I find that quote used often on pro-life websites to equate abortion with violence. However, it doesn’t ring true for most of these sites, that all too often support war and even the death penalty. Clear evidence of a nation using violence to get what it wants.

In fact, if I were to march in one of their “pro-life” demonstrations, carrying a sign with a picture of an Afghan child who was the victim of war, I would probably be called a “Taliban dupe”. Or if my sign had the photo of a Palestinian child, who was an innocent victim of war, I would probably be accused of anti-Semitism and not loving Israel enough.

I might even be whacked with one of their signs suggesting that abortion is the “new Holocaust”, complete with the most horrendous images.

Because there are several quotes also attributed to Mother Teresa, that I never see on a “pro-life” site, including this one:

Canada’s bishops have rejected allegations that the Catholic aid agency Development and Peace (D&P) provides money to organizations or projects in Mexico that promote abortion. The bishops created D&P in 1967 to support projects in poor countries and to undertake development education in Canada and two bishops sit on D&P’s board. The string of accusations began on March 11 when a web-based publication called Lifesite News claimed that D&P “is funding groups in Mexico that are pressuring the Mexican government to legalize abortion.”  LifeSite carried more than 45 articles on the topic between March and June of 2009. In April the CCCB announced that two Canadian bishops would lead an inquiry to Mexico to investigate the Lifesite allegations. The seven-person group also included the CCCB general secretary, an official from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and three people from D&P. The delegation met with representatives of the Mexican bishops’ conference and with groups that had been accused by Lifesite of promoting abortion.

On June 29, the CCCB released its report. In an accompanying statement, CCCB president Archbishop James Weisgerber summarized the inquiry’s key finding in the following manner: “The Committee of Inquiry has determined that the projects funded by Development and Peace did not promote abortion, and that the five Mexican organizations do not support abortion … the allegations by LifeSiteNews.com against Development and Peace are unfounded.” Weisgerber added that while the inquiry cleared the organization, the bishops would have “a full discussion” regarding D&P’s policies and practices at the CCCB’s annual meeting in October 2009.

D&P, in a statement issued on March 20, had denied Lifesite’s allegations but said that its Mexican partners were involved in a nation-wide consultation on the human rights situation, and were contributors (along with 100 other organizations) to an omnibus document on human rights issues. Other civil society groups participating in the exercise brought forward concerns that did relate to family planning even though that was not the focus of D&P’s partner groups. Lifesite seized on the existence of this document and other information it claimed to have as the basis for its allegations. The CCCB, in its report, said that the Mexican organizations assisted by D&P were “imprudent in signing the report in question”, but that their major preoccupation was to work for human rights. The bishops said that D&P should be “more vigilant” in analyzing requests from possible partners. The bishops also suggested that while their relationship with D&P is a good one, the organization should consult more closely with the bishops, particularly the two who sit on its board of directors.

Lifesite says report a “whitewash”

LifeSite responded defiantly on its website to the inquiry report: “This story is not over,” LifeSite said. “Many bishops have withheld funding from D&P over this and the CCCB report has not yet changed that, and we suspect that it won’t. Because it is a whitewash, the report will cause even greater scandal.” Lifesite’s web publication is a creation of the Campaign Life Coalition, which describes itself as the “political wing of the pro-life movement in Canada.” Lifesite staff share an office with Campaign Life in Toronto but Lifesite also lists a Pittsburgh address for itself and a many of its articles deal with American matters. LifeSite also said the inquiry team assembled by the bishops was not competent to investigate the allegations and that D&P personnel who accompanied the group “led the bishops in their investigations”. The bishops indicated in their report, however, that the D&P personnel organized travel and other arrangements but had no hand in writing the report.

The bishops’ report also appealed to the people behind Lifesite to “establish an open and fruitful dialogue” with the bishops and other Catholic groups. “Negative actions of this kind,” the report says, “encourage suspicion, scandal and division in the Church.” Finally, the CCCB report urged Canadian bishops, and the leadership of social justice and pro-life groups “to recognize there is a continuum and integrity to all human life issues  . . .  there is an urgency to all that threatens the dignity and sacredness of human life, including violence, hunger, poverty and oppression.” This was an appeal to everyone, including bishops, not to be selective in choosing any one issue as being of ultimate importance, as Lifesite continues to do with its emphasis on abortion and contraception and its willfully ignoring issues relating to poverty and human rights.

Lifesite’s continuing attacks have placed both D&P and the bishops on the defensive.  The signal from the CCCB is that the bishops will place D&P under the microscope. There is nothing unusual about this since the CCCB has long made it a practice to focus attention on one or two of its departments or agencies at the bishops’ annual meeting – but it will likely be doing so this year in the face of continuing negative attacks on D&P by Lifesite and its supporters. Lifesite has been emboldened by the belief that it has succeeded in creating division among the bishops. The CCCB has also placed itself into a position of requesting dialogue with an organization that many bishops have long considered to be on the church’s extremist fringe, and one that has no official status as a Catholic organization.

Archbishop Weisgerber, in a June 19 interview with Salt + Light television, expressed his frustration that the bishops’ integrity and their teaching authority was being challenged by a group of mostly unknown and self-appointed people from Lifesite. “There’s a big issue there,” Weisgerber said. “It seems that there is a tendency on the part of some people to trust allegations on websites more than they trust the bishops.”

More than a Catholic matter

The controversy may appear to be an internal Catholic matter (it has received virtually no coverage in the mainstream media) but it has broader implications. The nature of Lifesite’s attacks could well hamper the way in which D&P conducts is development work in poor countries. Lifesite insists that agencies described as Catholic should be prohibited from being involved in projects related to family planning of any kind, including contraception – and that Catholic groups be prohibited from associating with other organizations who are so involved. Such a policy, if enacted, would prevent Catholic groups from working for justice in many circumstances. This would be a victory for the Catholic right and would signal a return to a form of triumphalism that was supposedly discarded by Vatican II in the 1960s. Accepting this protocol would also set back the cause of women’s rights by decades and place Catholic organizations in the company of some of the world’s most religiously fundamentalist regimes.

It is worth noting, as well, that Lifesite strongly supported George W. Bush’s decision to refuse American support for international aid programs that dealt in any way with abortion or contraception. Bush was providing payback to the religious right for its political support. Lifesite has been particularly hostile toward President Barack Obama who moved quickly after his 2008 election to strike down Bush’s prohibition.

There are a growing number of areas in contemporary society where the religious right is having a negative impact on international development, and Lifesite’s attack upon D&P for its work in poor countries is one such example.

Part 2 of 2
Part 1

July5 , 2009
Used by permission of Dennis Gruending, Pulpit and Politics. All rights reserved.

…Jim Hughes, president of our own Campaign Life Coalition, said that “Those of us in the pro-life movement do not want to see abortionists die, we want to see them convert.”

A charming, coy thing to say, no doubt, but the everyday rhetoric of the CLC would have us believe that abortion is murder, and that abortion clinics are therefore ethically equivalent to concentration camps. The Coalition strongly supports, for example, the so-called “Genocide Awareness Project” being run on Canadian campuses by the California-based Center for Bio-Ethical Reform. Are we to believe that if Mr. Hughes stumbled across Auschwitz, he would try to “convert” the guards first? Is he opposed to taking up arms against “genocide”? Can he consistently condemn someone who did so?

No: Like most pro-lifers, he is simply a purveyor of beliefs whose literal truth he does little or nothing to act seriously upon. (As I’ve pointed out in this space, you can make Henry Morgentaler a member of the Order of Canada, thus offering the grossest provocation imaginable to Catholics and evangelicals who have received the honour, and literally 99% of them will suck it up.) But, very occasionally, some ardent religious loner is confused enough to hear those beliefs, conclude they are true, and follow through. And a doctor somewhere ends up maimed or dead. And we blame only the individual who pulled the trigger

When copy/pasting the link to this article, I noticed with some amusement that the original title of this post was “Don’t Blame The Shooter”.  I guess the editors considered that a little too hot for the socons in the audience.

Cosh is 100% right:  we are all influenced to varying degrees by external stimuli and input from our information sources.  If those sources repeatedly deliver the message that “So-and-so is a depraved maniac of a baby-butchering killer”, that will eventually flip someone’s batshit switch.  The worst thing is, these people know it.  Their hollow, weasel-worded denunciations of Dr. Tiller’s murder, always qualified with a “but he had blood on his hands” kind of statement, prove it.

Look at it this way:  if Dick Cheney ever kicks the bucket, the only people who’ll be talking about the “blood on his hands” will be the ones cracking open a bottle of bubbly to celebrate.

Now somebody go log in to the NatPo and tell them the news.

Used by permission. June 2, 2009 unrepentant old hippie

Pro-lifers in B. C., on the other hand, decided to adopt a different approach. Building on the success of their compassionate Focus on Life television campaign, they made some creative changes last June. They adopted a new name, Signal Hill, and featured a woman-and family-friendly look to their Web site and printed material. It all goes along with a new educational and service-oriented approach to help women make informed choices when they are in a crisis pregnancy.

The real news in O’Neill’s piece is that Reform wiseman Preston Manning, currently of the Manning Centre in Alberta, has leaped on board to advocate for the group, including giving a speech to supporters.

But there’s a hitch. What O’Neill dances around in that quote, without really saying, is that Signal Hill is not a new group per se, but simply a new mask for an old one, Pro Life BC. At some point they might even have thought about making the link explicit, judging from the tattered remnants of their old website. But no longer! Their new site scrupulously avoids references to the organizational roots.

Dammit Janet!, which opened the blogging world’s criticism of the O’Neill piece, made the connection immediately, and helpfully linked to some previous work done by that blog and by Unrepentant Old Hippie in January when Signal Hill first announced its existence to the world. Put briefly: this is little more than a re-branding effort

As promised, the following updates my previous post on the Parliamentary Pro-Life Caucus, a secretive group of pro-life parliamentarians in Ottawa. Interestingly, the article, after being cross-posted at Religious Right Alert, was picked up by the blog of Equipping Christians for the Public Square, a religious right political advocacy group currently headed up by a former Pro-Life Caucus secretary, Tim Bloedow.

The most common means of linking MPs to the Pro-Life Caucus is to study their voting records on abortion-related bills in Parliament, such as Ken Epp’s Bill C-484. Lloyd Mackey of CanadianChristianity.com first took this tack in 2004, and in doing so illustrated some of the problems: both Stephen Harper and Paul Martin show up as members.

Others, such as David Akin, suggest that we can identify the members of the Caucus based on their attendance at the March for Life. He made a list of 18 Members of Parliament spotted during the 2006 demo; Conservatives outnumbered Liberals by about four to one, which suggests that at least on this occasion, the Liberals weren’t showing up in representative numbers.

The leading list for the moment, however, seems to be won circulated last fall election time by the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada. This was the list adapted, for example, by Unrepentant Old Hippie last December in her analysis of Rod Bruinooge’s “kidneys’ rights” op-ed, his first shot across the bows as chairman of the Caucus. I’ve taken that list and combined it with Akin’s suggested criterion – attendance at the Campaign Life Coalition March for Life demos in Ottawa.

The following list identifies MPs according to four categories, then: whether they’ve been at one of the Marches; whether they were designated as pro-life MPs in previous election campaigns; whether they opposed bestowing an Order of Canada upon controversial doctor Henry Morgentaler; and whether they voted for Ken Epp’s fetal homicide bill (Bill C-484) on second reading last year. These final three categories are simply the ones suggested by the existing Abortion Rights Coalition work.

Until such time as the parliamentarians involved perform their democratic obligation to the public and explain for themselves whether they are affiliated with this caucus or not, we can do no more than speculate. Repeated apperances in pro-life causes, however, is indicative that the MP is pro-life – if not actually a part of the pro-life caucus. Those with three check marks to their name get coded yellow; those with all four get coded green.

Finally, those labelled pink are ones for which there exists direct evidence – usually from the MPs themselves, in press releases, Parliamentary speeches, and the like, or from references in the press – that they are current or former members or affiliates of the Pro-Life Caucus. There are only about a dozen and a half of those in the list, including the chairman, Bruinooge.

The consistently pro-life MPs, by these measures, are about sixty to seventy in number, which is around the rough size of the Pro-Life Caucus normally quoted by those in the know. That doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone I’ve highlighted is definitely a member of the Pro-Life Caucus, but it probably means that most are. Of course, individual MPs or their staff could do much to clear up the uncertainty by coming forward with a “yea” or “nay” on the issue of affiliation with the Caucus.

As also mentioned, The Globe and Mail gave the Campaign Life Coalition march some coverage, as did:

The Ottawa Citizen Thousands hit Hill to protest against abortion.

Lifesite News  covers the Campaign for Life march every year and their crowd estimates are usually what are passed on.

Salt and Light Television is busy with coverage of the Pope’s Middle East visit, but made it to Ottawa and blogged they’ll have more later.

The Eye of the Engima is written by a Catholic high school student who, like many Catholic high school kids, get bused in for a field day.

Dies Irae, another Catholic blogger, attended. And there is more below the fold…

Catholic Archbishop Terrence Prendergast also blogged about his day, he’s a bit more chatty since he is responsible for his fellow Archbishops who fly in and for hospitality to various Knights of Columbus leaders. 
Special masses are held in Ottawa cathedrals prior to the crowd hitting Ottawa streets.
Interdenominational prayer services were hosted in Ottawa by the Canadian Reformed Church and St. George, a  schismatic Anglican Church (ANiC).  

Antonia Zervisia  blogged at The Toronto Star, giving background.

Big Blue Wave (Suzanne Fortin, a former Christian Heritage Party candidate) posted some pictures.

Religious Right Alert got mentioned at Equipping Christians for the Public Square. Tim Bloedow, former administrative assistant for the Pro-Life Caucus and former Christian Heritage Party candidate took exception to this post: Finding the Pro-Life Caucus on Parliament Hill , where the question is raised about what Members of Parliament are part of the caucus, saying it was a McCarthyite article.
Given we are discussing  Canadian MPs, a Canadian name might have lent the ECPC question some credibility. 

MP Rod Bruinooge released the annual pr from the March media conference this year suggesting freedom of speech of anti-abortion groups was under threat, saying there was a ”disturbing trend of intolerance towards the pro-life point of view .” Examples are not given other than LifeCanada’s billboard campaign.

Unions, campuses, students and advertisers are named as opponents and the usual ”Polls consistently show that a majority of Canadians do not support Canada’s unrestricted tax-payer funded abortion regime” is again trotted out. That might be Mr. Bruinrooge’s brothers polling firm, hard to say, facts are in short supply in this pr.  

SoCon or Bust  headlined Mr. Bruinrooges press release: Pro-life speech being suppressed by pro-life facists.

The site administrator for Equipping Christians for the Public Square is genuinely upset Canadians want to know what elected MP’s are up to, and responded in an unfortunate tone to the idea that even pro-life Canadians might want to know which elected officials identify with this secret caucus:

 (click on the screenshot on the left to read from orginal source)

Would it not be in the best interest of all Canadian voters to know what secret caucuses their MP’s are participating in?
Just out of curiousity,  how many secret parliament caucuses hand out press releases once a year?

It’s the start of a long weekend in Canada, I didn’t see any other blogs mentioning the march,  did a very quick check of evangelical religious sites and blogs.

As for march attendees, The Ottawa Citizen says Jim Hughes of Campaign Life Coalition estimated about 10 thousand people braved the rain, Lifesite says 12 thousand.  Archbishop Prendergast wrote The Knights of Columbus managed to come out in strength this year.  Ottawa City Police don’t have estimated crowd numbers online.

Dammit Janet! summarizes some of the media back-and-forth.

Are you going (or were you at) the march? Drop us a line or a link to let us know how it went.

It’s not partisan. It doesn’t have a website. There is a chairman – normally two – and possibly even an independent staff of assistants. It’s been operating on Parliament Hill for the last decade, maybe more, and there still hasn’t been a public listing of its members.

The “it” I’m referring to is the Parliamentary Pro-Life Caucus, a theoretically non-partisan (though mostly Conservative, with a Liberal minority and pretty much no one from the other parties) group of MPs who are pro-life and would support reconsidering the current lack of national laws banning or restricting abortions. Once in a while the group pops up and garners a couple of headlines, but for the most part, it toils in obscurity. Those members who achieve political success, like Jason Kenney, probably had to sever their ties to the Caucus on their way up the ladder.

The encouraging thing about that is that it suggests, at least for the time being, that the anti-choice movement is having minimal success. Its representatives on the hill can’t even operate in the open, let alone put up legislation beyond a few disturbing fringe bills like Epp’s “murder of the unborn” law last year. This despite the fact that Lloyd Mackey, at least, believes our current prime minister might even be a former member of the Caucus. So, what do we actually know about this group?

The Parliamentary Pro-Life Caucus seems to operate in the shadows as a sort of open secret organization. After chairman Rod Bruinooge’s inflammatory “kidneys outrank fetuses” op-ed was published last December (h/t Dammit Janet, Unrepentant Old Hippie), Ignatieff’s spokesperson refused to answer whether he would permit Liberal MPs to sit in the Pro-Life Caucus, and even suggested the group might not exist. This was, as socon blogger Big Blue Wave immediately pointed out, probably a lie: there’s no way the Liberal leadership wouldn’t know about the caucus. But no membership list was forthcoming, either. Bouquets of Gray expressed some well-deserved disapproval:

A secret AA chapter? Fine. A quilting klatch? No problem. A Dungeon-and-dragons cell? Whatever. MPs have a right to keeping their personal lives personal. But Bruinooge’s caucus advocates a change to public policy, and as such it should be operating out in the open.

Indeed, it is rather surprising that they do not want to operate in the open, because they can hardly hope to change public policy otherwise. If they are not going to argue their case in public, how do they expect to persuade anyone? win any votes? pass any laws?

Personally, I find it particularly bizarre that the group operates in secret and doesn’t get called on this. Its leaders claim this is because MPs who are members fear retaliation from their party leaders and from the public. The first I can understand. Maybe. But the second? If it’s something so seriously unpopular that you have to do it in secret, then as an elected representative you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. We wouldn’t stand for such convenient cynicism in other issue areas. Why should we on this one?

In honour of next month’s swiftly approaching March for Life parade, put on by the Campaign Life Coalition (a close ally of the Pro-Life Caucus), I intend to dig a little deeper into the mystery of the caucus. This is the sort of occasion when bloggers like myself just can’t match the resources of the declining mainstream media. I’m sure a few well-connected members of the press gallery could find out what I’m looking for in a single afternoon. I wish they’d do their jobs instead of leaving it to people like me and Unrepentant Old Hippie. Nevertheless, she called on bloggers to “ferret them out,” and that’s what I’m going to do.

The first Pro-Life Caucus emerged in the 1980s, during the first debate over abortion surrounding the Morgentaler decision in 1988. It collapsed in 1991 during debate over the Mulroney government’s failed Bill C-43. In 1998, Campaign Life Coalition president Jim Hughes played an unknown role in bringing together chairpersons for a new Caucus: Progressive Conservative Elsie Wayne, Liberal Tom Wappel, and then-rookie, now-immigration minister Jason Kenney, whose reactionary views at the time are probably best expressed by this article from his San Francisco Catholic university’s newspaper.

Tim Bloedow, then a Campaign Life lobbyist and writer for its paper The Interim, remarked that his group planned to step back and “work more behind the scenes” in the work of the new caucus. These intimate connections to Campaign Life may remain in place, though it is unclear. CLC is certainly an active defender of the Caucus; it fell to Mary Ellen Douglas to defend the group’s secrecy in December 2008. For his work in this regard, president Hughes was given a Catholic Civil Rights League award in 2007.

Reflecting its close connections with Campaign Life, the most significant event for the Caucus appears to be the annual March for Life demonstration, during which its chairs – and, from time to time, a few members – hold a special press conference highlighting an issue related to abortion. In 2003, the trio of co-chairs (Elsie Wayne, Paul Steckle and Maurice Vellacott) demanded the outlawing of embryonic stem cell research.

In 2005, Vellacott and Steckle suggested that an unknown but enormous number of women were being forced into abortions by abusive partners. The next year, they argued that abortion causes breast cancer, backed by American surgeon Angela Lanfranchi. Vellacott later added that the Canadian Cancer Society was refusing to study this link because it was funded by pharmaceutical companies and therefore did not genuinely want to prevent cancer. In 2007, they were criticizing sex-selective abortions, using research supplied by Andrea Mrozek of the Focus on the Family Canada-funded think tank, Institute of Marriage and Family Canada. In none of these cases have firm statistics on the alleged Canadian “violence” been presented. In their last conference together, in 2008, Steckle and Vellacott brought in Alveda King to speak on abortion as a civil rights issue (fetus civil rights, not women’s civil rights, naturally).

While scientifically dubious, these sessions are arguably less provocative than the comments some Caucus members come out with in their speeches to the annual March – Cheryl Gallant, for example, once notoriously claimed that abortions in Canada were “absolutely no different” than beheadings of Western journalists by terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Other than being a clearinghouse for information and a hosting service for pro-life speakers, it’s unclear what function the Caucus currently serves, however. Information on the website of Conservative MP Gerry Breitkreuz implies that in 2002 the Caucus canvassed all thirteen provincial and territorial governments, asking whether they had officially defined “medically necessary” abortions. That was followed in 2003 by a letter to health minister Anne McLellan “on the topic of medically necessary abortions.” Given Breitkreuz’s comments at the end of the page, the letter probably argued that public funding for abortions should be withdrawn in the absence of a definition of medical necessity.

The merger of the Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties reduced the number of chairs of the Caucus from three to two – though according to Lloyd Mackey, the caucus did consider naming a third from the New Democratic Party, Bev Dejarlais, which would suggest that at least at that point there were NDP members of the caucus. In fact, several writers, like Kady O’Malley, believed that longstanding NDP MP and United Church minister Bill Blaikie was a member of the Caucus.

In 2008, Vellacott stepped down and was replaced by Winnipeg Conservative MP Rod Bruinooge. Bruinooge linked his pro-life stance to his aboriginal heritage, and was welcomed warmly by the Canada Family Action Coalition, the Association for Reformed Political Action and the Campaign Life Coalition.

Bruinooge announced his new chairmanship in November, then, on December 29, published a widely reported and controversial op-ed in the National Post, “Why I Am Pro-Life,” in which he suggested that abortion was hindering population replacement and that fetuses had less rights than kidneys, because you can’t take out your kidney and sell it on eBay. (You can’t actually do that with your fetus either, by the way.) The article was welcomed by such writers as Andrea Mrozek of ProWomanProLife and the Institute of Marriage and Family, panned by more pragmatic conservative bloggers like Raphael Alexander, and angrily denounced by Shameless, the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, and others. In a particularly odd post, Dr. Roy suggested that “radical feminists” would dismiss Bruinooge’s remarks because he was of First Nations descent!

In running the caucus, the co-chairs are assisted by one and possibly more staffers, paid by a pool of money submitted by the MPs out of their legislative office budgets and given a desk in one of the chair’s offices. In 2001 Campaign Life Coalition lobbyist Tim Bloedow took the job, which he held for at least three years, though he remained in Vellacott’s office until 2007, moving over to John Earnshaw’s job as legislative assistant.

Bloedow’s Conservative Party duties were not so onerous, it seems, to prevent him from also running as a Christian Heritage Party candidate in 2004. He then went on to write the extremist website ChristianGovernment.ca, and is now the president of Equipping Christians for the Public Square. Bloedow, it must be said, has always been good at getting into apparent conflicts of interest: he worked as a Campaign Life lobbyist while also as a religious journalist, and more recently published grand praise of Vellacott on the website of the Association for Reformed Political Action without mentioning that he was working in Vellacott’s office and had been for years.

After Bloedow moved over to become Vellacott’s personal assistant, Barbara McAdorey, administrator of Canadian Physicians for Life, then moved in to take over some of his former duties. Among her activities as the caucus administrator, it seems, was supplying information to Lutherans for Life Canada in 2006 to help them in their attempt to win charitable status.

The caucus would also seem to maintain amiable relationships with various organizations within the religious right, and especially, pro-life, communities. Lloyd Mackey says that “pro-life volunteers” supply Caucus meetings with coffee and sandwiches. They have worked with, and heard presentations from, José Ruba of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, among others. Alberta Pro-Life has been invited, too. After Bruinooge’s National Post article came under fire, Joseph Ben-Ami of the Charles McVety-linked Institute for Canadian Values leaped to his defence, arguing unconvincingly that even though the Caucus’s membership was secret, the fact that it included both Liberals and Conservatives meant that it was open and bipartisan (great, more fucking bipartisanship).

Despite Bruinooge’s inflammatory and highly publicized remarks in December, the influence of the Caucus would seem to be waning – not that it was ever overly influential in the first place. Before the 2008 election, Campaign Life president Jim Hughes somberly lamented the loss of some of the caucus’s leading lights, including Wappel, Steckle, and Norman Doyle. Shortly after his retirement, Tom Wappel told a gathering of Catholic clergy organized by Campaign Life that the caucus had never properly cultivated relations with the Catholic community. It remains to be seen what will happen to this organization in the coming years.

Tomorrow I’ll be publishing a tentative list of known and suspected members of the Caucus as a public service, since the Caucus itself apparently feels no need to make that sort of information publicly known.

• Pope Benedict XVI has issued a statement of “sorrow” but not an apology, after meeting with First Nations leaders to discuss the residential school system. (h/t Dammit Janet!, Unrepentant Old Hippie)

• David MacDonald and 4 My Canada director Faytene Kryskow have presented a 18 222-signature petition to the Governor-General, demanding she revoke Henry Morgentaler’s Order of Canada (h/t SoCon or Bust)

• Martin Cohn of the Toronto Star reports on Tony Blair’s Faith Foundation, which recently brought him to speak in Toronto.

• The Liberal policy convention will apparently consider overturning the Harper government ban on organ donations from gay men (h/t Slap Upside the Head

• On the National Post blog Holy Post, John Stackhouse argues that evolution has taken an unacceptable turn and become “a religion, an all-encompassing wolrdview and a ‘myth’… – the governing story of a people.”

(A disturbing “women’s work” metaphor in any case, and particularly during a controversy such as this.)

That a major Canadian development NGO was in serious trouble – for funding pro-choice groups would be news in itself. However, as deBeauxOs of Dammit Janet! pointed out in her scathing commentary on SoCon United’s blog SoCon or Bust, the pro-life crowd’s attacks were seamlessly carrying over from the specific issue of abortion, to all groups advocating women’s rights in general. There was, she remarked, an ironic message – “according to SoCon, fundamentalist Islamist and Catholic men share the same agenda: return women to the control that religious political authority allows men to enjoy.”

The same position was taken by Unrepentant Old Hippie when SoCon or Bust revealed a similar disgust for D&P’s supporting the use of condoms for contraception.

Terrible Depths recently took a similar perspective, too, and filled in some of the blanks on SoCon or Bust, an ostensibly “social conservative” but in fact Roman Catholic project of religious right activist John Pacheco:

SoCon or Bust is actually a group blog co-written by Chris Beneteau, an anonymous priest, and the organization’s director, John Pacheco. I don’t know who the priest is, though I initially suspected (and on reflection I’m almost certainly wrong on this) that he might be Pete Vere, a canon lawyer and author (with Kate Shaidle) of a book attacking Canada’s human rights commissions – and with whom Beneteau and Pacheco have written before. Beneteau doesn’t seem particularly prominent either, though he is an also-ran with the Family Coalition Party, a socon political party founded by Campaign Life Coalition activists in the ’80s.

Pacheco, however, is more recognizable. He also directs the Catholic Legate in Ottawa, a right-wing Catholic apologist group whose mission is to “re-evangelize our paganized North American and western culture” and which explicitly says that it accepts without question all dogmas, doctrines and moral teachings promulgated by the Vatican. In 2003, he also founded the Rosarium of the Blessed Virgin Mary Life Centre to oppose condoms and birth control pills. He and Pete Vere also helped found a new Catholic private school, Maryvale Academy,

SoCon United’s mailing address also raises some questions. They invite you to contact them at P.O. Box 11400, Station H, in Ottawa. Oh, ho! That’s also, as it happens, the mailing box used by the Catholic Legate, Pacheco’s apostolate, and the Rosarium, his anti-birth control league.