Partial Birth Abortion

(Illustration demonstrating the implementation of progressive pagan inalienable right )

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The [US] Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a law that banned a type of late-term abortion, a ruling that could portend enormous social, legal and political implications for the divisive issue.

The sharply divided 5-4 ruling could prove historic. It sends a possible signal of the court's willingness, under Chief Justice John Roberts, to someday revisit the basic right to abortion guaranteed in the 1973 Roe v. Wade case.

Hilary Clinton

This decision marks a dramatic departure from four decades of Supreme Court rulings that upheld a woman's right to choose and recognized the importance of women's health. Today's decision blatantly defies the Court's recent decision in 2000 striking down a state partial-birth abortion law because of its failure to provide an exception for the health of the mother. As the Supreme Court recognized in Roe v. Wade in 1973, this issue is complex and highly personal; the rights and lives of women must be taken into account.

It is precisely this erosion of our constitutional rights that I warned against when I opposed the nominations of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito.

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Ah yes. That famous unwritten constitutional right to infanticide.
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Barack Obama

I strongly disagree with today's Supreme Court ruling, which dramatically departs from previous precedents safeguarding the health of pregnant women. As Justice Ginsburg emphasized in her dissenting opinion, this ruling signals an alarming willingness on the part of the conservative majority to disregard its prior rulings respecting a woman's medical concerns and the very personal decisions between a doctor and patient.

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The court giveth by arbitrary rulings and the court taketh away....... or ..... ya can't have it both ways ......

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Democrat John Edwards

I could not disagree more strongly with today's Supreme Court decision. The ban upheld by the Court is an ill-considered and sweeping prohibition that does not even take account for serious threats to the health of individual women. This hard right turn is a stark reminder of why Democrats cannot afford to lose the 2008 election. Too much is at stake - starting with, as the Court made all too clear today, a woman's right to choose.

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Another "having cake and eating it too" guy.
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All Democrats of the progressive left. All vying to become the next president of the United States. All standing foursquare against the first civil right, without which all human rights are rendered moot.

Easter Sadness

(Canada in Mourning - statue on the Vimy Memorial)

It is Easter Sunday. It is a day when Christians around the world rejoice that Christ is risen. But our joy this Easter is tempered by the news from Afghanistan that seven have fallen. Six Canadian soldiers, and in a separate attack one American soldier, were killed today in Afghanistan by an explosive device placed by someone who follows the Koran.

It is often said, by the superficial among us, that religion kills more people than anything else. That is not true, as the mass murders of 20th century pagan Nazis and athiestic Marxists-Leninists and Maoists attest. But I grant superficial readers their premise that many wars have religion at the root of the conflict, for the simple reason that religious convictions are among the deepest convictions we humans possess.

I don't know what the religious beliefs the slain soldiers had. I know what religion motivated their killers. The latter is not one I choose to emulate.

These words of Pericles are a most fitting tribute for today's fallen warriors.

Each has won a glorious grave - not that sepulchre of earth wherein they lie, but the living tomb of everlasting remembrance wherein their glory is enshrined. For the whole earth is the sepulchre of heroes. Monuments may rise and tablets be set up to them in their own land, but on far-off shores there is an abiding memorial that no pen or chisel has traced; it is graven not on stone or brass, but on the living hearts of humanity.

Take these men for your example. Like them, remember that prosperity can be only for the free, that freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it.

Amen.

Were you there when they crucified my Lord??

(www.gloriadeichurch.org)




Today is Palm Sunday. I suspect that many of today's youth have no idea what this means, or what historical drama is being played out. I can tell you younguns confidentially that it is not a marketing campaign day for a certain electronic hand held device. Pass it on.

Palm Sunday commemerates the triumphant entry into Jerusalem of one Jesus of Nazareth - a man who on that day was so revered that the crowd spontaneously tore palm leaves from trees and spread them in his path. He was conveyed into the city on a donkey, and by the end of that week - what we now call Holy Week - he was set upon by a much lesser breed of asses and summarily put to death on a cross by the Roman procurator of the day. The procurator, Pontius Pilot, sentenced him to death even though he admitted that he found no fault in Jesus. Don't be too hard on Pilot. He is the merely the forerunner of so many Catholic politicians of today. "I think putting an inncocent man to death is wrong, but if the majority are in favour of it, hey, ..... I can't let my personal beliefs get in the way of the will of the people .........

Today, everywhere thoughout the world, Catholics, including many Catholic politicians of the ilk above, gather to celebrate mass - part of which always involves a number of readings from scripture. Palm Sunday begins the most solemn, dreadful and inspiring of weeks in the liturgical calendar. The readings this week are much longer than usual as the Passion of our Lord is read out - from the garden of Gesthemene, where Jesus knelt, prayed and suffered so greatly that scripture tells us His sweat fell as blood on the ground - through His arrest, trial, beatings, crucifixion. Towards the end, Jesus in indescribable agony utters the words, "It is consummated" bows His head and (in the words of the old Douay Rheims version of the bible) "He gave up the ghost."

Along the way his disciple Judas betrays him, his disciple Peter (the first Pope) denies him three times, and all but one of the other ten (the first college of bishops) flee in fear and confusion. Of the disciples only Saint John, stood beneath Jesus cross to see his master writhe in pain. The solemn (and to my eight year old son - interminable) readings in Holy Week end with Jesus being laid in a freshly hewn tomb donated by a just member of the Jewish Sanhedrin, a fellow known to history as Joseph of Arimethia.

Holy Week is a time of great solemnity and reflection. It is a time when God teaches us through example what it is to love unconditionally, totally and eternally. Greater love hath no man than that of God who gives up his life for his creatures ..... you and me.

The extraordinary ending of this tale is not read in churches until next Sunday on Easter Day, when Christians around the globe cry out those great words of our faith that have rolled down the ages from then until now, "He is risen!"

But this is the beginning, not the end, of Holy Week.