Oh, this is depressing. A 2010 article by Jeff Sharlet (I was browsing him for background on “The Family” and the Ugandan kill-the-gays bill) on how Hillary Clinton moved to the right on abortion at the behest of (gag, choke) “Mother” Teresa and “The Family” at the 1994 (gag, gag) “National Prayer Breakfast.”
HC was at the 58th annual nationalprayerbreakfast in 2010, and there she got nostalgic about the late Albanian nun.
In her address, Clinton sentimentally recalled meeting Mother Teresa at the 1994 National Prayer Breakfast. Mother Teresa had used her platform as guest speaker to chastise the Clintons (standing right beside her, smiles stretched to the breaking point) for their nominal support of abortion rights. “Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want,” Mother Teresa said, and went on to suggest adoption be promoted as an alternative to abortion. “Please don’t kill the child. I want the child. Please give me the child.”
Well, that’s the problem with having national prayer breakfasts where people in government go to be all goddy, isn’t it. They get blackmailed into forgetting all about the women who simply don’t want to be pregnant, and instead get all sentimental about “the child” who doesn’t exist yet, at the behest of a religious fanatic who thinks pain is a prezzy from Jesus.
The Clintons remained seated, yet both — particularly the ever-politic Hillary — understood how behind-the-scenes power politics work within the Christian Right, and responded to the rebuke by finding “common ground” with the nun. Although Clinton didn’t mention this in her public reminiscence last week, after C-Span stopped taping and the breakfast plates were cleared, Fellowship head Doug Coe gently brokered a peace between Hillary and Mother Teresa.
Coe left the Breakfast with one of the most powerful women in America in his debt for political services rendered. And Mother Teresa had the satisfaction of watching Hillary’s support for abortion as a fundamental right give way to an acceptance of it as a “tragedy” — one that should be made as “rare” as possible. In the long run, Hillary turned a public scolding into a highly visible friendship with a figure whose widely accepted moral bona fides came with an explicitly anti-abortion imprimatur from the Christian Right.
Read on, if you have a strong stomach.
The fact that adoption doesn’t make the pregnancy go away when the woman wants it to go away, so it’s a non-solution, aside, this:
sounds really creepy.
The last person I would give a child to is one that says “I want the child. Please give me the child.” Creepy visions come to my mind. My sister always said the same thing – and several children are now dead because people listened to her.
When a dried up Albanian nun who knows nothing about the problems real women face in this country has so much power over our politicians, things have really gotten bad.
Oh, and she’s against birth control, too. So that would be lots of children for her. Then she could do what with them? Use them in her hospitals? Have her picture taken with them and send them off to Catholic Boarding school? My mind is shuddering at the thought.
Obviously she’s going to sell them to rich families. It’s what the Catholic Church did with literally hundreds of thousands of children in Spain and Australia throughout the 20th century – stole them from parents that they deemed ‘unfit’, told these unfit parents that the child died, and then sold the children to good Catholic couples.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2011/10/spains-stolen-babies-an-ugly-past-on-a-staggering-scale-2/
How anyone can claim that the Catholic Church is anything but pure, concentrated evil is beyond me.
The Clintons are political players. I completely agree that she was kowtowing a bit. But I also have little doubt HC would defend legal abortion if pushed.
And that’s pretty much what I care about. I don’t care if you personally consider it tragic. In a sense (though not the one MC or HC probably meant), any major surgery is a tragedy. I also don’t care if you stay silent during a photo op when the public figure is saying something you don’t agree with. Just defend the legal right and our citizens’ practical ability to do it.
‘Kay. I’ll cop to being awfully curious about what was the deal with your sister…
That aside, yeah re creepy. And that’s probably a good general rule that goes double when it’s anyone in a religious office saying it.
(… and probably goes triple for Catholics. Seriously, footage of a Catholic priest, monk, or nun saying ‘Give me the child!’ could easily be taken as horror movie teaser material, and a suitable trigger warning should accompany it for those for the now many for whom the overtones might get a mite personal.)
… not to mention, of course, as noted above, there is no ‘child’ yet, Theresa, you nasty little piece of work, you.
That thankfully now deceased nun, she was one creepy little monster–a nonfiction Emperor Palpatine, if ever there was one. All piety and your humble servant and plastic smiles on cue for the cameras, and then blood money from dictators and endless, grinding misery and death touted as a virtue less than a millimeter beneath. Hitchens had her measure all too well.
eric – well I do care if people in government not only think all abortion is a tragedy but also say so, for instance in the Senate. And defending the legal right is far from all there is to it. Treating abortion as a tragedy is one way to make sure that however legal it may be, it is impossible to get for nearly everyone. Abortion is impossible to get for many women in the US right now, because there are no providers for many hundreds of miles.
“Voting rights are a tragedy and I’d like to see the instances of voting limited as much as possible.”
Hmm. Doesn’t translate as well to other rights, does it?
“Free speech rights are a tragedy…”
Give me a sec, maybe I can find one that doesn’t sound horrible.
I remember that horrible nun saying in her Nobel peace prize acceptance speech that abortion is “the greatest destroyer of peace” because it inevitably leads to everyone killing each other.
So women who for any reason do not want to be pregnant are responsible for war.
She was one horrific person and by no means only for that reason.
Slightly OT: does anyone here know how to pronounce “Bojaxhiu”?
I suspect that, if properly enunciated, hearing that name should elicit a prompt “Gesundheit!”
Pierce R. Butler,
http://www.pronounceitright.com/pronounce/5778/agnes-gonxha-bojaxhiu
… but I have no idea whether this is right.
Beatrice @ # 10 – Thanks!
(Intriguing site – I look forward to playing with it later…)
As for ol’ Aggie – her middle name will titillate some of my more Rastafarian-minded friends…
I remember that horrible nun saying in her Nobel peace prize acceptance speech that abortion is “the greatest destroyer of peace” because it inevitably leads to everyone killing each other.
Why don’t these people get upset about capital punishment? That’s what I don’t understand…
Ophelia @6:
Yes, and I think that’s wrong, and I hope that folk like HC will fight against it. Which is why I said (adding emphasis this time) “Just defend the legal right and our citizens’ practical ability to do it.”
It must be said that Mother Teresa’s miracles are very limited by the standards of the Bible and medieval saints, like St. Genevieve and St. Francis Xavier. Want to see which ones you can recognize?
Did MT ever speak in several languages without having to learn them?
Did MT ever calm any storms?
Did MT ever miraculously fill an empty oil can with oil or recharge a dead battery?
Did MT ever miraculously desalinate seawater?
Did MT ever point out any monster-containing trees?
Did a crab ever return a lost crucifix to MT?
Did MT ever cure blindness?
Did MT ever strike blind anyone who stole from her?
Did MT ever cause an earthquake in a town whose citizens said nasty things about her?
Did MT ever miraculously create any big piles of bread and fish?
Did MT ever raise anyone from the dead?
Did MT ever cure anyone with magical spit therapy?
Did MT ever walk on water?
Did MT ever turn water into wine?
Did MT ever zap some Missionaries of Charity employee who kept too much for herself?
Did MT ever turn some sticks into snakes?
Did MT ever sic a pack of stray dogs on some kids who teased her about being a wrinkled old hag?
Did MT ever have a competition with some Hindu priests about whose god was better at making a rain of fire from on high?
I will concede that she had worked some miracles:
“Curing” the stomach cancer of Monica Besra, someone who was being medically treated for it.
Creating an image of herself as a great humanitarian.
An inverse bread-and-fish miracle: the disappearance of large amounts of money from the bank accounts of the Missionaries of Charity, her order of nuns.