The night President Obama gave his State of the Union address, I gave my own ‘State of the Union Address’ at Andrews Auditorium at the University of Notre Dame.  I said, political correctness aside, that this was the real ‘State of the Union.’  Global warming looms over us like a scary doomsday scenario.  More and more children are growing up in American urban gang war zones.  There is now a 60% divorce rate in America, broken families everywhere.  There’s astronomical national debt, terrorism and war.  We’ve reached the 50 million abortion mark in America…  I showed a picture of a baby in it’s mother’s womb.  I then said during an abortion procedure, a surgical instrument is inserted and the baby’s limbs are excrutiatingly dismembered.  He or she is then suctioned out of the womb.  I followed this by saying that our global society has become so crazy that… Barack Obama, who is a major player in this ongoing genocide of babies, was recently given the: Nobel Peace Prize. HELLO!

Haiti…  Before the earthquake, Haiti was the second poorest country in the world.  To quell persistent, acute hunger pains, a significant number of people there were eating patties made of mud, oil and flour.  While this was slowly killing these people, apparently it was better than immediately dying of starvation.  Meanwhile in America, significant numbers of people think nothing of spending all kinds of money on non-nutritional junk food and beverage (as opposed to taking the savings to send to Haiti, Uganda, Somalia…).  We had the chance to help Haiti before.  We have the chance to help Haiti now. It’s important we do that.  Not only for them… but for our souls.  Note:  While in Virginia on a campaign tour several years ago, a woman told me she’d just returned from a missions trip to Haiti.  And what had particularly struck her was “…how stick thin almost everyone seemed to be there.”

I just read that if every person on earth was positioned side-by-side, they could all fit: on the island of Jamaica.  Over populated?   We have traveled the “back roads of America” for many years now looking for common sense takes on all the major issues of the day.  In Keene, New Hampshire, Ray Rivest posed this question to me:  “Do you think God would allow more people on the planet than it could sustain?”  Good question.  Perhaps a more salient question then is:  “Are many of us overusing the resources God has given us to live here?”

I’m just in the process of preparing a talk I’ll be giving at Notre Dame University toward the end of the month.  I hold to a Consistent Life Ethic that sets me against poverty, pollution, abortion, euthanasia… and anything else that can end life prematurely.  Today I was writing a segment about abortion.  I noted that in the womb there are 10 fingers, 10 toes and a heartbeat.  Now it wouldn’t take, say, a top-flight physician at the Mayo Clinic to figure out that these are: THE HALLMARKS OF A HUMAN BEING!  Yet while the fact seems so basic, so simple, many in society have come up with a tremendously complex set of rationalizations (read: rational lies) to justify killing these little babies.  Note:  While in Mansfield, Ohio, to give a Pro-life talk, I noticed the following bumper sticker:  “Call me extreme, but I think dismembering babies in their mothers’ wombs is wrong.”