Thread by NYer.
DENVER, Colorado, June 1, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A Denver Catholic bishop is warning parents that membership in the Girl Scouts could carry the danger of making their daughters more receptive to the pro-abortion agenda.
In a Wednesday column for the Denver Catholic Register, Denver Auxiliary Bishop James D. Conley observes that in the last year a growing number of parents and youth ministers have shared concerns with him over the Girl Scouts alignment with groups advocating abortion.
He urges parents to browse for themselves the websites of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS) and Girl Scouts USA (GSUSA) to see the organizations approach to sexuality, choice, and reproductive issues, saying this exercise may be a sobering experience.
The Girl Scouts have faced strong criticism especially in the last year after the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM) revealed that they participated in a United Nations workshop distributing the Planned Parenthood sex education pamphlet Happy, Healthy, and Hot.
The pamphlet instructs young girls not to think of sex as just about vaginal or anal intercourse. There is no right or wrong way to have sex. Just have fun, explore and be yourself! it states.
Just last month, two teenage girls went public with their decision to leave the Girl Scouts after eight years because of the organizations ties to Planned Parenthood.
In his column, Bishop Conley quotes a youth minister who warned that girls who have been influenced by Girl Scouts USA will be more receptive to the pro-abortion and pro-contraception agenda.
Its hard to imagine that a girl who remains involved with Girl Scouts into young adulthood wont eventually learn of the connections her organization has with pro-choice, pro-contraception and reproductive freedom groups, the youth minister wrote. If she was introduced to GSUSA through her parents and her local parish, then that will inevitably create contradictions between her Catholic faith and her Scouting experience.
The bishop notes that Scoutings structures allow local troops to have a certain amount of autonomy, but nevertheless he says the activities and orientations of the international and national Scout bodies have an important trickle-down effect. This is exactly why pro-choice organizations have worked to develop connections with the Scouting movement, he writes.
Parents, as the primary educators of their children, have every right to insist that their beliefs, especially their moral and religious beliefs, be respectednot underminedby the organizations to which they entrust their children, he says. Parents need to remain alert to the content of their daughters activities. And Catholics involved in the Girl Scouting movement should make it clear to leadership that Scouting is only a means to an endthe proper formation of young character.
Its not an end in itself; and should Scouting ever fail in that proper formation, other groups can be found or formed to take its place, he concludes.
Contact Information:
World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts
World Bureau, Olave Centre
12c Lyndhurst Road
London NW3 5PQ
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7794 1181
Fax: +44 (0)20 7431 3764
Email: wagggs@wagggsworld.org
Girl Scouts of the USA
420 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10018-2798
Phone: (800) 478-7248
E-mail: Use this form.
Thread by me.
Today, at age 83, Dr. Jack Kevorkian slipped into eternity and left in his wake a trail of civilizational wreckage from which we may never recover. With his Physician Assisted Suicide (PAS) movement, he was one of the Twentieth Centurys architects of the Culture of Death; the Margaret Sanger of the opposite end of the life spectrum.
As Msgr. William Smith taught so very well:
1. All social engineering is preceded by verbal engineering.
2. All evil begins with a lie. Identify the lie, and we succeed in unmasking the evil.
Kevorkian began his evil with a lie by omission. He frightened terminally ill people with the specter of an excruciatingly agonizing death (and Ive seen cancer patients go this way), while never giving equal weight to palliative care and the reality that pain can be made bearable. Moreover, he spent the last 21 years of his life as the champion of suicide, while he could have used his considerable knowledge and skills to help advance the field of palliative medicine.
He didnt.
Kevorkian invoked the idea of Death with Dignity, which suggests that suffering is a hollow experience of no redemptive value. The concept also fails to address the reality of hospice care, where people die peacefully sedated surrounded by friends and family.
Death with Dignity hardly describes suicide. Suicide is desperation-driven, fueled by the twin afflictions of helplessness and hopelessness. Its grubby and base, advanced by people who lack vision or soul. Surrendering to despair while standing on the brink of eternity is the final admission of the individual that God has no power in that moment. What should be the individuals moment of greatest trust is laid waste by the smooth-talking clinician who says that the only sure avoidance of suffering lies in the flip of a switch on a Kevorkian machine.
As with all evil, it has metastasized throughout the medical community. The right to die with dignity has become an imperative to die as soon as possible when diagnosed with a terminal condition, and now in England, the obligation for the elderly to simply go away. Just this week, word has come out of England that doctors are prescribing water, WATER for the elderly in hospitals so that nurses will actually hydrate them.
Doctors caring for elderly patients in hospital are being forced to prescribe water for them in order to ensure they have enough to drink.
Inspectors from the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the NHS watchdog, found nurses sometimes left patients so thirsty that the only way for doctors to ensure they had enough liquid was to add drinking water to hospital medication charts.
The revelation comes in the first reports from the CQC into dignity and nutrition of elderly people treated by the NHS, which reveals a failure to attend to the most basic requirements of care. The Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, who ordered the reports, said the failings were unacceptable.
Read the rest of the story here.
The plight of the terminally ill is no light matter. The fear of confronting ones mortal ending can be paralyzing. Add to that the specter of dying in unbearable agony. Now add to that the dishonest physician who offers no real assurance of palliative care, and offers only suicide.
That is the essence of predation.
God be merciful to Dr. Kevorkian. Nobody knows his soul, but God. However, he has done great evil during his time among us. His last 23 years were the slow suicide of a soul.
Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let Perpetual Light shine upon him.
"We will not be silent.
We are your bad conscience.
The White Rose will give you no rest."