Red Meat by Tiffy

Here is the text of the speech I gave with my rosary-swinging infant on my hip. Perhaps he'll grow up to preach and battle prayerfully as a Dominican friar? (Moms will dream.) I thank the organizers for asking me to participate, and will add a link to both Bob Flint and Catherine Neumayr's speeches from the rally. *update: found here. It was a treat to see friendly faces in the assembled protesters, and to chat with students and countrymen afterwards. I am proud of my city, state and grateful for our participation.

(March 23 -- Anchorage, Alaska) Anchorage has answered, today. This is a call which has its place in history --- and now, so do you. Just beneath the surface of the government healthcare mandate are three driving forces. They are separate but equal. Equally insidious.

First is social engineering, dressed up as humanitarianism. To declare that a certain class of people -- the unborn, in this case -- must meet some pedigree requirement before being granted continued life is eugenics by definition. The gentle cruelty of slogans like, "Every Child A Wanted Child" really display the arrogance and spiritual confusion of those who promote them. Wanted? By whom? Certainly by God, who imparts unique talents into each eternal soul at the moment of conception. The Catholic faith is the sole body with a consistent teaching, in the fullness of truth and love, on the dignity of human life. Which describes why we are the target of the Health and Human Services Department's contraception mandate. Breaching the separation of church and state in this way has created a very false parallel and shown our President's hubris in sharp focus. The Catholic Church is not an arm of the state, subject to its demands. We will not comply, in the words of Archbishop Dolan, is our response to such bureaucrats. Mother Teresa's Sisters don't answer to Washington, D.C.

The second point of attack being that Christians are now made enemies of the state simply by being Christian.

Picture Lady Justice. She is blindfolded to ensure no preference is given to either party beyond what the law requires for both. In the United States of America, we do not ask what your religion is before we will fight in the streets to defend your right to cling to it. We have a President who wants to be a king. This unconstitutional mandate would be a jewel in his crown. We who have gathered here are one day further away from being his subjects.

This encroachment by the federal government leads into the third angle, and perhaps here lies the more general danger. We have these two bodies facing off, which have altogether different goals. The Church has a mission of evangelization and salvation, but never coercion to Her creeds. If we're paying attention, we must be in fervent and constant prayer for the conversion of souls. But each "Yes" for Christ is meaningful because it is the product of free will.

The federal government, however, has an approach and a mission its own. Devoid of any goods or services, it feasts on the fruits of American enterprise, just hoping to bloat itself into continued existence and stay afloat. Who are its prospects? The fabricated demand, in this case for free birth control, is dictating a supply problem. This is a mirage --- it doesn't exist.

The potential recipients of these abortifacent drugs are presented as victims of unyielding dogma.

In truth, outright strong arm tactics belong to our President and his advisors. No one is forced into a Catholic employer, but these private agencies would be forced to violate their foundational teachings, should this mandate pass.

Can't we see the writing on the wall, for the entire government takeover of healthcare, is this its debut? Mitigating human fertility? Our teachings as Christians represent the largest opposition to Obama's agenda. He is threatened by the existence of Catholic healthcare, education and charity. Why?

We must prick up our ears to the terms being used in this debate, without being distracted by the debate itself. Here I think of Sandra Fluke, the almost idyllic Girl Scout figure, whose testimony on Capitol Hill about the expense of hormonal birth control became its own sideshow. Civilian testimony is as routine as sunrise and bean soup in the Senate, rarely thrust into public eye. So again ~ why?

Our president needs villains in order to cast his victim class, whose dependence on entitlements reduces their existence to loyalty through votes. He wants to be their hero.

Now, the villains chosen by this administration are never our actual sworn enemies. That would be too unifying --- this man's very currency is division.

A term we need to reject on its face is "freedom of worship". First, because it's a concession of sorts, and we don't have license to concede the founding principles of our nation. The freedom to worship confines us to the pulpit, the pew and the prayer rug. It says we have access to our special place, and permission to think our special thoughts. But it seeks to remove us from the marketplace, political life and the public sphere if we dissent from the tenets of the Extreme Left Wing in America. This administration is not content to marginalize Christianity and its adherents. They will criminalize it, if mandates like this one are codified into law.

Those who observe Lent and its culmination at Easter are necessarily bound to a Tomb. Not symbolic in the least, we take actual faith in Death itself failing to contain our Lord. Its emptiness reveals His power, glory and love. Eternally.

The tomb of the unknown soldier, in one sense symbolic -- entirely mortal, entirely final lost in the earthly sense -- it reveals our duty as Americans to reflect on this sacrifice. We are the benefactors of their work, which has as its focus liberty and justice. What is our responsibility to them, to God, to the cause of freedom?

Not everyone is an activist, even fewer are soldiers, but the threat to all of us requires action.

Pray. Organize. Pray. Organize.