Historic Beginnings of American Culture War – Philadelphia – 1970s

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I had a nightmare last night.  I dreamt that State Senator Martin P. Mullen had come back from hell to inflict more inhumane legislation on not only the people of Pennsylvania but the whole planet. 


I don’t know how the culture war in America took shape in various other parts of the country, but like New Hampshire where the shot heard round the world that supposedly started our American Revolution, the culture war in America has no better historic model than Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the 1970s.


I drift back forty years to the point where I, as an eighteen year old, decided that I did not want to hear anymore boiler plate sermons about Satan from the local priest in Philadelphia and I never set foot in that church again. 


All around me was a world where the War in Vietnam was wrapped in a flag.  That fucking war was so important to all the middle aged losers who hated their lives and had served so faithfully and or really had no choice but serve in World War Two.  


The basic cultural war in the minds of Philadelphians then, if you were young, was if your draft number would come up and you would have to serve, fight in a war that made absolutely no logical sense.  


On another level, there was the creeping fear that blacks would try to cross the invisible border, south on Lehigh Avenue, and try to invade your beautiful turn of the century row house paradise, built for factory workers.  


Oh there were factories in the neighborhood, and they employed blacks, but in retrospect I can remember all the blacks lined up at the 5 bus stop after work waiting to get back to wherever it was that they lived outside our perfect white lower middle class bubble existence.  In retrospect, the image of Apartheid comes to mind and is superimposed on those distant scenes. 


I have seen or heard comments from people who lived there at the same time.  The thing that destroyed Philly, they usually say, was “Section 8” housing, which is of course code talk for racism and welfare. 


In a way, the inability of people to recognize and love your neighbor is what destroyed that old Currier & Ives idealized brain image of the slums where I grew up in Kensington - Harrowgate in Philly. 


Where was I? Oh yes, the war, the blacks and yeah Vatican II.  Well Vatican II did not change anything in a neighborhood of mixed Irish and I-talian catholics.  Oh there were protestants out there.  We saw their churches dotting the landscape.  Never saw who entered those houses of worship on Sundays.  Didn’t care.  The predominant local culture was of Irish Catholic factory workers and Irish Catholic churches and schools. 



In a way, my parents were intelligent, and liberal.  They got into the ideal that blacks should have equal rights.  But somewhere along the timeline, people like my parents got scared about what they saw on the tube with black militant groups, war protestors and the rapid decline of a normal society into chaos around 1968.  They never told me directly but my so called liberal parents voted for George Wallace in 1968,  I figured that out later along the timeline. 


I guess I stayed there, going along my own liberal timeline, and did not realize how secular I was and in relation to terms of also being a Catholic from birth.  Did not feel the difference until they shot Martin Luther King. 


I can remember to this day, the priest Father Locke, freshly minted from the seminary, stumbling for words, almost apologetically, from the pulpit that next Sunday, stating something to the effect that he did not know if it would be proper but would not forbid personal prayers for a Protestant (after all, only Catholics go to heaven- your prayers are probably wasted on him), for the slain civil rights leader.  Huh?


It was there that I got the clue that maybe Catholics were not really Christians like people like MLK who called themselves Christian.  Christian was not a word I heard often in the first eighteen years of a Catholic life.  I heard the word but in conjunction with other words like Christian Doctrine etc. 


(An aside - Reminds me of my own Irish Catholic joke I told to a former boss in the 1980s, also Irish Catholic – “I was twenty-one before I realized that Protestant and bastard were two separate words.” – My boss howled in laughter.) 


Oh yeah, getting back to Vatican II, I wrote some thoughts on that in my earliest blogs here, but let me get to the point and back to my nightmare about the late great Martin Mullen of the Pennsylvania State Legislature. 


Pennsylvania on a map may look like an east coast type of place.  But like the famous political advisor said and is quoted.  “Pennsylvania isPhiladelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.”  I have already shared a few thoughts above on my cosmopolitan cultural upbringing in Philly. There was that other thing, the sex thing and the RC church confusion about birth control. 


Paul VI brought out his Zero Tolerance document on birth control.  Like all life in general, most of us just stumbled into ways of dealing with our own individual sexuality.  (No user manual necessary.)


The cultural war in Philly and Pennsy had a pie-eyed, drunk on his own arrogance and self importance, fanatic in the form of Martin Mullen who suddenly was on the black and white TV screen, the chosen mouthpiece of John Cardinal Krol and his decision to bring Pennsylvaniaunder the recent Catholic Sharia Law (Humanae Vitae) on human sexuality. 


PENNSYLVANIA: Bitter Abortion Battle

Mullen, backed by equally conservative John Cardinal Krol and his Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, decided that the state, with its 35% Catholic population, was natural terrain to make a stand against the trend to more liberal laws on public morality. The battle was joined over the issue of abortion. To counter a liberal abortion bill, the conservatives proposed a bill of their own that outlawed abortion altogether except when a panel of three physicians certified that the mother's life was endangered. It made no allowance for victims of rape, incest or mental illness. Supporting the conservative bill, the Catholic Conference ran a long and costly campaign that included weekly pictures of truncated fetuses and aborted embryos on Page One of the Cathotic Standard &Times, the official organ of the archdiocese of Philadelphia. Last June the campaign paid off: the liberal bill was easily defeated, and the conservative bill was adopted by both houses and sent to Shapp for his signature. Mullen warned the Governor that if he attempted to stop the bill through veto or pocket veto he would run against him in the Democratic primary next year.  

While Shapp mulled over what to do, the protest and counterprotest boiled on. In an unusual turn, Patricia Arney, 32, a divorcee who is a district Democratic committeewoman, revealed to the Philadelphia Inquirer that State Senator Henry J. Cianfrani, 49, one of the conservative bill's strongest supporters, had paid for her abortion in 1970 while they were having an affair, and produced a receipt for his check to prove it. He did not deny their relationship, but said that he had given her the money to visit her family inToledo and did not know that there had been an abortion. Though the disclosure caused yowls of protest on the floor of the state senate, letters to the Inquirer ran 10 to 1 in favor of Arney's blow against hypocrites.  

Last week Shapp, calling the bill "unsound, unenforceable and totally unfair," vetoed it. Mullen failed to muster the three-fourths majority necessary to override the veto, leaving the state functionally without an abortion law of any kind, since lower courts have declared the present statute unconstitutionally vague and appeals are pending. With that, Mullen sounded the charge for his race against Shapp next spring, which could be among the bitterest elections in Pennsylvania's history: he called the Governor's veto the result of a "paganistic, atheistic philosophy."

In reality, few states had laws to deal with archaic or non-existent laws to deal with modern technology and recent developments in birth control.

Somewhere along the timeline, the culture war on birth control became the culture war on abortion.  The discussion regarding sexuality was not about choice in the form of birth control methods to prevent pregnancy, it became all about abortion and the strategy and the rhetoric of Krol’s hand puppet to the media in the 1970s has not changed much to this day IMHO.

My leaving my local church, not the People of God, when I was eighteen was also in reaction to archconservative mean spirited types shouting at you on the TV like Martin Mullen as Krol’s in front of the curtain media voice .  It was also the loss of the sermons on Satan, a chance to nod off, that got dropped on Sundays and propaganda spiels from the pulpit that you had to pick up the mimeographed letter to your state legislature in the church lobby, copy it in your own handwriting, and mail it to show that you were in favor of the most current Martin Mullen anti-sexuality law pending in Harrisburg.  Model – Modus Operandi – set for the American future landscape.  Pity.

I have read many a Catholic blog lately and the ones that aren’t praising, drooling on,  the guys in red are the ones that wonder why priests these days don’t bother to deliver a decent homily.  Considering what I know, the truth is that the thought police might hear something like love or tolerance being advocated and send off a letter to the bishop to complain about dogmatic incorrectness that would get back to the priest and rather than get slapped down, why bother to preach anymore. 

After all, isn’t it all just about the ritual and the consecrated bread? (And the collection plate?)

The American culture wars are far from over.  The best, I fear, is yet to come. 

July 23, 2011

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The Shunning of Bill Cosby in America – Reasserting White Cultural Standards in the Media?

Perhaps this current mess with Bill Cosby is a mistake. Or PC has caught up to the past when there pretty much were no rules when it came to sex and or sexuality in America.

I seem to think that social networking among other things takes a lot of shared ignorance out of the closet so to speak and shed some light on matters in a modern global capacity.

That sins like masturbation on the Church list, mortal sins mind you, that they are pretty much considered body function anymore and not sinful but just something normal in the life of the man beast race that remains half ape and is still half imagining the other half is angel. Which is why the guys in dresses at the Vatican don't have a clue about anything sexual - still preaching from the same old everything is a sin textbook as genuinely "moral" - yeah right.

Getting back to Cosby. I always thought he was a grade A phony. If you look at the old “I Spy” detective shows where he was a so-called breakthrough part for an African American on prime time TV in the mid-1960s. The show was on at 10 P.M. when school children were supposed to be already off to bed in Beaver Cleaver white America. 

If you see these old shows, they are poorly written and full of a lot of direct and veiled sadistic violence. Not good fare for mom and pop watching them. But then again few choices then for three TV channel America.

I remember a show with Cosby being a gym teacher which actually fit in with his Temple U degree in Philly for P/E.

Over and above his moderate visual success on TV was his dirty comedy records which to many was his real source of income.

I remember around 1971 when he was on the David Frost show making a big deal about retiring from Show Business and going off to Massachusetts to get his PhD in education. Why? Because he wanted to be an outstanding model for his race and in education etc. PR PR PR  BS BS BS Whatever became of his academic career? But the bait and switch entertainment marketing scam worked well to create demand so well that Frank Sinatra, a has been night club singer retired two or three times before his many comebacks. Whatever.

Then there was that bizarre Cosby fantasy show of a successful Harlem Doctor and his cute black middle class gentrified family that it was somehow successful even though I had no desire to watch it. I knew black people and I knew Harlem and the last place any successful black people I knew in New York - they did not want to live and or work in Harlem.

Which kind of leaves us now with the present and all these bimbos coming out of the woodwork wanting an out of court settlement from a filthy rich black entertainer who for better or worse has not managed his private tastes too well. Or these women, groupies in their younger days or whatever never heard the adage that in getting ahead in Show Business is the same as in Wall Street – it is not who you know, it is who you blow to get ahead in life.

I have often thought that the death of the hypocritical White Town Square standards in America was the start of the culture wars in the 1980s forward to establish those old standards that were pretty much set by the local town newspaper owned by the local white establishment.

That when someone like Madonna came onto the scene with her skank nouveau marketing model, that the old white standard bearers, the newspapers and national TV media could not shame her or shun her or make an example of her slutty appeal to the rising younger female buying demographic market.

That now with six corporations controlling the top tier (1%) of the information and tech pyramid, I look at this current Bill Cosby sideshow with mild disinterest but realize that Cosby is collateral damage of sorts of the six year plus Fox News TV and Limbaugh radio hate campaign against Obama and trying to reassert the old white standards in the obsolete in a global town square sense, of the old American Town Square. The white GOP’s Neanderthal base is going to lynch this guy, in virtual-osity, in the social media. 

So much for doing their Ted Cruz - Joe Wilson style of protecting our white women in the burbs from “those people”. That Rafael Cruz courtesy of the Heritage Foundation endorsement of Cuban white hatred of all blacks including black cubans - and Joe Wilson's "You Lie" white trash talk to the WH Nigger from the inbred crowd in South Carolina has a butterfly affect on the all Racist Revival of the old loser Confederate States even in a global age of tech and information movement. 

I say this because today, even the casino in Arizona run by the Tohono O'odham Indian nation outside Tucson is cancelling Bill Cosby’s scheduled performance in February. That the nation that sells tobacco and liquor untaxed by the Feds and caters to gambling addicts are pimps of sorts or good capitalist businessmen depending on your POV – but the point is that they feel comfortable enough in judging Bill Cosby in the social media maelstrom that eats and chews ppl out faster than whatever.

The media sucks. 

Good luck Bill in your virtual retirement as an ideal model of whatever it was that you were in your fifteen hours of fame. 

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Lack of Value of Women in Monotheistic Patriarchal Religions Affecting Female Numbers in Global Census Stats

The balance of nature in Britain is being unbalanced by ethnic groups, presumably from Monotheistic “ethnic” groups that have had Abortions based on gender and skyrocketing.

While the short term effects are probably small but science and “medicine” accompanying the worthlessness of females as heirs and ego place mats of inheritance is a trend that in a decade could realty fuck up the human race.

With the GOP and RC / Christian War on Women now winning that tangent of the greater culture war ploy of the oligarchs, well we are living in a different world. Something to think about.

Is this fucked up or what?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-lost-girls-illegal-abortion-widely-used-by-some-uk-ethnic-groups-to-avoid-daughters-has-reduced-female-population-by-between-1500-and-4700-9059790.html

The illegal abortion of female fetuses solely to ensure that families have sons is widely practiced within some ethnic communities in Britain and has resulted in significant shortfalls in the proportion of girls, according to an investigation by The Independent. 

 The practice of sex-selective abortion is now so commonplace that it has affected the natural 50:50 balance of boys to girls within some immigrant groups and has led to the “disappearance” of between 1,400 and 4,700 females from the national census records of England and Wales, we can reveal. 

 A government investigation last year found no evidence that women living in the UK, but born abroad, were preferentially aborting girls. However, our deeper statistical analysis of data from the 2011 National Census has shown widespread discrepancies in the sex ratio of children in some immigrant families, which can only be easily explained by women choosing to abort female fetuses in the hope of becoming quickly pregnant again with a boy. The findings will reignite the debate over whether pregnant women should be legally allowed to know the sex of their babies following ultrasound scans at 13 weeks. 

 Some experts have argued that the baby’s sex should be withheld automatically until much later in pregnancy, when abortions are more difficult to obtain – as some NHS hospitals have already started to do.

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Catholic Neo-Confederate Cultural Warrior Paul Ryan Still Attacking Humanity For The Political Right

Paul Ryan - Catholic Neo-Confederate (Tea Party)

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2013/11/24/175123/27

Now it has come to light that Doerflinger - obviously with Cardinal Dolan's approval - colluded with Tea Party darling, Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) to continue the recent  shut-down of the federal government. Doerflinger's goal was to hold up the continuing resolution (CR) legislation until the birth control benefit in the Affordable Health Care Act (ACA) was removed. 

 …This is the kind of thing we have come to expect during Dolan's tenure as president. And its not just Doerflinger. Dolan's all out culture warring was on full display this past April, for example, when the cardinal hired Kim Daniels to be his personal spokeswoman on USCCB matters. As Commonweal Magazine's Grant Gallicho pointed out, "Daniels served as Sarah Palin's "personal domestic-policy czar" in 2009 (as part of SarahPAC)." 

 …But these Catholic neo-confederates are not far from the destabilizing views of Dolan, Doerflinger and their allies -- who are willing to disrupt our ability to govern ourselves in order to establish the orthodox Catholic position on issues such as birth control as the de facto law of the land. Such strategy will endanger both the country as well as the Church.

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#teaparty= A Cult of personality draped in a #neoconfederate sheet & slathered in bullsh*t #RedNationRising #dem #ctl pic.twitter.com/VQ4YzIMVaB
— Aika Rumba (@I_Karumba) November 22, 2013

Right Wing Archbishop Chaput Continues His Hatchet Job Gutting Assets of Philly Archdiocese to pay for fiscal Mismanagement of the last 40 years of his Predecessors Spending Tens of Millions on Culture War Politics

"Right Wing" Archbishop of Philadelphia Charles Chaput

"Our difficult financial situation must be addressed and the actions that we need to take may  be painful ones," Archbishop Charles J. Chaput said in a news release.

“Our”? “We”? Spokesman for the Right Wing of the American RC church has some financials to deal with after spouting out too much anger against Pope Francis in Rio de Janeiro that gets accurately reported in the American Catholic press. He did the same thing in Spain back in 2011. 

(Off on my prediction by six months I think about Chaput becoming the great embarrassment of the American RC church, per above link.)

Charles gets a little heady being in Catholic Fascist countries like Spain or projecting oneself into Brazil where nine year old girls can get raped by their fathers and then be refused an abortion and at the same time also blamed for forcing dad to rape her. 

Leasing Cemeteries and getting rid of the Nursing Homes originally built to house the aging parents of nuns and clergy, no need to worry about that now for all those imported priests from Africa and Asia.

Archbishop Charles Chaput has signed off on expert advice of the accounting firm KGMP to cook the books and sell and lease off assets to pay for all the lawyers bills in the ongoing Child Abuse secret Sub-Business (sub-culture) of the Philly Archdiocese (wink,nod).

How do you lease a cemetery? And who gets use of the Cemetery Perpetual Care Fund? That’s a question for experts on cemeteries like Cardinal Dolan in New York I would think.  

Then you fire the 180 people working in the Catholic cemeteries there now and then maybe the leasing company will offer to hire some of them back for half the wages and no healthcare benefits or pension plan?  

No wonder Chaput hates Pope Francis and his public statements so far about humanity and in contrast to the past thirty years of right wing bishops being installed by the bankers at the Vatican. Whatever.

http://articles.philly.com/2013-08-21/news/41433585_1_archdiocese-archbishop-charles-j-catholic-health-care-services

In an aggressive move to help remedy its deep financial woes, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia said Tuesday that it had put its six nursing homes up for sale. 

 The archdiocese also said it would attempt to lease out 11 cemeteries and two parcels that could be used as cemeteries. 

 In addition, the archdiocese said it would try to outsource the management of the cemeteries, a move that could cut costs and increase revenue. 

 "Our difficult financial situation must be addressed and the actions that we need to take may be painful ones," Archbishop Charles J. Chaput said in a news release. 

 "I understand this fact fully, but it is of critical importance that we rebuild our financial foundation so that we can continue our collective good works." 

 The archdiocese last month reported a $39.2 million loss for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2012. Excluding millions in unusual expenses, the archdiocese's cash outlays in fiscal 2012 still exceeded revenue by $17.4 million.

 In addition to annual operating shortfalls, the archdiocese has huge long-term gaps in its balance sheet, totaling about $350 million, for pensions, self-insurance reserves, and money owed to a trust-and-loan fund for parishes.

Why not lease out the cathedral to Burlington Coat Factory while you are at it?

Doing a great job “Hatchet Charlie”.  The Red Hat is in the pipeline but only I think after Pope Francis catches John Paul the First Disease? (wink, nod) lol

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Romney Mormon Gay Hate Agenda Reflected in His Retaliation Against PBS – W/Sesame Street’s Recent Divorce from Chick-fil-A

Romney an Ally in Chick-fil-A's Culture Wars Involving Big Bird and Sesame Street

Got to keep the fanatics and haters on the Right happy Mitt?

Kill off Big Bird and the other Muppets on Sesame Street as part of retaliation of the far right fundamentalists organized under the banner of the Mormon Hate Campaign against gays and Marriage Equality?

Go BainSource yourself Asshole!

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/07/muppets-dump-chick-fil-a-over-christian-values-non-support-of-gay-marriage/

The Jim Henson Co., owner of the widely promoted Muppets characters, says it won’t be working with Chick-fil-A any more based on the statement of Christian faith from the restaurant chief that he does not endorse homosexual marriage.

“The Jim Henson Company has celebrated and embraced diversity and inclusiveness for over 50 years and we have notified Chick-Fil-A (sic) that we do not wish to partner with them on any future endeavors,” said a Facebook statement from the company. “Lisa Henson, our CEO, is personally a strong supporter of gay marriage and has directed us to donate the payment we received from Chick-Fil-A (sic) to GLAAD [ a homosexual promotion organization].”

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Culture Wars - Philly - 1971

Billboard, 3rd and Market, "Abortion is Murder".


Propaganda costs money.


Your tax free church dollars at work.



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Catholic Cultural War Against the Vagina – 40 Years Later

(GOP towing the Catholic Party Line - September 28, 1969, was declared Cardinal Karol Wojtyla Day in Pennsylvania at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa in Doylestown.  Left to Right, Cardinal Krol of Phila., Karol Wojtyla, Gov. Ray Shafer (R) of Pennsylvania.)

The  Catholic Culture  War Against the Vagina Continues – Forty Years Later

I sat through a few minutes of the CSPAN-2 the other day with speeches from the floor of the United States Senate delivering the same crap I heard in the Catholic church in the late sixties about Birth Control that drove me forever from that church.  That Senators Roy Blunt and Kelly Ayotte sounded today like the cookie cutter no thought priests of that faith forty years ago.

Here is a repeat of my previous blog:

Historic Beginnings of American Culture War – Philadelphia – 1970s

I had a nightmare last night.  I dreamt that State Senator Martin P. Mullen had come back from hell to inflict more inhumane legislation on not only the people of Pennsylvania but the whole planet. 

I don’t know how the culture war in America took shape in various other parts of the country, but like New Hampshire where the shot heard round the world that supposedly started our American Revolution, the culture war in America has no better historic model than Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the 1970s.

I drift back forty years to the point where I, as an eighteen year old, decided that I did not want to hear anymore boiler plate sermons about Satan from the local priest in Philadelphia and I never set foot in that church again. 

All around me was a world where the War in Vietnam was wrapped in a flag.  That fucking war was so important to all the middle aged losers who hated their lives and had served so faithfully and or really had no choice but serve in World War Two.  

The basic cultural war in the minds of Philadelphians then, if you were young, was if your draft number would come up and you would have to serve, fight in a war that made absolutely no logical sense.  

On another level, there was the creeping fear that blacks would try to cross the invisible border, south on Lehigh Avenue, and try to invade your beautiful turn of the century row house paradise, built for factory workers.  

Oh there were factories in the neighborhood, and they employed blacks, but in retrospect I can remember all the blacks lined up at the 5 bus stop after work waiting to get back to wherever it was that they lived outside our perfect white lower middle class bubble existence.  In retrospect, the image of Apartheid comes to mind and is superimposed on those distant scenes. 

I have seen or heard comments from people who lived there at the same time.  The thing that destroyed Philly, they usually say, was “Section 8” housing, which is of course code talk for racism and welfare. 

In a way, the inability of people to recognize and love your neighbor is what destroyed that old Currier & Ives idealized brain image of the slums where I grew up in Kensington - Harrowgate in Philly. 

Where was I? Oh yes, the war, the blacks and yeah Vatican II.  Well Vatican II did not change anything in a neighborhood of mixed Irish and I-talian catholics.  Oh there were protestants out there.  We saw their churches dotting the landscape.  Never saw who entered those houses of worship on Sundays.  Didn’t care.  The predominant local culture was of Irish Catholic factory workers and Irish Catholic churches and schools. 

In a way, my parents were intelligent, and liberal.  They got into the ideal that blacks should have equal rights.  But somewhere along the timeline, people like my parents got scared about what they saw on the tube with black militant groups, war protestors and the rapid decline of a normal society into chaos around 1968.  They never told me directly but my so called liberal parents voted for George Wallace in 1968,  I figured that out later along the timeline. 

I guess I stayed there, going along my own liberal timeline, and did not realize how secular I was and in relation to terms of also being a Catholic from birth.  Did not feel the difference until they shot Martin Luther King. 

I can remember to this day, the priest Father Locke, freshly minted from the seminary, stumbling for words, almost apologetically, from the pulpit that next Sunday, stating something to the effect that he did not know if it would be proper but would not forbid personal prayers for a Protestant (after all, only Catholics go to heaven- your prayers are probably wasted on him), for the slain civil rights leader.  Huh?

It was there that I got the clue that maybe Catholics were not really Christians like people like MLK who called themselves Christian.  Christian was not a word I heard often in the first eighteen years of a Catholic life.  I heard the word but in conjunction with other words like Christian Doctrine etc. 

(An aside - Reminds me of my own Irish Catholic joke I told to a former boss in the 1980s, also Irish Catholic – “I was twenty-one before I realized that Protestant and bastard were two separate words.” – My boss howled in laughter.) 

Oh yeah, getting back to Vatican II, I wrote some thoughts on that in my earliest blogs here, but let me get to the point and back to my nightmare about the late great Martin Mullen of the Pennsylvania State Legislature. 

Pennsylvania on a map may look like an east coast type of place.  But like the famous political advisor said and is quoted.  “Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.”  I have already shared a few thoughts above on my cosmopolitan cultural upbringing in Philly. There was that other thing, the sex thing and the RC church confusion about birth control.

Paul VI brought out his Zero Tolerance document on birth control. Like all life in general, most of us just stumbled into ways of dealing with our own individual sexuality.  (No user manual necessary.)

The cultural war in Philly and Pennsy had a pie-eyed, drunk on his own arrogance and self importance, fanatic in the form of Martin Mullen who suddenly was on the black and white TV screen, the chosen mouthpiece of John Cardinal Krol and his decision to bringPennsylvania under the recent Catholic Sharia Law (Humanae Vitae) on human sexuality. 

PENNSYLVANIA: Bitter Abortion Battle

Mullen, backed by equally conservative John Cardinal Krol and his Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, decided that the state, with its 35% Catholic population, was natural terrain to make a stand against the trend to more liberal laws on public morality. The battle was joined over the issue of abortion. To counter a liberal abortion bill, the conservatives proposed a bill of their own that outlawed abortion altogether except when a panel of three physicians certified that the mother's life was endangered. It made no allowance for victims of rape, incest or mental illness. Supporting the conservative bill, the Catholic Conference ran a long and costly campaign that included weekly pictures of truncated fetuses and aborted embryos on Page One of the Cathotic Standard &Times, the official organ of the archdiocese of Philadelphia. Last June the campaign paid off: the liberal bill was easily defeated, and the conservative bill was adopted by both houses and sent to Shapp for his signature. Mullen warned the Governor that if he attempted to stop the bill through veto or pocket veto he would run against him in the Democratic primary next year.  While Shapp mulled over what to do, the protest and counterprotest boiled on. In an unusual turn, Patricia Arney, 32, a divorcee who is a district Democratic committeewoman, revealed to the Philadelphia Inquirer that State Senator Henry J. Cianfrani, 49, one of the conservative bill's strongest supporters, had paid for her abortion in 1970 while they were having an affair, and produced a receipt for his check to prove it. He did not deny their relationship, but said that he had given her the money to visit her family in Toledo and did not know that there had been an abortion. Though the disclosure caused yowls of protest on the floor of the state senate, letters to the Inquirer ran 10 to 1 in favor of Arney's blow against hypocrites. 
Last week Shapp, calling the bill "unsound, unenforceable and totally unfair," vetoed it. Mullen failed to muster the three-fourths majority necessary to override the veto, leaving the state functionally without an abortion law of any kind, since lower courts have declared the present statute unconstitutionally vague and appeals are pending. With that, Mullen sounded the charge for his race against Shapp next spring, which could be among the bitterest elections in Pennsylvania's history: he called the Governor's veto the result of a "paganistic, atheistic philosophy."

In reality, few states had laws to deal with archaic or non-existent laws to deal with modern technology and recent developments in birth control.

Somewhere along the timeline, the culture war on birth control became the culture war on abortion.  The discussion regarding sexuality was not about choice in the form of birth control methods to prevent pregnancy, it became all about abortion and the strategy and the rhetoric of Krol’s hand puppet to the media in the 1970s has not changed much to this day IMHO.

My leaving my local church, not the People of God, when I was eighteen was also in reaction to archconservative mean spirited types shouting at you on the TV like Martin Mullen as Krol’s in front of the curtain media voice.  It was also the loss of the sermons on Satan, a chance to nod off, that got dropped on Sundays and propaganda spiels from the pulpit that you had to pick up the mimeographed letter to your state legislature in the church lobby, copy it in your own handwriting, and mail it to show that you were in favor of the most current Martin Mullen anti-sexuality law pending in Harrisburg.  Model – Modus Operandi – set for the American future landscape.  Pity.

I have read many a Catholic blog lately and the ones that aren’t praising, drooling on,  the guys in red are the ones that wonder why priests these days don’t bother to deliver a decent homily.  Considering what I know, the truth is that the thought police might hear something like love or tolerance being advocated and send off a letter to the bishop to complain about dogmatic incorrectness that would get back to the priest and rather than get slapped down, why bother to preach anymore. 

After all, isn’t it all just about the ritual and the consecrated bread? (And the collection plate?)

The American culture wars are far from over.  The best, I fear, is yet to come.

http://thisculturalchristian.blogspot.com/2011/07/historic-beginnings-of-american-culture.html

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Santorum Bottom - Romney Top - GOP 2012 Ticket - Pennsylvania Strategy

Rick Santorum - Culture War Meme Bearer


The greatest harm Rick can do to American freedom and separation of church and state is being the bottom half of a Romney ticket.  Rick is not too smart but is capable of delivering Pennsylvania to the GOP and possibly throwing the election into the House.  Guess how that will turn out?  Rick can no doubt do a Cheney type shadow government as VP and continue to be a meme bearer for General Franco lovers like Chaput in Philly (a strategic papal appointment?) who framed the official post mortem Vatican hit on JFK's theologically incorrect 1960 Houston speech and his wrong attitude toward Church dominance in the Vatican American public town square in their ideal visualization of the future. 





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"Religious Liberty" War on Secularism - Bishop William Lori

How has the secularization of American culture fueled these legal and legislative challenges to religious freedom? 

The erosion of religious liberty is first a cultural issue, then a legal issue. It has been going on for a long time. Some philosophers, social scientists and others in a position to influence culture have long regarded religion not only as absurd but also as the source of much societal and personal unhappiness. Their views have not remained confined to the academy but have become popularized through the media and entertainment industries and, over time, have been reflected in laws, judicial decisions and administrative rules. As the great constitutional lawyer Learned Hand once said, if liberty dies in the hearts of men and women, “no constitution, no law, no court, can save it.” 

The Church, “an expert in humanity,” must strive to transform the culture. In this sense, the defense of religious liberty is very much a part of the New Evangelization, which is very much a theme of this pontificate. In proclaiming the Gospel afresh and in bearing witness to the Gospel with renewed conviction, we must seek, in God’s grace, to heal the rift between the Gospel and an aggressively secular culture.

http://www.bridgeportdiocese.com/index.php/fcc/article/bishop_lori_religious_liberty_the_pre_eminent_social_justice_issue_of_our_t

Catholic Culture War on Americans continues.  Don't these Prissy Bishops have something better to do with their free time?  Like Pray?

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Defining Terms - ChristoFascism - ProLife - Bishop Lori - Trent Franks

Bishop Inquisitor Bill Lori of Connecticut testified before a sweetheart congressional committee to describe the erosion of “religious freedom” caused by Obama and his department of HHS etc.


Bishop to Congress: Religious freedom subject to 'rapid erosion'

Among the policies and laws Lori singled out were:

• A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services mandate that health insurance plans cover contraceptives and sterilization as "preventative services" in health care plans.
• A new requirement from the same department that government contracts to those who provide services to victims of human trafficking only go to those that provide contraceptive and abortion services. Lori says that requirement assures that the bishops' Migration and Refugee Services "will be barred from participation in the program."…
•  Among the bills Lori said Congress should pass are the "Protect Life Act," which passed the House on Oct. 13, and the "Respect for Rights of Conscience Act."
• The "Protect Life Act" would prohibit women covered under the health care reform law from buying health insurance plans that cover abortion and would make it legal for hospitals to deny abortions to pregnant women with life-threatening conditions. The "Respect for Rights of Conscience Act" would allow certain religiously affiliated institutions to opt out of other coverage requirements in the reform bill.

Follow the money.  If you want to destroy the power of these gay bashing, vagina hating, pedophile enabling money men, the pro-life bishops, don’t call them what they want to be called “Pro-Life” – what life, they are more like criminals than holy men. 

Don’t confuse terms.  Christo fascism accurately describes the ongoing crime of Bishops in bed with Big Money and Corporations, a term I think that might confuse the public. A new user friendly term to help enlighten the public is needed to shed light on these covert crimes involving gross conflicts of interest combining politics, religion and unregulated greed. 

They, Big Money and Corporations, control the media and they want to confuse us.   Presently they seem to be interchanging two terms Religious Freedom or Religious Liberty looking for the perfect final sell, marketing term, to push this new culture war idea. Power is the name of the game - not Religion - freedom and liberty are merely just add-on chump words I believe. Think about it, especially the next time the media throws these mind game words/terms at you.

The big money boys and politicos did the same thing with the terms Climate Change vs. Global Warming.  I am still confused. Not really, but it took a long time for me to focus on the heart of the problem.  Now it is too late I fear regarding that likely doomsday scenario. Whatever.

Am waiting to see what official title Tim Dolan finally chooses for this new emergency profits for the Health Care Industrial Complex ad hoc committee and at what point in the 2012 election produces that final term as a code word for non-truth. This new USCCB committee - on Religious Safety (my term) was recently formed.


Follow the money.


Lori was not testifying about religion.  He actually was mostly testifying about medical procedures in front of Rep. Franks of Arizona, a freakin Evan Mecham appointee, hack toadie - Racist Evan Mecham, such a failed Arizona Governor that even the Rednecks cheered when they impeached his sorry ass out of Phoenix - for Christ’s sake! - and Trent Franks, oil man and shill for a half dozen money laundering non-profit right wing political think tanks and ignorance enabling culture war agenda groups.

Back to Lori, Bishop in the Health Insurance Headquarter Capital of the Universe / Connecticut…follow the money?

Anybody notice how some Prostate screening tests are being discounted recently by Federal Committees and will soon disappear or how women “don’t need” so many Mammograms as announced by Federal Committees­ etc.?  Follow the money.

Follow the money.  Indict some, many more “pro-life” crooks, religious and secular, under R.I.C.O. laws. 

Have a nice day.