8 awesome signs from the March for Life

Austin, Texas, Nov 5, 2018 / 04:11 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- After a pro-life leader said she is voting for a pro-choice Senate candidate because she believes he will best advance the cause of life, another pro-life advocate rejected this approach to fighting abortion.

Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, founder of New Wave Feminists, said in an Oct. 31 column for the Dallas Morning News that she is voting this year for Democrat Beto O’Rourke, who is challenging incumbent Republican Ted Cruz for his seat in the Senate. O’Rourke has gained traction in the normally red state, and polls show a tight race ahead of the Nov. 6 election.

Currently a U.S. Representative, O’Rourke has said that he opposes efforts to limit abortion access. He is endorsed by NARAL Pro-Choice America, which gave him a “100% pro-choice” rating last year, noting his opposition to more than a dozen pro-life measures during that time.

Herndon-De La Rosa said that despite his voting record, she believes O’Rourke’s cooperative approach in seeking common-ground solutions will do the most to advance the pro-life cause.

She described O’Rourke as a “different” kind of candidate who “talked about working with Republicans and independents alike.”

Dr. Joe Pojman, executive director of Texas Alliance for Life, said that he believes this line of thinking is “deeply flawed and very unfortunate.”

He told CNA that it is a “fallacy” to believe that voting for candidates who favor legal abortion will bring about an end to abortions.

In her Dallas Morning News column, Herndon-De La Rosa explained that she had long accepted the belief that being pro-life meant voting Republican.

“[F]or years I reluctantly supported candidates who talked about making the sand glow in other countries with bombs and who advocated taking children away from their mothers, simply because unlike us, they hadn’t won the geographic lottery,” she said.

These votes often felt difficult for her as an independent who does not completely agree with either major political party, and as a “consistent life ethicist,” who opposes “all forms of violence against other human beings, including war, torture, the death penalty and abortion.” But she believed that compromise was necessary, because the right to life was so foundational.

However, Herndon-De La Rosa said the 2016 presidential election was eye-opening for her, showing her “just how deep the GOP had its hooks in the pro-life movement.” She stressed that “while I am 100 percent pro-life, I’m also 100 percent feminist, and I saw the way Trump treated women as an absolute deal-breaker.”

“I saw the way these politicians used unborn children’s lives to get out the vote but then oftentimes forgot about those lives soon after,” she said. “I saw the way pro-lifers compromised so many of their own upstanding ethics and morals to elect a man thrice married, who bragged about his infidelities and predatory behavior. And why? So they could get their Supreme Court seats.”

She said the final straw was watching Republican Senator Susan Collins agree to vote in favor of confirming Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh only when he said that Roe v. Wade was “settled law.”

This convinced Herndon-De La Rosa that abortion must be eradicated on a cultural, rather than legal, level – “by creating a post-Roe culture while Roe still stands.”

O’Rourke’s proposed policies and willingness to work across party lines, she said, will help address the factors that lead women to feel that they must choose abortion.

“Abortion becomes unnecessary when women have so much support from within their community that the one violent choice never even becomes an option in their minds,” Herndon-De La Rosa said. “Abortion becomes unthinkable when women of color realize that having their children will not cost them their own lives because we have men like O’Rourke actually addressing the disproportionate number of minorities and children dying during childbirth.”

However, Pojman countered that Texas already “provides a tremendous amount of help for pregnant women” and does much to offer alternatives to abortion.

The state has more than 200 pregnancy resource centers that offer free to help to women in need, he said, and some half of these centers receive state funding. In addition, the state’s social service network provides health care for more than half of the minors in Texas, and the majority of childbirths in Texas are funded by Medicaid.

Rather than advancing the pro-life movement, Pojman argued, “O’Rourke would be a disaster.”

“He has shown himself to be entirely hostile to protecting unborn children from abortion. He has voted to allow late abortions, he has voted to support tax funding for abortions. If he became senator and had his way, he would eliminate the Hyde Amendment, which has been demonstrated to have saved some 2 million babies from abortion since it was first implemented in the ‘70s.”

Texas Alliance for Life has enthusiastically endorsed Ted Cruz for Senate. Pojman pointed to Cruz’s consistent record of voting for pro-life measures, including a ban on late-term abortions and an end to federal funding of Planned Parenthood.

The U.S. bishops’ guide to political engagement, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, stresses the importance of examining issues rather than voting automatically for any political party. The bishops emphasize the right to life as a foundational human right in evaluating candidates and issues.

“As Catholics we are not single-issue voters. A candidate’s position on a single issue is not sufficient to guarantee a voter’s support,” the document says. “Yet if a candidate’s position on a single issue promotes an intrinsically evil act, such as legal abortion, redefining marriage in a way that denies its essential meaning, or racist behavior, a voter may legitimately disqualify a candidate from receiving support.”
 

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Bishop Giovani Arana of El Alto, Bolivia. / Credit: CEB

ACI Prensa Staff, May 30, 2023 / 17:00 pm (CNA).
Bishop Giovani Arana of El Alto, secretary general of the Bolivian Bishops’ Conference, pointed out in his homily for Pentecost Sunday on M… […]

Knoxville, Tenn., Apr 2, 2019 / 07:00 pm (CNA).- During an annual week of controversial sex-ed events at a Tennessee college, the Fellowship of Catholic University Students has organized an alternative event based on a Catholic view of human sexuality.  

A student group at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville has hosted “Sex Week” on its campus since 2013. Organizers bill it as “a week of free, comprehensive sex education events.” This year’s program includes a drag show, a cabaret, and free HIV testing, according to the organizers’ website.

Kara Logan, a FOCUS alum and doctoral student in theology at Ave Maria University, offered an alternative talk April 2 entitled “How to have Worthwhile Sex: An Alternative View.”

She based her talk on the teachings of St. John Paul II, and his series of addresses on human sexuality that have come to be known as the Theology of the Body.  

Logan told CNA in an interview before the talk that she hopes to help students understand that the so-called “sexual revolution” of the 20th century hasn’t brought with it the happiness and  fulfilment that it promised.

“I think we just want them to see that this ‘doing whatever we want’ [attitude], sexual promiscuity, all these things— they’re just not fulfilling,” Logan told CNA.

“We’re not finding happiness here. And if I can just show them the beauty of the Theology of the Body, the beauty of true love, and of sacrifice, of making a gift to the other and not reducing the other person to an object of use, that would be great. That would be the main thing.”

Logan said she plans to share statistics with the students about the negative effects of hooking up, pornography, contraception and other common practices that society consider part of normal sexual expression.

“The hookup culture is really making young adults less social; they’re more anxious,” she noted.

“The number one reason women go off of oral contraception is because she’s depressed…People who take oral contraception are significantly more depressed than women who aren’t.”

She said she hopes to help the students understand what it means in the Theology of the Body to “give a gift of yourself,” which is rooted in self-mastery and self-possession.

“The heart knows what it’s called to be…that there’s still a call to be a gift, but we’re battling it now because of concupiscence, because of sin,” she said.

“Christ comes to restore the human heart, to fix it…and he shows us, too, that true love is to die to one’s self for the sake of the beloved.”

Logan said that she hopes to show the students that it’s possible to live out the Theology of the Body and be fulfilled in a meaningful way, as opposed to the “lie that you can do whatever you want, or that you don’t really have any meaning, or that Catholicism is just a set of rules to enslave us.”

The concept of “Sex Week” was first introduced at Yale University in the early 2000s. Attendance at the Sex Week events at UTK has ranged from 1,650 participants to more than 3,500, according to Inside HigherEd.

Sex Week at UTK has been controversial ever since its inception in 2013, when it was revealed that student fees were going to fund controversial activities, including a condom scavenger hunt.

Sex Week is not unique to UTK’s campus— other public and private institutions across the country hold similar events— but Tennessee legislators have called the week a “national embarrassment” and have moved to exclude the event from using public funding. University administrators have said that they have done as much as they can to tone down the event without violating the group’s First Amendment rights.

The Tennessee state comptroller released a 269-page report in February about the use of public funds for Sex Week, which detailed the fact that university departments and programs originally committed over $11,000 in funds for Sex Week.

The university chancellor ultimately withdrew the public funds before the 2013 event, and the organizers of UTK’s Sex Week have had to use other funding sources, such as online crowdsource funding, for subsequent years’ events.

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