Obama administration accused of illegally using using US funds to promote abortion in Kenya

400,000 in US funds was funneled to the International Development Law Organization.  At its website, the IDLO says that it "uses a variety of programs to reach its objectives.  These programs are fully consistent with the 2005 UN Summit and the Millenium Development Declaration.  We read in No. 58 of this document, pp. 16-17:


Gender equality and empowerment of women


58. We remain convinced that progress for women is progress for all. We reaffirm

that the full and effective implementation of the goals and objectives of the Beijing

Declaration and Platform for Action22 and the outcome of the twenty-third special

session of the General Assembly is an essential contribution to achieving the

internationally agreed development goals, including those contained in the

Millennium Declaration, and we resolve to promote gender equality and eliminate

pervasive gender discrimination by:

(a) Eliminating gender inequalities in primary and secondary education by

the earliest possible date and at all educational levels by 2015;

(b) Guaranteeing the free and equal right of women to own and inherit

property and ensuring secure tenure of property and housing by women;

_______________

21 World Health Assembly resolution 58.3.

22 Report of the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, 4-15 September 1995 (United Nations

publication, Sales No. E.96.IV.13), chap. I, resolution 1, annexes I and II.

A/RES/60/1


(c) Ensuring equal access to reproductive health;

(d) Promoting women’s equal access to labour markets, sustainable

employment and adequate labour protection;

(e) Ensuring equal access of women to productive assets and resources,

including land, credit and technology;

(f) Eliminating all forms of discrimination and violence against women and

the girl child, including by ending impunity and by ensuring the protection of

civilians, in particular women and the girl child, during and after armed conflicts in

accordance with the obligations of States under international humanitarian law and

international human rights law;

(g) Promoting increased representation of women in Government decision making

bodies, including through ensuring their equal opportunity to participate

fully in the political process.

59. We recognize the importance of gender mainstreaming as a tool for achieving

gender equality. To that end, we undertake to actively promote the mainstreaming of

a gender perspective in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of

policies and programmes in all political, economic and social spheres, and further

undertake to strengthen the capabilities of the United Nations system in the area of

gender.
 
Empowerment of women is tied to "equal access to reproductive health."  And by "access to reproductive health," of course, is meant access to abortion.  The problem is that the allocation of US funds to lobby for abortion in other countries is illegal.  The Siljander amendment, an annually renewed law which prohibits US foreign assistance funds from being used to lobby for or against abortion (Source: FY 2006 Appropriations Act, Title II, "Child Survival and Health Programs Fund" and/or Title V, Section 518), was ignored by the Obama administration.

Is it the official policy of the Franklin Massachusetts Police Department to categorize pro-lifers as "domestic terrorists"?

LifeSiteNews is reporting:


A pro-life activist in New England says he was unjustly beaten, arrested, and accused of a bomb plot while passing out pro-life bookmarks at a local town fair.


“I’m at peace because Our Lord and Savior was by me the whole way,” D’Attilio told LifeSiteNews in an interview. “I was shocked when it did happen. It was completely unexpected and out of the blue because I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I never got so much as a warning. They basically just grabbed me and cuffed me without a crime.”

In his account of what happened, published online by the pro-family group MassResistance, pro-life activist Peter D’Attilio says that police approached him on the evening of August 11 when he was handing out two-inch-wide pro-life bookmarks to six teenagers. D’Attilio was at the annual St. Rocco fair on the grounds of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Franklin, Massachusetts.

Peter D'Attilio with the black eye that he says he received after being punched by Officer Burchill. According to D’Attilio, the police asked him to present identification. After asking why, the police officer reportedly responded that by law D’Attilio had to identify himself when asked by an officer.

In the police report filed by Officer Robert Burchill, Burchill says that he approached D’Atillio only after the chairman of the festival, Peter Brunelli, asked him to. The officer says that Brunelli had received several complaints about D’Atillio and that he wanted him removed from the property.

The pro-life activist says that when the officer prevented him from leaving the property after he offered to leave voluntarily, “I told him he was illegally detaining me.”

“He then put his hand in my back pocket to grab my wallet, but I also put my hand in my back pocket to hold my wallet, so he gave up trying.” At that point D’Attilio was put into handcuffs.

The pro-life activist says that after he was handcuffed he suddenly found himself pushed to his knees while the police officer “started choking me,” after which the officer reportedly punched him in the face, giving him a black eye.

In the police report, Officer Burchill claimed that D’Attilio repeatedly resisted arrest. “While I was trying to place the handcuffs on him, he pulled away and had to be physically restrained and handcuffed,” he said.

The officer said that D’Attilio again resisted when the officers were placing him into the police cruiser, and that “he had to be physically put into the cruiser.”

D’Attilio, however, denies the charge. “He claimed I tried to resist that, which I didn’t,” he said.

At the police station, D’Attilio says that the sergeant who did the booking asked him if he had planned to blow up the fair, telling him that pro-life people “are known for that kind of thing.”

When D’Attilio got out of jail, he found that his truck had been thoroughly searched with “bomb-sniffing dogs.” The pro-life activist says he has been told that he has been put on a “terrorist watch list.”

“By putting us all, every pro-life citizen, on the (Modern Militia Movement), it sends a powerful message that stereotypes all civil rights activists against abortion as terrorists,” he told LSN. The Modern Militia Movement is a government collective that identifies the warning signs of potential domestic terrorists for law enforcement communities.

D’Attilio, who still needs a lawyer to represent him, was arraigned in court before a judge on August 19, and is scheduled to appear in court again at 9:00 a.m. on September 28. He has filed a citizen’s complaint about his treatment at the hands of the police.

Neither Franklin Police Chief Stephen Williams nor Franklin Town Council Chairman Scott Mason responded to a request for comment from LSN.

I'm not surprised that Chief Williams decided not to respond to LSN.  Remember when the Obama administration issued its "Domestic Extremism Lexicon" to the Department of Homeland Security back in 2009?  The pro-life movement was defined in this lexicon as, "A movement of groups or individuals who are virulently anti-abortion and advocate violence against providers of abortion-related services, their employees, and their facilities. Some cite various racist and anti-Semitic beliefs to justify their criminal activities."

Is this the position of Chief Williams and his department?  That pro-lifers are a danger to the community?  That pro-lifers are prone to domestic terrorism?

It was the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel, a man whose thought so greatly influenced my own, who said that, "Fanaticism is essentially opinion; opinion pushed to paroxysm; with everything that the notion of opinion may imply of blinded ignorance as to its own nature...whatever ends the fanatic is aiming at or thinks he is aiming at, even if he wishes to gather men together, he can only in fact separate them; but as his own interests cannot lie in effecting this separation, his is led...to wish to wipe his opponents out. And when he is thinking of these opponents, he takes care to form the most degrading images of them possible - they are 'lubricious vipers' or 'hyenas and jackals with typewriters' - and the ones that reduce them to most grossly material terms. In fact, he no longer thinks of these opponents except as material obstacles to be overturned or smashed down. Having abandoned the behaviour of a thinking being, he has lost even the feeblest notion of what a thinking being, outside himself, could be. It is understandable therefore that he should make very effort to deny in advance the rights and qualifications of those whom he wishes to eliminate; and that he should regard all means to this end as fair. We are back here again at the techniques of degradation...fanaticism is, of its very nature, incompatible with any regard for truth; and as truth itself is not really seperable from our regard for it, we need not hesitate to say that the fanatic is the enemy of truth..." (Man Against Mass Society, pp. 149-150).


The Franklin Massachusetts Police Department should be investigated.  Have other pro-lifers been treated in similar fashion? 

Obama administration manipulating statistics to hide massive unemployment

"In the past, including last month, when the unemployment rate has dropped that was because of a big drop off in the number of people looking for work. In government logic, fewer people looking for work means fewer people who are unemployed. (You have to be looking to be counted.)" (Full article here).

The following article speech entitled “Another kind of terrorism: The unjust economic system," was given on October 5, 2001, by The Most Rev. Vincent Michael Concessao, Archbishop of Delhi, India.  His Excellency gave speech at the general Assembly of the Synod of Bishops at the Vatican.  It is taken from the Oct. 31, 2001 issue of the Vatican weekly, L'Osservatore Romano):


A few days ago, we were all stunned when we saw on the television the destruction of the World Trade Center, and heard about the death of over dox-thousand innocent people. In some countries of the world today, it is a daily affair, and often a sign of despair stemming from helplessness.

There is another kind of subtle, hidden, little spoken of terrorism. I mean the terrorism of an unjust economic system which grinds to death thousands of people every day. According to a study on international debt published two years ago, eleven million children under the age of five die every year the world over mainly for lack of food and health care against preventable diseases.

With the present trend of globalization, the situation of the poor is getting worse. Small industries are closed down, depriving thousands of people of gainful employment; the state-spending on the basic requirements of the poor is reduced as part of the structural adjustment programme; the poor are getting further marginalized and driven to despair. They become easy victims to politicians and fundamentalists. Do we have a message of hope for them, not just in words but in concrete action programs?


The statistical situation of poverty in the third millennium is frightening. While nearly one billion of the people of the world are illiterate... nearly 1.3 billion people lack safe potable water, and about half of the world's population is without access to adequate sanitation.

There is a frightening sentence in the Second Vatican Council (Gaudium et spes) from the Decree of Gatian: Feed the man dying of hunger, because if you are not feeding him, you are killing him. It is a case of murder by omission.

There is enough in the world today for all that people need, but not enough for their greed (Mahatma Gandhi). Should we not take a clear stand with and for the poor, and against the system in which they do not count? It will be part of our commitment to a culture of life and a civilization of love.

“The worst form of terrorism: the economic and financial mechanisms”

In the first week of January, 2002, a meeting took place in Delhi, India, organized by the Justice, Peace and Development Commission of the Indian Conference of Catholic Bishops, which was reported by Vatican Radio on January 9. In his speech, the Archbishop of Delhi, Most Rev. Vincent Concessao, developed on the subject he had mentioned at the Synod of Bishops in the Vatican last October (see page 5), defining social injustice as the worst form of terrorism. He stressed the fact that the terrorist attacks of September 11 made much ado in the world, but that one continued to keep silent on another type of terrorism that makes, every day, thousands of victims, and which does not seem worth the attention of governments. Archbishop Concessao referred to the economic and financial mechanisms that rule the globe and which, according to statistics, are more deadly than terrorism in its common interpretation. “We live in a state of scandalous social injustice,” he said, “and the tendency goes towards an aggravation of the situation. The Church must therefore fight for social justice, without which peace and harmony cannot exist.”


Isn't the truth refreshing?  What a shame that the Obama administration doesn't at least give it a try.  Perhaps we need a new department within Homeland Security to deal with this form of terrorism?

Chief Justice John Roberts: Elena Kagan claim "startling and dangerous."

In an article written by Jacob Sullum entitled "Elena Kagan Looks Wobbly on Freedom of Speech," Jacob Sullum explains that, "Defending a 1999 federal ban on depictions of animal cruelty, Kagan boldly asked the Supreme Court to recognize a new category of speech that, along with such historical exceptions as defamation, incitement and obscenity, is entirely outside the scope of the First Amendment. 'Whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection,' she wrote, 'depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs.'

Writing for the 8-to-1 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts called this claim 'startling and dangerous,' adding: 'The First Amendment's guarantee of free speech does not extend only to categories of speech that survive an ad hoc balancing of relative social costs and benefits. The First Amendment itself reflects a judgment by the American people that the benefits of its restrictions on the Government outweigh the costs. Our Constitution forecloses any attempt to revise that judgment simply on the basis that some speech is not worth it.'"

Knowing that socialists view orthodox Christianity as an enemy and an obstacle to their program, how would Christian speech which expresses moral opposition toward abortion and homosexuality fare under Elena Kagan when placed within "a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs"? We know that socialists make special efforts to gain control of key communications media in society. Already, FCC "Diversity" Chief Mark Lloyd, who is inspired by Saul Alinsky, has argued that government is the "only" institution that can manage the communications of the public. See here.

The Obama administration, as this Blog post details, is overrun with socialists, communists, sexual radicals, Alinskyites and globalists. Where is all this leading? It was Pope Pius XII who warned, in his Encyclical Letter Summi Pontificatus, that, "Once the authority of God and the sway of His law are denied..the civil authority as an inevitable result tends to attribute to itself that absolute autonomy which belongs exclusively to the Supreme Maker. It puts itself in the place of the Almighty and elevates the State or group into the last end of life, the supreme criterion of the moral and juridical order, and therefore forbids every appeal to the principles of natural reason and of the Christian conscience." (No. 53).


Related reading: Vatican Cardinal: New World Order gaining ground.

Obama administration to welcome representatives of the Secular Coalition for America

The Secular Coalition for America describes itself as "a national lobby representing the interests of atheists, humanists, agnostics, freethinkers and other nontheistic Americans." Secular Humanism has most of the characteristics of a religion. The Secular Humanist places man at the center of things. In the Humanist Manifesto II, which was released in 1973, humanists called for a new faith: "...traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to love and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them is an unproved and outmoded faith. Salvationism, based on mere affirmation, still appears as harmful, diverting people with false hopes of heaven hereafter. Responsible minds look to other means for survival." (Humanist Manifesto II, The Humanist; September/October 1973, p. 4).

Many today seek to build a godless world which is man-centered. When he makes himself known, the Man of Sin will incarnate this spirit. As Romano Guardini noted in his book The Lord, "...The ultimate aim of all aims will be to prove that existence wihtout Christ is possible - nay rather, that Christ is the enemy of existence, which can be fully realized only when all Christian values have been destroyed.." (p. 513).

Jeanne Le Royer, a mystic, once said that, "When the time of the reign of Antichrist is near, a false religion will appear which will be opposed to the unity of God and His Church. This will cause the greatest schism the world has ever known. The nearer the time of the end, the more the darkness of Satan will spread on earth, the greater will be the number of the children of corruption, and the number of the just will correspondingly diminish."

The stage is set. On September 18, 1988, Our Lady told Father Gobbi of the Marian Movement of Priests: "..there will come to completion that fullness of time beginning with La Salette* all the way to my most recent and present apparitions; the purification will come its culmination; there will come to completion the time of the great tribulation, foretold in Holy Scripture, before the Second Coming of Christ; the mystery of iniquity, prepared for by the ever-increasing spread of apostasy, will become manifest; all the secrets which I have revealed to some of my children will come to pass and all the events which have been foretold will take place."

* Hence the title of this Blog.

"When the time for the Advent of the Antichrist approaches..."

The Prophecy of St. Nilus, who lived around 400 AD:

"After the year 1900, toward the middle of the 20th century, the people of that time will become unrecognizable. When the time for the Advent of the Antichrist approaches, people's minds will grow cloudy from carnal passions, and dishonor and lawlessness will grow stronger. Then the world will become unrecognizable. People's appearances will change, and it will be impossible to distinguish men from women due to their shamelessness in dress and style of hair. These people will be cruel and will be like wild animals because of the temptations of the Antichrist. There will be no respect for parents and elders, love will disappear, and Christian pastors, bishops, and priests will become vain men, completely failing to distinguish the right-hand way from the left. At that time the morals and traditions of Christians and of the Church will change. People will abandon modesty, and dissipation will reign. Falsehood and greed will attain great proportions, and woe to those who pile up treasures. Lust, adultery, homosexuality, secret deeds and murder will rule in society."

"...intimidation by surveillance..."

"The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded."

- Vance Packard, American journalist, social critic and author.

Read this article. Is this an attempt at intimidation by surveillance? An attempt to stifle dissent from White House policies? If not, what was this all about?

Related reading here.