Bearing false witness

A liar for Jesus

Michael Voris has made a career of being more Catholic than the pope. You'd think, however, that so religious a person would hesitate to break the commandment against bearing false witness. I daresay he thinks it's okay because his lies of in the service of his imagined savior. Yet I wonder: How effective can the lies be when they are so transparent. In one of his typical rants, Voris castigates the president on the occasion of Obama's visit to the Vatican and an audience with the pope. Voris would have us believe that Obama wilted under the pontiff's glowering disapproval.

[T]he pope is the leader of the church militant and there is no more powerful organization on earth than the Catholic Church. Only it can consign the diabolical to the furnaces of hell. Perhaps that's why, when the pope encounters one of hell's agents, he doesn't have much of a smile on his face.... [The pope] doesn't like being a prop, especially for political leaders advancing evil, and his usual ebullient smile was missing from all the official photos, sending a clear message.

In a word, Voris's statement is untrue. The official photographs are readily viewed on the Vatican website. It does not take too long while scrolling through the voluminous archive of images to discover that Pope Francis managed to smile several times in the presence of our evil president and even while greeting Secretary of State John Kerry (often denounced by arch-Catholics for being a pro-choice member of the Church). See for yourself how readily Voris is refuted:

No further words are required.

Sharing the good news

A most unlikely source

Do you remember Ken Ham's lament that most teenagers stop going to church when they leave the family nest? The Creation Museum highlights the datum that only one in three continue their participation in church activities once they are on their own. It's one of the most uplifting features of Ham's “museum.”

Similar good news comes to us now from Michael Voris, the unconscious self-parody who holds forth at ChurchMilitant.TV, routinely excoriating the insufficiently ardent faith of the current leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. Voris wrings his hands in frequent episodes of  The Daily Vortex (“where lies and falsehoods are trapped and exposed” [the distinction between lies and falsehoods is never clarified]), decrying the lack of rigor in contemporary Catholic practice.

Despite himself, Voris recently found himself unhappily reporting good news from the annual “March for Life” in Washington, D.C. With microphone in hand, Voris accosted several young demonstrators who styled themselves “pro-life” and quizzed them on camera, subjecting them to a quick inquisition on the depth and breadth of their faith. To his horror, he discovered that approximately 30% of the young Catholics were unwilling to agree that contraception is always wrong: “Do you think a couple using birth control is always wrong in every situation?”



Voris was deeply shocked that many respondents did not agree with him that contraception is inherently a “diabolical evil.” The video ends with a lengthy and irritatingly repetitive diatribe against all forms of birth control (in stark black-and-white for enhanced drama). Exposing the laxity of young Catholics with respect to contraception was just the tip of the iceberg. Voris also quizzed the March for Life participants on the evils of homosexuality. Many of the young demonstrators disappointed Voris in their lack of anti-gay militancy. “Do you think it is okay for two guys to be in a romantic relationship?”



Some of the respondents are the same young people who indicated acceptance of contraception in the previous installment of The Vortex, but several new faces also popped up. A few of them wanted to qualify their position as “tolerance” rather than as “acceptance” of the right of people to engage in same-sex relationships, but Voris was still deeply dismayed that approximately 20% were essentially okay with gay partnerships.

Voris and his fellow Catholic militants fancy themselves as the faithful remnant that will be exalted at the second coming of Jesus Christ (any day now!), although they do not embrace the rapture concept of evangelical Protestant eschatology. Instead they are bracing themselves for the great apostasy that they believe is already rampant in what Voris dismissively describes as “the Church of Nice,” the insufficiently macho current incarnation of the One True Church. The bunker mentality is evident in each episode of The Vortex. But with Voris's every pronouncement of impending doom, the sensible viewer can take comfort in the dwindling influence of his point of view within the ranks of the next generation of Catholics. Not even the clergy embrace Voris's extreme ultramontanism.

Gaudeamus!

The empty threat

Donohue unfriends the president

The funniest message in my in-box this week was from the Catholic League. I started laughing the moment I saw its title in my list of the day's e-mail: “Obama pushed us too far.”

Resident Catholic League curmudgeon and president Bill Donohue was putting President Obama on notice that mandates for birth-control coverage would spark heated opposition from the Catholic League and its allies, especially if they could succeed in tarting it up as an assault on religious freedom. The risible part is obvious, right? Donohue and his ilk enlisted in the spittle-spraying opposition to Obama a long time ago. How is it even possible for Donohue to be “pushed too far” when he is already the fringiest of the nation's nutcase right wing?

Of course, Donohue is making the argument that Obama has overreached in such a way that the extremist Catholics now have a host of new allies:

President Evil!

We have been inundated with support from Protestants, Jews, Mormons, and others. When the federal government seeks to impose a radical secular agenda on religious entities, denying them the right to exercise their doctrinal prerogatives, it is trampling on the First Amendment rights of the faithful.

I have no doubt that Donohue's phone has been ringing off the hook in a gratifyingly cacophonous way, but how many of his callers were ever Obama allies in the first place? (Hint: Approximately zero.)

While I have every intention of voting for Obama's re-election this year, I have never numbered myself among his most enthusiastic supporters. Simple  realpolitik, however, makes it clear that a second term for the president is the best outcome we can hope for when the alternatives are either hollow men like Romney, egomaniacs like Gingrich, or religious fanatics like Santorum. A Republican administration headed by any of the current candidates would almost certainly destroy support for civil liberties in the Supreme Court for a generation, while more Obama appointments like Sotomayor and Kagan would keep hope alive (or actually increase it, if we were so fortunate as to witness a retirement by Scalia or Thomas).

The president compromises too quickly and too much in too many cases, in my humble opinion, and is a much greater fan of incrementalism than I am (health care public option, dammit!), but all the steps in the right direction, large or small, will be swept away if Obama is defeated. The current hyped-up controversy over birth-control coverage appears to be yet another instance of the president advancing a policy and then quickly backing away from it. I've seen plenty of muttering about this new example of Obama's unwillingness to stick to his guns. This time, however, I wonder.

Although the Catholic bishops and Donohue are chortling over the supposed rebuke to Obama's new healthcare initiative and whining that his hasty retreat doesn't go far enough, it's not clear to me that the president has suffered a defeat. While practical questions of implementation remain, Obama's revised policy includes two strikingly opposite key features: (1) an opt-out option for religious employers who oppose contraception and (2) free coverage of contraception for the employees whose employers opt out. There is, of course, dark muttering about how the “free” coverage will be absorbed (or “hidden”) in the costs for basic healthcare packages, but the president now gets to claim that he addressed the bishops' concerns without revoking the basic mandate of birth control coverage for everyone.

That latter point is undoubtedly something that will rankle the Catholic League and other anti-contraception fanatics. Let's not forget, however, what a small group this is. We're not even talking about abortion here (although Donohue will blusteringly disagree). We're talking about things like The Pill. Plenty of people—even those who describe themselves as pro-choice—have some qualms about abortion. Very few, however, see any problem with ready access to birth control pills. Obama's strategic retreat aligns his administration with birth-control coverage policies in many states while reminding the nation at large that the Catholic League and the bishops do not represent them.

Advantage: Obama.

Religion is bliss

Because of the ignorance thing

And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. (Gen. 3:7)

It must help to lack self-awareness. Surely self-awareness is a trait that would severely handicap the helpful god-botherers who manage to peer past the beams in their eyes while seeking motes in their neighbors'. A perfect example of this blinkered perspective showed up in an anti-abortion flier that came into my possession. It contained an account of its diligent distributor's efforts to paper high school and college campuses with her “pro-life” literature. It also contained an example of her poetry. Her rhyming isn't particularly bad (of course it rhymes; poetry has to rhyme!) and the message isn't especially insipid for a composition of this kind. Not especially. No, just the usual level of insipidity: an anti-Obama rant that equates him to a “king.” This is nothing more than your typical modern-day right-wing hand-wringing.

But read to the end. That's where the pay-off is:

HUMPTY OBAMA

Humpty Obama sat on a wall;
Humpty Obama had a great fall;
All the “king's” media and all the “king's” men
Can't put Obama together again.

Polls in the thirties predict his demise;
People now see through the maze of his lies;
All broken promises—Obama's schemes
Fell on a people to shatter their dreams.

God will be with us to keep us from fear:
Let's look at a hero of yesteryear!
Washington crossing the Delaware—
Hope to a people in dark despair.

Crossing the Delaware of broken schemes,
Someone will rescue our broken dreams;
Humpty Obama in November will lose;
Out by a people with power to choose.

Read that last line again. The anti-abortion activist is singing the praises of people having the “power to choose.”

I swear. No self-awareness at all.

Christ on a stick

Bouncy bouncy

The February 10, 2011, installment of “Catholic Answers” featured a pre-recorded interview with Cardinal Francis Arinze. Once considered among the papabili, Arinze is the African prelate whose puckish sense of humor prompted him to cleverly declare that he was “personally opposed” to gunning down all the members of the U.S. Senate, including those Catholic members who “personally oppose” abortion but decline to enact legislation to outlaw it for everyone. (Arinze's audience chuckled appreciatively as the cardinal equated the slaughter of a legislative body with a “pro-choice” decision to terminate a pregnancy. Never doubt that the cardinal and his admirers really see no difference between abortion and murder.)

Arinze was momentarily flummoxed during his “Catholic Answers” interview when host Patrick Coffin quizzed him about permissible practices during the celebration of mass. After a brief discussion of the unsanctioned (but not forbidden) custom of holding hands during the Lord's Prayer, Coffin indulged in a bit of hyperbole:

People say that receiving holy communion on a pogo stick or letting monkeys into the sanctuary is also not forbidden. I guess it's a matter of balance.

Balance? Yes, I would say that's pretty important in the instance of the pogo-stick eucharist. Catholic traditionalists should also be pleased that both hands are usually needed to maintain stability while bouncing about, so that pretty much settles the question of receiving the host in the hand or on the tongue. It puts a premium, though, on the priest's hand-eye coordination as he thrusts the wafer at the communicant's oscillating tongue.

I haven't quite wrapped my head around the monkeys-in-the-sacristy scenario (unicycles, perhaps?), but I have to admit that Coffin is a veritable font of ideas for resuscitating the entertainment value of the Catholic mass. I'd consider going back!

God the abortionist

IOKIYAD

Colorado voters went to the polls in November 2010 and rejected Amendment 62, the Fetal Personhood Initiative, by 71% to 29%. The failed initiative was an effort on the part of extreme anti-abortionists to confer legal “personhood” on fertilized eggs (“from the beginning of biological development”) under the state constitution. Under Colorado's constitution, the rights of personhood specifically include “acquiring, possessing and protecting property,” ready access to the courts, and “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.” (Certainly it would be an injustice if a fetus were to purchase a choice piece of real estate and then lose it without due process of law.)

Personhood Colorado, the organization sponsoring Amendment 62, was quite forthright in its intentions: “It will make sure that children in the womb are treated exactly the same as children outside the womb.”

That is, abortion is murder.

I know that quite a few people purport to believe that. They accept that a legally entitled person exists before birth and want it recognized in law. And those legal entitlements supposedly exist from the moment of conception, when a human being exists as no more than a one-cell fertilized egg. The conceptus is supposed to be accepted as a full-fledged person.

Unless God kills it, of course. Which he apparently does at least one-quarter of the time. This is, of course, difficult to determine. Other estimates suggest that as many as half of all fertilized eggs perish.

That is, God aborts them.

But he never seems to get credit—or blame—for being the greatest abortionist of all.

It's odd.

A family member suffered a spontaneous abortion last year (and “suffered” is the right word). Early in her pregnancy, she lost the incipient twins she was carrying. The emotional impact was great. She praised God for helping her through the crisis.

This year she has a new pregnancy and it appears to be going better than last year's. She posted a note to family and friends:

we are very excited to announce that we saw a strong heartbeat and a perfectly healthy little baby this morning during our ultrasound. we are expecting a little blessing this summer! thanks for all the prayers, god is so good!

All the credit. None of the blame. It puzzles me. Abortion may be murder, but it's okay if you're a deity.

The Club of Rome

Look what the pope dragged in

Jesus is criticized in chapter 15 of the gospel of Luke for hanging out with sinners. Given the company he's been keeping lately, Jesus may be in for some more negative publicity. Newt Gingrich has been born again as a Roman Catholic, having been received into Christianity's oldest sect on March 29, 2009.

By becoming a Catholic, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives has joined the religion of his third wife. It's just a little bit complicated, now that Newt belongs to a church that does not recognize divorce. During his religious instruction, Gingrich was undoubtedly confronted with the necessity of regarding his first two marriages as retroactively nonexistent, as sacramentally invalid. The Catholic Church normally recognizes Christian marriages as binding, which could be a problem if Newt participated in church weddings. The details can be complicated. It would be much easier if Newt married his first and second wives in civil ceremonies, but I don't know if that was the case. If it wasn't, then the Church authorities had to determine that the first two marriages didn't count. Fortunately (by the grace of God and all that), they have ways and dispensations to deal with difficulties of this nature.

Presumably Newt's current marriage to the former Callista Bisek (who was also his mistress during his second marriage) has been regularized in some fashion. The sacrament of penance can come in very handy in such circumstances and I expect that the happy couple are now properly shriven and bathed in the light of forgiveness. One recalls that Jesus responded to the criticism of his keeping company with sinners by recounting the parable of the lost sheep and the shepherd's joy at bringing it back into the fold. It's a story with a happy ending, although Jesus neglected to comment on what the shepherd would have done if he had instead found a wolf in sheep's clothing. Gingrich is part of the flock now, but the pope might want to keep a wary eye on him. (I'm certain that Callista should.)

One hears that Gingrich is exploring the possibility of a presidential run in 2012. He may as well give it a try. He can run on a platform espousing traditional family values. Sure, it would take a miracle for him to win, but a sprinkling of holy water from Rome has already transformed him into a member in good standing of an anti-divorce religion. He's had one miracle, so why not two?

The fumbling finger of God

His mysterious ways

Colorado state legislator Ted Harvey is a “pro-life hero” according to Barbara McGuigan, the host of the anti-abortion segment of EWTN's Open Line talk-radio program. A resolution was pending at the state capitol to recognize and honor the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Rocky Mountain branch of Planned Parenthood. Harvey saw an opportunity for a publicity stunt, stealthily arranging to have an anti-abortion activist appear as his guest at the legislative session. Harvey's guest was a young woman who had survived being prematurely born as the result of an attempted late-term abortion; she had grown up to become a singer. After Harvey arranged to have her sing the national anthem at the Colorado House of Representatives session, he turned his introduction of her into an attack on the Planned Parenthood resolution before being gaveled down as being out of order. (He was using the time granted for introduction of guests to address measures pending before the house.) His account of his ploy was soon thereafter featured on his campaign website, where he said the whole event was “orchestrated” by God.

McGuigan devoted a large chunk of her June 20, 2006, broadcast to a phone interview with Representative Harvey, lauding him for his efforts to oppose what she called the “heinous resolution” to honor a “legacy of genocide.” She gushingly introduced him and welcomed him to the program:

I can't thank you enough and let's try to get all the details. We want to hear it all, Ted. I remember a very wonderful priest that I know always says nothing happens by accident.

[Noise]

Whoops! I think we might have lost him. Hopefully he'll be able to get us back.

Anyway the holy Russian priest that I just met said he who believes in accidents does not believe in God, so that was not an accident that we lost Ted Harvey. So hopefully he will be able to get back to us.

---

A little while later, Harvey was able to re-establish his phone connection to Open Line, after which the interview continued without further intervention by God. McGuigan chortled with glee throughout the conversation, celebrating the initiative that Harvey had taken against the Planned Parenthood resolution. After devoting a quarter hour to her lovefest with Representative Harvey, McGuigan moved on to her next guest. Curiously enough, however, neither hostess nor guest thought to share with the radio audience “the rest of the story”:

Senate Joint Resolution 06-044 was passed by both houses of the Colorado legislature despite Ted Harvey's supposedly divinely inspired ploy.

Divine inspiration

God is kitsch

The California high school exit exam has started to exact its toll on students who now face the possibility of ending their senior year without a diploma to show for whatever effort they put in. No doubt this has lead to higher levels of prayer in school, which—despite the propaganda of the Christian right—has never been banned from public education. (Students can pray whenever they like as an act of personal freedom, but it's not your teacher's job to lead you. Simple as that.)

For many years religious conservatives have been a major part of the back-to-basics movement. Those who haven't fled to home-schooling want public schools to drill students relentlessly on the classic three R's. They are all in favor of rigorous standards and strict accountability.

As a math teacher I am accustomed to maintaining pretty strict standards with my students. Nevertheless, I account myself a skeptic of the back-to-basics movement, the push for high-stakes testing, and the resurgence of rote learning. It strikes me as a reactionary campaign to return to a past that never really existed, when “all” students were eager and successful learners—well, at least those who were in school in those days instead of in the fields and factories.

Still, it had not occurred to me until recently to question the sincerity of those who argue the fundamentalist educational cause. But it turns out that some of these rigorists are eager to make excuses or exceptions for their fellow travelers. I am not talking about smarmy little prevaricators like the recently fired NASA public information employee who lied about his college drop-out status while injecting his sectarian point of view into government research on the Big Bang and the age of the universe. No, my epiphany came during EWTN's Open Line broadcast last Tuesday. It turns out that the most miserable dreck passes for divinely inspired art when churned out by one of their own.

On Tuesdays it is Barbara McGuigan's turn to host Open Line. I've mentioned her before. Her shtick is pro-life activism. McGuigan likes to encourage her listeners to lobby against abortion without fear of ineloquence because God “gives us the words to say.” This past week, on February 7, a caller named Theresa shared with Barbara a poem she had written, no doubt under divine inspiration. Brace yourselves, folks. Here is the whole thing:

The hardest choice

Did you buy that lie?
It's not just an apple anymore.
We've turned it into a pie
Overflowing and growing with sweet knowing
In which the words are changed and all rearranged.

So do you get this trick on the rhetoric?
Don't buy a pie with a lie.
Get a pie with no lie,
One where all is growing with humble, meek knowing
With grace from above that comes with selfless love.

So never quit when you find you're not fit
And don't fall apart, just open your heart.
Get into the right story that's filled with mercy and glory
For you, for me, for all.

So choose to seek and live the wisdom from above
On the way to the kingdom of love.

---

McGuigan was delighted with the poem and squealed, “That's beautiful, Theresa! I love it! That's wonderful. Wonderful poem!”

A few possibilities suggest themselves. Perhaps Barbara was merely being polite (I doubt it). Maybe Barbara has a tin ear (quite likely). Possibly Barbara gives high marks to anything—no matter how dreadful—that follows the party line (Bingo!). It was a moment of cognitive dissonance.

I listened to the recording of the poem several times while transcribing it as accurately as I could for your edification. Several times. Please pray for me!

Postscript: I regret to inform you that the figurine of Jesus playing football is part of a series.

The end of abortion

It's not what you think

The anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision always occasions a lot of excitement and political demonstrations. Emotions are heightened this year by the imminent replacement of retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor with someone who is less likely to support abortion rights. Giddy pro-lifers see their best opportunity to overturn Roe looming on the horizon.

Even a 5–4 decision to vacate Roe would not, however, immediately result in the end of abortion. It would instead return us to the situation that preceded Roe, when the fifty states regulated abortion in dramatically different ways, some outlawing it outright while others making it readily available. (Ironically enough, California's very liberal abortion laws were enacted with the signature of pro-life icon Ronald Reagan.) In such a situation, we could expect to see a patchwork of laws roughly approximating the national divide between so-called red states and blue states.

Although I am talking about the end of abortion, I do not foresee this as the consequence of future court action or legislative enactment. Those factors, I believe, will be frustratingly peripheral to those engaged in the political struggle over a woman's freedom to choose. Rather, abortion will diminish almost to a vanishing point in a way that will certainly be regarded as a staggering defeat by those who style themselves as pro-life. In fact, many of the losers will angrily declare that abortion has not so much gone away as merely changed its mode of operation. I may even agree with them, but that will give them little comfort.

The harbinger of my prognostication is Plan B, currently tied up in the FDA by the Bush administration's efforts to pander to its pro-life political base. Plan B (levonorgestral), as you may already know, is currently a prescription-only drug that has been proposed for over-the-counter sales. It's a progestin-only medication that is designed to prevent pregnancy if taken within 72 hours of intercourse. Plan B interferes with ovulation, fertilization, and implantation. The third item is the tricky one, because many pro-life groups adhere to the Roman Catholic dogma that a fertilized ovum is a human being and that pregnancy begins at the instant of fertilization.

The modern definition of pregnancy says that a woman is pregnant when the fertilized egg implants in the endometrium, the inner membrane of the womb. If, however, you believe a woman is pregnant the moment a sperm cell penetrates the egg cell, then to you the prevention of implantation is an abortion. From this point of view, you did not head off the pregnancy, you killed a human being.

Chopping down an acorn

The idea that a fertilized ovum is that same as a human being strikes me as being no more sensible than equating an acorn with an oak tree. The acorn has all the resources and genetic data necessary to generate a stately oak, but it is not an oak tree. A fertilized egg contains all the data necessary to generate a human being, but it is not yet a person. We know now that many fertilized eggs never implant, making God himself the busiest abortionist in creation. Implantation failure may occur spontaneously as a consequence of immune system interactions (perhaps rejecting the foreign matter that is the male's contribution to the fertilized egg) or for other reasons that we just don't understand yet.

Human intervention with Plan B or its eventual successors will—depending on one's perspective—either dramatically reduce the likelihood of abortions of unwanted pregnancies or dramatically increase the number of chemically-induced abortions. The conflict in interpretation will stem from opposing definitions of fundamental concepts. Whichever way the partisans view it, the inexorable progress toward greater control over the human reproductive cycle will increasingly make it easier to avoid the near occasion of later-term abortions. Those will be left (in states that don't ban it) for woman who don't make their minds up early enough to avail themselves of remedies like Plan B.

State of the art

I expect surgical abortions to become exceedingly rare in the future whether Roe v. Wade remains the law of the land or not. While anti-abortion administrations like that of the incumbent can fight a rear-guard action, the success of such anti-choice efforts depends on a static state of the art. That is exactly what we do not have. Just as we can expect contraceptives such as Plan B to have ever-more-effective successors, we can anticipate that outright abortifacients will continue to advance. Such drugs as RU-486, which induces early-term miscarriages, will be supplanted by milder and even more reliable forms.

If I were a pro-lifer, I would be only mildly heartened by recent developments on the national scene. The trend toward greater control over reproduction is inevitable. Short of ending biological and chemical research, we cannot keep the birth control genie in the beaker. What I cannot predict, however, is what portion of the pro-life crowd will eventually face reality and discover that Bill Clinton was their true leader and prophet: Abortions should be "safe, legal, and rare." That's the best anyone can hope for.

Why do you feel bad, whore?

Cruel to be kind

Some senior citizens have a special "phone voice" that they use during telephone conversations. Perhaps you know what I mean. My mother's phone voice is sing-songy and punctuated with little giggles; the manner is precious and a bit breathless. I suppose the special phone voice is an artifact of the days when telephone conversations were uncommon and called for more ceremony. Today, of course, cell phones are ubiquitous and telephone conversations are everyday occurrences (and seemingly 24 hours a day for some of our young people).

This is all by way of introducing Barbara McGuigan (pronounced "McWiggin") of EWTN's Open Line call-in program. McGuigan has an old school radio voice that sounds like a parody of my mother's phone voice. She anchors the Tuesday installment of Open Line, which is devoted to attacking abortion and fighting the evil pro-choice minions of Satan. She gushes over her callers, squealing with delight when they phone in to agree with her and affecting a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone if they dare dispute with her. McGuigan laughs at inappropriate moments more often than Julius Hibbert. Her closest real-life counterpart is probably the wacky Pat Robertson, who grins like a loon while denouncing various opponents as damned.

On December 6, 2005, McGuigan set her sights on the Los Angeles Times article Offering Abortion, Rebirth. With the assurance of the true believer, she repeatedly described as a liar the abortion doctor who was profiled in the article. McGuigan denounced him for saying he waived his fee for women with financial hardship, stating that this had to be untrue. It's strange how she calls him as a tool of Satan one moment and in the next moment declares that his only motivation is the money he makes from abortion fees; that's a pretty lame tool of Satan if he doesn't offer the infernal procedure under all circumstances. But logical consistency has never been one of McGuigan's strong suits. Minutes later she vigorously agreed with a caller who denounced the abortion doctor for charging money: "If he really thinks he's providing a service, he should be doing it for free!" "You are so right!" said Barbara, who knew that the doctor didn't waive his fees because she had already decided he was a liar.

The abortion doctor told the Times that during the first two trimesters he completely deferred to the woman in her judgment of her condition: "It's not a baby to me until the mother tells me it's a baby." We could argue whether the doctor's professed lack of a personal opinion is an exercise in sophistry, but McGuigan is ready to deal in certainties. Barbara stumbles, however, when she tries to raise the unassailable standard of life: "Every abortion flattens a heartbeat," observed Barbara, noting that the fetal heart begins to beat within 18 to 24 days of conception. She regarded this as a telling point, yet did not consider the obvious problem that such a criterion for "life" opens the door to birth control medications like Plan B, which prevent implantation in the womb and thus preclude there ever being a beating heart. Surely she did not mean to imply a loophole in the Catholic dogma that life begins at conception. Fortunately, she had a "brilliant" caller on the line who agreed with her.

McGuigan also helpfully embroidered the comments of the abortion doctor's clients. Where one woman was described in the Times article with the sentence "Ending her pregnancy seemed easier, she says," McGuigan smoothly changed that to "Killing her baby seemed easier, she says" as she read excerpts to her radio audience. She did not bother to admit that she had redacted the text, allowing her listeners to assume they were hearing actual quotes.

On this particular Tuesday, Barbara's prize exhibit was a caller named Charlotte, who reported that she had had an abortion as a teenager over twenty years ago, had converted to Catholicism, and was now a basket case. Charlotte was a textbook example of the pro-life approach to women who have had abortions. Now that she was Catholic, she was being made to understand that she was a murderess. Forgiven, naturally, but a murderess just the same. Strangely enough, Charlotte was having trouble gaining comfort from her new insight.

"I am drenched in guilt," Charlotte confessed. "And I think that being in the Catholic Church now has heightened my consciousness and I’ve been Catholic for three years and it’s just been—ever since then—eating and gnawing. And the guilt has grown exponentially every day that I get out of bed until I was not functioning. I had to go into counseling." Barbara was happy to point out to Charlotte that she was now washed in the blood of the lamb and surely she must realize that. Charlotte agreed that she was forgiven, but she was still acutely suffering. McGuigan cheerfully announced that all was well and dispatched her caller with a wish for continued enlightenment. It doesn't seem to me that Charlotte was particularly benefiting from the knowledge of her iniquity.

Open Line is always a happy gabfest on Tuesdays. McGuigan is generous in her praise of agreeable callers, while suffering penitents like Charlotte are jollied along and earnestly told that all is well now (even if it clearly isn't). It smacks a bit of those Protestant healing ministries where the lame and halt rise up and run to and fro in the revival tent; we don't get to see how they scramble to recover their canes and crutches after the cameras are turned off and their adrenaline rushes have faded. McGuigan isn't as skilled as the faith healers in pumping up afflicted callers like Charlotte, but she forges bravely ahead. She knows the truth and it has set her free—free to step sprightly over the shattered souls of those she has helped to understand their evil, evil ways.