Monday, February 12, 2007

More Seamless-Garbage

From the interview at California Catholic Daily:
Ed Cavagnaro: Of course, [Pro-abort Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi] has a big say in the direction of the country and the legislative agenda, certainly. Other than this issue [of abortion], what other issues do you feel that she should concentrate on? What is important to you as an archbishop?

Archbishop George Niederauer: I think all the issues are important. I think the life issues are important, like euthanasia, like abortion, but of course there is another life issue where you would find the side switching very quickly, and that is the death, -- the death penalty -- capital punishment. I think we would find ourselves in agreement with a whole different group of people who would be -- have a very similar but opposed opinion with regard to, well let’s say abortion. I think health care for everyone, I think is an important issue. I think affordable housing is an important issue. I think immigration reform. I think there is an hypocrisy, whereby we say, we send forth this message, as a country – I think we are anyway -- “Don’t you dare cross our borders but if you do we have a great job for you.” Something has to be done about that. Something has to be done about splitting up families. So that people can -- can try to support themselves and their families. Those are all, I think, issues. And I think an issue that is compelling to all of us right now is the war in Iraq.

We'll put aside the nonsense of equating affordable housing and immigration reform with abortion. For the sake of argument, let's give the good bishop (and anyone of like mind) some breathing room and assume the death penalty is just as deplorable as abortion (note: which it isn't).

In America last year, 53 criminals paid an early visit to their Maker via painless, lethal injection. During that same period of time, an estimated 1.31 million babies were tortured to death in their mothers' wombs. That's a ratio of 24,717:1 (babies:criminals).

So logic would dictate, just going off the numbers (again, wrongly assuming DP = Abortion), our time and effort should be correspondingly divided between the two.

In other words, every sixty seconds Niederauer uses to speak out against capital punishment, should be balanced with 412 hours of (non-stop) verbal opposition to abortion.

And every $100 spent by the USCCB on fighting the death penalty, should be balanced with $2.4 million fighting the war in the womb.

Memo to the USCCB: How about it?

2 comments:

Christina Dunigan said...

You make an excellent point, but you might want to state it in a less confrontational way than with a "seamless-garbage" headline.

You might actually be able to divert some SGN people toward anti-abortion or anti-euthanasia advocacy with their time rather than anti-DP if they realize how much more effective antiabortion efforts can be in terms of saving lives.

The Herring family said...

Christina,

1) You've got a great blog! I plan to link to it in the future.

2) Thanks for the kind words.

3) I appreciate the constructive criticism but I'm going to stick with my guns on this one.

From your blog alone, I could not determine whether or not you are Catholic. In any case, the term "Seamless Garment" was coined by the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin (d. 1996) of Chicago, and has lead to mass confusion among untold millions of Catholics in America.

Instead of focusing attention on the most serious and grave evils of our time, the good bishops have opted for a more "balanced" approach, (as evidenced in this interview with Archbishop Niederauer) by discussing "the many" and "varied" aspects of human life that are "under attack" today. Among these are euthanasia, homelessness, abortion, health care, affordable housing, welfare, the death penalty, and more. The (intended?) result has been literally tens of millions of Catholics who are absolutely clueless about morality.

For them there is no heirarchy of values (i.e., torturing and killing unborn babies > poverty), which is why John Kerry stole about half the Catholic vote. Many Catholics disagreed with his position on abortion, but liked his economic policies more than they did those of George W.

Besides, Bush is in favor of the death penalty...so the vote goes to Kerry -- or, in any number of other elections, Nancy Pelosi, or Patty Murray, or Maria Cant-vote-well, or the Cape Cod Orca, or Joe Biden, or Patrick Leahy -- so what's the big deal?

...another Catholic whose only hope for Eternal Joy comes via the 8th Sacrament: Ignorance.

And while the millions of ignorant, uniformed, misguided, lay Catholics may be able squirm out from under the tremendous weight of judgment that is abortion, I find it hard to believe the likes of Bernardin, Mahoney, and Niederauer will be able to play the same trump card on the Last Day.

Afterall, it was their "Seamless Garbage" which informed and guided all those Catholics to elect all those pro-aborts. It was their leadership, by and large, which got us up to our necks in this moral cesspool to begin with.

And my "confrontational way" of calling Bernardin's strategy 'garbage,' tucked away on an obscure blog, is about the extent of my ability to object to it.

But object to it I must.