My Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — feed was full of chortling posts claiming that the Vatican denied Vice President J D Vance a meeting with Pope Francis, sending the Vatican’s second-ranking official instead, in what the left loudly proclaimed was a deliberate snub to Mr Vance.
That’s not quite what it was.
The story behind JD Vance’s unlikely visit with Pope Francis
Vance and Francis had publicly disagreed in recent months on immigration policies and other aspects of church teaching.
The Most Reverend John Stowe, Bishop of Lexington
While I cannot say that I am friends with His Excellency, the Most Reverend John Stowe, O.F.M. Conv., Bishop of Lexington, we are at least acquainted with each other. The Bishop at least recognizes me when he sees me, though I cannot be certain he remembers my name. We have had some pleasant conversations the few times he has visited our small parish.
I have written about him, or at least mentioned him, on this poor site, in 17 previous articles, not always charitably. Bishop Stowe is an excellent homilist, one who can really connect with a congregation, and I have no doubts at all about his faith. But, as a Catholic priest, he chooses the wrong things far too often for me.
Kentucky prelate calls lack of election response from American Church ‘disappointing’
by John Lavenburg | Tuesday, December 3, 2024
NEW YORK – In the month or so since former President Donald Trump was elected to occupy the White House for a second term, the majority of American bishops have either not commented on the election publicly, or issued a generic statement about the importance of civility, unity, and democracy.
That extends to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, where – outside of responses to Trump’s stated plan for mass deportations – not much has been said. Bishop John Stowe, in a recent conversation with Crux, said that reality isn’t surprising considering how American Church leaders have handled the presidency of Joe Biden over the last four years.
“It was not surprising coming from the USCCB. What was surprising was the attitude when Joe Biden was elected, a Catholic president four years ago, and there was such an uproar in the conference about that election, and because of that, I really had no expectation that there would be much said about the Trump election,” said Stowe, the bishop of Lexington in Kentucky.
His Excellency the Bishop does not like former and future President Donald Trump. Speaking in August of 2020, before the 2020 election, the Bishop let us know, let all of his Catholic parishioners know, that he was opposed to President Trump’s re-election. Bishop Stowe was appalled by Mr Trump’s anti-illegal immigration policies, calling them “anti-life.” Continue reading
In the modern world, abortion has become something of a secular sacrament, down to which all politicians must make obeisance. If they do not, then they are clearly haters of women and an obvious supporter of the evil, reich-wing Donald Trump. The Roman Catholic Church is one of the few bulwarks against pre-natal infanticide in the West, though the Church’s actual action against it seems sparse.
Irish politician refused communion over abortion vote
BBC | Monday, July 15, 2024
The refusal of the Eucharist to a public representative in the Republic of Ireland has been “unambiguously condemned” by the Association of Catholic Priests.
It follows reports that Fine Gael TD and Minister of State Colm Burke was refused Holy Communion at a funeral Mass on Friday.
That politicians would have condemned the priest’s actions is unsurprising; that the Association of Catholic Priests would do so ought to be shocking. Continue reading
I’m sure that columnist Linda Blackford and the rest of the editorial staff of the Lexington Herald-Leader are aghast, but almost 1,900 lives were saved!
Kentucky abortions dropped by nearly half last year, showing impact of statewide bans
by Alex Aquisto | Thursday, October 5, 2023 | 4:48 PM EDT | Updated: 5:11 PM EDT
The number of reported abortions provided in Kentucky last year dropped by roughly 43 percent, according to new annual report tracking the medical procedure.
The reduction in legal pregnancy terminations correlates directly with the commonwealth’s trigger law banning abortion and a six-week ban, both of which became enforceable last summer with the overturning of federal abortion protections by the U.S. Supreme Court. Continue reading
The one-world-government folks want to subject the United States to the United Nations, regardless of American law. From The Washington Post:
Almost 200 rights groups call on U.N. to intervene over U.S. abortion access
The U.S. cannot be a global champion of human rights when its own abortion rights are not protected, one activist group said
by Adela Suliman | Thursday, March 2, 2023 | 9:03 AM EST
Almost 200 human rights organizations from across the world have issued an “urgent appeal” to the United Nations to intervene to ensure the United States protects reproductive rights — after a Supreme Court ruling last year overturned the constitutional right to an abortion.
In a letter issued Thursday, nonprofits and civil society groups including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Global Justice Center, as well as dozens of smaller U.S.-based charities have written to the U.N. warning that “people residing in the US who can become pregnant are facing a human rights crisis.”
“(P)eople residing in the US who can become pregnant”? Guffaws! Footnote #1 of the letter, on page 5 of the .pdf file states, “While the remainder of this letter often refers to women and girls as the targets of laws restricting abortion, we recognize that although most people who can become pregnant and require abortion services are cisgender women, people with diverse gender identities are also affected and need abortions.” How can any sensible person take seriously the logic of people who would say something that stupid?
It comes after the Supreme Court ruling last year, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, struck down reproductive protections enshrined in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, igniting a seismic social and legal change in the country by shifting power to regulate abortions into the hands of individual states. A majority of justices argued that Roe v. Wade’s reasoning was “weak” and that the issue of abortion should be considered by “the people’s elected representatives,” in a decision that was a long-sought triumph for conservatives.
At least a dozen states have moved to ban or heavily restrict abortions since Dobbs.
The 196 signatories to Thursday’s letter describe “intensifying harms” occurring in the United States as a result of the legal ruling.
It says approximately 22 million women and girls of reproductive age in the United States are living in states where “abortion access is heavily restricted, and often totally inaccessible,” causing them to face a plethora of public health harms.
Of course, the letter writers think nothing of the harms which come to the unborn children who are slaughtered, all for the convenience of the pregnant woman. I’m reminded of Tuesday’s editorial in The Philadelphia Inquirer, in which the Editorial Board urged the City Council to rename Taney Street, named after Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott v Sandford decision, who wrote that blacks are “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The Editorial Board, as you might guess, are all in on supporting abortion rights, despite the fact that abortion means that unborn children are, to paraphrase, “so far inferior, that they had no rights which adults were bound to respect.”
“By overturning the established constitutional protection for access to abortion and through the passage of state laws, the US is in violation of its obligations under international human rights law,” it says, detailing violations to the right to life, health and privacy, among others.
U.N. human rights bodies have previously spoken out against last year’s ruling, calling it a “major setback” and a “huge blow to women’s human rights and gender equality.”
Apparently “women’s human rights and gender equality” don’t include the human rights of the children aborted, half of whom are girls.
“We sent this letter to draw the world’s attention to the suffering that US abortion law is inflicting on women, girls and others who can become pregnant,” Christine Ryan, legal director of the Global Justice Center, which uses international law to advocate for gender equality, said in an emailed statement.
There’s considerably more at the original, but it’s much the same as quoted above, a cry that women have rights and not-yet-born children have none, along with the call that the United Nations should Do Something to bring the United States into line.
Well, f(ornicate) that! The United Nations has no authority that the United States is, or ought to be, bound to respect.
Rigoberto Vasquez-Barradas, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.
Mr Vasquez-Barradas was arrested on Friday, January 20, 2023, which was 2½ weeks, or 17 days ago. According to the Fayette County Detention Center, Mr Vasquez-Barradas is still behind bars, facing the same charges as we detailed in our previous story, though it now states that he “can post property bond” to meet his $300,000 bail.
The Lexington city government has a rather sketchy record of posting information in a timely manner, but after 17 days have passed, the Lexington Police Department’s Homicide Investigations Page still does not show the fetal homicide Mr Vasquez-Barradas allegedly committed. That the suspect is still behind bars, or so the Fayette County Detention Center records show as of 1:00 PM EST,> and still charged with fetal homicide, tells us that yes, it’s still considered a murder, but the city, for some reason, does not show it as one.
So, I have to ask: does the city, in which the public officials all support abortion, simply not wish to state that a fetal homicide under state law is actually a homicide?
I’m not certain that there has ever been a Supreme Court decision which has ever provoked the mass hysteria and insanity that has attended Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision which overturned Roe v Wade. We’ve seen all sorts of whacky comments that the decision means the end of the right to use contraception, marry someone of a different race, and same-sex ‘marriage.’
But this story, from the supposedly very serious Washington Post, pretty much takes the cake!
Men rush to get vasectomies after Roe ruling
By Meena Venkataramanan | June 29, 2022 | 3:12 PM EDT
Thomas Figueroa always knew he didn’t want children. Growing up in Central Florida, he remembers his classmates getting pregnant as early as middle school, and had considered getting a vasectomy for the past few years.
But after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on Friday, he rushed to schedule one. He registered Monday for a vasectomy with Doug Stein, a Florida urologist known as the “Vasectomy King” for his advocacy of the procedure. Continue reading
It’s perhaps telling that Amanda Marcotte’s Twitter biography photo was taken in a bar.
While I knew that the left would wax apoplectic over the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, I was fully aware that Amanda Marcotte would go off the deep end far worse than some of the others. Miss Marcotte wrote:
As many who watch the Supreme Court closely suspected, it now appears all but certain that the draft decision was probably leaked by a conservative trying to pressure Chief Justice John Roberts into joining the majority opinion. That pressure, if that’s what it was, worked.
This is factually untrue. From the conclusion of the Syllabus in the Supreme Court’s release of the decision, found on page 8 of the document:
ALITO, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which THOMAS, GORSUCH, KAVANAUGH, and BARRETT, JJ., joined. THOMAS, J., and KAVANAUGH, J., filed concurring opinions. ROBERTS, C. J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment. BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., filed a dissenting opinion.
Translation: while the vote to reverse the decision of the Court of Appeals, 945 F. 3d 265, was 6-3, the Chief Justice did not join with the majority opinion, but wrote separately. While Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh also filed separate, concurring opinions, they signed onto Associate Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion. One thing is clear: Miss Marcotte did not actually read, at least not carefully, the actual decision.
It is also that, of the six justices who voted to uphold abortion bans, only one — Justice Clarence Thomas — was appointed by a president who won the majority of the vote. Both Trump and Bush obtained the White House, and the ability to nominate justices, because of the archaic electoral college system that overweighs the votes of rural whites and marginalizes the majority of Americans who support reproductive rights.
Again, this is factually untrue. While the younger George Bush received fewer popular votes than Vice President Al Gore in 2000, he not only won the popular vote in 2004, 62,040,610 to 59,028,444 for Senator John Kerry (D-M), but with a 50.7% to 48.3% margin, he won an absolute majority of all votes cast. John Roberts was appointed by the younger President Bush on July 19, 2005, which was in Mr Bush’s second term. Justice Alito was nominated on October 31, 2005, also during the President’s second term.
To compound the injustice of this, one of the Trump-nominated judges, Justice Neil Gorsuch, has no right to sit in his seat. He is only there because Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., illegally used his power as then-Senate Majority Leader to refuse to hold hearings for then-President Barack Obama’s 2020 nominee to the court, Merrick Garland.
“Illegally used”? I wonder: did Miss Marcotte ever claim that Senate Majority Leader Ton Daschle (D-SC) was “illegally us(ing)” his authority over the Senate’s schedule to deny votes to several of President Bush’s lower court nominees, stating that if they did not have the support of at least 60 members, the number required to break a filibuster, he would not allow a vote at all?
Of course, there is no law which compels the Senate to vote on any particular nomination. The Constitution, in Article I, Section 5, specifies that “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings.”
Instead, in a direct violation of his constitutional duties, McConnell held the seat open for a year. All so Republicans could install someone who could be counted on to ram through endless amounts of reactionary policies rejected by the American majority that wants a clean environment, sensible gun safety regulations, fair labor laws, and human rights.
Senator McConnell took a real gamble, a gamble that the Republican nominee would win the 2016 election. At the time he did this, Donald Trump was surging and leading in the Republican primaries, and all of the polls had him losing against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In refusing to allow Mr Garland to be confirmed, he was gambling that the (supposedly) more moderate Merrick Garland wouldn’t be replaced by a flaming leftist appointed by Mrs Clinton. We got lucky, and Mr Trump defeated Mrs Clinton.
And there’s no sign that the restlessness is going away. In his concurring opinion on Dobbs, Thomas openly invites lawsuits to challenge “all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” i.e. the decisions that secured the right to use birth control, the right to have sex with another consenting adult in the privacy of your home, and the right to marry someone of the same sex.
It is true that Justice Thomas has long been an opponent of the concept of “substantive due process,” not that Miss Marcotte has any flaming idea what substantive due process actually means, but it is also true that none of the other Justices joined Mr Thomas’ concurring opinion.[1]Justice Thomas concurring opinion begins on page 117 of the .pdf document. Rather, in the majority opinion, Justice Alito specified:[2]Page 66 of the Opinion of the Court, found on page 74 of the .pdf document. This is pointed out again on page 71 of the Opinion of the Court, page 79 of the .pdf document.
Unable to show concrete reliance on Roe and Casey themselves, the Solicitor General suggests that overruling those decisions would “threaten the Court’s precedents holding that the Due Process Clause protects other rights.” Brief for United States 26 (citing Obergefell, 576 U. S. 644; Lawrence, 539 U. S. 558; Griswold, 381 U. S. 479). That is not correct for reasons we have already discussed. As even the Casey plurality recognized, “[a]bortion is a unique act” because it terminates “life or potential life.” 505 U. S., at 852; see also Roe, 410 U. S., at 159 (abortion is “inherently different from marital intimacy,” “marriage,” or “procreation”). And to ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.
Miss Marcotte has long claimed that evil reich wing conservatives want to take away the right to use contraception, but when she tried to document this in her book It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments, the most up with which she could come is Quiverfull, a small sect about which Wikipedia said, “One 2006 estimate put the number of families which subscribe to this philosophy as ranging from ‘the thousands to the low tens of thousands’.”
Even taking the extreme position of Miss Marcotte that we evil reich wing conservatives want to ban contraception, it fails the logic test: while we might want our wives to bear us as many strong, fine sons as possible, we really don’t want our mistresses to get knocked up and cause us problems, or cost us child support.
Of course, if our mistresses are married to other men, we do want to get them pregnant, so other, weaker men will have to pay to rear our progeny. 🙂
Is there a sarcasm tag for the previous two paragraphs?
Of course, the author had absolutely no problem with vaccine mandates for COVID-19.
References
| ↑1 | Justice Thomas concurring opinion begins on page 117 of the .pdf document. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | Page 66 of the Opinion of the Court, found on page 74 of the .pdf document. This is pointed out again on page 71 of the Opinion of the Court, page 79 of the .pdf document. |
It can get amusing when the Editorial Board of the San Francisco Examiner decides to appeal to His Holiness Pope Francis to get rid of a Catholic Archbishop who is actually, you know, Catholic!
Editorial: Attack on Nancy Pelosi should be San Francisco archbishop’s final act here
Cordileone denies Catholic Pelosi communion due to abortion right support
By The Examiner Editorial Board • May 21, 2022 • 6:00 AM PDT
In open defiance of Pope Francis, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone on Friday banned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from taking Holy Communion here in her home diocese. The reason? Her strong support of women’s abortion rights.
Cordileone’s decree was guaranteed to provoke deep chagrin among San Francisco Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Last year, Cordileone joined other bishops in the United States as they pushed to ban President Joe Biden from taking Communion. Pope Francis headed off that divisive idea, stating that Communion “is not the reward of saints, but is the bread of sinners.” He also told pro-choice President Biden that he is a “good Catholic.” Continue reading
