Every day it seems there is news of
some sort about the environment, whether it be pollution, extreme weather,
sustainability, or environmental disasters caused by oil spills, gas line
ruptures, or derailed oil tankers. Under
the rubric of ‘global climate change,’ fears of all sorts are portrayed daily
and blamed on corporate greed, over-population, and/or under-regulation. Several years ago I was incensed at an
article appearing in the local neighborhood paper. The gist of the article was that anyone who
brings a child into the world is committing an environmental crime because of
the huge carbon footprint of humans over the course of their lifetime. I wrote a letter to the editor rebutting the
article, but it was never published.
Have you noticed that a big part of the
progressive agenda is aimed at
preserving the planet, even at the expense of suppressing human life or
destroying our economy? Many
environmentalists are genuinely more concerned about animal rights and
endangered species than about human rights. I suspect that your average animal rights
protestor is a big advocate of abortion in which unborn children’s right to life is denied. The liberal agenda is contradictory in that
the most basic human rights and human ecology are ignored in favor of saving the
planet, insects, and animals they will probably never see. How many environmentalists are willing to
speak up on behalf of the right of children to be born, and to be raised by
BOTH of their biological parents? These
same ecology-minded souls seem to have no problem with lowering the standard of
living of average Americans when they drive up the cost of gas, electricity,
food and housing, by foisting ever more ridiculous EPA requirements on the
energy and agricultural industries. For
example, our government has vastly expanded the amount of federal land declared
‘preservation areas’ at the expense of farmers and ranchers whose grazing and
farming leases have been cancelled. Is
it any wonder beef prices are at an all-time high and rising, and electricity
prices are going through the roof? Increasing taxes and expanding regulations on
the oil and gas industries drives energy prices higher, and if the
environmental lobby had their way, we would sign the Kyoto Agreement and begin
to levy massive carbon taxes on industry, while sending those dollars overseas
where third world countries would sell us their carbon credits, doing little to
reduce actual carbon emissions, but making US products even less competitive in
global markets.
This summer, in addition to visiting
the America to address Congress and the UN, Pope Francis is scheduled to release
an encyclical on the subject of the environment. No one knows what the pope is going to say in
this encyclical, but there are several things I am willing to bet he will NOT
say. Pope Francis will most certainly
NOT say that over population is the cause of any of our environmental problems. This argument has been around for several
hundred years and every dire prediction made about massive starvation or
human-caused weather calamities has proven to have been dead wrong. Funny that the press never follows up on
those bogus predictions, isn’t it? Second, he will NOT say that contraception,
abortion, or sterilization should be part of any plan to address environmental
problems. Environmentalists and other
liberals try to claim the moral high ground by appealing to our fears about the
weather, pollution, and the environment, but then seem to have total disregard
for the dignity of human life and religious freedom. President Obama and other prominent liberals
have attempted to co-opt the pope’s moral authority for their own, by asserting
that they share his concern for the poor and the underclass, but then they go
about insisting that abortion is a basic human right, when it just the opposite
because it denies human life the right to exist in the first place. ‘Marriage equality’ and ‘income equality’ are
the cause celeb these days, but deny the rights of children and create a
welfare trap that is nearly impossible to escape. Why isn’t anyone standing up for children’s
rights?
It would be amusing to observe how the
media treats the so-called “Francis effect,” if not for the fact that they so
boldly misrepresent both the pope and the Church’s teaching. For example, 60 Minutes ran a story
about the “Francis Effect” a couple months ago, asserting that the new pope is
bringing up discussions on birth control, pre-marital sex, marriage, and
divorce. The reporter went on to
editorialize that the Church has refused to discuss these matters for the past
35 years. Nothing could be further from
the truth! St. John Paul II gave 153
consecutive talks about sex and marriage and it resulted in his “Theology of the Body” which has been
studied, taught, widely disseminated, and is perhaps the most important and life-changing
theology of the second millennium. In
fact there have been intense discussions about these topics consistently, and
the Church has remained firm in its moral teaching on these topics. Virtually every theology department in every
Catholic University in the world has been discussing and teaching the Church’s
moral stance sex and marriage. What the 60 Minutes interviewer really meant by “no
discussion” was that the Church’s teaching has not changed with regard to
sexual morality, family planning, the nature of human heterosexual love, and
the indissolubility of marriage. Pope
Francis is certainly NOT going to adopt the liberal view in these matters. If anything, he is likely to chide us all for
becoming a “throw-away culture” in which even children are discarded so as to
avoid any inconvenience.
Sadly, too many self-professed
Catholics take the view that the Church is wrong-headed in these matters. Rather than take the time to study the deeply
meaningful and beautiful content of the Theology
of the Body, they fall in with the progressive chant for ‘women’s rights’, ‘women’s
health’ and ‘freedom to choose,’ mindlessly claiming that they are the moral arbiters
of these issues, and the Church is “on the wrong side of history.” I might add that they do so without ever
exploring the well-thought out actual teaching of the Church, and while ignoring
the many and serious consequences of sexual immorality on society and
civilization: violent sex crimes, human
trafficking, declining birth rates, and a pandemic of cancer-causing STDs just
to name a few. To add insult to injury,
our government is now foisting these practices on the American public, using
tax dollars to fund millions of abortions at home and abroad, and forcing every
employer to do the same, regardless of their moral abhorrence to doing so. In doing so, they have shredded our
constitutional right to practice our religious beliefs freely.
The Environmental Movement is more than
it seems. In my view it is rooted in the
selfish notion that we must preserve the earth for our personal use, even it if
means preventing and killing babies, and destroying our economy in the process,
because after all, it makes us feel good to “go green.”
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