#327 Amnesty Int'l, Mother Teresa - September 9, 2016
Amnesty International Still Abandoning Conscience Several years ago, Amnesty International (AI) – which up until then had a marvelous record working on mobilizing action for freeing prisoners of conscience – moved toward a stand of treating abortion access as a “right.” We launched a petition drive against this new position and hand-delivered the petitions to the board at their conference. Yet we were dismayed to find that democracy and free speech were no longer in practice there. Later, they took a pro-war stand on the U.S. war in Afghanistan, showing that the move toward violence as a problem-solver had spread, as it often does. Now AI, with a large grant from George Soros' Open Society Foundation (OSF), is assertively promoting abortion legalization in Ireland, Algeria, Burkina Faso, El Salvador, Nepal, Morocco-Western Sahara and Tunisia. They’ve collected 271,000 signatures globally. Now there’s a counter-petition which at this writing has almost 192,000 signatures, and sponsors hope to surpass AI’s petition numbers. It’s called “Amnesty: Abortion is not a "human right" - stop pushing it around the world!” Sponsors say: “Let's make it clear that we reject big-money corporate attacks on the sovereignty of small and developing nations and their absolute right and duty to protect the unborn.”
September 4 Celebrations At her National Prayer Breakfast speech back in 1994, Mother Teresa (1910-1997) said, “"Any country that accepts abortion, is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what it wants." She expounded upon how abortion is the greatest threat to peace, and did so in front of a political audience where this was a courageous thing to say. Huge crowds gathered at the Vatican to see her canonized (officially recognized as a saint) on September 4. She’s now Saint Teresa of Kolkata (also known as Calcutta in British imperialist spelling). This did bring some of her critics into the news again. Most notable is the writing of Christopher Hitchens. However, Christopher’s brother, Peter Hitchens, is someone we quoted as having marvelous consistent-life insight.
Mother Teresa statue in Struga, Macedonia / credit: Zlatko Menkinoski
Latest CL Blog Richard Stith explains “When ‘Choice’ Itself Hurts the Quality of Life.” For abortion, assisted suicide, and voluntary euthanasia, giving people “choice” can cause the future support they need to diminish or disappear. "Their choice, their problem," many may think. And what does it do to living people to know that their lives were or are optional?
Quotation of the Week Paulist Fathers Statement on Moral Issues in the 2016 Presidential Election September 6, 2016 As we consider the many incidents of mass violence and individual gun violence, we acknowledge they have not occurred in a vacuum. We exist in a society that does not always cherish human life. The American people have grown numb to war, paying scant attention to a 15-year military operation in Afghanistan that has seen thousands of people killed. . . . Abortion of the unborn also threatens our culture. We pray that all people will see human life as a precious gift . . . We also recommit ourselves to be present to single women and couples facing unplanned pregnancies. . . . Similarly, the death penalty and euthanasia are the easy solutions of a culture seeking to avoid the heavy-lifting of reconciliation and the burden of pain. Our society will be stronger when all human life, from conception to natural death, is protected.
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