PRI President Steve Mosher Joins International Scholars in Defense of Humanae Vitae; Obama Administration Threatens Catholic Schools by perverse addition to Title IX; UN Negligence Caused Haiti’s Worst Cholera Epidemic Ever; New Mexico High School Students Subjected to Trauma dissecting baby brains
PRI Review
September 30, 2016
Obama Administration Threatens Catholic Schools
UN Caused Haiti’s Worst Cholera Epidemic Ever
PRI President Steve Mosher Joins International Scholars in Defense of Humanae Vitae
The Obama administration has a dagger aimed at the heart of Catholic education, and the American Left, saturated with sex, wants to help supply the targets.
Bearing in mind that pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, we note that a group that calls itself "Campus Pride" has drawn up in enemies list of some 50 campuses around the country which apparently do not bow to the LGBT bullies.
Actually, these folks aren’t proud of any campus at all – they’re proud of the sin of sodom, that ancient name that they can’t say, even though they’re so proud of it.
We recall that organized sodomy calls anyone who supports sexual morality a bully. That's how homosexual activists got into public schools across the country some 20 years ago, hiding under the banner of "anti-bullying" programs that were thinly veiled grooming seminars designed to attract young new recruits.
Well, Confucius says we should call things by their proper names if we are to restore order in a chaotic world. So here goes.
What bothers the Sodom Pride crew is this: right now, the federal government grants a so-called exemption from Title IX requirements to certain Christian schools. Why do they need an exemption? Because the Left insists that the government has the right to force homosexuals, transgenders, and those suffering other sexual disorders onto Christian college campuses in the name of civil rights – even though sexual preference has never been defined by Congress as a protected class under the 14th Amendment. And once upon a time we could boldly state that it never will be.
But not any more.
These folks are not neutral, as God the Father told Saint Catherine of Siena. They have fallen deeply, to the point that Christ and Christianity are their sworn enemy.
Title IX says nothing about sexual deviation, but that doesn't bother the Sodom Pride bullies and their allies in the federal government – and don’t be fooled, this is a serious matter for all Catholic schools as well as every other charitable enterprise sponsored by a religious organization.
Allow me to use the descriptive adjective of C.S. Lewis: they are “bent.”
And the Bent Gender fanatics want to put you on a blacklist – “welcome our agenda or we will put you out of business.” They’re not into dialogue, they’re into power.
The issue is simply this: under Obama, the federal government wants to force its pernicious views of sexual diversity – also known as deviance – into every public and private corner of the country. In the case of schools, the first point of entry available to the federal bully is federal funding, no matter how remote that funding might be.
In 2010, the federal government quietly took over the student loan program, and immediately turned it into a political football. It’s now a dagger aimed at the heart of Catholic education.
In 2013, Obama went to the University of Buffalo and announced that the federal government would now determine the standards by which the decision to fund or not to fund student loans at specific institutions would be applied.
Bear in mind that, without those funds, any school now depending on them would go broke. Out of business. Keep that fact in view as we consider the landscape.
Now that Obama has claimed that power for the federal government, the next step would be for his Justice Department to embrace and then enforce the definition of "rights" offered by the Sodom Pride crew, and move to close the 50 Christian schools on the Sodom Pride list that refuse to be bullied into bowing to Obama's bent-gender ideology.
Sodom Pride is giving Obama’s thought police their argument on a perverted platter.
Most of the schools on the list are little-known schools run by Protestant denominations, but three notable Catholic institutions are included – Belmont Abbey College, the University of Dallas, and the Franciscan University of Steubenville.
Christendom College, founded by our stalwart friend Warren Carroll, God rest his soul, would undoubtedly be on the list, but Christendom has wisely refused since its founding in the 1970s to accept any federal funding – which for the moment preserves its independence from federal meddling and intrusion.
Sodom Pride calls on Bent-Gender activists everywhere to consider filing a formal complaint against these schools with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. This is a classic ploy of radicals in the federal government. They quietly reach out the back door of their office to manufacture a wave of supposedly "public opinion" complaints, which will then magically come in the front door of the agency masquerading as “citizen input.”
This ruse typifies how our rotten bureaucracy has gotten so powerful, and explains the widespread dissatisfaction and even contempt that Americans bear today towards intrusive federal government bureaucrats.
But those bureaucrats are not going to go away, and neither will Sodom Pride.
The Bent Gender activists will not quit. They’re now after a private Catholic school in Memphis, Tennessee. When a homosexual student wanted to bring his same-sex so-called date to the school homecoming dance there, the school refused his request.
The student dropped out, and is now attending the notoriously gay-friendly DePaul University in Chicago. From there, he has filed a lawsuit in federal court, seeking $1 million in damages. His lawyer argues that, and I quote, that “the private school is the recipient of some federal funding, thereby making it subject to the precepts of Title IX and "responsible for following the letter of the law under Title IX."
Please note that Title IX includes no such letter of the law and no such “precept” – But as the Looney Left says, “Hey, so what? That doesn’t matter!” Moreover, that “federal funding” might constitute something as simple as lunch items subsidized by the USDA – but that doesn’t matter either. The federal camel’s nose is under the tent, and we know all too well that it never stops there.
This is a lesson so stark and threatening that America’s bishops are catching on. They strive to maintain a good relationship with the administration because they receive a billion taxpayer dollars in grants and contracts every year. But they’re now finding out that there’s a bitter price to pay.
And sodomy? Sodom Pride says, celebrate it! It’s not in the law, so let’s ask the courts to rewrite the law! And that’s just what the Obama Administration's Justice Department is trying to do – force its favorite perversions into legislation by fiat, the same way that the Supreme Court has tried to force same-sex marriage on every community in the country.
Those cases are now working their way up to the Supreme Court – just one more reason why appointments to future courts are such a central issue in the upcoming presidential election.
Speaking of which –
In recent weeks, we have seen many anomalies in the secular media’s so-called reporting on Catholic teaching. But it’s no secret – my own alma mater, the University of Notre Dame, has again defied its bishop and given a pro-abortion rights politician its highest honor – well, what was once its highest honor.
Here in PRI’s home state of Virginia, a thoroughly pro-abortion Senator is given a round of applause, led by his Catholic pastor, at Mass, when he is chosen to run as the running mate of the most pro-abortion presidential candidate in history – right up there with pro-abortion Senator Obama back when he voted to allow children who survived abortion to be killed after they were born.
In the midst of all this, we have seen bishops who are uncertain about where to stand regarding the election, on the one hand, while in contrast we see heavy media coverage favoring groups calling themselves Catholic in public who are very supportive of the pro-abortion ticket.
In fact, one of them has just declared that abortion is Catholic Social Justice!
This is not all happening by accident.
The intrepid Austin Ruse is our friend and ally who has singlehandedly taken on the manifold international claque of enemies of life at the United Nations. Austin now reports that a guy named George Soros, a notorious atheist Hungarian billionaire, has been paying off leftist groups in the United States for months. His goal? To silence Pope Francis and all Catholics on the church’s teaching regarding abortion, gender, and marriage.
Newly released documents have exposed the efforts of Soros and his allies – efforts to make Pope Francis quiet down on social issues like abortion and marriage. Soros sends money to liberal prelates who want to avoid the issues of life and death. They are bent on making income equality and global warming the materialist centerpiece of Catholic teaching.
A thought: Would martyrs of old have willingly gone to the stake for the sake of global warming?
Wouldn’t the fire just make the globe warmer?
Back to Soros: The documents show how these wealthy groups are working closely with the Pope’s closest advisers, including two U.S. Bishops and one Latin American Cardinal.
What these paid liars won’t tell you is that the bishops of Eastern Europe, including those from Soros’s home of Hungary, already know the score and are not afraid to preach the truths of the faith – even the unpopular ones. They met recently in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, and discussed the crisis of the family and, specifically, the low European birthrate.
“Europe, first of all, needs stable families,” they said in a joint statement.
“It is necessary to foster the reflection on the European identity, which has always been connected with the family based on marriage between a man and a woman,” the Council of European Bishops’ Conferences said in a statement on the meeting. “Only a society with an offspring is a society with hope.”
“At present, Europe, first of all, needs stable families and a cautious population policy,” the statement continued. “Immigration is no solution to the demographic crisis.”
This puts those bishops in direct contrast with America’s bishops. Having lost some thirty million faithful who today identify as “ex-Catholics,” our bishops are seeking to fill those empty pews with immigrants. So let me repeat the words of their Eastern European colleagues: “Immigration is no solution to the demographic crisis.”
The Bratislava bishops discussed other topics, including refugees and the persecution of Christians, and expressed the hope that “Europe becomes a continent that puts in the first place the respect for human life– from conception to death– and that support for the family and marriage has the first place in the awareness of public representatives.”
These bishops stand in brave opposition to their counterparts in Germany, Holland, and other western European countries where the faith has simply worn out in many quarters. May they continue their unpopular but necessary teaching of the truths necessary for salvation.
When we come back, we’ll hear the news from the Caribbean – this time we’ll look at the role that the U.S. Government played in the recent cholera epidemic.
This is PRI Review from www.pop.org. We’ll be right back.
First Break
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Second Segment
And now, here’s PRI’s Latest weekly Briefing:
Here’s PRI’s Latest Weekly Briefing:
As Cholera Death Toll Soars, U.N. Tacitly Admits Starting Haiti Epidemic
After six years of denial, the United Nations has tacitly admitted its role in starting Haiti’s cholera epidemic. Since Cholera was introduced to the Caribbean island nation by U.N. peacekeepers in 2010, over 800,000 people have been afflicted. It has become the worst Cholera outbreak in modern history.
“The U.N. has become convinced that it needs to do much more regarding its own involvement in the initial outbreak,” a spokesman for U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon told the New York Times.
It’s about time.
Over 9,000 people have already perished from the epidemic, according to official statistics from the Haitian Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP). However, because of a shortage of health care workers in remote areas to monitor the epidemic, the actual death toll is believed to be much higher. A study conducted by Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) estimated that the real death toll could be two to four times higher than what the official estimates indicate.
While admitting that peacekeepers caused the outbreak, the U.N. still refuses to compensate victims and their families.
Over 1,500 Haitians have filed a class action lawsuit against the U.N. in a federal district court in New York, claiming $40 billion in damages for cholera victims and their families. U.N. officials did not even bother to appear in court to contest their case. The organization maintains that it has diplomatic immunity in the matter and therefore has no obligation to offer compensation to cholera victims and their families. The court agreed with the U.N. that peacekeepers have diplomatic immunity, and the plaintiffs have appealed the ruling to the Second Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals.
"We don't like the UN,” one Haitian local told The Guardian, “They have given us nothing. They're not clean. And we are still getting cholera."
A number of investigative reports, including a report from Yale Law School and the Yale School of Public Health, have concluded that negligence and unsanitary conditions at the U.N. peacekeeper base in Méyè, Haiti caused the cholera outbreak.
Between October 8-24, 2010, the United Nations Stabilization Mission (MINUSTAH) brought a contingent of Nepalese soldiers into Haiti as a part of an ongoing peacekeeping mission and stationed them at Méyè. At the time, Nepal had been recovering from a recent cholera outbreak.
Cholera, while very rarely seen in developed countries with modern sanitation infrastructure, can thrive in environments where water treatment and plumbing are sparse. Cholera can be spread when fecal matter comes into contact with food or with water used for drinking, cooking, or bathing. Because many Haitians lack access to running water, many have no choice but to use untreated water from lakes, rivers, and streams.
There have been reports that sanitation at the U.N. base at Méyè was poor and susceptible to flooding. Waste water ran in an open canal through the base and directly into the river adjoining the camp. Residents from the town nearby frequently observed waste from the camp in the Artibonite, Haiti’s largest river. On October 19th, MSPP began receiving reports of a spike in cholera cases around the Artibonite, downstream from the U.N. camp.
Prior to the arrival of U.N. peacekeepers in 2010, Haiti had not seen a cholera outbreak in over 200 years. Later DNA testing and sequencing found that the cholera strain in the Haiti epidemic was not indigenous to Hispaniola, the Gulf of Mexico, or anywhere else in Latin America, but was rather found to be a descendant of the strain of cholera indigenous to Nepal.
According to a U.N. investigation conducted by an independent panel of experts, “the evidence overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that the source of the Haiti cholera outbreak was due to contamination of the Meye Tributary…as a result of human activity.”
When aggressively treated with basic, inexpensive rehydration therapy, only about 1 percent of those who contract cholera die from the disease. But because Haitians had not had to deal with a cholera outbreak before, and due to widespread poverty in the island nation, the epidemic took a heavy toll.
In the beginning, many succumbed to the disease because many Haitians were unfamiliar with the symptoms, treatment protocols, and prevention methods for the disease. Haiti’s health system and infrastructure had also been weakened by the cataclysmic earthquake that had leveled much of the capital city only 10 months prior. Access to clean drinking water and health care is extremely limited for many of Haiti’s poor. In some rural areas, the nearest health clinic is 10 hours away by foot, an impossibly far distance for most. Those who die from the disease typically perish within 12-18 hours after showing symptoms.
According to health and legal experts, Haiti’s cholera epidemic could have been averted for a mere $2,000, had the U.N. screened all Nepalese troops before deploying them. Instead, they tested for cholera only when suspected of carrying the disease. Troops were also sent home to Nepal to visit family between screening and deployment.
10 – 9:56
An internal U.N. review leaked to The Guardian earlier this year found that the U.N. mission had water treatment facilities at their disposal which would have prevented the cholera outbreak, but failed to use or properly maintain them. According to the leaked report, a little over $3 million could have addressed most of the sanitation issues at MINUSTAH sites. It is now estimated that it will take 10 years and over $2.2 billion to eradicate cholera from Haiti.
As if MINUSTAH had not done enough damage already, many MINUSTAH camps were still pumping waste into canals as recently as 2014, U.N. auditors have since discovered.
The U.N.’s negligence in properly screening for disease among peacekeepers is unacceptable. Their failure to adequately address the issue once the outbreak began is wholly reprehensible. There is no reason why it should have taken the U.N. 6 years to acknowledge their fault in starting the worst cholera epidemic in modern history. For years the evidence has clearly pointed to MINUSTAH’s camp in Méyè as the culprit. Even as there were no other viable explanations for the epidemic, the U.N. stubbornly and unjustly maintained their innocence in the matter.
And even now, the U.N. continues to shirk its responsibility and refuses to provide compensation for the lives lost, lives which can never be adequately replaced. The U.N.’s negligence and refusal to make sufficient amends is a gross violation of human rights and human dignity.
The U.N.’s folly also comes at steep financial cost as well. The U.S. Government has spent over $75 million fighting the U.N. initiated epidemic.
The international community should take note of the U.N.’s debacle in Haiti and the alarming rise of sexual abuse by U.N. “peacekeepers” worldwide. Measures of accountability for U.N. peacekeeping missions simply do not exist…and the effects of this are clearly showing. U.N. peacekeepers have diplomatic immunity. If a U.N. peacekeeper commits a crime while on mission, the most the U.N. can do is repatriate them and hope their home country holds them accountable.
It’s about time that effective accountability measures are put in place for the U.N. Just as U.N. peacekeepers have failed to respect the dignity of the people of Haiti, so they will disrespect the people of other countries into which they are sent if left unaccountable.
That’s PRI’s Latest Weekly briefing. When we come back, we’ll look at a new initiative to support Humanae Vitae, the Church’s time-honored teaching on marriage and family. This is PRI Review from www.pop.org. We’ll be right back.
Second Break
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Third Segment
And now for Charlie’s corner, in honor of PRI’s friend, advisor, and longtime board member, the late Professor Charles E. Rice of Notre Dame.
PRI President Steve Mosher has joined some 500 prominent pro-lifers who have affirmed the Church’s teaching on marriage and family.
Nearly 50 years after the “prophetic” papal document Humanae Vitae, the Catholic Church’s long-standing teaching against contraception continues to promote the human good, the group said on September 20th.
“We hold that Catholic teaching respects the true dignity of the human person and is conducive to happiness. Humanae Vitae speaks against the distorted view of human sexuality and intimate relationships that many in the modern world promote. Humanae Vitae was prophetic when it listed some of the harms that would result from the widespread use of contraception,” they said.
The scholars charged that a new United Kingdom-based statement opposing Church teaching “offers nothing new to discussions about the morality of contraception and, in fact, repeats the arguments that the Church has rejected and that numerous scholars have engaged and refuted since 1968.”
The statement in question, organized by the U.K.-based Wijngaards Institute, claims there are “no grounds” for Catholic teaching against contraception. It questions the idea that openness to procreation is inherent to the significance of sexual intercourse and says that “the choice to use contraceptives for either family planning or prophylactic purposes can be a responsible and ethical decision and even, at times, an ethical imperative.”
The Wijngaards statement was set to be presented at a meeting hosted at the United Nations Sept. 20 to “encourage the Catholic hierarchy to reverse their stance against so called ‘artificial’ contraceptives,” the institute said.
The United Nations? Aha!
Now here’s the rub: why would these opponents of Catholic teaching – whom the beloved Servant of God Father Hardon insisted we call heretics, not merely dissenters – why would they go to the United Nations with their demands?
The answer is simple. The U.N. is the organized worldwide scepter of secularism and it operates as action central for the New International Order. As such, it wants to challenge the Church for the role of truly worldwide leadership.
The UN supports every deviance and perversion that our homegrown Sodom Pride crowd does at home – and like the Bent Gender claque, their primary target is always and everywhere the Catholic Church.
So is Satan’s, by the way.
Organizers of the Wijngaards statement said they would promote their claims to Catholic Church officials, ordinary Catholics and “opinion leaders,” and would also approach “all U.N. departments and development agencies who are trying to navigate the relationship between religious belief and women’s health as they work towards the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.”
Well. We know all about those goals, don’t we? Abortion – free, taxpayer funded, and available worldwide, courtesy of the population planners who want not to serve the poor, the brown, and the black, but to eliminate them.
The signers of the heretical statement include the usual roll call of internationalists, but also include Charles Curran, a former Catholic University of America theology professor who played a key role in organizing dissent from Humanae Vitae. Folks devoted to Saint Ignatius of Loyola would no doubt find it curious that several signers of the heretical statement teach at Jesuit institutions of higher education.
The Wiingaards signers ignore science, which is typical of an ideological campaign based on power, not facts. In a time when the Church is roiled by confusion and uneasiness regarding approaches to moral teachings and their pastoral application, the Wiingaards heretics are aiming to drive a wedge between the truth and the people, using their allies in the UN and the popular culture as their delivery system.
Remember, folks, Satan never sleeps, and his followers never take Sundays off.
Next up, a look at ancient truths as they confront modern atrocities.
Aristotle taught that good habits take a lifetime to acquire and are very easy to break. Bad habits, on the other hand, are easy to acquire, and very hard to break.
In the state of New Mexico, government-run schools are teaching young pupils some very bad habits. In fact, in Congress, a House Panel has Accused University of New Mexico of Illegally Transferring Aborted Baby Body Parts for Research.
Here’s their report:
The House Select Panel of Infant Lives has accused the University of New Mexico’s medical school of illegally transferring fetal tissue. The charge came after reports surfaced that High School students dissected aborted baby brains among other body parts during a summer program in 2012 and 2014.
In a letter to New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), chairman of the panel, reportedly accused the school of breaking New Mexico law as it pertains to the use of aborted fetal tissue it buys from Southwestern Women’s Options, an abortion clinic that provides late-term abortions.
The story gets pretty gruesome, but it boils down to this: those babies didn’t donate their bodies to science, and selling baby body parts is both horrific and illegal.
The Albuquerque Journal reported, in somewhat chilling tones, that the school ordered, and I quote, “whole, fixed brains to dissect with summer camp students.”
I’ve visited the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque several times. It’s nestled in beautiful country on the old Route 66, where the old song used to sing that you could get your kicks.
Not any more.
Now your high-schoolers can get “whole, fixed brains” from aborted babies.
And that’s what they call that progress.
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