Pro-Lifers on the Post Office Wall?
by Deal Hudson - April 15, 2009
Reprinted with permission.
The headline on the Drudge Report really didn't do justice to the content of the recent Homeland Security report issued by its new director, Janet Napolitano, warning against "right wing" terrorism.
Basically any interest group opposing the Obama administration is listed as potentially dangerous – pro-lifers, anti-immigration activists, gun owners, and – get this – military veterans who find it hard to integrate into society upon their return from active service.
The report is being used, obviously, to set up hate crimes' legislation, supported by Obama, that would criminalize specific language used about, among other groups, homosexuals (yes, also lesbians and the transgendered).
The report describes right-wing extremism as "divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups) and those that are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting governmental authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration."
Anti-government? Heavens, we better all get ready to bend our knee to the new administration or we will be accused of "rejecting federal authority."
(No wonder the great state of Texas passed a resolution today calling for state sovereignty!)
Single-issue? That should read a "crackdown" on Evangelicals and Catholics who care enough about the protection of human life, as quaranteed in the Declaration of Independence, to organize, educate, protest, and vote on the basis of the moral principle upon which all other moral principles are based.
Will Fr. Pavone's picture soon be hanging in the local post office? Or Fr. Euteneuer's, or Judie Brown's, or Congressman Chris Smith's.
The post office wall could become the place d'honneur during the Obama years.
Deal W. Hudson is the director of the Morley Institute, and is the former publisher of CRISIS Magazine, a Catholic monthly published in Washington, DC. His articles and comments have been published in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times, National Review, Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Village Voice, Roll Call, National Journal, The Economist, and by the Associated Press. He appears regularly on television shows such as NBC Nightly News, One-on One with John McLaughlin, C-Span's Washington Journal, News Talk, NET's Capitol Watch, The Beltway Boys, The Religion and Ethics Newsweekly on PBS, and radio programs such as "All Things Considered" on National Public Radio. He was associate professor of Philosophy at Fordham University from 1989 to 1995 and was a visiting professor at New York University for five years. He taught for nine years at Mercer University in Atlanta, where he was chair of the philosophy department. He has published many reviews and articles as well as four books: Understanding Maritain: Philosopher and Friend (Mercer, 1988); The Future of Thomism (Notre Dame, 1992); Sigrid Undset On Saints and Sinners (Ignatius, 1994); and Happiness and the Limits of Satisfaction (Rowman & Littlefield, 1996). His autobiography, An American Conversion (Crossroad, 2003), is available from Amazon.com.
