FLASHBACK: Archbishop Collins Please Redress Schwarzenegger-McGuinty Scandal

Published today to SignOfContradiction.Blogspot.ca

This is a timely reprint of a press release issued in June 2007 dealing with the ongoing scandal in Canada of Catholic politicians defying Church teaching and the indifference/inaction of Catholic Bishops on the matter.

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Vote Life, Canada! Calls on Toronto Archbishop to Redress Scandal Surrounding Governor Schwarzenegger's Stem Cell Deal with Ontario Premier McGuinty

MEDIA ADVISORY, June 4 /Christian Newswire/ -- "The scandal caused in Canada and the US by so-called 'devout' Catholic politicians who defy the true Catholic faith reached new depths of disgrace last week," says Eric Alcock, President of Vote Life,Canada!

Even as Governor Schwarzenegger met with Premier McGuinty to contract a deal which underwrites $30 million in public funds for the willful destruction of embryonic human beings, both politicians brazenly affirmed a staunch Catholic faith.

Catholic teaching condemns embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) as a crime against the dignity of embryonic human beings since they have a right to the same respect as the child already born. Furthermore, Alcock noted, "ESCR is a worse crime than abortion since no mother sets out from the beginning to abort her child whereas ESCR always envisions the purposeful, willful destruction of human life at the embryonic stage."

"Canada has descended a path of barbarism and secularism, even sponsoring the monstrous evil of abortion, thanks to a succession of 'devout' Catholic politicians and Prime Ministers," says Alcock. "Their testimony confirms the spiritual apathy and neglect of Canada's Bishops, practically all of whom continue the cowardly policy of leaving the defense of innocent Unborns to a persecuted minority of 'fundamentalist' pro-lifers."

Ironically, Alcock disclosed that in Toronto on the same day of Schwarzenegger's and McGuinty's scandalizing actions, Toronto's Archbishop Collins was delivering a speech entitled "The Contribution of Religion to Society." One point the Archbishop made was that religion contributes to the common good of society by bringing to bear on current social issues the insights arising from religion's ancient heritage of wisdom.

Alcock also pointed to an interview in December past when Archbishop Collins inferred that he would not rule out excommunication for politicians who defied Church teaching. Father Raymond J. de Souza judged in an article in the National Post that "the sheer size of Toronto and its status as the nation's media capital make the Archbishop the sine qua non of the Church's presence in Canadian public life."

Therefore, for the sake of Canada's Unborn, Vote Life, Canada! calls on Archbishop Collins to reverse the trend of deadly silence among the Bishops, to immediately and publicly address this scandal through reaffirming Church teaching on ESCR and to initiate Church Canon law discipline for all professing Catholics who refuse to make their consciences correct with Magisterial teaching, starting with Premier Dalton McGuinty.

[Source]

Missouri Stem Cell Amendment and Big Business

Recently I blogged on the controversy surrounding Michael J. Fox, Embryonic Stem Cell Research and the Missouri Stem Cell amendment. My goal was to help clarify the issue and to point out that ESCR ALWAYS takes the life of an innocent human being in the earliest stages of development and is particularly heinous because all such research aims from the very beginning to destroy the embryo.

I did point out clearly that ESCR has produced no successful medical therapies in humans yet those who promote ESCR make bold (and misleading) claims that it is immensely promising and that it has the potential to relieve or cure dozens, even hundreds, of serious human illnesses such as cancer, Parkinson's and diabetes.

What I did not mention was the extreme degree of lobbying that takes place by special business interests who would love to take advantage of the enormous sums of venture capital that would flow once these sorts of amendments are passed into law.

Fox News is now reporting on a billionaire couple whose firm invests significantly in the healthcare sector and who is pumping a whopping $29 million into advertising in order to win votes for the Missouri amendment. Records indicate that this couple has also donated significantly to lawmakers sympathetic to such research and they run an Institute that has made a $300 million expansion project contingent on Amendment 2 passing.

The MSM hype about ESCR is really all about one thing…big business influence and the Almighty Dollar. Who cares how many “invisible” human beings in embryo form get killed?

God help us to speak up for life.

h/t Michelle Malkin

Michael J. Fox and Stem Cell Research

Michael J. Fox is much in the news lately promoting embryonic stem cell research. Following his emotional pleas, other celebrities such as Jim Caviezel (Passion of the Christ star) and Patricia Heaton (Everybody Loves Raymond and honorary chair for Feminists for Life) have entered the fray.

This ongoing controversy deserves a separate post (which I hope to undertake) but there are very important facts about stem cell research that the average citizen urgently needs to know in order to safeguard society. This may sound extreme but the principles at stake in this debate are very weighty.

Perhaps I can help to sketch out for you the landscape of stem cell research in this posting. If you are in the dark on this subject, please take a few minutes to hear me out.

Embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) requires that stem cells be taken from five day old human embryos, directly resulting in the destruction of that embryo. However, stem cell treatments can originate from sources other than human embryos. Adult (non-embryonic) stem cells are available from placentas and umbilical cord blood and have already proved successful in treating more than 70 different diseases and conditions. By contrast, ESCR has produced no successful medical therapies in humans. Yet those who promote ESCR make bold (and misleading) claims that it is immensely promising and that it has the potential to relieve or cure dozens, even hundreds, of serious human illnesses such as cancer, Parkinson's and diabetes.

Recently, a confusing Toronto Star editorial which condemned President Bush’s recent veto (which blocked legislation that would have required taxpayer money to fund ESCR) stated that Canada would be hurt by this. The claim was made that “Canada wisely has gone a different route, cautiously and under very strict rules approving the research use of stem cells from embryos…” The truth is that very recently the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) announced that it will allow the creation of living human embryos specifically for research purposes and approved a $523,000 project to do just that. The CIHR unashamedly stated that it does not consider that a human being at the embryonic stage has any inherent moral status. One of the chief researchers on the project said he sees no problem with the research. “There are embryos going down the drain all the time.”

Here’s the important question. Even if the extravagant claims of ESCR materialized over time, would it be right to do research on embryos? Science, philosophy, moral common sense and Christian teaching argues that the embryo qualifies as a human being. From the moment of conception a unique individual is created, distinct from its father and mother and every other living thing, first in the form of a zygote, then an embryo, then a fetus.

Moral logic for judging this unborn human life must be applied by a truly just society. It’s wrong to kill innocent human beings. ESCR (and abortion) kills innocent human beings. Therefore ESCR (and abortion) is wrong. If the zygote or embryo or fetus is not a human being, no justification for either abortion or ESCR is necessary. However, if it is a human being, no justification for taking his or her life is adequate.

Human beings have intrinsic value and their worth cannot be evaluated in terms of how useful one thinks them to be or what one thinks of their future or current quality of life. Arguing the benefits of ESCR ("Think of all the people it will help"), even if true, holds no merit. If embryos are in fact human beings (and therefore intrinsically valuable), then the end does not justify the means in the case of ESCR. We do not sacrifice human beings for medical purposes regardless of the good it might bring others. Human beings, unborn or born, deserve the same legal protections.

What should we do with the “leftover” embryos? Simple, really. Because each embryo is a valuable human being, we should treat him/her like anyone else. Each one should be protected from being destroyed or sold off as a medical experiment or pillaged for valuable body parts. Find mothers who are willing to adopt them (by implantation) or failing that, allow them to die naturally. To prevent a similar dilemma in the future, in vitro fertilization should be restricted to the number of eggs that can safely be carried by the mother without risking "selective reductions" which is medical jargon for abortion.

A careful analysis of the funding of ESCR will show that it is actually morally worse than legal abortion. No woman purposely sets out to kill her unborn child through abortion. Many factors are brought to bear upon her before she makes such a decision. By contrast, those who advocate public funding for ESCR purposefully aim to destroy human embryos and seek to convince the public to pay for it, even though the prospects for cures are very distant and unproven, and even though adult stem cell research is daily proving itself and is unquestionably ethical. Furthermore, when parents of these living human embryos donate them to science, they deny the humanity of their own offspring and reduce them to scientific objects and commodities.

We as Canadians must do our best to care for those who have difficult diseases but we must do it without hurting others in the process. Aggressively promoting and funding the scientific research of somatic (adult) stem cells is the wise, just and decent path to follow. All prolifers should be calling on the government of Canada to do exactly that and to immediately stop the creation and funding of human embryos and ESCR.

[Short video primer on stem cell research by Family Research Council, entitled Beyond Hype, Real Hope.]