Intimidation and violence of the liberal left

Tiller, Terror and TV Tilt, American Life League
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzYIQxmjVUE

In the weeks after the George Tiller murder, so much of the mainstream media tried to blanket all the pro-Life community as terrorists. In truth the murderer of George Tiller was the work of a deranged loner unconnected with any legitimate pro-Life organization. Intimidation and violence toward pro-Life advocates by the liberal left is common.

Please view the American Life League's production Tiller, Terror and TV Tilt at the Youtube link above. Very enlightening.

Mark Pickup

Pain and the path to spiritual healing

"Only in surrender do we become pliable in the hands of God. He is the potter, we are the clay. Only in surrender to the will of God can we discover the reason for which we were created." taken from Mark Pickup's blog entry for 3 July 2009 under the title Pain and the path to spiritual healing.

Read the rest at http://markpickup.org

All life is sacred

On May 31st, America’s most notorious late-term abortionist was murdered. Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, Kansas, performed second and third trimester abortions and even performed the horrible partial birth abortion procedure. Partial birth abortion is done by inducing labour prematurely in the mother and the baby is partially delivered breech but stopped with its head still in the birth canal. The abortionist kills the child in a way that is too grisly to mention to civilized readers. The abortionist then completes the delivery of the dead baby.

The man charged with George Tiller’s murder is Scott Roeder (51). At the time of writing this column very little is known about him, other than he was associated with an obscure anti-government militia group known as the Freeman movement. He also has a history of mental illness.

Pro-Life advocates across North America (including me) were quick to condemn the murder of George Tiller, although mainstream media have been trying hard to connect the pro-Life movement to the crime. They are not right.


I have been active with the pro-Life movement in Canada and the United States for more than twenty-five years. I’ve spoken to innumerable conferences and prolife gatherings and met countless pro-Life advocates. Not one advocated violence.

By definition, those who kill or advocate violence are not pro-Life. The shedding of blood, or promoting it, draws the clearest line of delineation and definition about who is pro-Life and who is not.

ALL LIFE IS SACRED

Being truly pro-Life involves holding the sanctity and dignity of all human life as something dear and worth cherishing ― even the life of a mass murderer like late-term abortionist George Tiller. We deplore what he did and work in non-violent ways to stop people like him. We reach out with love and support to mothers considering abortion. Our humanity demands it.

As a Christian, I mourn the death of George Tiller just as I mourn the thousands of children he killed. He (and they) were part of the human community. Our common bond is the image of God stamped indelibly upon us all. From conception on we are part of Mankind. The Seventeenth Century poet John Donne said, “Any Man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind."

Being pro-Life is more than decrying the shedding of innocent (or guilty) blood. It also entails working to create a cultural climate that is welcoming to the unwanted, the unloved, the deranged and the derelect.

.Being pro-Life means extending Christ-like love to the woman in crisis pregnancy and her baby. Being pro-Life means tenderly guiding post-abortive women toward Christ’s forgiveness and healing. Pro-Life advocates have the high and sacred honour of being Christ’s emissaries to hurting people. Whether they accept our overtures on Christ’s behalf is not within our power. Our task is point the way toward life and love, not death and despair. We align ourselves with Christ’s way. Having done this, we remember that not everyone accepted Christ’s way when he himself offered it.

The love and mercy that occupied Jesus’ heart brought healing to the sick, returned sanity to the deranged and forgiveness to the adulteress woman, but never did it include killing as an answer to life’s problems.

Peter drew a sword and cut off a man’s ear in defence of the personification of all that is sacred and good. Jesus rebuked his violence and healed the man’s ear. Men need ears to hear the Good News and renounce their inner violence. Interior violence precedes all outer violence to which Jesus relies, “Stop, no more of this.”

The assault on the sanctity and dignity of human life is the great struggle of the 21st Century. It is the spiritual battle for the hearts, minds and souls of humanity; it is manifested in the physical world by violence against the weakest and most vulnerable, the defeated, and the unloved in our midst. It is evil because it is the antithesis of Christ’s love.


Abortion, embryonic stem cell research, assisted suicide and euthanasia are all expressions of this evil. How you and I respond to it will help define our humanity and may even help to save the humanity of other people. The stark choice of the 21st Century is this: barbarity or beauty. Our individual choices about life will contribute to one or the other.

It is a daunting prospect, I know. But we have not been left without resources. We can take solace knowing that in Jesus Christ is life and the light of Mankind (John 1.4-5). We have the Word of God to assure us, the teachings of the Church and the Holy Spirit to guide us. Jesus told us he would not leave us orphans. He told us, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Mark Pickup

(This blog also appears in Canada's Western Catholic Reporter for the week of 15 June
2007, under the title "Pro-Life supporters never adevocate murder of anyone."
See http://www.wcr.ab.ca/columns/markpickup/2009/markpickup061509.shtml )

A Judeo Christian history?

See http://markpickup.org for blog "A Judeo-Christian history?

HLM

Reflections about Babyboomers on D-day anniversary

Read Mark Pickup's latest blog Throwing pearls before swine at http://markpickup.org

One night on the Michael Coren Show

The Michael Coren Show on Canada's CTS television network airs three times a week across the nation. It's a panel talk show covering various subjects ranging from current affairs to religion. I like the Michael Coren show: It's a guarantee of lively debate with a slightly intellectual but not snooty quality.

The casual viewer can not tell whether Coreh is right or left on the political spectrum. Michael Coren has both left and right, liberal and conservative representation on his panels. He's demanding but fair with his guests and demands fair and thoughtful responses and is quick to challenge pat answers, slogans or Newspeak. For example, last evening his conservative guest was columnist and author Clare Hoy. The liberal guest was Marianne Meed Ward. The token representation from western Canada was broadcaster Rob Brackenridge.


One story they covered was out of Swaziland. Member of Parliament, Timothy Myeni, for a solution to the AIDS epidemic in his country: compulsory HIV testing of the population. HIV-positive people with receive a tattoo on their buttocks.

Marianne Meed Ward objected to the idea. At one point she used the phrase "sex trade
workers." Michael Coren interrupted her liberal diatribe with something to this effect:

MC: "You mean whores?"
MMW: "Yes."
MC: "Why do to try to dignify prostitution? Dignify the person but but the activity."

Well done Michael.

My view of the Swaziland proposal is one of support for the MP's idea. Desperate measures are sometimes required for desperate times. HIV has made these are desperate times for Swaziland (and other African countries). It's a reasonable requirement to save a population threatened by the AIDS epidemic. If the choice is privacy versus public health of life threatening disease, I side with public health. My only concern was placing a tattoo on the buttocks of an HIV-positive individual may not give a prospective sexual partner enough warning. A tattoo should be placed discreetly in view such as the palm of the hand or in the scalp.

Mr. Coren then changed the topic to the recent assisted suicide in the state of Washington of a woman suffering from pancreatic cancer. Predictably, Marianne Meed tried to defend assisted suicide with the outdated argument of dying people living in a drug induced stupor from pain medications. Obviously she had not done adequate research or she did the research and did not like what she found. It doesn't play well for euthanasia supporters.

After the show ended, I sent Email to Michael Coren saying that
Marianne Meed Ward made a weak case for assisted suicide in musing that pain management causes confusion. Not necessary.

If pain medications are properly administered by medical professionals with current and up-to-date understanding of pain management medications and techniques -- complete pain relief can be achieved without the loss of lucidity or confusion to the patient.

Ward (and Rob Brackenridge) tried to reverse the argument for assisted suicide by asserting the state does not have a right to force people to live. (?) Talk about confusion! Ward and Brackenridge did not even have medication to blame!

The point is this: The state must never support suicide or assisting suicide. Legalized assisted suicide, such as in the states of Oregon and Washington, are striking deviations from Anglo-American historical legal traditions and law. I spoke about this in my previous blog. For more than 7 hundred years common law has discouraged or punished assisting suicide.

Because Canada no longer punishes people who attempt suicide is not an an endorsement of it. It simply acknowledges that prosecution an inappropriate response to a suicidal person. They need psychologically help not prison. Ward alluded to the argument of a disabled person who can not kill themselves. So what! If Canada does not support suicide, why would they support assisted suicide.



I said to Michael Coren in my email: "I have suffered from aggressive multiple sclerosis for more than 25 years. My condition has degenerated significantly since you interviewed me in 1995. I am now triplegic and in a full electric wheelchair. My brain and CNS are riddled with lesions; only my left arm remains unaffected by MS."

"I do not need a community or society that assists me in my suicide. I need a society that holds up my value even when I cease to believe in it. And I have an obligation to the Common Good not to seek assistance or support of my suicide. For me to ask that society or other people to assist me in my suicide would be to support the notion that there is such a thing as a life unworthy to be lived. The ramifications of accepting that notion would have a detrimental effect on others with disabilities, the incurably ill, those who have sunk beneath the waves of depression or circumstances, ... and posterity."

I told Mr. Coren that it is better to live in my state of degenerative disease and disability that to compromise my own humanity (or my responsibility to humanity) for the sake of my personal relief.

Contrary to the popular slogan it's NOT all about me. Autonomy is a myth.

Mark Pickup

Alberta's 2009 March for Life

Last Thursday (May 7th) the second annual March for Life was held in Alberta's Capital city of Edmonton. It was supported by all Alberta's Catholic bishops, and attended by clergy from Eastern Orthodox and Ukrainian Catholic denominations. Sadly representation from evangelical denominations were conspicuous in their absence. Still, hundreds of people from throughout the province showed up at the steps of the provincial legislature to hear speakers of which I was one. My speaking notes are at the end of this post for information of readers.


The crowd marched through the streets of downtown Edmonton. It stretched three and a half blocks long, four and five marchers deep, and required police escort as traffic and the hustle of commerce was disrupted while we snaked through the streets with placards and banners declaring the sanctity, dignity and equality of all human life. Bystanders watched respectfully from the sidelines at the striking witness for Life before their eyes.

It was interesting but expected to note that Edmonton's major daily newspaper, The Edmonton Journal,did not report the event at all. According to their censorship of ideas the event did not occur. It was reminiscent of another pro-Life march that occurred in the city of Toronto in 1984. Twenty-five thousand people (police estimate of crowd size) silently march past the Morgentaler abortuary. Participants said it was eery to hear feet walking in silent protest of the killing of innocents occurring inside that terrible place. The silence was complete: The Globe and Mail, the CBC and other media did not report it. It was as though the massive protest of citizenry didn't happen. Shhh!

(Yet if a dozen abortion advocates, homosexuals or transvestites hold a demonstration and its news for days.)

When the marchers arrived back at the steps of the provincial legislature, I delivered the following short address:

We have entered a moral storm that’s breaking the ancient western moral code that governed the moral ethos of generations. Although people may have occasionally failed to behave the way they instinctively knew to be right, there was a consensus that the most vulnerable and weak of society must be protected.

For centuries, abortion was considered a serious crime. The Hippocratic Oath for doctors dating back thousands of years forbade abortion (and euthanasia). The Catholic Church has maintained the moral evil of abortion since the 1st Century. Ancient and persistent Common Law traditions dating back into the Middle Ages treated abortion as a “grave crime.” In 1802, England codified in to law what had been considered a criminal offence by custom, and made abortion a criminal act. What I am trying to illustrate to you is that considering abortion on demand as a right (as Canada and the US do) is a recent development and an aberration from the course of human history.

As I speak these words to you there are preborn children being slaughtered not more than 10 blocks away from us. These children are being killed because they are unwanted or inconvenient to their parents. All across Canada abortion can be obtained for any reason at all, or no reason whatsoever.

Now Canada is about to consider decriminalizing assisted suicide. It has already been embraced by Oregon, Washington state, Holland and elsewhere. This, too, is a deviation from centuries of Common law that discouraged, prohibited or punished assisting in the suicide of a person. Civilized and compassion societies did not kill their weakest or those who had sunk beneath the waves of circumstance.

Canada has abandoned its Christian roots. It has abandoned the ideal that there is something sacred to human life. The nation of my birth has coarsened to the point that I can scarcely recognize it. I feel like an alien in my own country. Public opinion polls consistently reveal that 70 % of Canadians agree with euthanizing (or helping the suicides) of the terminally or chronically ill people and the severely handicapped (people like me). That means that 7 out of 10 of my fellow Canadian citizens I pass on the street agree with helping me to kill myself if I despair of my situation. Apparently they believe it’s my freedom to choose.

But choices made from the perspective of abandonment, depression or desperation are not free at all. Do not talk to me about the freedom to choose unless all my choices are equally weighted and people have access to good supportive services and feel included within a tender embrace of community. There is no freedom of choice for the incurably ill person who feels the cold winds of abandonment or sees the world from beneath the dark veil of depression. There is no freedom to choose for a desperate woman is crisis pregnancy who is being pressured to have an abortion.

If Canadians really are “pro-choice”, why is only one choice so heavily funded? I propose a balanced approach. Provide equal funding for women who choose life for their babies. Provide funding to homes for unwed mothers where they can finish their education and receive prenatal care and life skills training. Provide funding for community and faith based partnerships with government for shepherding homes where women in crisis pregnancies can be mentored and establish or re-establish community connections. Give women positive choices not just negative choices.

Ensure modern techniques of palliation, pain management are strengthen in medical schools. Create government and community based hospice options where the dying and incurably sick are loved and included within their communities.

Until the choices for desperate people have equal attention, the idea of the freedom to choose is a hollow lie.

You are a critical minority who still believe in the sanctity, dignity and equality of all human life. Stand firm in the present Dark Age. Make your witness matter for a culture of life in a prevail culture of death. Do not tire or flag. Do not succumb to intimidation. You can turn the tide! I believe this with all my heart. I have to, the alternative is unthinkable.

Mark Pickup