-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
I remember when we first moved to St. Louis 40 years ago that we had a party and the sister of a priest friend asked me to make her a scotch and coke.
Now I know very little about chemistry or the fine art of mixology but I do know that what the inexperienced drinker ordered had the potential of being a toxic cocktail.
I am starting to feel the same about sports and religion. I interviewed Joe Garagiola 35 years ago and he talked of the way baseball players were making novenas before they actually got into the batter’s box.
He said his friend Yogi once wiped out the sign of the cross that Jimmy Piersall used to draw in the dirt. Yogi told him “why don’t you just let God watch the game.” (That’s why they had the hole in the old Dallas stadium so God could watch His team.)
Politics and sports, as well as war and sports have always been fair game for analogies. Friday’s paper had a stern and defiant president demanding that the Republicans get off the sidelines and get in the game.
Oh I think they have been in the game all along. It has been his horrendous play calling that has driven them off the field.
Maybe his team should just punt since they have done little to advance the ball of prosperity the past year. Let the other side give it a try.
Franklin Roosevelt used to call himself the quarterback who would use all sorts of plays to advance the economy.
I hate to tell those who thought he scored all the time that he fumbled the ball on most occasions and even tried to intimidate the Supreme Court Referees by bringing in his own pack of judges.
But religion is different! As I said with the McGwire flap, it was bad enough trying to understand the economics of sports with salary caps, exorbitant contracts, union negations and the season-ending strike of 1994.
Now I have to understand the science of steroid-cocktails, greenies and all sorts of pharmacological mixtures that detracts from the game on the field.
Now it seems abortion has embedded its ugly head on the playing landscape.
An abortion controversy is brewing that involves Tim Tebow, the outstanding quarterback from the University of Florida and the first sophomore ever to win the Heisman trophy.
An outstanding young man, Tim was also the first college football player both to rush and pass for 20 touchdowns in a season. In the past three seasons he led his Gators to two national championships. This year he fell just short, losing to the eventual champion, Alabama’s Crimson Tide.
At 6 feet 3 inches and 245 pounds, Tim Tebow is an imposing figure. History might regard him as the greatest college football player who ever lived.
During this coming Super Bowl he hopes to pay tribute to his mother by producing an ad that is scheduled to air on CBS during the February 7th game.
While the ad was produced by Focus on the Family, an admittedly a pro-life group, it is not a negative attack on Planned Parenthood for the evil they do behind closed doors.
Tim’s story and especially that of his mother is an inspiring one. His parents Bob and Pam Tebow, who was pregnant with their fifth child when they traveled to the Philippines on a missionary trip about 23 years ago.
Pam contracted amoebic dysentery and the medicines used for her recovery threatened her unborn child—Tim. Her doctors advised her to abort the her son.
Fortunately for Tim, his mother ignored their advice and gave birth to him on Aug. 14, 1987.
She had listened to her heart and her conscience instead of a medical doctor who was living in defiance of his Hippocratic Oath and advising her to do harm to her unborn child.
It is a travesty that the pro-abortionists have politicized medicine by almost eliminating that oath from its ethical training and trying to force all medical schools—even Catholic ones to teach abortion techniques.
Makes you wonder where your doctor stands when you are elderly and they want to pull the plug on you before your time is up. Or maybe they just need your bed for a wealthier patient.
Now they are trying to turn the Super Bowl into an a political football issue.
Tim Tebow is a living embodiment of what women sacrifice on their altar of choice. He’s 245 pounds of human flesh and blood that had his mother listened to her doctor, would have been flushed down the memory hole of history.
There’s more to the Tebrows’ story but I will save it to later in the week. I will also add some comments about the “coach,” St. Louis University’s Rick Majerus and how every time he opens his mouth off the court he sticks his ample foot in it. Someone should off him a gag of common sense and verbal logic.
In response to my last posting, my friend Emmett raises a good question about the Catholic faith. How can a religion about forgiveness and reconciliation tick off so many people? What is so offensive about a Savior and a humble family from 2000 years ago?
Perhaps it is the fact that Catholics are supposed to kneel before the Blessed Sacrament and secular society encourages its disciples to kneel before other men or ideas that promote the control of other people. Sure the Church stresses conformity to its “way of thinking,” but it is voluntary. Sure they used to use Heaven or Hell arguments to goad us into compliance with the right way of behavior but again free will was what set us off from lower forms of animals.
To the secular state we are no better than numbers and statistics—round people that bureaucrats want to force into square animal holes. Just wait until they are running the entire health care system in this country. We might as well stop giving our children names and just call them by their SS numbers when they are born—Heck they even give you two middle numbers to go with your three digit praenomen and your three digit cognomen. It will be easy and we will not have to worry about being overtly creative.
On a similar note, I was reading the obits in the Post-Dispatch this morning—I always check them to make sure I haven’t died in my sleep—I was drawn to a citing for an attractive woman who died this past Sunday. It mentioned that she was the “companion” of some man, which I believe is Newspeak for she was “living in sin.” Well that’s not what struck me. It was more the “other” meaning” meaning of the word “companion.”
Perhaps some of you are unaware that the wonderful PETA people, you know the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals? They are the ones who encourage beautiful and handsome celebrities to shed their “second skin,” and pose for propaganda posters. They have become Playboy for the Masses. They are trying to change the language so that we throw the word “pet” on the ash heap of history. They find that “pet” is demeaning to animals and animals have rights…at least according to one of our current president’s new czars—Cass Sunstein.
But the scary truth about animals having rights—how can they have rights when they have no free will—maybe that’s why they get ticked off at Catholics—-is that it does not raise the value of animals but only lowers our value as humans.
Think about it—if the government can equate animals with people they can have their collective way with us a lot more easily. It was the Catholic Church in those bad, old Medieval days of the so-called “Dark Ages,” that elevated the status human beings, especially women, by emphasizing in its teachings with its formidable theological and philosophical support system that men and women were made in the image and likeness of God. That provided us with a 1st class upgrade. This is the main underpinning that propels the Church’s “Right to Life” movement. We are not animals. We are not companions but humans with the spark of divine life in us—all of us.
But what is the tenor of society today? They tell us Darwin killed the need of a Heavenly creator. Now they are trying to destroy the soul and the thought of life after death. St. Louisans might remember the ad campaign that the zoo ran a few years ago about the fact that chimps and humans had 98% of the same DNA.
I don’t know about you but that whole idea bothered me until I asked the author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Evolution,” on Phyllis Schlafly’s radio program. He asured me that there was a big difference in that 2%. I told him I was relieved and could now stop having my back shaved every two days.
I once flew with J. Fred Muggs—remember him when Dave Garoway was the host of the NBC Today Show? OK I do because I am OLD! Ok, I said it. Well old Fred gets on the plane wearing a cool yellow plaid jacket. He sat in 1st class of course. Well when my family boarded the plane—about 30 years ago—old Fred is stripped naked and standing tall in a…CAGE!
I submit to you that this is the end result when people are reduced to the level of animals…and believe me it is a lot easier to kill an animal than it is a human being. In the Civil War Era, black slaves were defined as “chattel,” which mean “property.” The Jews in Nazi Germany were officially listed as “Untermenschen.” You do not need to know German to realize that meant something less than human. Unborn children are usually referred to as “fetuses,” which creates a sense of ambiguity as to their “humanness.”
Last weekend I was fortunate to have interviewed Bill Donohue the president of the American Life League. Bill has been fighting a long battle against ideas, such as the one I have described today. You might check out his book, “Secular Sabotage: How Liberals are Destroying Religion and Culture in America.” I admire his courage and his indefatigable enthusiasm for engaging our ideological adversaries on the intellectual filed of combat. And that’s what it is—combat—there is a culture war going on for the very soul of America. The battle lines are being joined. Now is the time to gird our loins with the Gospel truth and take the fight to the enemy who are not bound by rules of logic, honesty and truthfulness.
Please tell your friends and even your enemies about my blog, so that we can stir of the pot of apathy among those who profess to believe in God, truth, motherhood etc.
The Gospel Truth 