A well-funded left-wing "poverty" operation inspires armed terrorists to attack pro-family groups; Is conscience really impervious to the truth, or should we humbly submit and inform our consciences according to the Word of God? And, Communist China says it's expanding its one-child policy, now permitting two children per family. Is this "progress"?
PRI Review Podcast
Hate Group SPLC Attacks PRI; Is Conscience Really Independent of Truth?
Is China Really Changing?
November 13, 2015
The population research Institute is pleased to announce that it has been attacked by one of America’s foremost hate groups.
Think about it.
What could be as innocuous as a world gathering to promote family life and values? Is there anything less threatening than kids being raised by a loving mom and dad?
Not according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a left wing cash machine that goes by its initials, SPLC.
No, for SPLC marriage and family values are hateful and homophobic.
Why would this outfit publish a hit job just prior to the World Congress of Families terrific meeting in Salt Lake City?
The SPLC maligns an entire array of pro-life and pro-family organizations that gathered at the star-studded event — which counts among this year’s many distinguished speakers the Most Reverend Emmanuel Badejo, Bishop of the Diocese of Oyo, Nigeria.
The World Congress of Families was founded almost 20 years ago by Doctor John Howard, longtime college President and founder of the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society. Doctor Howard, a long-time friend of your host, who died earlier this year after a long and very productive life, was a pioneer in championing the values of family life, and the critical role that intact and flourishing families play in civil society.
The World Congress gathers social scientists and religious, civic, and pro-family leaders to exchange ideas on ways to strengthen the family in society. This year’s distinguished guests included Population Research Institute President Steven Mosher, who addressed a number of panels at the event.
So people so people from all over the world gather to celebrate and strengthen the family, and they are attacked?
Well, the Southern Poverty Law Center has made a name for itself by targeting pro-family leaders and organizations. Once a reputable law firm, SPLC has had a long history pursuing civil rights against a panoply of real hate groups like Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, anti-Semites, anti-Catholics, and other groups driven by hate.
But lately, SPLC has focused on targeting pro-life and pro-family organizations, as well as a number of Christian and conservative figures who dare to uphold the definition of marriage that has been the foundation for civilization since the Garden of Eden.
In the eyes of SPLC, if you believe that kids do best when they’re raised by their mom and dad, you’re a Nazi!
And that’s not all. In the winter 2015 issue of the organization’s “intelligent report,” we find that opponents of amnesty for illegal aliens are “racist white nationalists,” that the organization producing the blockbuster expose videos of Planned Parenthood’s butchery consorts with radicals – meaning pro-lifers and, of course, including “some of the worst characters in the antiabortion extremist movement which the SPLC’s sources call “terrorists”.
While the issue goes on page after page about the white terrorist who killed nine black parishioners in South Carolina last June, it does not mention at all the black terrorist who killed two of his colleagues at a Roanoke TV station because he resented whites, was gay and had no lovers, and seethed with envy. He hated his victims because both of them planned to get married in the coming year.
The SPLC makes no bones about it: it has nothing to do with poverty, it is a super-rich left-wing advocate of sodomy, abortion, a powerful federal government, and, of all things, sharia law!
That’s right – Its latest report praises sharia law as “essentially a code of ethics, or, as the New York Times put it, “Islam’s roadmap for living morally and achieving salvation.””
Tell that to the decapitated Christians and their brethren who are being hounded out of the Middle East by the millions by Islamic terrorists who use sharia law to kidnap, torture, and kill them.
In 2012, SPLC successfully sued Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH), making it illegal in the state of New Jersey for support groups to offer assistance to kids who want help in dealing with unwanted homosexual attractions.
The list of pro-family groups targeted by SPLC is a long one. It includes such unlikely candidates as the American College of Pediatricians. SPLC once even labeled now-2016 Presidential Candidate and world renowned brain surgeon Dr. Ben Carson as an “extremist.”
That’s the lazy man’s favorite label for somebody I don’t agree with.
SPLC’s aggressive targeting of Christian groups has fomented violence and hatred among its supporters. In fact, not long ago, it inspired one would-be mass murderer to launch a terrorist attack in the middle of the day in downtown Washington, D.C.
In 2012, an LGBT activist moved to rage by SPLC’s attacks entered the headquarters of the Family Research Council, intending on killing everyone inside. His attack was foiled by an alert security guard, who managed to disable the hate-filled triggerman even after being shot by the terrorist.
Few terrorist attacks are foiled without fatalities, but this one was, and Dr. Patrick Fagan, an expert on the family whose offices are housed in the building, credits Our Lady for saving him and his colleagues – after all, he said, the attack was carried out on the Feast of Our Lady of the Assumption.
But why target the Family Research Council? Well, the terrorist, apparently a champion of Sodomite causes, claimed he had identified his target by using a “hate map” produced by SPLC and identifying the Council as a hotbed of hatemongers.
Reportedly, the FBI and the U.S. Army have both since distanced themselves from SPLC, and no longer use the firm as a resource investigating domestic hate crimes – even under the Obama Administration, which often promotes attacks on the family, using the toxic combination of taxpayer money and government power.
Of course the SPLC denies any connection with the terrorist attack inspired by its supposedly authoritative hate materials. Nor has it cleaned up its act.
Its rhetoric against Christians is spiteful and reckless. Even Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, who is no conservative, publicly chastised the rancid outfit. “The Southern Poverty Law Center should stop listing a mainstream Christian advocacy group alongside neo-Nazis and Klansmen,” he wrote – undoubtedly signaling his editors’ desire to distance itself from the organization.
The SPLC couldn’t concoct its diatribe on its own. For its attack on pro-family advocates and simple people of faith (which SPLC characterizes as persons who ascribe to “homophobia and sexism”), the Montgomery, Alabama, group enlisted the support of the Political Research Associates of Somerville, Massachusetts, and the abortion device manufacturer, Ipas, of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
This is an interesting troika. Among other key issues, Political Research Associates advocates abortion and the redefinition of marriage. They have criticized Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco for simply requiring that teachers in Catholic schools not openly and publicly contradict Church teaching. We’ll bet the Political Research Associates would not remain silent if one of their employees chose to come out publicly to denounce their mission to redefine marriage and promote abortions.
Then there’s Ipas. They manufacture the abortion device called manual vacuum aspirator, or MVA. Ipas routinely attempts to exploit loopholes in abortion laws in its effort to increase access to abortion worldwide – and to sell its baby-slicing machines. Ipas has distributed hundreds of thousands of MVA devices in developing countries, intentionally placing them in the hands of “midwives, nurses, and other midlevel providers, rather than relying only on doctors” – a practice that places women at higher risk of complications.
If this doesn’t constitute back-alley abortion, we’re not sure what does.
Yes, the SPLC has chosen strange bedfellows, so to speak, especially since it has banked hundreds of millions of dollars advertising itself as an anti-poverty organization. What about the poorest and most vulnerable human beings on the face of the earth – the unborn?
To put it gently, the SPLC has a poor understanding of pro-family, peace-loving Christians who offer nothing but good-will to everyone, even towards groups that seek to marginalize, harass, or even attack them.
Speaking about “demographic winter,” SPLC and company allege that pro-family advocates maintain that “demographic shifts will result in “global catastrophe.”
That’s a curious assertion indeed. The last time we checked, the world is not currently trending for any sort of demographic “global catastrophe”—and this is precisely the reason why radical and coercive population control programs are irrational.
While we are not approaching a demographic Armageddon, declining populations are creating challenges and unfavorable consequences for many Western and Far Eastern nations. SPLC claims that these challenges have been amply “repudiated” as non-existent.
Oh, really?
Then why did the Chinese government just announce that it was abandoning its one-child policy and allowing couples to have two children? Could it be due to the labor shortages that have resulted from decades of below-replacement level fertility?
And why is Japan challenged by the problems that come with a rapidly aging population, the emptying of rural areas, and the consequent decline in economic activity?
SPLC can’t resist playing the racist card: “demographic winter warnings are…ultimately rooted in white supremacy,” they unctuously announce – without any proof, of course. clearly they haven’t asked the bishops of Africa, who told the bishops gathered at the Synod on the Family that it is rather the supremacist imposition of degenerated Western values that propel so-called “population control programs” and the redefinition of marriage that constitute what they call an “ideological colonization” from the West.
Is SPLC providing “research” or simply peddling thinly-camouflaged propaganda? They certainly seem to ignore any facts that might muddle their message. Over the past 25 years, the Population Research Institute has defended the human rights of all peoples around the globe including in places as diverse as China, India, Latin America, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Vietnam, the Caribbean, and in many nations across Africa. We understand as well as anyone the benefits that migration and respect can bring to economies where migrants are welcomed and where assimilation is encouraged. In fact, it is because of immigration that many effects of population decline are often mitigated.
As it has become more secular and radicalized, the SPLC has acquired a fundamental misunderstanding of the family and the people who support it. We have no intention to “outlaw” other family structures. It’s our belief that we should be supportive and compassionate towards persons who may feel something missing when they are deprived of their mother or father due to different life circumstances. But it cannot be denied that children flourish the most when raised by their mother and father. On this point the research is unequivocal. For this reason, public policy should be supportive of marriage and family life and no child should be intentionally deprived of her mother or father.
When we come back, we’ll take a closer look at reaction to the Synod on the Family.
Break One
Here’s some good news: Vulnerable Pregnant Women Now Have an Alternative to Planned Parenthood in the Caribbean
It’s Great news, in fact.
The Population Research Institute has opened its first-ever, full-service Family Care Center on St. Lucia!
And when you make a tax-deductible year-end gift today, you’ll become a Signal Supporter of PRI’s work to save babies.
On St. Lucia, like many Caribbean islands, poverty dwells just beyond the luxury resorts. For decades, many desperate pregnant women here have gone to places like Planned Parenthood, simply because it’s the only place to go.
But not anymore. Today, your year-end gift will help support PRI’s full-service Family Care Center, give women on St. Lucia all the support and encouragement they need to choose life for their babies, including:
• Free medical care provided by volunteer doctors and nurses
• Housing at the Center
• Job training
• Mother and baby supplies
• And other essential pre-natal and post-natal aid for mothers and babies
This is a huge step forward for PRI and for the countless women who wouldn’t kill their babies—if only they had someplace else to turn.
Our first full-service Family Care Center in St. Lucia is that place.
• Your gift today of $40 helps provide a month’s supply of diapers.
• Your gift today of $150 helps provide clothing and blankets for the first 3 months.
• Your gift today of $250 helps provide a crib and other safety necessities.
• And if you can give $5000 today, you’ll help provide a doctor to help that mother have her baby
I can’t think of a better way to strike a blow against the real Planned Parenthood—the one we all saw in those horrific videos. We need to deprive them of the “customers” they need to run their ghoulish business.
And while this is PRI’s first Family Care Center, with your ongoing support, it certainly won’t be the last.
That’s why when you make a year-end gift to support our new Family Care Center and all of PRI’s baby-saving efforts around the world, we will recognize you as a Signal Supporter at our first-ever Family Care Center.
Your name will be included on a special Honor Roll of Donors to be displayed inside the Center and blessed by PRI’s Spiritual Advisor, Father Clovis, whose prayers and action led the effort to open this alternative to Planned Parenthood on St. Lucia.
Planned Parenthood has a monopoly on women in poor communities throughout the Caribbean, and we plan to break that monopoly, starting today.
But right now, our first full-service Family Care Center is very new, and PRI needs your help to put it on a strong financial footing, right from the start.
Because there is nothing Planned Parenthood would like more than to see our first full-service Family Care Center on St. Lucia fail.
That would be terrible news for countless mothers-to-be and their unborn babies. Please don’t let that happen. Please make a tax-deductible, year-end gift to PRI today.
Segment Two
Our good friend John Smeaton is head of the London-based Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC) and co-founder of Voice on the Family. He was in Rome for the Synod on the Family, and his impressions are worth noting.
“There is a world war on the sanctity of life and on the family being waged by the most powerful politicians and organizations in the world,” he told lifesite news. What is more, “A small but highly influential group at the highest level in the Catholic Church structure appears to be dismantling the edifice of institutions and teachings which defend the family and defend life.
Now, one of the arguments used by those attackers is the appealing to what they call the “supremacy of the individual conscience.” It’s very attractive, but empty when it the conscience is unmoored from the eternal truths of the faith.
Fortunately, Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska recently cleared up the confusion surrounding the issue of conscience. Here are his thoughts on the matter.
“The primacy of conscience has become a matter of discussion at the Ordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family. At issue is what believers should do when the conscience seems to suggest a deviance from Catholic doctrine, and how pastors, and bishops, should respond. This question is especially relevant to the debates regarding the reception of the Eucharist by Catholics divorced and remarried, and regarding the proper pastoral care of Catholics in same-sex relationships.
Cardinal Newman believed that modernity had stopped listening to the real voice of conscience; instead citing the conscience to validate libertine choices. He said that a true sense of conscience had been “superseded by a counterfeit,” in order to assert the “right of self-will.”
When his contemporaries spoke of the conscience, Newman said that “they in no sense mean the rights of the Creator, nor the duty to Him, in thought and deed, of the creature; but the right of thinking, speaking, writing, and acting, according to their judgment or their humour, without any thought of God at all . . . [Conscience] becomes a license to take up any or no religion, to take up this or that and let it go again.”
Newman’s time is not much different from our own, the bishop continues. And the “counterfeit” conscience seems today to have taken lodging among faithful believers, who are comfortable explaining that their integrity demands they reject the teachings of the Church. Today, in the life of the Church, many believers claim that their conscience contravenes the Gospel. That the conscience demands they use or prescribe contraceptives. Or ignore the obligations of matrimonial indissolubility. Or indulge disordered sexual inclinations.
But the conscience can never enjoin a person to act contrary to divine precept. In fact, the conscience is, as Newman wrote, “the voice of God,” a channel of divine communication, “the aboriginal vicar of Christ.” Newman understood that the conscience reveals the law of God—that it is a “prophet,” preparing the soul in the way of the Lord.
Newman counseled that the man earnestly seeking to hear the conscience “must vanquish that mean, ungenerous, selfish, vulgar spirit of his nature, which, at the very first rumour of a command, places itself in opposition to the Superior who gives it, asks itself whether he is not exceeding his right, and rejoices, in a moral and practical matter to commence with skepticism. He must have no willful determination to exercise a right of thinking, saying, doing just what he pleases, the question of truth and falsehood . . . being simply discarded.” The task of pastors, as he understood, was to help their flocks in the task of self-examination, and true discernment. The task of pastors is to help the faithful understand that conscience can never contradict truth.
Pastoral guidance of that sort might seem severe, but, for Newman, it was wholly necessary. In Newman’s view, validating a false sense of the conscience would be a kind of pastoral negligence; it would rob the believer an opportunity to hear the voice of God.
Unfortunately, the synod’s discussions reveal that a counterfeit sense of the conscience seems to inform the view of some ecclesial leaders, who feel they must support decisions made “in conscience,” even when those decisions contravene revealed truth. This is nothing new. In the aftermath of Humanae Vitae, pastoral support for the “counterfeit conscience” ran rampant. But the consequence of suppressing and ignoring the voice of God—the authentic conscience—is borne out in the empty pews and dwindling seminaries in the places where “conscientious dissent” was most rampant.
Today, at the synod, the Church discusses wholesale endorsement of the counterfeit conscience. Such endorsement would be disastrous—most especially for those who would be taught by their pastors to ignore the saving power of divine precept.
Catholic who believes that conscience might really abrogate the Gospel has abandoned belief in the normativity of divine law, and its contribution to human flourishing. And a pastor who fails to instruct a misguided conscience seems to have forgotten that appeals to false conscience will offer no protection in the final judgment.
Of course, the process of forming the conscience takes time. A person who begins in opposition to the Gospel may well find himself becoming gratefully obedient. And pastors should assist with the process of discernment, however long it takes. But pastors should also be clear—certain decisions really can render a Catholic outside the bounds of ecclesial communion, with the implications that entails. Our decisions—even made with appeals to an unformed conscience— always have consequences in this life, and consequences in the next.
“Obedience to conscience leads to obedience to the Gospel,” Newman wrote, “which, instead of being something different altogether, is but the completion and perfection of that religion which natural conscience teaches.” The conscience is a gift, and a grace. Like Newman, before toasting anyone else, we should drink to that gift—and then we should help believers to hear the “still, small, voice,” of the Lord in our hearts.
We are grateful for Bishop Conley for spelling things out so clearly. And his remarks give rise to another issue.
The recent Synod addressed the words of Christ, who told the Jews that a person who divorces his spouse and marries another commits adultery.
Long before he was Pope Benedict, Cardinal Ratzinger made it clear thirty years ago to a dissident bishop in Seattle.
“It appears that there has been a rather widespread practice of admitting divorced persons to a subsequent Church marriage without prior review by your Tribunal, or even after they have received a negative sentence,” Cardinal Ratzinger wrote to Seattle Archbishop Hunthausen, who was advising Catholics that after divorce and civil remarriage, they may in conscience return to the Sacraments.
Such a practice lacks foundation in the Church's clear teaching about the indissolubility of a sacramental marriage after consummation, and in sound jurisprudence. A clear presentation, then, of the sacra mentality and indissolubility of Christian marriage should be made to all your people. Every effort must be made to avoid written materials which equivocate regarding the essential properties of marriage and which may encourage the divorced to attempt a second marriage without the Tribunal's declaration of nullity. At the same time, steps need to be taken to ensure that your Metropolitan Tribunal, both in its constitution and practice, conforms with all the prescriptions of the revised Code of the Church's public law.
These words from thirty years ago should ring loud and clear throughout the world: A clear presentation, then, of the sacra mentality and indissolubility of Christian marriage should be made to all your people.
Let the bright living light of truth dispel the fog, the confusion, and the outright lies being spread about Holy Mother Church and her teaching.
Speaking of confusion, it is curious that several truths – and even sacraments – have been largely absent from the conversation propelled by those who wanted the synod on marriage to become one on divorce instead.
They wanted a train wreck – to derail the timeless teaching of the Church – and to do it, they erased several vital fundamentals from the conversation.
For instance:
"Repentance." Does our appeal for divine mercy first require that we repent?
Well, repent of what? A mortal sin – which in justice, separates us from the grace of God.
In fact, mercy doesn't make sense without justice. After all, why ask for mercy if we haven't done anything wrong?
After all, justice makes us liable for punishment for something we have done wrong. If in justice we have not been condemned, then why do we need to beg for mercy at all?
But the aroma – no, the smoke – surrounding the divorce advocates avoids even the notion of Forgiveness. It’s so So judgmental! As though we had done something that is wrong! Didn't we act according to our conscience?
Bishop Conley settled that question for us – but the smoke machine goes further.
What ever happened to Confession? It’s available to every single baptized Catholic, no questions asked. All that is required is honesty, contrition, and a firm purpose of amendment.
These are the realities that appear to be missing in many discussions regarding the Synod. In fact, to some they appear to have been made entirely unnecessary by "progress."
When we come back, we’ll hear PRI President Steve Mosher’s view of the China’s recent announcement regarding its forced abortion policy. Is anything really changing?
Second Break
Do you know what NFP means?
NFP stands for Natural Family Planning is the natural way to celebrate life, love, and marriage while avoiding the dangers of powerful artificial hormones.
NFP brings husband and wife together, sharing the mysteries of life as they work together with God’s natural plan for raising a family.
And you don’t have to be Catholic to practice NFP. In fact, many women have switched from the pill to NFP after they’ve discovered the damage that the pill does to their bodies and to their well-being.
NFP recognizes that women conceive only when their bodies are ready. And the science behind
NFP reveals to the couple when those “fertile days” are by giving certain signals that can easily be detected.
In fact, when you cooperate with these natural signals, you’ll find that NFP is more accurate than the pill – totally without any damage to your health, your marriage, or to the environment.
So don’t let the Pill come between you and your spouse. Celebrate life and its mysteries by learning about NFP. You can easily check out PRI’s NFP video – just search for PRI and NFP on YouTube.
You’ll be glad you did.
Segment three
China Announces End of One Child Policy
China Expert Steven Mosher Says Abuses Will Continue under New Two-Child Policy
The Chinese government is apparently ready loosen to the stranglehold it has had on reproduction in that country since the late seventies—a little bit. Under the new policy, married Chinese couples will be allowed not one, but two children.
“The regime is backing away from draconian birth limits,” says Steven Mosher, President of the Population Research Institute, “not because senior Party officials have suddenly developed a conscience. Rather, it will be because they have finally realized that a shrinking workforce and a rapidly aging population are crippling future economic growth.”
For at least the past two years, China’s workforce has been shrinking. Last year, the potential workforce fell by 3.71 million , a significant number even by China’s standards. At the same time, the over-sixty population is exploding. According to U.N. projections, it is expected to more than double by 2050. China is growing old before it grows rich, and the strains on China’s nascent pension programs will be enormous.
Mosher says, “Beijing now realizes that it must stop restricting childbirth and start encouraging it as soon as possible. Yet it can’t simply abandon the policy altogether and admit it made a mistake. That would call the regime’s legitimacy into question.”
The parallels between China’s current demographic and economic malaise and Japan’s demographic and economic decline in the 1990s is striking. The Japanese economy has never really recovered from its “demographic recession.” China may not recover either.
The One Child Policy has caused fertility rates to plummet over the past three and half decades. Sex-selective abortion has reached epidemic proportions in many parts of the country. The strong preference for sons in Chinese culture, especially in rural areas, has resulted in the deaths of millions of unborn baby girls.
The overall loss of human life in China is staggering. China’s own Ministry of Health estimated in 2013 that 336 million babies had been aborted as a result of the onerous population control program. With an estimated 13 million abortions taking place in China every year—almost 1,500 lives per hour—the number is likely significantly higher today.
Chinese President Xi Jinping first sought to loosen the policy in 2013. It was announced that couples where both the husband and the wife were themselves only children would be allowed to have a second child following the birth of their first. The response was underwhelming as few couples applied for a second birth “permit."
Mosher says, “Now couples are allowed to have a second child. But don’t expect it to stop there. A government bent on controlling the fertility of its people will do whatever necessary to produce the number of children it thinks necessary.”
After all, the One Child Policy is only one phase of the larger Planned Birth campaign. This is Beijing’s ongoing campaign to control the reproduction of the Chinese people under a state plan in the same way that it controls the number of tanks, or the number of coal-fired power plants, that it builds each year.
This means that, if the Chinese people refuse to conceive and bear the number of children that the state demands, childbearing will become mandatory. Women will be forcibly inseminated, regular pelvic examinations will be instituted to monitor their pregnancies, and abortions will be forbidden.
Unless and until the Communist regime abandons its Planned Birth policy, and allows couples to freely choose the number and spacing of their children, abuses will continue.
And since when has a one-party dictatorship ever voluntarily relinquished even a portion of the power that it wields over its people?
That’s the latest from PRI President Steve Mosher. This has been PRI review. I’m your host, Christopher Manion – thanks for listening.
