It certainly seems that we are at the end of the world. We won’t be surprised at the popularity of that new film 2012, even with its really bad special effects and uninspired acting. People from all political and religious persuasions will flock to see it, because we are truly frightened now.

There are so many signs of gridlock–economic, social, cultural, and religious. Every value that once glued civilization together, from honesty, to fidelity to spouse, to fidelity to business contract, to the sanctity of the single human life, has fallen. Socialism has failed. Capitalism has failed. We seem to stand naked and small on the edge of a chasm filled with smoking hell.

But such fears need not be accurate. Rather than facing the end of civilization, we might be in fact only facing the end of the viability of the secular state.

We forget the secular state was only an experiment following the madness of the French Revolution; we forget to entertain alternatives. Some of us do not even realize we are in a secular state. We keep arguing that the constitution calls on God now and again, why cannot we keep our crosses in our parks?

Europe, too, formed by centuries of a civilization in which the state and the Church partnered in meeting the needs of the flock, has not yet come to terms with the actual state they have erected on the ruins. But perhaps the time has come.

Perhaps the time has come to suggest a third party that proposes to replace the secular state with a religious state imposing the values of Christianity while tolerating the values and exercise of other religions, with limitations, those limitations spelled out in the policies of the party platform.

The most obvious limitation would be the end to the killing of the unborn, the re-imposition of the protective mantle Christianity places around the human person (and shares with some, but not all, other faiths as they have come to be so loosely defined, constituting merely personal beliefs that allow one to kill, in this particular instance, a human life distinguishable from one’s own).

Another could be the reassertion of the traditional definition and purpose of marriage, rolling back the changes the homosexualist mafia has imposed on the culture, and forbidding the further free proselytizing for the gay life style through the media . One place to start would be an end to no-fault divorce. Another could be re-control of pornography. It would also be possible to re-position marriage as central to our culture by curtailing the “rights” other forms of casual unions have demanded with legislation as simple as simply allowing the refusal to rent housing to unmarried couples or to extend benefits to them. If all that seems harsh, consider how harsh it is to be an African-American woman now, whose chances of marriage are only one in seven. For those with good hair. For those with money. Here is the real racism.

Such a third party actually has a wealth of economic strategies loosely known as distributism and characterized by what one might describe as the opposite of globalism: decentralized ownership (made possible by taxation policies that penalize concentration of ownership–think higher taxes after the third pizza franchise, or limitations on inheritance). Some benefits would be lost–no one disputes that Walmart can offer cheaper prices, but neither is it disputed that the health of the community is not made worse by more expensive commodities and more available jobs and smaller businesses owned by more people.

The Catholic Church, as Michael Moore’s most recent movie highlights, has never been in bed with either unfettered capitalism or socialism, but favors a system in which class warfare is discouraged and classes are organized together into productive guilds where the needs of both capital and labor are met. The Church has considered neither profits nor wages outside the domain of the state when curtailments benefited the common good; the caveat, as Pius XI pointed out in Quadragesimo Anno, is that the administration must be by a state with firm moral values. Our secular state fails that test, and it is thus that we are gridlocked. We simply cannot trust our state; it’s instinctual, we know our state can kill, we know it lacks that bright good respect for people, we know its armies and police forces are capable of the most enormous and casual cruelties. We try to keep them hidden, but Abu Ghraib reveals the truth. What happened to the citizens after Hurricane Katrina reveals the truth (pick up Zietoun for a chill). What happens every day in our stalemated state and national legislatures reveals the truth. We have lost our way. The secular state has failed.

A third party such as this could find supporters outside Catholicism and what is left of protestantism. Muslims understand the danger of a secular state, and it is arguable that Muslims would find life under a state with firm Christian religious principles preferable to one under an atheistic secular state that continually offends their deepest beliefs–such as ours does presently. That may be said about those Muslims living in our country. To Muslims in their own countries, some secular states, some religious, it might be a relief to be at war with invaders who at least do not set up their instant portable satellite dishes to begin to beam their pornography death rays to their armies–who invite the neighbors! Here, take a look at freedom! Isn’t it grand? This happens!

Perhaps in the end it must be war. But the prospect of peace seems greater when these religious issues (for the so-called ‘western lifestyle’ that drives Muslim mad are in fact religious issues, our lack of it, that is) are not the point, as they are made to be now.

Such a state might not find support, on the other hand, among all Catholics. Vatican II elevated the secular state to pride of place, and there are those cognoscenti , those who really understand what the constitutions of Vatican II actually say under all the pretty words, who would fight for it–and one cannot help thinking of how well all that “freedom” and all those “rights” lavishly granted in the constitutions of Vatican II were covers for the homosexual plague that immediately overtook the Church and has not yet abated. Yes, they might fight. Such a free ride as they have enjoyed is perhaps worth everything.

Would the ordinary Catholic, if he understood what is at stake, fight for it? That is debatable. The ordinary Catholic on his ordinary blog, at least, is apparently bewildered by what he sees, counting the ‘irrational not-Catholicism’ he views among pro-abort Catholic politicians and pro-mixed dormitory Catholic universities where buddha has taken the place of Our Lady at the gate, and “post-Christian” nuns who teach that Christ is only one of God’s sons, as non-Catholic, rather than realizing they are merely the new Catholics unleashed by Vatican II. They say so, over and over (please see an earlier blog, The Council Pow-Wow and Pro-life Catholics). Nor does the Vatican contradict them even as it laments abortion.

But the ordinary Catholic is still asleep.

It goes without saying that nothing could be closer to this discussion than the talks soon to open between SSPX and the Vatican. For the secular state as addressed by Vatican II is on the table, whether Rome wishes it or no. SSPX knows what is at stake. They have sworn their fealty to Christ the King and no stinking sixties-intoxicated love affair with the secular state will sway them. The word “Freedom” does not make them swoon like disobedient schoolboys. They do not wish to be ‘free,’ they wish to be bound to the King.

Let us propose a third party. Our Lady’s party. Our Lady’s Lions? Mary’s Martyrs? (It would come to that, have no doubt; even as I type it I expect the server to crash and Satan to fly in through the window.) Suggest something to call it and email me and volunteer. We could win. People are that fed up. We could have health care reform by forcing a constitutional amendment forbidding abortion and euthanasia. We could have prayer in schools (God knows they’ve tried everything else to help the situation in education in this country!). We could fight successfully on so many fronts. We might not win elections but we could influence the discussion mightily, and that’s what third parties are all about. We might then suffer through our economic distresses poorer, but not more terrified that they are coming for us in the night.

Down with the separation between Church and state. We need a third, Catholic, party!

Down with the secular state. We need a third party!

Down with liberalism. We need a third party!

All hail to Christ the King!

When Pope Benedict XVI met with the new US Ambassador to the Vatican this last week pro-life Catholics had to hear his welcoming remarks to Miguel Diaz with surprise and pain. The Associated Press report, quoted the Holy Father’s enthusiastic endorsement of the US’s “vibrant democracy” and his gushing support for Obama’s efforts to provide government health care for all, sentiments not shared by American bishops on the ground in the political carnage.

The pain, now, is constant and unrelenting. What Benedict calls ‘vibrant’ is more like ‘vicious.’ Let us count the ways unlicensed democracy, the “freedom now” democracy, the sweet forbidden nectar of the sexy sixties, has poisoned American life. In 1970, 77 percent of adults were married; now it is a mere 57 percent, and of that number 60 percent will end in divorce. Only sixty percent of children now are born to married couples, and of that number, only 60.3 of those children even live with their biological parents, let alone a father. These statistics are daily reported by various sociological surveys too numerous to link. An African-American woman has only a one in seven chance of reaching the safe harbor of marriage, and so she will either have to live as a celibate, never recommended by the Church as a way of life for most, or she will become one of the physically or emotionally battered sex toys seen trudging into abortion mills early Saturday mornings, alone, abused in every possible sense. In one of every two pregnancies, the life of a black child is snuffed out there, unmourned and unknown.

Shall we go on? How shall we call ‘vibrant’ what our lives have become? We Americans are less prosperous now. We don’t take vacations. We work longer hours and own less, less real tangible property. We kill ourselves in ever greater numbers at ever younger ages. We stuff ourselves with unneeded food and unhealthy drugs because we are so hungry for love we could die. The most rationale of us spend our lives fighting the system in an unequal contest. And Benedict calls our pathetic attempts to tame our out-of-control political system “fruitful dialogue” and chants the same old liberal mantra of “progress,” just as they did in his salad days in the Council, when, coming out of the fifties, there might have been some conceivable justification for their blindness to the real world. After all, there was a new Buick in every American driveway. The churches were full. They taught the Faith there. (They teach yoga now.)

So the pain is comprehensible. It hurts to hear our Holy Father continually deny the reality.

But the surprise is unwarranted. We should have seen it coming.

Because the scenario we are enduring in the US is actually the very “ideal” promoted by Vatican II. It elevated absolute freedom of conscience in a model secular state, a state in which the Church, as merely one among the many, can lobby with all the rest for those principles which the Church teaches and which protected us, before, from the excesses. We are to do this by continually praising what might be good or headed in a good direction, and ignoring what is bad, and we call this “forming consciences” and it sure doesn’t work in curing cancer or treating diabetis, but we just keep on doing it, and some even praise it as really creative dipolmacy. Way to go, Holy Father!

Evidently in our Catholic efforts to ‘form consciences,’ as the Holy Father himself put it when he welcomed Diaz, the Church loses gracefully, for Benedict serenely remarked that “the church in the United States wishes to contribute to the discussion,” including “the inalienable right to life from the moment of conception to natural death,” a fight we are daily losing along with human lives, yet he warmly praises other Obama initiatives, like the “goal of a world free of nuclear weapons” and “promotion of human rights.” (We do not wish to contribute, we wish to win. So we could go home and have one beer we don’t cry in before we die!)

Because pro-life activists know that Obama’s ‘promotion of human rights’ conceals the most aggressive imposition of abortion “rights” ever known, including economic sanctions against states that resist. The assault is certainly not balanced by the very distant step-down of nuclear weapons in world armaments.

The constitutions of Vatican II spell it out. It was right there in the texts all the time! It’s just so hard to get past the double-speak. You have to read them with a good English teacher. You have to get used to smarmy ad-sense nonsense from liberals smiling like baby buddhists delivering koans: Keep the Latin but push the vernacular. Keep God in the public square but insist that all gods be equal before the law. Continue to evangelize but invite the witchdoctor to dinner. After all, “all faiths lead to Christ,” well, eventually, don’cha know? No need for us to get all preachy!

Take one small example, the conciliar teaching on the secular state. Vatican II dissolved the remaining Catholic confessional states in favor of the ‘neutral’ secular state. It was first necessary to declare, as does Dignitatis humanae, that everyone must enjoy freedom of conscience to choose whatever god they select. The Church has never taught this crazy talk; consider only St. Paul’s teaching that Christ is the center of all things on heaven and on earth, all powers, all nations, all time (Col. 1:17-22). What did Christ send his apostles forth to ‘teach all nations’–Hinduism?

But Vatican II, citing some kind of “progress” mankind had made toward a freedom without Christ, dismissed that teaching.

The next necessary step then was the endorsement by the council of a secular state that could maintain the peace between all these different gods, and that was accomplished in Nostra aetate. It bears noting that they were not talking about freedom of religion under a neutral state in any pagan country, but in the Christian nations where Catholics, or Catholics and other Christian sects together, formed a majority of the population. And that situation is what we have suffered ever since the Council. It is the situation, soon to be before the Supreme Court (but already played in smaller communities throughout the United States), a case that calls for the removal of a World War I cross at a national park memorial because the National Park Service earlier refused to allow a buddhist memorial at the same site–the new Church will be praying, one may suppose, that the cross loses. Because the only solution possible is to forbid them both, the Cross of Our Lord and the buddha. That is the perhaps unintended consequence of Vatican II, and those Christians and Catholics who think this is a violation of Church policy must read Dignitatis Humanae and Nostra aetate with a grain of common sense to discover the betrayal.

But this is not the relation between the Church and the state always taught by tradition. The traditional teaching is clear: the Church is independent, the Church and the state are distinct, one for divine things and the other for civil, and in that sense the state may rightly be said to be ’secular’–the Church will not build roads and the state will not absolve sins; but they must be unified in action, because they have the same goal, to serve the people, the flock, and thus to preserve marriage, to protect life, to insure work and a dignified death, and, yes, health care. They serve the same people, their aims to promote the common good are the same. They cannot bear to be as divided as they presently are in the US, when the elderly are afraid to vote for health care, less the state come to kill them as they kill unborn babies. That’s the reality of American life now. Leo XIII’s Immortale Dei is only one of the traditional encyclicals ignored by the “pastoral” Council (that means, not infallible, not inspired, and definitely amendable) Vatican II in its rush to accommodate to the World and forcibly separate the Church and state.

Liberals have argued that the situation in the world had changed drastically regarding the Catholic confessional states in which there was this unity between Church and state, and of course it did, and has further since the Council. But as Archbishop Lefebvre noted in They Have Uncrowned Him, it was not necessary to capitulate to the separation, to embrace and celebrate it, and sensible people would wish now that the Church had rather shown resistance, however token, and helped us then, and help us now, to position ourselves politically to combat the attacks atheistic secularism has made on our quality of life, most notably and painfully in the little issue of the lives we have allowed to be taken through abortion, in the name of that “freedom of conscience.”

Contrary to the expectation during the Council of future “glorious progress forward” for mankind and the Church, an illusion based largely on their admiration for the United States and the growth the Church had enjoyed for a temporary period under conditions of pluralism, we have neither improved nor grown since Vatican II elevated the secular state and total religious freedom over the long-enduring civic preference of Christian values and the tolerance of other religions. We have, in fact, collapsed in every possible indicator, from the dearth of vocations to scandalous priestly behavior to empty churches. Benedict continually calls for this preference now, with Europe in shambles and dying, yet never realizes that his beloved Council was the tip of the spear that delivered death. But liberals are always incoherent thus. Bad writers and thinkers, they don’t mind contradiction as long as they sound pretty. Vatican II was so pretty. Who among all those flower children in cassocks knew it could have such devastating effects? Well, actually a whole roster of popes knew, and said so in encyclicals, but they were ignored.

This is the substance of the talks coming soon between SSPX and the Vatican. This writer, no theologian but plenty experienced with the suffering on the ground, has put it badly, but with hope that the reader can see the point. Please pray! We are so weary. We have already lost fifty million lives to abortion, and wasted and ruined the lives of living women, and most shamefully the lives of African-American women. Please pray! Pray SSPX wins!

And somebody buy our Holy Father a fiddle. Because Rome is burning. Hasn’t he heard?

Pro-life Catholics usually take the attitude toward pro-choice Catholic politicians that they are ‘renegade Catholics,’ acting outside the teaching of the Church regarding the definition of human life. We marvel that ‘dissidents’ continue to function within Catholic circles, unchallenged, receiving communion, teaching at Catholic schools, and even living in Catholic seminaries and convents.

Why is error so persistent? Isn’t Catholicism clear?

The misunderstanding apparently goes both ways. Recently the ‘renegades’ turned the tables and openly castigated pro-life Catholics for their lack of charity in vigorously protesting the Catholic funeral afforded the popular senator Ted Kennedy, who never repudiated his support for abortion. Some thought to be ‘traditional’ in the Catholic hierarchy participated in the laudatory funeral, to the renewed surprise of Novus Ordo pro-life activists. (Does not their surprise bone ever get weary?)

It’s almost diabolical. Or, is there some competing Catholic teaching that contradicts the obvious one that an unborn child is protected by the commandment against murder? Is there some teaching that supports pro-choice Catholics and allows those who disregard abortion to freely function by all levels of the Catholic hierarchy? How do pro-choice Catholics justify their voting records? And what can pro-life Catholics do besides wag their fingers and chant ’shame shame shame!’ on the internet?

Pro-choice politicians rarely risk public statements detailing the theology informing their voting records, but there have been chinks in the wall. Nancy Pelosi, for example, on Meet the Press, explained her support for abortion this way: “This isn’t about abortion on demand, it’s about a careful, careful consideration of all factors and–to–that a woman has to make with her doctor and her god.” (Punctuation as in original transcript.)

In other words, Pelosi is honoring a woman’s right to practice the religion of her choice, as guaranteed by our constitution–and, here’s the teaching that contradicts the commandment against murder: by the constitutions of Vatican II.

Vatican II made a right of the tolerance that had been practiced for reasons of charity or prudence on a case-by-case basis. Dignitatis humanae, the Declaration on religious freedom, asserts throughout that religious decision are strictly up to the individual and that no one must use any form of coercion to influence those precious decisions.

It is said in the declaration, for example, that “government is to see to it that equality of citizens before the law, which is itself an element of the common good, is never violated, whether openly or covertly, for religious reasons.” The word ‘right’ is used forty-eight times in the document regarding absolute religious freedom; one paragraph (n. 4) notes that “society has the right to defend itself against possible abuses committed on the pretext of freedom of religion. It is the special duty of government to provide this protection” and therefore the right of the government, not the Church, to define what is an abuse. Pelosi’s government does not define abortion as an abuse, and hence Nancy says she may, and even must, as a good Vatican II Catholic, honor the religions of all, even if they involve the sacrifice of one small human life. When Pelosi explains her voting record by saying abortion is ‘between a woman and her god,’ she clearly cites the woman’s freedom of religion to make such a decision.

The Church has not clarified Dignitatis humanae or numerous other constitutional references to ‘freedom of conscience,’ ‘freedom of religion,’ ‘freedom to choose,’ to clearly and unequivocally state that abortion, polygamy, divorce, and gay sexuality are not covered by the council’s insistence on ‘freedom’ and do not merit the excessive ‘respect’ continually demanded by Council documents. Unless this teaching is clarified, Nancy Pelosi is legitimately reflecting the diversity of her electorate. Vatican II commands her to do so in the novel teaching that religious freedom is an absolute right rather than charity toward many religious expressions of other faiths on a case by case basis, which the Church had always taught before the Council, but which may never be demanded as a right in those instances where the public good is so much at stake.

Other theologians take the ‘right’ to abort as an issue of Church and state as well, as evidenced by an article in a 1999 article in Christian Ethics Today by Dr. John M. Swomley, professor emeritus of social ethics at St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City. The pro-abort article takes the Vatican and active pro-life Catholics to task for their opposition to abortion specifically as a violation of the principle of separation of Church and state and emphasizes how important, unique, and precedent-setting this separation has been in the history of the United States and then for the world. The lynch pin to such separation is, of course, a presumed ‘right’ to practice whatever religion one chooses, however erroneous, with the state the neutral peacemaker between ideologies.

This new “right” is clearly novel. The popes of the nineteenth century formally condemned ‘religious freedom’ over and over as a liberal error. Pius IX, for example, in Quanta cura, explicitly denounced the proposition that “liberty of conscience and of forms of worship is a right proper to every man,” almost the exact words later elevated by Vatican II to the level of doctrine.

Thus freedom of worship is central to the continuation of abortion. Joe Biden gave an explanation similar to Pelosi’s for his voting record. Arguing that it was impossible to ban abortion, Biden said,  “That’s sort of reflected as close as anybody is ever going to get in this heterogeneous, this multicultural society of religious people as to some sort of, not consensus, but as close it gets.” John Kerry said that, although he was an altar boy, he must cite freedom of religion as the basis for his pro-choice voting record: “I can’t take what is an article of faith for me and legislate it for someone who doesn’t share that article of faith.” He is in this backed up by the US constitution. But he is also backed up by the new teaching of the Church. According to Vatican II’s teaching on freedom of religion, he really can’t set limits on the belief of others, and there are plenty of lay Catholics, theologians (among them Miguel Diaz, the new US envoy to the Vatican), religious sisters, priests, bishops, and cardinals who agree with him, and vote for him, by the same justification.

That it makes it easier to live the good life in secular America is only icing on the cake. Otherwise it’s possible there could be blood.

Commonweal magazine called  pro-abort Catholic politician Patrick Leahy, Vermont, a “John Courtney Murray Catholic,” Murray being the American peritus at the Council who gave us the teaching on the supremacy of the secular state over the religious state, with all religions subject to the state, which would ensure ‘equality before the law’ among them, at a time when there were still Catholic states, and it killed them, or rather it removed their justification by their own faith, so that others could kill them. This is the teaching of the Council’s Nostra aetate. Commonweal meant it as a compliment. The Church has not yet disabused Commonweal of the notion by repudiating John Courtney Murray and all he represented for the fall of the Church in the last forty years.

One does not know how many deaths beyond the unspeakable fifty million lives lost to abortion it will take to disabuse us of Murray’s tired hippy talk that ‘mankind’s conscience’ will always lead us to the good secular state, the state best suited for the modern world. The secular state doesn’t even provide us with a decent economy–because it keeps killing its future taxpayers and consumers!

And we are paralyzed as well as broke. Politically, the US is at a stalemate. We cannot get the health care we need. We cannot get the divorce reform laws we need to protect the institution of marriage, or even agree on a definition of marriage. We cannot get laws against the tsunami of pornography debasing our children. We cannot get banking industry reform, or tort reform. We cannot get even medicare reform, because we have a viciously secular government that has (as critics of the Council at the time pointed out would be the inevitable result of such a radical amputation of church from state), a nasty impulse to kill human beings to solve problems. Even the most humble of the elderly knows what that means: it means when times really get tough, like now, they’re coming for you. And so the elderly are acting up at town hall meetings. And they should. And they vote. So we’re paralyzed. And stressed.

Church and state have too many overlapping concerns to be completely separated, with the state elevated over the Church, as Vatican II does. It causes chaos. We’re living it.

Nor was total separation of Church and state ever the traditional teaching of the Church. For example, Leo XIII wrote, in Immortale dei  (n. 25), that human societies cannot, without becoming criminal, conduct themselves as if God did not exist. And yet Vatican II elevated the secular state to the model for the world, rather than teaching us how to live and fight for the faith in a secular world. Vatican II capitulated. It is true our times are more difficult regarding the separation of church and state, and it is true that the US is the most difficult, the most secular, of all.

But that does not mean we change the teaching, only the tactics. Unless we’re cowards. Vatican II caved.

But it can be fixed. Other temporary lapses have been fixed in the history of the Church. And then we can begin the work of re-building.

Traditionalist pro-lifers have stood shoulder to shoulder with Novus Ordo pro-lifers outside abortion mills, we have worked together in drives to collect funds and clothing for pregnant women, we have journeyed the many miles to Washington every year, and we have had our martyrs. We know each other to be sincere.  It is time for these Novus Ordo pro-life soldiers to listen to their traditional comrades and attend to the doctrinal issues from the sixties that give a platform to abortion forces.  We must all stand up and tell the Church:

Fix Vatican II!

We must write them letters the way we write to politicians. We must send them emails. And blog them and twitter them. Tell our pastors. Tell our bishops. Fix Vatican II! Quit acting as if it were all fine! Look at how it is being used, and fix it, before Catholicism disappears and the world ends. Just break down and restate the teaching according to Tradition, so that we’re all on the same page, and let’s get on with the work of evangelization!

First and last, we must pray the rosary as hard as we can that the coming talks between SSPX and the Vatican, which will address exactly these issues (in spite of Austrian bishop Schonborn’s assertion they’d be ‘off the table’), are successful on the side of SSPX.  That might be painful for some Novus Ordo pro-life activists. But investigate further, and think about the very strong  possibility that these novel teachings are the secret heart of our difficulties, from Notre Dame to health care reform. Clarity would force pro-abort Catholic politicians (and their Catholic voting base, and their Catholic media base) to find another way to explain their defection from traditional teaching on the absolute sanctity of human life–they’d at least have to stop calling themselves Catholic, which our confusion on doctrine allows them to do, or vote for life. For it is not their defection, but Vatican II’s first, that began our economic, political, moral, spiritual meltdown.

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre said it so much better, in They Have Uncrowned Him. You can get it here  along with other good Catholic books, or on Amazon.

History is going to overtake our discussion of abortion. It’s already begun, you can hear the distant bells.

South Korea’s Planned Parenthood has changed its name and its mission; no more abortions. Its leadership is aiming for a new pro-natalist program for the next five year plan (twenty five percent of all the time they have for the generation cohort entering the optimum fertility years now). It just has a few little hurdles to overcome, as Planned Parenthood’s president mentions: Korean women no longer want to marry, and find motherhood an imposition, just as they were taught, aggressively taught, in the last four five-year plans since South Korea got on the family planning bandwagon.

Planned Parenthood Korea–oops,sorry, Planned Population Federation–has no idea what to do about that latter little problem except throw money at it–which already didn’t work in Sweden or Germany or Italy or name a dozen more. Nor does Korea have the money to throw at it, since they waited too long to wake up and are already in the throes of an aging society being fed by too few younger workers. It’s too late. Maybe they’ll figure that out in the next five year plan, when the ticking time bomb will leave only ten years to really get it together with that cohort, that last, precious cohort. Go here for a link to an interview with Choi Seon-jeong that gives the details of their laughable new “plan.”

Or take China. China is ‘re-thinking’ its Gold Plan, the forced One-Child policy. They wagered they’d get rich before the implications caught up with them. Alas, no. China will become the first low-income country to have to deal with a rich country’s reproductive problems.

They now glimpse the danger. But like South Korea, it’s too slow, no go, bro. Thanks to human pride and a madness for planning, when party bosses recently introduced a small modification, changing the one-child to a two-child policy, they limited to only those cohorts they designated, principally only adult children from familial one-child households, rather than extending it to anyone who wished to have a second child, subject perhaps to ‘review’ of one type or another. But they misjedged, and wrote the law so that only these favored ones may “apply” for the “permit” to reproduce again; China is still penalizing anyone else who just wants to have another baby (with a one hundred thousand dollar equivalent fine), in spite of the fact that the authorities have had to resort to nudging the couples who actually fit the new criteria with mailings and media campaigns. Because these couples are, inexplicably, not functioning like spigots. They are declining to be turned on again. The authorities think this is quite curious, and promise they’ll debate the whole issue before 2011 when they come out with their new five year plan.

And yet at the end of the day they must sit looking at the numbers: In Shanghai, in 1979, when they began their great murderous project, there were seven workers for every retired person. Now there 1.6 and falling, and it’s the same all over China excepting a couple of pockets in the deep mountains. Their women are reproducing at the rate of just 0.88, lower even than the one child the Party “allowed.” The implications of that particular piece of data must cast long shadows in the evening meditation. Isn’t motherhood built in to women? Could we have killed it, too? And fewer women are available now, in the new generation–they were aborted at a much higher rate than boy babies. Another number: right now, more than 20 percent of Shanghai’s population is over 60, and it will be over 40% by 2050, and the rest of China is only slightly behind.

And yet the impending disaster has not sunk in enough to free them from their predictable desire to save face. They will never admit they were wrong. You’ve worked, you know how it goes with the bosses. They will take China to hell first.

China bought the big lie. (We all did.) And it worked, or it seemed to work, for a while, fewer mouths to feed meant more riches for all.

Now the pied piper must be paid, and we learn the lesson: You can’t plan a family! The concept was flawed from the beginning! You can plan barbeques, you can plan a piano lesson, but you can’t order up a boy baby for April 22, 2012, when you’ll have three of the credit cards paid down, and a girl baby three years later and she has to have blond hair and no gene predisposing for breast cancer. Or she gets aborted, booya.

No. You have to take the babies you get when you can get them. Something to do with love, which has something to do with sex. We ought to admit we don’t understand it. The only thing you can plan on in families is Planned Parenthood will make its billions. When babies get ‘planned,’ babies get aborted and women get played. And women learn to forget. This as it happens has not turned out to be a good thing.

Human reproduction is fragile, even more fragile than the other primates, who are amazingly skittish. You have to encourage ‘family’ with all your heart–and legislative power, and culture–and then pray on top of that. Because, here’s the truth, when we’re out of babies, we’re out of business, and women need real love to pull it off, not the secular orgy, the unrestricted party, we’ve been having since birth-control and abortion were substituted for love.

The economy does work like a ponzi scheme, and all we can do is take the next step and prepare to expand (we’re on our way, but we haven’t realized what the universe is offering us, if we only have a little faith). That, or die. Because staying at exactly zero population growth can only be done with severe and crude government control, as in China and its shameful forced abortions.

And then one little nuclear screw up, one little earthquake catastrophe, and the burner has to be turned up a notch–and then the bosses find we humans can’t or won’t. We humans don’t work that way. Love and dignity and desire and parenthood are real and biological and have their own laws. Sexual desire between men and women is precious and easily disengaged (witness not only Japan’s low birth rate but its low rate of intersexual intercourse, which condom manufacturers blame on pornography and masturbation). Women are only human, and motherhood is a real sacrifice. When we are taught and taught hard that career is everything, and motherhood (parenthood) is “bad” for the “Earth Goddess,” and even worse, it’s dumb. When we are subjected over and over, by every magazine and movie and subway ad, to gratuitous sexual stimulation to sell products, when real marriage is replaced by a dog-license as temporary as anyone likes, we human beings have to react somehow to this torture. We will stop reproducing just as other tortured creatures in zoos do. And we have. In country after country. All this “freedom” is killing us. Japan is only one.

We, in the US, with a hanging-on-barely-replacement level of births (and that thanks only to the Mexicans!) still have a chance, if we now, now, now take a position in favor of heterosexual marriage and against birth control of all forms except natural, meaning don’t have sex if you don’t want a child.

No abortion. And no porn. Then we might have a fighting chance to keep desire between men and women alive. It’s actually the plan we had, back in the day, before we let these false freedoms, these false entitlements, in the house. Nobody has a “right” to unfettered sexual activity untethered to reproduction and responsibility, and societies that survive know it.

Knowing what you know of human nature, do you think South Korea and China are going to use the next twenty years to completely repudiate and reverse their population control policies? Do you think an entire population can be re-taught to reproduce freely, after what it cost to teach them not to? Do you think we have a chance to do the same? Why, hell no. We have other things on the agenda that are more important. First we have to make gay marriage legal in all the states. We have to make abortion a national right backed up by the marines and paid for by the government. After that, maybe. After all, we have all the time in the world, and if it doesn’t turn out okay we’ll just forget to order birth control and force women to reproduce, as one space jockey on a colony website once suggested.

It’s official: the bizarro world of the novus ordo has declared that Barack Obama is ‘the spirit of Vatican II.’

All you sincere pro-life Catholics who passively attend and contribute to your local novus ordo parish while tolerating and even aiding through your peace sign and your donations their pro-choice politics, take heed.

All you good Catholics who believe that the government assuming the risk and giant monoopolies reaping the profits is shady, maybe fascist (or socialist, they’re all the same in the end), take heed.

Satan has almost got his unholy planetary alignment. Here it is:

Catholic magazine America ran a piece by Jesuit priest John O’Malley that proclaims Barack Obama “the Spirit of Vatican II.” You can find it right here.

If that doesn’t convince sincere novus ordo Catholics to throw themselves into the SSPX rosary crusade to be at the Holy Father’s side to clean house, what will? (You can send your rosary counts here, every month, as a comment, if you want to. I’m trying to average three rosaries per day–beat me, go ‘head!)

Father O’Malley is absolutely right. As the fifty comments proclaim, he’s nailed it! (Sorry, Lord.) Barack Obama is the spirit of Vatican II. And we need an exorcism.

“I really love that dress,” one handsome senior citizen comments to another as they sit, sorting baby clothes at the local crisis pregnancy center. “It looks so comfortable!” She herself could hardly have been dressed more comfortably, in grey sweats, but still she looked with admiration at her companion, as did the four other ladies sitting and working with them. They also were dressed in various degrees of informality– loose jeans, loose tee shirts, even a pair of pajama bottoms!

The woman in the dress stood and twirled around and said she’d made it. She called attention to the roomy pockets that peeked out of the inseams (bright green, contrasting nicely with the soft navy blue of the main dress fabric–a thoughtful touch you couldn’t buy, not cheap anyway). She called attention to the construction of the dress, the ‘disappearing princess seams’ that slimmed the bust and shoulders and, opening into graceful pleats, skimmed over the parts that needed skimmed over. That’s what made the dress as comfortable as sweats–in fact, even more comfortable, with nothing binding the waist. The sleeves, a forgiving three-quarter length hiding tattle-tale elbow aging and upper arm flab, were partially lined with the same green as the pockets, and revealed, upon inspection, tiny purple flowers around the interior edge which the woman explained had been an experiment with free-hand machine embroidery, and didn’t it work!? and wasn’t it easy! She had, in fact, aided by pattern-drafting software on the computer, designed from scratch and sewn the dress, and the clincher, the coup de grace in women’s fashion olympics, for less than fifteen dollars. It was so fun!

The other seniors sighed. They could not fathom anyone putting so much time into clothing when one could buy a serviceable pair of sweats for about the same, and save all that bother. Besides, where did they go to wear a dress?

If you think this is a tale of creativity versus capitulation, of energy versus sloth, you are only partly right. It is also a tale about religious faith. Five of the six ladies in the conversation are either liberal protestant or novus ordo Catholics–liberal Catholics. The woman in the dress is a traditional Catholic. Each these general groups of religious women follow a dress code, more or less consciously, that can be as different as the differences among dress-observant Muslim women, and just as intense. It’s just not talked about.

The novus ordo fashion statement is familiar, if seldom noted as ‘fashion’. Why would it be? One comes to church dressed in anything one wishes except a dress. One comes in jeans or shorts, ready to hit the beach or the trail immediately following mass. One comes in a halter top and combat boots–those are the fashionable ones! Most come in the same sweats or jeans they wore yesterday, and will wear tomorrow, as they declare themselves liberated of the whole fashion thing. Or either, just too tired, worked to death under the New Feminism. One of the two.

That’s the faithful in the novus ordo pews. If one is among the “extraordinary ministers” in the sacristy actually celebrating mass, one will be in tailored trousers and blazer–the ubiquitous Hillary Clinton look you can pay a little or a lot for and still look like hell. Consecrated women religious, if any, will likely be in the same outfit. Most will have severe uni-sex hair styles (“easy to care for” and ugly as sin). As far as dresses go, you can count them on one hand.

The thing is, unless they are covered by a tunic, pants unfortunately show it all, front and rear, and seem to require a contrary and perhaps balancing masculinization of the women wearers in terms of other fashion indicators, like make-up, hair couture or lack thereof, and shoe choice. In fact, most wear tennis shoes.

The woman in the dress goes to traditional mass. That’s the old Latin mass, retained in its fullness in outposts like the SSPX communities, or the incredibly rare tradition-minded novus ordo community, where you will find many instances of the old fashion ways. Traditionalists evidently believe that women should dress like women, men like men. There, to take just one example, women (even little girls), cover their heads. But you might think of it this way: they get to cover their heads.

The result is rich! In the pew in the traditional church, you’ll find a sweet little scarf tied gypsy style, two berets( one of silky cranberry cotton, one black velvet with a heartbreaking velvet rose); a generous mantilla with Our Lady of Guadalupe crocheted into the pattern, that falls in graceful folds around the fascinating, shaded face, a wool fedora with a peacock feather, and a cowboy hat. The traditionalist culture requires only that a hat be worn; the variety is natural talent, an expression of the freedom of Catholicism and the skill and heart of women. It is in no way puritan, or protestant. It is elegant and simple by turns. To wear a hat is required by custom, but the expression of the rule is up to the individual, so that the most creative and fashionable of women are actually given both an opportunity and a venue, and they rise to the occasion. You could never ever get away with it anywhere else, in today’s neutered basic-black workplace. A woman in a hat indoors might as well be an alien–except here, in tradition. Here she is safe.

So here, they wear dresses or skirts. Most of the dresses are home-made (since one cannot buy ‘everyday’ or even many ‘Sunday” dresses anymore, dresses being apparently confined to weddings and being as a result too dressy in fabric and cut to actually wear, to actually live in).They wear sleeves. Their culture asks them not only to dress this way for mass, but to dress so after mass as well, so that although they too come dressed for activities after mass, like the gals in the novus ordo, they will perform those activities in a dress or skirt. They only take off the head-covering; the modesty remains.

An interesting thing, the contrary thing, and perhaps it’s rude to say, is that there is clearly more ’sexual energy’ however subtly expressed among the traditionalists, simply because the girls look like girls, the women look like women, so femininity is on the loose, and free, unfettered femininity is beautiful, and sexual. You can see marriage and children in the future here. It’s in the air. It’s good to feel sure there will be a future with fertile human sexuality and children in it, that being no longer an option in most European nations now. That is why wise cultures retain some control over matters so seemingly simple as clothing. Womanhood has a power, a necessary power to encourage the sexual instinct. That is why it is so often imitated by faux women, the only ones in the larger culture encouraged to dress like women now. “Woman” has become a synonym for a dirty joke conflated by injected estrogens. Here in the traditional parish one finds more flirtatious dressing of an innocent but charming undertone.
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Whatever can be said of sexual energy between men and women to marry and reproduce, there are governments around the globe trying without success to revive it, now that they’ve spent roughly the last fifty years killing it with birth control and the enslavement of women in the labor market and pornography and solitary sexuality and easy divorce and all the sad, sick rest of it. But it lives here, and the proof is in those pretty frocks.

Of course, it’s not only dresses that express so much fashion. Shoes too are varied, to go with the dresses, strappy sandals with five inch heels, slim pumps, boots, and silver slippers. Sleeves! One will see among the traditional congregation fabulously ruched sleeves, and puff sleeves, and bells . . .and empire gowns (pronounced ‘um-peer’ in the vestibule where sewers have been known to trade tips) . . .and sweetheart necklines . . .and circle skirts draping dramatically and concealing everything that is better concealed . . .and graceful skirts in gores . . .summer wools and winter wools and rayons and knits and silks and velvets and prints and solids and pinafores on little girls and hats with flowers and veils . . . . They are almost of another species altogether–the feminine species. The Princess species. This is because their adopted mother, Mary, Mother of the Savior, is a Queen. (You may bet her statue will be close by, with a trendy yet modest cloak of stars.)

One cannot help but draw a surprising conclusion. The women kneeling in the traditional Catholic church in September in 2009 are not only more liturgically reverent than their novus ordo counterparts, they are just more fashionable! It is just about enough for a woman on the fence about liturgy but yearning for a place to wear an ordinary dress, to make the switch! It’s a woman thing.

And the phenomenon isn’t reserved for well-to-do traditional parishes in the US. Make the effort to find the traditional parish in Guadalajara, Mexico, and you will see the same fashion expression among women who are by no means financially middle class. They dress up for mass, each family to the best of their ability. They never wear trousers, and they cover their hair in the presence of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. Their community insists on this observance, but the women obey with joy and spirit. Scraps of left-over cloth can become a pretty skirt with ‘handkerchief hemline’ (so-called, it has little points all around), a few ribbons transform a little square of lace into a girl’s dainty headdress. The old Mexican fabric skills are passed on here: stitched pin-tucks of a full skirt and daisies hand-painted on a peasant blouse. Their counterparts across town, mind you, in a novus ordo parish, will have on the same tee shirts and jeans as children at mass in, say, Oakland or Chicago or Hong Kong–oh wait, there are no children in Hong Kong, since the citizens there learned how to ‘plan the family.’ But the point stands. It is no longer the location on a globe; it is the faith. And it’s a happy faith indeed that encourages women to dress like women without paranoia over their resulting beauty. Their modesty, not protestant at all, but Catholic to the core and hence liberal in the only nice sense of the term, clearly differs from the burqa solution, and it certainly lacks the twin perversions of secular humanism, unisex or its evil other head, naked pornography. This Christian fashion option known now only in traditional communities may be, to fashion-frustrated women, as persuasive of the deleterious role of Vatican II as the definitive text Iota Unum. Persuasive of the truth of the traditionalists’ goal, to return the Church to its identity. This fashion is apostolic. Down with the pants suit and the burqa both. Let’s wear skirts! Consider yourself invited, sister.

The July 13 edition of NPR’s Talk of the Nation almost asked one of health care reform’s most important questions: Are patients at least part of the problem in the explosion of health care costs?

Unfortunately, the show left the question unanswered.

Lynn Neary knew what she didn’t want, but not what she wanted. She didn’t want, and kept interrupting, guest Dr. Pauline Chen, New York Times house doc, who wasn’t delivering anything but double speak about ‘better communication’ being the preferred treatment for all ills.

The show had some powerful callers, all with different takes on the US health care experience. One savvy veteran teacher of ‘the working poor’ told of her efforts over time to help the families of her students get care, how they always ended up going to an expensive emergency room because all the free clinics had been closed or profitized, and wouldn’t see them without a credit card to run.

Another caller commented that his wife’s pregnancy care had included ‘far too many tests, because they would have continued the pregnancy exactly as they had anyway.’ His wife’s care, apparently, included lots of compulsory tests for fetal abnormality so that they could abort a potentially handicapped child, raising a different but equally compelling and thoroughly ominous subset of questions about health care reform.

The show did not, however, deliver any clues to the original question, are patients somehow driving up health care cost to levels being characterized as catastrophic, and even more pointedly, if the government underwrites care for those who do not have insurance and who are running up the tab so explosively, how will we possibly afford it, no matter how the bill is split? The show didn’t go there.

But here’s where Neary could have taken it. Besides wanting ‘the best’ care for ourselves and our loved ones, causing us to demand treatment and tests we might not need (the one on-topic observation of the program’s original question, which Lynn Neary herself finally had to generate) some patients’ behaviors are causing their own health problems, and here is what they are: gluttony and lust, those two behaviors of the seven known as the deadly sins. These two in particular are costing us big time and, added to the expense of an aging population, it could beggar us. If the government contractually obligates us to pay, it could be a long, slow death. Don’t throw up ‘well Europe does it,’ because Europe doesn’t have the number of sinners we here in the US have enabled in the past forty years. We are the whole world’s fattest, sluttiest sinners and we have super-sized our health care costs so that nobody can afford to pay for it, whether the government picks up the tab, or the bill is paid piece-meal as it is now, through higher insurance costs, state government payments, or charity.

True, the reform effort was sparked by the explosion of costs as presently funded. But shifting the payer will not substantially change either the treatment or the cost of expensive, self-induced illnesses, even if one layer of bureaucracy goes away. In mid-July, Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf warned that the Democrats’ health care bills won’t meet President Barack Obama’s goal of slowing the ruinous rise of medical costs. He stressed that the numbers show that all health care proposals would raise costs, not lower them.
Elmendorf said, “In the legislation that has been reported, we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount. And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs.”

To slow that scary ‘trajectory of federal health,’ NPR should have invited a traditional Catholic priest to Neary’s show. Gluttony and lust are treated by both doctors and priests. But we won’t go there. We banished sin back in the sixties. We declared all of ourselves officially innocent victims. The most we do now is make ‘bad decisions,’ and we look not to the practice of virtue but to medical magic to fix it: the abortions, the statins, the stomach staples, and the auto-immunune suppressants that cost more than a new Buick.

That we ourselves might have taken a wrong turn or two, that the power to ‘fix it’ lies in honoring the design of the body through individual restraint and personal sacrifice, that we are responsible for our illnesses when we ignore our nature, is simply out of the question. It never came up at all July 13 on NPR.

The fact is, we are now a nation of the fat and the f*****.

In our world, the whole conversation of “Mary Sue, you eat too much. You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” has to be left to the doctor, because at school, from the pulpit, and on the playground, that’s hate speech. No one should feel shame, ever! No one overeats. Everyone knows, fat people are special! Let’s staple their stomachs shut! That’ll fix it!

Or if we are forced to admit that obese people do overeat, they just ‘need more communication-education’ (ala Dr. Chen) on ‘how the molecules of glucose pass through the lower intestine into the blood stream, causing the pancreas to overproduce insulin, but yours is broken, so you have to take these pills that cost a hundred dollars per. See?’ The patient must be educated enough to deduce he’s supposed to uh, limit those molecules of glucose passing into the bloodstream.

And, get real, no doctor’s going to even try to do the job alone, with no backup from the other various community resources, from the church, the classroom, the evening news. Even if that is what he should tell them. Even if it’s the truth. We wouldn’t be the first culture where the truth wasn’t even whispered aloud.

Imagine a doctor using his fifteen minutes to teach his young patients, ‘The surest way to avoid sexual diseases is to postpone all sexual relations until you meet one very special person of the opposite sex, and then limit your sexual activity to that person for the rest of your life. That’s called marriage. Have all the kids that come with the sexual activity. Only use natural family planning. Because the research shows, all contraceptive barriers, whether chemical or physical, fail. They are expensive. The body fights them and most typically uterine or breast cancer and sterility are the result, and that’s even more expensive. So just wait until you are married.’

That is what he should tell them. If he is true to the data streams converging now on breast cancer, diabetes, AIDS, heart disease, and other lifestyle induced illnesses.

But don’t hold your breath. We will, short of divine intervention, and we shouldn’t rule it out, continue to fail to address how the patients are sometimes the too-expensive problem that will cost us rational, reasonable national health care, again. Because, how can a reform plan pass? They will sit there going, ‘we can’t afford health care reform,’ which is true, and the other side saying, ‘we can’t afford to pay for it the way we’re paying for it now,’ which is true, and both sides will have turned as pale as ghosts as they realize the enormity of what we have wrought in the past forty years. Out of which there is no affordable way. Except to say the party’s over.

Or maybe this time, fueled by Obamamania, we will risk everything, and ‘go for it’–and fail, as Massachusetts just did. Then the system as we know it will break down completely, which for the poor means even the emergency rooms will close to them. We’ll be bringing our own linens and pillow and toilet paper with us to the hospital, as they do in Mexico’s public health system.

Let’s be specific. Here’s some pricey items from the party menu, not the complete list:

• From the 4/1/2006 issue of the Chicago Journal of Infectious Diseases: annual expenditures for 635 HIV-Infected Patients ranged from 13,885 for those with CD4+ in the moderate range [not very sick] cell counts to $36,533 per patient in those with more severe infections.

• A study presented at the Third International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Pathogenesis and Treatment estimates that of the annual 40,000 newly infected US adults who begin antiretroviral treatment when their CD4-cell counts drop below 350 cells can be expected to live 24.1 years and will run up a medical tab of between $405,000 per person in total drug costs just for their HIV infection, with drug discounts, to as high as $648,000 without them.

The same article said that the 40,000 people newly infected with HIV each year in the United States will require about $12.8 billion in medical care.

• New York City has been so swamped by new AIDS cases that as early as 1995 they gave up their attempts to provide health and social services and are passing the care on to ‘community providers,’ a solution that will not be open to the federal government when the proposed health care reform contractually obligates all taxpayers to the astronomically expensive care of HIV infected men who have sex with men, the category where the infections continue to grow ‘for complex reasons,’ according to government statistics, in spite of wide-spread education and free condoms. This category, coyly known as MSM, accounts for the majority of increases in HIV.

• Europe’s public health systems, usually seen as the model for those advocating singer-payer health care reform (the next model we will have to adopt when the ‘public option’ plan we are being presented proves unable to deal with the contractual obligations the government would assume) are not dealing with these kinds of numbers or rate of infection. Western European countries had 17,355 new cases in 2007, compared to the 40,000 new cases every year in the US. Their rate of obesity is similarly smaller. According to World Health statistics, 74% of the American public is overweight. Compare that to Poland’s 47% or France’s 40%.

• The Center for Disease control reported that in 2000 obesity cost us $117 billion—$61 billion for direct medical costs and $56 billion for indirect costs.

• On July 28, the networks were reporting 147 billion of costs indirectly related to obesity. The Center for Disease Control reported that obesity increases the cost of care for a patient by an average of 42%.

• Bariatric surgery cost the US $948 million dollars in 2002 and if following the trend from previous years, this figure is expected to grow 400% each year. Insurance, meaning everyone, paid for 97% of the surgeries, as well as the $18,000 yearly maintenance costs per patient.

• Breast cancer, at epidemic levels in the US and stemming largely from controllable factors like abortion, followed by hormone replacement therapy, chemical contraceptives, chemical abortifacts, failure to conceive children and failure to nurse children, costs the US 3.8 billion per year. Statistics reported in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology admit that abortion is the single best predictor of breast cancer.

We can afford broken arms. We can afford innoculations. What we cannot afford are the injections and hospitalizations for self-induced diabetis in record-breaking numbers. We can afford the simple pre-natal care of a woman who does not have multiple STD’s and consequent complicating conditions, but treating the infertility of that other ’sexually liberated’ woman with severe uterine scarring from her last abortion is pushing it. We can afford handicapped children (we cannot afford not to have handicapped children–or do we not realize what handicapped children give to their families and indeed to the civilization to which they are born?). We can afford to treat the health problems of a virtuous population, including its handicapped members. What we cannot afford is sin. What we cannot afford is silence in the face of sin. As the Budget Office lectured, we need fundamental change, Barack!

The kind of real change that virtue produces, of which sin is the opposite. We must humble ourselves and call it sin. Our society must help us in repenting of it by calling it what it is. Not “mistake.” Not “wrong decision-making,” as if it were a boardroom. They must shame us about our sexual practices. (Yes, honeys, we must go there.) Our communities must demand more responsible behavior of us, especially at the table and in the bedroom, and then health care reform is possible. All these efforts presently underweigh are simply magicians’ slight of hand to shift the financial burden upward.

Want universal coverage? Bring back virtue.

In the astonishingly frank interview linked here, the head of Korean Planned Parenthood , Mr. Choi Seon-jeony, details the depth of Korea’s depopulation crisis and the transformation it has wreaked upon Planned Parenthood itself. Go read it, but if you don’t have time, below you will find a short summary. The reader may notice inconsistencies in the summary; they are present in the original.

Here is a summary of Mr. Choi Seon-jeony’s words: In the 1960’s the Korean government, through Planned Parenthood of Korea, began to implement the one child per family policy, as ‘economic development.’ Now Korea has the lowest birth rate and the fastest aging rate in the world. Population growth will reach 0% in 2019 but will continue to fall and turn into negative growth. The working age population will begin to fall in 2019. At the same time, the aging of workers will sharply increase.

Sometimes family planning means to reduce the number of children born, and sometimes to reduce the number could be inappropriate. When there are too few children, to bear and raise more children will contribute to our happiness, and so family planning will be changed accordingly. That is why we changed our name. We are no longer the Family Planning Association. We are now the Planned Population Federation. We will promote child-bearing and child-rearing, make efforts to prevent abortion, and cooperate with religious circles.

* * *

So Planned Parenthood Korea took out the Planning, and added some Praying? Well, we have lived to see the day! About time!

Unfortunately for Korea, Mr. Choi’s economic plan is as naive as one might expect from a person with a background in public relations. Sweden tried all the inducements mentioned, and the jury is out, because the country has rebounded to 2.1, but only due to the birthrate of immigrants, a feature shared with the United States. Discounting Muslim immigration, the Swede birthrate is 1.6, unchanged from before all the natalist policy initiatives, like 115% of pay for fifteen months for each child.

And an economist might know, if Mr. Choi does not, that inducements like flexible hours must be paid for, and that, without a fall in profits, means either more production or higher productivity, but either option during a period of falling labor force is, simply put, impossible. When Japan tried it, roboticizing to a degree since imitated in the US, the last word on the street was that they had even put the cats to work, to no effect.

Mr. Choi is in for a few unpleasant surprises in those ‘religious circles,’ too! He will find some other ideas, not just stopping abortion, that co-incidentally and necessarily go along with a high, healthy birth rate. He will find Korea must cleave to a traditional definition of marriage that specifies reproduction as its purpose, not mutual pleasure. Not benefits. Not even companionship. Babies.

This rules out gay marriage. It rules out easy divorce, because women reproduce the best in stable relationships. Masturbation and porn would go back in the shadows, since it was found, by none other than condom manufacturers, that these are factors in Japan’s national failure to engage in intercourse.

If Planned Parenthood thinks all it has to do is change its name, clearly, they’d best think again. Their data apparently shows that Korean women got it. They learned to value a career over marriage, to defer marriage, to get that education first, to get that career.

They learned not to want marriage. Oh, a ‘relationship’ is okay, but no thanks to marriage and that children thing. Most of all, like their counterparts from Manhattan to Hong Kong, they learned to live to shop.

They had to be carefully taught. There had to be poster contests and popular songs, back in those early days of the one child per family push. Every guidance office in the country had to have a a twenty-four by thirty-six right by the door: What do you call a pregnant teenager? Stupid. Planned Parenthood supplies them around the world, by the thousands, in all languages, of course, with all kinds of girls looking stupid, and embarrassed, and pregnant. The horror!

Mr. Choi does not seem to appreciate the difficulty of the task. He appears not to understand that it’s easy to promote sin, in this case easy sex, and hard to promote virtue, in this case reproductive sex followed by high-quality parenting in the peaceful home of a companionate marriage, and, speaking just for the West where Planned Parenthood is about due to wake up any minute now–it took two thousand years for the Church to build a culture where that kind of love and marriage had even a prayer of a chance in just enough homes to produce the high quality workers and creators and inventors that built the west.

Only a couple of generations under Planned Parenthood’s tutelage to wreck it.

Mr. Choi has no appreciation of the situation he’s in. Oh, he knows he’s got a cohort of twenty to thirty year olds who have to reproduce. If they don’t have a child now, they won’t have a second child. Korea’s survival is in the second and third child. If they wait until they’re thirty to have that first child, Mr. Choi already knows, there’ll be no second. And the clock is ticking. And if he misses it with this cohort, Korea’s population will be cut in half, as if overnight. And the other half a decade older! One generation to go, until it all topples over. Mr. Choi figures he’ll learn what to say hanging out in those confounded ‘religious circles.

The thing is, the first cohort, they’re not even listening to Mr. Choi. They’re on the cellie with the old Planned Parenthood.

Teachers know this stuff, Mr. Choi does not. It is very hard to rehabilitate what you have made taboo. There are sociologists who say it’s impossible. It’s very hard to unteach a girl who swears that she would ‘rather die than have a baby,’ the attitude they whipped up to legalize abortion. (Cf: see comment section here )

No society on earth ever recovered from a birth rate lower than 1.5, as best historical evidence can piece it out, when disease or disaster wiped out fertility in other epochs. It is debatable (see the link above, especially the comment section), whether the best efforts the world from one of the richest countries in the world, have resulted in a higher birth rate in Sweden, since at the same time, they facilitated mass immigration, and refuse to tease out the impact of the much higher birth rates of their immigrants (which will disappear in one generation as they, too, see the poster in the guidance office). Sweden got itself back to bare reproduction of the population, to 2.1, but anecdotal evidence suggests it’s probably not Swedish girls doing the reproducing, and thus it has not been proven that Planned Parenthood’s oopsy can actually be reversed, in any population. In time, that is. The world can go to hell in two generations if we refuse to reproduce.

There’s never been such a catastrophe specifically risked by a few fools’ version of choice, before.

It took all the pride and lust that we could muster.

The most sacred word in America’s liberal fascist style sheet is the word choice. Uttered unceasingly by President Obama, it annihilates dissent against his party’s relentless pro-abortion policies. But now that holy concept is under attack, from a surprising source. France is trying to take away Muslim women’s choice to wear a veil in public, arguing persuasively that ‘choice’ can be an illusion.

Sidewalk counselors, those people who stand outside abortion mills trying to dissuade women from entering with various resources, have been questioning the choice in pro-choice for a long time. Of the couples going to the mills, too many of the women entering appear to be reluctant to go through the door. They don’t appear normal. They often appear drugged or drunk. Sometimes, too often, they are literally drug in by a boyfriend or a parent.

It’s easy to read the body language. The girl’s eyes will be enormous with fear, or glazed. Her steps will be slow. The Boyfriend, however, will be hurrying along, muttering about being ‘late.’ His arm will be around her neck, it looks so much like an embrace; but it’s actually nudging her along. Approached, he will put himself between her and the sidewalk counselor, as if protecting her, but she will lean forward to hear around him, and it’s plain to see she would stop now for anyone, she’s clearly terrified. But he barks. He barks at the sidewalk counselor, some profanity, and, Get away! But the girl knows at whom the profanity is directed, and she complies completely. She drops her head, she gives up hope. She enters.

It’s the same with the other most frequent grouping, the whole family scene. A girl will be in the center of a small determined group of older women, a mom, an aunt, sometimes a grandmother. She looks the least determined of the lot, but she’s being swept along, and who’s choice it really is could not be more apparent.

Where family is concerned, ” choice” needs something to back it up, or it’s a pretty empty concept.

And now French feminists are saying the same thing: Muslim women are being subtly forced by their culture and their families to enclose themselves in the burqa, and France should pass a law that makes wearing one illegal.

It would be possible to have such a law, proponents say, without strict enforcement, a law ‘on the books’ but without teeth or militia. Merely having the law would suffice, however, because its mere existence “will allow women to use the ban as an excuse to shed garments they don’t want to wear, but were wearing under family pressure.”

That’s exactly what pro-lifers argue for: a ban on abortion, a rollback of Roe v Wade (especially since the Roe has repudiated her abortion that caused the legalization of abortion forty years ago). That would give women an excuse, a useful pretext: ‘I can’t do that honey, it’s illegal! Don’t even go there!’

But aren’t women already free under French law to veil themselves or not? Do not most people admit that women wear the burka and hijab voluntarily? Not at all. Proponents for the new law argue that even though it appears that women wear the veil voluntarily, it’s an illusion. They say,

“’Force’ and ‘compulsion’ can and are achieved all the time without the use of force. It’s SO common. Women will give in to something as trivial as covering up – even if they really, really don’t want to – just to keep the peace…. Families – families who love you and want what’s best for you, and whom you don’t want to hurt – can make you do almost anything.” Don’t pro-lifers see the truth of that, every busy Saturday at the mill.

Another correspondent writes, “Is the choice to cover oneself up really free if that choice is being made by someone who has undergone a lifetime of indoctrination with the message that this is the only proper way for a woman to dress? If a man tells his wife, ‘you’re free to decide whether or not you want to wear the burka, but only immodest women and bad wives choose to expose themselves.’ then that is no longer considered a choice; it’s considered social pressure and coercion.”

Just consider if those words were being applied to abortion: is it a real choice to kill one’s own child if it is being made by someone who has been taught since first grade that unplanned babies are tragedies? Because that’s what little girls are regularly taught. Just a couple of months ago, US little girls were taught by their beloved president that babies are a punishment for a mistake, and abortion fixes it. He was only repeating what they hear ad nauseum at school from teachers, guidance counselors, and school nurses.

They’re so busted: France’s Sarkozy pretends to champion the rights of women and insists that they need a law forbidding the burqa to give them an actual choice in place of their faux choice, and Obama pretends to champion the rights of women and denies they need a law forbidding abortion that will give them an actual choice instead of faux choice. Neither one cares about the women and both care very much about their political profiles.

Of course, the two situations are unequal. The cancellation of faux choice in the matter of what not to wear would affect about a hundred Muslim women residing in France and cost them the right to clothe themselves in a burqa. They could still achieve their ends, if they so wish, by dressing modestly in the options available to Christian women, which are many. The cancellation of faux choice in the matter of abortion would give about a million and a half human babies every year a chance to see the light of day. Instead of the hot flash of cold steel, the last thing they’ll ever feel.

Those who are truly pro-choice for women (and not merely human-hating anti-natalists who take every pretext to limit and end human life on the planet) will support the efforts of Italy’s Rocco Buttliglione in promoting a UN ban on forced abortions by the diabolical ploy of offering bread in exchange for the termination of a fetus’ life.

Ever gone through a checkpoint carrying some little something illegal? You’ll appreciate Al’s problem: he’s got those little pills and an unconscious priest! More tales of the Church in space. See parts one through six in other posts. And do me a favor? Comment on whether the checkpoint seems sufficiently authentic.

“Stay away from the bad angels!” Father Tim woke up and swung toward Al.

“Who are the bad angels?” Al said to him, and peered over the irregular lines to see how far they had to go yet.

“You have to listen,” Father said after a pause.

“What? Are they singing or something?” Al said absently, watching the youngest guard at the checkpoint, who evidently would be their guard. Too hot on the job, Al thought bitterly. Damn!

“No. Not singing,” Tim sing-songed himself. “God is talking to you. You-have-to-listen,” Father explained, as if giving Al a formula. “God will tell you all the bad angels. But we aren’t listen-ing.”

Al dropped a duffle, and then, retrieving it, managed to slip sideways into a throng that would end up at a different check point guard, a blond woman who Al was hoping could be managed.

They reached the scanwall. The blond held out her hand. Papers.

“Here’s mine,” Al said. “I’ve got my friend here’s, too. He uh he had a couple too many. Guess he’s not real experienced.” Al grinned his best grin and looked at her dead on but only for a second. “Tell me when you want his.” Then he shut up to see if she’d buy it. She hesitated.

“How do you know this guy?” she asked. “Did he ask you to take him across if he got drunk? Did he give you anything to hold?”

“No, no. I just picked up his duffle. He just had a few too many, is all. We were sitting next to each other in one of the bars. The Launch Pad, I think is it. You know it? He’s a priest! See, his collar and all. I’m an engineer. You see on my papers there. ” Al was struck by the feeling that they were the two least valuable members in an otherwise elite bunch: a God-monger and a drainage expert. This could work either way for them. He hazarded a peek at her face. Jeez! An iron maiden! He’d hate to play poker with her! She glanced down at his papers. That’s good. Now, she’d either ask for Father’s, or pull them over for a full search, or reject either or both of them on medical grounds, or the priest for not being able to respond to questions.

“And his papers?” she said and held out her hand. Whew! Al fished them out, put them in her hand.

“Sir? Sir?” she said to the priest. Al shook him a little. “Sir?” The priest stirred, and raised his head. He look straight at her—and smiled.

“Is she one of the good angels?” Father said. “Are you one of the good angels? ” he asked her.

She ignored the question. “Are you Timoteo Monaghan?” she asked.

“Yes, I am,” Father managed to look both lucid and silly. “Are we going to the shuttle? I’m ready,” he said. “You’re a good angel,” he finished, and gave her a final dazzling smile, and went back to sleep on Al’s shoulder.

Al looked at her and tightened just one side of his mouth into a lop-sided grin. Be that angel, he said in his heart. She hesitated just a moment longer, and jerked her head sideways. “Walk the wall,” she said, and strolled down it with them, checking the x-ray. Al tried not to think about the pills in his pocket. There was a lot to see in a short time. She might miss them. She might decide to miss them. Pills were not plastiques. They were a different sin. Maybe she had her own stash. Maybe she could care less for a bunch of privileged assholes earth will never see again, go ahead, kill yourselves, that might be her deal. Al held his breath.

She hesitated, and Al’s heart pounded. This be the moment to step in and give a little push, Al said to God, if you’re listening and haven’t made up Your Royal Mind yet ha ha which is highly doubtful, and why would You care anyway for a couple of losers? Then she simply handed him the papers, and turned back to the next evacuee. And that wasn’t God, Al snorted. No way. That was just picking your battles when you’re processing a couple thousand people. All in a day’s work, Al thought, all in a day’s work, and started shuffling them toward the shuttle doors far ahead. And now here comes my turn to work, he thought, thinking about what would happen when the young priest awoke in a claustrophobic nightmare.