Pope Benedict XVI Blog

Birther or Deather--which would you rather be?

Today on his blog, Loyal to Liberty, Alan Keyes, foregoing his usual political subjects, presents a thoughtful meditation directed toward fellow believers:

Saturday, August 22, 2009

A Meditation Especially for Fellow Christians (and those willing to think so.)

Much of my thought and writing in recent days has, not surprisingly, focused on the events and issues involved in the current battle over the national, socialist takeover of the health care sector being engineered by the Obama faction. Though a discussion of health should focus on how best to strengthen and preserve life, I am struck by the deep preoccupation with killing and death the Obama faction's proposals have forced upon us.

For all his hollow rhetoric of hope and compassion, the inescapable essence of Obama's actions reveals that killing and death are the foundation stones of his political vision. To reduce health care costs he proposes to establish institutions and practices that pressure the elderly and infirm toward self-abnegation and self-harvesting. To advance his political ambition he promotes as rightful action the killing of innocent children in the earliest stages of life. To gratify the demands of the licentious elite that has made him their idol of self-worship, he works to clear the way for those who seek to legitimize an understanding of human sexuality that encourages individuals to turn away from the responsibilities of natural procreation. Thus he extends the shadow of death through self-extinction to the whole human race.

Pope John Paul the Great roused Christians to recognize and reject the culture of death. Today there can be no doubt that Barack Obama is its great High Priest. The platform of the Presidency offers him unparalleled opportunities to promote it, and to draw the American people ever deeper into complicity with its rejection of the Creator's authority and intention. Ironically, those who demand an investigation into the inadequate credentials Obama has offered as proof of his Constitutional eligibility to wield the power of the Presidency, have been derided as 'birthers' by detractors who openly or covertly adhere to the cult of death he represents.

Though intended for derision, the term may aptly apply to people like me. After all, we fight to vindicate the right of birth for every child conceived in the mind of the Creator, God. We fight to preserve society's obligation by law to respect the natural family that is the first belonging and birthright of every human being. We fight to defend respect for the understanding of right and justice that requires all legitimate government to secure the unalienable rights inherent in the Creator's conception of our humanity.

Why do the deriders think we should cringe and be ashamed when they call us by an epithet that brings to mind our faithful allegiance to the truths upheld in America's great Declaration of Independence? I would rather be an advocate of life and birth, than a cultist of child murder and self-inflicted death. I would rather be held up for ridicule as a 'birther' than identified with the 'deathers' who idolize Obama at the expense of truth and reason, offering themselves as the vanguard of the future of tyranny and human self-immolation he represents.

The term 'deather' is not original with me, of course. I have seen or heard it elsewhere. But I am more and more taken with the aptness of the term. The specter and promotion of death lurks somewhere in every element of the Obama faction's agenda. I remember in particular the pro-abortion women who were demonstrating at Notre Dame. They sought to drown out the words and witness of people gathered to decry the homage being done to the idol of death by university administrators falsely identifying themselves with faith in the Tree of Life that is Jesus Christ. "Without abortion rights, women cannot be free," they chanted. This mantra truly epitomizes the principle Obama means to substitute for the self-evident truths on which America bases its understanding of freedom, beginning with the unalienable right to life. It clearly outlines the real import of the choice Americans face.

Which are we: a people that defines its freedom in terms of our obligation to respect the right to life, and the natural responsibility for procreation and self-government it entails; or a people that defines its freedom in terms of the right to murder our offspring, thereby rejecting the natural obligation of parents to love and care for their children and of children to respect and care for the lives of their aging parents?

Are we 'birthers' looking before and after to the origin of life in God's goodwill; or 'deathers' who assault the living image of God that represents His goodwill toward our humanity, so as to revel momentarily in the false similitude with God that appears seductively (to us as to Eve, the mother of us all) in the choice to transgress its provisions?

Deathers shall be delivered ( first in the throes of seeming pleasure and proud self-approval, but then forever grieving) from the body of this death to the inconsolable similitude of dying without end. Who cares to join them, while the Tree of Life still beckons, while Christ is standing nigh? I pray God it is not you or I.

posted by Dr. Denice Hanley, DPM, M.Div. @ 11:47 PM