1. “Chemical Abortion Drugs Aren’t Safe: Here’s Why“
After Alliance Defending Freedom announced a first-of-its-kind lawsuit challenging the FDA’s approval of chemical abortion drugs, many in the establishment media panicked.
In the months that have followed, the public has been inundated with claims about how safe these drugs are. We’re routinely told that chemical abortion drugs are safer than Tylenol, that side effects of the drugs are exaggerated, and that serious complications almost never occur.
These claims are categorically false. Chemical abortion drugs are dangerous, and claims to the contrary are not supported by the evidence. (Most of the research presented below comes from the Charlotte Lozier Institute, which filed an amicus brief in ADF’s lawsuit against the FDA.)
2. Matt Vallière: “State laws legalizing assisted suicide violate the Americans with Disabilities Act”
3. Becket: “Supreme Court protects religious business owner speech“
4. Cardinal Timothy Dolan: “Stand up for religious freedom — or surrender your rights to the government“
The defense of religious freedom is too sacred and essential to the welfare of this great republic to become a blue vs. red, left vs. right, Democrat vs. Republican issue.
It is an American issue.
- “Church Fire in Northern France Reportedly Contained: France is losing religious buildings at the rate of one every two weeks.”
6. “Judge fines Final Exit group convicted of assisting Minnesota suicide“
- Tevi Troy: “How to Combat Anti-Semitism“
A 2021 study of colleges found that more than six out of 10 Jewish students reported feeling unsafe on campus, with one in six fearing physical attacks. Worse still, another 2021 report found that more highly educated Americans are more, not less, likely to be anti-Semitic than less educated ones, calling into question the long-standing theory that anti-Semitism could be mitigated with more education. The link between anti-Semitism and college students raises fears of this hostility becoming even more mainstream: Institutions of higher education, after all, are where we train the next generation of leaders.
Campus anti-Semitism has often stemmed from anti-Israel groups, but the 2020s have witnessed the development of four primary sources of anti-Semitism in the United States: white-supremacist or -nationalist rhetoric, Islamist anti-Israel activism, urban street harassment, and left-wing anti-Semitism that is grounded in an anti-Israel animus but also engages in unnerving talk about billionaires and bankers. The emergence of these four sources of anti-Semitism has unfortunately not led to a unified focus on efforts to combat anti-Jewish hatred; instead, critics on the right call it out on the left while critics on the left call it out on the right. Few are willing to address the anti-Semitism in their own backyards.
Civil society leader and former Mexican Congressman, Rodrigo Iván Cortés, has been convicted of “gender based political violence” over posts on Twitter and Facebook referring to transgender-identifying Mexican Congressional representative, Salma Luévano, as a “man who self-ascribes as a woman”. On Wednesday, Cortés addressed the Organization of American States (OAS), asking the international body to intervene with regard to the “systematic violations of fundamental rights” occurring in Mexico.
Cortés, head of political advocacy group Frente Nacional por la Familia (“National Front for the Family” or FNF), has been convicted by a Mexican court for “gender-based political violence,” in addition to “digital, symbolic, psychological, and sexual violence,” for using masculine references on Twitter and Facebook with regard to Luévano. He is currently awaiting a ruling on his appeal.
- Jor-El Godsey: “Dear Google: A Response to Center for Countering Digital Hate Profiting From Deceit“
Don’t get fooled by Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s most recent publication, “Profiting From Deceit,” which is deceptive in itself and uses digital hate to shill for the abortion industry. Ahmed feigns concern for “Americans seeking reproductive healthcare advice and services” when his main concern is that American women might find and consider something besides abortion.
Don’t get fooled by Ahmed’s use of “reproductive healthcare,” which he deploys solely as a euphemism for abortion (chemical or surgical). If Ahmed were interested in helping American women find “healthcare advice and services,” he would celebrate access to pregnancy centers, which offer those very services to women in their communities. Instead, his report distorts the true meaning of reproductive healthcare to advance an agenda that targets and censors any abortion alternative.
The United States Department of Justice makes clear on its own website – describing “reproductive health services, including pro-life pregnancy counseling services and any other pregnancy support facility providing reproductive health care….”
Even President Biden’s Executive Order #14076 reiterated the government’s clarity on the matter: (b) The term “reproductive healthcare services” means medical, surgical, counseling, or referral services relating to the human reproductive system, including services relating to pregnancy or the termination of a pregnancy. [Emphasis added.] Even despite this language by the U.S. government, Ahmed prefers Big Abortion’s term for pregnancy centers, “fake clinics” Yes, Ahmed uses the false, misleading, and derogatory term “fake clinics” in abundance – even to describe those centers as real, licensed medical professionals offer accurate reproductive health services under the supervision of an actual medical director.
10. Ramesh Ponnuru: “A year after Dobbs, the pro-life side is making huge gains“
For the entirety of the past five decades, there have been many polls that suggest most people favor legal abortion, at least in some cases. For almost all of that time, the conventional wisdom has held that Republican opposition to abortion was a liability for the party — and many Republican politicians and strategists have shared that view and run from the issue. Divisions about how to proceed, too, have been a constant feature of the pro-life movement.
We are hearing a similar message now: Abortion is a weight dragging down Republicans, the main reason they underperformed in the midterm elections, a danger to them in elections to come. The fact that previous versions of these analyses turned out not to tell us much about how the abortion debate would go does not prove the current ones wrong. The political obstacles to pro-life political ambitions are real, and this time could be different. But we should be on guard that some of the same forces that have led in the past to an overestimation of those obstacles — such as the overrepresentation of pro-choice sentiment among Americans with college degrees and among journalists — could again be at work.
The torrent of stories about setbacks for pro-lifers has made it oddly easy to lose sight of the most basic point about abortion policy over the last year: The pro-life side is making huge gains. The Supreme Court no longer claims that our most fundamental law requires that the killing of unborn children be treated as a nonevent. In 23 states, legislators have banned abortion after six weeks or earlier; two more have banned it after 12 weeks. (Some of these bans are tied up in court.) In those places that have enacted new laws protecting abortion access, on the other hand, abortion had not been restricted before; they have for the most part ratified the status quo.
You might cheer or abhor these developments — and if in the latter camp you might object to the phrase “protecting unborn lives.” What can’t be denied is that policy has moved sharply in the direction opponents of abortion want. New regulations are bringing the number of abortions down.
11. Leor Sapir: “Why Europe and America are going in opposite directions on youth transgender medicine“
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14. Thomas Hibbs: “Contempt, Inquiry, and Rational disagreement: Learning from Aquinas in the Internet Age“
The seventeenth-century mathematician, philosopher, and Christian apologist Blaise Pascal once remarked, “The truth is so obscured these days that only those who love it will find it.”
Living at the advent of modernity, a time characterized by great ideological contests among and within philosophy, religion, science and politics, Pascal was quite aware of two facts about human beings. First, the need for truth is woven into the deepest impulses of our being. Second, the truth is not easy to ascertain. In many cases, the subject matter itself is difficult. But Pascal here speaks of truth being obscured, as if there were deliberate obstacles being placed before us. These obstacles are not just external forces that seek to deceive us. They are also internal, having to do with our own vices and disordered passions, our penchant for preferring our own fantasies over facts and our own will over that of others. If we have an impulse toward truth, we also cultivate impulses to evade the truth, even the truth about ourselves.
Fake news, irate passion, and violence are regular parts of our political life these days. Trapped in our ideological cul-de-sacs, eager to do battle with opponents in the disembodied world of social media, our default position is that anyone who disagrees with us must be both malicious and fatuous. Surveys show that there has been a marked decline in rich, personal friendships; meanwhile, civic friendship has been replaced by civic odium. We increasingly inhabit a culture of contempt. In response, there has been a great deal of talk about the decline in the quality of our public discourse. . . .
For guidance on these matters, I am going to turn to what may seem an unlikely source: Thomas Aquinas. At first glance, Aquinas may seem to advocate a model of reasoning that is highly abstract, a matter of moving from self-evident principles through lucid deductions to unimpeachable conclusions. That would seem to have little to do with rational disagreement or with the messy, passion-inflected give and take of public discourse. But this impression is misleading. In reality, Aquinas has a great deal to teach us about rational disagreement, and about the character traits that assist or hamper the pursuit of truth, especially the pursuit of truth in concert with others.
15. Rick Santorum: “Time to Return Parenting to Parents“
16. “What the shocking Nation’s Report Card scores reveal about Catholic schools“
There’s no secret sauce to the Catholic school advantage in mitigating learning loss. The typical parochial school starts its learning day earlier, focuses on the basics, and most of all were much more likely to encourage and provide in-person learning throughout the pandemic.
18. Meg Hunter-Kilmer: “Servant of God Stanisława Leszczyńska: The Midwife of Auschwitz Who Delivered Thousands of Babies and Saved Thousands of Lives“
Auschwitz was hell, a nightmare of agony, grief, and despair. Except in the maternity ward. There, as the lice bit and the patients shivered and the rats skittered, there was—astonishingly—peace. There were painless births and healthy babies and mothers holding their little ones as the midwife that they all called “Mother” prayed with them and sang to them and treated them like human beings.
This peace never lasted long. The babies were taken or the mothers were sent back out to work, trying desperately to feed their babies as they and all those around them starved. But in the maternity ward there was peace. There were babies who lived and mothers who lived. And all because of Servant of God Stanisława Leszczyńska.
19. Archbishop Charles J. Chaput: “Notes on the Prince of This World: The devil is real. Deal with it.“
Too often in our apostolate to the world we’re naive. Our mission isn’t about carving out some corner of secular culture to make it more “Christian.” It’s not about getting more Christian viewpoints in the media or more Christian values reflected in our various forms of art or political debates. Those things are important. But there’s more at stake.
20. “How to Critique a Book the Mortimer Adler Way“
21. “3 years after fire nearly destroyed it, Mission San Gabriel is ready to reopen“
22. “Beating the Odds, Baby Weighing One Pound Finally Heads Home“:
After living his first five months of existence inside the Florida hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, baby Alanie, born at 23 weeks, is finally heading home.
23. “Dignity in Death: Catholic High Schoolers Bury the Dead“
24. Father Paul Scalia: “Fear and Fearlessness“
Contrary to what the modern mind might think, Fear of the Lord leads to freedom. What enslaves us is fear of the wrong things: poverty, humiliation, weakness, loneliness, etc. Fear of these lesser things leads us into sin, or to control the situation and avoid the suffering. Thus, the adage that Fear is the chief activator of our faults. False fears lead us to grasp for control and drive us into the slavery of our own willfulness.
Further – and again counterintuitively – this fear of God as almighty Father is the necessary foundation for trust. After all, we don’t trust what we perceive to be weak. If His power cannot be feared, then neither can it be trusted. Precisely because He is mighty enough to be feared, we can also trust in Him. Most importantly, His power and might are for us, His children.
Finally, Fear of the Lord makes us fearless – which explains Jesus’ seeming contradiction in today’s Gospel. Fear of the Lord puts everything else into perspective. If we are rooted in Fear of the Lord – knowing Him to be our almighty God and loving Father – then we shouldn’t fear anything else. Or as Raniero Cantalamessa put it, “Fear God and don’t be afraid.” Persecution, humiliation, poverty, illness, even death – as long as we cling to our heavenly Father, we shouldn’t fear any of these things.
25. The Babylon Bee: “Study Shows Teaching A Teen To Drive Best Way To Improve Prayer Life“