4th Day of Christmas: Holy Innocents & Babies Saved By Christmas Carols

    Today, the 4th Day of Christmas, is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, which commemorates the slaughter of all male children in Bethlehem under two years old by King Herod's soldiers.  Herod had learned from the Magi that the Messiah had been born in Bethlehem, and feared that this Messiah would depose him.  As it happened, the Messiah (Jesus) escaped, and Herod went to his eternal reward (whatever it may have been) while Jesus was still an infant. You can read my post on the Holy Innocents (and Holy Innocence) HERE at Principium et Finis.

Massacre of the Holy Innocents, Ludovico Mazzolino

    My post on the other site explores the ramifications of this terrible event in more detail, including its reflection in the modern day abortion industry and our pornified culture. Here I would like to focus briefly on the connection of the Holy Innocents to an article on Lifesitenews.com, “Pro-life Christmas carolers save six babies in Orlando, more in other areas by touching hearts with their singing”.  The article details some amazing rescues, not only in Florida, but across the country:

Pro-Life Action League Executive Director Eric Scheidler described for LifeSiteNews how three different couples turned around and walked away from abortion this year as carolers sang outside Family Planning Associates abortion center in San Bernardino, California.

A compelling feature of the story is that the Christmas Carols themselves seem to have been the decisive factor in changing the minds of people who had come to the clinics intent on aborting a child:

. . . At least one couple was greatly moved by the hymns.

“What impressed me about this report is they actually stopped to tell the caroler group that they changed their mind,” Scheidler stated.

“The couple told them, ‘It was because of your caroling that we decided to keep our baby,’” he said. “The singing was the only thing that happened to change their mind.”

A group in Illinois reports similar results:

"We're having a baby! We changed our minds," a woman called out joyfully to Northwest Families for Life group caroling Tuesday, December 20, in conjunction with Pro-Life Action League’s “Peace in the Womb” Caroling Days in Wood Dale, Ill.

When they met the couple at the car, the group’s co-founder, Maria Goldstein, told LifeSiteNews, the man said to them with a big smile on his face, "Thank you. You're doing a great job!"  

“What exactly was the "great job" we did?” Goldstein said. “We didn't counsel them on the way in; we didn't talk them out of the abortion; we weren't able to show them pictures of developing babies.”  

“All we did was show up, pray, and sing,” she continued. “Maybe they heard our carols inside and felt God tug at their hearts. I guess that really is a "great job!" We got to bring the power of God to this dark place. God is good.”

    God is indeed good.  These stories of the babies saved by carolers cast an interesting light on both the Nativity of Jesus and today’s Feast of the Holy Innocents.  The Incarnation and Nativity came about because, while our efforts are necessary  - “faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (James 2:17) - they are not sufficient.  In the end, we can’t save ourselves, or anyone else, all by ourselves: only the power of God can do that.  In the Life Site story, the Holy Spirit working through sacred Christmas songs changed hearts that were not moved by human arguments.

    The fate of the children killed by Herod’s soldiers in Bethlehem likewise illustrates this point.  Nobody was able to save them from unjust slaughter, they were too young to have any intellectual knowledge of God, and, since Jesus himself was still a baby, baptism was not available to them.  And yet the Church assures us that these little ones did not die in vain, and that they enjoy the reward of Heaven (you can read a short, concise explanation here). They were beyond the help of human agency, but “with God, all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26).  If we do our part, God will do the rest.

    An interesting note: at one time, the story of these poor murdered children itself inspired a large number of songs.  The best known today (the only one, in fact that is still regularly performed) is The "Coventry Carol" (lyrics below), dating from the 16th century.  The spare, hauntingly beautiful rendition in the clip below is performed by Valeria Mignaco and Alfonso Marin.

1. Lullay, Thou little tiny Child,
By, by, lully, lullay.
Lullay, Thou little tiny Child.
By, by, lully, lullay.

2. O sisters, too, how may we do,
For to preserve this day;
This poor Youngling for whom we sing,
By, by, lully, lullay.

3. Herod the King, in his raging,
Charged he hath this day;
His men of might, in his own sight,
All children young, to slay.

4. Then woe is me, poor Child, for Thee,
And ever mourn and say;
For Thy parting, nor say nor sing,
By, by, lully, lullay.
Lully, lulla, thou little tiny child,
By by, lully lullay.

The Truth Is Pro-Life

This Worth Revisiting post was first published January 16th, 2015. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.    

  “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins.”  Thus spake Justice Blackmun, writing for the majority in the U.S, Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision in January, 1973.  And so the era of virtually unlimited abortion in the United States burst upon the nation in a flurry of obfuscation and falsehood.  There never was, in fact, any question of when “life begins”, certainly not on scientific grounds (I defy you to find a biology text that does not agree that life begins at conception): the only question was whether all human life was deserving of protection, or only certain lives.  For more than four decades now, the abortion industry and its apologists have relied on verbal smokescreens like Justice Blackmun’s to provide just enough cover that Americans can avoid the ugly truth about abortion.

     It’s getting harder all the time to keep the charade going.  When Blackmun wrote his decision in 1973, ultrasound was not yet commonly used by obstetricians in the United States, and so for the vast majority of Americans unborn babies remained invisible, out-of-sight . . . and therefore fairly easy to dismiss.  Not anymore.  Virtually all expectant mothers have pictures of their babies in the womb long before the birth, pictures that have become increasingly clearer and more life-like, especially with the advent of 3-d ultrasound (see photo below).  If it looks like a baby, squirms like a baby, gives a “thumbs up” like a baby (see photo above), well, what can one conclude?  Of course, women who go to abortion clinics are unlikely to be offered such pictures, even if an ultrasound is performed, because women who see an ultrasound of their unborn baby are much less likely to abort (see here).

      Howard Slugh, an attorney, addresses the ultrasound issue in an article [here] in National Review Online called “The Life-Affirming Power of Ultrasound”.  He discusses in particular the growing number of state laws in the U.S. that require the abortionist to perform an ultrasound and to show the images to the mother of the unborn baby.  There are some interesting features to the legal battles over these laws.  First of all, even though abortionists fervently deny that ultrasounds change minds, they “in fact have conceded the point in lawsuits challenging mandatory ultrasound laws”, which they have been fighting tooth-and-nail to stop.  Why bother, if they don't give women reason to reconsider their choice to abort?

3-d ultrasound image of a baby in utero

     That’s not the only revealing thing about the abortionists’ legal arguments.  “No one”, according to Slugh, “asserts that the images are misleading or that the laws require additional pro-life commentary.”  The abortion providers can only argue that simply requiring them to show clear, unaltered pictures of what (or really, as the images show, who) is being aborted will dissuade some of their customers.  A federal court, in striking down one of these laws in North Carolina, said in its decision that the law “explicitly promotes a pro-life message by demanding the provision of facts that all fall on one side of the abortion debate.”  Notice that the law does not require the suppression of “facts” that fall on the other side of the debate: it simply requires that the mother know all the facts before undergoing abortion, and the facts happen to be pro-life.  And so the abortionists are reduced to asking the court to help them hide the truth.  As Slugh notes:

All these sources agree that the more a mother knows about her child, the less likely she is to abort him.  This is not because ultrasound images are misleading or politicized; it is because they supply a mother with truthful information necessary for making an informed choice.

     It’s good to bear this in mind as we work to protect life: truth is our ally.  We should continue to publicize the truth by educating and informing our fellow citizems, by participating in pro-life events, and by supporting pro-life laws such as the ones mentioned above that give women more access to full and accurate information. But more than that, we should also be sure to pray to the Lord of Truth, that He continue to open our eyes and hearts, and those of our fellow people, to the Truth of the humanity of the unborn, and to the sanctity of all human life.

Are you Ready For "Real Funny Jokes About Abortion"?

(An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post was first published in September, 2014.  To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.)

“Be Sober, be watchful.  Your adversary the Devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.  Resist him, firm in your faith.”  (1 Peter 8-9)

     In my recent discussion of an essay by Ezekiel Emmanuel supporting the idea that we should not try to keep people alive beyond 75 years old, I said:

The more often such opinions come from such sources, the less unthinkable such opinionThes become in the wider world until they eventually become commonplace.  We have seen this strategy employed to perfection in recent years in regard to the redefinition of marriage. 

The Successful Game Plan

 

They aren't laughing . . . 

   The picture-perfect example of how to bring about a massive change in public perceptions and sentiment, in fact, has been the Gay Rights movement, which eventually built the stunningly successful Gay Marriage campaign.  The strategy was explicitly laid out almost three decades ago in 1987, in an article by Marshall Kirk and Erastes Pill (later expanded into a book) called “The Overhauling Of Straight America” (entire article here). Kirk and Pill call for a graduated media campaign to change public opinion, starting with making homosexuality seem commonplace by talking about it constantly, particularly in the entertainment media; then by portraying homosexuals as victims, at which point they can enlist supporters outside their own circles by appealing to a sense of justice, and only then seeking to destroy the credibility of any critics by using their media reach to portray opponents  as ignorant haters, bigots, etc.  Anyone who has been paying attention for the last three decades has seen this strategy play out precisely as scripted (we are now in the final “destroy the opposition” phase).

     This idea didn’t start with Kirk and Pill, of course, nor with the Gay Rights movement.  Some might recognize the ideas of master “community organizer” Saul Alinsky, who in turn was simply putting a groovy spin on long-standing communist agitprop doctrine - the need to use the entertainment media to shape public opinion explains why the communists were so interested in Hollywood in the thirties and the forties.  Kirk and Pill also saw the potential of the entertainment industry, but they had a resource that was not available to Stalin-era agitators: television.  Therefore:

Where we talk is important. The visual media, film and television, are plainly the most powerful image-makers in Western civilization. The average American household watches over seven hours of TV daily. Those hours open up a gateway into the private world of straights, through which a Trojan horse might be passed. As far as desensitization is concerned, the medium is the message--of normalcy.

“Desensitization” was necessary before the public would accept the rest of the gay rights program, and television did in fact prove to be the perfect medium (feel free explore the links here if you don’t believe that this strategy was employed to the fullest).

If it worked for Gay Marriage, why not abortion?

Mindy Kaling

     This brings us to today, and the curious case of Mindy Kaling, as recounted by Brent Bozell [article here]. Mindy, Bozell tells us, “not only stars in her own sitcom on Fox called 'The Mindy Project,' she’s in charge of it.”  Her character on the show is an OB/GYN.  Professional feminist and pro-abortion activist Amanda Marcotte sees Kaling’s show as a ready-made vehicle for the same sort of desensitization that the Gay Rights people carried out so successfully:

Abortion is actually a perfect topic for a half-hour comedy because it touches on so many themes that comedy writers love to mine for the laughs . . . How easy it is, if you let go of the fear of getting letters from anti-choice nuts, to make some really funny jokes about abortion.

     The problem for Marcotte is that most people, even those who are generally in favor of legal abortion, don’t see the humorous potential in the intentional slaughter of innocent life in the womb (including a huge number of women who have direct experience of abortion, such as the women from "Silent No More" pictured above).  Kaling herself, who doesn’t appear to be pro-life but does seem to know her craft, at first politely rejected the idea of using her show “to make some really funny jokes about abortion”, telling an interviewer: “It would be demeaning to the topic to talk about it in a half-hour sitcom”.  Unfortunately for Mindy, nobody is allowed to sit on the sidelines for this battle, and the abortion industry and its cheerleaders turned up the heat.  Soon she was apologizing for her failure to humorously promote abortion on her program, and has now reached the point where she says she “has faith” that she will find a “hilarious take on abortion that’s saying something new.”  Don’t worry, folks, “The Mindy Project” will be rolling out its abortion laugh-riot any day now.

     This is not the first recent attempt by the abortionists to follow the gay marriage media  playbook: there was the Abortion Comedy “Obvious Child”, and creepy “comedienne” Sarah Silverman has been trying to mine the laugh-potential of abortion for some time.  “Obvious Child”, however, was much more popular with pro-abortion movie critics than it was with the public, so maybe Anthony Esolen is right [see here] that the average person’s innate common sense won’t allow too many of them to be taken in too deeply by the Culture of Death for too long.  Maybe . . . but I’m not sure that he isn’t underestimating the power of people in our fallen state to convince themselves of just about anything, especially if it means the orgy can continue.  Be that as it may, brace yourself: I suspect we’ll be seeing more and more of the “lighter side” of abortion from the entertainment media in the future. Be sober and be watchful . . .

    

Abortion Myth # 4

MYTH: "Most abortions are wrong, but exceptions should be made in cases of rape or incest."

TRUTH:

-The paramount argument against abortion is that intentionally taking the life of an innocent human being is an intrinsically evil act; if we say that it's permissible for a woman who has been raped to kill an innocent child, we have abandoned the very foundation of the case against abortion.

-Aborting a child conceived by rape does nothing to punish the perpetrator but sentences an innocent child to death.   Rebecca Kiessling says:

Did I deserve the death penalty? My “crime” was being conceived through rape.  So the next time you hear people talking about “exceptions” to abortion for rape or incest, think of me.  I am that exception. (Rebecca’s web site here)

Rebecca Kiessling 

 -Very often the abortion is arranged by the perpetrator of rape or incest, against the wishes of the pregnant girl or woman, to cover up his crimes and to allow him to continue them (see The Elliot Institute here, and theunchoice.com).

-Abortion does not bring healing to a rape victim.  “Studies that examine risk factors (here) for psychological problems after abortion show that women  with a history of sexual assault or abuse are more likely to have difficulty coping after abortion.” (The Elliot Institute)

-Other findings by the Elliot Institute:

-Nearly 80 percent of the women who aborted the pregnancy reported that abortion had been the wrong solution.

 -Most women who had abortions said that abortion only increased the trauma they were experiencing.

-In many cases, the victim faced strong pressures or demands to abort.  43 percent of rape victims who aborted said they felt pressured or were strongly directed by family members or health workers to abort.

-In almost every case where an incest victim had an abortion, it was the girls’s parents or the perpetrator who made the decision and arrangements for the abortion, not the girl herself.  In several cases, the abortion was carried out against her expressed wishes, and in a few cases, without her being aware that she was pregnant or that an abortion was taking place.

-None of the women in their study group who gave birth to a child conceived in sexual assault expressed regret or wished they had aborted instead.

-Compassion demands that family, friends, Church and society do all they possibly can to support a woman in this incredibly difficult situation.  Creating another innocent victim is never a solution.

DON”T BUY THE LIE!

UPDATE: Just ran across this article on Lifesite News: "Priest conceived in rape: I forgave my father and heard his confession."

UPDATE: A recent post from Darlene Pawlik, another woman conceived in rape herself, and whose first child was also conceived through rape: "Kicking the Vulnerable to the Curb"

Essential Pro-Life Resources:

Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (link)  

The Elliot Institute (link)  

National Right To Life Committee (link) 

Care-Net (link)

The Nurturing Network (link)

To See The Entire Abortion Myths Series Click HERE

Abortion Myth #13

MYTH: "Legalized abortion is necessary for the protection of women’s rights."

TRUTH: Abortion demeans and exploits women.

-Pregnancy is a natural, healthy state for women; it is the most significant difference between women and men.  Treating pregnancy like a disease implies that there’s something wrong with the nature of women's bodies and therefore with simply being a woman.  The group Feminists for Life says in their Debate Handbook:

When women feel that a pregnant body is a body out of control, deviant, diseased, they are internalizing attitudes of low self-esteem toward the female body.  These attitudes contradict the rightful feminist affirmation of pregnancy as a natural bodily function which deserves societal respect and accommodation.

-It is also natural for women to want to protect and nurture their children; to destroy their own children when they are most in need of protection violates an essential part of women's nature.

Mother and Child, by Frederic Leighton

-Abortion denies the most basic right, the right to life, to hundreds of thousands of unborn women every year.

-Most women who abort do so because they believe they have no choice: many are coerced, and they are often abused and threatened with violence, with loss of employment or educational opportunities, or with other adverse consequences if they don’t abort (see http://www.theunchoice.com/coerced.htm ). Shouldn't we protect a woman's right not to be forced to kill her own children?

-Legalized abortion empowers irresponsible men, because it enables them to exploit women sexually without having to accept the responsibilities of fatherhood.

-Pro-abortion activists fight strenuously at every turn against laws requiring women be given information about abortion and its alternatives.  What about women's right to make informed choices?

-The original feminists (Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, for instance) opposed abortion on the grounds that abortion was a crime against women as well as their children.  Alice Paul said “Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women.”

DON’T BUY THE LIE!

Essential Pro-Life Resources:

Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (link)  

The Elliot Institute (link)  

National Right To Life Committee (link)  

Care-Net (link)

The Nurturing Network (link)


To See The Entire Abortion Myths Series Click HERE 

Abortion Myth # 12

MYTH: "It’s not wrong to abort 'fetuses' because they are not yet persons"

TRUTH: “personhood” is a subjective criterion, dependent on the opinion (and often the convenience) of whomever has the power to decide who is a person and who is not; it has no objective or scientific basis.  Therefore:

Prof. Peter Singer: even newborns are not "persons"with a right to life

1)      A common pro-abortion argument is that the unborn are not technically persons under the law, and that it is therefore permissible to kill them.  This is a false argument because the law cannot make us human beings; that is an objective reality regardless of what the law says.  If it were true, then there was nothing wrong with the mistreatment and killing of African slaves in the United States before the Civil War, because they were not full persons under the law; likewise Jewish people killed in Nazi Germany.

2)      Criteria offered for philosophical definitions of personhood that exclude the unborn also apply to other people who have been born, and whom the proponents would not advocate killing.  For instance:

-          Consciousness – We all lack consciousness when we sleep; some people are unconscious for long periods in comas.  May we kill them?  Also, we don’t really know how early we acquire “consciousness”, but unborn babies do exhibit extensive mental activity well before birth.

-          Dependence on the mother’s body-  Newborns are not much less dependent than the unborn, and actually require much more conscious effort from their care-givers than unborn babies, a dependence that diminishes only gradually over a number of years.  If dependence renders someone a non-person, we should also be free to kill very young children or anyone else who is seriously disabled.

-          Viability – that is, the baby’s ability to survive outside the womb.  Viability, also, is a subjective term: it is a measure of our ability to care for newborn babies, not something inherent in the babies themselves.  We can keep much younger premature babies alive today than we could just a generation ago. And again, this is an argument for killing anyone who is unable to survive on their own.

-          Whether or not the baby is wanted -   It is a measure of how debased the arguments for abortion have become that some people seriously put forth the proposition that some other persons wanting you can determine whether or not you are a human being.  Shall we “abort” homeless adults if there is no family to claim them?

3)      The only objective, rational, and incontrovertible criteria for determining “personhood” are being A) alive and B) human.  From the moment of conception, whether we call them blastocysts, embryos, or fetuses, unborn babies meet both of these requirements.  They are indisputably alive (contrary to Roe vs. Wade, there is not, and has not been for the past two centuries, a scientific “debate about when life begins”); they are also genetically complete, and already have all the genetic material they will need, everything they will ever need, in fact, except food and protection.

4)      It follows that if we can declare living human beings in the womb non-persons, then we have the power to declare other people non-persons as well.  This is already happening in regard to people in the final stages of life, and in some places to the very seriously disabled, if not yet in law at least in practice.  We even see apparently respectable (!) “authorities” such as Princeton Professor Peter Singer argue for the right to kill newborn babies.  None of us are safe from a state that can declare entire categories of human being expendable.

(Randy Alcorn's Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments provided much of the material for this post)

DON’T BUY THE LIE!

Essential Pro-Life Resources:

Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (link)  

The Elliot Institute (link)  

National Right To Life Committee (link)  

Care-Net (link)

The Nurturing Network (link)


To See The Entire Abortion Myths Series Click HERE 

Are We Collaborators in the Culture of Death?

Abortion Good, Religion Bad?  

   I don’t like to get into partisan politics too much on this blog, although I do deal fairly often with moral or social issues that have become politicized.  There are times, however, when partisan politics forces itself upon us so insistently that it cannot be avoided (which is happening with greater frequency in recent years).  This is one of those times.   

     I’ll start with a speech delivered by Hillary Clinton last Thursday (story here) – if you read religious blogs or more conservative news outlets you’ve heard about it already (numerous times); if you rely on more established media, probably not. Mrs. Clinton is the (so far) unchallenged Democratic candidate for President of the United States, and she said something that would have been unthinkable just twenty years ago when her husband was president.  First, she opined that: 

Far too many women are still denied critical access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth.  All the laws we’ve passed don’t count for much if they’re not enforced. 

Safe childbirth is not really what she’s concerned about, as we shall see; she's really talking about  what she refers to as “reproductive health care”, which is newspeak for abortion.  The interesting part is what she sees as the obstacle to, ahem, "reproductive health care"; she said: "deep seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”  Except for some tiny fringe groups,of course, religious beliefs etc. do not affect access to “safe childbirth”, the the issue is, obviously, abortion.  Allow me to translate from the pro-choice dialect into standard English: the right to destroy unborn human life in the womb is a fundamental good, and since religion tends to hinder the fullest realization of that good (after all, only about 1.3 million women are able to abort their babies every year in the U.S.), religion has to bow to the pro-abortion regime or be crushed. 

Not All Issues Are Equal

     Now, it’s not really news that she believes that, or that the leadership of her party believes it.  What is newsworthy is that she is comfortable putting the matter so bluntly. Such a thing, as I mentioned above, would have been unthinkable a couple decades ago.  Her husband, President Clinton, did not want to offend the religious or moral sensibilities of potential voters, so he often softened the message, saying that “abortion should be legal, safe, and rare”,  as if it were a sad, unfortunate necessity.  No longer.   Mrs. Clinton is convinced, apparently, that she can publicly promote abortion, upholding it as a blessing greater than  freedom of religion (the first item in the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights), and that tens of millions of voters will simply shrug and vote for her anyway . . . including about 50% of those voters who identify as Catholic.  Just as they did for Barack Obama, who as an Illinois state senator led the fight to keep it legal to “abort” babies even after they’ve been born.
      Can we agree that this is a problem?  If I may quote once more Cardinal Ratzinger’s letter to Cardinal McCarrick On The Worthiness To Receive Holy Communion: 

There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia. 

According to the then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (and soon-to-be Pope) our preferred prudential judgments about economic or foreign policy cannot outweigh matters of intrinsic evil like abortion (and we can add to that  the dismantling of the institution of marriage).  It should not be that half of all Catholics are voting for candidates who actively promote these evils, whatever poverty programs they favor.  And it doesn’t have to be this way: if even a somewhat larger proportion, let's say 60%, of Catholic Democrats refused to vote for candidates who were not prolife, the party would change, because that’s what parties do (at least in the United States) when they keep losing elections.  Just look at the number of leading Democrats who were pro-life in the early seventies, but changed to pro-abortion as the party moved in that direction: Ted Kennedy, Mario Cuomo, Jesse Jackson, Al Gore.  One wonders whether such prominent party members might have prevented or slowed that anti-life slide if they had stood by their supposed principles? Instead, the party’s likeliest presidential candidate doesn’t even seem to think that directly attacking the teachings of their Church will drive Catholics away. 

Evil Is Never Satisfied

     As I said at the outset, I'm really not that interested in the partisan aspect of all this, because the real problem goes far deeper than a particular political party or candidate (my own state is represented in the U.S. Senate by a pro-abortion Catholic Republican).  Hillary Clinton is who she is, but she wouldn't be in a position to influence, much less make, public policy (or her own positions would be very different) if enough of us didn't allow her to do it, either by downplaying the seriousness of the evils involved, or even by promoting them.  
     We also see a real-life example of the nature of evil: it is never satisfied. If Christians tolerate abortion and the complex of other evils associated with it (pornography, prostitution, promiscuity, contraception, et.al.) the supporters of those things will not tolerate Christian morality in their turn, they will keep pushing until their views are all that remain.  We see a similar trajectory in the movement that started by seeking to end persecution of homosexuals, proceeded to demanding social acceptance, and now threatens to destroy the reputation and even the livelihood of any who disagree. 
     One last thing: supporters of abortion, same-sex marriage, etc. will try to dismiss all opposition as mere "politics", or as irrational "hatred"; they will not concede that there are any moral dimensions to these issues at all, or that opponents are motivated by any sincere concerns.  We can't let those assertions go unchallenged.  We need to be outspoken in our opposition, but also be clear that our position is rooted in love: love of God and his law, but also love of those, including those with whom we disagree, who will be harmed by the evils we oppose.  As St, Paul tells us: "Let us not grow weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap, if we do not lose heart." (Galatians 6:9)