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May 25, 2018 (AnitaCrane.com) – Today, Irish citizens will vote on the 8th Amendment of their constitution. The government is allowing voters to choose abortion on demand, and voices from Ireland’s two most famous rock bands have spoken.

On the one hand, the men of U2 urge the Irish to vote Yes for abortion on Facebook and other social media. U2 became stars in America with their song “Pride: In the Name of Love” about Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., so I asked his niece Alveda King and U2’s friend, former U.S. senator and former presidential candidate, Rick Santorum to comment, but first let’s look at U2 and Irish artists they know.

On the other hand, Eileen O’Riordan, mother of the recently deceased Delores O’Riordan, star singer and songwriter of The Cranberries, said her daughter Delores was completely opposed to abortion and in the video below she is encouraging everyone to vote No on repealing the 8th Amendment.

Alec Foege of Rolling Stone famously interviewed Delores and wrote:

Not that the freewheeling possibilities of a rock lifestyle have totally swayed O’Riordan from her conservative Irish Catholic roots. … And don’t count on O’Riordan as an ally in defending abortion: “I’m in no position to judge other women, you know? But, I mean, ‘Idiot – why didn’t you not get pregnant?’ It’s not good for women to go through the procedure and have something living sucked out of your bodies. It belittles women – even though some women say, ‘Oh, I don’t mind to have one.’ Every time a woman has an abortion, it just crushes her self-esteem, smaller and smaller and smaller.”

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Peter Rowen on the cover of U2's album "Boy" (1980).

Here is a closeup of Delores O’Riordan’s mother campaigning with the LoveBoth Project, which means love both mother and child before and after birth. This goes very deep for Mrs. O’Riordan because she reputedly named Delores after the Seven Dolors of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which means the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and one of those sorrows was the need to flee from King Herod, who slaughtered all known Jewish infants in his efforts to kill the baby Jesus.

Peter Rowen, the little lad who appears on U2’s album covers for “Boy” and “War,” grew up to become a photographer based in Dublin, and sometimes photographed the band. After U2 urged Irish citizens to vote for abortion, he said this on Facebook:

John Waters is also horrified. He wrote the book “Race of Angels: Ireland and the Genesis of U2.” He knows the band well, and is a longtime Irish author and playwright chiefly concerned with human rights in the light of Christ.

He opens his May 7 article “How U2 Betrayed Rock ‘n Roll” with these words:

On May 25 Ireland will decide whether to repeal or retain the Eighth Amendment of our Constitution, which recognizes the equal right to life of mother and unborn child. As the date approaches, we are hearing all the elaborate genteelisms and justifications. Only those deluded by hypnotic propaganda – and those who do not care about consequences – can really, truly buy in. “Repeal” is about empowering the strong over the weak, the strident and demanding over the silent and docile.

And yet, I was not surprised that U2 came out for Repeal. It was only a matter of time. The world’s loudest folk band has been heading in that direction for years, its early truth-telling gradually giving way to a jostling for liberal kudos. In 2015, U2 backed another Irish referendum, supporting the bogus idea of gay marriage. May 25 is just the next step on the continuum of progressiveness.

Yet, the horror I felt on hearing of the band’s support for child murder was not caused so much by what they said as by how they said it. On May 2, they posted on Instagram and tweeted a graphic created by the trendy Maser design firm showing the phrase “Repeal the 8th” squeezed into a love heart, the word “Repeal” writ large in what might be the faintest parody of a baby waiting in a womb: love pregnant with death. Death by euphemism, death by choking with weasel word, death made up to look like life: Repeal.

As you can see from Rick Santorum’s Facebook photo, he considers Bono Vox a true friend. When I asked Mr. Santorum to comment on U2’s abortion agenda for Ireland, he honored that friendship. Vox disagrees with Santorum on many matters of law, and he reportedly said: “But on our issues, he has been the defender of the most vulnerable.”

Indeed Santorum defends the most vulnerable. He is Senate author of the U.S. Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. The method was and still is shocking to many Americans because the abortionist pulls an unborn baby almost all the way out of his/her mother’s womb, leaving part of the child’s head in her. Then the abortionist stabs the baby’s skull and vacuums out his or her brain. In the end, some lawmakers insisted on a “life of the mother” exception that many pro-lifers found absurd because this gruesome method requires forcing mothers to give birth.

Both Rick and his wife Karen Santorum speak for unborn babies who are prenatally diagnosed as disabled and they prove it with their very lives as they raise their daughter Bella. She has Trisomy 18, which is far more challenging than Down syndrome. They wrote the book “Bella’s Gift” to help parents and everyone understand why all babies should be brought into this world and loved.

With all this in mind, here is Rick Santorum’s answer about U2’s 8th Amendment politics, and it is a message to all voters in Ireland:

Bono is a good friend who I respect greatly for leading the effort to successfully protect the innocent in the third world who faced a deadly pandemic. That respect has led me to privately communicate with him about the effort in Ireland to remove protections from the innocent unborn. One of my favorite books is Thomas Cahill’s “How the Irish Saved Civilization.” My prayer is that the people of Ireland today will likewise hold on to the faith and moral truths that saved the world from darkness.

Again, U2’s song about Martin Luther King made them bestselling rock stars in America, so I asked his niece Alveda King what she wants the band to know.

She’s a human rights activist in her own right. Alveda’s father Reverend A.D. King, like his brother Martin, was murdered. Both ministers hated abortion, and Martin Luther King Jr. refused to accept The MargaretSanger Award from the abortion chain Planned Parenthood, who named the award after their founder. Sanger invented The Negro Project and literally wrote: “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

Therefore, Alveda King said: “Sometimes people like the talented members of U2 – and, yes, actor Liam Neeson – can be sincerely wrong. Brokenness has strange effects on people. Pride can sow strange seeds in the midst of pain.”

Among her many roles, Alveda King is pastoral associate at Priests for Life.

She knows the pain of being tricked into having abortions, and she mentors young women. Alveda sent me this text from her Uncle Martin’s last sermon for the men of U2 and all voters in Ireland.

Now let me say that the next thing we must be concerned about if we are to have peace on earth and goodwill toward men is the nonviolent affirmation of the sacredness of all human life. Every man is somebody because he is a child of God. And so when we say “Thou shalt not kill,” we’re really saying that human life is too sacred to be taken on the battlefields of the world. Man is more than a tiny vagary of whirling electrons or a wisp of smoke from a limitless smoldering. Man is a child of God, made in His image, and therefore must be respected as such.

Until men see this everywhere, until nations see this everywhere, we will be fighting wars. One day somebody should remind us that, even though there may be political and ideological differences between us, the Vietnamese are our brothers, the Russians are our brothers, the Chinese are our brothers; and one day we’ve got to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. But in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile. In Christ there is neither male nor female. In Christ there is neither Communist nor capitalist. In Christ, somehow, there is neither bound nor free. We are all one in Christ Jesus. And when we truly believe in the sacredness of human personality, we won’t exploit people, we won’t trample over people with the iron feet of oppression, we won’t kill anybody.

She also wants Irish voters to see Saint Mother Teresa’s 1994 brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the essential highlights are available here.

Will Irish citizens vote in the name of love or vote like U2?

They might want to ponder this song by Delores O’Riordan and The Cranberries.

Note: Movie star Liam Neeson’s history of urging Irish citizens and their government to decriminalize abortion is an in-depth topic of its own.

Published with permission from AnitaCrane.com.

Anita Crane is a writer, editor, and digital media producer with a B.A. in Catholic Theology from Christendom College. Please click here to send her an email message.