Pope Welcomes New US Ambassador

Pope Benedict XVI receives credentials from new U.S. Ambassador to the

Holy See, Mary Ann Glendon, during a private meeting at the Vatican.

REUTERS/Osservatore Romano

Pope Benedict XVI warmly welcomed Mary Ann Glendon as the new United States Ambassador to the Holy See today, and saluted the "American people's historic appreciation of the role of religion in shaping public discourse and in shedding light on the inherent moral dimension of social issues."

In his welcome to the former Harvard Law School professor, the Pope urged greater respect for "God's gift of life from conception to natural death, and the safeguarding of the institution of marriage, acknowledged as a stable union between a man and a woman, and that of the family" -- themes the Pope is likely to emphasize when he visits the United States in April.

The full text of the Holy Father's address to Dr. Glendon is here.

Don't Buy the Cookies!

From WorldNetDaily

By Jane Chastain

I used to dread this time of year. In the month of March, Girl Scouts are out in force in their smart little green and brown uniforms selling cookies. There was a time I would buy a box from every girl I encountered as a payback for my positive scouting experience.

However, buying that box of cookies now presents a moral dilemma, as the Girl Scouts have become a training ground for the left-wing feminist agenda.

I used to get a knot in my stomach as I turned down these Girl Scouts. Last year I came up with a better plan. I began giving each girl who approached me a letter with an offer to give her troop $100 if it will change its affiliation to the American Heritage Girls. I greet the leader or parent with the girl and hand her information from the AHG website, along with my column "Confessions of a former Girl Scout" and my contact information.

I can still remember the pride I felt as I stood at attention in my crisp Girl Scout uniform to recite the promise:

On my honor, I will try:To do my duty to God and my country,To help other people at all times,To obey the Girl Scout Laws.

How times have changed! Now God has an asterisk telling the girl that "it is OK to replace the word 'God' with whatever word your spiritual beliefs dictate."

The word "duty" (to God) has been replaced with "serve" and the new all-inclusive Girl Scouts are free to serve anyone, including themselves, which seems fitting after reviewing some of their materials that stress "girl empowerment" and moral relativism.

Is it any wonder that the "Covenant of the Goddess" website now boasts that the Girl Scouts allow its members to earn and wear its Over the Moon and Hart and Crescent Award, offered to any young person who is a member of a nature-oriented religion (Wicca, Druid, Asatru, you name it)?

While the Boy Scouts have clung to their original God-centered charter, the Girl Scouts adopted a policy of nondiscrimination and now accepts atheists and lesbians as scouts, troop leaders and staff. In 2004, the Arcus Gay and Lesbian Fund gave a $21,500 grant to the Glowing Embers GS Council in Kalamazoo, Mich., to develop and produce a series of interactive games based on the new diversity (code word for homosexual) curriculum, "Living on My Honor"

The changes began in 1970 when feminist Betty Friedan was put on the national governing board. Soon afterward, the Girl Scouts began purging their materials of all positive references to homemakers. Partnerships with Planned Parenthood followed and the Girl Scouts begin showing up at gun control rallies like the Million Mom March. The Scouts have adopted a new global agenda under the Studio 2B program. The Scouts bemoan the fact that the United States has not signed the radical feminist treaty, the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which would force nations to legalize abortion and prostitution. Guess a girl has to make a living!

To earn the Women Worldwide Interest Project Patch, senior girls are asked to research women who have made an impact. Eve Ensler, the author of the "Vagina Monologues," and Rigoberta Menchu Tum, the lesbian Guatemalan Marxist activist, are held up as role models.

To be sure, there are many good people engaged in Girl Scouting, and the experience largely depends on the character of the local leader and the disposition of the area council. Local councils select area delegates. However, these delegates have no say in national policy. This presents a real conflict for most people of faith, especially since the Girl Scouts brought in the controversial New Age group the Ashland Institute to assist in leadership training.

Today, the American Heritage Girls is everything the Girl Scouts used to be. AHG began in 1995 and offers a scouting experience similar to the Boy Scouts of America. AHG's highest honor is the Stars and Stripes Award patterned after the BSA's Eagle award. It is not at all surprising that the Girl Scouts is losing members, while AHG is one of the fastest-growing youth organizations in America. AHG now boasts 185 troops and more than 6,300 members in 33 states with plans to expand to all 50 states in 2008.

I proudly support them and I hope you will too.

Poland and Malta Stand Up to European Union, United Nations on Abortion

by Samantha Singson

The governments of Poland and Malta broke rank with the European Union on the question of abortion this week. The dissension occurred at the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) which convened it’s annual two-week meeting at UN headquarters in New York on Monday. The reaction of Poland and Malta happened after the EU tried to shift the meeting’s agenda to include the right to abortion.

On Tuesday Radoslaw Mleczko, the Polish Under-Secretary of State in the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy, told the gathering of UN Member States that Poland generally aligned itself with the EU but that any EU reference to sexual and reproductive health could not include abortion.

On Thursday afternoon, the head of Malta’s mission to the UN, Ambassador Saviour F. Borg said, “Malta would like to clarify its position with respect to the language relating to sexual and reproductive health and rights in the [EU] statement. Malta firmly continues to maintain that any position taken or recommendations made regarding women’s empowerment and gender equality should not in any way create an obligation on any party to consider abortion as a legitimate form of reproductive health rights, services or commodities.”

The split in the European Union is significant because the EU hardly ever splits on questions of social policy at the UN. Even countries that are generally anti-abortion go along with the more radical approach taken by the United Kingdom, France and Germany. They do this as an agreement that the EU will always work out their differences behind closed doors and present a united front at UN negotiations.

This works to the advantage of the pro-abortion states since they outnumber the anti-abortion states.

Moreover, an EU that is divided is one that can be defeated on social policy questions. In fact, the last time the EU split in any significant way was in the UN cloning debate which resulted in the UN calling for the ban of all forms of human cloning, an effort opposed by the UK, France, Germany and other left-wing European governments. It is unclear how meaningful this current split will be in the negotiations which will begin in earnest tomorrow.

Pro-life and pro-family issues were also woven into UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s opening remarks to the commission on Monday when he criticized the now widespread practice of choosing abortions based on the sex of the baby, an issue that was all but taken off the agenda at last year’s CSW despite solid support from both civil society and numerous governmental delegations.

In his speech to launch the new UN multi-year campaign to end violence against women, the Secretary-General stressed, “Through the practice of prenatal sex selection, countless others are denied the right even to exist. No country, no culture, no woman young or old is immune to this scourge.”

The Secretary-General also highlighted the importance of families and children stating, “We know that violence against women compounds the enormous social and economic toll on families, communities, even whole nations. And we know that when we work to eradicate violence against women, we empower our greatest resource for development: mothers raising children.”

Among the many pro-life and pro-family lobbyists attending the CSW is a large contingent of high school girls from Overbrook Academy in Rhode Island. Fourteen year old Elsa Corripio told the Friday Fax, “We want these delegates to know that there are many young people who believe in respecting life.”

Ana Paola Rangel, 15, added, “Maybe we can't change the world, but we know we can make a difference.”

The CSW meeting continues through next week.


Samantha Singson writes for the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute. This article originally appeared in the pro-life group's Friday Fax publication.

William F. Buckley: May He Rest In Peace

William F. Buckley, Jr.

1925 - 2008

From National Review Online

By Peter Wehner

There will be many people who knew Bill Buckley far better than I who will attest to his personal kindness and grace over the years. And many people will pour forth with testimonies about Mr. Buckley's monumental role in the history of modern conservatism. I simply want to recount his role in my own pilgrimage of faith.

When I was a young Christian, I happened to come across a re-broadcast of a Firing Line episode in which Mr. Buckley interviewed the British journalist and author Malcolm Muggeridge. The subject was Muggeridge's Christian faith. I had never heard of "St. Mugg" before - but as I watched the interview, I was utterly captivated by the conversation. It was a remarkable, intellectually serious, uplifting, and even moving discussion between two close friends, united in common purpose. That interview became a kind of touchstone for me, one that I still return to (via videotape) from time to time. Years later, I corresponded with Mr. Buckley about this interview, and about faith more broadly. He was as gracious - more gracious - than I could have hoped for.

William Buckley was many remarkable things. But he was, perhaps above all, a good and faithful servant of the Lord. And now he is in the company of his Lord and his beloved wife Pat, in a place where there is no more death or mourning, crying or pain, and where every tear has been wiped away. And with Messrs. Buckley and Muggeridge together again, the conversation has gotten even better, even richer.

God bless William F. Buckley, Jr.

British Parliament To Investigate Catholic Influence in Catholic Schools

This blog has frequently lamented the growing secularization of Europe and its suicidal refusal to even acknowledge the Christian foundations on which Western civilization flourished. But with this story in The Independent about a British Parliamentary investigation into Catholic influence in Catholic schools, one must wonder if outright persecution is at hand.

According to The Independent, "Members of the Children, Schools and Families Committee plan to call senior bishops to give evidence in an inquiry into the approach schools are adopting towards a range of issues – including abortion, sex education and PSHE (personal and social health education) classes." Let's hope that with that "Catholic influence," those students are preparing for the world in which they may have to live, and are learning about the English Martyrs and the Tyburn Tree.

Has anyone heard about a Parliamentary investigation into Muslim influence in Britain's Islamic schools?

OBAMA'S WOMEN REVEAL HIS SECRET

From the Asia Times Online

By Spengler

"Cherchez la femme," advised Alexander Dumas in: "When you want to uncover an unspecified secret, look for the woman." In the case of Barack Obama, we have two: his late mother, the went-native anthropologist Ann Dunham, and his rancorous wife Michelle. Obama's women reveal his secret: he hates America.

We know less about Senator Obama than about any prospective president in American history. His uplifting rhetoric is empty, as Hillary Clinton helplessly protests. His career bears no trace of his own character, not an article for the Harvard Law Review he edited, or a single piece of legislation. He appears to be an empty vessel filled with the wishful thinking of those around him. But there is a real Barack Obama. No man - least of all one abandoned in infancy by his father - can conceal the imprint of an impassioned mother, or the influence of a brilliant wife.

America is not the embodiment of hope, but the abandonment of one kind of hope in return for another. America is the spirit of creative destruction, selecting immigrants willing to turn their back on the tragedy of their own failing culture in return for a new start. Its creative success is so enormous that its global influence hastens the decline of other cultures. For those on the destruction side of the trade, America is a monster. Between half and nine-tenths of the world's 6,700 spoken languages will become extinct in the next century, and the anguish of dying peoples rises up in a global cry of despair. Some of those who listen to this cry become anthropologists, the curators of soon-to-be extinct cultures; anthropologists who really identify with their subjects marry them. Obama's mother, the University of Hawaii anthropologist Ann Dunham, did so twice.

Obama profiles Americans the way anthropologists interact with primitive peoples. He holds his own view in reserve and emphatically draws out the feelings of others; that is how friends and colleagues describe his modus operandi since his days at the Harvard Law Review, through his years as a community activist in Chicago, and in national politics. Anthropologists, though, proceed from resentment against the devouring culture of America and sympathy with the endangered cultures of the primitive world. Obama inverts the anthropological model: he applies the tools of cultural manipulation out of resentment against America. The probable next president of the United States is a mother's revenge against the America she despised.

Ann Dunham died in 1995, and her character emerges piecemeal from the historical record, to which I will return below. But Michelle Obama is a living witness. Her February 18 comment that she felt proud of her country for the first time caused a minor scandal, and was hastily qualified. But she meant it, and more. The video footage of her remarks shows eyes hooded with rage as she declares:

For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment.

The desperation, frustration and disappointment visible on Michelle Obama's face are not new to the candidate's wife; as Steve Sailer, Rod Dreher and other commentators have noted, they were the theme of her undergraduate thesis, on the subject of "blackness" at Princeton University. No matter what the good intentions of Princeton, which founded her fortunes as a well-paid corporate lawyer, she wrote, "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong."

Never undererestimate the influence of a wife who bitch-slaps her husband in public. Early in Obama's campaign, Michelle Obama could not restrain herself from belittling the senator. "I have some difficulty reconciling the two images I have of Barack Obama. There's Barack Obama the phenomenon. He's an amazing orator, Harvard Law Review, or whatever it was, law professor, best-selling author, Grammy winner. Pretty amazing, right? And then there's the Barack Obama that lives with me in my house, and that guy's a little less impressive," she told a fundraiser in February 2007.

"For some reason this guy still can't manage to put the butter up when he makes toast, secure the bread so that it doesn't get stale, and his five-year-old is still better at making the bed than he is." New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reported at the time, "She added that the TV version of Barack Obama sounded really interesting and that she'd like to meet him sometime." Her handlers have convinced her to be more tactful since then.

"Frustration" and "disappointment" have dogged Michelle Obama these past 20 years, despite her US$300,000 a year salary and corporate board memberships. It is hard for the descendants of slaves not to resent America. They were not voluntary immigrants but kidnap victims, subjected to a century of second-class citizenship even after the Civil War ended slavery. Blackness is not the issue; General Colin Powell, whose parents chose to immigrate to America from the West Indies, saw America just as other immigrants do, as a land of opportunity. Obama's choice of wife is a failsafe indicator of his own sentiments. Spouses do not necessarily share their likes, but they must have their hatreds in common. Obama imbibed this hatred with his mother's milk.

Michelle Obama speaks with greater warmth of her mother-in-law than of her husband. "She was kind of a dreamer, his mother," Michelle Obama was quoted in the January 25 Boston Globe. "She wanted the world to be open to her and her children. And as a result of her naivete, sometimes they lived on food stamps, because sometimes dreams don't pay the rent. But as a result of her naivete, Barack got to see the world like most of us don't in this country." How strong the ideological motivation must be of a mother to raise her children on the thin fair of government assistance in pursuit of a political agenda.

"Naivete" is a euphemism for Ann Dunham's motivation. Friends describe her as a "fellow traveler", that is, a communist sympathizer, from her youth, according to a March 27, 2007, Chicago Tribune report. Many Americans harbor leftist views, but not many marry into them, twice. Ann Dunham met and married the Kenyan economics student Barack Obama, Sr, at the University of Hawaii in 1960, and in 1967 married the Indonesian student Lolo Soetero. It is unclear why Soetero's student visa was revoked in 1967 - the fact but not the cause are noted in press accounts. But it is probable that the change in government in Indonesia in 1967, in which the leftist leader Sukarno was deposed, was the motivation.

Soetero had been sponsored as a graduate student by one of the most radical of all Third World governments. Sukarno had founded the so-called Non-Aligned Movement as an anti-colonialist turn at the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia. Before deposing him in 1967, Indonesia's military slaughtered 500,000 communists (or unfortunates who were mistaken for communists). When Ann Dunham chose to follow Lolo Soetero to Indonesia in 1967, she brought the six-year-old Barack into the kitchen of anti-colonialist outrage, immediate following one of the worst episodes of civil violence in post-war history.

Dunham's experience in Indonesia provided the material for a doctoral dissertation celebrating the hardiness of local cultures against the encroaching metropolis. It was entitled, "Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: surviving against all odds". In this respect Dunham remained within the mainstream of her discipline. Anthropology broke into popular awareness with Margaret Mead's long-discredited Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), which offered a falsified ideal of sexual liberation in the South Pacific as an alternative to the supposedly repressive West. Mead's work was one of the founding documents of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and anthropology faculties stood at the left-wing fringe of American universities.

In the Global South, anthropologists went into the field and took matters a step further. Peru's brutal Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerilla movement was the brainchild of the anthropologist Efrain Morote Best, who headed the University of San Cristobal of Huamanga in Ayacucho, Peru, between 1962 and 1968. Dunham's radicalism was more vicarious; she ended her career as an employee of international organizations.

Barack Obama received at least some instruction in the Islamic faith of his father and went with him to the mosque, but the importance of this experience is vastly overstated by conservative commentators who seek to portray Obama as a Muslim of sorts. Radical anti-Americanism, rather than Islam, was the reigning faith in the Dunham household. In the Muslim world of the 1960s, nationalism rather than radical Islam was the ideology of choice among the enraged. Radical Islam did not emerge as a major political force until the nationalism of a Gamal Abdel Nasser or a Sukarno failed.

Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother's milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.

There is nothing mysterious about Obama's methods. "A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is," wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are the world's biggest suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture. Listening to Obama speak, Sinclair Lewis' cynical tent-revivalist Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone Power's portrayal of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noire Nightmare Alley. The latter is available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly recommended as an antidote to having felt uplifted by an Obama speech.

America has the great misfortune to have encountered Obama at the peak of his powers at its worst moment of vulnerability in a generation. With malice of forethought, he has sought out their sore point.

Since the Ronald Reagan boom began in 1984, the year the American stock market doubled, Americans have enjoyed a quarter-century of rising wealth. Even the collapse of the Internet bubble in 2000 did not interrupt the upward trajectory of household assets, as the housing price boom eclipsed the effect of equity market weakness. America's success made it a magnet for the world's savings, and Americans came to believe that they were riding a boom that would last forever, as I wrote recently [1].

Americans regard upward mobility as a God-given right. America had a double founding, as David Hackett Fischer showed in his 1989 study, Albion's Seed . Two kinds of immigrants founded America: religious dissidents seeking a new Promised Land, and economic opportunists looking to get rich quick. Both elements still are present, but the course of the past quarter-century has made wealth-creation the sine qua non of American life. Now for the first time in a generation Americans have become poorer, and many of them have become much poorer due to the collapse of home prices. Unlike the Reagan years, when cutting the top tax rate from a punitive 70% to a more tolerable 40% was sufficient to start an economic boom, no lever of economic policy is available to fix the problem. Americans have no choice but to work harder, retire later, save more and retrench.

This reversal has provoked a national mood of existential crisis. In Europe, economic downturns do not inspire this kind of soul-searching, for Europeans, richer are poorer, remain what they always have been. But Americans are what they make of themselves, and the slim makings of 2008 shake their sense of identity. Americans have no institutionalized culture to fall back on. Their national religion has consisted of waves of enthusiasm - "Great Awakenings" – every second generation or so, followed by an interim of apathy. In times of stress they have a baleful susceptibility to hucksters and conmen.

Be afraid - be very afraid. America is at a low point in its fortunes, and feeling sorry for itself. When Barack utters the word "hope", they instead hear, "handout". A cynic might translate the national motto, E pluribus unum, as "something for nothing". Now that the stock market and the housing market have failed to give Americans something for nothing, they want something for nothing from the government. The trouble is that he who gets something for nothing will earn every penny of it, twice over.

The George W Bush administration has squandered a great strategic advantage in a sorry lampoon of nation-building in the Muslim world, and has made enemies out of countries that might have been friendly rivals, notably Russia. Americans question the premise of America's standing as a global superpower, and of the promise of upward mobility and wealth-creation. If elected, Barack Obama will do his utmost to destroy the dual premises of America's standing. It might take the country another generation to recover.

"Evil will oft evil mars", J R R Tolkien wrote. It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama. As he recalled in his 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, Obama idealized the Kenyan economist who had married and dumped his mother, and was saddened to learn that Barack Hussein Obama, Sr, was a sullen, drunken polygamist. The elder Obama became a senior official of the government of Kenya after earning a PhD at Harvard. He was an abusive drunk and philanderer whose temper soured his career.

The senior Obama died in a 1982 car crash. Kenyan government officials in those days normally spent their nights drinking themselves stupid at the Pan-Afrique Hotel. Two or three of them would be found with their Mercedes wrapped around a palm tree every morning. During the 1970s I came to know a number of them, mostly British-educated hollow men dying inside of their own hypocrisy and corruption.

Both Obama and the American public should be very careful of what they wish for. As the horrible example of Obama's father shows, there is nothing worse for an embittered outsider manipulating the system from within than to achieve his goals - and nothing can be more terrible for the system. Even those who despise America for its blunders of the past few years should ask themselves whether the world will be a safer place if America retreats into a self-pitying shell.

Note1. Obama bin lottery Asia Times Online, January 29, 2008.

A Call To Texans

A call to action for all Texans to stand for their principles and convictions and to support Mike Huckabee in the primary on March 4, 2008. Mike Huckabee needs Texas, y'all!