Blogposts

Washington Promotes Abortion, Attacks Religious Freedom The Totalitarian/Socialist Temptation

02-28-2021Weekly Reflection

Some particulars from the Conference of the American Bishops about a proposed bill called the Equality Act, introduced in Congress and supported by the President. The Conference rejects this proposed bill and advises Catholics to oppose it:

The Equality Act:

  • exempts itself from the bipartisan Religious Freedom Restoration Act, in an explicit and unprecedented departure from one of America’s founding principles, thereby infringing on religious freedom and making it more difficult for individuals to live out their faith
  • forces religiously operated spaces and establishments, such as church halls, to either host functions that violate their beliefs or close their doors to their communities
  • requires women to compete against men and boys in sports, and to share locker rooms and shower facilities with men and boys
  • forces faith-based charities that serve all people to violate their religious beliefs, and threatens the welfare of thousands of beneficiaries of charitable services such as shelters and foster care agencies, by forcing a multitude of them to be shut down
  • jeopardizes existing prohibitions on the use of federal taxpayer funds for abortion, likely pressuring or even mandating the performance of abortions by health care providers in violation of their consciences, and ultimately ending more human lives
  • hinders quality health care, by forcing health care professionals, against their best medical judgment, to support treatments and procedures associated with “gender transition.”

This bill is contrary to the natural law, the religious freedom guaranteed by the Constitution, and Catholic teaching.

Given this proposed bill, the Little Sisters of the Poor may once again be a target as they were in the Obama years, to force them to provide for contraception and abortion under the guise of health-care. Biden’s Health and Human Services nominee, Xavier Becerra, rabidly pro-abortion, including partial birth abortion, vehemently attacked the Little Sisters of the Poor trying to force them to comply with the anti-life, anti-religious freedom agenda, when he was attorney general in California.

This Equality Act must be defeated. Our voices also need to be heard by contacting the President and local representatives to oppose this bill. You can follow the link on the parish website to help make your voice heard.

Bills like the Equality Act and the drive to mandate abortions and gender ideology and suppress free speech are an indication of a totalitarian-temptation, which has taken over the political class in Washington. There is a marked effort to force people and institutions to comply as the political class kowtows to extremists. United in this effort are big tech and many in the media. This extremism operates as a pseudo-religion. This was recently pointed out by one of the premier Catholic philosophers of our time Edward Feser. He states:

The Western world is the creation of the Church, and the crisis of the West is always at bottom the crisis of the Church. This is especially so where the Church has receded into the background of the Western mind – where men’s plans are hatched in the name of progress, science, social justice, equity, or some other purportedly secular value, and make little or no reference to religion. For liberalism, socialism, communism, scientism, progressivism, identity politics, globalism, and all the rest (include here Nazism and Fascism) – this Hydra’s head of modernist projects, however ostensibly secular, is united by two features that are irreducibly theological. First, they are all essentially apostate projects, enterprises that have arisen in the midst of Christian civilization with the aim of supplanting it. And they could have arisen only within the Christian context, because, second, these projects are all heretical in the broad sense of that term. That is to say, they are all founded on some idea inherited from Christianity (the dignity of the individual, human equality, a law-governed universe, a final consummation, etc.) but removed from the theological framework that originally gave it meaning, and radically distorted in the process.

This is why this political-religion will always attack the Church and Christians to try to force them to follow their political beliefs because the Church resists the political-religion and points outs its errors on human life, family, and sexuality. Much media and big tech (Facebook recently cancelled news feeds to the entire country of Australia!) are acting as the official enforcers of the political-religion seeking to punish those, who don’t abide by its speech codes (all social engineering begins by verbal engineering) and policies. Schools are especially targeted to spread the political religion to indoctrinate young people not to mention the universities where in many of them (most of them?) academic freedom no longer exists for those who oppose the current suppression of free speech and the reigning politics. Parents must be especially vigilant about what is being taught to their children. Tax money must not be used for political indoctrination in the guise of education which is what happens in authoritarian regimes. This war by the political class in Washington against the natural order and human life causes immense evil, suffering, and loss of life. Prayer and fasting are required to defeat this as well.

In this regard some wisdom and a warning from Winston Churchill about the dangers of socialism one of the components of today’s political religion being advanced and all its progeny:

....there can be no doubt that Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State. …liberty, in all its forms is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism. …there is to be one State to which all are to be obedient in every act of their lives. This State is to be the arch-employer, the arch-planner, the arch-administrator and ruler, and the arch-caucus boss.

A Socialist State once thoroughly completed in all its details and aspects… could not afford opposition. Socialism is, in its essence, an attack upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils.

But I will go farther. I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart that no Socialist system can be established without a political police. Many of those who are advocating Socialism or voting Socialist today will be horrified at this idea. That is because they are shortsighted, that is because they do not see where their theories are leading them.

No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.

And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil. And where would the ordinary simple folk—the common people, as they like to call them in America—where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?

BACK TO LIST