This item at LifeSiteNews caught my eye. To their credit, at least they had something to say about Sen. John McCain's suggestion that the GOP should let the issue of abortion alone. The national Right to Life Committee had nothing to say, confirming it has become a mere adjunct of the GOP.
But the article at LifeSiteNews also contained this curious, and deplorable, sentence:
Leading figures in the party's leadership hope the party will change its long-held stance on the increasingly conjoined issues of the right to life, defending marriage, and immigration enforcement -- another issue McCain raised on Fox News.
Now, we all move in overlapping intellectual, political and social circles. But how on earth did the people at LifeSiteNews come to see the issue of right to life and "immigration enforcement" as "increasingly conjoined"? One wishes they would see the issues as conjoined in the manner in which Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas, saw them as conjoined in his Steele lecture earlier this autumn, that the people at LifeSiteNews think the key thing about immigration enforcement is that it is a mess because the law is a mess. But such a wish is impossible to sustain when you look at the text of that sentence, which calls the GOP's position on immigration enforcement "long-held." Unless I missed it, those Republicans who have been advocating for a relaxation of our punitive immigration laws have been in the minority in the GOP. And if I missed it, so too did Latino voters who rejected the GOP this year in record numbers.
To be clear: The best thing that can happen to the future of the pro-life cause is to bring more Latinos into the country and to encourage them to hold on to as much of their culture as they can. Latinos are pro-life at a very deep level, at the level of culture. I have recalled the story before about phoning a Puerto Rican priest the day Sonia Sotomayor was nominated to the Supreme Court, asking if he knew if she was pro-life. He replied, "Of course she is pro-life. She is Puerto Rican. Even Puerto Ricans who have had an abortion are opposed to it." His comment illustrates something very different about a Catholic culture from our dominant liberal culture, a difference Cardinal Francis George has remarked upon: In a Catholic culture, there are many things that are not permitted, but everything can be forgiven. In a modern, liberal culture, everything is permitted but many things are never forgiven. Me? I prefer a Catholic culture. And the more Latinos can bring a sense of their Catholic culture into the US, the better the future of the family, of unions, of social solidarity in all its forms, including with the unborn.
Whoever is writing and editing at LifeSiteNews should stop listening to Rush Limbaugh and start listening to Bishop Flores.
