As the Obama administration signals its willingness to make others pay for the birth- control-and-abortion rope that liberals are fashioning to hang the Catholic Church, another embattled Catholic group is fending off a different attack on freedom of religion. This one too is just another secular assault in the name of the liberal goal ensuring for all of us freedom from religion.
And like the dead man that keeps washing back up on the beach, this one keeps washing back up on the shores of Lake Michigan, in the City That No Longer Works, Obama’s Chicago.
“Nuns in western suburban Stone Park are working to keep a strip club from opening next to their convent,” reports CBS Chicago. “As WBBM Newsradio’s Regine Schlesinger reports, the Missionary Sisters of St. Charles Borromeo, or the Scalabrians, said they first heard rumors, then found out the building being erected behind theirs will be a gentlemen’s club called Get It.”
The Scalabrian order was founded in 1887. Its mission is to the migrant community, “with a special priority for the poorest migrants,” with outreach in 12 U.S. cities, plus Canada, Guatemala and Mexico. As the order’s founder said according to the tradition of the order: "Remember, my child: your soul belongs to you. I'll help you save it, but you're the one who must save it."
A religious order preaching personal responsibility? Salvation as a choice, rather than a preordained outcome of a mechanistic universe?
OK, so now you can understand why the party of abortion would be so incensed with the order.
How dare this “religious” order compete with the federal, state and local governments in providing services to the migrant community in the U.S. Don’t they know that ignoring migrants and then alternately harassing migrants falls only to the whims of governments?
With the help that the sisters give to migrants, before you know it, these migrants will be independent members of society, with a voting-age population that won’t be worth pandering to at all.
And, if there is one thing that Chicago knows how to do well, it’s pandering to voting-age migrants and minority populations.
“This sounds like a matter that involves the Constitution’s prohibition against mixing church with state. The nuns have no right to object to a strip club being built next door to their convent. How could the strip club infect the minds or moral codes of the nuns?
Surely they know what’s going on in the world, whether it happens mere yards or millions of miles away from where they work,” says Gloria Kaplan Sulkin, who lives in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood on the other side of the city; a side which is intellectually and philosophically a million miles away from where the rest of us live.
Apparently when you are actively religious you have no right to object to anything that the government does. I guess the Constitution doesn’t protect the right to have a conscience.
Stone Park, where the not-so-gentleman’s club is going up just two feet away from the nuns’ property line, is about 90 percent Hispanic. The sisters who minister to the residents are concerned about the influence that a strip club would have in a largely residential neighborhood, where home prices have fallen from over $300,000 in 2006 to under $100,000 in 2011 according to city-data.
A strip club won’t help the values of either real estate or families, or nuns.
“What are we trying to teach the children in the neighborhood?” Sister Marissonia Daltoe, of the Missionary Sisters of Saint Charles Borromeo – Scalabrinians told the Chicago Sun Times. “Also, our novices, we’re trying to form them to live a religious life, a missionary life, and it’s so ironic that right behind them is this place.”
I don’t think she meant ironic as in ha, ha.
And don’t count on the Chicago’s liberal elite to help out the nuns or the neighborhood. They’ll probably just tell the nuns to shut up and take their federally-mandated birth control pills to help even out their hormones.
The antipathy of the new regime in Chicago and Washington to Catholics in general is fairly well-documented. Obama and company, especially the first lady, doesn’t like Catholics, especially the white variety, and so they have decided to humiliate them.
“I think it is because the Obama White House has made the decision that it doesn’t need those white voters to win,” writes John Feehery in The Hill regarding the administration’s move to cast out Irishman and Roman Catholic Bill Daley as Obama’s chief of staff. “That may be true in 20 years, but it is not true today…. Those white Irish Catholics whom Michelle Obama so despises are the key to her husband's campaign success. And getting rid of Bill Daley is one more example of President Obama’s real problem this coming election year.”
And while a small convent, more or less, on Chicago’s west side won’t ever make much of a difference to Michelle and Barack Obama, who apparently resent Catholics, it should make a difference to all of us who think that freedom of religion is just as important as freedom from Obamacare.
Because there is hardly a difference, between the disrespect shown religious freedom in Obama’s “false religiosity” that forces insurance companies to pay for the bullets fired at the Catholic Church, instead of making Catholics buy those bullets themselves and the disrespect progressive’s- and Obama’s- “false secularism” forces on a neighborhood unwilling to host the sex trade.
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