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.