/* Written 5:07 PM Mar 17, 1999 by tburghardt@igc.org in igc:pol.right.anti */
/* ---------- "[AFIB] `In the Name of the Fetus' -" ---------- */
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|| * -- RESEARCH - * - March 17, 1999 - * - RESEARCH -- * ||
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* RESEARCH SUPPLEMENT *
______
* ANTI-FASCIST FORUM (AFF) *
P.O. Box 6326, Station A
Toronto, Ontario
M5W 1P7 Canada
E-mail: aff@burn.ucsd.edu
Web: http://burn.ucsd.edu/~aff
-----
_________________________________________________________________
`IN THE NAME OF THE FETUS'
Human Life International, the Catholic Right and the Vatican's
Crusade for Patriarchy
_________________________________________________________________
By G. Montini and E. Cartman
* * *
Dear Friend,
Do you know what's the best strategy for combatting abortion
now, when the Culture of Death seems stronger every day? Do
you know the UN's frightening plans for global war upon life
and family? How to defeat dissenters in your parish or
diocese? How to teach kids to stay chaste in an X-rated
world? The incredible, shocking truth about Prof. Alfred
Kinsey, the father of the sexual revolution? You'll find the
answers to a hundred urgent questions like these when the
world's largest, most informative pro-life/pro-family event
comes to Toronto.
-- from the registration form for Human Life International's
18th World Conference on Love, Life and the Family, to be
held from April 7th to 11 at the International Plaza Hotel
in Toronto (demonstration info below)
* * *
This spring over a thousand right-wing Catholics will be
gathering at Human Life International's world conference in
Toronto. What follows is an examination of what this group
is, where it comes from and who it works with.
ORIGINS
HLI is a right-wing Catholic organization based in the
United States. It was created in 1981, the child of two odious
parents: John Paul II's militantly right-wing Catholic Church and
the Reagan-era American New Right.
From the New Right, HLI initially received much support from
the Washington DC-based Free Congress Foundation. The FCF has
been one of the key think tanks within the New Right over the
past twenty years. In the eighties it was instrumental in setting
up not only HLI but also Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, and
helped lay the groundwork for the virulent political homophobia
that erupted in the nineties. HLI's first offices were provided
by the FCF, and many of its initial contacts on the political
right were certainly facilitated by this think tank.
HLI has also benefitted from the steady support of the
Vatican, especially the Pontifical Council on the Family. The PCF
is a special Vatican department that was set up in 1981 to
coordinate attacks on reproductive rights, including the rights
to contraception and abortion. The PCF has hosted special
"pro-life" conferences with HLI leaders and Protestants like
Randall Terry of Operation Rescue. Its current president Cardinal
Alphonso Lopez Trujillo was one of the few Latin American
advisors to the Vatican's thought police (aka the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith, aka the Office of the Holy
Inquisition) when this department was persecuting liberation
theologists there.
HLI fights against not only abortion but also an entire
gamut of supposedly anti-Christian forces. It publishes booklets
and organizes workshops attacking liberal Catholics, groups like
Planned Parenthood and UNICEF, contraceptives, the "homosexual
agenda", Islam, pornography and other alleged threats to Western
civilization. It holds numerous conferences around the world
every year, generally featuring a half-dozen workshops on these
subjects. Its conferences on "Love, Life and the Family", like
the upcoming Toronto event, represent the annual climax of this
activity, normally attracting upwards of a thousand people and
featuring dozens of reactionary "experts".
RACISM
Father Paul Marx has played a leading role in HLI since its
inception, first as president and now as chairman of the
organization. Many of Marx's statements are explicitly anti-
Semitic, and his book Confessions of a Pro-life Missionary
(published and distributed by HLI) includes a chapter entitled
"Pro-Abortion Jews and the New Holocaust." (see They Said
What!?!? below)
These statements have attracted much controversy, but the
group nevertheless continues to stand by Marx and distribute his
racist works. Nor is he the only bigot in this "pro-life" group.
HLI's past conferences have included workshops on "The Moslem
Threat to the World", "The Muslimization of the Balkans" and "The
Balkans and the Future of Christian Europe". Regular HLI
collaborators like Quebec's Gilles Grondin are active in anti-
immigrant nationalist organizations. Some, like Siegfried Ernst,
HLI's former German Advisor, have been linked with neo-Nazis and
have been accurately described as fascists.
HOMOPHOBIA
For many years HLI worked closely with Paul Cameron, a
homophobic psychologist who was expelled from the American
Psychiatric Association for dishonest and faulty research. In
1987, Cameron advocated making homosexuality a federal offense,
and giving queers convicted of transmitting AIDS the death
penalty. A few months later, he proposed that people living
with AIDS should be branded on the face with the letter "A". He
also stated that "elimination of the carrier" (i.e. murdering
people living with HIV) may become necessary.
In 1995, when activists in Montreal called attention to
Cameron's advocacy of mass murder, HLI was forced to ask Cameron
to retract these statements. When the psychologist refused he was
officially dropped from the conference. Lest anyone be fooled,
this decision was transparently hypocritical: Cameron had made
his statements almost a decade earlier, and yet HLI had no
problem working with him. His books are still for sale at HLI's
Ottawa headquarters. At the very Montreal conference where
Cameron was shunned, Randall Terry of Operation Rescue was
featured as a keynote speaker; the "pro-life" Protestant
reiterated his belief that all homosexual acts merit the death
penalty.
ANTI-FEMINISM
HLI hates feminism. It distributes books like Donna
Steichen's "Ungodly Rage" claiming that the modern-day feminist
movement is merely the latest incarnation of medieval anti-
Christian heresies, all manipulated by Satan himself. Steichen
has been invited to speak at past conferences of HLI, as has
Cornelia Ferreira, the founder of the Canadian chapter of Women
for Faith & Family. Ferreira has written that feminism, along
with environmentalism, freemasonry and the New Age movement, are
all parts of an actual Satanist conspiracy.
HLI's professional anti-feminist speakers at the upcoming
Toronto conference are a little less imaginative. Babette
Francis, HLI's current Australian advisor, has been an outspoken
foe of women's liberation for years. In the seventies she set up
Women Who Want to be Women to oppose what was then a growing
Australian feminist movement. WWWW attacked claims that women
were oppressed and mobilized opposition to various government and
UN-sponsored declarations against sex discrimination. WWWW later
changed its name to the Endeavor Forum, and as such has been
increasingly active around the abortion issue, going so far as to
organize pickets outside the homes of prominent abortion
providers. Endeavor enjoys a cosy relationship with the Christian
Democratic Party, a virulently homophobic party that proposes
Australia be an officially Christian country with civil
government under the authority of God and legislation kept in
accordance with Biblical principles.
Another full-time anti-feminist who will be speaking in
Toronto is Gwendolyn Landolt, one of Canada's pioneer anti-choice
and anti-feminist activists. Almost from day one Landolt was
involved in the Canadian anti-abortion movement, serving as legal
counsel for the Toronto Right to Life Committee throughout the
seventies and then helping to found the Campaign Life Coalition,
Canada's most militant national anti-choice organization.
It is as the outspoken vice-president of R.E.A.L.
(Realistic, Equal, Active for Life) Women, though, that Landolt
is best known. REAL Women is Canada's premiere anti-feminist
organization. It was formed in 1983, an attempt by several women
in the anti-abortion movement to attack the much more popular and
well-established feminist movement.
In 1990 the president of REAL's BC chapter suggested that
Marc Lepine, the gunman who murdered 14 women in Montreal, "just
might have been a man whose child had been aborted by a feminist,
and that had been enough to trigger a terrible response to the
abuse of his childhood". She also claimed that most people living
with AIDS were gay men, and as such were "simply reaping what
they have sown".
REAL has worked closely over the years with HLI as well as
with other Canadian right-wing organizations such as the National
Citizens' Coalition, Campaign Life Coalition and the now-defunct
Northern Foundation. This last group was a broad mish-mash of
conservatives, Christian fundamentalists and outright neo-nazis
associated with the Heritage Front. It was set up by "pro-life"
activist Ann Hartmann, herself a REAL Women activist and
committed racist, and Landolt spoke at its 1989 Leadership
Conference. (The NF has since fell apart; in all fairness it
should be mentioned that the neo-nazis involved in the project
seem to have played down their politics in an unsuccessful
attempt to woo the conservatives.)
UNITED NATIONS
A key concern of organizations like HLI is that human rights
will be defined internationally as including access to abortion,
contraceptives or sex education. It is the nightmare of many a
conservative that national laws banning abortion, homosexuality
or contraception may be struck down by international tribunals.
This is why HLI has been active behind the scenes at a
number of international conferences organized by the United
Nations, trying its hardest to discredit the conferences as
"pro-death" feminist attempts to spread immorality by means of a
one-world government. The first major battle on this new terrain
took place in 1995, as a campaign was undertaken to undermine the
position of feminists at the UN's Fourth World Conference on
Women held in Beijing. Subsequent skirmishes have occurred at UN
conferences on the environment, food, housing and other themes.
Spokespeople for HLI have accused lesbians and radical feminists
of trying to use the United Nations to impose homosexuality on
public school children and creating all-female cities where
"blissful lesbians could raise girl children."
WOMEN'S HEALTH
While by no means a single-issue organization, HLI certainly
retains a sharp focus on the questions of reproductive rights
regarding contraception and especially abortion. The fetus has
become the symbol of choice for this section of the Catholic
right, with rhetoric frequently alluding to an "abortion
holocaust" and comparisons with the Nazi death camps being a dime
a dozen.
HLI's conferences have featured the likes of Randall Terry
and Joseph Scheidler, who pioneered the blockading of clinics in
the United States. Several HLI allies have expressed sympathy or
even approval for the bombing of abortion facilities. While the
organization has officially condemned each and every act of
murder perpetrated by the broader anti-choice movement, it has
also made repeated overtures to various groups which maintain the
legitimacy of violence against abortion providers. For instance,
in 1995 Father Matthew Habiger (at that time president of HLI)
addressed a national conference of the American Coalition of Life
Activists, a group founded by activists unwilling to condemn the
murders of abortion providers. Or take the case of Bishop Austin
Vaughn of New York, who in 1993 co-signed a statement declaring
that "those who take up arms against abortionists cannot be
simply condemned, nor are they guilty of murder."
Even though most of HLI's allies oppose the murder of
abortion providers, there is a broad consensus that they are
engaged in a real war against the queers, feminists and liberals
who support the "culture of death". In the words of HLI's current
president the Father Richard Welch, "Christians are now at war -
culturally and spiritually - with the United States government."
As a soldier in this war, in the early nineties Welch himself was
responsible for organizing the only clinic blockades ever in
Puerto Rico. Welch had students from the Catholic high school he
taught at videotape women entering abortion clinics, and invited
the mainland anti-abortion groups Rescue America and the Lambs of
Christ to help him interfere with Puerto Rican women's
reproductive rights. On one occasion one of Welch's goons even
videotaped the child of a pro-choice activist in an obvious
attempt to intimidate the opposition.
Several other speakers at the upcoming conference have also
been involved in the direct action movement to restrict women's
access to abortion. For instance, several leaders of the Campaign
Life Coalition are scheduled to speak. Campaign Life is the
national Canadian organization that helped Operation Rescue come
to Toronto in 1989 to blockade the Morgentaler Clinic on Harbord
Street (the clinic was eventually bombed by anti-abortionists in
1992). The Coalition's president James Hughes and Father Ted
Colleton, editor of the Coalition's newspaper "The Interim", will
be speaking at HLI's Toronto conference. Colleton has been
arrested dozens of times for obstructing entry to clinics in
Canada. Americans like repeat-blockader Joan Andrews-Bell and
John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe - editor of HLI Reports and an architect
of the blockade strategy - will also be addressing the Toronto
conference.
BYFIELD BOYS
The most influential publications in Canada to support HLI
are certainly Alberta Report, BC Report and Western Report, three
widely read magazines coming out of western Canada. The Reports
have advocated for the teaching of Christian fundamentalism in
schools, have reprinted the vile research of Paul Cameron
regarding queer sex, and have consistently supported groups in
the "pro-family" lobby such as REAL Women, Focus on the Family,
Promise Keepers Canada and Campaign Life Coalition.
The magazines are the creation of Ted Byfield, and are
controlled by he and his family. The Byfields' have thus become
some of the best known Christian conservatives in western Canada,
and are key players on the Right. Ted's son Link, the current
editor of Alberta Report, was one of the founders of the Northern
Foundation in the 1980s. As mentioned above, the NF was an uneasy
amalgamation of conservatives and neo-Nazis. Link and Ted were
also involved in the abortive attempt to set up a Canadian
Christian Coalition in 1996.
Link's wife Joanne Hatton was the woman behind the Committee
to End Tax-Funded Abortions, a group that tried to remove
abortion from the list of publicly funded medical procedures in
Alberta. The Byfield family was heavily involved in setting up
the Reform Party, but has continued to have misgivings about
Preston Manning's pragmatism, bemoaning the influence of
"politically correct" moderates on the party.
Joseph Woodard, former senior editor of Alberta Report, and
Tom McFeely of BC Report magazine, will both be speaking at the
upcoming conference in Toronto. Both have worked closely with HLI
in the past, putting the Catholic organization's views into print
on such issues as abortion, human rights and the United Nations.
It should be noted that these journalists sometimes forget to
inform readers of their relationships with the organizations they
are writing about.
Both Woodard and McFeely have attended various UN
conferences along with Theresa Bell of HLI Canada. Woodard has
also been involved in several other right-wing ventures, such as
>From the Right and Gravitas magazine. He has sat on the board of
directors of the Canadian Catholic Civil Rights League, an
organization that (amongst other things) works for the censorship
of anti-Christian and blasphemous artists like Marilyn Manson. He
has written more than his share of scare-mongering articles about
AIDS, queers and child sexual abuse, often using other HLI-allies
like Paul Cameron and Joseph Nicolosi as sources.
* * *
_________________________________________________________________
THEY SAID WHAT!?!
_________________________________________________________________
"AIDS victims should be hidden away like lepers [....] People
who do wrong should be isolated, separated. The No.1 public
health threat in the world today is homosexuality, not AIDS.
Either we destroy homosexuality, or we will die."
-- Dr Paul Cameron
"I feel about homosexuality the way I feel about child
molestation. Even if carried out between consenting adults in
their own homes, it is dangerous. It needs to be made illegal."
-- Dr Paul Cameron
HLI ally Psychiatrist Joseph Nicolosi...thinks that
controlling AIDS may generate a new problem.
"Given that male gays still make up well over 80% of the cases,
that illness is still the result of a lifestyle choice. To
whatever extent fear of death imposed sexual moderation on the
gay community, the reins will go slack if the disease seems
controllable."
-- "An AIDS cure could increase gay promiscuity," by Joseph
Woodard, Alberta Report 25-3-96.
Mr Woodard will be giving a workshop on "Pro-Life
Journalism" at HLI's upcoming Toronto conference
"I guess we have 250,000 Vietnamese here already, and they are
going to have large families; the Orientals always do. God knows
how many Mexicans cross the border every night...And if we ever
have to fight the Russians, I wonder if these people will be
willing to stake their lives."
-- Father Paul Marx, chairman of HLI and speaker at upcoming
conference
"Moslems are taking over Western Europe, if you are not a friend
of Allah, you're an enemy... they will kill you to please Allah."
-- Father Paul Marx
"Why is there this attitude of degenerated masochism which makes
us destroy systematically our own breed and race and makes us
passively watch how our own mental, moral, and biological
inheritance is getting wasted and ruined?"
-- Siegfried Ernst, Former German Advisor to HLI
"Europe is already beyond the point of no return, say the
greatest prolifer in Europe, Dr Siegfried Ernst - and I agree."
-- Father Paul Marx
"Along with the risk of a permanently depressed economy, a
depopulating Canada also faces possible tears in its social
fabric through the high immigration levels needed to help
compensate for the paucity of births."
-- Tom McFeely, "A waning will to live," Alberta Report 19-2-96.
Mr McFeely works closely with HLI Canada and will be
speaking at the upcoming Toronto conference.
"People are adopting from outside of the country, while we're
aborting our own blood and our own religion and that's just the
tip of the iceberg: in our schools, social workers are inciting
young girls to get abortions. Let's not mince words: we can
really talk about a holocaust in Quebec."
--Maurice Prevost, treasurer of the fascist Centre d'information
national Robert Rumilly (CINRR), at HLI's 14th World Conference
on Love, Life and Family held in Montreal.
Another member of the CINRR, Gilles Grondin, will be
speaking at the upcoming conference in Toronto.
"In a homosexual union there is no purpose - I hate the word gay.
There is nothing gay or happy about homosexuals. It's a tragic
lifestyle - Hitler was brought to power by homosexuals."
-- Dr Judith Reisman, who will be giving a workshop on The Price
of Pornography" at HLI's upcoming Toronto conference.
"The same segment of the Jewish community that accuses the Pope
of insensitivity to the Jewish Holocaust not only condones but
more or less led the greatest holocaust of all time, the war on
unborn children."
-- Father Paul Marx
"Notice how many Jews helped lead the infamous abortion planning
meeting in Los Angeles, which I exposed; some 40 percent of the
speakers were Jewish. Also note the large numbers of abortionists
(consult the Yellow Pages) and pro-abortion medical professors
who are Jewish.
-- Father Paul Marx
"It was Jewish feminist Simone Weil who, as health minister,
treacherously engineered abortion on demand in France in 1974,
despite her great sufferings in Auschwitz."
-- Father Paul Marx
"Currently, prominent Jews are among the chief exponents of
euthanasia in Germany, Austria and Holland."
-- Father Paul Marx
"Although they are supremely sensitive about their own Holocaust,
Austria's Jews gave me and my colleagues no help in stopping this
new holocaust; on the contrary they spoke eloquently for killing
preborn babies."
-- Father Paul Marx
"Among the chief crusaders for abortion in England, too, were
prominent Jews. And I learned, in Buenos Aires, that leaders of
Argentina's two and-one-half millions Jews were pressing for sex
education, which always includes contraception and (subtly)
abortion."
-- Father Paul Marx
"Only Catholics and their action can save the soul of our
culture. Only Catholics know society's affliction - sin. Only
Catholics know the cure - the Heart of Christ...Isn't that our
task on earth, to save my soul and to make the world want to be
Catholic?"
-- Father John Perricone, who will by giving workshops at the
upcoming conference on a "Blueprint for a Just Society" and
"Natural Law and Life Issues"
"This killer disease, transmitted first into the homosexual
populace of North America by a homosexual airline steward, and
subsequently into the nation's blood supply, was to achieve for
homosexuals what they had previously been unable to attain:
sanction of sodomy and tolerance of an immoral lifestyle. This
was accomplished under the sophism and deceptive mantle of
compassion for those dying of AIDS."
-- Sylvia MacEachern, former research director HLI Canada
"Children could contract the disease in day care, through the
biting, kissing or drooling of their AIDS-infected fellow
students."
-- Dr Paul Cameron, speaking at an HLI Canada Conference in 1990
in Ottawa
"This is the Garden of Eden all over again... watch for and
reject the apples being offered by the new Eves... These
[feminist] consciousness raising tools...are the forbidden fruit
dangling of the boughs of the tree of knowledge."
-- Cornelia R. Ferreira, past speaker at HLI Canada conferences,
from her booklet "The Emerging Feminist Religion," distributed by
HLI Canada
"Those who take up arms against abortionists cannot be simply
condemned, nor are they guilty of murder."
-- Citizens for Life statement, co-signed by Bishop Austin
Vaughn, a regular speaker at past HLI Conferences
"Lethal force will be the only reasonable action for some, and
those of us who stood by and did nothing will have the least
right to throw stones."
-- Steve Pruner, former director of HLI's Ohio chapter
"Simply by [our] being there, they're upset inside... and the
doctor's nervous... Women going in are thinking, 'This must be a
bad thing to do, to murder my baby.' ... The complication rate
will go up during the operation. That's not my fault."
-- Joseph Scheidler, a regular speaker at HLI Conferences
* * *
A MESSAGE FROM ANTI-FASCIST FORUM
Various groups around Toronto are organizing against this
conference. As HLI will be meeting at the International
Plaza Hotel (655 Dixon Rd.) in Martingrove outside of the
downtown area, the Ontario Coalition of Abortion Clinics and
other groups are arranging for busses to bring people to a
welcoming demonstration on Wednesday April 7th. The busses
are scheduled to leave the downtown area at 5 pm, and places
can be reserved for $5 by phoning (416) 969-8463 (public
transport is normally $4 each way).
A more militant coalition of groups including Anti-Racist
Action Toronto, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, the
New Socialist Group and others are organizing a Rage Against
HLI demonstration for Saturday, April 10th. There will be a
rally at Christie Pits starting at 11:30 am, and then busses
will leave for the International Plaza Hotel. The
demonstration in front of the Hotel is scheduled to start
around 1 pm. For more information email stop-hli@tao.ca or
phone ARA at (416) 631-8835.
Past experience at other HLI conferences shows that
protesters should be wary of police and far-right
opposition. Journalists from right-wing publications as well
a police have attended anti-HLI meetings in other cities,
subsequently sharing the information they learned about
organizers. In Monteal in 1995 a police spy who had attended
meetings against HLI was instrumental in the arrest of a key
organizer at an anti-HLI demonstration.
STAY SAFE - BE AWARE - FIGHT BACK!
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