According to AP reports, “Catholic nuns are urging Congress to pass President Barack Obama’s health care plan, in an unusual public break with bishops who say it would subsidize abortion.”  Reportedly, 60 leaders of religious orders sent lawmakers a letter pleading with them to pass the Senate healthcare bill.

The AP clearly has not noticed the virtual ongoing war within the Catholic Church, especially with regards to government responsibility as opposed to private/church responsibility.  In no sphere is this internal war more evident than when it comes to matters involving the Church’s Doctrine on Social Justice.

The Doctrines on Social Justice are, perhaps, the most misunderstood and lied-about facets of the Catholic faith.  Just about everyone in public life, including even the majority of Catholics themselves, completely ignore the fundamentals of Social Justice teaching.  They summarily conclude that Social Justice is a synonym for socialist redistributive policies, which seek to equalize material outcomes for all.  I call this the Kumbayah Fallacy.

These nuns have fallen hook, line and sinker for the Kumbayah Fallacy.  Right along with all the liberation theologians, who have shamefully wrapped Marxist doctrine around the cross of Christ for decades.

This mingling of socialism with Christianity makes a diabolical mockery of the Church’s genuine Social Doctrine, as delineated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.  In fact, the Catholic Church explicitly rebukes all forms of “communism” and “socialism” right there in plain sight in the Catechism.  While the Church also condemns completely unfettered capitalism, with no regulations whatsoever, She saves most condemnation for the Marxist doctrines, which attempt to regulate the economy “solely by centralized planners,” as this “perverts the basis of social bonds” between human beings.

While President Obama has made wide use of his claim to fighting for Social Justice, especially with his zeal towards a government takeover of our healthcare system, he has utterly ignored the natural – fully predictable – unintended consequences of his attempt to reorder the best medical delivery system the world has ever created.

In fact, this reordering of the American medical delivery system to suit the whims of socialist reformers, President Obama is ensuring a genuine Social Justice nightmare for the whole world.

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Imagine, if you will, that you are living in a changed America, or in President Obama’s words, an America that begged “re-making.”  In this now-changed America, hope is in big government and her closest ally, big science.

Now imagine that you and your spouse give birth to a child in this brave, new America, in a hospital linked by law to the federal citizens database.  Immediately upon your child’s birth, a hospital clerk assigns your newborn with a “Unique Health Identifier” (UHI), a specially coded number, which is then put into a national electronic database, along with your newborn’s fingerprints and any other identifiers the bureaucrats in D.C. have demanded.

Sex.  Weight.  Length.  Race. APGAR score.  Health appraisal at birth, including any disfigurements or handicaps, identifying traits or birthmarks, and DNA markers.   Information about the child’s parents, such as names, age, race, number of prior pregnancies, number of prior births, number of prior abortions, education attained, occupations, finger prints and criminal records, if any, are also stored.  Almost anything can be included in the database for future government needs, whatever those might be.

Imagine that all constitutional safeguards for an individual’s privacy are deemed to have been complied with, when compiling this database, because healthcare is an interstate activity that the Feds can regulate and government access to the information improves the “general welfare.”  Imagine that it is even required that your newborn, before leaving the hospital, be fitted with a surgically implanted microchip, the way babies are now, in many states, required to be vaccinated and blood-typed.  The implanted microchip can then be accessed with a scanner by anyone who has a scanning device, with or without parental consent.

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First Lady, Michelle Obama, has decided to take a whack at solving the American obesity epidemic. Splendid.

She should start by looking at one of the biggest roots of the problem: liberal government and its most favorite project of the past 40 years, the welfare state.

There is a surprising, yet undeniable, correlation between skyrocketing obesity rates and race and socioeconomic status. The group most disproportionately affected by obesity is poor black women.

A survey of the available research on obesity was conducted in 2004 by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Center for Human Nutrition. Among the results:

• The U.S. obesity prevalence increased from 13 percent to 32 percent between the 1960s and 2004.
• Women 20–34 years old had the fastest increase rate of obesity and overweight.
• 80% of black women aged 40 years or over are overweight; 50% are obese.
• Less educated people have a higher prevalence of obesity than their counterparts.
• 16% of children and adolescents are overweight and 34% are at risk of becoming overweight in 2003-2004.
• White children and adolescents had the lowest prevalence of overweight and being at risk of overweight compared with their black and Mexican counterparts.

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