O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing ---C Wesley

What a glorious hymn

O Happy Day!

From America Magazine's blog on Komen

The folks at Planned Parenthood, which orchestrated the shock and awe response to Komen's decision, have been busy on a number of different fronts this week and must be feeling pretty satisfied with their many public relations efforts. In fact the Komen controversy and the U.S. bishops response to HHS have proved something of a public relations and fiscal watershed for Planned Parenthood. In television ads this week PP is thanking President Obama and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for "standing firm" on contraception. PP may be overdoing the victory dance on this one; watching the self-righteous counterattack against the bishops and noting the increasingly Nativist tone of some of the sentiment expressed on that vast wasteland of the Interent, I can feel some atavistic response mechanism kicking in myself. Will liberal Catholics come home to stand by their bishops despite their differences?

They link to this piece by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal, who writes:

The president signed off on a Health and Human Services ruling that says that under ObamaCare, Catholic institutions—including charities, hospitals and schools—will be required by law, for the first time ever, to provide and pay for insurance coverage that includes contraceptives, abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization procedures. If they do not, they will face ruinous fines in the millions of dollars. Or they can always go out of business.
In other words, the Catholic Church was told this week that its institutions can't be Catholic anymore.

I invite you to imagine the moment we are living in without the church's charities, hospitals and schools. And if you know anything about those organizations, you know it is a fantasy that they can afford millions in fines.

There was no reason to make this ruling—none. Except ideology.

The conscience clause, which keeps the church itself from having to bow to such decisions, has always been assumed to cover the church's institutions.

Now the church is fighting back. -snip-

 This is in fact a potentially unifying moment for American Catholics, long split left, right and center. Catholic conservatives will immediately and fully oppose the administration's decision. But Catholic liberals, who feel embarrassed and undercut, have also come out in opposition.
The church is split on many things. But do Catholics in the pews want the government telling their church to contravene its beliefs? A president affronting the leadership of the church, and blithely threatening its great institutions? No, they don't want that.

-snip-

There was no reason to pick this fight. It reflects political incompetence on a scale so great as to make Mitt Romney's gaffes a little bitty thing.
 

Left-wing Christianity is hopeless against the new atheists says Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson's blog was silent for several days but now he's baaaaack with a delightfully scathing post about Occupy protesters and hopes some Left-wing Christians have that they will revive Christianity.  Here's an excerpt but please go on over and read the whole thing:

Of all the delusions nurtured by Left-wing Christians, perhaps the loopiest is that anyone under the age of 40 gives a monkey’s about their opinions. -snip-
The average bright 25-year-old Briton isn’t looking for supernatural solutions to existential problems. Senior churchmen speak of the “spiritual hunger” of the young. That’s wishful thinking. The next generation don’t believe in God. Few of them frame their arguments as rabidly as Richard Dawkins; they don’t all use the word “atheist” – “humanist” is cooler – but that’s what they are. If they worship anything, it’s “human rights” or, in the case of Johann Hari, Laurie Penny and Owen Jones, themselves.

Their attitude towards Christians ranges from indifference to hatred. This is partly thanks to the paedophile scandal in the Catholic Church. We can argue about the extent to which this has been misreported, but not about the fact that crimes against children were covered up by bishops (and not just conservative ones, either). These crimes were seized upon by academics, writers and opportunistic publishers to create an indestructible caricature of institutional Christianity.

One reason that caricature isn’t challenged is that this is the first generation of young people whose parents didn’t go to church themselves. Their religious education consists of nativity plays, visits to Sikh temples and lectures about energy-saving light bulbs.
But that doesn’t make the new atheists stupid, despite their intergalactic levels of conceit. The brightest of them are far, far cleverer than the bishops, who (if you ignore the puzzling anomaly of Rowan Williams) are men of middling intellect – and that’s being polite, in the case of the Catholic hierarchy. All that drivel about “religion in the public square” makes me want to convert to a more rigorous creed, such as a Prince Philip-worshipping cargo cult. 

Mark Steyn on the shakedown of Komen

Is feeding us to the lions not far down the pike?

As Sen. Obama said during the 2008 campaign, words matter. Modern "liberalism" is strikingly illiberal; the high priests of "tolerance" are increasingly intolerant of even the mildest dissent; and those who profess to "celebrate diversity" coerce ever more ruthlessly a narrow homogeneity. Thus, the Obama administration's insistence that Catholic institutions must be compelled to provide free contraception, sterilization and abortifacients. This has less to do with any utilitarian benefit a condomless janitor at a Catholic school might derive from Obamacare, and more to do with the liberal muscle of Big Tolerance enforcing one-size-fits-all diversity.

and

 After 72 hours being fitted for the liberals' cement overcoat and an honored place as the cornerstone of the Planned Parenthood Monument to Women's Choice, Komen attempted to chisel free and back into the good graces of the tolerant: As Nancy Brinker's statement groveled, "We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women's lives."
Congratulations! Planned Parenthood certainly raised Nancy's awareness. I wonder what color ribbon that comes with? Black and blue?
The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto was unimpressed by the liberal protection racket (Nice little charity you've got there; be a shame if anything were to happen to it). As Taranto pointed out, in a real-life protection racket, the victim never pays voluntarily: "The threat is present from the get-go." By contrast, Komen's first donations to Big Abortion were made voluntarily. A prudent observer would conclude that the best way to avoid being crowbarred by Cecile Richards is never to get mixed up with her organization in the first place. 

Go Rick Santorum!!!!

He is the best of the lot running so far.  Here are some excerpts from an interview with Hugh Hewitt (HH):

RS: No, it’s true. I look at the American health care system, and I have always said one of the reasons I decided to run for president was because of Obamacare, and because of the government taking over health care. And I have stories from Canada and from Europe of children like my daughter, who simply are refused care because they just don’t see them as a life worth living, not a good use of government dollars, because she won’t be able to give back anything economically to the country. And that’s a tragedy. It’s a devaluing of human life. And I see that in our current health care system.

-snip-

HH: Now Rick Santorum, obviously you do need money to win against Romney. www.ricksantorum.comis running a money bomb. Have donations fallen off? Or are they continuing to be as strong as they have been since Iowa?
RS: Hugh, we had our best day yesterday. I mean, that’s almost remarkable to report.

-snip-

HH: Now I want to talk to you about two substantive issues, Senator Santorum. The first are these new regulations from the Obama administration. I read the letter from Archbishop Olmstead of Phoenix on the air. Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles has written a new article in First Things. It’s shocking, actually, what’s going on. Should this be a centerpiece of whoever the nominee’s campaign is?
RS: I talked about it in every speech I’ve given today. And here’s what I said, though, Hugh. I said that I took issue with the Catholic Bishops Conference, because Hugh, you may remember, they embraced Obamacare.
HH: Yes.
RS: They embraced it and said…here’s what I said to them. Be careful when you have government saying that they can give you rights, that you have a right to health care, and government’s going to give you something, because once you are now dependant on government, they, not only can they take that right away, they can tell you how to exercise that right, and you can either like it or not. And that’s the problem. That’s what the Catholic Bishops Conference didn’t get, that there’s no free lunch here, folks. If you’re going to give people secular power, then they’re going to use it in a secular fashion. And that’s why, you know, I hate to say it, but you know, you had it coming. And it’s time to wake up and realize that government isn’t the answer to the social ills. It’s people of faith, and it’s families, and it’s communities, and it’s charities that need to do this as it has in America so successfully for so long.
HH: Rick Santorum, what do you advise Catholic hospitals, Catholic colleges, Catholic…the centers of poverty assistance, the adoption agencies? What do you advise them to do in the face of, as Archbishop Olmstead said, we cannot comply with this unjust law?
RS: Civil disobedience. This will not stand. There’s no way they can make this stand. The Supreme Court, eventually, this thing’s going to get to the Supreme Court just like the ministerial hiring issue that was just decided by the Supreme Court the other day. And it was a 9-0 decision that said the Obama administration can’t roll over people of faith when it comes to hiring. Yet in the face of that decision, this radical, secular government of Barack Obama continues to have faith be the least important of the 1^stAmendment. And I just think they fight. They fight in the courts, and they fight by civil disobedience, and go to war with the federal government over this one.

What is the CBC doing with our tax dollars?