"Our united prayers, sacrifices, and efforts to protect human life and heal the wounds inflicted by abortion remain as important as ever. As our Holy Father Pope Leo XIV has said, ‘God’s mercy calls us to protect every life, especially those society overlooks—-the child yet to be born and the elderly nearing their journey’s end—-because each bears Christ’s face.’ May we see the face of Christ in every single person, in every pregnant mother, and every child in the womb. Let us remain steadfast in our commitment to ensure that every human life may be protected in law and welcomed in love, and that abortion may be unthinkable.”
--Bishop Daniel E. Thomas, Chairman, USCCB Committee on Pro-Life Activities
Showing posts with label activism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label activism. Show all posts
Thursday, January 22, 2026
Quote of the Day
Wednesday, June 21, 2023
Marching for Life in the Post-Roe Era
by Justin Soutar
June 21, 2023
On February 1, 2023, I was among many thousands of faith-filled people of all ages, races, and backgrounds from across the Old Dominion and neighboring states who converged on Richmond for the Virginia March for Life. While the great majority of participants in this annual demonstration were my fellow Catholics, including hundreds of brother Knights of Columbus, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, Bishop Barry C. Knestout of Richmond, and Bishop Michael F. Burbidge of Arlington, there were many hundreds of people from other Christian denominations as well, including Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin. It was also an overwhelmingly younger crowd, with a large number of enthusiastic teenagers and young adults present. Despite our differences, we were all gathered for a single purpose: to respectfully demand that Virginia lawmakers protect the God-given right to life of innocent unborn children in the Commonwealth.
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| Photo by Justin Soutar |
It has been a year since the U.S. Supreme Court finally rectified its erroneous and infamous 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized the horrific practice of abortion in all fifty states and resulted in the tragic murder of more than sixty million unborn children during a forty-nine-year period. While the pro-life movement in the United States grew dramatically in the following decades, with tens of millions of believers consistently praying and advocating for Roe's reversal and most states enacting various effective restrictions on abortion access, we were not entirely prepared for the Dobbs v. Jackson decision and how to proceed in its wake.
This lack of a unified and coherent plan for the post-Roe era was reflected in the variety of opinions and responses to Dobbs. Some pro-life leaders insisted that the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C. should continue to be held even though its goal of ending Roe had been achieved. Others favored shifting the movement's activism efforts to the state legislatures. And still others argued that pro-life activism should continue at both the federal and state government levels. Similarly, some parishes and Catholic colleges sent busloads of parishioners and students to the March for Life in our nation's capital; others sent buses to the March for Life in their state capitals; and still others participated in both the national and state demonstrations.
Meanwhile, although the abortion cartel led by Planned Parenthood was considerably less prepared for Dobbs than the pro-life movement was, it quickly adapted to the new legal situation to protect its bottom line, shifting its deadly operations to states with permissive abortion laws and convincing (bribing?) the FDA to allow the abortifacient drug Mifeprex (formerly UR-486) to be distributed over the counter to pregnant women in all fifty states via retail pharmacies and the U.S. Postal System in clear violation of federal drug safety guidelines.
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| Photo by Justin Soutar |
Considering that the Dobbs decision returned the abortion issue to the American people and their elected representatives at the state level, it makes perfect sense that pro-life efforts in the state governments, including electing pro-life representatives and governors and enacting pro-life legislation, should be intensified in order to restrict and ban abortion in as many states as possible. This will significantly reduce the number of unborn baby killings nationwide, allowing us to make good progress toward our goal of eliminating legalized abortion throughout the United States. But we simply cannot reach that goal through state-level activism alone because certain states will continue to keep abortion legal.
The inalienable right to life of each innocent person is affirmed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, although neither document specifies when life begins because no one knew at the time. Far more importantly, abortion is a direct violation of the Creator's natural law and basic human rights regardless of anyone's beliefs or opinions about it, so the question of whether or not it should be legal cannot simply be left to the whims of each state legislature's vote and each governor's signature or veto.
Federal legislation will ultimately be necessary to eradicate this scourge from our nation once and for all. In his famous 1983 "Evil Empire" address, U.S. President Ronald Reagan predicted that legislation to end the abortion tragedy would someday pass Congress. There is, in fact, just such a piece of legislation called the Life at Conception Act, introduced by Senator Rand Paul, that would enshrine the right to life of the unborn child into federal law. The pro-life movement should unify behind this Act and get it passed and signed into law.
All things considered, this author believes that the American pro-life movement should be waging a two-front campaign at the state and federal government levels to end the slaughter of the unborn. The long-running March for Life in Washington should continue for as many years as is necessary until the Life at Conception Act becomes the law of the land, but the route should be altered to end at the U.S. Capitol building instead of the Supreme Court. In the meantime, every state should have an annual March for Life demonstration in its capital city to push for an end to legalized abortion in that state. Let's keep praying and marching for life until we win!
Copyright 2023 Justin D. Soutar.
Thursday, January 23, 2020
Quote of the Day
"The pro-life movement is about more than saving the life of the baby, although that already is a very great thing and enough to justify all that we do on behalf of life. But the movement is also about the mother, and providing her the emotional, spiritual and material support she needs to make a happy and truly human choice."
--Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, Homily, January 28, 2014
Monday, February 18, 2019
In Praise of Democrats
No doubt many readers will be put off by the unexpected title of this essay, so I'll hasten to add a crucial disclaimer: This article will not extol the godless, radically secularist ideology of the current Democratic Party leadership or its abominable methods of putting it into practice. Nor will it condemn the traditional Judeo-Christian values, strict constitutional government, and fiscal responsibility espoused by the current Republican Party leadership. Rather, my intention here is along the lines of Jesus' famous remark to his disciples that the children of this age are wiser in their generation than the children of light. My goal is to demonstrate that there is something truly praiseworthy in our worst political enemies, the Democrats, and that there is something truly blameworthy in our best political friends, the Republicans.
Looking back over the past ten years of contemporary American history, which includes eight years of President Obama and two years of President Trump, it becomes painfully obvious that the Democrats have been steadily gaining the upper hand in national and state politics. This increasing concentration of power in Democratic hands has been taking place despite the remarkable growth and ascendancy of the Tea Party movement which swept historic Republican majorities into the Senate, the House of Representatives, and state legislatures and state governorships across the nation in 2010 and 2014 and propelled Donald Trump into the White House in 2016. Ironically, Democrats are even more powerful and dangerous now in 2019, with majority control of the House alone, than they were in 2009 when they controlled the White House, the House and the Senate with a filibuster-proof supermajority in the latter chamber. How so?
In today's money-driven, politically polarized, social media-saturated culture, a political movement easily claims victory over its opposition based on the sums of money it raises and spends on advertising, the amount of media publicity it gets, and the number of seats and chambers it wins and holds in Washington and state capitals. Although these factors are to some extent important and necessary for any political movement to achieve national prominence, their sum does not automatically equal enduring influence. The true yardstick for measuring the long-term success of any U.S. political movement is its ability to accomplish its stated objectives. And the absolutely critical factor here is the movement's determination (or lack thereof) to implement its agenda.
During the past ten years, the Democrats have made it very clear that their agenda is to fundamentally transform America from a Judeo-Christian, Constitutional, pro-life, pro-family, small-government, low-tax, balanced-budget, market-economy-based, secure-borders nation into a godless, lawless, pro-abortion, anti-family, big-government, high-tax, high-debt, socialist, open-borders nation. Their toolkit to accomplish this has included lies, propaganda, secrecy, name-calling, character assassination, threats, and blackmail. Frankly, they've made substantial progress toward their revolutionary goal with the continued expulsion of God from our national life and public places, a litany of unconstitutional laws and executive orders from ObamaCare to DACA, maintaining taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood, Supreme Court decisions upholding ObamaCare and striking down state marriage laws, swelling of the federal bureaucracy, high taxes, a national debt increase of $12 trillion, stifled economic growth, and a massive population of illegal immigrants.
The fact that most of this was accomplished with Republicans controlling one or both houses of Congress is a shining reflection on the bulldog tenacity of Democrats to see their agenda through, come what may. It's also a glaring reflection on the disappointing lack of determination by Republicans to implement their own agenda for the country. Supposedly, the Republicans want to keep America a Judeo-Christian, Constitutional, pro-life, pro-family, small-government, low-tax, fiscally responsible, market-economy-based, secure-borders nation. And it's true that in the past two years, President Trump and Congressional Republicans have taken some important steps to implement their agenda, reversing some of the damage wreaked by Democrats under President Obama. However, the Republicans have not been anywhere near as aggressive in implementing their good agenda as the Democrats have been in implementing their evil one. Worse, Democrats consistently make agenda-driven campaign promises and deliver on them, while Republicans tend to make agenda-driven campaign promises and renege on them.
Case in point: the ObamaCare monstrosity. Democrats promised it during the 2008 election campaign, and after winning that election, despite opposition from Republicans and two-thirds of the American people, they delivered, ramming the controversial bill through Congress and into law in 2010. Republicans promised to either repeal or de-fund it during the 2014 election season, but after winning that election, despite massive support for fulfilling their campaign promise, in 2015 Republicans led by House Speaker John Boehner caved in to President Obama's demand for money for his pet law. Again in 2016, Donald Trump and the Republicans solemnly pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act [sic] and replace it with entirely new healthcare legislation in line with their own agenda. But while a Democratic-controlled White House, Senate and House in 2009 and 2010 proved entirely capable of enacting ObamaCare, a Republican-controlled White House, Senate and House in 2017 and 2018 proved entirely incapable of repealing it.
The fact that ObamaCare is still on the books today certainly demonstrates the staying power of the corrupt Washington establishment behind it (with which the Democrats are fully in bed), but more to the point here, it exemplifies the ominous trend of the past ten years in which Republicans are quickly throwing their campaign promises out the window, quietly setting their agenda aside, and gradually ceding more power to their Democratic enemies. The donkey's iron determination combined with the elephant's hushed timidity effectively renders the Democratic Party the majority party in America today. If this trend continues, within twenty years the Republican Party will find itself an irrelevant minority party, leaving the Democrats firmly in charge of national affairs.
Why have Republican politicians abandoned their core principles, betrayed their loyal constituents, and compromised their cherished values in this fashion? Apparently, for fear of the Democrats who are threatening them and have added the incitement of mob violence to their toolkit in their increasing desperation to further advance their radically secularist agenda. And apparently, Republicans are so scared of the above-mentioned establishment that they've been transformed into creatures of that very establishment, while still claiming to represent "we the people." They are now followers disguised as leaders. The Republicans' hypocrisy is sickening and their cowardice is frightening. I have to hand it to the Democrats: they know exactly what they want to achieve and how to achieve it, and come heck or high water, they're accomplishing it. Meanwhile, much of the wholesome agenda our country sorely needs languishes in the comfortable offices of House and Senate Republicans.
Yes, the Democratic bullies have lots of money and power thanks to the corrupt establishment and the "mainstream" media. But that's a poor excuse for Republicans to roll over and play dead. The Republican principles that made America great are worth defending as strenuously as possible, and since the Republican agenda based on those principles holds the key to America's long-term survival, it must be pushed with even more determination than the Democrats are pushing their rotten agenda if it is to succeed long-term. This means the Republicans must be "wise as serpents and simple as doves," taking full advantage of their own strengths and fully exploiting the Democrats' weaknesses. The Democrats may seem stronger at the moment in worldly terms, but Republicans have the far greater strengths of faith and trust in God, the revealed truths of natural law regarding human life and liberty, the wisdom and example of the Founders, prayer and fasting, and divine grace. If Republicans utilize their own strengths with sufficient determination and resolve for a sufficient period of time, America will be rescued from the tyranny of radical secularism. If not...
Copyright © 2019 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.
Looking back over the past ten years of contemporary American history, which includes eight years of President Obama and two years of President Trump, it becomes painfully obvious that the Democrats have been steadily gaining the upper hand in national and state politics. This increasing concentration of power in Democratic hands has been taking place despite the remarkable growth and ascendancy of the Tea Party movement which swept historic Republican majorities into the Senate, the House of Representatives, and state legislatures and state governorships across the nation in 2010 and 2014 and propelled Donald Trump into the White House in 2016. Ironically, Democrats are even more powerful and dangerous now in 2019, with majority control of the House alone, than they were in 2009 when they controlled the White House, the House and the Senate with a filibuster-proof supermajority in the latter chamber. How so? In today's money-driven, politically polarized, social media-saturated culture, a political movement easily claims victory over its opposition based on the sums of money it raises and spends on advertising, the amount of media publicity it gets, and the number of seats and chambers it wins and holds in Washington and state capitals. Although these factors are to some extent important and necessary for any political movement to achieve national prominence, their sum does not automatically equal enduring influence. The true yardstick for measuring the long-term success of any U.S. political movement is its ability to accomplish its stated objectives. And the absolutely critical factor here is the movement's determination (or lack thereof) to implement its agenda.
During the past ten years, the Democrats have made it very clear that their agenda is to fundamentally transform America from a Judeo-Christian, Constitutional, pro-life, pro-family, small-government, low-tax, balanced-budget, market-economy-based, secure-borders nation into a godless, lawless, pro-abortion, anti-family, big-government, high-tax, high-debt, socialist, open-borders nation. Their toolkit to accomplish this has included lies, propaganda, secrecy, name-calling, character assassination, threats, and blackmail. Frankly, they've made substantial progress toward their revolutionary goal with the continued expulsion of God from our national life and public places, a litany of unconstitutional laws and executive orders from ObamaCare to DACA, maintaining taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood, Supreme Court decisions upholding ObamaCare and striking down state marriage laws, swelling of the federal bureaucracy, high taxes, a national debt increase of $12 trillion, stifled economic growth, and a massive population of illegal immigrants. The fact that most of this was accomplished with Republicans controlling one or both houses of Congress is a shining reflection on the bulldog tenacity of Democrats to see their agenda through, come what may. It's also a glaring reflection on the disappointing lack of determination by Republicans to implement their own agenda for the country. Supposedly, the Republicans want to keep America a Judeo-Christian, Constitutional, pro-life, pro-family, small-government, low-tax, fiscally responsible, market-economy-based, secure-borders nation. And it's true that in the past two years, President Trump and Congressional Republicans have taken some important steps to implement their agenda, reversing some of the damage wreaked by Democrats under President Obama. However, the Republicans have not been anywhere near as aggressive in implementing their good agenda as the Democrats have been in implementing their evil one. Worse, Democrats consistently make agenda-driven campaign promises and deliver on them, while Republicans tend to make agenda-driven campaign promises and renege on them.
The fact that ObamaCare is still on the books today certainly demonstrates the staying power of the corrupt Washington establishment behind it (with which the Democrats are fully in bed), but more to the point here, it exemplifies the ominous trend of the past ten years in which Republicans are quickly throwing their campaign promises out the window, quietly setting their agenda aside, and gradually ceding more power to their Democratic enemies. The donkey's iron determination combined with the elephant's hushed timidity effectively renders the Democratic Party the majority party in America today. If this trend continues, within twenty years the Republican Party will find itself an irrelevant minority party, leaving the Democrats firmly in charge of national affairs.
Why have Republican politicians abandoned their core principles, betrayed their loyal constituents, and compromised their cherished values in this fashion? Apparently, for fear of the Democrats who are threatening them and have added the incitement of mob violence to their toolkit in their increasing desperation to further advance their radically secularist agenda. And apparently, Republicans are so scared of the above-mentioned establishment that they've been transformed into creatures of that very establishment, while still claiming to represent "we the people." They are now followers disguised as leaders. The Republicans' hypocrisy is sickening and their cowardice is frightening. I have to hand it to the Democrats: they know exactly what they want to achieve and how to achieve it, and come heck or high water, they're accomplishing it. Meanwhile, much of the wholesome agenda our country sorely needs languishes in the comfortable offices of House and Senate Republicans.
Copyright © 2019 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.
Saturday, November 3, 2018
ElectionWatch 2018: What Will Happen?
Continuing with a tradition begun in 2010 and continued in 2014, it's time (past time, really) for an ElectionWatch series of blog posts and articles offering insight and commentary on the 2018 U.S. congressional, senatorial, gubernatorial and state legislative elections. Although leap-year presidential elections are the "big shows" that generate increasingly huge amounts of political fundraising, campaigning, media attention and voter activity, I personally find the off-year elections a bit more interesting.
While millions of Republican, Democratic and independent voters regard presidential elections as the most consequential for our nation, the fact is that midterm elections are often just as influential, if not even more so, on the direction of our country. This is because our president, while head of the executive branch of government and director of national policy, is only one man, whereas the fifty state governors, ninety-nine state legislatures, one hundred senators, and 435 members of Congress do the lion's share of actual governing, thereby exerting tremendous influence on state and national policy by virtue of their offices and authority. Depending on the issue positions, agenda, and political affiliation of these lawmakers and executives, this influence is used either in support of or in opposition to the president's national policy goals. During the notoriously immoral and corrupt administration of President Barack Obama, for example, Republicans who took control of state legislatures, governorships, Congress, and the Senate provided an important check on the president's abuses of power by refusing to implement ObamaCare, suing the federal government over the unconstitutional HHS mandate, restricting abortion, protecting religious liberty, and enforcing immigration laws.
Yes, senators, members of Congress, governors, and state legislators are elected in presidential election years as well. However, the midterm elections provide a valuable barometer of national opinion across a wide range of issues, typically indicating voter support or lack thereof for the incumbent president and his agenda. In the historic 2002 midterms, Republicans expanded their majorities in both the House and the Senate due to voter approval of President George W. Bush's pro-life, economic and national security measures. As support for Bush's foreign policy waned, Democrats managed to narrowly take over Congress and pick up some state governorships in the 2006 election. The stunning Republican landslide victories of 2010 and 2014 were driven by massive public dissatisfaction with Barack Obama's abortion, healthcare, economic and tax policies.
What will happen in 2018? Will Republicans keep and strengthen their majorities in the House and the Senate as in 2002? Will Democrats seize control as in 2006? Or will something entirely different happen? To answer these questions in a meaningful way, we must attempt to combine historical perspective with an objective evaluation of the current complex situation in the United States.
We live in a country that is more deeply divided than at any time since the Civil War. Party lines have become fault lines segregating people with radically different values, issue positions, interests and income levels from each other. Republicans have become the party of traditional Judeo-Christian values and support for President Donald Trump, and Democrats have become the party of radical secularism and outright hatred of President Trump. Yet many Americans feel that neither party truly represents their interests. Civil discourse, the art of expressing one's opinions and convictions in a compelling yet respectful manner; and bipartisanship, the art of working together for the common good based on common values, have all but vanished from Washington, replaced by vulgar personal attacks and legislative deadlock. Meanwhile, many Americans, myself included, applaud President Trump's performance on certain issues such as abortion, religious liberty, the HHS mandate, court appointments, taxes, the economy, and (partially) immigration and foreign policy while taking issue with his decisions on renewable energy, environmental protection, and (partially) immigration and foreign policy.
Although it has certain unique aspects pertaining to our own time, our current national crisis is far from unprecedented, and history teaches that such profound wounds of division will be reflected in the election results. That said, it's tricky to predict what will happen on Tuesday night. On the one hand, Democrats are spending a ton of money to try to take over Congress, with the secular media and certain national opinion polls biased in their favor. But on the other hand, the economy is doing pretty well, which helps the Republicans. The latest polling averages from Real Clear Politics show Democrats winning a narrow seven-seat majority in the House of Representatives and Republicans holding on to the Senate, but as we saw with Hillary Clinton in 2016, the polls can be inaccurate. To offer my best guess at this point, I don't think we'll see a repeat of 2002 or 2006. I think something entirely different will happen: Republicans will maintain majority control of both the House and the Senate, albeit by extremely narrow margins.
Regardless of what happens, much is at stake in this election. The Democrats have vowed to impeach President Trump and force their own radically secularist agenda on our nation, and they will certainly attempt to do this if they achieve even a one-seat majority in the House. We need to pray earnestly for our country's conversion and healing, vote our values and leave the results in God's hands.
While millions of Republican, Democratic and independent voters regard presidential elections as the most consequential for our nation, the fact is that midterm elections are often just as influential, if not even more so, on the direction of our country. This is because our president, while head of the executive branch of government and director of national policy, is only one man, whereas the fifty state governors, ninety-nine state legislatures, one hundred senators, and 435 members of Congress do the lion's share of actual governing, thereby exerting tremendous influence on state and national policy by virtue of their offices and authority. Depending on the issue positions, agenda, and political affiliation of these lawmakers and executives, this influence is used either in support of or in opposition to the president's national policy goals. During the notoriously immoral and corrupt administration of President Barack Obama, for example, Republicans who took control of state legislatures, governorships, Congress, and the Senate provided an important check on the president's abuses of power by refusing to implement ObamaCare, suing the federal government over the unconstitutional HHS mandate, restricting abortion, protecting religious liberty, and enforcing immigration laws.
Yes, senators, members of Congress, governors, and state legislators are elected in presidential election years as well. However, the midterm elections provide a valuable barometer of national opinion across a wide range of issues, typically indicating voter support or lack thereof for the incumbent president and his agenda. In the historic 2002 midterms, Republicans expanded their majorities in both the House and the Senate due to voter approval of President George W. Bush's pro-life, economic and national security measures. As support for Bush's foreign policy waned, Democrats managed to narrowly take over Congress and pick up some state governorships in the 2006 election. The stunning Republican landslide victories of 2010 and 2014 were driven by massive public dissatisfaction with Barack Obama's abortion, healthcare, economic and tax policies.
What will happen in 2018? Will Republicans keep and strengthen their majorities in the House and the Senate as in 2002? Will Democrats seize control as in 2006? Or will something entirely different happen? To answer these questions in a meaningful way, we must attempt to combine historical perspective with an objective evaluation of the current complex situation in the United States.
We live in a country that is more deeply divided than at any time since the Civil War. Party lines have become fault lines segregating people with radically different values, issue positions, interests and income levels from each other. Republicans have become the party of traditional Judeo-Christian values and support for President Donald Trump, and Democrats have become the party of radical secularism and outright hatred of President Trump. Yet many Americans feel that neither party truly represents their interests. Civil discourse, the art of expressing one's opinions and convictions in a compelling yet respectful manner; and bipartisanship, the art of working together for the common good based on common values, have all but vanished from Washington, replaced by vulgar personal attacks and legislative deadlock. Meanwhile, many Americans, myself included, applaud President Trump's performance on certain issues such as abortion, religious liberty, the HHS mandate, court appointments, taxes, the economy, and (partially) immigration and foreign policy while taking issue with his decisions on renewable energy, environmental protection, and (partially) immigration and foreign policy.
Although it has certain unique aspects pertaining to our own time, our current national crisis is far from unprecedented, and history teaches that such profound wounds of division will be reflected in the election results. That said, it's tricky to predict what will happen on Tuesday night. On the one hand, Democrats are spending a ton of money to try to take over Congress, with the secular media and certain national opinion polls biased in their favor. But on the other hand, the economy is doing pretty well, which helps the Republicans. The latest polling averages from Real Clear Politics show Democrats winning a narrow seven-seat majority in the House of Representatives and Republicans holding on to the Senate, but as we saw with Hillary Clinton in 2016, the polls can be inaccurate. To offer my best guess at this point, I don't think we'll see a repeat of 2002 or 2006. I think something entirely different will happen: Republicans will maintain majority control of both the House and the Senate, albeit by extremely narrow margins.
Regardless of what happens, much is at stake in this election. The Democrats have vowed to impeach President Trump and force their own radically secularist agenda on our nation, and they will certainly attempt to do this if they achieve even a one-seat majority in the House. We need to pray earnestly for our country's conversion and healing, vote our values and leave the results in God's hands.
Monday, October 8, 2018
Traitors to the Church
How appalling it has been to see millions of American Catholics sharing in the general public's explosion of irrational and unjustified anger against the Church! These well-intentioned Catholics have made the terrible mistake of trusting and accepting the secular media's heavily biased reporting on the matter without question, apparently forgetting that the secular media is controlled by the Church's enemies--their enemies. Their righteous indignation is irrational and unjustified because they have nowhere to direct it. They're angry with priests, but most of the priests who committed these crimes and sins against children and teens are either dead, retired, or laicized and in prison; more than 99 percent of priests currently serving the U.S. Church have never abused a child or teen. They're mad at bishops, but most of the bishops who conspired to cover up these crimes and sins are either dead or retired, and nearly all (if not all) of the bishops currently serving the U.S. Church have never engaged in such cover-up. And they're incensed at Pope Francis (who has increasingly become a scapegoat for many of the Church's problems) for allegedly mishandling the situation, but nearly all of the crimes and sins took place during the reign of Pope Saint John Paul II, many years before Francis was elected pope. Angry Catholics, some of whom have abandoned the Church altogether, have been sucked into the secular media drama and have become unwitting pawns in Satan's army.
It's time well-meaning American Catholics recognize they've been duped into treason, abandon the Enemy's side and re-direct their volleys of righteous indignation at the proper targets: anti-Catholic activists in our government and in the secular media. We're commanded to love our enemies, but we should NEVER trust or follow them! If your innocent mother was unjustly attacked by enemies bent upon her total destruction, wouldn't you defend her with every fiber of your being? The Church is our Mother, and she is in this exact situation at this very moment. We Catholics must speak out and take every action within our power to defend Holy Mother Church against the malicious accusations of her radically secularist enemies in government and the secular media. We must defend our holy priests and bishops against fictitious charges; we must defend Pope Francis against the false accusations of Archbishop Vigano. Above all, we must pray unceasingly for the Church as well as for the conversion of her enemies. This is a public relations battle, a battle for the Church's reputation, a cultural battle, but above all it is a spiritual battle. As Ephesians 6:12 says, "Our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the present darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places." May we fight valiantly for the Church at this critical time with boundless trust in the protection and intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Michael the Archangel and all the Heavenly host, confident in Christ's promise that the gates of Hell will not prevail against her.Copyright 2018 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
Defending our Freedom
Of course, the main event that led our bishops to establish this annual observance was the controversial HHS mandate bombshell dropped by the Obama administration in January of 2012, which demanded that health insurance plans across the country include artificial contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients regardless of religious or moral objections to the distribution of such items. Although this mandate--the crucial centerpiece of the massively unpopular Affordable Care Act, generally known as ObamaCare--is still on the books four and a half years later, having been unfortunately upheld by the Supreme Court along with the rest of the ObamaCare travesty as somehow "constitutional" in June of 2012, dozens of lower court rulings against it have provided temporary injunctive relief to scores of Catholic and other Christian religious groups, healthcare providers, charitable organizations, universities, media entities, and other institutions that have rightly refused to comply with this unjust law despite the threat of crushing tax penalties. Furthermore, last year the Supreme Court ruled that most businesses that object to compliance with the mandate on religious grounds should be permanently exempt from it. So while some progress has been made against this particularly egregious and unconstitutional attack on our religious liberties, more remains to be done: it must be completely overturned.
Like the other freedoms we enjoy as Americans such as freedom of speech and of the press, freedom to peaceably assemble, and freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances, freedom of religion is a gift from our Creator that is guaranteed by our Constitution and must accordingly be protected by our government. No one should be forced into providing anti-life products and services that he or she considers immoral, against the dictates of his or her religion and conscience.
However, as Yuval Levin pointed out in an article in First Things magazine several months ago, we should beware of too narrowly individualistic, negative, and subjective an approach to religious liberty. Freedom of religion must not be confined to simply obtaining and retaining exemptions for certain individual persons and organizations that refuse to obey the law because they consider it wrong. Rather than being limited to a condescending exception for certain seemingly fanatical individuals within our society, religious liberty should be the rule for our society as a whole, as it was once upon a time. The idea here, which originated with our nation's founders, is that American society will flourish when all of its members are allowed to freely exercise their religious beliefs together as a community. In addition, it is fundamentally misguided to oppose the HHS mandate simply because we Catholics consider it an unjust law that attacks our religious liberties and moral conscience rights or simply because we Catholics regard contraceptives and abortifacients as immoral drugs. Such arguments are too narrowly focused and too subjective to be really convincing in the long run, and our radically secularist opponents have already seized on those weaknesses to bolster their own position. We must go deeper, building our defense on the bedrock of natural law and objective truth. Ultimately, we seek to rid America of the HHS mandate, not simply because we Catholics consider it an unjust law, but because it is an unjust law--not only for Catholics, but for pro-life Americans of all faiths and even for pro-life atheists. It isn't just an attack on our religious liberties and moral conscience rights; it's an attack on the natural law established by our Creator and upon our sacred right as human beings to act in accordance with that law.
Anchored firmly in the natural law, the concept of ordered liberty was a key founding principle of our nation that unfortunately is largely forgotten today. In a remarkably Catholic view of this concept, the Founders regarded freedom not as the totally unrestricted ability of human beings to do whatever the heck they may want to do, but rather as the ability to do what they ought to do, what they should do. While the freedom our Creator has given us is indeed very broad, it does have certain limits that He has laid down for our own good, and those limits are defined by the natural law, which is accessible to human reason. As long as we obey the natural law and thus act in accord with right reason, we remain truly free as individuals and as a nation. Morally speaking, to violate the natural law is an abuse of freedom, which was once commonly referred to as license or permissiveness.
A big part of the problem with America today is that we have largely abandoned this rational concept of ordered liberty rooted in the Creator's natural law in favor of a nebulous, ill-defined sort of "freedom" that is ultimately a product of moral relativism. In the past, our nation had laws prohibiting obscenity, indecency, and pornography in printed material and radio broadcasts; these entirely reasonable laws, which reflected the natural law, benefited our society by discouraging certain forms of immorality, which naturally helped to protect our freedom. No one at the time ever claimed that these laws violated anyone's right to freedom of speech. But if someone today advocates for bringing back such laws, he or she is derided as a crackpot fundamentalist who opposes freedom of speech. That's a shame. We must revive this forgotten concept of ordered liberty based on "the laws of nature and nature's God" in order to re-learn the true meaning of freedom, so that we can preserve this treasure and hand it on to future generations.
This is the first full Fortnight for Freedom since the Supreme Court's infamous ruling last June that overturned dozens of state marriage laws by elevating immoral homosexual relationships to the legal status of marriage throughout the country. As with the Obama administration's HHS mandate, this terribly misguided and wrong decision is not just a major attack on our religious liberties, but constitutes an assault on the Creator's natural law, in which the union of a man and a woman is the primary social institution for the good of the couple, their children, and the whole society. As we fight to defend our religious freedom on this particular front, our well-reasoned arguments must be grounded in the objective truth of the natural law and borne out by the personal witness of our own lives in order to resonate with the widest possible audience and effectively influence public opinion.
Returning to what was said above about the communal aspect of religious freedom, it should be underscored that only a truly religious people will value, fight for, protect, and defend their religious liberty. America's founders and colonists who fought for our independence from Britain and established our nation were deeply religious people of devout Christian faith, and we considered ourselves a Christian country until very recently. As the pseudo-religion of radical secularism increasingly dominates American society and strives to supplant the Judeo-Christian philosophy that made us a great nation, the question naturally arises as to whether we will remain a religious people tenaciously committed to defending our first freedom in an increasingly hostile cultural climate, or whether we will eventually surrender to the forces of militant secularism and allow this cherished freedom to be stolen from us by a handful of godless elitist pirates who have commandeered our Ship of State. It is to be hoped that we the people will retain the courage to stand up and retake control of our nation from the high priests of radical secularism; to recover and proudly reassert our nation's traditional Christian identity; and to consistently and vigorously defend the religious liberties and moral conscience rights of all Americans of good will, so that we can pass this great land on to our children and grandchildren as "one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all".
Mary Immaculate, Patroness of the United States, pray for us!
Thursday, May 12, 2016
The Political Rise and Fall of Dr. Ben Carson
by Justin Soutar
(This article was originally published on the website Intellectual Conservative May 11, 2016 at http://intellectualconservative.com/the-political-rise-and-fall-of-dr-ben-carson/ )
More than two months ago in early March, following a slew of major defeats in the GOP primary elections, award-winning neurosurgeon, popular speaker, bestselling author and Tea Party candidate Dr. Benjamin S. Carson officially announced that he had decided to withdraw from the presidential race. For those millions of us citizens across America who had been his loyal and dedicated supporters for the previous several months and years, the sudden demise and fizzling out of Dr. Carson's remarkable presidential campaign came as a jarring and profoundly disappointing anticlimax. Carson's stunningly dramatic rise from relative obscurity to a leading presidential candidate in less than a year's time appeared to bode well for his chances of winning a substantial number of state primary elections--and thus a sufficient number of delegates to the upcoming Republican National Convention--to secure his adopted party's nomination for President of the United States in 2016.
Unfortunately, however, Dr. Carson's performance in the early Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada primary election contests in February, as well as in the Super Tuesday primaries of March 1, failed to meet the expectations of his hardworking organizers and supporters, who had reasonably expected him to carry at least a handful of these critical early voting states. Instead, closely reflecting national polling data at the time, Ben Carson came in consistently third or fourth in each state's election returns behind Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. In the wake of Super Tuesday, with more than one fourth of the states having already voted, Carson had amassed a total of only about 60 delegates--not even one-twentieth of the total necessary to clinch the GOP nomination. Since the math and polling trends now rendered electoral victory extremely unlikely if not impossible, Carson's campaign team realized that it would be futile for him to continue to stay in the race. Calmly facing the unpleasant reality of defeat with his characteristic humility and wisdom, Carson acted prudently in bowing out of the primary election contest when he did.
Within two and a half years' time, Dr. Ben Carson's political star had climbed with extraordinary steadiness from the horizon to the zenith, where it shone with dazzling brilliance, and then suddenly it plunged toward the opposite horizon, disappearing from view entirely in a matter of weeks. What happened here? How did the previously little-known Dr. Carson so quickly achieve the status of a major presidential candidate, only to find himself leaving the race just as things were heating up?
Paradoxically, Dr. Carson had laid firm groundwork for his presidential run by building a solid reputation outside the political realm in the fields of medicine, education, business, and culture. He is probably best known for his trailblazing twenty-nine year career as the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, during which he performed more than 36,000 surgeries with an extremely low patient mortality rate, including the first-ever successful separation of twin boys joined at the back of the head. For his veritable encyclopedia of stunning achievements as a neurosurgeon, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008. For a number of years, through the Carson Scholars Fund, Ben and his wife had been working to reform and improve America’s education system by setting up reading rooms in inner-city elementary schools across the country to encourage more kids to read books, stimulating better academic performance through a merit-based reward system, and offering scholarships to promising students from low-income families.
In addition to the significant business experience he accumulated as head of the multi-million-dollar pediatric neurosurgery division at Johns Hopkins for three decades, Dr. Carson had served on the corporate boards of a number of Fortune 500 companies, including Costco and Kellogg’s. Finally, Carson’s fascinating rise from a single-parent childhood of poverty in inner-city Detroit to a world-class neurosurgeon had won the respect and admiration of many Americans of different races and backgrounds who had read his popular autobiography Gifted Hands (1990) or seen the TV documentary of the same title (2009). More recently, Ben Carson’s influence on American culture was further strengthened by several other widely read books, including the number one New York Times bestsellers America the Beautiful (2012) and One Nation (2014); the latter sold an astonishing forty-two million copies in the ten weeks following its release, outselling Hillary Clinton’s simultaneously released autobiography Hard Choices three to one.
What initially catapulted Ben Carson into the political limelight was his brilliant, thoughtful, frank, courageous, and respectful off-the-cuff address at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast attended by President Obama and Vice President Biden—a monumental discourse which deserves a place in the annals of conservative oratory alongside Barry Goldwater’s 1964 speech at the Republican National Convention and Ronald Reagan’s famous “Evil Empire” address of 1983. In this eloquent and well-balanced critique of contemporary America, delivered while he was still practicing neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Carson put ObamaCare, our nation's tax system, our national debt, and our moral decline into perspective and suggested some biblically-based, common-sense solutions to these problems. To those who heard him speak that February morning, it was obvious that Dr. Carson was endowed with a rare ability to discuss complex issues in simple terms that any layperson could easily understand. It was this highly accessible speech that introduced him to the nation as a great communicator with a solid grasp of America’s founding principles and ignited a national movement to draft Ben Carson into the 2016 presidential race.
From that time onward, as a popular speaker and author of multiple bestselling books, Dr. Carson became increasingly well-known within both the African–American community and the wider American cultural arena for his insightful and articulate reflections on what made our country great; for the simple stories he often used from his own experience to illustrate a point; for his intelligent and original opinions on how to resolve our national problems; and for his optimistic vision of America's future based on a return to our nation's founding principles. And his character traits of self-reliance, hard work, honesty and integrity, humility, courtesy, and compassion, combined with his devout Christian faith, traditional moral values, and record of exemplary achievement, made him a principled leader and a shining example of the American dream whose mass appeal transcended racial and political boundaries. In short, millions of Americans already knew, liked, and trusted Ben Carson for months and years before he ever became a presidential candidate.
The ironic thing is that, despite his authentic leadership credentials, Dr. Carson had never desired or intended to run for President of the United States. When the suggestion was first made to him immediately following the 2013 speech, he laughed it off as ridiculous. After all, he was a sixty-plus-year-old pediatric neurosurgeon on the verge of retirement and a registered Independent with no prior experience in politics. But his address at the National Prayer Breakfast had unwittingly prompted the establishment of a super PAC called the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee under the leadership of conservative political activist John Philip Sousa IV—and once that ball got started rolling, it continued to steadily gain momentum. During the next two years, at the instigation of this committee, upwards of 500,000 Americans insistently clamored for Ben Carson to run for president on the Republican ticket, claiming that his leadership in the White House was desperately needed to straighten our country out. Finally, in May of 2015, the reticent Dr. Carson acquiesced to the will of the people and threw his hat into the presidential ring, entering an already crowded field of contenders for the GOP nomination.
At that time, national polls registered Ben Carson as the presidential choice of about 5 percent of Americans, so it wasn't surprising that the mainstream media initially paid him little attention. He was a classic longshot candidate for the White House, and most observers never seriously expected him to surge out of the bottom category into the top tier of likely presidential candidates. They were in for a surprise. Carson's entry into the race further elevated his public profile, stimulating his modest and already growing support base to expand at an accelerated tempo. Slowly but unmistakably, Ben Carson's national poll numbers started to climb out of the doldrums, leaving single digits behind within a few weeks. (During this time, he also made quite a splash as the surprise winner of the first televised Republican debate.) By the end of June, Dr. Carson had risen to 18 percent, making him the second most popular Republican candidate, and he continued to surge throughout the summer, steadily gaining on Donald Trump. In August, he was tied with Trump for the number one spot, and by early October, Carson had actually overtaken Trump to become the leading Republican presidential candidate in national polls--and despite the predictions of naysayers, he managed to hold that enviable position for the next two months straight.
If Ben Carson's five-month ascendancy from near-oblivion to the pinnacle of the GOP field and his two-month dominance of that field represented astonishing achievements and newsworthy events from the perspective of any reasonable observer, the reaction of the radically secularist mainstream media pundits on both sides of the political aisle was even more astonishing. With conspiratorial uniformity, they ignored Dr. Carson almost entirely. Despite their earlier casual dismissals and negative predictions, here he was leading in national polls, sharing the center of every debate stage with Mr. Trump, yet there was no serious discussion of why this was happening, no thoughtful commentary on this remarkable and unexpected development, no extensive interviews with Ben Carson on the major networks. Instead, we were saddled with a nearly total mainstream media blackout of Dr. Carson, while the lion's share of big media attention remained obsessively devoted to Trump, Bush and Christie. This incomprehensibly hypocritical and blatantly unfair treatment of Ben Carson on the part of America's media elite represented a prime example of biased and irresponsible journalism. Journalists bear a responsibility to the general public to convey and reflect upon the truth of what's actually going on, but in this case the Beltway journalists were obviously at pains to conceal the truth because it didn't mesh with their radically secularist agenda for our nation.
The corrupt mainstream media elite and the corrupt Washington political establishment--which, for convenience, may be treated as a single entity, since the same mega-corporate interests essentially run both entities and they share the same radically secularist agenda--couldn't tolerate the mere idea of an honest and principled citizen statesman like Ben Carson getting into the White House. If that were to happen, the deeply entrenched political corruption that buttresses and sustains their jealously guarded power and influence would be pulled like a rug from beneath their feet and the power of the federal government would revert from these usurpers back to its rightful owners, i.e., we the people. So these cunning and worldly-wise media moguls had to figure out some way to derail Ben Carson's astoundingly successful grassroots presidential campaign in order to prevent him from winning the Republican nomination. They knew they wouldn't be able to smear his reputation with any dirt from his past because there isn't any dirt in his past to dig up. They had attempted to spread some lies about him, but that didn't work very well because most people already knew the truth about him, and those who didn't discovered it soon enough. They tried to find some juicy errors or omissions in Carson's income tax returns--a huge potential "gotcha"--but that search came up empty. And they knew that his political campaign (unlike their good pal Hillary Clinton's) was being run entirely in accordance with federal election law, so they couldn't shut him down legally or call that into question.
Consequently, the mainstream media executives settled on a strategy of deliberately ignoring Ben Carson and relentlessly focusing their primary attention on their own favorite GOP candidates, Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie. This approach extended to the Republican debates, where despite his high poll rankings and central position on the stage, Dr. Carson was generally given far less time to speak than the mainstream media darlings. As the months passed, this strategy of marginalization proved effective. Not seeing or hearing much of their candidate on TV, millions of less fanatical Carson supporters gradually became discouraged and drifted into the more visible and noisier Trump, Cruz, and Rubio camps. By the end of 2015, Carson had slipped to second place in national polls; he was at third place this past January, and had sunk to fourth place by the time actual voting began in early February.
Yet even with this perceptible decline in nationwide support precipitated by the big media boycott, Carson might still have won the Iowa caucus on February 1 had a despicable last-minute dirty trick not been pulled off by a rival and less principled GOP campaign team. Just hours before voting began, a false rumor that Carson had dropped out of the race was deliberately circulated by the Ted Cruz presidential campaign, deceiving who knows how many thousands of Carson supporters into casting their ballots for Cruz instead. Spreading this lie about Carson enabled Cruz to steal victory in the Iowa primary election. Although he would not withdraw from the race for another month, it's apparent in retrospect that the Ben Carson presidential campaign was essentially finished at that point. Dr. Carson already had enough of a challenge trying to win state primary elections with official campaign and super PAC funding limited to grassroots donations and the heavy media bias against him, but when a dishonest tactic by a fellow candidate on opening day was thrown into the mix, the stage was unfortunately set for his presidential campaign to flounder beyond reasonable hope of recovery.
Although history indicated that Carson didn't necessarily have to win Iowa to win the Republican nomination this summer, and so technically his chances were still pretty good, it was critical that he score victories in at least some of the other early voting states to give him a realistic shot at winning his adopted party's nomination. But with the deck stacked against him, he lost one state after another, and his chances of making it to the GOP convention as a presidential finalist correspondingly dwindled. Regrettably, Dr. Carson's campaign never recovered from the major damage it sustained in Iowa.
So in essence, Ben Carson rose to political prominence on the strength of his credentials as a principled citizen statesman, but he failed to clinch the Republican nomination because the corrupt mainstream media and D.C. political establishment conspired to do him in. Shame on them. However, there is more to the story than that. While many of us ordinary Americans do profess traditional religious and moral values, we have nonetheless almost unconsciously allowed the propaganda being constantly cranked out by the radically secularist mainstream media machine to influence our thinking and shape our political loyalties. As a result of this, we have gradually abandoned a humble, honest, great, wise, selfless, moral, principled, civil, commonsense citizen statesman candidate--Ben Carson, a true populist--in favor of an arrogant, dishonest, petty, foolish, self-seeking, immoral, unscrupulous, rude, and ridiculous establishment politician--Donald Trump, a fake populist. Shame on us. Apparently, we’ve allowed ourselves to become so intoxicated by the mainstream media propaganda that we are unable to clearly distinguish between a counterfeit and the real deal. Unlike Carson, who truly represented "we the people," Trump is a charlatan who merely pretends to represent us, while in reality he represents himself and his bank accounts and the Washington political establishment he craves to join. Unlike Carson, Trump is a shameless braggart and a rabble-rousing demagogue who cannot be safely trusted to govern this nation in accordance with the principles of the Founders. Yet this clanging cymbal is seemingly trusted by more than two-fifths of the American populace.
If, at the end of the day, we the people are really on the side of the corrupt media and political establishment, what does that say about us? It says, for one thing, that we are a gullible bunch, easily bamboozled into believing exactly what the establishment wants us to believe. This lack of discernment and critical thinking would have horrified the Founders, who regarded an intelligent and well-educated citizenry as indispensable to the continued health and wellbeing of the American republic. While Carson intuitively held, as he put it in one of the debates last autumn, that "the American people are not stupid" (his emphasis), he was clearly overestimating our intelligence. Yes, we are stupid. Just as a certain crowd, at the instigation of certain religious leaders, preferred the release of a convicted murderer over the innocent Son of God himself, so we, under the influence of our own media and political elite, would rather elect an assertive, blustering, corrupt, and ambitious worldly real estate mogul as President of the United States than a meek, quiet-spoken, ethical, and trustworthy Christian doctor, philanthropist, speaker and writer. We prefer Trump to Carson. We prefer vice to virtue. And because of that, we’ve cavalierly passed up our first real chance to nominate and elect a truly great president since the days of Ronald Reagan, leaving America vulnerable to the capricious whims of a corrupt, immoral, and tyrannical Trump or Clinton presidency and ensuring continued national decline for at least another four years.
During the past two months, I've been asking myself why God permitted Ben Carson to achieve such remarkable early success as a presidential candidate if he knew that his campaign was ultimately doomed to failure. I had sincerely believed that God was raising up Dr. Carson to be our next president, and I was also convinced--as I still am--that he was the only presidential candidate who would have healed and united our broken and wounded nation and restored America to greatness. Apparently, for some strange combination of reasons, God willed that Ben Carson emerge for a brief span of time as a prominent national figure in the political arena, but did not will him to be our next president. Perhaps one of those reasons is that God wanted to expose the interior nastiness and rottenness of our radically secularist mainstream media and political establishment and to show us how easily we good folks are awed, taken in, and deceived by the gleaming exterior of that omnipresent establishment. On the positive side, I would also suggest that God willed to clearly show us, through the beautiful witness of Dr. Carson's words and actions, the path we must tread as a nation if we wish to reclaim our former greatness in the years to come. There may be other reasons as well. At any rate, I continue to trust that God, in his infinite wisdom and providence, has a plan for this beleaguered country of ours, and that Carson's tragic political demise—which guarantees a continued absence of principled leadership in the White House, at least in the near term—is somehow a part of that mysterious plan.
With his amazing roller-coaster ten-month sojourn in presidential politics now behind him, the inimitable soft-spoken conservative genius Dr. Ben Carson is back where he prefers to be, living the quieter life of a private citizen, albeit a much better known one now. He may have lost his one and only bid for the presidency, but unlike his fellow contenders for that high office, at least he had his priorities straight: he would rather lose an election than lose his soul. He will undoubtedly spend his remaining years on this earth continuing to serve his beloved country in any way he can. He will remain and be remembered as a great American physician and speaker and writer and philanthropist, a tireless defender of Constitutional government and a fervent champion of liberty and justice for all, respected for his character and values and renowned for his abilities and accomplishments.
Although he never wanted to run for President of the United States, Dr. Carson did it on behalf of “we the people”, out of genuine love for us and genuine concern for our country, offering a noble and splendid example of both Christian servant leadership and authentic patriotism. For months on end during the height of his popularity, he calmly yet firmly stood his ground and steadfastly weathered the storm of unjustified political and media hostility and prejudice and indifference that beat mercilessly upon him, without becoming bitter or retaliating against his enemies. For that example of selfless service and that tranquil steadfastness in the face of adversity, he deserves our sincere admiration and our humble gratitude.
Unlike any of the other leading presidential candidates, Ben Carson was a true Christian gentleman and a true patriot, and his absence leaves our current political arena acutely impoverished. At a time of constantly deepening national crisis, Dr. Carson's definitive departure from the 2016 presidential contest exposes a yawning leadership vacuum within the American political system that no lesser candidate can possibly fill.
Copyright © 2016 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.
(This article was originally published on the website Intellectual Conservative May 11, 2016 at http://intellectualconservative.com/the-political-rise-and-fall-of-dr-ben-carson/ )
More than two months ago in early March, following a slew of major defeats in the GOP primary elections, award-winning neurosurgeon, popular speaker, bestselling author and Tea Party candidate Dr. Benjamin S. Carson officially announced that he had decided to withdraw from the presidential race. For those millions of us citizens across America who had been his loyal and dedicated supporters for the previous several months and years, the sudden demise and fizzling out of Dr. Carson's remarkable presidential campaign came as a jarring and profoundly disappointing anticlimax. Carson's stunningly dramatic rise from relative obscurity to a leading presidential candidate in less than a year's time appeared to bode well for his chances of winning a substantial number of state primary elections--and thus a sufficient number of delegates to the upcoming Republican National Convention--to secure his adopted party's nomination for President of the United States in 2016.
Unfortunately, however, Dr. Carson's performance in the early Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada primary election contests in February, as well as in the Super Tuesday primaries of March 1, failed to meet the expectations of his hardworking organizers and supporters, who had reasonably expected him to carry at least a handful of these critical early voting states. Instead, closely reflecting national polling data at the time, Ben Carson came in consistently third or fourth in each state's election returns behind Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. In the wake of Super Tuesday, with more than one fourth of the states having already voted, Carson had amassed a total of only about 60 delegates--not even one-twentieth of the total necessary to clinch the GOP nomination. Since the math and polling trends now rendered electoral victory extremely unlikely if not impossible, Carson's campaign team realized that it would be futile for him to continue to stay in the race. Calmly facing the unpleasant reality of defeat with his characteristic humility and wisdom, Carson acted prudently in bowing out of the primary election contest when he did.
Within two and a half years' time, Dr. Ben Carson's political star had climbed with extraordinary steadiness from the horizon to the zenith, where it shone with dazzling brilliance, and then suddenly it plunged toward the opposite horizon, disappearing from view entirely in a matter of weeks. What happened here? How did the previously little-known Dr. Carson so quickly achieve the status of a major presidential candidate, only to find himself leaving the race just as things were heating up?
Paradoxically, Dr. Carson had laid firm groundwork for his presidential run by building a solid reputation outside the political realm in the fields of medicine, education, business, and culture. He is probably best known for his trailblazing twenty-nine year career as the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, during which he performed more than 36,000 surgeries with an extremely low patient mortality rate, including the first-ever successful separation of twin boys joined at the back of the head. For his veritable encyclopedia of stunning achievements as a neurosurgeon, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008. For a number of years, through the Carson Scholars Fund, Ben and his wife had been working to reform and improve America’s education system by setting up reading rooms in inner-city elementary schools across the country to encourage more kids to read books, stimulating better academic performance through a merit-based reward system, and offering scholarships to promising students from low-income families.
In addition to the significant business experience he accumulated as head of the multi-million-dollar pediatric neurosurgery division at Johns Hopkins for three decades, Dr. Carson had served on the corporate boards of a number of Fortune 500 companies, including Costco and Kellogg’s. Finally, Carson’s fascinating rise from a single-parent childhood of poverty in inner-city Detroit to a world-class neurosurgeon had won the respect and admiration of many Americans of different races and backgrounds who had read his popular autobiography Gifted Hands (1990) or seen the TV documentary of the same title (2009). More recently, Ben Carson’s influence on American culture was further strengthened by several other widely read books, including the number one New York Times bestsellers America the Beautiful (2012) and One Nation (2014); the latter sold an astonishing forty-two million copies in the ten weeks following its release, outselling Hillary Clinton’s simultaneously released autobiography Hard Choices three to one.
What initially catapulted Ben Carson into the political limelight was his brilliant, thoughtful, frank, courageous, and respectful off-the-cuff address at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast attended by President Obama and Vice President Biden—a monumental discourse which deserves a place in the annals of conservative oratory alongside Barry Goldwater’s 1964 speech at the Republican National Convention and Ronald Reagan’s famous “Evil Empire” address of 1983. In this eloquent and well-balanced critique of contemporary America, delivered while he was still practicing neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Carson put ObamaCare, our nation's tax system, our national debt, and our moral decline into perspective and suggested some biblically-based, common-sense solutions to these problems. To those who heard him speak that February morning, it was obvious that Dr. Carson was endowed with a rare ability to discuss complex issues in simple terms that any layperson could easily understand. It was this highly accessible speech that introduced him to the nation as a great communicator with a solid grasp of America’s founding principles and ignited a national movement to draft Ben Carson into the 2016 presidential race.
From that time onward, as a popular speaker and author of multiple bestselling books, Dr. Carson became increasingly well-known within both the African–American community and the wider American cultural arena for his insightful and articulate reflections on what made our country great; for the simple stories he often used from his own experience to illustrate a point; for his intelligent and original opinions on how to resolve our national problems; and for his optimistic vision of America's future based on a return to our nation's founding principles. And his character traits of self-reliance, hard work, honesty and integrity, humility, courtesy, and compassion, combined with his devout Christian faith, traditional moral values, and record of exemplary achievement, made him a principled leader and a shining example of the American dream whose mass appeal transcended racial and political boundaries. In short, millions of Americans already knew, liked, and trusted Ben Carson for months and years before he ever became a presidential candidate.
The ironic thing is that, despite his authentic leadership credentials, Dr. Carson had never desired or intended to run for President of the United States. When the suggestion was first made to him immediately following the 2013 speech, he laughed it off as ridiculous. After all, he was a sixty-plus-year-old pediatric neurosurgeon on the verge of retirement and a registered Independent with no prior experience in politics. But his address at the National Prayer Breakfast had unwittingly prompted the establishment of a super PAC called the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee under the leadership of conservative political activist John Philip Sousa IV—and once that ball got started rolling, it continued to steadily gain momentum. During the next two years, at the instigation of this committee, upwards of 500,000 Americans insistently clamored for Ben Carson to run for president on the Republican ticket, claiming that his leadership in the White House was desperately needed to straighten our country out. Finally, in May of 2015, the reticent Dr. Carson acquiesced to the will of the people and threw his hat into the presidential ring, entering an already crowded field of contenders for the GOP nomination.
At that time, national polls registered Ben Carson as the presidential choice of about 5 percent of Americans, so it wasn't surprising that the mainstream media initially paid him little attention. He was a classic longshot candidate for the White House, and most observers never seriously expected him to surge out of the bottom category into the top tier of likely presidential candidates. They were in for a surprise. Carson's entry into the race further elevated his public profile, stimulating his modest and already growing support base to expand at an accelerated tempo. Slowly but unmistakably, Ben Carson's national poll numbers started to climb out of the doldrums, leaving single digits behind within a few weeks. (During this time, he also made quite a splash as the surprise winner of the first televised Republican debate.) By the end of June, Dr. Carson had risen to 18 percent, making him the second most popular Republican candidate, and he continued to surge throughout the summer, steadily gaining on Donald Trump. In August, he was tied with Trump for the number one spot, and by early October, Carson had actually overtaken Trump to become the leading Republican presidential candidate in national polls--and despite the predictions of naysayers, he managed to hold that enviable position for the next two months straight.
If Ben Carson's five-month ascendancy from near-oblivion to the pinnacle of the GOP field and his two-month dominance of that field represented astonishing achievements and newsworthy events from the perspective of any reasonable observer, the reaction of the radically secularist mainstream media pundits on both sides of the political aisle was even more astonishing. With conspiratorial uniformity, they ignored Dr. Carson almost entirely. Despite their earlier casual dismissals and negative predictions, here he was leading in national polls, sharing the center of every debate stage with Mr. Trump, yet there was no serious discussion of why this was happening, no thoughtful commentary on this remarkable and unexpected development, no extensive interviews with Ben Carson on the major networks. Instead, we were saddled with a nearly total mainstream media blackout of Dr. Carson, while the lion's share of big media attention remained obsessively devoted to Trump, Bush and Christie. This incomprehensibly hypocritical and blatantly unfair treatment of Ben Carson on the part of America's media elite represented a prime example of biased and irresponsible journalism. Journalists bear a responsibility to the general public to convey and reflect upon the truth of what's actually going on, but in this case the Beltway journalists were obviously at pains to conceal the truth because it didn't mesh with their radically secularist agenda for our nation.
The corrupt mainstream media elite and the corrupt Washington political establishment--which, for convenience, may be treated as a single entity, since the same mega-corporate interests essentially run both entities and they share the same radically secularist agenda--couldn't tolerate the mere idea of an honest and principled citizen statesman like Ben Carson getting into the White House. If that were to happen, the deeply entrenched political corruption that buttresses and sustains their jealously guarded power and influence would be pulled like a rug from beneath their feet and the power of the federal government would revert from these usurpers back to its rightful owners, i.e., we the people. So these cunning and worldly-wise media moguls had to figure out some way to derail Ben Carson's astoundingly successful grassroots presidential campaign in order to prevent him from winning the Republican nomination. They knew they wouldn't be able to smear his reputation with any dirt from his past because there isn't any dirt in his past to dig up. They had attempted to spread some lies about him, but that didn't work very well because most people already knew the truth about him, and those who didn't discovered it soon enough. They tried to find some juicy errors or omissions in Carson's income tax returns--a huge potential "gotcha"--but that search came up empty. And they knew that his political campaign (unlike their good pal Hillary Clinton's) was being run entirely in accordance with federal election law, so they couldn't shut him down legally or call that into question.
Consequently, the mainstream media executives settled on a strategy of deliberately ignoring Ben Carson and relentlessly focusing their primary attention on their own favorite GOP candidates, Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie. This approach extended to the Republican debates, where despite his high poll rankings and central position on the stage, Dr. Carson was generally given far less time to speak than the mainstream media darlings. As the months passed, this strategy of marginalization proved effective. Not seeing or hearing much of their candidate on TV, millions of less fanatical Carson supporters gradually became discouraged and drifted into the more visible and noisier Trump, Cruz, and Rubio camps. By the end of 2015, Carson had slipped to second place in national polls; he was at third place this past January, and had sunk to fourth place by the time actual voting began in early February.
Yet even with this perceptible decline in nationwide support precipitated by the big media boycott, Carson might still have won the Iowa caucus on February 1 had a despicable last-minute dirty trick not been pulled off by a rival and less principled GOP campaign team. Just hours before voting began, a false rumor that Carson had dropped out of the race was deliberately circulated by the Ted Cruz presidential campaign, deceiving who knows how many thousands of Carson supporters into casting their ballots for Cruz instead. Spreading this lie about Carson enabled Cruz to steal victory in the Iowa primary election. Although he would not withdraw from the race for another month, it's apparent in retrospect that the Ben Carson presidential campaign was essentially finished at that point. Dr. Carson already had enough of a challenge trying to win state primary elections with official campaign and super PAC funding limited to grassroots donations and the heavy media bias against him, but when a dishonest tactic by a fellow candidate on opening day was thrown into the mix, the stage was unfortunately set for his presidential campaign to flounder beyond reasonable hope of recovery.
Although history indicated that Carson didn't necessarily have to win Iowa to win the Republican nomination this summer, and so technically his chances were still pretty good, it was critical that he score victories in at least some of the other early voting states to give him a realistic shot at winning his adopted party's nomination. But with the deck stacked against him, he lost one state after another, and his chances of making it to the GOP convention as a presidential finalist correspondingly dwindled. Regrettably, Dr. Carson's campaign never recovered from the major damage it sustained in Iowa.
So in essence, Ben Carson rose to political prominence on the strength of his credentials as a principled citizen statesman, but he failed to clinch the Republican nomination because the corrupt mainstream media and D.C. political establishment conspired to do him in. Shame on them. However, there is more to the story than that. While many of us ordinary Americans do profess traditional religious and moral values, we have nonetheless almost unconsciously allowed the propaganda being constantly cranked out by the radically secularist mainstream media machine to influence our thinking and shape our political loyalties. As a result of this, we have gradually abandoned a humble, honest, great, wise, selfless, moral, principled, civil, commonsense citizen statesman candidate--Ben Carson, a true populist--in favor of an arrogant, dishonest, petty, foolish, self-seeking, immoral, unscrupulous, rude, and ridiculous establishment politician--Donald Trump, a fake populist. Shame on us. Apparently, we’ve allowed ourselves to become so intoxicated by the mainstream media propaganda that we are unable to clearly distinguish between a counterfeit and the real deal. Unlike Carson, who truly represented "we the people," Trump is a charlatan who merely pretends to represent us, while in reality he represents himself and his bank accounts and the Washington political establishment he craves to join. Unlike Carson, Trump is a shameless braggart and a rabble-rousing demagogue who cannot be safely trusted to govern this nation in accordance with the principles of the Founders. Yet this clanging cymbal is seemingly trusted by more than two-fifths of the American populace.
If, at the end of the day, we the people are really on the side of the corrupt media and political establishment, what does that say about us? It says, for one thing, that we are a gullible bunch, easily bamboozled into believing exactly what the establishment wants us to believe. This lack of discernment and critical thinking would have horrified the Founders, who regarded an intelligent and well-educated citizenry as indispensable to the continued health and wellbeing of the American republic. While Carson intuitively held, as he put it in one of the debates last autumn, that "the American people are not stupid" (his emphasis), he was clearly overestimating our intelligence. Yes, we are stupid. Just as a certain crowd, at the instigation of certain religious leaders, preferred the release of a convicted murderer over the innocent Son of God himself, so we, under the influence of our own media and political elite, would rather elect an assertive, blustering, corrupt, and ambitious worldly real estate mogul as President of the United States than a meek, quiet-spoken, ethical, and trustworthy Christian doctor, philanthropist, speaker and writer. We prefer Trump to Carson. We prefer vice to virtue. And because of that, we’ve cavalierly passed up our first real chance to nominate and elect a truly great president since the days of Ronald Reagan, leaving America vulnerable to the capricious whims of a corrupt, immoral, and tyrannical Trump or Clinton presidency and ensuring continued national decline for at least another four years.
During the past two months, I've been asking myself why God permitted Ben Carson to achieve such remarkable early success as a presidential candidate if he knew that his campaign was ultimately doomed to failure. I had sincerely believed that God was raising up Dr. Carson to be our next president, and I was also convinced--as I still am--that he was the only presidential candidate who would have healed and united our broken and wounded nation and restored America to greatness. Apparently, for some strange combination of reasons, God willed that Ben Carson emerge for a brief span of time as a prominent national figure in the political arena, but did not will him to be our next president. Perhaps one of those reasons is that God wanted to expose the interior nastiness and rottenness of our radically secularist mainstream media and political establishment and to show us how easily we good folks are awed, taken in, and deceived by the gleaming exterior of that omnipresent establishment. On the positive side, I would also suggest that God willed to clearly show us, through the beautiful witness of Dr. Carson's words and actions, the path we must tread as a nation if we wish to reclaim our former greatness in the years to come. There may be other reasons as well. At any rate, I continue to trust that God, in his infinite wisdom and providence, has a plan for this beleaguered country of ours, and that Carson's tragic political demise—which guarantees a continued absence of principled leadership in the White House, at least in the near term—is somehow a part of that mysterious plan.
With his amazing roller-coaster ten-month sojourn in presidential politics now behind him, the inimitable soft-spoken conservative genius Dr. Ben Carson is back where he prefers to be, living the quieter life of a private citizen, albeit a much better known one now. He may have lost his one and only bid for the presidency, but unlike his fellow contenders for that high office, at least he had his priorities straight: he would rather lose an election than lose his soul. He will undoubtedly spend his remaining years on this earth continuing to serve his beloved country in any way he can. He will remain and be remembered as a great American physician and speaker and writer and philanthropist, a tireless defender of Constitutional government and a fervent champion of liberty and justice for all, respected for his character and values and renowned for his abilities and accomplishments.
Although he never wanted to run for President of the United States, Dr. Carson did it on behalf of “we the people”, out of genuine love for us and genuine concern for our country, offering a noble and splendid example of both Christian servant leadership and authentic patriotism. For months on end during the height of his popularity, he calmly yet firmly stood his ground and steadfastly weathered the storm of unjustified political and media hostility and prejudice and indifference that beat mercilessly upon him, without becoming bitter or retaliating against his enemies. For that example of selfless service and that tranquil steadfastness in the face of adversity, he deserves our sincere admiration and our humble gratitude.
Unlike any of the other leading presidential candidates, Ben Carson was a true Christian gentleman and a true patriot, and his absence leaves our current political arena acutely impoverished. At a time of constantly deepening national crisis, Dr. Carson's definitive departure from the 2016 presidential contest exposes a yawning leadership vacuum within the American political system that no lesser candidate can possibly fill.
Copyright © 2016 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.
Monday, January 18, 2016
Quote of the Day
“Cowardice asks the question - is it safe? Expediency asks the question - is it politic? Vanity asks the question - is it popular? But conscience asks the question - is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right.”
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929--1968)
Sunday, August 23, 2015
The Great Civil Rights Movement of Our Time
A national, ecumenical week of prayer and fasting for the end of abortion and the closure of Planned Parenthood began yesterday, August 22, the feast of the Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and will conclude on Saturday, August 29, the feast of the Passion of Saint John the Baptist. A variety of Catholic and Christian pro-life organizations are working together to co-sponsor this praiseworthy and timely initiative in response to the recent unsavory video revelations of how America's largest abortion provider really operates behind the scenes. This is an excellent example of true ecumenism, in which Christians of different denominations can collaborate on the basis of their common faith and shared moral values (in this case, the right to life of innocent unborn children) to achieve a common goal (in this case, the end of abortion and the demise of the U.S. abortion cartel). A noble attempt was made on Capitol Hill early this month to cut off all federal funding to Planned Parenthood, and while such political action is vitally important, it will not succeed unless we implore heavenly assistance through prayer and fasting. The battle to end the atrocity of abortion is not simply a political and legal fight against a powerful murder corporation and its allies in the federal government. More fundamentally, this is a moral and spiritual campaign against the Devil and his evil angels who want the slaughter of innocent children to continue. Therefore, we must deploy spiritual weapons and obtain the assistance of heavenly powers--God, our Blessed Mother, the good Angels, and the Saints--in order to effectively combat and defeat our spiritual enemies who are the real driving force behind the abortion industry. And when millions of us unite to pray and sacrifice for the same intention, our prayers and sacrifices are that much more effective. All U.S. Catholics and Christians are encouraged to participate in this important effort. For prayer resources and more information, please go to http://prayercampaign.org.
The fight to end legalized abortion here in the United States is indeed the great civil rights movement of our time, and it has many parallels with the battles against the evils of slavery and segregation that plagued our nation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively. Both were grave violations of the natural law and human dignity that remained a legal part of our society for many years. Both threatened the unity of our nation. Both stubbornly resisted numerous attempts to eradicate them even as public pressure against them continued to build over time. And both were finally defeated by church-based mass movements of millions of like-minded Americans of different denominations who prayed and took action under the unifying leadership of a respected advocate for their cause. For the abolition of slavery, that great leader was Abraham Lincoln; for de-segregation, it was the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The only weakness with the current pro-life movement is the lack of a single unifying leader who appeals to everyone regardless of denomination. We do have some wonderful leaders within our movement such as Father Frank Pavone, Dr. Alveda King, and the Reverend Clenard Childress who are working tirelessly and effectively for the pro-life cause, but their appeal is mainly limited to those who are already pro-life. I think we're going to need a powerful and charismatic religious leader to rally our movement for the final push to victory. If Dr. Ben Carson were to win the Republican nomination and the presidency next year, he would fill the vacuum splendidly. In any case, after more than four decades, upwards of 55 million unborn children killed, a majority of Americans self-identifying as pro-life, more and more Planned Parenthood abortion mills shutting down each year, the glaring failure of ObamaCare to increase the national abortion rate, a substantial pro-life majority in both houses of Congress, and the enormous negative publicity generated by the Center for Medical Progress video expose, the American pro-life movement has now gained sufficient momentum that its goal of restoring Constitutional protection for the God-given inalienable right to life of all innocent unborn children in this country is actually within reach in the foreseeable future. We are winning, but we must not give up until we reach the finish line.
The fight to end legalized abortion here in the United States is indeed the great civil rights movement of our time, and it has many parallels with the battles against the evils of slavery and segregation that plagued our nation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively. Both were grave violations of the natural law and human dignity that remained a legal part of our society for many years. Both threatened the unity of our nation. Both stubbornly resisted numerous attempts to eradicate them even as public pressure against them continued to build over time. And both were finally defeated by church-based mass movements of millions of like-minded Americans of different denominations who prayed and took action under the unifying leadership of a respected advocate for their cause. For the abolition of slavery, that great leader was Abraham Lincoln; for de-segregation, it was the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The only weakness with the current pro-life movement is the lack of a single unifying leader who appeals to everyone regardless of denomination. We do have some wonderful leaders within our movement such as Father Frank Pavone, Dr. Alveda King, and the Reverend Clenard Childress who are working tirelessly and effectively for the pro-life cause, but their appeal is mainly limited to those who are already pro-life. I think we're going to need a powerful and charismatic religious leader to rally our movement for the final push to victory. If Dr. Ben Carson were to win the Republican nomination and the presidency next year, he would fill the vacuum splendidly. In any case, after more than four decades, upwards of 55 million unborn children killed, a majority of Americans self-identifying as pro-life, more and more Planned Parenthood abortion mills shutting down each year, the glaring failure of ObamaCare to increase the national abortion rate, a substantial pro-life majority in both houses of Congress, and the enormous negative publicity generated by the Center for Medical Progress video expose, the American pro-life movement has now gained sufficient momentum that its goal of restoring Constitutional protection for the God-given inalienable right to life of all innocent unborn children in this country is actually within reach in the foreseeable future. We are winning, but we must not give up until we reach the finish line.
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
ElectionWatch 2014: We Did It!
Personally, I was surprised and delighted by the news of this spectacular victory. Like many other observers, I was completely misled by the apparently inaccurate and biased polls conducted by the mainstream media showing all of the key Senate and gubernatorial races extremely close. As a result, my expectations were about ten percentage points to the left of the true public opinion. For two months, I predicted that Republicans would pick up only three to five seats in the Senate; that they would hold their own in the House; and that they would lose one or two state governorships. My predictions were based not just on the flawed polling data but on the tenacity of the corrupt Democratic political establishment in Washington and on all the big money, big lies, and big media they were employing so relentlessly in their bid to dupe the voters into keeping them in power. I was also aware of the potential for vast voter fraud in a close election and knew that Democrats would not hesitate to exploit this technique to their advantage wherever possible. Corrupt and dishonest Democratic politicians have used all these dirty tricks to win election or re-election in 2008 and 2012, so I didn't want to get my hopes up again for this election, only to be disappointed once again. Of course, it's true that the midterm elections of a president's second term traditionally result in major defeats for the president's party (this happened less dramatically in 2006 during the Bush administration), but given the times we are in now, I wasn't about to fall back on electoral tradition.
On the evening of November 4, as I flipped around to various AM radio stations to find out what was happening, I found the early news reports mixed and inconclusive. Republican Governor Rick Snyder had won re-election in Michigan; Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen had narrowly won re-election in New Hampshire; several key Senate races and the Wisconsin governor's race were undecided. Nothing significant seemed to be happening; apparently, we were in for a repeat of 2012 at the Congressional and gubernatorial levels. Snyder's re-election was the proverbial tip of the iceberg, but I didn't realize that at the time. One Libertarian commentator was dubbing the whole election event "a big yawn" and saying, "Democrats win, Republicans win, nothing really changes." Although I was disappointed, this was exactly the result I was anticipating. "Oh well," I thought, "I guess I was right on." I went to bed expecting no change in the status quo.
The next morning, I went to CNN's website with some apprehension to check the news. The headline was "RED AMERICA" across a map of the continental U.S. almost solid red; the subheading read, "Republicans seize Senate, gaining full control of Congress." I was stunned. "We did it!" I shouted. "We took over the Senate!" I could hardly believe what I was saying. I was never so glad to be wrong in all my life. I was even more blown away when I read the full story and learned that nearly all of the Republican and Tea Party incumbents and challengers had won handily: Joni Ernst, Thom Tillis, Tom Cotton, Cory Gardner, Shelley Moore Capito, Steve Daines, Mia Love, Scott Walker, John Kasich, Rick Scott, and so on and so forth. It was nothing short of a massive political earthquake for the Obama administration, a clear repudiation of its ongoing project to "fundamentally transform" America into a socialist paradise. The election results were all the more dramatic and rewarding given that the corrupt establishment did its absolute utmost to prevent such an astounding upset from ever occurring under President Obama. Planned Parenthood even spent a record $20 million in key races to retain its pro-abortion majority in the Senate. So much for that concerted endeavor. The establishment's worst nightmare has now become inescapable reality: the balance of power in Washington has shifted decisively into Republican and Tea Party hands.
Why did this election go the way it did? The answer can be summed up in one word: ObamaCare. Just as in the similar midterm elections of 2010, the American people were angry with President Obama and his Democratic cronies for betraying their trust, lying to them, and saddling them with an unjust, immoral, unconstitutional, and unaffordable socialized healthcare system that kills the unborn, attacks their religious liberties and moral conscience rights, restricts their healthcare options, and further burdens our struggling economy. The main difference between 2010 and 2014 is that ObamaCare is now in effect and the majority of American individuals and families are directly suffering from its negative consequences. They want this disastrous pork-barrel law repealed in its entirety and replaced with sound healthcare reform legislation that respects their God-given rights and allows decisions to be freely made at the local level.
And that's all because--despite the glib pronouncements of career politicians, celebrities, and mainstream media pundits--most Americans still hold traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and values in accord with the natural law and the wisdom of the Founders. They believe that America is (or at least ought to be) a Christian country, and they reject the godless ideology of radical secularism being shoved down our throats by President Obama and activist judges. They believe abortion is wrong and should be further restricted if not outlawed altogether. They believe that marriage is the union of a man and a woman and should be legally defined that way. They believe that religious liberty is sacred, that they have a moral right in conscience to refuse to participate in objectively immoral acts, and that no government law may interfere with either. They believe in limited, effective government and fiscal responsibility, not in a bloated bureaucracy with unlimited spending and unsustainable debt. They believe in a free-market economy with limited regulation, not wholesale government takeover of the private sector. They believe in equal opportunity for everyone regardless of race, gender, or background. And they believe that our borders should be secured and our immigration system properly reformed. These are the religious and moral values of Middle America, and these are the values that decided the election of 2014. It was a victory for the American people and their much-maligned, attacked, and ridiculed traditional values whose demise (to paraphrase Mark Twain) have been greatly exaggerated.
As the old Latin saying goes, Vox populo, vox Deo: The voice of the people is the voice of God. I believe that this election was a powerful manifestation of God's Will for our country: God shouting through a megaphone, if you will. In His great mercy, I think He has a better future in store for us and doesn't want our nation to keep going down the tubes as it has been thanks to our corrupt and dishonest establishment leadership. He is giving America a chance to get back on track and become a great nation once again. And not even President Obama can prevent that from happening if it is God's Will.
It was my earlier predictions for this election that turned out to be right on target. Six months ago, in my first ElectionWatch post for this series, I opined that the 2014 election season "promises to be just as exciting and historic, if not more so, than the elections held four years ago." In my second, I wrote that the nomination of Joni Ernst was "an indication, albeit an early and a small one, of what is probably going to happen this November when we the American people go to the polls: We're going to take back the Senate!" I added that "on the whole the desperate efforts of establishment politicians to cling to power will fail to hold back the wave of national rebellion now gaining momentum... We are going to elect (and re-elect) a slew of Tea Party candidates to state governorships as well as the U.S. House and Senate--citizen statesmen and women of religious faith and moral principle who will strive to return our country to greatness by governing in accordance with the law of God and the Constitution of the United States as the Founders intended." All of this has now come true, with the Tea Party revolution of 2014 meeting or even exceeding my original expectations.
However, this election was not just a landslide victory for the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement. It was also a victory for the weakest and most defenseless among us--the millions of innocent unborn Americans hidden in their mother's wombs. We owe it to them and to our nation's future to protect their inalienable right to life and put an end to the unspeakable tragedy of legalized (and now taxpayer-funded) abortion. Now that we have a pro-life majority in both houses of Congress, including many who have pledged to cosponsor and pass the Life at Conception Act, the time is ripe to move forward with this excellent legislation that guarantees legal protection, and thus a chance at life outside the womb, for all unborn Americans. When passed, the Life at Conception Act will do just that: by defining that human life begins at conception, it will overturn Roe v. Wade legislatively and end the horror of legalized abortion in America once and for all. Way back in 1983, President Ronald Reagan prophesied that such legislation would someday pass Congress, "and you and I must not rest until it does." So let's honor his legacy by remaining firmly committed to ensuring Congressional approval of the Life at Conception Act. This should be the first priority of the new Congress.
As the saying goes, our newly elected and re-elected senators, representatives, and governors definitely have their work cut out for them. Six years of President Obama have taken their toll on our country, and we can't expect all our problems to be resolved immediately, especially with two years of his disastrous presidency still to go. However, our Republican and Tea Party leaders now have a clear mandate from the voters, and they know what they must do: outlaw abortion, repeal ObamaCare, protect marriage and religious liberty, cut taxes, approve the Keystone XL pipeline, shrink the government, balance the budget, secure our borders, and hold President Obama accountable for his egregious abuses of power. We the people have spoken; now our elected representatives must act. As the baton is passed to the next generation of American leaders, let's keep them and our country in our prayers as the next Congress moves forward with the challenging but much-needed work of reform. And no matter what happens along the way, let us never forget that Divine Providence is watching over our country. In the words of a famous anthem, "Let this be our motto: In God is our trust."
Go Tea Party! And may God bless America!
Monday, October 27, 2014
ElectionWatch 2014: Us v. Them
Unfortunately, this key hallmark of our democratic society--free and fair elections--is somewhat compromised by the lack of a genuine sense of civic responsibility among many voters and is now under tremendous assault from an increasingly corrupt Washington political establishment. While some of the voters fully grasp the seriousness of their responsibility and choose their candidates rationally based on fundamental issue positions, a large percentage do not really appreciate the responsibility involved and choose who to vote for based on superficial factors such as likeability or oratorical skills or TV advertisements. These swing voters, the ones who generally decide elections, are being subjected to a barrage of campaign ads by candidates from both the major parties.
Most of the Republican candidates, especially Tea Party contenders, are taking their responsibility seriously and doing a fairly good job of candidly explaining their positions on the issues while respecting our nation's traditional religious and moral foundations. The behavior of our corrupt and dishonest Democratic establishment politicians, on the other hand, is downright embarrassing and morally despicable. They are pouring millions upon millions of dollars into negative, slanderous and libelous campaign ads designed to smear and destroy their Tea Party opponents so they can retain their grip on power. These desperate career politicians can't run positive campaigns and play by the rules because they have nothing positive to stand for and know that the voters are turning against them, so their strategy of last resort is to outspend their opponents and cover them with mud. What they are doing is not only dishonest but unjust. They are taking an election that should be a landslide for our movement--the Tea Party movement--and turning it into a toss-up. Using big money, big lies, big media, and voter fraud, they are gradually transforming our national election process into a meaningless charade to keep their beloved establishment firmly in place to the fullest extent still possible.
This national election campaign has become a classic battle of "us v. them": David versus Goliath, the people against the establishment, America's traditional religious and moral values against the encroachment of a radically secularist ideology, inalienable human rights and freedom against tyranny and oppression, corruption against honesty, character and integrity against greed and lust for power, career politicians against statesmen and public servants. The mighty Washington political establishment is beholden to the large abortion, biotechnology, junk food, pharmaceutical, and insurance corporations that have kept it entrenched for many years now. By contrast, most of the little Tea Party and Republican candidates actually share our values and represent our interests. They are the ones who should be running this country. And the good news is that they are on track to do just that despite all the efforts of the establishment to keep them shut out.
Consider that most of the Democratic incumbents are outspending their Republican rivals two to one, three to one, four to one, in some cases even five to one, yet their challengers are still very close to them in the polls, dead even with them, or even slightly ahead of them! This is very telling. If both sides were spending the same amount on their campaigns, the Democrats would already be soundly defeated in this election. Good candidates can run strong campaigns on their own merits and don't need barrels of money to prop them up--and they're proving it. Considering the unfair disadvantages they're facing, our Tea Party candidates are doing splendidly well, and American public opinion is clearly on their side.
Obviously, because of the Washington establishment's dirty tricks, not all of the Republican and Tea Party candidates are going to win in this particular election, but at least some of them will--and that will be good progress for our movement. By all accounts, this is going to be a very close election, with many races undecided for at least a day or two after Election Day, and probably several runoff elections and a couple dozen recounts. At least two or three Senate races will be nearly tied, and control of that house of Congress may well come down to just one very close and bitterly contested race, with the most probable final result being a 50-50 split.
Pray for our country and make sure you go to vote on November 4 if you're physically able to do so. Continued prayer and action before, during, and after this election are essential if our movement is to keep advancing. We can't stop now--we are winning! Any losses in this election must not discourage us. We should count our victories, not our losses. The Tea Party revolution has only just begun. We must keep the big picture in mind, and keep looking toward the future. If God is with us, who can be against us? Together, with the help of Divine Providence and the assistance of Mary Immaculate, our national Patroness, we the people will reclaim our country and restore its greatness for the benefit of future generations.
In God we trust!
P.S. Stay tuned for coverage of the actual election results, coming next month.
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