15 February 2012
Copyright © 2012 by P. A. Ritzer
In light of the Obama Administration’s recent attack on the Church, religious liberty, and freedom of conscience, I think back to the unseemly process by which Obamacare passed the Congress and how the Stupak Amendment conciliated Church leadership. On Sunday, November 8, 2009, we received an “Urgent Action” insert in our church bulletin directing us to contact our representatives and let them know that we wanted them to support the Stupak Amendment to the Obamacare Bill, an amendment that would prohibit funds “authorized or appropriated by” Obamacare to be used for abortion except in cases of life of the mother, rape, and incest. Rarely have I felt such a rush of shock and righteous indignation in a church. I knew the Stupak Amendment for what it was, a ruse to give cover to so-called pro-life Democrats to secure the passage of Obamacare. Thus I was infuriated that some Church leaders were taking the bait and getting reeled in to set up the Church for the assault that President Obama, his administration, and the Democratic Party would naturally–given their commitment to big government and the culture of death–unleash upon her through the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Obamacare. (Of course, Bart Stupak, and his cohorts, eventually knuckled under to pressure and dropped support for his own amendment after being given the cover of a meaningless executive order from the President.) I immediately wrote the following to a Church leader. I have here omitted the leader’s name and responses and other identifying portions out of respect and have omitted greetings and closings and have otherwise lightly edited these communications.
Copyright © 2009 by P. A. Ritzer
With all due respect, I feel conscience bound to let you know how deeply upset I was by the “Urgent Action Parish Bulletin Insert” we received at Mass this morning. I will be blunt in unburdening my mind, heart, conscience: These Democratic bills cannot be fixed; they must be stopped! There is no fix for them.
The Democratic Party has proven over nearly thirty years that it is committed to the culture of death! They “Borked” judicial nominees who would have been strict constructionists unlikely to find a “right” to abortion in the Constitution, and placed on the Supreme Court and any federal court (and Obama is trying to create more federal courts to stack) judges whose one requirement was to be pro-abortion. They used taxpayer money to promote and coerce abortion and contraception around the world, imposing them, with the help of the United Nations, on the poorest of peoples, except when Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush could stop them by executive order, which they circumvented nonetheless. Most opposed an attempt by Republicans to ban partial-birth abortion, a ban which Bill Clinton vetoed. They promote the destruction of the Sacrament of Matrimony. And more and more, they support euthanasia and assisted suicide. And now comes Mr. Obama, whose tedious obfuscation cannot hide his radical commitment to abortion in the great tradition of such notable Democrats, and Catholics, as Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Nancy Pelosi, Kathleen Sebelius–it is scandalous! Why on earth would we ever want to hand over more control of healthcare to government, when we see what these people will do with the power we have already handed over to them in contradiction of the distrust of government enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
On the other hand, the party that has had a pro-life platform for the last thirty years, the Republican Party, does offer real healthcare reform that would make it more affordable and available without handing over more control of it to government. We hear about Stupak: what about the party that has maintained a pro-life platform, at great cost to itself, for decades? Why aren’t we working with them to oppose this monstrosity. So what if the Democrats have the votes. We should oppose them regardless!
What more does the Democratic party need to do to prove to us all that it is the Party of Death? Why on earth would we as rational people think we can work with a party so radically committed to the exploitation of women and girls and the slaughter of unborn children, and, more and more, the destruction of the Sacrament of Matrimony, and euthanasia. Those of us who have never been Democrats do not understand this accommodation of the Party of Death. We find it hard to see the great virtue in the party that was pro-choice on slavery: the party of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, and the internment of Japanese-Americans. We do not see the virtue in the party that launched the attacks on personal property and the reduction of free human beings to impoverished dependency called the New Deal and the Great Society. We see, instead, how such attacks and reductions could create a dependent class robbed of initiative and responsibility ever dependent on the Democratic Party which would thereafter depend on their votes. And now they want to take over healthcare–God forbid! Have we not seen enough in the bankrupt programs of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and all the problems they have wrought.
We all are free (though less and less so under Democratic governance, especially if Obama gets his way about ending charitable deductions) to give to the charities of our choice. The churches, other private institutions, and localities, in the spirit of the doctrine of subsidiarity, used to provide medical and other services with the freedom to do so according to their moral codes. But the more we support the big-government Party of Death, and its programs, the less freedom we have to support the charities of our choice according to our values, and we give up that freedom to a party that embraces and promotes the culture of death, which is absolutely consistent with its big-government tradition.
Years ago, I met the priest who was the godfather of Avery Dulles when he entered the Church. He gave me an article he had written about his own conversion to Catholicism. In it he recounted how he would visit different churches in Germany during the Third Reich. As I remember it, he said that the Anglican churches did not say much so as not to rock the boat. The Lutheran churches spoke out about their right to religious freedom. But the Catholic churches preached that Hitler, Himmler, Goering, and Goebbels were wrong because Jesus Christ was right.
Obama, Biden, Pelosi, and Reid are wrong because Jesus Christ is right. We must oppose them because we must embrace Him.
The following is my response to the recipient’s response.
I remain blunt, as anything less seems to me a waste of time. I do not understand how the bills [Obamacare] can be fixed by amendments when the ideology behind the giant power grab, which is the basis for Democratic healthcare reform, is the same that has promoted, guaranteed, and funded the most aggressive and far-reaching attack on the culture of life in this country.
Yes, I am partisan. I make no apology for it. (Nevertheless, where the Republican party is wrong, I will oppose it.) One party, the Republican, is flawed, as are all human institutions; the other, the Democratic, has long been committed to evil, to the culture of death. I believe that the Democratic Party’s ongoing drive to expand government and control more and more aspects of our lives are part and parcel of their evil commitment to every aspect of the culture of death. Are there some Democratic leaders who are pro-life? Well sure, but less and less so when their party requires a vote. I make no judgment on their souls (I pray for them daily) but do judge their party, its actions, and the real consequences, intended and otherwise, of their actions. I would be irresponsible and a bad citizen to do less.
Today we Americans will countenance the cutting and tearing apart of another 4000-some children in the sanctity of their mothers’ wombs, and we will leave their mothers and fathers with the baggage. And the great Democratic Party will have had as much, if not more, to do with making sure this takes place than any other institution in the country. And we are still talking about it! The Republican Party has taken the principled stand on slavery, human rights, and abortion when it was difficult to do so. In each case, it was opposed by the Democratic party. When the Democratic Party believes that a pro-life position will get it power, it will convert. Until then, it must be defeated.
As for what the Republicans have and have not done. They did pass some healthcare reforms, like health savings accounts. Should they have done more, like tort reform and enabling competition between insurance companies across state lines, probably. (But among their priorities were two wars, and the Democrats–not to mention the press–were opposing every healthcare reform they attempted.) But many of us believe that the current “crisis” in healthcare has been manufactured by the Democratic Party to set up this enormous power grab, and that much, if not most, of the problems in healthcare have been created by other government meddling in the form of the likes of Medicare and Medicaid. As I was growing up, my family was anything but wealthy, but my mother was able to give birth to seven children in the hospital, and my parents were able to pay the bill. This was pretty much the norm among the families I grew up around in Wisconsin. Today, after forty years of government healthcare solutions like Medicaid and Medicare, a family could go bankrupt doing the same.
The following is my response to the recipient’s response.
I fear the blindness of partisanship that has a majority of Catholics helping to put the Party of Death in power.
I wrote the above over two years ago anticipating the recent attacks on the Church, and worse to come, if we did not stop this anti-Constitutional takeover of healthcare by Obama and the Democrats. We have got to deal with reality here. This is tyranny as only the Democratic Party can serve it up. And the Democratic Party is the Party of Death. This is not about well-groomed, well-dressed, well-fed, fat-cat Democratic politicians throwing around the antiseptic word “abortion.” This is about the truth of what that word represents: a horrific reality of human savagery and carnage; of exploitation of girls and women, mothers; of emasculation of boys and men, fathers. The Democrats have tried too long to keep this issue at bay by playing it as if it ought not be on the table, just as they did with slavery in the founding years of the Democratic Party with the Richmond-Albany axis. Just keep it off the table and let it fester and let people suffer and pretend there is nothing worth considering about it. They managed to some extent to do it with slavery until the Republican Party rose up in reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and defeated slavery and fought for full recognition of the rights of African Americans–the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and the Civil Rights Acts, etc.–despite the Democratic tyranny of the Ku Klux Klan, and lynchings, and Black Codes, and Jim Crow, etc. The unborn and their mothers and fathers need the Republican Party to be their champion as it was for slaves and freedmen. And we all need the Republican Party to reverse this anti-Constitutional, dictatorial power grab by President Obama and the Democrats. And we need to regain a love for life and freedom that welcomes the baby and stands up against government oppression.
Revisiting Dr. Seuss In Parenthood (Part One)
5 January 2012
The following commentary first appeared in Saint Austin Review, July/August 2005. It appears here with some revisions. Quotations in quotation marks and block quotes are from the works being considered.
In this election year, we might give special attention to the case of Yertle the Turtle and consider well the growing weight of government and taxation, especially considering the founders’ conviction that it must be a limited government–as established with the Constitution, “deriving [its] just powers from the consent of the governed” (as the Declaration of Independence would have it)–that best secures the “unalienable rights” with which our Creator has endowed us.
Copyright © 2003 by P. A. Ritzer
I remember my brother saying, years ago, that he looked forward to having children of his own, so that he could again watch old Disney movies. I, for my part, in my parenthood, have discovered the joy of revisiting Dr. Seuss and sharing his works, his stories, his words with my children.
This is not my first revisiting. The birth of my nephew and godson in 1990 opened the door for the first revisiting, which went so far as to include sharing with him and his parents a breakfast of green eggs and ham. It was during this first re-acquaintance that I remember declaring that Dr. Seuss was the Shakespeare for children. This declaration, besides being inspired by an adult appreciation for the genius of these works that I had so enjoyed as a child, may also have been an enlightened response to a long-remembered concern, voiced by my parents, and possibly initiated by my teacher, that at second, third, or fourth grade (some grade that was still on the first floor of Sacred Hearts School), perhaps I was too old to be reading Dr. Seuss. My youthful appreciation for these works has since been further vindicated, at least in my eyes, by the discovery that these classics were prescribed for my wife, long before she met me, to alleviate the stress of medical school exams, by a good friend and classmate, with whom she read the works in a stairwell amidst their echoing laughter. The prescriber is now a psychiatrist for both children and adults.
I offer no blanket endorsement or recommendation of the thought and works of Theodor Seuss Geisel. I do not know his thought and have not read all his works, nor have I revisited all his works which I read as a boy. But rather, what I wish to do is to share, as an adult and parent who struggles to live a Christian life in our modern world, an appreciation for the values expressed in at least some of the words, stories, and works of Dr. Seuss.
Certainly, in Green Eggs and Ham the reader is taught a lesson about deciding to dislike foods before one tries them, but does not the persistent Sam eventually wear down the nameless green-eggs-and-ham-hater’s pride- and ignorance-based prejudice, so that he might lead a fuller life with his discovery: “’Say! I like green eggs and ham! I do! I like them, Sam-I-am!’” Thus, the changed fellow can come to the grateful conclusion: “’I do so like green eggs and ham! Thank you! Thank you, Sam-I-am!’”
And, in our culture in which the words nip, tuck, and augmentation have become commonplace, might not the young reader benefit from considering the case of Gertrude McFuzz, a “girl-bird” who “had the smallest plain tail ever was. One droopy-droop feather. That’s all that she had. And, oh! That one feather made Gertrude so sad,” when she compared herself to “a fancy young birdie named Lolla-Lee-Lou,” who “instead of one feather behind, she had two!” This state of affairs leads a jealous Gertrude to one day shout in anger, “‘This just isn’t fair! I have one! She has two! I MUST have a tail just like Lolla-Lee-Lou!'”
Despite the admonition of her wise uncle Doctor Dake, who assures her, “’Your tail is just right for your kind of a bird,’” she throws tantrums, until he tells her of the pills of the pill-berry vine, which will make her tail grow. And although one pill gives her tail another feather, “exactly like Lolla-Lee-Lou,” she decides to “grow a tail better than Lolla-Lee-Lou.” And she does, by gobbling all the pill-berries down. She grows a tail so stupendous that “that bird couldn’t fly! Couldn’t run! Couldn’t walk!”
It takes her uncle and his assistants two weeks to fly Gertrude home. And Dr. Seuss relates:
And how much smarter or wiser might the young reader be after considering the case of Yertle the Turtle, king of the Pond on the Isle of Sala-ma-Sond, where “the turtles had everything turtles might need. And they were all happy. Quite happy indeed.”
So, Yertle begins to build a higher throne on the backs of his subjects, by commanding the turtles to stack themselves up, one on top of the other, beneath him, so that Yertle can see more and exclaim: “’I’m Yertle the Turtle! Oh, marvelous me! For I am the ruler of all that I see!’”
But the burden on the common folks grows to be too much to bear, so that “from below in the great heavy stack, [comes] a groan from that plain little turtle named Mack,” who petitions the king from his distress at the bottom of the stack, “’I know, up on top you are seeing great sights, But down at the bottom we, too, should have rights.’”
By now, though, the power-drunk Yertle has lost all sense of proportion, and after silencing Mack, he begins to call for more turtles that he might build his throne higher than the moon, when:
And from that throne, shaken by the common movement of the lowest subject upon which his corrupt foundation of exploitation is built, falls the mighty Yertle, “that Marvelous he,” into the depths of the mud. And “that was the end of the Turtle King’s rule!” The tyrant is thus deposed, “And the turtles, of course . . . all the turtles are free As turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be.”
(to be continued in Part Two)