The Quiet Conservative 09/10/2008
Accomplices and Heretics Part II.
With Democratic vice president pick Joe Biden, (abortion accomplice and minor league Catholic
heretic) stepping up to the big leagues in Catholic heresy, you have to wonder why Senator Obama
chose him in the first place. Senator Biden went on Meet the Press to try and dig the Democratic
Party out of its awkward position of having pro-choice/tax payer funded abortions as their core party
plank, while giving lip service to Christians and pro life people to get their vote.
The firestorm ignited with Senator Obama at the Saddleback Forum stating the determination of
when life begins was above his pay grade. That bungled answer opened a flood gate of questions. If
he didn't know when life began, then the automatic default position was to defend life from
conception. Otherwise you condone murder. If life begins some time else, when?
The pro death crowd cannot answer that. They won’t answer that. The politicians who defend the
abortion industry do not care about the sanctity of life. They care about money. There is a lot of
money to be made in declaring a baby (or "fetus", the Latin for “offspring,” if you prefer) a lump of
tissue or a choice. A lot of that money is available from abortionists to people who protect that view
in the legislature.
You can’t make an unborn baby a human if you are a liberal politician. If you do, then you mentally
assign yourself responsibility for either protecting that life, or allowing that life to be killed. If a baby
is considered human you would have blood on your hands for taking money to protect the businesses
that terminate helpless babies. That wouldn't be good. You have to wash your hands of the
responsibility.*
The last thing the left wants is responsibility for the choices people make in creating a new life. The
left doesn't want it that way. Instead they want to think about moral relativity. The left has no
absolutes. They have no deity to answer to in their world view, therefore they can follow their
basest hedonistic impulses without reproach. The left cares about avoiding responsibility. They care
about avoiding consequences. They care about not holding themselves to any standard of behavior or
moral absolutes. They care about sex without emotion, meaning, responsibility, or accountability.
This situation is quite a quandary for liberals. They behave one way, but have to conceal it by
speaking another. The left is faced with the fact that despite a stranglehold on the press, education,
and popular culture for forty years, America has resisted the transformation into a post Christian
secular European style socialism. Politicians that are otherwise solid progressives must couch their
positions and temporize when comparing their agendas and their public image. America still believes
in right and wrong, good and evil. God and accountability.
Nancy Pelosi’s unbelievably inept defense of abortion citing her Catholic faith on Meet the Press
finally triggered the Catholic Church to respond. After decades of a mostly passive, timid responses
to liberal Catholic politicians, the Bishops were finally faced with a “fish or cut bait” moment.
Having horribly and incoherently described the Church’s position on abortion, the most powerful
woman in the Congress was called out by over twenty individual bishops and the Council of Bishops
on her twisting of Catholic Doctrine. (See the first article Accomplices and Heretics). Even her own
San Francisco bishop has been goaded into calling Nancy into his office for a chat on her...
indiscretion.
Feeling the heat with a normally safe Democratic voting block of old style Catholic Democrats, the
Democratic Party went into full damage control. Enter Joe Biden, the next Catholic heretic to
represent the Democratic Catholic politician point of view.
Senator Biden appeared on Meet the Press only two weeks after Nancy Pelosi went on the show
as an “ardent practicing Catholic.” Joe proceeded to mangle the Church’s teachings all over again.
What were the Democratic Party heads thinking? The U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, having been
inflamed by one pro abortion heretic, would be placated by having another pro abortion heretic
appear in the same media venue? Senator Biden appeared to have learned something from Nancy’s
implosion, but like the rest of the liberal elite he seemed to be completely unable to relate to the
religion he belongs to. From the Meet the Press Transcript for September 7, 2008:
MR. BROKAW: You're a lifetime communicant in the Catholic Church. You've talked often about
your faith and the, and the strength of your feelings about your faith.
SEN. BIDEN: Actually, I haven't talked often about my faith. I seldom talk about my faith. Other
people talk about my faith.
MR. BROKAW: I'll give you an opportunity to talk about it now.
SEN. BIDEN: Yeah.
MR. BROKAW: Two weeks ago I interviewed Senator Nancy Pelosi--she's the speaker of the
House, obviously--when she was in Denver. When Barack Obama appeared before Rick Warren, he
was asked a simple question: When does life begin? And he said at that time that it was above his
pay grade. That was the essence of his question. When I asked the speaker what advice she would
give him about when life began, she said the church has struggled with this issue for a long time,
especially in the last 50 years or so. Her archbishop and others across the country had a very
strong refutation to her views on all this; I guess the strongest probably came from Edward
Cardinal Egan, who's the Archbishop of New York. He said, "Anyone who dares to defend that
they may be legitimately killed because another human being `chooses' to do so or for any other
equally ridiculous reason should not be providing leadership in a civilized democracy worthy of
the name." Those are very strong words. If Senator Obama comes to you and says, "When does life
begin? Help me out here, Joe," as a Roman Catholic, what would you say to him?
SEN. BIDEN: I'd say, "Look, I know when it begins for me." It's a personal and private issue. For
me, as a Roman Catholic, I'm prepared to accept the teachings of my church. But let me tell you.
There are an awful lot of people of great confessional faiths--Protestants, Jews, Muslims and
others--who have a different view. They believe in God as strongly as I do. They're intensely as
religious as I am religious. They believe in their faith and they believe in human life, and they
have differing views as to when life--I'm prepared as a matter of faith to accept that life begins at
the moment of conception. But that is my judgment. For me to impose that judgment on everyone
else who is equally and maybe even more devout than I am seems to me is inappropriate in a
pluralistic society. And I know you get the push back, "Well, what about fascism?" Everybody, you
know, you going to say fascism's all right? Fascism isn't a matter of faith. No decent religious
person thinks fascism is a good idea.
MR. BROKAW: But if you, you believe that life begins at conception, and you've also voted for
abortion rights...
SEN. BIDEN: No, what a voted against curtailing the right, criminalizing abortion. I voted
against telling everyone else in the country that they have to accept my religiously based view that
it's a moment of conception. There is a debate in our church, as Cardinal Egan would
acknowledge, that's existed. Back in "Summa Theologia," when Thomas Aquinas wrote "Summa
Theologia," he said there was no--it didn't occur until quickening, 40 days after conception. How
am I going out and tell you, if you or anyone else that you must insist upon my view that is based
on a matter of faith? And that's the reason I haven't. But then again, I also don't support a lot of
other things. I don't support public, public funding. I don't, because that flips the burden. That's
then telling me I have to accept a different view. This is a matter between a person's God, however
they believe in God, their doctor and themselves in what is always a--and what we're going to be
spending our time doing is making sure that we reduce considerably the amount of abortions that
take place by providing the care, the assistance and the encouragement for people to be able to
carry to term and to raise their children.
Sigh. There is an expression used in the workplace. It goes like this- “There are people with twenty
years experience and there are people with one year twenty times.” Already nettled by Nancy
Pelosi's incomprehensible babbling about the Church’s teachings, the Bishops were primed and ready
with a response for this...new heretical viewpoint. From the USCCB web site:
Bishops Respond To Senator Biden’s Statements Regarding Church Teaching On Abortion
WASHINGTON—Cardinal Justin F. Rigali, chairman of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life
Activities, and Bishop William E. Lori, chairman, U.S. Bishops Committee on Doctrine, issued the
following statement:
Recently we had a duty to clarify the Catholic Church’s constant teaching against abortion, to correct
misrepresentations of that teaching by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on “Meet the Press” (see "http:
//www.usccb.org/prolife/whatsnew.shtml"). On September 7, again on “Meet the Press,” Senator
Joseph Biden made some statements about that teaching that also deserve a response.
Senator Biden did not claim that Catholic teaching allows or has ever allowed abortion. He said
rightly that human life begins “at the moment of conception,” and that Catholics and others who
recognize this should not be required by others to pay for abortions with their taxes.
However, the Senator’s claim that the beginning of human life is a “personal and private”
matter of religious faith, one which cannot be “imposed” on others, does not reflect the truth
of the matter. The Church recognizes that the obligation to protect unborn human life rests on the
answer to two questions, neither of which is private or specifically religious.
The first is a biological question: When does a new human life begin? When is there a new living
organism of the human species, distinct from mother and father and ready to develop and mature if
given a nurturing environment? While ancient thinkers had little verifiable knowledge to help them
answer this question, today embryology textbooks confirm that a new human life begins at
conception (see "http://www.usccb.org/prolife/issues/bioethic/fact298.shtml"). The Catholic Church
does not teach this as a matter of faith; it acknowledges it as a matter of objective fact.
The second is a moral question, with legal and political consequences: Which living members of the
human species should be seen as having fundamental human rights, such as a right not to be
killed? The Catholic Church’s answer is: Everybody. No human being should be treated as
lacking human rights, and we have no business dividing humanity into those who are valuable enough
to warrant protection and those who are not. This is not solely a Catholic teaching, but a principle of
natural law accessible to all people of good will. The framers of the Declaration of Independence
pointed to the same basic truth by speaking of inalienable rights, bestowed on all members of the
human race not by any human power, but by their Creator...(Page 2)