Deal W. Hudson

Where are the conservative champions of health freedom?

The human body was made to be healthy; it wants to be healthy. When it hurts or misbehaves, it is telling its owner that it needs to be treated differently. 

Confronted with a body showing sickness, conventional medicine will generally default to some course or other of poisoning or cutting or burning (antibiotics, surgery, or radiation). Quick and dirty. 

Alternative/holistic medicine will try to figure out why the body is out of order, and will adjust, nourish, or calm (chiropractic, nutrition, various forms of emotional freedom techniques). Slow and healing. 

Guess which costs more? Guess which works better? I suppose the answer depends on who you talk to.

The pharmaceutical companies will give you one answer. Their profits depend on people getting more prescriptions for more ailments.

But people who are raising kids on a single income and frequently without health insurance are likely to give you a different answer. They’re the ones who nurse their babies for many months, use herbs and homeopathic remedies, treat their kids with carefully-monitored diets, and use midwives instead of OB-GYNs.   They resort to conventional medicine for the major problems, but the routine ones they handle with little conventional medical intervention.  They just want to be left alone to solve their own health problems.  That's why they're called the Health Freedom Movement.

If more people lived like that, the nation might not have the health crisis it has right now.   It seems that this kind of behavior (taking personal responsibility for one's health) ought to be encouraged, not discouraged.

But Ted Kennedy wants to discourage it.  He is sponsoring S. 1082, which would expand the FDA's authority to ban nutritional supplements.

 Fact: at least one-third of all Americans now use some form of alternative therapy. That’s a lot of citizens spending their own money (insurance doesn’t reimburse for much alternative care) for something they value. Since it’s their own money they’re spending,  market principles apply: if they don’t get results they want, they’re not going to keep buying.

Homeschoolers have rejected the benevolent dictatorship of the public education establishment. They have won the right to control what goes into their children’s heads. Perhaps more super-Trads than super-Libs are doing it, but they’re following a sound libertarian principle. 

Parents who have learned how to keep their kids healthy without seeing a doctor every week have, in essence, rejected the benevolent dictatorship of the conventional medicine establishment. They are thinking for themselves, researching for themselves, and acting for themselves. Can’t get more libertarian than that, can you? 

Where are the conservative champions of health freedom?

"Don't See Any Great Difference Between the Two"

Connie Marshner

Today I happened to find a quotation from a nonagenarian Nazi endorsing and approving of contemporary liberalized abortion.

 
It is in a book about the children of Nazi leaders, My Father’s Keeper, written in 1959 by Norbert Lebert, and completed 40 years later by his son Stephan Lebert.

 
In the pertinent passage, Stephan is quoting Gitta Sereny’s biography of Albert Speer. Sereny is an Austrian-born Hungarian British biographer and historian (whose stepfather happened to be Ludwig von Mises, according to Wikipedia). Her 1995 book is Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth.

 
Theodor Hupfauer was over 90 years old when he was interviewed by Sereny.  He had been a close associate of Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister for Armaments during World War II.

 
“So that she should know straight away, Hupfauer said, he didn’t take back one centimeter of his convictions from that time; not one. He remained a Nazi, and furthermore had recently been in the best of spirits, having noticed that so much nowadays was coming back from those days. Did he mean the skinhead movement? What was she talking about? asked Hupfauer. No, he meant today’s youth culture…. And he wanted someone to explain to him the difference ‘between our euthanasia policy’ and the current practice of allowing the termination of pregnancy on the basis of testing positive for certain handicaps. ‘I don’t see any great difference between the two.’”*

 
You know, Theodor, neither do I.

 

 

*Quoted on p. 108-109 of My Father’s Keeper, by Stephan and Norbert Lebert, translated by Julian Evans, Little, Brown and Company, 2001, ISBN 0-316-51929-4.

From the Black Depths of the Human Heart

Connie Marshner   

Brian Clowes of Human Life International was in Ireland and elsewhere not too long ago conducting some extraordinary interviews.   

What he has to tell will not be unimaginable to those acquainted with the black depths of the human heart... but it is extraordinarily grisly.

According to Clowes, a worldwide network is trading in fetal and newborn bodies and organs.  These bodies and organs are supplied to more than a hundred clinics that advertise them as cures for AIDS and everything else.  Also, cosmetic clinics liquefy the body parts and inject them directly into their customers.   

This has been investigated by several nations, prompted by the disappearances of hundreds of newborn babies whose bodies, ransacked of their organs, have been found in shallow graves.   Late last year the BBC did a major expose entitled   "The Stem Cell Swindle" on the subject.

This ghoulish business has protection in high places.  Two Ukrainian doctors who blew the whistle on it have fled to Ireland after an attempt on their lives.  Drs. Vadym Lazaryev and Vladymyr Ischenko have requested asylum in the isle of saints and scholars.   

Unfortunately, according to Clowes, Ireland seems reluctant to grant the request.   

In Defense of Dr. Dobson (Kind of)

Deal, I quite agree that Dr. Dobson’s remark about former Sen. Fred Thompson was a bit too much to take. It is odd that he would single Sen. Thompson out for scrutiny when the prospective field of presidential candidates includes people like Newt Gingrich, whom Dr. Dobson has praised, and who I am sure is a committed Christian but who nevertheless rarely peppers his public speeches with personal testimony.

However, we may be dealing with a classic case of a mainstream secular journalist printing Dr. Dobson’s remarks out of context. I do not here accuse Dan Gilgoff, the reporter, of malice but, perhaps, ignorance. Consider the follow up remarks of Gary Schneeberger from Focus on the Family, which have been widely viewed as “back peddling”:

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Thompson, took issue with Dobson's characterization of the former Tennessee senator. "Thompson is indeed a Christian," he said. "He was baptized into the Church of Christ."

In a follow-up phone conversation, Focus on the Family spokesman Gary Schneeberger stood by Dobson's claim. He said that, while Dobson didn't believe Thompson to be a member of a non-Christian faith, Dobson nevertheless "has never known Thompson to be a committed Christian—someone who talks openly about his faith."

"We use that word—Christian—to refer to people who are evangelical Christians," Schneeberger added. "Dr. Dobson wasn't expressing a personal opinion about his reaction to a Thompson candidacy; he was trying to 'read the tea leaves' about such a possibility."

It seems to me that Mr. Corallo and Dr. Dobson/Mr. Schneeberger are suffering a communications breakdown of sorts and the conduit is Mr. Gilgoff. I don’t believe that Dr. Dobson meant to suggest that Sen. Thompson is a Muslim or an atheist, but clearly that is the putative charge against which Mr. Corallo pushed back.

But I think Dr. Dobson is saying that Sen. Thompson has never shown any interest in the role the evangelical Christian community plays in public life. In doing so, he may have conflated the word “Christian” with the idea of politically active evangelicals, which is a conflation he can make when speaking to his audience, but not one he can make when speaking to the mainstream secular media if he wants to be understood.

Under this interpretation of the dustup, it is possible that someone can have been baptized in the Church of Christ (and even affirm the Nicene Creed, for that matter) and still not be a Christian in Dr. Dobson’s usage of the word in this particular instance. I am willing to allow that Dr. Dobson was—inartfully—trying to say something like this: Sen. Thompson is well-known to be a conservative. But in my experience, he has no history of being active in our causes, which will pose an obstacle to him in the primary should he decide to run.

I have offered a charitable interpretation here. This is because I have a great deal of respect for Dr. James Dobson and I find Sen. Fred Thompson to be an intriguing guy (of course, I work for Sen. John McCain) and I am eager to throw cold water on this controversy. But I also think I have a high degree of understanding of how evangelicals speak to one another. So, while charitable, I feel my interpretation is also probable.

In his U.S. News piece, Mr. Gilgoff drops in this one-sentence paragraph:

Dobson's comments yesterday about the 2008 presidential race appear to be his first to a secular news organization in months.

Frankly, I don’t blame Dr. Dobson for distancing himself from the secular media.

Maputo Protocol: Who is Paying Attention?

Connie Marshner

From time to time, we hear on the news about the struggles in one country or another to legalize, or not legalize, abortion. Most recently, it was Portugal.

But nobody is hearing anything about the effort underway to legalize abortion with a stroke of a pen on an entire continent.
That’s right.

Africa.  The Maputo Protocol is set to be approved next month, and it would sneak a right to abortion provision into the charter of the African Union.

The Pope is paying attention. He condemned the Maputo Protocol back in January.

 Where is the rest of the world’s attention?

Benedict XVI, Putin, and the Future of Russia

Deal Hudson

The meeting yesterday between Benedict XVI and Vladimir Putin is another attempt to ease relations between the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church, and specifically the head of the the Russian church, Patriarch Alexiy II.

It was Alexiy II who blocked John Paul II from visiting Russia, which was perhaps the greatest personal disappointment of his papacy.

In 2002 I met with the patriarch's staff in Moscow as part of a team building a public maternity clinic. This clinic -- named after my friend Tom Murray of Sandusky, Ohio -- would eventually become the only abortion-free maternity clinic in Russia.  (Tom is a trial lawyer, and a pro-life Democrat.)

We sought a meeting with Russian Orthodox leadership in the hope of securing their moral support.  They were willing to get behind the project, they told us, as "long as it was not Roman Catholic." (Everyone on the American side of the table was RC.)  It was clear they were not interested in anything that might offer Roman Catholics the opportunity to make converts, which, in fact, was not our intent.

The clinic was built, and is now fully operative, providing a level of maternity care formerly only available to the wealthiest Russians.  But the experience was an eye-opener, a brief glimpse into the kind of suspicion that Orthodox leadership has toward the Vatican.

I have only been to Russia twice, each time I spent a week in Moscow working on the clinic project.  My impression, as superficial as it might be, is that it takes a leader like Putin to keep a grip on the country. I don't mean this as praise, but as a simple observation. 

My other observation is that leaders like Putin are keeping the lid on another kind of change, a spiritual revival that will one day explode like a volcano. 

The explosion of 90 years ago defined the major struggle of the twentieth century, who knows when the next one will come or what age it will define.  I'm very pleased that Benedict XVI is continuing to knock at the door of Alexiy II.

Cheap Low-Down Deceitful Legerdemain

Connie Marshner

Talk about duplicitous! Talk about cheap, low-down, hypocritical, dishonest, unscrupulous, deceitful, contemptible, dirty trick, legerdemain! 

This I think takes the cake.

OK: here are the details:

Today (Thursday) the House Appropriations Committee is scheduled to take up a Supplemental Appropriations bill to fund the war in Iraq.

This is regarded as a legislative emergency.

This is important stuff.   Lives of troops depend on this. National security depends on this. 

Now hear this: into this important, vital bill, the Democrats have slipped in a little tasty nugget of highly specialized pork: more funding for Planned Parenthood.

I kid you not. The text is in Section 6003 of the Supplemental, not available online yet, on p.155 of the hard copy currently available on the Hill. It is a “technical correction” to the Deficit Reduction Act, dealing with how Medicaid reimburses certain drug coverage. The intended effect is to enable Planned Parenthood to get drugs at a greater discount. 

As the nation is being asked to squeeze our belts tighter to protect the lives of our men and women in harm’s way in Iraq, the Democrats who control Congress are making sure we spend a little more money to kill more unborn babies in the United States.

 Apart from the outrageous sneakiness of this -- apart from the intrinsic evil of federal funding of Planned Parenthood -- the juxtaposition is beyond ironic. The Democrats are planning to give more money to Planned Parenthood so we can have even fewer future citizens who might be born and grow up to earn money and so they could pay taxes to cover the deficits that are piling up. 

Voegelin on Radical Islam?

Connie Marshner

The Fox News special on Radical Islam last Saturday (Feb 3) was harrowing to watch, but it was a necessary public service.   Anyone who maintains that “Islam is a religion of peace” will be hard put to explain the indoctrination of young children into the jihad mentality that was so graphically documented in that one hour documentary.

A quote from the unexpected pen of Eric Voegelin comes to mind:

“Resistance against a satanical substance that is not only morally but also religiously evil can only be derived from an equally strong, religiously good force.  One cannot fight a satanical force with morality and humanity alone.” 

Is islamofascism a satanical substance, comparable to the fascism Voegelin was writing about?   If there is something in official, organized Islam that can be a good religion, let it step forward now.

Another thought, prescinding from Voegelin.  What “equally strong, religiously good force” can combat Islam?

It is not consumerism.  It is not hedonism.  It is not exceptionalism.  It is not any form of government per se. Generic Christianity is good, but is it strong? 

Is the Catholic Church the only equally strong, religiously good force equal to Islam in the world today?

If Voegelin is right that resistance must come from an equally strong, religiously good force, and if the Catholic Church is that force, then the Holy Spirit already knows it.  In which case, we must believe He is at work changing the Church and making her ready for the combat. 

Does that cast a different light upon some of the internecine ecclesiastical warfare we are all too sadly aware of?

Contra Encomia

Connie Marshner   

“The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”So says Marc Antony at the funeral of Julius Caesar.

 

He was describing reality, not necessarily advocating that reality. Why, then, do Catholic obituary writers try to reverse that reality?

 

The current spate of encomia in honor of the late Reverend Honorable Robert A. Drinan, S.J., proves that at least some pious traditions die hard, namely the one to “not speak ill of the dead.”

 

The evil that Drinan did does live after him. Speeches advocating free abortion, votes cast in favor of abortion – these have effects that outlive the man. I remember a debate I had with him on C-SPAN, where we wangled back and forth for what seemed like forever until he, sitting there in his Roman collar, finally admitted he favored abortion. (At least, that’s my recollection of how it went – such would be consistent with his votes). 

 

If there’s something in Scripture that commands us not to mention the wrongdoing of those deceased, somebody please direct me to the passage. 

 

I can understand why if a parent of young children were to die, we would bite our tongues so as to ensure that the impressionable youths heard good things about their fundamental role model. 

 

But Fr. Drinan is no role model – at least, he shouldn’t be. Yes, he was a priest. Graham Greene knew that was no guarantee of exemplary behavior. 

 

Why should we now have to pretend to forget that what Drinan argued for, what he voted for, what he taught, was contrary to the church, contrary to human nature, and outright disobedient dissent? 

March for Life Video

Here is video from the March for Life:

(Via: David Brody)

It appears to have been a Brownback-heavy event, as reported. And this is interesting: A group of young people are shown holding an anti-Romney banner and chanting, “No flip-floppers! No flip-floppers!”