From the Los Angeles Times:

In a move that some called historic, the county’s oldest African American civil rights group voted Saturday to endorse same-sex marriage.

The National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People passed a resolution supporting gay marriage at a meeting of its board of directors in Miami, saying it opposed any policy or legislative initiative that “seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the constitutional rights of LGBT citizens.”

Directors of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force erupted in applause at their board meeting Saturday as their phones buzzed with the news.

“Today is a historic day,” Rea Carey, executive director of the task force, said a phone interview from Seattle. “This is what leadership looks like in this country.”

The vote marks a national turning point on the issue of gay marriage. President Obama announced this month that he supports gay marriage. A Gallup Poll last year found, for the first time in the poll’s history, that a majority of Americans supported the legalization of gay marriage, 53% to 45%. This year, the poll showed 50% supported it, while 48% opposed it.

“Civil marriage is a civil right and a matter of civil law,” Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the 103-year-old NAACP said in a statement.

“The NAACP’s support for marriage equality is deeply rooted in the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution and equal protection of all people.”

Read the rest here.

While tragic, it is not at all surprising that the NAACP has taken a course of action that is at odds with the 62% of the black community mentioned in the article, who oppose such unions on religious grounds.

In New York City, 60% of black pregnancies end in abortion and authentic African American leaders such as Dr. Alveda King and the Reverends Catherine Davis, Walter Hoye, Stephen Broden, Clenard Childress, Michael Faulkner, Arnold Culbreth, Dr. LaVerne Tolbert, and Ryan Bomberger (to name a few), cannot get a hearing by the people Rea Carey calls “real leadership.”

With 6/10 of New York Blacks never seeing the light of day, and similar statistics elsewhere, African Americans are locked into what can only be assessed as demographic suicide. The NAACP leadership has thrown in with the same Democrat party that funds Planned Parenthood nationally with a third of a billion dollars annually; and it is this same Planned Parenthood that has been operating some 78% of their centers in minority neighborhoods, commensurate with Margaret Sanger’s Negro Project.

Now this.

It is tempting to assess the NAACP’s recent vote as an indiscriminate siding with anyone who is oppressed. However, if that were so, the NAACP would be joining the Catholic Church and other religious faiths in opposing the HHS contraceptive mandate, which is actually a war on religion.

The truth is that the American people stood by passively and consented to gays and lesbians being granted all of the goods and privileges society once reserved for married couples, everything from adoption rights to shared employment benefits, domestic partnerships protecting housing rights, etc.

The truth is that gays and lesbians were handed everything but a marriage license. We now see the emerging agenda with the emerging punitive measures against military chaplains opposed to performing such weddings.

The truth is that heterosexuals have been far more tolerant and permissive than the gay community is now behaving, and that the NAACP has missed the opportunity to address the new discrimination in America: Gay intolerance of authentic Judeo-Christian morality. It is an intolerance that, to use the NAACP’s words, “seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the constitutional rights of,” traditional Christians.

The truth is that it isn’t leadership being demonstrated by the NAACP. It’s something far worse. I’ve heard the assessments range from sheer cluelessness to something sinister. With almost 2/3 of the people it purports to “lead” opposing same-sex marriage on religious grounds, the NAACP has joined in President Obama’s war on religion. Dragging one’s members by the hair is not the same as leading. Neither is neglecting the demographic suicide that has gripped their community.

This weekend the association purporting the “Advancement of Colored Persons,” ceased to exist. Not willing to address their membership’s demographic suicide, they have thrown in with a president bent on reshaping the Christian faith that sustained them during slavery and the Jim Crow era, as well as the authentic and noble struggle for civil rights. In so doing, the NAACP has abdicated the sacred trust that once made them the noblest and most honorable institution in the United States of America.

The African American community in America, as many other quarters in America, has real needs, real problems that call for real, fresh, and imaginative leadership. Becoming embroiled in a war on the Christian roots of its membership and much of the nation has only cemented in the minds of many the image of an organization that has become thoroughly radicalized.

The rest of the nation should take heart that there are many, many other black leaders committed to authentic equality that respects the constitutional rights of all citizens. We turn now to those leaders and seek the way forward together, a way that is characterized by mutual support and respect.

“We become what we think we are.”

That was the constant admonition of my life’s mentor, Father Luke McCann. Luke was genius, and constantly ahead of the curve by 20 years in everything. As with so much he taught me, I am still unpacking the depth of it all almost twenty years later.

“We become what we think we are.”

The ascendance of the Culture of Death attests to the fact that ever greater numbers of humans have lost sight of who they are, losing their identity in a morass of guilt and shame. These traveling companions need to be teased apart, and Good Friday is as good a time as any to do so.

Guilt is a healthy emotion, as it is the soul’s barometer, a warning that we have committed a transgression that has harmed others and/or ourselves. Guilt gets a bad name when it leads to others shaming us.

Guilt is about what we have done. Shame is about who we are. If guilt is the soul’s barometer, shame is the soul’s cancer.

Shame is about being devalued, belittled, made to feel worthless. Parents who beat their children with fists and belts for transgressions communicate worthlessness to the child; the same holds true for people being belittled for being “thoughtless”, being “clueless”, being “stupid”.

Note that the behavior is not the issue, but the individual. “Being” is who we are.

“We become what we think we are.”

If we are conditioned to think that we are worthless, we will begin to act that way. People who live with ridicule often cannot separate their behaviors from themselves. In time, they do indeed become what they think they are. They begin to engage in behaviors that will reinforce their feelings of worthlessness, of alienation, of shame.

“We become what we think we are.”

Think of the abortionist who was not the brightest bulb in the ceiling in medical school, who has washed out of pulmonology, oncology, pediatrics, etc… and has endured the ridicule from his/her peers (which is seering and brutal). Abortion is the last stop for these people. It is hard to impress upon such a person the intrinsic value of the baby when they have little sense of their own intrinsic value.

Sure, they’ve made their deal with the devil, but why?

Earlier this week I went to confession and the priest offered the following admonition: “You are not what you have done. You are a son of God who loves you as His own, just as you love your own children as your own.”

That’s the key right there. We are not what we do. If we grasped our true identity and the intrinsic dignity in that identity we wouldn’t cut people to ribbons with our tongues, be they abortionists, siblings, children, or spouses.

When Regina and I had our first real good disagreement, I stopped her and reminded her of the rules of engagement: We address and criticize the behavior, not each other. (I’ve been the biggest beneficierary of that rule.)

How often do we hear people ask if some offender has no shame, when we really mean a conscience. Even Time magazine conflated these terms several years ago when they ran an article asking whatever became of shame.

That’s the problem. We have too much shame with its attendant alienation. We have too many people with poorly formed senses of self (boundary issues), and not enough moral formation.

Morality and ethics only take root in the fertile soil of a self imbued with belonging and intrinsic value. Perhaps that’s why Jesus said that the one who says, “you fool” to his brother is liable to the fires of Gehenna. He knew all too well how those words alienate and isolate people and dissolve the social bonds so necessary for building His kingdom on earth.

To the extent that He came to take away the part of our guilt that carries with it eternal separation from Him, Jesus did so on the cross. Because He did so on the cross, He washed away our shame and restored us to our full dignity. That may not be convincing to unbelievers, but we need to treat them with dignity and value. In time they will come to appreciate Father Luke’s great admonition:

“We become what we think we are.”

Some of the loudest lamentations of this penitential season come not from the laity, but from the clergy. Specifically, the churches packed on Ash Wednesday and Palm Sunday when people who don’t darken a church door all year arrive, “to get something for free.”

I understand their frustration and also see within it a missed opportunity, especially on Ash Wednesday. More on that in a moment. Here are some happenings from a friend’s parish yesterday.

One of my friends who is a pastor has decided to tie the distribution of ashes to the mass. When one of the priests distributed ashes after the homily, more than 60% of the Church cleared out before the Liturgy of the Eucharist.

At another mass, when ashes were to be distributed after mass had ended, a man came up the communion line and when the host was extended to him replied, “I don’t want that. I’m here for ashes.” (At that mass, everyone stayed for the entire mass in order to receive ashes at the end.)

What was missing there, and at a great many churches yesterday, was the Sacrament of Reconciliation. I’ve often heard it said that it would be too much all in one day. I disagree.

Perhaps tying the reception of ashes to the Sacrament of Reconciliation wouldn’t be a bad idea. Perhaps through a penance service. Yesterday, I saw a church packed to the rafters (literally) sit through an entire noon mass in order to receive their ashes.

What is needed is a stemwinder of a homily on the Last Things: Death, Judgement, Heaven, Hell. Tying that in with the opportunity in the present moment to receive another free gift, God’s forgiveness and mercy, might not be a bad way to go. Having several priests on hand to hear confessions (doable in most areas with a little creativity) might well yield surprising results.

It might also be beneficial to offer Reconciliation at times that dovetail more with contemporary schedules than the 1930′s Saturday afternoon-only.

There is something that draws such crowds on Ash Wednesday, a spark that needs to be gently nurtured into something a bit brighter and more intense. It’s easy to become discouraged and even cynical. However, many of these people will not be seen for another year, and what holds them back is the power of guilt and sin.

We must encounter them not on the terms of our predilections, but where they are at in their journey. If Ash Wednesday is the only day of the year they can be expected to be in Church, then we should be waiting with what they need most:

Forgiveness.

On Friday afternoon I wrote an open letter to Cardinal Dolan here at Coming Home. As has been our working practice, Steven Ertelt at Lifenews.com reposted my piece at his site almost immediately that afternoon (changing the title, as is his custom). What Steven neglected to do was give me attribution as the author of the piece. As a result, the piece carried Steven Ertelt’s name as the author, and it did not appear under my column.

This caused me no small amount of heartburn, as it has happened a few times before, and over the next 18 hours I sent Steven several emails asking him to correct the error, telling him that people were beginning to question the attribution: did I take the piece from him?!

Steven said my emails were buried in a mountain of emails to him, apologized, and corrected the error as soon as he saw my email some 24 hours later. However, by that time the damage was done and there was no public statement on his site explaining the error. After an exchange of emails today (Monday), Steven placed an editor’s note at the bottom of the original article after changing the name. It evidently was sufficiently buried to escape the notice of a reader from Irleand who sent me the following email:

Hello Dr Gerard Nadal,

I read your statement on Obama’s Mandate. I’m totally in agreement with it. However, the byline was “by Gerard Nadal”. Now if you care to look, I had a link to the same article published a few “Comments” above the lady who gave your link and it was to Archbishop Timothy Dolan’s blog on http://www.archny.org/ . This statement was on http://www.lifenews.com/ and I think you should have credited this organization with the statement. I’m going no further with this as we all must stick together. However, it is good to give credit where credit is due.

Indeed.

Steven Ertelt is a good man who is doing a great work at Lifenews. However, I have not been able to succeed in getting him to make a statement placed in a noticeable position on his main page that would clear the air. It’s unfortunate, as I have allowed my writing to be published on his site free of charge. However, such an egregious error, however innocently made requires more than a private apology and a note buried at the bottom of the original article (which nobody is going to re-read!).

So absent a separate article at Lifenews explaining the error, an explanation which would have cleared the air and restored my good name for those misled by the error, (people who may not be inclined to write) I’m publishing this correction and explanation 72 hours later in my more limited sphere of influence and consequently no longer writing for Lifenews.com.

Though I would have preferred that the explanation come from Steven, I honestly wish Steven all the best.

Coming Home is moving forward.

To be clear, all Obama needs to do is yield for now. That will mollify enough Catholics, including Cardinal Dolan, who said as much. When asked by Charlie Rose what he would say to a President who might admit that he misstepped, Cardinal Dolan responded:

I would say… The religious exemption is very choking and very tight. There’s a restriction there that we can’t live with. Simply in the best American principles of freedom of religion, simply give a much more dramatically wide latitude to that religious exemption and protection of conscience and religious freedom, and you’re not gonna hear from us any more.

Watch the interview here to get the whole context:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ75snNhliE&feature=player_embedded

The other alarming statement from Cardinal Dolan is this:

We bishops aren’t fighters. We’re pastors, and we want to stand on principle. We just want to do our work as effectively as we can.

To the Obama White House, that’s sweet, sweet music. Throw the fools a bone, because November is an eternity away in electoral politics. This will all be a distant memory. When Obama is reelected and has nothing left to lose we’ll pay dearly for our bishops not having galvanized us against the mortal threat.

Cardinal Dolan lamented the broken promises made by Obama when he received his honorary doctorate from Notre Dame.

He lamented Obama’s broken promises to the Catholic Health Association.

He lamented Obama’s broken promises to him personally at a private meeting in the White House.

And Cardinal Dolan’s response to the Church being played repeatedly for a fool?

Simply give a much more dramatically wide latitude to that religious exemption and protection of conscience and religious freedom, and you’re not gonna hear from us any more.

Translation: Throw us a bone.

When the President of the United States receives an honorary doctorate from the most revered Catholic University in the nation and gives his word, then is received by the Catholic health professionals and gives his word, then invites the head of the Catholic Bishops to personally give his word, and then makes them all look like fools, it’s hard to admit to having been played for a fool. However, we must recognize the true danger lurking in the president’s health care plan, as I wrote about yesterday.

Not only should have Cardinal Dolan not said, “you’re not gonna hear from us any more,” he should have signaled that having repeatedly played us for fools, Catholics and others are beginning to wake up to a profoundly disturbing reality that has lurked under all of those false assurances and will register their concerns at the polls in November. Further, while the bishops have not been fighters hitherto, that reality has changed. We recognize that this president has declared war on religious liberty, and that such ideology so flagrantly expressed is neither benign, nor transient. It is a manifestation of character and core ideology that stands diametrically opposed to the freedoms we enjoy under the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Further, Cardinal Dolan should have stated that he can no longer work with a president who has lied to the Church from the outset, and that this is not the “change” Catholics augered for when they voted for Obama three years ago.

The bishops of Nazi Germany spoke up, led by Cardinal Faulhaber. There were brutal consequences for having done so.

We have reached the point in the history of our Republic where the president has declared openly the war that his liberal minions have been waging surreptitiously for decades. This is our last best hope to stand against the aggression against Catholicism and other faithful religious denominations. We can no longer keep silent for fear of losing our tax-exempt status. The President of the United States has declared an end to religious liberty. He has defined for us what is and is not a religion, what is and is not a religious institution, and who may or may not follow the dictates of conscience as formed by their faith.

The tax-exempt status?

That will go in the second Obama administration.

What we need now are bishops who see the mortal dangers inherent in Obamacare at every stage of the life spectrum.

We need bishops who realize that there is no reason to remain on the sidelines any more.

We need bishops who realize that a totalitarian regime is one more presidential election away.

We need bishops who will lead from in front.

We need a Cardinal who will say, “You haven’t even begun to hear from us.”

Dear Ms. Brinker,

As one who has been at odds with SGK over your organization’s funding of Planned Parenthood, I write today to offer you my heartfelt gratitude and congratulations for the principled and prudential position that you have taken in defunding Planned Parenthood.

Having lost many family members to cancer, and having several close friends experience the ravages of breast cancer, I’ve experienced this issue intimately and laud you for making good on your deathbed promise to your sister, Susan. You have done what so many researchers could only dream of.

You have rallied an entire nation around women and the disease that strikes fear not only into their hearts, but into the hearts of the men who love them passionately. You have raised hundreds of millions of research dollars and in so doing have advanced the understanding of molecular medicine in the field of oncology far beyond where it would be today, but for your foundation’s single-mindedness of purpose.

In all of that focus on research, you have not forgotten the women of today who lack the means for appropriate breast screening utilizing state of the art mammography, and the need for younger women to be educated in prevention. Toward that end, it is my understanding that you and Planned Parenthood saw a shared mission and purpose in the field of women’s health where breast cancer screening and prevention were concerned.

Many of us heard of your largesse in funding breast screenings at Planned Parenthood, screenings which we were told included mammograms. Tragically, we have come to know that Planned Parenthood lied about performing mammograms, and in so doing took money from SGK that might have otherwise benefited women through mammography elsewhere, or through additional research.

Over the past few years, repeated sting operations have time and again caught Planned Parenthood acting with treachery:

Lying about performing mammograms.
Aiding in what they perceived to be the sex trafficking of minors.
Suborning lies from perceived minors to skirt reporting of statutory rape.
Lying about the developmental status of the baby they were about to abort.

And on, and on…

SGK’s February 1, 2012 statement of clarification speaks very clearly as to why the defunding took place:

We are dismayed and extremely disappointed that actions we have taken to strengthen our granting process have been widely mischaracterized. It is necessary to set the record straight.

We regret that these new policies have impacted some longstanding grantees, such as Planned Parenthood, but want to be absolutely clear that our grant-making decisions are not about politics. Throughout our 30 year history, our priority has always been and will continue to be the women we serve. As we move forward, we are working to ensure that there is no interruption or gaps in services for the women who need our support most in the fight against breast cancer.

Indeed your stringent criteria leave little room for organizations that are repeatedly caught in sting operations either lying to, or suborning lies from young people. Such criteria also no doubt would require an organization such as Planned Parenthood to actually perform the mammograms they claim to perform, or at the very least, set the record straight when others make such false claims on their behalf.

So now you are being assailed by Planned Parenthood and their devotees for being…

…what?

Anti-women’s health?

That’s a tough narrative to sell where SGK is concerned.

If the word circulating on the internet is true, Planned Parenthood has raised over $400,000 in response to your withdrawal of funding. This is indeed good news all around. Planned Parenthood has demonstrated repeatedly that when monies are withdrawn they have the capability of stepping up and doing the necessary fundraising to offset and replace the lost income. That is a cardinal sign of a strong and financially healthy organization. It means that SGK can give their support elsewhere, confident in knowing that Planned Parenthood can thrive without your support.

You have acted here with the highest integrity and moral courage. Your manifest integrity should serve as a beacon to corporations that currently fund Planned Parenthood, and who might fear the backlash and vilifying you have been receiving should they similarly redirect their money. I would encourage those corporations to fund real women’s health initiatives by funding Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Such a move would indemnify themselves against Planned Parenthood’s predictable allegation of hating women and not supporting women’s health. It would also increase your efficacy in accelerating the arrival of that day when this terrible scourge becomes a thing of the past. Perhaps corporations switching their support might in conjunction with SGK establish a program of purchasing and donating mammogram machines to areas of need, especially for low-income women.

For now, Ms. Brinker, my heartfelt congratulations and gratitude once again for your principled leadership in upholding your exacting standards with equally rigorous equanimity, regardless of the consequences. Through your principled leadership, many more women’s lives will be saved, and many more women made whole once again.

God Bless You,

Gerard M. Nadal, Ph.D.

The first paper I ever wrote in graduate school was a review of the literature on Leprosy. It is a disease transmitted by contact that we now know to be caused by a close first cousin of the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, and can be cured using the same antibiotics that we use against TB. This miracle of 20th Century medicine has emptied the leper colonies, arresting and eliminating the disease in its earliest stages before it maims and disfigures its victims.

Sunlight seems to be having the same salutary effect on the Susan G. Komen Foundation, and they have elected to leave the leper colony, as Planned Parenthood languishes with the increasing ravages of their disfigurement, unwilling to take the medicine that would end the insideous effects of their disease. It’s actually too late for Planned Parenthood, but for Komen, there is yet hope.

The sunlight began to pierce the darkness back in 2007, when Dorinda Bordlee, Vice President and Senior Counsel of the Bioethics Defense Fund met Eve Sanchez Silver who told her about her about the Komen-Planned Parenthood funding link. Silver, a breast cancer survivor and charter member of Komen’s Hispanic/Latina Advisory Council, resigned from Komen, stating,

As a Christian and life affirming citizen I can not reconcile the Foundation’s decision to affirm life with one hand and support its destruction with the other.

Bordlee began to research Komen’s grant database to confirm Silver’s claims. The most recent data available to her back then were the 2005 numbers which showed over $700,000 in grants made by certain Komen state affiliates to their local Planned Parenthood clinics. Subsequent grant totals can be read here at BDF’s site. BDF’s initial findings were picked up and pursued by a great many who then launched their own investigations.

It was discovered that Komen Founder, Nancy Brinker (Susan Komen’s sister), sat on the board of Planned Parenthood in North Texas. Jill Stanek wrote two great articles about the links between Komen and PP.

At the heart of the matter lies three essential issues regarding the deplorable decision by Komen to fund PP:

1. The causal link between breast cancer and abortion (ABC link).
2. The causal link between breast cancer and oral contraceptives.
3. The fact that Planned Parenthood does NOT do mammograms.

Yes the ABC link is hotly disputed, and only because radical proabort researchers have lied through their teeth about the literature. I’ve written 56 articles dealing with this link, which can be read here. Placing that contentious issue to the side, along with PP’s complicity in placing women at risk for breast cancer through their abortion services, we need to look at the role of PP in dispensing oral contraceptives, which have been well established causes of breast cancer.

In 2009, the same Dr. Louise Brinton who is Branch Chief in Epidemiology at the National Cancer Institute, and who chaired the sham 2003 workshop denying the ABC link, coauthored a 2009 paper in which she listed abortion and oral contraceptives under known or suspected risk factors for breast cancer. The reference for the paper follows at the end of the article.

In their paper, the authors list in Table 4. Multivariate adjusted case-control odds ratios for all breast cancer cases, triple-negative
and non-triple-negative cases, in relation to oral contraceptive risk factors, stratified by age at diagnosis under age 40 and
41-45 y, the following devastating information.

The risks for acquiring the deadliest, most aggressive and difficult to treat form of breast cancer, Triple Negative Breast Cancer based on age of first use of oral contraceptives is:

Age 22+: 250%
Age 18-22: 270%
Age Under 18: 540%

These numbers, from some of the finest minds in science, beg the question:

What would possess an organization such as Komen to ever fund an organization that dispenses birth control pills like candy? Could it be the claim that PP does life-saving breast screenings?

Certainly, Senator Barbara Boxer has been quite vocal about PP’s “mammograms”, as reported here.

In truth, PP does NOT perform mammograms. When one hears the term, “breast screening” or “breast cancer screening”, one tends to envision a mammogram. Instead, PP’s screening is a palpation of the breast, checking for detectable lumps. So, yes, if a lump is detected, and if the lump is cancerous, that could be lifesaving. But if no lump is detected? Is the woman given a referral for a mammogram?

It is the mammogram that is essential.

A woman’s best chances at beating her cancer are when the cancer is found through mammography before it is large enough to be palpated, or found through mammography in women whose breast density make it difficult to detect by palpation. By funding PP, Komen funded the abortions that lead to increased risk of breast cancer, the distribution of oral contraceptives which are well known to cause breast cancer, and the lie that women were receiving mammograms.

In an era where less than 10% of research grants are receiving federal money, there is no dearth of scientists in desperate need of funding for legitimate research purposes. One can barely walk the corridors of a university without bumping into them, so Komen should have no difficulty at all in finding and funding worthy Ph.D.’s and M.D.’s who simply cannot access the ever-dwindling supply of federal research dollars.

As far as funding prevention efforts, the neglect of the Dolle and Brinton study, or the many other papers showing oral contraception’s role in breast cancer is tantamount to a crime.

Komen is to be applauded for getting out of the leper colony and breaking its funding ties with one of the largest purveyors of death on the planet. The great work of antisepsis begun by Eve Silver and Dorinda Bordlee that was picked up and furthered by thousands will help Komen more fully achieve Nancy Brinker’s deathbed promise to her sister to do all she could to find a cure. Now that Komen is out of funding causality and lies, they may see a more robust financial future, which we all pray may help speed the end of this scourge which afflicts so many of our wives, mothers, sisters, friends, and other loved ones.

As for Planned Parenthood the mask has been ripped away, in no small measure by Lila Rose and her associates, revealing the true face of the leprosy lurking under the guise of women’s healthcare.

Reference:

Risk Factors for Triple-Negative Breast Cancer in Women
Under the Age of 45 Years

Jessica M. Dolle,1 Janet R. Daling,1 Emily White,1,3 Louise A. Brinton,4 David R. Doody,1
Peggy L. Porter,2 and Kathleen E. Malone1,3
Divisions of 1Public Health Sciences and 2Human Biology, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center; 3Department of Epidemiology, University of
Washington, Seattle, Washington; and 4Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, Rockville, Maryland

Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2009;18(4). April 2009

Hot on the heels of our medical conference last Saturday, Therapeutic Advances in Poor Prenatal Diagnoses, comes this letter from Archbishop Chaput to the people of his archdiocese. Opposition to this new eugenics is swelling all over the nation. Here is a bishop who makes me proud of my Church.

Earlier this week local media covered the story of Amelia Rivera, a young girl with Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome reportedly denied a kidney transplant by a local hospital. Amelia’s syndrome results in serious developmental delays, and according to her parents, the hospital declined a transplant due to her diminished mental ability and shortened lifespan.

It’s unwise to assume that news media get all the details of a story like this right, or that the motives of an entire hospital’s leadership and staff are as unfeeling as an individual doctor might seem. Nonetheless, a couple of things are worth noting. First, Amelia’s parents are persons who love their daughter zealously for who she is, and who know the beauty and dignity of her life despite her disability. Second, the habit of treating genetically disabled children as somehow less worthy of life is growing across the country.

A number of my friends have children with disabilities. Their problems range from cerebral palsy to Turner’s syndrome to Trisomy 18, which is extremely serious. Prenatal testing can now detect a high percentage of pregnancies with a risk of genetic problems.

The tests often aren’t conclusive. But they’re pretty good. And the results of those tests are brutally practical. Studies show that more than 80 percent of unborn babies diagnosed with Down syndrome, for example, now get terminated in the womb. They’re killed because of a flaw in one of their chromosomes – a flaw that’s neither fatal nor contagious, but merely undesirable.

The older a woman gets, the higher her risk of bearing a child with special needs. And so, in medical offices around the country, pregnant women now hear from doctors or genetic counselors that their baby has “an increased likelihood” of a genetic flaw based on one or more prenatal tests. Some doctors deliver this information with sensitivity and great support for the woman. But, as my friends know from experience, too many others seem more concerned about avoiding lawsuits, or managing costs, or even, in a few ugly cases, cleaning up the gene pool.

In practice, medical professionals can now steer an expectant mother toward abortion simply by hinting at a list of the child’s possible defects. And the most debased thing about that kind of pressure is that doctors know better than anyone else how vulnerable a woman can be in hearing potentially tragic news about her unborn baby.

I’m not suggesting that doctors should hold back vital knowledge from parents. Nor should they paint an implausibly upbeat picture of life with a child who has a disability. Facts and resources are crucial in helping adult persons prepare themselves for difficult challenges. But doctors, genetic counselors and medical school professors should have on staff – or at least on speed dial – experts of a different sort.

Parents of children with special needs, special education teachers and therapists, and pediatricians who have treated children with disabilities often have a hugely life-affirming perspective.

Unlike prenatal caregivers, these professionals have direct knowledge of persons with special needs. They know their potential. They’ve seen their accomplishments. They can testify to the benefits – often miraculous – of parental love and faith.

Expectant parents deserve to know that a child with special needs can love, laugh, learn, work, feel hope and excitement, make friends and create joy for others. These things are beautiful precisely because they transcend what we expect. They witness to the truth that every child with special needs has a value that matters eternally.

Raising a child with special needs can be demanding. It always involves some degree of suffering. Parents grow up very fast. None of my friends who has a daughter or son with a serious disability is melodramatic, or self-conscious, or even especially pious about it. They speak about their special child with an unsentimental realism.

It’s a realism flowing out of love – real love, the kind that forces its way through fear and suffering to a decision, finally, to surround the child with their heart and trust in the goodness of God. And that decision to trust, of course, demands not just real love, but also real courage.

The real choice in accepting or rejecting a child with special needs is never between some imaginary perfection or imperfection. None of us is perfect. No child is perfect. The real choice in accepting or rejecting a child with special needs is between love and unlove; between courage and cowardice; between trust and fear.

That’s the choice we face when it happens in our personal experience. And that’s the choice we face as a society in deciding which human lives we will treat as valuable, and which we will not.

This Sunday, January 22, marks the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legitimized permissive abortion around the country. More than 45 million abortions later, the damage of that decision continues to grow — undermining our reverence for the life not just of unborn children but of the mentally and physically disabled as well.

We need to understand that if some lives are regarded as unworthy, respect for all life is at risk. We should pray that Amelia Rivera gets the help she needs, and that God surrounds her parents with the support they need.

And especially this week, more than ever, we should recommit ourselves to defending the dignity of all human life, no matter how “flawed” it may seem in the eyes of the world.

File this one under, “Thinking Out Loud.”

As years go 2011 has by all measures been a deeply challenging year for me. In the tragedy department, this year has been one that makes the law of averages work, making up for the many years of relatively smooth sailing. A recap and an analysis seem to be in order.

I’ve been to the funerals of five close friends this year; buried my Godmother and last surviving maternal aunt; traveled the road with my sixteen year-old niece who was left paralyzed from the waist down after a devastating accident in September; buried Kortney Blythe Gordon, her baby Sophy, and Jon Scharfenberger after the horrific accident that claimed their lives in October; two weeks later buried my brother-in-law, Joe Calo, who leaves behind fifteen and seventeen year-old daughters; and currently have my best friend, Father Steven Clark, recuperating from open heart surgery three weeks ago.

It’s been one year I hope never to repeat. Some might be tempted to curse God, or at least to question where He was when faced with this kind of year, and there are many who have faced a similar year, and many who have faced worse. The answer is not to curse God when we experience loss, but to redouble our praise and thanksgiving. That seems counterintuitive.

Great loss points to great blessing, which points to the loving providence of God. None of the great people in my life has been my doing, but God’s. They are like the threads of a tapestry which intersect my life for a time (some for a very long time) and then end. What the final image will look like is only God’s to know, but as I look at the many beautiful people who are no longer with us, I come to appreciate more and more God’s admonition that His grace is sufficient for me.

I think of the Apostles on the mount during the Transfiguration, how they never wanted to leave that place, that vision, that beauty. The Transfiguration was meant to be instrumental and not aesthetic. It was a foretaste of the Kingdom of Heaven for the Apostles who would all (save one) be martyred as they brought the Gospel to the lost.

The beauty of our loved ones produces transfigurations in our own lives, and like the Apostles we can get fixed on the beauty of the moment and lose sight of the instrumentality that such beauty is meant to have in our lives.

We never want it to end. Given a choice between the foretaste of Heaven or the ultimate reality, I’m not ashamed to admit that I’d like to settle for the bird in the hand. It’s all that I’ve ever known. I suspect that God understands that pretty well. So, faced with the loss of such great beauty I reflexively thank God for blessing me with such beautiful family and friends, for all of the good in me that has come from their influence.

On the brighter side, my niece continues to slowly regain sensation and some movement in her legs. If Father Clark has had a rough surgery, I can’t escape the fact that when the surgeons went in, they found that he had huge blood clots in BOTH atria of his heart, and his continued presence is attributable to God alone.

I look at how Joseph is growing beautifully in Boy Scouts, how his social skills are growing there at an accelerated pace, how he is forming good bonds with other men who are excellent mentors and role models.

I look at the avalanche of trophies and awards all three of my children have earned in competitive bowling, how they are all developing as dancers.

Most of all for the children, they are growing in their faith, in their scholastics, and in their love for one another and their family.

And then there is Regina’s love.

Looking at the events of a year is ultimately a misleading exercise, as a year is nothing more than one revolution of our planet around a star. The focus needs to be on our lifetime, and the impact of God’s blessings over the course of that lifetime’s continuum.

When I do that, the sorrow of loss gives way to a whole new transfiguration.

To say that it’s been quite a year would be an understatement. Looking back over the year, I’ve looked at Coming Home’s statistics to see what the top ten blog posts were in terms of traffic. Almost all were articles dealing with priest’s travails: Father Corapi and Father Pavone. Rather than leaving it at that, I’ll compress the posts on each priest and report the most viewed one for each so that we may look at what else has grabbed people’s attention. We’ll start with #1.

#! Prayers for Jon Scarfenberger. I’m still completely at a loss for words at the magnitude of this tragedy and the impact it has had on me. Let’s all continue to lift the Scarfenberger, Blythe and Gordon families in prayer.

#2 Freeing Father Pavone!

#3 Susan G. Komen Gives Million$ to Planned Parenthood.

#4 Father Corapi and March Madness

#5 Pepsi, Aborted Babies, Ethics, and Tasteful Research

#6 Pro-abort’s Lies Written by my ten year-old daughter, Elizabeth; it’s the eigth highest all time on the blog. (Proud Papa smiling!)

#7 Pro-Life Academy. Biology: Cells (III) This is surprising, as it’s an article written in January 2010 when the blog was three weeks old. Who says pro-lifers aren’t science-oriented!!

#8 Exorcists Shutting an Abortion Mill

#9 Pope Benedict XVI: Love & Truth

#10 Post-Abortion Agony

Topically, that represents a nice distribution of science, human pathos, ministry, healing, and theology. In short, it captures the breadth and complexity of who we are and what we do.

I have no idea what lies in store in 2012. I only know that I am so very blessed to be walking the road with everyone here at Coming Home. My prayers for a healthy and prosperous New Year for all.

God Bless.

It was two years ago today that I began this undertaking with great trepidation and an even greater assurance that nobody would ever discover the blog.

Jill Stanek, who knew better, along with her moderators Bethany and Carla really encouraged me to step out of the boat. Jill gave Coming Home a beautiful write-up two weeks later on Christmas Eve, and the rest has been the Holy Spirit of God.

In the past two years, this blog has covered a great deal of ground. 633 Posts and 370,000 hits later, I feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface.

Many on the other side have criticized the tag line:

“Science in Service of the Pro-Life Movement.”

I think that line is misunderstood, and I’d like to clear that up. I’m not distorting science in order to service the pro-life movement. It’s quite the opposite.

After 40 years of abortion, after 50 years of the sexual revolution, the casualties can no longer be swept under the rug with the rhetorical broom of the Culture of Death. The pile of human debris has turned into a mountain, and every shred of credible science shows as much.

Science done properly and well serves the truth, and the truth consistently emerging from credible science serves the pro-life argument.

Science validating the truth of life, the truth of God’s creation. That leads to the second great criticism of this blog:

The blending of science and religion, especially Catholicism, is seen as discrediting the science.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

Living an integrated life, in part, means taking truth from science and applying that truth to the contentions of faith and vice-versa, and looking for the areas of agreement. Science is increasingly demonstrating the benefits of a life lived according to God’s wise design. That’s why I get hammered. The Culture of Death is terrified by that prospect.

And of course, I would be having a conversation with myself, but for all of the good people who have stopped, read, contemplated, responded, encouraged and challenged me, and spread the word about what Coming Home has been bringing to light:

The wondrous nature of God’s creation, and the consequences of disregarding the revealed plan for that creation.

My heartfelt thanks and prayers to all who have spent their time here and who have spread the good news that the systematic study of God’s creation has validated his wise design for that creation.

I have never asked for money to help sustain me and my family, considering the time this blog consumes, and I never will.

God has sustained us, and He always will.

For all who responded to my request for the money and prayers we needed to bury Kortney, Sophie and Jon in October, my eternal gratitude. The outpouring of love and support were a healing balm for Ben Gordon, the Scharfenberger family, and the family at Students for Life. This was the pro-life family in our finest hour.

God Bless you all, and please be assured of my ongoing prayers for all as we soldier on together.

Over a year ago, friend, Catholic blogger and co-founder of KIDS (Keep Infants with Down Syndrome), Leticia Velasquez asked if I would be interested in contributing a chapter to an anthology of stories by parents of special needs children, A Special Mother Is Born. It was a book a couple of years in the making, and I agreed. I thought the title bemusing for a dad as contributor, but Leticia assured me that Senator Rick Santorum had contributed, as had Patrick Coffin. We three would be in the great company of some truly great women.

This book addresses one of the burning issues of our day. With prenatal diagnostics leading to the abortions of the less-than-perfect among us, with parents who are frightened into paralysis by these diagnoses and a medical establishment increasingly surrendering to the cowardice of eugenics, over thirty mothers and three fathers of special needs children have stepped forward to share their journeys.

If one is looking for a feel-good easy read, this book isn’t it. This book tells the story of fear, bewilderment, broken hopes and dreams, and the triumph of love in all of its raw and untamed beauty. It is a window into the human soul, into souls that have been forever transformed by children whose needs call forth what love demands most:

Sacrifice.

For those of us who have known the unspeakable beauty of being loved by another, we know that the love we have experienced has come at a cost to the one who has loved us. They have given us their time, attention; material, spiritual and emotional substance. They have accepted us with our strengths and pursued us in spite of our weaknesses–even because of our weaknesses. They have wrapped us in their love and esteem, and lifted us to heights we never could have attained by our own efforts.

That is the sort of love that flows through this book like a rampaging river, overflowing the banks that would contain it, and flooding the surrounding countryside. It is the sort of love that is desperately sought after in a world desperate for authentic love, and purpose, and meaning.

The stories in this book are the stories a frightened and weary world needs to hear, a world that has bought into the counterfeit culture for so long it mistakes love’s essence–sacrifice–with servility, and fails to see its reciprocity. Here’s a teaser from Chapter 13.

Mary von Schlegell is in her eighties and is the mother of Tony, who has Down Syndrome and is in his forties. Born in the age before the therapies that now advance these children as far as college graduation, the only word Tony has ever spoken is “Mama”. Here is Mary’s poem to her beloved son:

Tony

As you, my child, are the limitation
So are you the sweetest consolation of my life
And imitation of our Lord.

Oh how can we ever fathom
The strange economy of a loving God?
Why does our trust so often fail,
With salvation springing even here along our path?

Mary’s sentiment is shared throughout this book. Our special children have been our salvation. We perfect ourselves as humans to the degree that we empty ourselves for another. The movements of the parents in this book go from joyful anticipation, to shock and despair, to fear, and finally to the triumph of love and our personal salvation.

The children mentioned here span the spectrum of poor prenatal diagnoses and other challenges, from the trisomic conditions, to autism, to tracheoesophageal fistulas, to brain tumors, Type 1 diabetes, epilepsy, and ADHD.

There are the stories of the doctors who along with family and friends brought relentless pressure to abort, and of the resistance by men and women who felt the depths of betrayal, isolation, and abandonment in that relentless pressure.

Through it all, these are the stories of grace and triumph in the face of cynical abandonment and despair. These are the stories that needed to be told, that need to be heard, that need to be shared. These are the stories that medical students need to read and carry with them into their practice of medicine. So vital are these experiences to our physicians in training, that I will see to it that every medical student who wants a copy of this book will have one.

Next year, for the entire year of 2012, Medical Students for Life, in conjunction with the Family Research Council and KIDS will be hosting a series of medical, psychological, and services conferences addressing the many facets of treating patients with poor prenatal diagnoses and their families. We will be educating the medical students, resident physicians, nurses and the public in a series of live webinars and conferences in the treatment, care and therapeutic management of these special children, and how to advance them as far as technology and therapy will permit.

This book is already getting our year off to a jump-start with pre-publication orders and sales skyrocketing. Books may be purchased by clicking here at aspecialmotherisborn.blogspot.com

In this book, Leticia Velasquez has succeeded in tearing away the veil of silence surrounding the mounting eugenic pursuit of perfection in medicine, and in shining the light of truth on the reality that parents not only survive, but thrive as they pour themselves out for their special children. If we are to stop medicine’s slide into soulless oblivion, we must plant our flag on this hill and defend it at all cost.

Leticia Velasquez has done so, commandingly. The stories are so compelling that I could not put this book down and read it in one long sitting.

If there is one book that points the way forward in reclaiming a culture of life, this book is it. It is triumphal, but not at all in the way the world would expect. It needs to be read, and contemplated, and then acted upon. It needs to be shared and its stories celebrated. Most of all, it needs to be a source of strength and hope to other parents who are facing or will face similar diagnoses.

This is a mess. It’s also one of the thorniest questions in vaccination medicine to have surfaced in a long time. From the outset, it must be clear that I am neither endorsing, nor dismissing the question of vaccinating boys. Get a cup of coffee, and let’s kick this one around for a bit.

The issues here are many, so let’s start with some straightforward infectious diseases epidemiology.

Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) is the most prevalent of the sexually transmitted pathogens. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have an excellent fact sheet which is a must-read. Click here.

From a strict infectious diseases perspective, the goal of public health is to certainly limit the pool of pathogen within a population, and to eradicate it if at all possible. This was done successfully with smallpox through a determined and aggressive campaign of world-wide immunization. From a strictly scientific perspective, the same makes sense with HPV. Why not shoot for eradication?

Of course, smallpox and HPV are very different diseases, both in their lethality and in their mode of transmission. The smallpox virus is spread through saliva droplets and remains alive for anywhere between 6-24 hours on contaminated surfaces. Someone might have sneezed into their hand, touched an object in the office such as a phone receiver, and thus facilitated transmission to others touching that object.

HPV requires sexual contact. It is that dimension of personal behavior, of choice, that leads to disease transmission and the current debate.

Certainly, as Cardinal O’Connor used to say, good morality is good medicine. Virginity followed by fidelity in both parties to a marriage obviates the need in that couple for any immunization against STD’s. For the rest of the world, we have an imperfect reality. Let’s consider the parent who does not want their child immunized (and we’ll get to the vaccine safety issues shortly).

Regina and I will stress virtue in our children, and would hope that they remain virgins until marriage. Assuming all goes well, there is no guarantee that their spouses will be virgins, despite assurances given verbally. Therein lies the danger. With well over half of the population infected, the probabilities of even the most virtuous among us encountering HPV are astronomical.

Given that the vaccine is only effective before one is exposed to the virus, the question of when to vaccinate becomes a real concern for parents. Children from the best and most faith-filled families succumb to peer pressure and have sex. Many identify virginity with vaginal intercourse and settle on oral and anal sex as compromise activities that bring about orgasm while ‘preserving’ their virginity, such as they define it.

The problem is that HPV can be spread from the genitals to the mouth and oropharynx, with 35% of all throat cancers being caused by HPV. HPV can also be spread from the mouth to the genitalia.

It’s a mess.

In the strictest sense, vaccinating our children against this pathogen can save a great many women from cervical cancer, males from penile cancer, and both women and men from throat cancer. That’s simply a fact.

The problem comes in with some 68 reported deaths from Gardasil given to girls, and tens of thousands of reported adverse side-effects. Still, when one considers the following ANNUAL numbers from CDC:

Cervical cancer. Each year, about 12,000 women get cervical cancer in the U.S. Almost all of these cancers are HPV-associated.

Other cancers that can be caused by HPV are less common than cervical cancer. Each year in the U.S., there are about:

1,500 women who get HPV-associated vulvar cancer
500 women who get HPV-associated vaginal cancer
400 men who get HPV-associated penile cancer
2,700 women and 1,500 men who get HPV-associated anal cancer
1,500 women and 5,600 men who get HPV-associated oropharyngeal cancers (cancers of the back of throat including base of tongue and tonsils) [Note: Many of these cancers may also be related to tobacco and alcohol use.]

The question arises: What is an acceptable risk in vaccinating?

No vaccine is 100% safe. Ever. Period.

People get sick and people die from vaccines. It’s a numbers game. It’s a cost-benefit analysis. If all of the reported adverse effects of Gardasil are actually true, they still represent a drop in the bucket compared to the numbers of HPV-associated cancers reported above. In the cold calculus of public health, it seems an acceptable risk.

Enter again the behavioral component of disease transmission, and the clarity of acceptable risk immediately becomes foggy. Were smallpox once again in the population, I wouldn’t hesitate to accept these numbers as an acceptable risk, precisely because one cannot see the disease coming.

However, people contract HPV through willful behavior. They will the behavior that carries the risk of transmission. In that light, here is the dilemma faced by Regina and me:

Do we risk our children’s lives and health today in an attempt to hedge our bets on their behavior years down the line, or of their future spouses’ premarital behaviors?

Even if our children remain virgins, there is no guarantee with their future spouses. Do we risk their lives to attenuate a possible case of HPV in a future mate?

If Gardasil is good enough for girls, then it’s good enough for boys.

The question is whether it’s good enough?

I honestly don’t know.

This isn’t how we hoped this novena would conclude. Jon entered his eternal rest yesterday. The need for prayers for the victims continues. Four human beings perished as a result of this accident. Two others face a long road back to health, and countless others have been shattered by the experience. We know that God is always with us and that one day this side of eternity will all pass away.

We conclude our novena grateful for Jon’s ultimate healing, while at the same time bewildered and filled with inexpressible sorrow.

We gather in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

DAY NINE

O glorious Mother of God, to you we raise our hearts and hands to implore your powerful intercession

in obtaining from the benign Heart of Jesus all the graces necessary for our spiritual and temporal welfare, particularly for the grace of a happy death. O Mother of our Divine Lord, as we conclude this novena for the special favor we seek at this time.

We pray that just as Jesus gave to Jon the ultimate healing yesterday, that you would intercede for Jon’s family and friends, that they be given the grace to bear this staggering loss. We pray especially for Jon’s parents and immediate family, and ask your maternal intercession on their behalf.

We feel animated with confidence that your prayers in our behalf will be graciously heard. O Mother of My Lord, through the love you bear to Jesus Christ and for the glory of His Name, hear our prayers and obtain our petitions.

O Brilliant star of purity, Mary Immaculate, Our Lady of Lourdes, glorious in your assumption, triumphant in your coronation, show unto us the mercy of the Mother of God, Virgin Mary, Queen and Mother, be our comfort, hope, strength, and consolation. Amen.

Our Lady of Lourdes , pray for us.

Saint Bernadette, pray for us.