasion that abortion is the preeminent political issue of our time. He has spoken against the barbarous practice in the strongest possible terms, including comparing it to the Holocaust. For the informed Catholic, there can be no question where Francis stands. Yet Fratelli Tutti makes one passing reference to the matter. Why does he spend so much time talking about the environment and refugees when tens of millions of unborn children are killed in the womb every single year?

This is the great danger behind Francis’s rambling missives. I don’t doubt that he cares deeply about the plague of abortion, but he gives the impression that it’s less important than saving the rainforest or thwarting “populism.” It’s inevitable, then, that millions of Catholics follow suit.

Perhaps the more fundamental problem is that we Catholics have an unhealthy understanding of the papacy. As Bishop Athanasius Scheider said in his recent book Christus Vincit,

I think that popes should speak rarely, in part because the inflation of the pope’s words obscures de facto the magisterium of the bishops. By his continuous pronouncements, the pope has become the pivotal point for daily life in the Church. However, the bishops are the divinely-established pastors for their flock. In some way, they are quite paralyzed by an unhealthy papal-centrism.

So, what do we do with the encyclicals? If we’re not obligated to read them, perhaps we shouldn’t. Perhaps we begin moving away from this unhealthy papal-centrism by ignoring the pope as much as possible. If we do insist on reading these strange memoranda, it’s only fair to give Francis our full attention and weigh his opinions carefully.

Of course, a man has his limits. If the Holy Father wishes to speak to me about the need to “create a beautiful polyhedral reality in which everyone has a place,” I will say, “Thank you, Your Holiness, but no thank you,” and walk away.

[Photo credit: Vincenzo Pinto/AFP via Getty Images]

Tagged as Bishop Athanasius Schneider, capital punishment, Donald J. Trump, Pope Francishttps://www.facebook.com/v2.10/plugins/like.php?action=like&app_id=485814248461205&channel=https%3A%2F%2Fstaticxx.facebook.com%2Fx%2Fconnect%2Fxd_arbiter%2F%3Fversion%3D46%23cb%3Df1d1fffdc63ed94%26domain%3Dwww.crisismagazine.com%26origin%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.crisismagazine.com%252Ff1b0a426b8191d8%26relation%3Dparent.parent&container_width=660&href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.crisismagazine.com%2F2020%2Ftowards-a-beautiful-polyhedral-reality&layout=button_count&locale=en_US&sdk=joey&share=true&show_faces=false112Michael Warren Davis

By Michael Warren Davis

Michael Warren Davis is the editor of Crisis Magazine. He is a frequent contributor to The American Conservative and the author of The Reactionary Mind (Regnery, 2021).

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BABY-KILLER BIDEN IS PROMISING THAT MORE BABIES WILL BE KILLED AFTER HE IS ELECTED PRESIDENT (PLEASE GOD DO NOT LET THAT HAPPEN)

Posted on October 7, 2020 by abyssum


Biden doubles down on abortion law pledge

193Former vice president Joe Biden during a campaign stop in May, 2019. Credit: Pix_Arena/ShutterstockFormer vice president Joe Biden during a campaign stop in May, 2019. Credit: Pix_Arena/Shutterstock

CNA Staff, Oct 6, 2020 / 09:30 am MT (CNA).-  

Former vice president Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, repeated his pledge to codify a right to abortion into federal law should the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision be overturned by the Supreme Court.

Speaking at an outdoor town hall event airing on NBC Monday, Biden was asked what he would do to protect “reproductive health rights” should Judge Amy Coney Barrett be confirmed to the Supreme Court.

“Number one, we don’t know exactly what [Barrett] will do, although the expectation is that she may very well move to overrule Roe, and what the only thing–the only responsible response to that would be to pass legislation making Roe the law of the land,” said Biden. “That’s what I would do.” 

After decades of reservations about unrestricted abortion and Roe v. Wade, which he originally said went “too far,” Biden committed during the 2019 Democratic primary contest to enshrining the full extent of the decision into law.  

Kirsten Day, executive director of Democrats for Life of America, responded to Biden’s renewed pledge, saying it was “sad to see [Biden] move from recognizing the humanity of preborn children to pledging to make abortion the law of the land if elected.”

“Pro-Life Democrats, we have to mobilize to make sure this does not happen if he is elected,” Day said via Twitter.

President Donald Trump, who is back at the White House following a three-day hospitalization for the coronavirus, encouraged his own supporters to vote against Biden, and against congressional Democrats’ plans to potentially add more seats to the Supreme Court.

On Tuesday, Trump said that “Joe Biden just took a more Liberal position on Roe v. Wade than Elizabeth Warren at her highest.”

Trump also said that Biden “wants to PACK our great United States Supreme Court.” Biden was asked if he would support court-packing were he elected following a Barrett confirmation during the presidential debate last week, he declined to answer. 

The president also noted that Biden had endorsed Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who sparked controversy in January 2019 after he said that if a baby were sufficiently disabled at birth, it could be “kept comfortable” and might be resuscitated if the mother wished, and there could be a “conversation” between doctors and the mother.

Several states have already passed laws codifying a right to an abortion should the Roe decision be overturned in future. There is no federal law enshrining abortion rights. 

The Democratic Party platform has rapidly evolved on abortion rights during the 21st century. As recently as 2004, the platform was calling for abortion to be “Safe, legal, and rare.” The 2020 platform was the first to call for a codification of abortion rights into law, in addition to calls for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment and Mexico City Policy, which limit U.S. tax dollars from funding abortions.

Despite the Church’s absolute condemnation of abortion as the taking of an innocent human life, Biden has frequently touched upon his Catholic faith throughout his campaign, including a series of recent spots on Catholic radio stations.

He has also released ads saying that he was partly inspired to run for president due to an encounter with religious sisters at the Vatican. 

In the ad, which was released during the Democratic National Convention, Biden narrated how once, after having a brief meeting with Pope Francis at St. Peter’s Basilica, he departed the church and ran into a group of religious sisters. 

These sisters, said Biden in a voiceover, “to me, epitomize everything Pope Francis talked about in his homily and what he stands for. About generosity to other people, about reaching out, about making it a point to understand that we are our brother’s keeper,” said Biden. 

Biden said the idea that people have an obligation to look out for one another had been imprinted on him during his Catholic upbringing and “being educated by the nuns.” 

“That’s what those lovely women I’m talking to symbolize to me,” said Biden. 

Despite that evidently favorable encounter with nuns in Rome, Biden has been quite critical of a religious order in the United States. 

Shortly after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Little Sisters of the Poor in Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania on July 8, Biden said he was “disappointed” by the decision and promised to reinstate Obama-era policies requiring the sisters to ensure access to birth control in violation of their religious beliefs.

Tags: Joe Biden, President Donald Trump, Catholic News Abortion

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