/* Written 5:07 PM Mar 17, 1999 by tburghardt@igc.org in igc:pol.right.anti */ /* ---------- "[AFIB] `In the Name of the Fetus' -" ---------- */ ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||| ||| ||| A N T I F A ||| ||| ||| ||| I N F O - B U L L E T I N ||| ||| _____ ||| ||| ||| ||| * News * Analysis * Research * Action * ||| ||| ||| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ***** ||/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\||/\|| || * -- RESEARCH - * - March 17, 1999 - * - RESEARCH -- * || ||\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/||\/|| * 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! * * * Support AFF - Subscribe to `Antifa Forum' Today! Anti-Fascist Forum is not a state-funded project. It relies solely on its own resources and supporters. 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