Politics
Goal: $45,000. Donations received: $29,280.
Wednesday March 1, 2006
E-mail
Print- Massachusetts Gov. Romney Changes Position, Supports Bishops Opposed to Gay Adoptions
- India Official Saves Baby Girls By Shaming Parents Who Consider Abortion
- HHS Removes Pro-Gay Web Page After Complaint By Family Research Center
- Vatican's Chief Exorcist Repeats Condemnation of Harry Potter Novels
- Democrat and Republican Panelists Struggle With Abortion and Catholic Politicians Issue
- Ontario Liberals Propose Denying “Working Poor” Federal Child Care Supplement
- LifeSiteNews.com NewsBytes
- IRA Party Sinn Fein Passes Pro-Abortion Motion
Massachusetts Gov. Romney Changes Position, Supports Bishops Opposed to Gay Adoptions
TODAY'S HEADLINES
By Gudrun Schultz
BOSTON, Massachusetts, March 1, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) –Governor Mitt Romney has said he will consider the request of the Massachusetts bishops that Catholic adoption agencies should be exempted from placing children with gay couples, in an unexpected shift from earlier statements,
“We respect and honor the free practice of religion, and we look forward to meeting with representatives from the Catholic Church to discuss this issue,” Mr. Romney said through a spokesman yesterday.
Earlier, Gov. Romney had said he did not have authority in the matter, and the decision would have to be undertaken by state legislators.
Massachusetts’ law prevents any adoption agency from “discriminating” against gay couples seeking to adopt, including Catholic agencies. The bishops have asked that Catholic agencies be granted an exemption from the law on the grounds of religious freedom, since the Catholic Church teaches that gay adoptions are “gravely immoral.”
“Because of the Church’s teaching, Catholic agencies may not provide adoptions to same-sex couples,” the bishops said in a statement released yesterday. “Hence we intend to seek relief from the regulatory requirements of the Commonwealth on this issue. We do this in the hope that we will be able to continue focusing our attention on serving children in need of adoption.”
The bishops said the issue is “a serious problem in which our religious freedom is challenged.”
Gov. Romney has been inconsistent in his stand on traditional marriage and family values, allowing legal considerations to outweigh moral objections. He opposed same-sex unions in 2003, but ordered state officials to perform same-sex services regardless of their personal convictions.
In the fall of 2005 he defended the rights of Catholic hospitals to refuse to dispense the “morning-after” pill, but in December he changed his mind and said the hospitals would be required to follow state law and provide abortifacient birth control on demand, despite moral dissent.
See previous LifeSiteNews coverage:
Boston Archdiocese Includes Gay “Couples” in Catholic Charities Adoptions
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/oct/05102405.html
Romney Does Flip-Flop and Forces Catholic Hospitals to Distribute Morning-After-Pill
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/dec/05120905.html
Back to TopIndia Official Saves Baby Girls By Shaming Parents Who Consider Abortion
By Gudrun Schultz
KHOTHRAN, Punjab, March 1, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – An Indian official’s personal campaign to halt the disastrous abortion rates of baby girls in the Punjab state has been successful.
Khrishan Kumar, deputy commissioner in the Nawan Shahar district of Punjab state, began publicly shaming parents who aborted, or consider aborting, baby girls for no other reason than their gender.
"What kind of society are we building?" said Mr. Kumar, reported the Telegraph. "One without any girls? One where parents kill their own child in the womb just because she's a girl?"
Ultrasounds for gender determination have been illegal in India since 1994, and gender abortion has been banned, but cultural preferences for male children overrides the laws. The Punjab is suffering from a drastic loss of female births—fewer than 600 girls are born for every 1,000 boys in the northern state. Normal ratios are 1,050 girls for every 1,000 boys.
Mr. Kumar started a list of women who had obtained ultrasounds or were known to be considering abortion, and then, along with a group of volunteers, staged surprise visits and phone calls to deter them. Public humiliation is a strong measure to embark on, but it is having an effect.
In December 2004, the birth rate in Khothran had risen to the equivalent of 787 girls for every 1,000 boys. By December 2005, the number was at 897.
HHS Removes Pro-Gay Web Page After Complaint By Family Research Center
By Gudrun Schultz
WASHINGTON, D.C., United States, March 1, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Family Research Center (FRC) has succeeded in convincing the federal Department of Health and Human Services to remove pro-gay content on the department’s website.
In January 2006 the FRC sent a letter to Michael Leavitt, secretary for Health and Human Services, (HHS) complaining that the website was “loaded with biased, politically-charged language, such as condemnations of so-called ‘homophobia,’ ‘heterosexism,’ and ‘sexual prejudice.’” The FRC also objected to the website’s use of material from pro-homosexual activist groups, such as Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG).
Peter Sprigg, with the FRC, said the web page focused on celebrating homosexuality, while useful health information on the site was minimal.
“There were links to outside organizations as information sources that people could go to and virtually all of those links were to pro-homosexual organizations. There was no balance,” he told Family News in Focus, a website of Focus on the Family.
Eleven days after HHS was contacted, the information on the site was removed, reported Cybercast News Service. HHS sent a letter to the FRC saying the information had been removed because it was not with the mission of the agency.
Regina Griggs, with the organization Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX), told Family News that organizations claiming homosexuals can’t change should not be allowed to advertise on a government website dedicated to health.
“I think if you’re not a medical association, if you’re not providing fact-based, replicated studies and information you ought to not be listed. We ought to be concerned about the AIDS infection rate, drug use, sex outside of marriage.”
The HHS website was targeted last year by gay activist groups who orchestrated the re-wording of information on the site using gay-friendly language. PFLAG was one of the organizations involved. Under their direction, the wording “alternative lifestyle” was changed to read “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender lifestyle,” to avoid the implication that sexual orientation is a choice.
As well, the section advising parents of gay children to seek therapy with a family counselor was changed to read “counselors and other health professionals may by helpful to both teens and parents when addressing difficult issues.”
PFLAG was listed on the site as the primary resource for heterosexuals who wanted to be better educated on gay issues.
Vatican's Chief Exorcist Repeats Condemnation of Harry Potter Novels
By John-Henry Westen
ROME, March 1, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Vatican's chief exorcist, Rev. Gabriele Amorth, is reported to have repeated his condemnations of the Harry Potter novels yesterday. According to press reports, Fr. Amorth, said of the books, "You start off with Harry Potter, who comes across as a likeable wizard, but you end up with the Devil. There is no doubt that the signature of the Prince of Darkness is clearly within these books."
"By reading Harry Potter a young child will be drawn into magic and from there it is a simple step to Satanism and the Devil," he said.
The news will come as no surprise to LifeSiteNews.com readers who recall that Fr. Amorth made very similar remarks in 2002 which went misreported in the North American media, until LifeSiteNews.com clarified the matter.
In a 2002 interview with the Italian ANSA news agency, Rev. Amorth said "Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil." The exorcist, with his decades of experience in directly combating evil, explained that J.K. Rowling's books contain innumerable positive references to magic, "the satanic art". He noted that the books attempt to make a false distinction between black and white magic, when in fact, the distinction "does not exist, because magic is always a turn to the devil." (coverage: http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2002/jan/02010202.html )
At the time, however, North American coverage of Rev. Amorth's warnings about Potter significantly downplayed the warnings. The New York Times coverage by Melinda Henneberger, which was carried in Canada's National Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and on Yahoo Daily News left out most of the information in the European coverage, only quoting Rev. Amorth as saying that "If children can see the movie with their parents, it's not all bad."
North America's most prominent Harry Potter critic, Michael O'Brien, has told LifeSiteNews.com that the movie version has significantly cleaned up Harry's image, making it far less troublesome than the books.
Another condemnation of Harry Potter coming from Rome was not widely reported until LifeSiteNews.com's intervention. When in 2003, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger allowed his comments against the novels to be aired publicly, the news was reported in Europe, but not in America. However, when in 2005 LifeSiteNews.com published Ratzinger's letter concerning Potter online, the international media exploded with the news that the new Pope opposed Harry Potter. (coverage: http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/jul/05071301.html )
Writing to Germany's best known Potter critic Gabriele Kuby, the man who was to become Pope Benedict XVI wrote, "It is good that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly."
Democrat and Republican Panelists Struggle With Abortion and Catholic Politicians Issue
Boston College discussion reveals persistent rejection of Church teaching by Democrats
by Hilary White
CHESTNUT HILL, March 1, 2006, (LifeSiteNews.com) - A 90-minute panel discussion at Boston College on "Catholic Politicians in the U.S.: Their Faith and Public Policy," on the evening of February 27, was attended by nearly 6000 people.
Five Catholic journalists and prominent political commentators, sponsored by the college's Church in the 21st Century Center, spoke on a wide range of subjects including unions, media bias, economic policy, the just war theory, federal funding of stem cell research and Terri Schiavo. But at the centre of the discussion, and the crux of all the other issues was the right to life.
One of the panelists, James Carville, who with E.J. Dionne, a Washington Post columnist, represented the liberal Democrat view, said with surprising candour, "What we're really talking about is abortion."
Carville said, "That is the issue, when people talk about it, we need to go right to what it is, we should talk about the abortion issue because abortion is first and foremost what this is about." But Carville, a former senior political adviser to President Clinton, went on to avoid direct discussion of abortion, only saying, "It's a tortured issue."
While Dionne attempted to give a more nuanced and delicate consideration of the issues, Carville, who considers himself a Catholic, noisily denied most of the moral teachings of the Church. At one point he interrupted the discussion with an outburst of denunciations of the Catholic Church's teaching and authority, calling the constant teachings on homosexuality and contraception "ridiculous."
Implying that the morality of abortion could be decided by popular vote Carville said, "A majority of Catholics believe that abortion should be legal in almost all circumstances. Apparently well over half of the faithful believe that you can be a good Catholic and have a different position (from the Church) on abortion."
The panel's moderator, Tim Russert, managing editor of Meet the Press and political analyst for NBC Nightly News, read out a list of exit poll statistics from election day 2004, that showed that overwhelmingly, church attendance and traditional moral values on abortion and other life and family issues, was the most decisive factor in the last presidential election.
The wide gap between the beliefs of America's majority of regular church-goers and the anti-life and anti-family policies of the Democratic party was revealed and has embarrassed Democrats and their media supporters into desperate back-pedaling and policy review.
Dionne and Carville relied heavily on the discredited "seamless garment" argument first put forward by Chicago's Cardinal Bernardin that tries to assert that all issues are of equal importance, there being no greater moral weight to the problem of homelessness than abortion.
Dionne, a senior fellow at a liberal think tank said, "Certainly if you went through the entire teachings of the Church, I'd say that the teachings of the Church more line up with the Democratic Party than they do with the Republican Party."
Representing the conservative position, Peggy Noonan, a former special assistant to the late President Ronald Reagan, decried the liberals' and Democrats' attempts to avoid discussing the evil of abortion itself.
She said, "It just comes down to some real things. Since abortion has been legal in the United States, we've had roughly 40 million abortions. Presumably, that's 40 million people who would be here if they hadn't been aborted. That's something that's real."
"When you come right down to it, you've got people saying, 'I personally am against abortion but I will defend to the death your right to be for it,' to me that sounds like…this is 1860 and (I say) I am against slavery but I will defend to the death your right to be for slavery."
Dionne responded by reiterating the Democrat's new policy to discuss abortion only in terms of installing more sex-education, contraception and the elimination of poverty. "It's about creating the circumstances in which a woman who is pregnant can bring the child into the world with some hope that she and that child can live a decent life. If that's not real, I don't know what is."
Noonan responded, "Everybody wants that but you can't say, look life has to be perfect. Life isn't going to be perfect. Life is imperfect at the beginning of it and at the end of it. Abortion is either OK or it's not."
Democrats, Noonan said, love to "talk eloquently about the Democratic party and to suggest it as the party of the little guy; you know there is no guy who is littler than someone who might be aborted tomorrow. A foetus is pretty much a little guy! That's about as little as you can get!"
Listen to the discussion: (90 minutes. RealPlayer required)
http://frontrow.bc.edu/program/faithandpolicy/
Ontario Liberals Propose Denying “Working Poor” Federal Child Care Supplement
Ont. Bishops’ spokesman slams McGuinty Liberals for unconscionable proposal
By Terry Vanderheyden
TORONTO, March 1, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Ontario Liberal government has proposed denying the province’s poorest families a Conservative campaign promise of a federal childcare allowance.
Under an election promise from the federal Conservatives, $1,200 per child per year would be given to families with children under the age of six years old to offset the cost of childcare. Stephen Harper said that passing the childcare supplement bill will be a priority for his government when MPs return to the house in April, with cheques going out by July.
The Ontario Liberals have said that they have not overlooked the option of deducting the proposed federal childcare supplement from social assistance and disability payments, as it already does with the National Child Benefit Supplement.
Income Security Advocacy Centre lawyer Cynthia Wilkey told the CBC that she’d “be horrified if they did. But would it surprise me? No.” Ending Ontario’s clawback of federal National Child Benefits was a campaign promise made by Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals during the last Ontario election but never honoured said Wilkey.
The Ontario Conference of Catholic Bishops slammed the Ontario Liberal proposal as “unconscionable”: “With their knowledge of the hardship that the existing clawback causes, it would be unconscionable for the Ontario government to claw back another federal allowance for families,” OCCB spokesman Tom Reilly stated in an e-mail to LifeSiteNews.com. “The welfare of families who need help is surely more important than squabbles between levels of government.”
“For some time the OCCB, with other religious groups, has been trying to persuade the Ontario government to stop clawing back the federal child allowance,” Reilly explained. “The clawback takes money away from families where the parents can be classified as working poor – that is, earning little more than the minimum wage – the parent may have a disability and be on ODSP (Ontario Disability Support) or the parents may be dependent on the Ontario Works program. These are the most vulnerable families in our society.”
Contact Ontario MPPs:
http://olaap.ontla.on.ca/mpp/daCurRdg.do?locale=en&ord=RDG_NAME
Contact Sandra Pupatello, minister of community and social services:
http://olaap.ontla.on.ca/mpp/daMbr.do?locale=en&whr=Id=82
LifeSiteNews.com NewsBytes
Prime Minister announces appointment of Mr. Justice Marshall Rothstein to the Supreme Court
http://pm.gc.ca/eng/media.asp?id=1041
Italian intellectuals: moral and spiritual crisis prevents Europe from reacting to Islamic terrorism
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=6128
Republican Gov. Haley Barbour said Wednesday that he likely would sign bill to ban most abortions in Mississippi if it's approved by lawmakers
http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/13984932.htm
U.N. Reform Promises to be a Long Haul
http://www.family.org/cforum/news/a0039694.cfm
The Myths and Reality of Living Together Without Marriage
http://www.cwfa.org/articles/10218/BLI/dotcommentary/index.htm
Feminists Step Up Attempt to Ratify CEDAW Treaty
http://www.cwfa.org/articles/10233/CWA/nation/index.htm
Movie Group: 'Crash' Has Most Curse Words
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/01/AR2006030100077_...
U.N. Resolution on Human Rights Council Does Not Deserve U.S. Support
http://www.heritage.org/Research/InternationalOrganizations/wm1002.cfm
School teachers molesting students dwarfs in magnitude the clergy sex-abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=49049
IRA Party Sinn Fein Passes Pro-Abortion Motion
By John-Henry Westen
DUBLIN, March 1, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - At its weekend conference, the Irish Republican Army associated Sinn Fein Party has passed a motion calling on a change to the Southern Constitution to permit "a woman's right to choose". Sinn Fein also gave support to the Irish Family Planning Association's campaign for free abortion both North and South of the Border.
Esmond Birnie a pro-life MLA of the Ulter Unionist Party in South Belfast commented, "Many Irish nationalists and republicans will be appalled by SF's stance if they realise this is in fact the SF line. Birnie also noted that the move may hurt SF's Catholic support.
MORE NEWS: 
LifeSiteNews.com Home Page Last 10 Days Archives Special Reports
Copyright © LifeSiteNews.com. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License. You may republish this article or portions of it without request provided the content is not altered and it is clearly attributed to "LifeSiteNews.com". Any website publishing of complete or large portions of original LifeSiteNews articles MUST additionally include a live link to www.LifeSiteNews.com. The link is not required for excerpts. Republishing of articles on LifeSiteNews.com from other sources as noted is subject to the conditions of those sources.