Saturday, February 11, 2006

What is the C for?

There was an odd twist today to the campaign in Australia to legalise the abortion drug RU486. A letter appeared in The Age supporting the campaign and praising parliamentarian Lyn Allison for telling the world about her own abortion. The letter runs:

Thanks to the courage of four female senators who put forward a private bill, the question of whether women will have access to RU486 is one step closer ... Particular acknowledgement must go to Lyn Allison, whose bravery in telling her personal story will come as a great comfort to the many women who have also made the difficult decision to have an abortion. I hope that members of the House of Representatives will follow in the footsteps of their Senate colleagues and vote in support of this important bill ...


Why is this so remarkable? It was penned by the Shannon Rees, the President of the YWCA!

I'd known that the YWCA was left-leaning but this open and extravagant support for abortion by a supposedly Christian women's organisation surprised me.

So I went to the YWCA website and discovered the following:

YWCA used to stand for Young Women's Christian Association. Our name was officially changed to YWCA in 2002. Although we respect and honour our Christian history, we are a modern progressive secular organisation ... YWCA women are united by one belief: a commitment to equality and opportunity for all women, and peace, justice, freedom and dignity for all people.


So they no longer pretend to be Christian. In some ways I admire them for their honesty. It's clear that many "Christian" organisations are so in name only and are really motivated by secular "progresssive" ideals. Perhaps in coming years we'll see more of these nominally Christian organisations follow the lead of the YWCA and formally renounce their religious affiliation.

2 comments:

  1. I note that there was a similar letter in the Sydney based Daily Telegraph of Saturday 11 February 2006:

    The writer declared that he was a "devout Catholic" and so alikened himself expressly to the Health Minister Tony Abbott. However the writer added that he believed a woman's "right" to terminate her pregnancy was her's alone and that no male should keep her from exercising it.

    I was bewildered that an allegedly "devout Catholic" could appropriate the feminist Marxist position while also lobbying in favour of abortion.

    The "devout Catholic" may as well have also refuted Papal authority, and denied the divinity of Christ, all in the name of Christian progressive tolerance.

    What utter potato-heads these people are. But the most frightful thing is that many within mainstream society fall right into the feel-good yet vacuous rhetoric.

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  2. Australia seems unique in the sheer slobbering indulgence it shows towards "Catholics" who, by any measure that would have been understood in 1966, let alone 1936, are not Catholics at all.

    America forms an obvious and painful contrast. There, the enemies of Catholicism have to put up with powerful, sophisticated groups like the Catholic League. These groups, when confronted with the US equivalents of such pseuds as that Telegraph writer, administer stinging and well-deserved bitch-slaps.

    What a bizarre concept! To use the favourite grunt-adjective of our chickenhawkish, RU486-legalising, dirigiste, "conservative", "Christian" Prime Minister, how "un-Australian"!

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