(Zenit.org).-
Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor looked at the bright side, after noting the disappointment brought by parliamentarians who voted to leave the upper time limit for Britain's abortion law at 24 weeks of gestation.
The vote rejected a proposal to lower the time limit to 12, 16, 20 or even 22 weeks, based on research showing that babies are more and more able to survive outside the womb at earlier points of gestation.
Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor said in a Wednesday statement: "Many people [...] will have been very disappointed by the result of last night's votes on the abortion time limit. But this issue will not go away.
"While the law affects attitudes, it does not in itself compel anyone to have an abortion. Even without a change in the law there is much we can all do to change the situation.
"There are many people on all sides of this debate who agree that 200,000 abortions a year is far too many, and abortion on this scale can only be a source of profound sadness and distress to us all."
The cardinal affirmed that abortion is not just a "personal choice. It is also about the choices our society makes to support women, their partners and families who face difficult decisions."
"For the sake of our common humanity, and the lives at stake, we must work to foster a new understanding and approach to relationships, responsibility and mutual support," he urged. "Even without a change in the law we can and should work together at least to make abortion much rarer."
Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor looked at the bright side, after noting the disappointment brought by parliamentarians who voted to leave the upper time limit for Britain's abortion law at 24 weeks of gestation.
The vote rejected a proposal to lower the time limit to 12, 16, 20 or even 22 weeks, based on research showing that babies are more and more able to survive outside the womb at earlier points of gestation.
Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor said in a Wednesday statement: "Many people [...] will have been very disappointed by the result of last night's votes on the abortion time limit. But this issue will not go away.
"While the law affects attitudes, it does not in itself compel anyone to have an abortion. Even without a change in the law there is much we can all do to change the situation.
"There are many people on all sides of this debate who agree that 200,000 abortions a year is far too many, and abortion on this scale can only be a source of profound sadness and distress to us all."
The cardinal affirmed that abortion is not just a "personal choice. It is also about the choices our society makes to support women, their partners and families who face difficult decisions."
"For the sake of our common humanity, and the lives at stake, we must work to foster a new understanding and approach to relationships, responsibility and mutual support," he urged. "Even without a change in the law we can and should work together at least to make abortion much rarer."
37 comments:
200,000 abortions far too many, Eminence. One is far too many.
Abortion is murder.
tjp.
Surely what His Eminence meant to say was ".....we can and should work together to eradicate the abortion law from the statute, because it is one of the gravest sins that cries out to Heaven.
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This language of making abortion 'rare' and 200,000 being 'too many' is totally misguided. There is nothing positive, no cheer, that can be gained from the events of the last two weeks in the mother of parliaments. There is now nothing sacred about human life, and the principle that law should make the possible legal has been fully adopted.
Personally, I think the pro-life movement came off badly in this debate. It was misguided to seek anti-abortion amendments to a government Bill that, of its very nature, is geared towards the liberalising of laws in other respects but did not touch abortion. All the energy should have gone into debating the other matters. SPUC predicted that now is not the time to seek to amend the abortion laws - the anti life lobby is too strong.
Father Joe Boyle must understand that there is no Pro-Life "movement" in the UK. There are, rather a number of cliques, some more silly, self-serving and pointlessly oppositionalist than others.
The jury is out as to whether abortion amendments should or should not have been buckled onto the HFE Bill given the chronically disorganised state and embarrassing political inexperience of the cliques.
What should not be in doubt, however, is that there was a genuine, historic opportunity to achieve reductions in the abortion time limit, possibly tighten up the working of the Abortion Act on the back of the wave of public empathy for the unborn child prompted by Stuart Campbell's 4D pictures.
A movement would have been able to achieve that result. Cliques led by self-appointed millionairess busybodies with no relevant experience in any related field can't.
I don't know why Father Joe Boyle quotes SPUC as authoritative source on these matters. SPUC has a policy of non-engagement in British politics and indeed has no expertise in politics whatsoever. It's widely said that thanks to SPUC's wrecking tactics, the Mental Capacity Act was passed in a vastly worse state that Pro-Life parliamentarians anticipated. It's precisely because of this sort of thing that certain bishops hold SPUC very much at arms length, some reputedly refusing to allow it to hold White Flower appeals in their dioceses and very sensible too.
John Smeaton spends his time and his membership's money in issuing irrelevant epistles to former prime ministers (which predictably go unanswered) and demanding that Archbishops explain themselves to him. He's less keen to engage in debate himself however; his blog very conspicuously lacks a comments facility.
It's precisely these pompous, dictatorial attitudes, top-down, undemocratic, hostile to criticism, which prevents a genuine Pro-Life movement from being built and from achieving real political results.
And be in no doubt what those real political results would mean in terms of lives saved.
The historic opportunity to save lives has not yet passed. Public disquiet about abortion is still discernable. But it is a genuine, grassroots led, internally-healthy Pro-Life movement which is most likely to be able to take advantage of these favourable circumstances.
The debate between gradualists and total abolitionists in Pro-Life will go on. Total abolitionists must ask themselves how exactly they plan to abolish legal abortion over night and how many extra deaths they are prepared to countenance in the meantime. They must ask themselves whether doing nothing is an option when everything can't be done. They will have to square with their own consciences why they don't strain every sinew to prevent a late term foetus from being given a lethal injection in its heart because they can't outlaw all abortions immediately.
Well, I thought the Cardinal's article was excellent. He is right that the debate has not ended. The fact that the embryology measures are now fused with abortion in the public debate is good, because it points to the significance of conception.
Politics may have just taken a very decisive change this week. It is going to be much harder for pro-abortion MPs to get elected. Watch what happens at the next General Election. I reckon the House will be much more pro-life, and much more amenable to lowering the abortion limit.
This week much evil has been exposed. That is a great step.
Simon Heffer who usually appears to live on a different Planet did pose a pertinent question in todays Telegraph,he asks "why is an abortion at 23 weeks not murder?"
Perhaps the berks who rule us could answer this question.
This may sound odd coming from me, but when I read this, I couldn't help but be grateful that His E. had put the caveat "at least" in there. I am the last to suggest that Cardinal Cormac is a great pro-life campaigner, but he has never fallen into the "rare" fallacy. He has made his stand quite clear many times that , at least in public, he is with the Church on abortion. Obviously he could have said something stronger, but no one expects this from the man who smiled bucolically through Tony Blair's speech at Westminster. He has said many times that abortion is bad always and forever. When he said "rare" I was greatly relieved to see the "at least" preceding it.
The Catholic "pro-life" position makes little sense to most non-Catholics. This is not surprising since it needs to be seen within the overall context of Catholic Social Teaching, about which there is a shameful reluctance on the part of the laity to engage ourselves in, as we are required to do.
Were we to do so, we would have a relevant Catholic position to put forward on the entire spectrum of social and ethical issues, and in that context, our pro-life stance would be better understood as part of a comprehensive way of viewing man's place in the world and the cosmos, and its relationship to God, which is what the Catholic faith comprises.
As long as we maintain our narrow focus we will be seen as narrow-minded. And ignored.
Henry - I think the social teaching is lower down the ladder on this one. This transgression from the natural order betrays something much more basic in the hierarchy of truths. It goes against life itself, and Human life, at that, which we are taught is the summit of God's creation.
This could not be more serious.
I really don't get you Henry.
What is so difficult, complex and nuanced about "You can't kill people to solve your problems"
You seem to have forgotten taht "Catholic social teaching" is based in the natural law that everyone can get pretty easily.
The "Catholic" "position" on abortion is about the same as everyone's "position" on premeditated murder. You really don't need a whole lot of "context" to get this.
The other fallacy here Henry, is to say that the pro-life position (You can't kill people to solve your problems, not now, not ever, not even when you can't see the person, or the person is very small.") is only a Catholic thing, and that only a person with a full grasp of Catholic social teaching can hold a pro-life position.
You have implied that only after the entirety of Catholic social teaching is explicated and grasped, can we make a case against abortion. But this is, not to put too fine a point on it, crap.
I don't know about you, but I've been able to make the case very clearly to school children in less than an hour in such a way as they understood it completely. Forgive me, but what is so complex about "you can't kill people to solve your problems"? Why is this so very difficult for the sooo sophisticated English politicians. The ten year-old kids in the classes I've addressed have grasped it pretty quickly, and I'm fairly sure none of them had ever heard of Catholic social teaching.
This is because the prohibition against abortion is the precise prohibition that every culture in the world held until recently as the foundation of moral life: you can't kill people to solve your problems.
It is also crap because the pro-life position (ie: "you can't kill people to solve your problems") is held by lots of people, quite comprehensively and intelligently. By people who are not Catholics and have never heard and never will hear of Catholic social teaching. I know plenty of atheists, Jews, Muslims, and more Prods than you can shake a stick at, who are totally and completely pro-life.
...and who aren't looking around for excuses not to talk about it because it is a politically "embarrassing" viewpoint.
Man, I've never come across a bigger bunch of nellies than the English on this subject.
Face it. The pro-life position isn't the cool kids position. You aren't going to make cool, hip or trendy friends when you hold it. You aren't going to get invited to the right sort of cocktail parties.
Suck. It. Up.
But I have faith in you Henry.
If my lapsed Methodist aunt can get it, (in the ten minutes it took to explain it to her) I'm sure you will manage eventually.
Hillary, please remember the UK is a non Catholic society where unborn children are seen as blobs of jelly or at best, limbs of the mother. I don't agree with that position but it is impossible to make the argument in a convincing way to those people, who just marginalise us as cranks, bigots etc concerned about one single isolated issue. Which achieves nothing, as we have just seen.
Catholic Social Teaching if properly followed would prevent many of the problems which lead members of the substantial and vociferous and influential and powerful right-to-choose lobby to imagine can be solved by killing people.
But we are ourselves very much to blame for conniving at at situation where both parents are obliged to go out to work absurdly long hours and neglect their families in order to pay for cramped and overpriced housing with insufficient space for their children. That such a state of affairs exists, particularly in the UK, is a consequence of having an entire economic system which is in contravention of the natural law. Yet we are silent on that and speak out only when the problems caused by flouting of the natural law build up and lead to people seeing worse contraventions as the way out of their problems.
We Catholics are not listened to partly because we have abrogated our responsibilities.
Yep, a non catholic society that managed to grasp the concept that you can't kill babies for its entire protestant history until 1967.
You are still making an error in perpetuating the myth that opposition to abortion is exclusively "Catholic doctrine" or "Catholic social teaching"
It is not. And you don't have to be Catholic to understand it.
One of the many things that I have seen is missing in the British pro-life "movement" is a basic grasp of pro-life apologetics. Pro-life 101 has exactly nothing to do with Catholicism.
For Catholics to understand and properly expound Catholic social teaching (and I am assuming we are both talking about real Catholic social teaching, as explicated by the 19th century Popes, ie: the social reign of Christ the King amd not the warmed-over socialism that is passed off as Catholic social teaching in our pomo Churc), is undoubtedly a good thing.
But we fall instantly into a bigger hole than ever if we admit to the foolish journalistic accusation fostered by the BBC/Guardian/Reuters axis, if we hold that the pro-life position is necessarily a Catholic one. It is also quite insulting to the thousands of protestants who have laboured tirelessly for the pro-life movement and unswervingly hold comprehensively pro-life positions in the face of precisely the accusations you are listing (being a crank, etc).
We fall into their trap when we try to excuse the pro-life position by saying, "Oh, it's part of this great and glorious thing, Catholic social teaching, that is terribly complex".
India is also a non-Catholic society, as is the Netherlands, but the pro-life people there (non-Catholics themselves) don't use the excuse to avoid talking intelligently about the life issues without worrying about what everyone is going to think.
Sorry Henry, but it's still a red herring.
And a lame excuse.
What achieves nothing in Parliament is a pro-life movement that refuses to adopt a pro-life position and expound it intelligently and energetically to the public because it is terrified of being labelled a crank.
Where are the Pro-Life 101 training seminars? Where are the teams of happy and articulate young pro-life activists going into schools to teach students what being pro-life means? Where are the television appearances of these people defending the position on the housewife talkshows? Where are the newspaper editorials?
Where are the pro-lifers?
Cowering in terror of being kicked out of the book reading and gardening clubs?
Silent for fear of being seen to be a bit odd?
The "right to choose lobby" as you call it, has grown so powerful in this country because it has, as far as I can see, gone unanswered.
I asked a Protestant friend of mine tonight whether, since he had being going to the Anglican Church, he had heard one sermon preached against the HFE bill or abortion. He replied, "Not one. We don't see the beginning of life in quite the same way that you do."
For me, that speaks volumes! Here we are, a nation with an established Church (the Catholic Church is still a minority religion in this country as we know), and the Anglican Church can't even raise their voice to their congregation on this issue.
Don't get me wrong, I look back now and think I was lazy in not campaigning more against the bill, too busy with my own selfish pursuits. But it goes to show that no, it isn't true that all Christians, all faiths, many different people, see this as a "Life Issue". We ARE on our own on this one, because we ARE the only people proclaiming the sanctity of life from conception to death. Correct me if I am wrong, but British Muslims are not up in arms about this bill. Their silence is deafening! Here is one thing on which all faiths can unite, surely, the sanctity of human life, yet our Catholic leaders are again the voice in the wilderness. Vociferous, yet ignored.
Hillary
I am as pro-life as anyone, AND we must appreciate that it goes way beyond beginning of life issues. Pro-life is a set of concerns that go from conception to death and beyond.
To judge by the phrasing of your comments I would assume that you are (a) from the USA and (b) fully in agreement with free market Capitalism, a loose term I know but we are probably talking about the same thing, which in the US takes the most vicious form through the privileges accorded to large corporations. Such as system is just as anti-pro-life as easily available abortion. So do you campaign against it?
Catholic Social Teaching has nothing to do with what you refer to as watered-down socialism, which is little more than state capitalism with a mask in the form of a human face. The term, as you should know, refers to the series of encyclicals beginning with Rerum Novarum. They are far more radical than any socialist doctrine and would indeed get us into difficulties with the powers that be if we attempted to promote them.
The general problem of getting people to see our point of view is that the notion that early life is no more than a blob of jelly is impossible to shift without first shifting the prevailing blindness in British society, probably in Western society. That is what has to be addressed first.
And perhaps you might like to answer this. Whilst on holiday I stayed with a retired doctor who had as a young man worked in a gynaecological ward in the late 1940s. I came under attack for being the bearer of the Catholic church's position on abortion. He pointed out that most of the women in his care were there for him to try to patch up the consequences of botched illegal abortions. Sometimes the women died. What is the response to that? Sorry I could not think of one.
Be a good thing to start at the beginning though hey?
Or how 'bout in the middle.
or how about at all...
Not much good saying that the game of cricket is so complicated and difficult to master that no one should ever play it until he is ready for the pro leagues (I assume there are pro leagues for cricket).
Answer:
Sometimes people die of heroin use. The solution is not to make heroin use legal. Abortion is dangerous, whether it is legal or not. The notion that making a dangerous thing legal will make it "safe" is one of the biggest deceptions of the abortion lobby.
I'm afraid you are not convincing me that you are sincerely pro-life, frankly. The more you go on about how we dare not mention our opposition to abortion until the entirety of C.S. teaching is fully explicated, the more I am convinced that you simply do not want to say unpopular things.
The Church's prohbition against abortion has exactly (as I've said) NOTHING to do with social teaching.
It has to do with the Ten Commandments and the people who want to ignore that are the ones you are never going to convince, no matter how much fluff one spews about Catholic social teaching.
Our enemies will continue to assert that we are crazy, not because they think it is true, but because it is an easy way to dismiss us.
And there is not thing one we can do about that.
I'm afraid it all still looks like you trying to weasel out of saying boldly what is plainly true and simple to understand. It is unpopular not because it is difficult to understand, quite the contrary. It is unpopular because it results in the inevitable conclusion that the pro-abort must change his lifestyle.
People like abortion because it enables them to sleep around. Particularly men.
I admit that talking about Catholic social teaching will make us sound more noble, deep and sophisticated, will likely even get us invited to give noble-sounding blather at Westminster Cathedral about "Faith and public life"
Meanwhile, people want to screw each other without consequences and that is why abortion continues. Your problem is that it isn't nice to say that whilst standing at the pulpit with the bucolic Cardinal smiling behind you.
The general problem of getting people to see our point of view is that the notion that early life is no more than a blob of jelly is impossible to shift
So, to recap. You're making a fundamental error. People who like abortion like it not for anything like an intellectual reason. If they used their intellect about it for ten minutes, they would be forced to admit (as I have seen them do) that abortion kills someone.
What you are failing to take into account the fact that by the fourth grade in school, everyone already knows where babies come from. NO ONE believes there is a blob of jelly there, or there would be no such thing as post abortion trauma.
What we don't like about pro-lifers is not that they have crazy political ideas. Those are just convenient bludgeons with which to shut them up (works too dunnit!). What we don't like about pro-lifers is that they tell us what we already know and are trying desperately to make go away.
Sex makes babies and abortion makes baby-free sex possible. That it results in the death of a child is something we don't want to think about so we come up with as many vitriolic insults we can think of, we ostracize as much as possible the people telling us, so we can carry on ignoring them and screwing around.
If you think there is any important and sophisticated rationale behind all that, you are as deluded as they are.
Had a very interesting experience once in a school. Started the day with the younger kids in grade eight (about 12 and 13) and they got the facts very quickly. By the end of it, they were cheering me and pledging to stop abortion themselves.
But by the time we had worked our way into the older grades, the kids (who at 16 were probably already screwing each other) didn't take even ten minutes to figure out that what I had to tell them would necessitate them either not screwing around or admitting that they were willing to kill to continue.
It is the inescapable bleakness of the choice that makes people hostile to us, not the purported lack of sophistication of the message.
But of course, it has ever been the weakness of the left to fail to observe anything real about human nature.
And as for free market capitalism being the heart of the abortion problem: tell that to the Russians.
But Henry, I do thank you for once again making my point. I keep saying that although there may be pro-life people, or at least people with vaguely pro-life sentiments in Britain, they do not know the pro-life position well enough to defend it. That little slogan, "but women died from backalley abortions, and therefore abortion should be legal" is one of the top five most popular and is among the first that a pro-life advocate is required to answer. It is the most basic of the pro-life apologetics questions. The fact that you cannot answer it tells me all I need to know.
I think Henry is coming in for a bit of an unfair battering there. Sounds to me like he is pro-life, but he is placing it in the wider context of a society that does not care for the dignity of the human being full stop. A society in which people kick beggars to death in their sleeping bags (it seems to be happening in Brighton alot at the moment) will be a society which kills its unborn children. A society which values people on what they earn, how much is in their bank account and what car they drive will be a society which places no value on the defenceless unborn at all. But as we all here agree we DO have to defend life from conception to death.
hjmw - I would like you to accompany me so that you can give your glib answers to people who have worked on the front line. Then see how convincingly you have put your case. Or even if anyone will bother to give you a hearing.
People have abortions for all sorts of reasons ranging from the trivial to the substantial eg having the child would be a mild inconvenience or they can't afford it or the mother lacks the strength or was pregnant as a result of rape.
Incidentally there is little in Catholic Social Teaching that is not directly derived from the Ten Commandments. Both the Capitalist and Socialist systems of economics are based on theft, so no surprise that all sorts of other evils are associated with both systems.
Done it:
http://www.abortionno.org/
about_us.html
That is without doubt the most distressing and shocking video I have I have seen in my entire life.
hjw - THAT is what those who argue for the "Right to choose" need to see. I have added it to my own blog.
hjw - the video makes the case well and I have just put up a link to it from my own blog but that was a relatively late stage abortion was it not? Fifteen weeks at least, I would guess. And that is not enough to support the case for reducing the date of abortion to less than say ten weeks. How can the case be made for banning abortion at the "blob of jelly stage"? Because that is one of the arguments we are up against. If you read the "progressive" UK press you will have a better idea of what we have to counter.
The avoidance of pain argument would take the limit down to, probably, ten weeks, which would be a good start. Which makes me wonder if the whole issue might not be taken to the European Court of Human Rights. It may be that this cause is more likely to be won in the courts than in the political arena and could be a worthwhile course to pursue. It is always a good thing for the evil and tyrannical and utterly incompetent British government to get a good kicking.
How one takes the limit down to the moment of conception, which is the logic of our position, is another matter.
I think you missed the point of the link.
The Genocide Awareness Project and its attendant intensive training in pro-life apologetics was what I was trying to steer you to, not just a single video.
This is the whole crux of the matter. In the US, and increasingly in Canada, there is a phalanx of pro-life activists who are receiving this training which is comprehensive and capable of answering smoothly and simply all of the accusations and slogans of the abortion movement. It is training in making the case with no references whatever to religion.
It is apparently desperately needed here, where even the people who claim to be pro-life support abortion, IVF and "a woman's right to choose", and have no answer for the simplest of abortion slogans, are left dumb and helpless at the most elementary of their assertions and who cannot disentangle the most obvious of their logical contradictions.
Trust me Henry, the progressive UK press makes arguments and points identical in every respect to every other mass media in the English speaking world.
When I started doing pro-life apologetics training ten years ago, I was told that there were only five or six standard assertions made by the pro-abort movement. I thought that this could not be so, there had to be more to it than this. Naive me! When I got into the field, I discovered it is absolutely true. There has been no deviation in 40 years from the standard lines. You hear them in different forms, but they all boil down EVERY time to the same five slogans.
But this is not the place to give the lecture, and as I've said, I'm retired and have no wish to evangelize the British pro-lifers. I have seen that they are dedicated to their own safety and have no wish to learn anything new.
If you want, look it up. Do the work. But believe me when I say that I have never seen a group of people more poorly informed and complacent than the British pro-lifers. There are a few people who seem to be trying, but they have no idea where to go to find what they need and with the education system having broken down, seem to lack the ability to develop it for themselves. Elementary methods of logical reasoning have not been taught here for decades. There will not be another C.S. Lewis in this country for some time, if ever.
But if you do want to put the work in, I'd suggest just putting the keywords "Pro-life apologetics" into Google. I'd recommend starting with Scott Klusendorf's work. But I warn you, there is no place in it for woolly-headed leftism.
hjw - What is this comment of yours about "wooly-headed leftism"?
I am no supporter of the political left (or the right, for that matter - a plague on both their houses), but this reveals a particular agenda.
I wonder if you have ever expressed views about, for example, cluster bombs, land mines, nuclear weapons, the illegal Iraq invasion or the use of spent uranium in anti-tank weapons, all of which produce effects closely resembling those in the video? Or capital punishment, for that matter?
The way that the anti abortion issue has been captured by the "Religious Right" is as strange as the way it has been ignored by human rights activists and animal welfarists.
In both instances there is what I think is now referred to as a cognitive disjunction.
'cluster bombs'
not my department. But the left in the Church certainly seems to enjoy banging on about it and about "unjust systems of economics" and seems incapable of examining any moral question outside the framework of their economic obsessions.
I wonder if your grasp of what constitutes leftism is as firm as your grasp on the life issues?
As for capital punishment, the Church does not now and never has taught that it is forbidden for states to execute criminals. I support the death penalty and have no moral qualms about it as a Catholic.
'the illegal invasion of Iraq'
why do I think you're just another typical Catho-marxist?
Cant
imagine.
Henry,
You are correct to perceive an agenda in HJMW's tendentious posts. Aside from the crude red-bashing (her understanding of Marxism, Labourism or Liberal Leftism leaves much to be desired) it includes toxic Islamophobia, blatant racism and support for the violent anti-democratic BNP. In other words, it is the antithesis of Pro-Life.
It is for these reasons that the All Party Parliamentary Pro Life Group would never work with her.
She doesn't like it when these things are pointed out and typically affects an air of persecution when they are. It's undoubtedly the reason she's recently restricted her blog to invited readers only. That was after a poor attempt at self-censorship saw her delete a number of candid posts - such as those lauding the BNP and youtube videos of wannabe fuhrer Nick Griffin's speeches - from her blog.
The British Pro-Life movement may have its problems but one thing it is not is a cover for extreme right wing, violent politics.
One thing it is, is firmly anti-racist, firmly anti-sectarian, firmly anti-violence and open to people of any ethnic origin and all religious backgrounds and none.
Anastasia,
I note that Fr Blake does not "link" to Ms White's blogsite. If I had one neither would I.
Ms White expresses social views which are barely within the magisterium.
She is a member of the BNP. Her type of anti-abortion views are actually anti-Life and damaging to the Pro-Life and Catholic cause. They show the danger of somethiong which is profoundly good being infiltrated by the profoundly bad.
Ah yes, the very helpful ad hominem dodge. So familiar.
There's a name for this in politics. the Something Law...can't quite remember. But it goes something like, "The first one to shout 'racist' has conceded the argument."
Thankyou Richard, you're spot on. I noticed that Father Ray hadn't linked to Hilary White just as I noticed that Hilary didn't (publically at least) evince a smidgeon of sympathy for him when he disclosed that he'd been a victim of a fascist attack. As ever she played the victim card herself, as she always does, when her open BNP sympathies are commented on. The BNP's well-documented record of violence is something she has not once found it in herself to condemn. Not even once.
Sorry Hilary but pointing out that you are a BNP sympathiser isn't an ad hominem or even an ad feminam dodge it's a simple statement of fact. You shout(ed) it from your blogs' rooftops afterall. Before feverishly deleting the more outrageous posts, that is.
Just as pointing out that racist or fascist sentiments are incompatible with Pro-Life is a simple statement of fact.
And that you have sod all knowledge of the Marxist, Labourite, Liberal or Christian Left in the UK is another simple statement of fact.
And er, what's that word for someone who lionises Nick Griffin, favourably comments on and links to the violent BNP as well as the whites-only Steadfast Trust?
What's the word for someone who posts the following inflammatory trash on their blog? This is a direct quotation from your own blog, Hilary:
*******
http://anglocath.blogspot.com/2008/04/muslim-occupied-churches-of-europe.html
Monday, April 14, 2008
The Muslim-occupied churches of Europe
The church of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, Brussels
From the indispensable Brussel's Journal:
Altar of Our Lady of Sorrows
a confessional.
Are we there yet?
And if not, how much further can we watch the Islamic occupation and desecration of our Catholic patrimony? How much longer can we stand by watching the smiling hierarchy holding the door open for these savages to squat [literally] in our most sacred sites?
"...in Florence, [Orianna Felacci's] hometown, in 1999. As a political protest, Moslems erected a tent on Cathedral Square and lived in it for 3 ½ months. Fallaci describes their behaviour, including how they would piss and shit on the church. She shows you that they were exhibiting not a mere lack of respect for her culture, but out-and-out contempt and disdain.
But people are afraid to react because if you criticise or object to their actions, you will be accused of being a racist. And everyone in Europe is afraid to be labelled a racist.
Fallaci wonders how so many Moslems get to Europe, and where they get the money. She wonders if they are being funded – sent over by “some Ousama Bin Ladin for the mere purpose of establishing the Reverse Crusade’s settlements and better organising Islamic terrorism.”
I'd just like to note: I'm starting to be quite keen on being called a 'racist'.
H/T to Kathy
Posted by Hilary Jane Margaret White at 11:52 AM
Labels: Islamonausea, xenophobophiliac
*******
I'll tell you what that is, Hilary. It's one of the most shameless examples I've seen of a minority group being libelled and caricatured since Der Sturmer and as a lifelong Pro-Lifer and Roman Catholic I protest against it.
As a Pro-Lifer I protest against your description of fellow humans as "savages".
As a Roman Catholic and a Pro-Lifer I protest against your misrepresentation and scorning of the charity extended by a church in Brussels to asylum seekers.
As a Roman Catholic I protest against the inflammatory lie you deliberately and maliciously spread that the church was desecrated.
You wrote what you did in full knowledge of the possible consequences not just for the asylum-seekers within the Brussels church but those without. Mob riots have been sparked by less. In other words, you were careless with their lives.
This sort of stuff isn't just not Pro-Life, it's a contradiction of everything Pro-Life stands for. You cannot be Pro-Life and support a violent, racist fascist party. You are not Pro-Life if you deliberately spread inflammatory lies about a particular group of people knowing that lives may be endangered as a result.
Unless and until Hilary White publically repudiates the BNP, The Green Arrow Forum and The Steadfast Trust and disowns the racist comments she has made as well as the inflammatory lies she has spread about Moslems desecrating churches she is unwelcome in any campaign, project or initiative the All Party Parliamentary Pro Life Group is involved in. It's as simple as that.
So. Suck. It. Up.
It's all in cache memory, backed up on file and in print. Triple Lock.
Pro-Life means
No racism
No fascism
No violence
Period.
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