August 29, 2015 Pro Life Rally in Petoskey

Driving over here from Harbor Springs, Polly and I noticed just a little bit of fall color in some of the trees. Summer is almost over. Labor Day is coming. Soon enough, here in God’s country, we will be surrounded by the spectacular symphony of nature preparing to renew itself through the long sleep of Winter.

And we wondered how many people would be here at the Knights of Columbus Hall. How many folks would put aside their Saturday chores, their golf clubs, or fishing gear, or their gardening tools to gather in this place and listen to speeches?

It’s a fair question to ask: why are we here? Just what exactly are we doing?

I’ll tell you what we are doing.

We are making a statement. That is what we are doing. We are standing up for America. We are standing up for Michigan. We are standing up for Petoskey and Harbor Springs, and all the good people who pay the taxes and fight the wars and pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

We came here to make a statement. We gathered here, because we believe that abortion is wrong. Because abortion stops a human heart. Because abortion is the deliberate killing of a human being. Because abortion is a death penalty carried out on an innocent human being. Without a trial. Without a jury. Without any due process of law.

We came here because Planned Parenthood of America is the symbol and the trademark of a poisonous public policy that is pushing our nation down the wrong road.

It’s a public policy approved by an arrogant, ego centric Supreme Court. It is a policy funded by a lobby-loving Congress; it is a suicidal public policy that has, in the last 42 years, witnessed, enabled, and has actually celebrated the annihilation of 60 million Americans.

The pro abortion Guttmacher Institute reports an actual count of 57 million, 762 thousand, 169 abortions and they brag about it.

Think about it. Sixty million Americans. That’s more than the combined population of California and New York. A little closer to home, my friends, for those of you who follow Big Ten sports, just think about this: sixty million people is more than the combined populations of Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa.

We’re talking about sixty million human beings denied the basic human right to be born. Sixty million children who will never go to school or go to college, or learn a trade or get married or vote. Sixty million Americans who will never pay taxes or answer the call to defend our homeland from its enemies.

How could this have happened in America? How did we come to this insanity in the land of the free and the home of the brave?  How did a nation dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all of God’s children come to adopt a public policy of genocide?

Hitler killed six million Jews and took the gold from their teeth. Planned Parenthood and their ilk have exterminated ten times as many people and sold their livers and kidneys to the highest bidders.

We have come here today to tell the world that Margaret Sanger was wrong.

Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood. They still honor her as their hero. Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist. She wanted to improve the human race. She thought Americans were having too many babies. Not just too many babies. She thought Americans were having too many of the wrong kind of babies.

Believe me: Margaret Sanger didn’t think that black lives matter. She didn’t think that the poor people should have so many children. People who live in tenements. People who work two jobs to put food on the table. People who didn’t come from the right side of the tracks. The low class. The Underclass. The Uneducated.

Margaret Sanger had a vision of a nation that would be populated by people chosen for their blood line, just like horses and dogs. The good people. The best people. The Upper class.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty obvious that much of  Margaret Sanger’s vision has come to pass in America. We have witnessed the transition of our nation from a democratic republic to a bureaucratic oligarchy run, not by the people, but by a ruling political class who think they are the brightest and the best and who believe that they were born to tell the rest of us what kind of light bulbs to use and how much water to flush down the toilet.

And how many infants should be allowed to see the light of day.

My friends, we have come here today to tell the world that we reject the ideas of Margaret Sanger. We have come here today to protest the destructive activities of Planned Parenthood of America.

We have come here to join with thousands upon thousands of Americans all across this great land to send this message to the Congress of the United States:

Stop funding abortions! Stop paying for genocide! Stop using our tax dollars to eliminate black people or poor people or working people.

Stop spending our money to kill little boys and girls just because their mothers don't love them.

And for the love of God, please, please stop sending our money to Planned Parenthood of America.

If our Representatives in the Congress have any shred of decency, any modicum of respect for the dignity and sanctity of human life, they must not; they cannot be allowed to finance the harvesting of body parts from the unborn. 

Margaret Sanger’s blueprint for racial cleansing written in the 1920’s was echoed by Adolph Hitler in the 1930’s. It has nothing to do with women’s health care; it has everything to do with the politics of elitism and racism and class warfare.

The American people fought a bloody civil war in the nineteenth century to establish the sacred truth that no person can own another human being. The infant entrusted by the laws of nature to the care and protection of a mother’s body is not hers to destroy or to cut up and market by the piece.

She has no right to do it; and she has no right to authorize Planned Parenthood do it. Chopping up little babies to sell their body parts is wrong. It is just plain wrong.

And that brings me to a final point. Supporters of Planned Parenthood love to snicker that everyone who opposes them is just trying to impose religious beliefs on them. They love to identify protesters such as you and I, as Catholics or evangelical Christians.

The fact is that the prohibition of abortion is older than Christianity. It comes from the Hippocratic Oath written in Greek five centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ to define the ethics of the medical profession.

What the Greeks discovered from logic and human experience is still wise public policy for us today. Even if we forget religion; even if we ignore the moral  question of right and wrong; does anyone dispute the fact that America would be bigger and better, and stronger, and more prosperous, more powerful and more secure if we had those 60 million Americans living among us in 2015?

I don’t know about you people. But I am waiting for one of those 20 or 30 candidates who want to be the President of he United States to stand up and say that abortion ranks with slavery as the greatest curse and shame of America, and that its abolition is not only morally right, it is economically sound public policy and common sense. 

The United States of America is our country. We are the people; the ordinary folks; the common every day men and women who make this country good and make our nation the greatest place on the face of the earth.

What we say here today, my friends, won’t be reported in the New York Times. We may not go viral on the Internet or catch the attention of the talking heads on television. But I can tell you this and you can take it to the bank:

We are the people; and in the United States of America, the the people really matter. We all matter. black, white, born and unborn. Old folks matter. Babies matter.

You and I didn’t come here today just to make a little local fuss. We are part of a growing chorus of national protest against the criminal abortion culture which is dehumanizing its victims and snuffing out whole generations of our posterity.

It is already autumn in America. The political landscape is changing. We are already engaged in the long and difficult battle for the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens. And we will not back off. We will not back down. We will not compromise with Margaret Sanger.

In a little while you and I will go home. But we will not forget why we came here. And we will not rest until the scourge of genocide has been torn from the pages of American history.

DEAR CANDIDATE

         Literally hundreds of people have registered with the Federal Election Commission as candidates for President in 2016. At this writing only 22 of them are being touted as serious contenders.

         Two days ago, I sent each of those 22 candidates a letter by certified mail, asking them to answer these twenty-three questions:

CANDIDATE SURVEY ON CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUES

1.    Do you favor the calling of a convention to propose constitutional amendments as provided in Article V of the United States Constitution?                                                               YES   NO

2.    Do you favor repeal of the 23^rd Amendment and restoration of Maryland and Virginia citizenship to residents of the District of Columbia?                                                                  YES    NO

3.    Would you favor an amendment to require non partisan nomination of Supreme Court Justices?                                                      YES   NO

4.    Would you favor term limits for Supreme Court Justices? YES NO

5.    Would you favor an amendment prohibiting the Supreme Court from rendering any opinion expanding or diminishing the powers of the government or the rights of the people?                       YES   NO

6.    Would you favor establishing a constitutional ratio of constituents to members of the House of Representatives?                      YES   NO  

7.    Do you favor a constitutional requirement that House of Representative districts be drawn along county or municipal boundaries?                                                                         YES   NO

8.    Would you favor an amendment prohibiting voting for more than one member of the House of representatives?                       YES   NO

9.    Would you favor an amendment requiring members of the House of Representatives to reside in their districts?                        YES   NO

10. Do you favor an amendment limiting all Bills in the Congress to a single subject, clearly stated in the title?                      YES         NO

11. Do you favor the repeal of the 17^th Amendment and a requirement that voting in the Senate be by States?                               YES   NO

12. Do you favor term limits for members of the House of Representatives and the Senate?                                      YES   NO

13.  Do you favor the “Jefferson Amendment” prohibiting Congress from    borrowing on the credit of the United States and requiring monetizing the national debt?                                                               YES   NO

14. Do you favor setting a constitutional limit on the power of the Congress to coin money?                                              YES         NO

15. Would you favor an amendment authorizing the Congress to levy a single, one time ad valorem tax on assets in case of an emergency?                                                                                  YES   NO

16. Do you favor an amendment that would credit all payments of State and local taxes against 50% of federal taxes?                   YES   NO

17. Do you favor an amendment prohibiting the Congress from mandating any action by State or local governments?          YES         NO

18. Would you favor an amendment prohibiting the Congress from appropriating any money to be paid to the States or to local units of government?                                                            YES   NO

19. Do you favor the transfer of all unsold federal lands, except those dedicated and maintained as parks or otherwise authorized in the Constitution, to the States in which they are located?       YES   NO

20. Do you favor an amendment prohibiting the deployment of the National Guard or State Militias outside the United States except in the conduct of a war formally declared by the Congress?     YES   NO

21. Would you favor an amendment forbidding the President from ordering the killing of any person except an enemy defined in a formal Congressional declaration of war?                             YES   NO

22. Do you favor an amendment that would authorize Congress to prohibit the desecration of the American flag during a war formally declared by the Congress?                                        YES   NO

23. Do you favor an amendment defining the word ‘person’ as used in the Constitution as an identifiable human being?                 YES   NO

It will be interesting to see if any of the candidates who say they want to fix the mess in Washington are in favor of really doing something about it.

Or is their only solution to a dysfunctional government summarized in two words: “Elect me”?

TRUMPED UP

Golf is a wonderful sport. Particularly so because it always was a gentlemen’s game, built around civil values such as sportsmanship, integrity, perseverance, fellowship, respect and fair play.

My personal golf hero is Jack Nicholas. His achievements as a professional golfer are unequaled. His records are of historic proportions. But most of all, from my perspective, Jack is a real gentleman. A class act.

I have been privileged to visit Jack a couple of times. He has always been gracious and hospitable. We have chatted on the phone as well. On one such occasion, Jack shared a personal opinion that has stuck in my memory for many years.

He told me that he likes people. In fact, he said, he could think of only one person he had ever met that he didn’t like. That conversation came back to me as I watched the Fox News Presidential debate the other night.

It was obvious from the git go that front runner Donald Trump was going to be the center of attention. The Donald and Doctor Ben Carson were the only two men on stage who had never held public office. Trump stood out for another reason: he is blunt, outspoken, unapologetic, and forceful in describing his frustrations with and criticisms of the government of the United States. All of it. Both parties. All politicians.

His solution to all the problems in America; financial, political, social, economic; the entire panoply of challenges facing the nation is simple. “Put me in charge,” says he without hesitation. “I can fix everything.”

Are the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mexicans getting the better of us in the world’s markets? Trump can fix it. How? He will negotiate with them. He always wins negotiations. He always gets his way. He is, after all, THE DONALD.

His notion of the power of the Presidency has little resemblance to the office of the Chief Executive envisioned by the Founders and written in our national constitution. As Trump sees it, a President can do whatever he wants to do. Just like he does with his money. Some pundits, searching for an explanation for Trump’s success in the opinion polls, have opined that he strikes a chord of popular frustration with big government, that he articulates the almost universal dissatisfaction of the American people with our post-constitutional oligarchy.

Perhaps that is true. But there is something else. Trump is the poster boy for the Howard Beale syndrome. Here’s what Beale, the fictional, demented, TV newscaster, famously said in the 1976 film “Network:”

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!'   

Getting people mad as hell is an age old political strategy. Hitler did it in Mein Kampf. American politics have always been combative. Election to public office is all about deciding who gets to impose decisions on people at the point of a gun. It is serious business.

We will all be losers, as will our children and grandchildren, if we allow our political process to descend from discussion, to debate, to argument, to quarreling, to name calling and inveighing against anyone who disagrees. There is enough honest disagreement in America. We don’t need to get Trumped up.

IN HOC SIGNO VINCES

Seventeen centuries ago, the Roman Emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity. It is recorded that he saw a vision of a cross above the sun bearing the Latin message, In Hoc Signo Vinces meaning “in this sign, you shall conquer.”

And conquer, he did. Not only militarily, but religiously. It was during his reign that Christianity went from being a despised and persecuted sect meeting in catacombs to avoid being fed to the lions or crucified, to become the official state religion of the world wide Roman Empire.

For all practical purposes, it was Constantine who launched the civilization which came to be known as Christendom. Joseph Pearce, the writer in residence at Aquinas College in Nashville, Tennessee, defines ‘Christendom” thusly,

Christendom is best and most succinctly defined in traditional ecclesiological terms as the Church Militant…Her war is with the world and its worldliness. Her war is not fought with soldiers but with saints and also with those sinners who are trying to become saints. Her weapons are not those that bring death but life to her enemies. The culture of life that she brings with her is animated by the goodness of virtue, the truth of reason, and the beauty of God’s image in His creatures. She is the wellspring of civilization.

Up until a few years ago, colleges and universities in America offered a course called Western Civilization. It was the secularized version of the study of Christendom. Mostly, it was a chronicle of wars and battles, conquests and defeats.

Evangelism always has the smell of warfare. We talk about battling for the hearts and minds of people. Almost in the same breath, we mention boots on the ground.

Constantine went from ruthless persecution of Christians to ruthless promotion of Christianity. It took a long time and lot of bloodshed for Christendom to become the wellspring of civilization.

In our day, the most truculently militant religion is Islam. Mohammedanism brooks no dissent. The mass murder of non believers, the beheadings of Christians, the slaughter of those branded as ‘infidels’ brazenly portrayed in videos on the Internet, sends the chilling message that the days of religious warfare are not yet relegated to the history books.

I came to ruminate about these things as the result of an email from a very good friend in Florida. It was one of those chain letter initiatives that are so often inspired by good intentions and so often based on ‘facts’ that are not factual.

The message claimed that the President of the United States has abolished the National Day of Prayer created by Congress; that he celebrated a Muslim Day of Prayer instead; that he has said that America is no longer a Christian nation.

A visit to Snopes was enough to persuade me that the chain letter is based on a hoax. Among other things, it claimed that the President was authorizing elective courses in the Quran for American school children. That claim, Snopes points out originated on a satirical web site called the National Report.

It is not the first time that well meaning, but naïve, conservatives have fallen for National Report satire. Among their other offerings: outrageous fictional stories such as "IRS Plans to Target Leprechauns Next," "Boy Scouts Announce Boobs Merit Badge," and "New CDC Study Indicates Pets of Gay Couples Worse at Sports, Better at Fashion Than Pets of Straight Couples."

In the ‘Quran in the schools’ bit of political tongue-in-cheek, National Report gave an actual telephone number for the National Muslim Outreach Hotline. The number was that of the Republican National Committee.

I felt sorry for my Florida friend, who sent me the chain letter. It called for recruiting a virtual army of 100 million vocal Christians who would stand together against the Islamizing of America.

I sure would like to see 100 million American Christians standing up for their faith. That’s why I answered him by suggesting that he ask his friends to sign the Manhattan Declaration. It’s a clarion call to Christians to sign up and be counted. 551,274 have already signed. I invite you to do so as well.

www.manhattandeclaration.org