All the bills mentioned in this report have passed the California state legislature and are awaiting the Governor’s signature. He has until Sept 30 to either sign or veto. Please contact the Governor to urge a veto - 916-445-2841.

AB354. Juan Arambula, (D- Fresno. Immunizations.

DIGEST: This bill deletes certain age limits for specified childhood immunizations required for admission to specified schools or child care centers, and requires the Department of Public Health to consider the immunization recommendations of the American Academy of Family Physicians.

This five page bill seems simple and straight forward, but it isn’t. It is a lot of words designed to hide the fact that the state’s legislators seek authority to mandate that schools be responsible for administering vaccinations to your child including HPV2 Cervarix for girls ages 10-25 or HPV 4 Gardasil for boys ages 9-26. That would be compulsory vaccinations without parental consent or notification.

This bill employs the phrase “vaccine preventable disease” (rather than air born communicable disease) determined through “evidence based findings” (as determined by an independent, non-government based Task Force On Community Preventable services, i.e., they do something and then watch to see what results - no moral or ethical values whatsoever.) www.thecommunityguide.org,

It also mandates that schools adhere to the recommendations of the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices - ACIP, which represents 12 different lobby groups, including the American Academy of Family Physicians, as an advisory body, for determining what vaccinations are to be required. The AAFP is little more than a lobby with which Planned Parenthood is connected, urging that all youth be vaccinated with Gardasil or Cervarix.

What’s the problem? Human Papilloma Virus is not a communicable disease like chicken pox or measles or even TB. It is a venereal disease communicated through sexual contact. This bill declares that the state believes that every child from age 9 years on will be engaging in sexual activity and, since Planned Parenthood has been foremost in promoting this vaccine it further means that the state’s leaders believe that 9 year olds have the right to be sexually active regardless of what you, the parents, or the outdated old fuddydud church says.

The main supporters of this bill are the California Academy of Family Physicians, a branch of the American Academy of Family Physicians, the California immunization Coalition - CIC, which has a website admonishing people to “vaccinate before you date.” and by GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical company that manufactures Cervarix and Gardasil.

By the Way the CIC website which is sponsored by the California Department of Public Health is sponsoring a contest to see who can come up with the winning logo for advertising HPV vaccinations to 18-25 year olds.

Further, the CAFPs website familydocs.org lists 26 California health related bills which they are supporting, including AB 1600 by Asm Jim Beall establishing state funding for mental health coverage for ANY AGE CALIFORNIANS. Any age covers your newly expected baby and his pregnant mother, your 3 year old child in day care, your teen age student who, under Sen. Mark Leno’s bill, SB 543, will be able to contract for his/her own mental health counseling. This is also on its way to the Governor.

Seeing that the organization of Social Workers, school sex eduators and the American Psychiatric Association all believe that homosexual activity is not a deviant lifestyle guess what sort of counseling your child just might get in the privacy of a minimally trained mental health worker recruited from the LGBT job placement bureau?

And now, let us turn to just exactly what happens with all this vaccination information and electronic recording of data that will be gathered on you and your child[ren]. Where does it go, who sees it, who analyzes it, who plans you and your family’s future in partnership with you?

AB 1542, Dave Jones, (D-Sacramento), Patient-Centered Medical Homes Act of 2010.

Digest: This bill would establish the Patient-Centered Medical Home Act of 2010.

It is the intent of the Legislature to encourage licensed health care providers and patients to partner in a patient-centered medical home that promotes access to high-quality, comprehensive care and ultimately to ensure that all Californians have a medical home.

Your attention should be drawn to several words - partner, comprehensive, other licensed health care provider, and, evidence based - that gives away the intent behind this bill.

Definition of Medical home, according to the bill: "Medical home," "patient-centered medical home," "advanced practice primary care," "health home," "person-centered health care home," and "primary care home" all mean a health care delivery model in which a patient establishes an ongoing relationship with a physician or other licensed health care provider acting within the scope of his or her practice, working in a physician-directed practice team to provide comprehensive, accessible, and continuous evidence-based primary and preventative care, and to coordinate the patient’s health care needs across the health care system in order to improve quality and health outcomes in a cost-effective manner.”

This is one of the other 26 bills that the California Academy of Family Physicians, referred to in AB 543, is sponsoring. The AAFP and other medical groups have been pushing this concept since 1967. This bill (only the last of many years of attempts), as last amended, Aug.28, states that the main functions of creating medical homes are an assurance of “reducing health disparities, reining in costs and improving quality and outcomes.

AB 1542 has been amended 9 times and still is only 4 pages long. It is very vague stating only that it seeks to coordinate all phases of everyone’s mental and physical health practices and preventions in partnership with a lead physician, community organizations and the patient.

It is necessary to look elsewhere for the intended expansion of mandated government aka Obama care oversight authorized by this bill.

By the way, President Obama and the current Democrat controlled Congress did not come up with all these ideas, they are merely the most successful, so far, in pushing programs that have been planned for years by foundations, lobbies, educators and other population control groups.

As a part of ongoing educational credits for Pediatricians the Washington University, St. Louis School of Medicine, published two articles, Vol 30, # 11 and 12, May and June, 2010. The articles are entitled: Postpartum Depression: Why Pediatricians Should Care and Rethinking Well-Child Care. These articles contain interviews with leading pediatricians and psychiatrists on the subject of how to care for the whole person from birth to age 26. The answer is establishment of a medical “home” for every individual beginning with the pregnancy.

A medical home, basically, is an electronic data collection system gathering all required information about each individual’s social, emotional, educational, mental, employment, and lifestyle activities. This information will not just be gathered from written surveys or questionnaires upon entering the physician’s office for the first time, but through home visitations, school health records, employment records, visits and referrals to community organizations authorized to share information.

This information will be continually analyzed, evaluated according to the most current politically correct desired outcomes (best practices as determined by evidenced based research) and then shared amongst the other participating agencies. Each individual, including the newborn, will have his/her own individualized record with its predetermined set of desired outcomes. Not only will you, the patient, be under constant scrutiny but so will the lead physician who is charged with oversight of this medical home. In the case of the infant through 21 year old it will be a Pediatrician.

In other words, the village will care for you, assist you in setting goals for yourself, guide you in attaining those goals, keep down the costs of your medical care through best practices preventive gimmicks and make sure that everyone gets the exact same care and concern.

This bill required a 2/3rds vote due to the funding requirements and its urgency status (it is to go into effect immediately upon the Governor’s signature). It passed every committee and floor vote by a wide margin including the final floor vote but was called back to the Senate Rules Committee on a technicality. I have not been able to learn what that technicality is, but I suspect that it will be dealt with on Tuesday, Sept 7 and be on its way to the Governor soon after.

Please consider doing the following asap: Phone the Senate Rules Committee, 916-651-4120. Urge that they retain AB 1542 within the Rules Committee. I called on Labor Day and was able to leave a message. I will keep you posted as to the final outcome.

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Today we are concentrating on education bills. It is through the school system that Master Planners and their cohorts are building bridges, connecting themselves to our children directly, to override parental authority and set standards for the planned outcomes of raising children.

When Educators and Legislators talk about the development of education master plans they always start out by referring to the 1960’s creation of the once in a lifetime created California Master Plan. From there they make it appear that any current activity in this regard is just a mere adjustment of those plans and goals.

The original Master Plan set standards for, basically, what type of educational programs the various levels of state schools, especially, colleges and universities would concentrate on offering plus linkage of all education, K-18, into one smooth exercise in accessing entrance.

It also addressed issues of equal opportunities regardless of social and economic levels, and easing of access regulations for all students in California.

Today’s goals for an Education Master Plan go way beyond that to determining in the early years just what educational channel each child will walk through throughout the child’s educational years ending in the pre-planned and desired college graduation outcome and into workforce enrollment.

In Sacramento there is the legislative Joint Committee on the California Education Master Plan. It’s committee is composed of the legislators who most often are the authors of all the touchy/feely pseudo education; social studies programs or after school, health care, workforce development bills.

This committee periodically holds hearings on education, the latest being in March of this year. John - I’m ok, you’re ok - Vasconcellos, former Santa Clara legislator and chairman of the Education Committee that wrote legislation to re-do the Education Master Plan was one of the presenters at that March hearing.

The latest Education Master Plan legislation, AB 1901, Post-Secondary Education Master Plan is authored by Assemblyman Ira Ruskin, (D-Sta Clara). It has passed both houses and is awaiting the Governor’s signature. He has until August 31 to sign or veto this bill. I would urge a veto.

Here is the goal of this bill:

1. California has now passed the threshold of becoming a state with a new multicultural majority as the ethnic composition of the population is changing dramatically. Our state’s future economic, social, and cultural development depends upon ensuring that all its citizens have opportunities to develop themselves so that they can contribute their best to society.

Note that the emphasis is on contributing to society, not to one’s personal, academic and intellectual development in order to more efficiently direct one’s own life.

AB 1901 continues:

(2) Current estimates indicate that California will need to prepare more than one million additional graduates by the year 2025 in public higher education institutions to meet our workforce needs. [emphasis added] California needs to prepare now for the projected enrollments in the 21st century. And, if the goals of the master plan and its subsequent updates are to be fully achieved, especially if groups that are historically and currently underrepresented increase their rates of participation in higher education, enrollments will most likely exceed even these projections.

(3) California must support an educational system that prepares all Californians for responsible citizenship and meaningful careers [emphasis added] in a multicultural society; this requires a commitment from all to make high-quality education available and affordable for every Californian.

(4) To accomplish these goals, California’s system of higher education will need to expand.

1. It is the intent of the Legislature that the work completed by the master plan review committee be used to guide higher education policy.

The only supporter of this bill is the Post Secondary Education Committee itself yet it passed both houses with flying colors. Also an accompanying Assembly Committee Resolution was passed favoring passage of ACR 184 which means that all the legislators approve of this bill without having to put their signatures to it.

This bill very much needs to be vetoed. However, it is the community organizations, stakeholders as they are referred to, who latch onto bills like this in order to promote their programs as those which will most benefit the ultimate goal of an outcome planned student.

It is in the following type bills that we see who will prosper under the elitists efforts to create the future adult most beneficial to society.

SB 798, Mark DeSaulnier, Before and After School Programs.

Since the school day is already so taken up with academics plus programs it is necessary to expand the school day through before and after school programs in order for the Stakeholders to gain access to the students.

This bill addresses the financing of programs but not the specifics of content. It allocates $25,000 a year for five years per after school site if that site conforms to approved 21st Century Community Learning Programs. This is a group which has been given approval by the state to develop programs.

This bill is supported by Children Now, a conglomerate of reproductive rights and parental controls organizations along with Invest In Kids, another umbrella family intervention program.

A DeSaulnier companion bill, SB 1157, Education: Healthy Schools Act of 2010, is a sop to the Environmental groups who would enter the schools and get goals and standards for running the schools according to politically correct standards.

It is sponsored by Parents for Safer School Environment and San Francisco Bay Keeper, both approved for Obama’s Greening of America objectives regardless of the costs to taxpayers or states. It also maintains after school programs on environmental issues for students.

SB 1381, Joe Simitian, (D-Sta Clara) Kindergarten: Age of Admission. Amends the age at which is a child admitted to Kindergarten and or first grade. Age is now 6 for First Grade but will be dropped to age 5 and places the student in a transitional class of older aged kindergarteners and First graders. This will have the effect of dropping the age for regular kindergarten and open the options for even younger pre-school.

One of the supporters of this bill is the California Association of School Psychologists. Recall that we have written articles about SEnator Leland Yee’s and Sen. Mark Leno’s bills regarding mental health problems of students all of whom need professional direction including monitoring pregnant women to insure that their preborn child is born mentally healthy. If the psychologists can’t get the babies at birth, at least they can try to start getting them at age 3 and 4.

sb 1380, Loni Hancock, School Facilities: Construction.

This bill sounds harmless. It addresses various needs for school construction and modernization, but it is endorsed by a group entitled California Association of Leaders of Career Preparation - CALCP. It seeks funding and authorization through Bonds to direct school construction towards buildings, etc that will facilitate career development not academic preparation. This is not your old auto workshop or home economics with sewing machines, etc.

If you think all of this is just pie in the sky silliness, I would direct your attention to the years of planning that the city of Vallejo put into developing a City Master Plan for Children, birth to 18 years. Every agency they could think of got involved in setting up goals for everybody else’s child including training teachers to conduct home visitations, mentoring, etc. before and after school activities, etc. Just google Young Master Plan to see all the programs.

While we are all agonizing over mythical homosexual plans for marriage, Ex-Governor Blagojevich’s guilt or innocence, saving turtles, etc, the legislature is planning on ways to take over the parental duties. Every child is be considered the state’s foster child.

All of these bills are sitting on the Governor’s desk or waiting for a final Assembly floor vote.

There is little time left to defeat these bills.

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Using Children For Community Takeover

Legislators, School Boards, Parents, and Teachers — BEWARE! "Whole Child Education" is here and it is dangerous. In fact, all education that claims to be "child centered" should be avoided. It is toxic to everyone involved. A better name for child centered education would be "Psychological Vandalism."

What does child centered education mean? It means that to the "educator" the child is a product. The product must be judged according to universal standards. It must learn to adapt to the global environment in which, it is told, it later will have to work and live. The New World Order needs obedient robotic human responders, not self-controlled individuals who have internal standards.

"Whole Child" is a really stupid term. Try to figure out the meaning. What is a half child? What is a third of a child? Dumb!

But the term does make sense to NWO curriculum planners. To them it means taking control of a child’s social and emotional development, spiritual foundation, economic condition, physical and mental health, education and environment from kindergarten through high school. The goal of whole child education is controllable adults, control of the environment, and a community obedient to the demands of the New World Order.

Instead of defining course content with specific information such as: anatomy, physiology, biology, algebra, geometry, English, grammar whole child education decides how a child must be affected by his education. The ideal type for life in the new world order is a human automaton with no internal standards. A robot can’t say no. It is controlled by whatever environmental signals are used to activate a response.

Child centered education turns the classroom into a robot factory for the creation of obedient followers who can’t say no to the behavioral standards of curriculum planners.

Devvy Kidd in her E-mail alert of July 16 provided us with the address for the Whole Child curriculum that is being considered by the Helena, Montana public school Board of Trustees. The curriculum was put together by an organization called the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD). Fifty five people, headed by work facilitator Teresa Burson were listed as participants. The whole outline of 62 pages is probably long enough to discourage Montana Legislators and Helena School Trustees from paying too much attention to the contents. At any rate, look it over. Here is the web address Devvy provided.

I checked it out, and I can understand why parents in Helena are outraged by the sex education recommendations for their whole children. Do you want your whole child fifth grader to "understand that sexual intercourse includes but is not limited to vaginal, oral, or anal penetration?"

Do you believe that your whole child sixth grader should know a bit more and "understand that sexual intercourse includes, but is not limited to vaginal, oral, or anal penetration, using the penis, fingers, tongue, or objects?" ASCD believes they must understand that and more. However, I expect the "more" is reserved for classroom discussion when parents are not present.

Since I was checking out whole child education I decided to look a bit farther. Oh my! I might have guessed. There are hundreds of Whole Child web sites. Now we can understand what happened. "No Child Left Behind" is a failure just as we expected. But failures never bother the management gurus. There is always a new and more comprehensive replacement. Follow the money! Your beloved whole child is also the community organizer’s new cash cow.

The danger for protesters focusing on sex education for the whole child is that one could easily overlook the other areas where the whole child gimmick is involved. It is being used not only to take over education, but also the child’s family, the community, and the environment. To see how this is done enter "whole child connections" on your search engine.

Children and communities worldwide are being managed by setting up standards for education of the whole child. All types of facilitators are invited to interfere with the child’s social and emotional development, spiritual foundation, economic situation, physical and mental health, education, and the environment in which he lives.

It is only the beginning. Be alert for attempts to install Whole Child education in your community.

[Read Erica Carle’s books: Why Things Are The Way They Are. and "Give Us The Young"]

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I, the Lord, am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
You shall not have other gods before me. Exodus 20:2-4. New American Bible, 1982-3 Ed.

With a foot in both worlds, PICO provides precisely the kind of
democratically controlled links from society, to the faith-based community,
and to the state, that are so scarce in contemporary American society.
Faith in Action: Religion, Race and Democratic Organizing in America, Richard L. Wood, 2002.

The next time a politician or a priest tells you that politics and religion shouldn’t mix, tell him or her about Richard Wood’s 2002 book “Faith in Action: Religion, Race and Democratic Organizing in America.” The book details the successful raising of community organizing for political power to the heights of religious fervor. Though Wood is a proponent of community organizing, he writes a powerful expose of the goals, objectives and tactics of direct action programs.

Community organizing became a common catchphrase with the presidential campaign of Barack Obama and questionable voter registration activities conducted by a group called ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Even so, little has been written about what this and similar groups actually do and how they organize.

Religion and politics have been mixing it up long before President George W. Bush’s administration created funding for the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives and certainly well before President Obama, on February 5, 2009, expanded it to include neighborhood partnerships.

A good example of a community organizer is found in the popular 1957 musical production “The Music Man,” which tells the tale of Professor Harold Hill arriving in a small town. Unbeknownst to the townsfolk, he is a musical instruments salesman. And he cons the entire town into believing that the best way to keep their youngsters out of trouble is by starting a boys’ band, adding for emphasis, “I mean they need it right now.” He gets the townspeople’s hopes up and they buy his band instruments, even as they wonder how they are going to form a band when the would-be musicians can’t even read music. They trust him so much that they believe him when he tells them that they don’t need practice; they just have to have the confidence that they can succeed.

That’s basically what a community organizer is. He plants dreams and hopes into the minds and hearts of selected communities and then convinces these people that their personal hopes and dreams are what the entire community needs. What the good citizens don’t realize is that this community organizer’s own priorities are always uppermost in his mind. And these priorities always encompass more laws, taxes, legislation and government interference in private lives.

Just as Professor Hill sounded the cry for a boys’ band, today’s community organizer would have you believe that what your town needs is affordable housing. (“And I mean you need it right now!”) Or maybe it’s health care that he’s selling, telling you that you have the right to demand it from the government right now. I’m sure you can recall the slogans. “What do we need? Health care. When do we need it? Now!”

In so doing, the organizer takes a thesis, creates an antithesis from which oozes forth a synthesis. In other words, he takes the people as they are, creates a yearning in them to strive for something that they most likely will not be satisfied with in the long run, i.e., affordable housing, (the antithesis) and the community ends up with a synthesis (a dislike of officials and burdensome laws). Or, put another way, he victimizes them, causing them to blame the government for what they now view as their oppression.

There are four main federations of community organizing agencies. Two of them – DART, Direct Action and Research Training www.thedartcenter.org; and ACORN, www.acorn.org – focus on secular and political organizing of the most marginalized people and neighborhoods. This includes the recent immigrant, the welfare recipient and the racial and ethnically victimized.

Gamaliel, www.gamaliel.org (named for a minor, rather shadowy figure in the Old Testament), and PICO, Pacific Institute for Community Organizing, www.piconetwork.org, emphasize organizing within religious communities and are often referred to as faith-based entities. These groups tend to search out the lower to middle income faith-based citizens who are members of ethnic and racial minorities, recent immigrants and those church members who are anxious to do the Good Samaritan work that their ministers and pastors have been preaching about for years.

It can be said that the direct-action folks soften up the politicians and that the faith-based groups make the politicians feel ashamed that they are preventing the people from living the America-as-Utopia life that was presented to them.

All of these groups share a common base from the Saul Alinsky Industrial Areas Foundation method of training for organizing communities. Alinsky began in Chicago in the 1920’s with the help of a Jesuit priest to organize the “back of the Yards” neighborhoods around Chicago’s slaughterhouses. Their first success was in bullying the banking industry to provide housing loans to the local residents who, basically, had little or no collateral to put up.

Jesuit priests John Baumann and Jerry Helfrich were two Alinsky-trained organizers. They came to Oakland, California, in 1972 and formed PICO. Baumann retired as PICO’s director in December 2008. During those years PICO grew to involve more than 50 organizations in the United States, Central America and Africa. Here are Fr. Baumann’s praise-filled words:

“PICO’s success points to the powerful role that faith communities play in shaping our nation. Across the U.S., people from all varieties of religious traditions are hungry to put their faith into action, and PICO has helped channel this energy into concrete wins for working families.” http://www.piconetwork.org/news-media/news/archive?id=0413

PICO started out, according to Wood’s book, relying strictly on their skills as community organizers to rouse up the neighborhood residents to demand change. They had only minor and scattered success until they began to realize that they were ignoring the very people who would best respond to their call to be organized - the faithful, church-going community. And, after all, they were Catholic priests; they had a natural entry into the churches.

PICO set up its first local organized affiliate within St. Elizabeth’s Parish in East Oakland in 1982. St. Elizabeth’s is a mostly Latino neighborhood parish of lower income and welfare recipients.

To quote from Wood’s book (pg 51):

“But when faith-based organizing is successful, many factors contribute simultaneously to that success. Such factors include trained leaders, astute strategy, professional staff organizing, the legitimacy accorded by church affiliation and clear pastoral support, the cultural resources of church life and of American traditions…makes faith-based organizing unique.”

It is somewhat easy to recognize a PICO affiliate at work in your community. Its name tends to reflect the title of its parent organization, using words such as “community organizing” or “interfaith organizing” or “reform now.”

East Oakland’s local PICO affiliate is called COR, which stands for Communities Organizing for Reform. This group tends to focus on local community issues of affordable housing and workforce development in the school setting. The official newspaper of the Catholic Diocese of Oakland continually reports on COR’s activities within the parishes and general community.

Groups that operated in West Oakland and other parts of Alameda County are collectively referred to as OCO, or Oakland Community Organizations. OCO tends to work on organizing around statewide issues of education, health care and jobs while also working on the parish level. PICO also promotes charter schools.

Often, in tracking state legislation, I have seen PICO and CCISCO (Contra Costa Interfaith Supporting Communities Organizing) listed as supporters of health care bills or workforce development and education bills right along with Planned Parenthood and the California Catholic Conference.

Another of PICO’s early pioneers is Jim Keddy. He was a student at the Berkeley-based Graduate Theological Union when Fr. Baumann came to give a talk about PICO. He now is a PICO director based in Sacramento, working closely with the CCC.

PICO, like the other organizations, is a parish or fraternal membership organization. The fee for joining is anywhere from $200.00 to $1,000.00, depending upon the size of the group. However, the major portion of their funding comes from large donors, foundations, gifts and, especially, the annual Catholic Campaign for Human Development. This is a nationwide fundraising endeavor conducted annually. The CCHD, both nationwide and locally, has been held up to close scrutiny for a few years now due, in part, to its funding of both ACORN and PICO.

In the adjoining county of Contra Costa, where CCISCO is based, the organization periodically makes slight changes to its name, but the acronym stays the same.

CCISCO is very busy in Richmond, Concord and Antioch, cities with dense ethnic and lower income neighborhoods. A young, Latina community organizer proudly stated to me recently that she was working within four of the five Catholic churches in Concord. The pastor of Queen of All Saints Church is so enamored of CCISCO’s efforts that he has included their logo on his parish letterhead and provided the young lady with an office and a committee.

They have also captured the heart and soul of the Catholic Community of Immaculate Heart Parish in Brentwood, where the pastor, formerly an Episcopal priest and registered nurse, has openly embraced their presence, placing his signature on CCISCO letters, even though he knows that abortion and contraception is a main thrust of CCISCO’s health care advocacy. The same is true for the Antioch parish of St. Ignatius.

So, what’s wrong with all of this organizing of communities and parishes? Haven’t we all, at some point, prayed that our churches would wake up to the need to address the state of politics and human struggles? Aren’t we constantly reminded that we are a nation of immigrants and we should, like the Good Samaritan, help our neighbor who may be, figuratively at least, lying alongside the road with no one to come to his aid?

The answers to these questions can be seen in the following story. I recently attended daily Mass at my parish, during which the Gospel reading was Matthew 12: 1-8. This is the passage about the Pharisees complaining to Jesus because his disciples were breaking a Sabbath law.

Our pastor said, in his homily, that in the Old Testament many of the laws had become too burdensome to follow. These laws were inflicting suffering on the people. Jesus, on the other hand, had encouraged his disciples to go into the field and pull off the heads of wheat so that they would have more to eat – a clear violation of the law. In other words, as told by our pastor, Jesus favored setting aside laws that were burdensome. In telling this story as he did, I believe our pastor endorsed – whether directly or tacitly – the violation of current laws that are equally burdensome, including immigration laws. While we’re at, just for sake of argument: Aren’t all laws, civil and religious, somewhat burdensome to those who do not wish to follow them?

Father continued with his sermon, saying Jesus came to preach love, not to support burdensome laws that were causing His people suffering. What did it matter which side of the border these people of God came from; weren’t God’s laws, His new way of life, for all people?

This very nice priest, an admitted anchor baby, sees restraints on illegal immigrants as a sin. He openly advocates for amnesty, the sooner the better. I asked him if he thought abortion couldn’t also be considered a burdensome law on the faithful. He said of course abortion is wrong. I reminded him that when groups like PICO and CCISCO organize groups of parishioners to travel to Sacramento and Washington, D.C. to lobby for health care they are, in fact, lobbying for abortion. They are lobbying for the very thing that our church declares immoral. At that point, the good Father responded as any non-religious person might. ”Oh, so, what, we shouldn’t have health care? You would deny health care to sick, poor people just because it has abortion in it?”

He is not the only member of a religious organization who has uttered such words. A church spokesperson once told me that abortion is a given in California. The people need health care and they need it now. If a patient chooses abortion, that’s not the church’s fault. And so, the church is selling out its soul for a few doses of medicine. It is symbolically placing health care on the high altar of worship. It is no longer God who saves His people, but the almighty federal bureaucrat.

Many immigrants risk their lives and their health to come here to have the good life, or so they believe. What happens is that they become pawns in the hands of unscrupulous activists who lead them to the very bondage from which they tried to escape.

It’s as if Professor Henry Hill were telling them that the answer to their troubles can be found in new band uniforms and musical instruments. Only, in this case, it’s the community organizers convincing them that their salvation can be found not in God, but in government.

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The Contra Costa Times, a member of the Bay Area News Group - BANG, has now completed a two part series entitled: “How Bills are really passed.” or “How Our Laws in California Are Really Made.” It is a very informative series and I would encourage you to read it on line.

It would appear to be an expose of the somewhat incestuous relationship between legislators and lobbyists. Or, as the article refers to lobbyists, “sponsors” of legislation.

The article details how anywhere from 30%-40% percent of bills are actually developed, written and promoted by special interests with the legislator’s role being only one of accommodating the lobbyists by lending their name to a bill and speaking for it with lobbyist prepared statements, in session. The Times article focused only on private business and industry type groups.

An amusing sidelight is that the Newspaper Publishers Association is one of the “sponsors” of a bill on which we have been reporting. Senator Leland Yee’s, SB 438, Charter Schools: Freedom of Speech and of the Press. The bill has little to do with freedom or speech and everything to do with promoting the homosexual agenda in the Charter Schools.

That set me to examining 138 of the bills we have been tracking in the area of education, health and workforce development. Forty of the bills are sponsored by non-profit, community organizer type agencies. I am working on an article which I hope to publish soon detailing the close association of community organizing agencies, the politicians and the churches with legislation as the ties that bind. I am thinking that the title should be, Community Organizing: Where politics and Religion embrace.

Under the guise of guaranteeing to students a constitutionally protected Right of speech this bill sets up criterion for when and where speech rights can be exercised on the Charter School Campus as an diversity (sex, gender, religious, racial equality) issue and sets the school personnel as the authority over the exercise of this Right.

One of the areas of special interest in the State House not mentioned in the article is the use, by a legislator, of their position to enhance and expand their own area of special interest and or former business or profession. Senator Leland Yee, (D-SF) a psychiatrist in his former life, is one of those constantly promoting more mental health counselors in the schools.

Senator Mark Leno, a San Francisco Democrat and LGBT activist, has a bill, SB 543, Minors: Consent to Mental Health Treatment. This bill’s special interest groups are a little more cleverly listed. The National Association of Social Workers (a lobby), the Gay-Straight Alliance and Equality are listed as sources. That means that they provided all the so-called facts and figures.

This bill would delete the requirement for parental consent for minors, 12 and up to receive drop-in mental health treatment. According to these groups “parental consent for mental health services can create a barrier, especially in prevention and early intervention programs where the youth may not be experiencing serious physical or mental harm.” The supporters go on to argue that “This barrier is especially harmful to certain populations of youth ioncluding lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth. All of which means that your child or grandchild is be able to leave the classroom for drop-in counseling at the local Gay/Lesbian center in order to help them identify their sexuality. The latest phrase is “bi-sexual curious.”

I also just noticed that one of the supporters is listed as State Board of Equalization District one Chairwoman Betty T. Yee, (D). She is listed online as having a degree in Social Work. Is it possible that she is related to Leland Yee, Psychiatrist? One of the authorized counselors is a board certified psychiatrist as well as clinical social workers.

This is the type of bill that Leland Yee would ordinarily carry, but perhaps it could prove embarrassing to his career if it was learned that a family member would benefit from his sponsorship of this bill. The answer, get your seat mate to author it.

Yee helps Leno get favored status in Charter Schools with his gay/straight alliance promotion and Leno helps Yee get more psychiatrists into association with schools. Who says legislators don’t work hard?

Leno’s bill, SB 543 succeeded in passing 4 committees and is on the Assembly floor. It has been held in the inactive file due to concerns over the costs. When the next budget is settled this bill may go quickly to the Governor. It is up to you to see that it dies on that floor. Contact your Assembly Member.

SB 438 by Leland Yee has gone through 5 committee hearings and is awaiting a vote on the Assembly floor. It has received support from both Democrats and Republicans because they are afraid to turn down anything even remotely resembling a freedom of speech and press right. Contact your Assembly-member

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COMMENTS.

Perhaps it is time to review the mission and goal of this monthly Legislative Report that we have titled State of Things - SOT.

Ca. Right to Life is dedicated to preserving and protecting the right to life from conception to natural death. We have been active in the educational and legislative arena since 1980. We realize that there are many fine pro-life groups doing marvelous life saving work. We are merely one of many such dedicated organizations in the state and nation.

There are at least 7 different ways to protect and defend human life: Sidewalk and pregnancy center counseling, educational, legal (court cases) political; and, also through religious associations as well as providing for the post abortive mother and father.

CRLC chose the legislative arena, which, though the most seemingly remote from the work to save lives, is, in fact, one of the most direct. It was California legislation (mid-1960’s) that brought abortion to our state followed by the 1973 Roe v Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. However, it has been the legislature, state and federal, which has enabled abortion’s expansion to a point where it is now considered a mainstream, well-funded industry. The defeat of anti-life/anti-family legislation has the potential to save untold numbers of lives just as surely as the actions of sidewalk counselors.

It has been my experience during the 20 plus years that CRLC has researched legislation, that even those elected officials professing their allegiance to the right to life cause approach legislative tasks with blinders on. They see each bill as an island unto itself without understanding the broader implications of either harm or protection for innocent human beings. The legislators are bombarded daily by lobbyists promoting their anti-life cause. Legislators are wined and dined and catered to and made to feel that they are on a level with the gods. If they never hear from the pro life people in their own districts they begin to believe their own press.

With the Democrats holding a simple majority of the votes in the California legislature it is a foregone conclusion that abortion is safe, well funded and protected. Now that the legislature has gained control, so to speak, over who gets into the world, they have moved on to organizing and planning the lives of those who can be referred to as abortion survivors.

Author Thomas Sowell refers to these people as the Intelligentsia or The Anointed which he describes as those elected officials and Think Tank elitists who believe that only they have the foresight to guide the path of human endeavor.

This, I believe is the motive behind all the health care plans, the workforce development plans, the universal education plans (otherwise known as core standards) and all the other plans being referred to as “best practices.” They do all the heavy thinking and none of the active work of providing services.

It is also pro life work when we confront the elected officials with our rightful demands to protect and respect innocent human life. We have to show these elected officials what lies behind the seemingly innocuous legislation that they are voting for. If we don’t it underscores their belief that they have a right, given by the citizens who elected them, to direct our lives comprehensively.

Now, then, enters the lesser gods of humanism, the handmaids of these Anointed, who can be described as opportunistic. They see a personal profit to be made in delivering the unsuspecting citizen into the hands of the idealists, by performing the work of the state in delivering prescribed, tax funded “services” to these, now government dependent, human beings.

How many times since 1973 have we heard that abortion is better for us than childbirth?

That freedom from sexual restraint is a good? Now we are being deluged with opinions from pseudo-scientific outfits, that placing our 3 year old babies in professional day care/preschool is their only hope of ever being prepared for a place in the global world.

How many times have we heard from so-called Women’s advocacy groups that it is better for a woman to be in the workforce than in the home? And, now, of course, that the mothers are out in the workforce, do we hear, from the same groups, that since they are out of the home it is bad for the children, therefore, professional groups have to get tax money to develop school-based after school programs for the children to make up for that lack of a mother in the home.

And, of course, there are the community organizers. Many of these groups have infiltrated the churches with their promise of assisting parishes to obtain the goals of the diocesan Social Justice Committees. Of course, these groups do not work for nothing. They are salaried through tax funding, foundation grants, church membership fees and partnerships with labor and industry. Their goals are always the same, immigration, jobs, affordable housing, health care. Not the salvation of souls, but the pseudo improvement of temporal needs through government services.

Legislation and the courts have helped to create and sustain the abortion/ population control industry. We, the pro life citizens are the only ones, acting as individuals or in concert with pro life and pro family organizations, who can defeat this insidious population control industry community by community.

When we read of abortion clinics closing we don’t cheer. We ask ourselves where have they gone? Why don’t they need that clinic anymore? We exist to tell you where they have gone and how they are continuing their insidious and destructive activities.

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TEENAGE PRO LIFE SURVIVAL CAMP.

Those of us who have worked long and hard in the pro life/pro family arena can take heart in the fact that many young people are standing up for life and learning the ways in which to legitimately defend life.

Jeff White, formerly of Operation Rescue, has developed a teen summer survival camp now in its second or third year. It is held in Southern California each summer for about 6 weeks. It is a training ground for activism in witnessing to life. Some students and parents from Contra Costa County have attended this program. It could always use your financial support.

Recently, while on an assignment to be witnessing to life a group of Survivor Camp students set up a display in downtown Los Angeles where there happened to be an outdoor televising of a local TV show called the Jimmy Kimmel show.

It seems that the camera crew hired for this broadcast taping took a dislike to the students display and attempted to intimidate and disburse the students. The students declared their freedom of speech rights only to have the crew turn their extremely hot kleg lights on some students holding a large banner. The lights were so hot they singed a couple of the students, almost melting a plasticized arm band.

Heated words were exchanged between adults on both sides causing the police to intervene. It was finally settled, an apology was issued by the Kimmel Show producers and the students were vindicated of any wrong doing.

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COMMUNITY ORGANIZING.

Recently I had the opportunity to interview a local, young, Latina Community Organizer who is working within a Catholic Parish in the Oakland Diocese. The Pastor with whom she is working is so enamored of this group, CCISCO, (Contra Costa Interfaith Supporting Community of Organizing) that he has placed their logo on his parish letterhead stationery and provided this woman with an office and committee within the parish. Parish committees are referred to as Local Organizing Committees - LOC. The committee at this particular church is an all Latino committee “because we can’t get anybody else to join” she said. The Chancery takes no position on the development of these groups within the parish and, therefore, within the diocese.

The young woman stated that she is working with 4 of the 5 Catholic parishes in Concord. CCISCO is also working with other Contra Costa based Denominations and local legislators as well. Outside of Contra Costa County, in Alameda County, other community organizing groups are active within churches. Community of Renewal - COR - is one of these groups.

Depending upon the size of the Parish. Each provides a donation to CCISCO anywhere from $200.00 to $1,000.00 for the privilege of working with CCISCO. This is standard. Community organizing groups do not volunteer their services. They use local residents and parish members as volunteer protestors for hidden agendas. They also engage in verbal virtuosity, as Thomas Sowell says by substituting kind, compassionate words and phrases for reality, i.e. undocumented instead of illegal.

This young woman proudly informed us that only the previous week she had taken a busload of parish school students to Sacramento where they assembled at the Catholic Cathedral prior to going off to lobby the legislators for health Care and Immigration issues. http://.ccisco.org.

During our interview the Community Organizer talked about CCISCO’s work in the area of immigration reform. They focus on the “undocumented” immigrant, the one who is not eligible, so she said, for a social security number and, therefore, a decent paying job. She mentioned working with the City of Concord in the hopes of finding employment for this group of undocumented (illegal) residents in the building trade area particularly in the town development of the former military base. She stated very firmly that due to a person’s status as an undocumented, that person is never able to become a naturalized citizen and, therefore, never able to get a decent job. That is why, in reference, she was working to get recognition and citizenship for this group of people. [Note: Diocesan Social Justice Committees and the state office of Bishops, in Sacramento are constantly working to produce a change in the immigration laws allowing illegals to obtain almost instant legal status. This is referred to in legislation as The Dream Act.]

I checked with the United States Customs and Immigration Office in San Francisco regarding her claim. It is not quite accurate. I make no claim to being well informed about immigration laws. but, according to a USCIS representative, there are ways for anyone reaching the age of 18 years, to begin application for naturalization. Few of them requiring deportation of the individual or his/her illegally established parents.

It has been pointed out in previous legislative reports that Planned Parenthood and PICO have often been listed along with the California Catholic Conference and or Catholic Charities, in support of legislation. Also, in an earlier SOT we reported on a Parish Nurse’s activities in an Antioch, Ca. Parish in which she admitted that she referred young people to Planned Parenthood for reproductive services. She didn’t mention working with Birthright or Pregnancy Crisis Centers.

An article in the most recent Catholic Voice, the official publication for the Oakland Diocese, reported on a South Alameda County faith-based organization entitled COR and how it is working to help youth. The article also quoted a community organizer with a group called “Youth Up-rising.” Checking this group online shows that they connect youth to Planned Parenthood’s clinics for abortions and contraceptives.

So, we have the situation of the Bishop stating his pro life concerns while the parishes are, at the same time, coordinating their efforts with groups who promote abortion and contraception to the youth of the parishes. And, don’t forget the dues that these parishes are paying for the “privilege” of working with these groups.

In addition, while researching this article I came across a community organizing group in the Monterey area referred to as COPA - Communities organizing for (relational) Power in Action. They are also working in Catholic and Protestant parishes and are planning a meeting with Monterey’s Bishop Garcia, on June 20. Researching this group online brought me to a Maryland based site called CASA de Maryland, located in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, which lists COPA as one of its action item committees. CASA is an affiliate of La Raza which also works with Planned Parenthood. So an organization headquartered in the nation’s capitol masquerades as a local, social justice type ministry on the California shores.

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AN EXAMPLE OF VERBAL VIRTUOSITY.

SB 438 by Sen. Leland Yee, (SF-Dem) is entitled Charter Schools: Freedom of Speech and of the Press. It has sailed right through 6 Senate Committee hearings obtaining the votes of Republicans and is now passed out of its second Assembly committee hearing. It is on its way to the floor and then to the Governor.

This bill has nothing to do with freedom of speech or anything else. It has to do with clamping controls just a little tighter on Charter Schools. The Charter School Assn has opposed it. Another bill, by Assemblywoman Brownley placing restrictions on Charter Schools has been withdrawn due to lack of votes. I suspect that the reason for its withdrawal is that SB 438 is moving ahead and will eventually obtain the same results.

Our office received a phone call from recently elected Assemblyman Chris Norby regarding our position of opposition on SB 438. He said that since pro life people fight so strongly for our free speech rights we shouldn’t be opposing this bill. What he doesn’t understand is that this bill has been cleverly devised to make it appear that it is a freedom of speech issue when, in fact, it is not.

Charter Schools have been created by state legislation as an alternative schooling for parents who are dissatisfied with the public school system. They are referred to as voluntarily chartered by like minded groups with their own local official and parental controls. Even many private schools and Catholic schools have applied to become Charter schools in order to obtain the tax funds needed to survive.

It has never been the intention of the legislature to leave these schools alone to prosper in competition with the regular public schools. The legislature has been slowly writing legislation that is drawing these schools into an ever tighter state control from which, because of the funding, they will never leave. Even President Obama is now suggesting that Charter Schools are an answer to the educational dilemma.

Legislators like Asm. Norby do not look beyond the nice words on the page. He sees Freedom of speech and thinks, okay that’s a Republican Principle, I should vote for that.

He fails to understand that wiser and craftier legislators than he have learned how to use language to dissemble. He can tell his constituents that he voted for freedom of speech when, in fact, he has voted for restriction of conservative speech on Charter School campuses.

You can still stop this bill by contacting your assembly member and urging a “NO” vote on SB 438. Most likely we will ultimately have to direct our urgings to the Governor because of the Democrat majority in the legislature.

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OBAMA APPOINTS A PLANNED PARENTHOOD FAVORITE.

President Obama has, during a Congressional recess, appointed Donald Berwick, MD, as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The National Partnership for Women and Families’ Campaign for Better Care is just delighted that Obama has snubbed the proper political process of Congressional approval in order to install someone who believes in rationing health care as a means of re-distributing the wealth. He seems to also be enamored of the British Health System.

Didn’t the President promise that there would be no rationing in health care?
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Published by: California Right to Life Committee, Inc, 1920 Monument Blvd, PO
Box 309, Concord, Ca 94520. (925) 899-3064.
Your comments, suggestions and thoughts on items for inclusion in this report are earnestly requested.

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The above quote was taken from a commentary entitled “Our future depends on boosting interest in science,” published in the San Jose Mercury News for 5-20-2010. Ms Hardy’s words parallel the goals and mission of the latest federal Five year plan for expansion of the National Science Foundation mission and budget.

The House of Representatives has just today, May 28th, passed a major piece of work entitled the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2009 which is a bill to fund the National Science foundation. (see the official press release at the end of this article).

The National Science Foundation reauthorization lingered in the U.S. Congress’s Committee on Science and Technology for the last year while 52 Amendments were fought over. The bill was authored by the chairman of the committee, Tennessee Democrat, Bart Gordon. It is a 120 page bill. The original bill number, HR 5116 was changed to HR 5325 because of the need to make several amendments. However, the just issued press release refers to it by its original number of HR 5116.

“The stated purpose of the bill is: “To invest in innovation through research and development, to improve the competitiveness of the United States, and for other purposes.”

HR 5325 represents the goals and objectives of the Obama White House in establishing an energetic and urgent public policy on environmental “green” issues, workforce and education partnership issues and Al Gore’s favorite, global warming. Though it is not an appropriations bill, it contains requests for billions of tax dollars to implement.

There are four California legislators on this 41 member committee: John Garamendi, (D-Contra Costa), Lynn Woolsey, (D-Sta Rosa), Brian Bilbray, (RSolano Beach) and Dana Rohrabacher, (R-Huntington Beach).

Here is a sample of committee member, Lynn Woolsey’s statement in support of the bill, as given to the Committee hearing:

“I believe in science — and that with enough support — our scientists can solve almost any problem put in front of them. But at the end of the day, this bill is about jobs. Investments in basic and applied research, green manufacturing jobs, and high risk, high reward technologies will help lay the groundwork for a clean energy economy and create thousands of new green jobs in our country.”

Should the bill succeed in being signed by the President (it has two other House Committees in which to be heard - Education and Labor and Energy) it will be put before a finance committee to work out the financing. This financing of specialized activities within various branches and departments within the federal government, is in addition to the main mission and budgeting of these departments. So, the several billion dollars being sought through this Act could be added to the costs of the various departments which will be affected.

Any funds appropriated for these activities will not be funneled through the various departments but will go directly from the White House in the form of grants, mostly, to universities, non-profit foundations, local and state federal workforce development agencies that have been planted in each state.

As a side note, California Gubernatorial Candidate Steve Poizner lists as one of his White House Fellowship interests, the subject of science and technology as an important public policy.

The bill either creates new workloads on government agencies or amends and expands current Acts pertaining to science and technology in seven, different areas of governmental agencies. It establishes oversight and partnerships (also referred to as contracts) between government and the private sector in industry, educational curriculum and workforce development. It, therefore impinges on the mission and duties of several branches of Government such as Dept. of Energy, Dept of Education, Nasa, Noaa.

When speaking with members of either the Science and Technology Committee or with a representative of the National Oceanographic and aeronautics Committee, they quickly assure me that neither NOAA or NASA are involved in this. However, when I remind them that the bill says that these agencies will be represented on Advisory Committees, they say, “oh, well, yes.”

Regarding the Department of Education, this Act seeks to establish greater federal involvement in the development and direction of pre-K-16 classroom studies in workforce preparation, Charter schools and STEM Education - science, technology, engineering and math.

This ambitious federal education/workforce development program is reflected in numerous state bills in California and, especially in creating scholarship opportunities for high school students to specialize in certain areas and, those who declare an interest in attending colleges with engineering programs.

A third way, as stated in the bill is for those students who achieve post secondary degrees in STEM subjects, but do not find jobs in those industries, to return to college for teaching degrees to become STEM teachers in the classroom.

HR5325 also attracted 52 amendments including one that prohibited any person found guilty of housing pornography on his/her computer from obtaining funding under this bill.

It was further amended to reduce the intended 5 year plans for implementation to only 3 years since it was determined that 5 years of budgeting for these programs was too expensive.

This bill is on a par with the national health care legislation in so far as it adds further federal authority and direct Presidential oversight over controlling major areas of human health, social, academic and work life.

Both the bill and the Science and Technology Committee have very interesting histories.

In the 1950’s when the National Science Foundation was first created, the expressed reason was fear of other countries obtaining the Atom Bomb. The U.S. came up with the idea of a program of mutually assured destruction - MAD. This, we were told, would protect us from ever having to face the threat of nuclear attack from a foreign and hostile government, by meeting any such force with a similar or greater force. Today the government would have you believe that as we approach global unity we are in a similar situation of hostility from not only outer space, but inner space.

We must conquer the inner space mysteries of nanotechnology, global warming, environmental threats, a seeming dearth of adults competent in all areas of science, technology, engineering and math. And, we must do it before other countries get to the top of this latest race for dominance on the global playing field.

In fact this is the most ambitious plan to be offered so far. Congress is attempting to initiative a massive outcome based educational program that requires scouring the classrooms pre-K-16 to find certain types of students who will fit the government’s needs, train those children from Kindergarten to graduate school and place them in preconceived positions to give the United States supremacy through science and technology to capture global leadership in physical, economic, environmental and sustainable population development. This could well be the new meaning behind the old saying “our children are our future,” or everybody working for the good of society.

Already state legislatures, especially California, are loaded with education bills calling for totally remodeling the system of education in order to place California as the state most capable of racing to the top; mandating various types of technology class requirements for high school graduation. Those children who do not quite qualify for the post secondary education in science, technology, engineering or math will get those green jobs designed as “shovel ready.” And, if the student does make it to a master’s degree in STEM but can’t get a job they will be offered an opportunity to return to school, get a teaching credential and teach STEM education to other students.

This is all contained in a section entitled STEM Education and Workforce Training or Integrative Graduate Education and Research Trainee (IGERT) Program. This will be funded through a National Science Foundation - NSF - Robert Noyce Scholarship Grant Program which will favor students completing International Baccalaureate Programs in high school. There are now about 300 or more public, Charter and Academy type schools in California featuring International Baccalaureate programs or variations thereof.

One section of The Act contains the requisite demand for gender equity and data collection for keeping track of the workforce by race and gender.

The bill further calls for using every idea available from the simplest to most wild-eyed plan imaginable through harnessing nanotechnology. In future the NSF will not just research and create programs but will form partnerships in the private sector to move their ideas out of the lab into the community for development and implementation. Title 1, sec. c-1, Nanotech Partnerships: recruit and help prepare secondary school students to pursue postsecondary level courses of instruction. This is referred to as the 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and development Act, S 189 by Sen. Ron Wyden. This, like the 6 other titles, is all contained within the NSF re-authorization Act each with its own budget in the $millions or billions.

The final, total budget for this re-authorization is nearing nine billions.

Today, the very same people, scientists and educators, who in the 1950’s called for a national, tax funded all out effort to gain supremacy in conquering the mysteries of the atom and outer space are once again behind this effort to not just be equal with the rest of the world in science and technology, but now, through conquering inner space to Race to the Top of the global world competition and cut it off.

I suggest that this is the true goal behind all the calls for increased educational funding and reform efforts. The No Child Left Behind education Act promoted by Clinton and Bush has been declared a failure. The NCLB has been renamed Race-To-The-Top funded in part by ARRA money, to claim today’s student as tomorrow’s mad scientist.

One segment of The Act is devoted to development of environmentally sound green technology development. Senate and House leaders are talking about “green” jobs, the California state legislature has numerous Workforce Development green jobs creation bills. In the last two years California has created a massive bureaucracy with state and local Workforce Development Centers which is setting priorities for jobs and partnering with schools to begin training students through job shadowing and summer placements, and strong emphasis on STEM classes.

This section is all part of Al Gore’s global warming push. Title 1, Subtitle B creates the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Act which amends the original 1991 High Performance Computing Act which Al Gore dubbed the Information Superhighway.

The health care bill was fought over for months, this bill just sails right through because the American citizen’s attention is being diverted. Americans are now so hungry and anxious for jobs and income that we are not listening to what those jobs and educations are intended to do.

This bill, HR 5116, submitted to both the house Committee on Science and Technology and to the House Committee on Education and Labor, on 4/22/2010 has, astonishingly, passed the House in a month’s time with almost no debate, no public hearings. The Health Care bill was fought over for months. This bill is every bit as important, but no one seems to know about it. In fact a House Resolution, HRES 1344 by Ed Perlmutter (D-Co) was submitted and passed in one day calling upon all the legislators to hurry up and pass the National Science Foundation Reauthorization Act.

The original idea for a National Science Foundation Act, HR 4846, was begun under President Roosevelt and was passed and signed by President Harry Truman on May 10, 1950, following almost five years of debate and planning.

The idea for a national, government directed, science foundation was attributed to the thoughts and reports of Dr. Vannevar Bush (involved in the Manhattan Project) then Director of the Wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development.

One website describes the NSF mission as “devot[ing] its funds and talents to research and education in non-medical science and engineering - the National Institute of health is its counterpart.”

Another segment of the bill, Title lV, is a total reorganization within the Department of Commerce. This section, originally called the Office of Standards and Technology, is referred to as the National Institute of Standards and Technology Act of 2010. It addresses the issue of ownership of any patent rights to discoveries. Whether it is a university or private research firm, if it is funded with tax dollars the patent rights belong to the federal government. This is under the Commerce section of the bill and refers to Intellectual Property Rights which are defined as “management of scientific collections of physical specimens, living or inanimate for the purpose of supporting science.” It also refers to the development of international data bases, conformity standards and security systems and includes bio manufacturing, environment, bioscience (DNA) and human identification. It is, in a sense, putting sensors on the information highway, or setting speed traps for unsuspecting trespassers. The budget for this segment for 2011 is set at $991,100,000.00 ending in 2015 with a budget of $1,191,955,000.00.

Title lll STEM Education is subtitled the STEM Ed Coordination Act of 2010. It creates a Commission to coordinate federal programs and activities setting up Science, Technology Engineering and Math - STEM - education. It draws members from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, NASA, National Oceanography and Aeronautics Agency, Department of Education and includes private sector and non-profit groups.

Title V is entitled Stevenson-Wydler Innovation Act, 1980, (S.1250 signed 10-21-1980 by Jimmy Carter).

This Act is amended, retitled and placed under the Department of Commerce to be referred to as the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Members of this committee will be appointed from the Departments of NSF, Department of Energy.

Title Vl, Department of Energy is subtitled: Office of Science; Department of Energy, Office of Science Authorization Act of 2010. This segment sets a budget for 2011 as $5,247,000,000.00. This Act declares, in part that it’s mission and goal is:

a) MISSION The mission of the Office of Science shall be the delivery of scientific discoveries, capabilities, and major scientific tools to transform the understanding of nature and to advance the energy, economic, and national security of the United States.

(1) Science for Discovery to unravel nature’s mysteries through the study of subatomic particles, atoms, and molecules that make up the materials of our everyday world to DNA, proteins, cells, and entire biological systems;

(2) Science for National Need by –

(A) advancing a clean energy agenda through research on energy production, storage,
transmission, efficiency, and use; and

(B) advancing our understanding of the Earth’s climate through research in atmospheric and environmental sciences and climate change.

This segment restricts any experimentation on human biology.

Sunday, May 23, CBS’ 60 Minutes program did a segment called “Waiting for Superman.” It was an infomercial type program on a new prototype of schools called “Seed” Schools. There are two, one in Washington, D.C. and one in Maryland with many more in the works. President Obama has visited the school and proclaimed its great potential. Oprah Winfrey is even promoting it. Information about Seed schools can be found at www.seedfoundation.com.

There are other seed type schools which are advertised on San Francisco Bay Area television and on signs on the highway; DeVry University which is made up of five colleges of STEM type programs and The Phoenix school. All of these are designed to begin early in a child’s life to search for and nurture the scientifically oriented student.

Public school classes on STEM Ed are being developed. Teachers are being sought who will consent to being retrained to teach specific STEM classes and Charter Schools and/or Academies are developing to prepare students to work in the new, global economy of government centered, scientifically based environmentally sound future jobs.

Understanding what is contained in the federal health care bill and placing it side by side with the Science Foundation Re-authorization Act one is able to gain a better understanding of the immense all consuming and overreaching designs planned for citizens by federal government and private industry leaders.

The bill will now go to the Senate which will present its version of reauthorization.

Here is today’s official press release:

Innovation Legislation Clears the House With Bipartisan Support

(Washington, DC) – Today, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 5116, America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 by a vote of 262 to 150. The bill, which has over 100 cosponsors and more than 750 endorsers, makes investments in science, innovation, and education to support employers today while strengthening the U.S. scientific and economic leadership to grow new industries of tomorrow, and the jobs that come with them.

“If we are to reverse the trend of the last twenty years, where our country’s technology edge in the world has diminished, we must make the investments necessary today,” said Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN). “The path is simple. Research and education lead to innovation. Innovation leads to economic development and good paying jobs and the revenue to pay for more research. And as private firms under-invest in research and development because the returns are too far off in the future, there is a clear and necessary role of government to help our nation keep pace with the rest of the world.”

Over 750 organizations have endorsed the legislation including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable, the Council on Competitiveness, the Association of American Universities, the Association of Public and Landgrant Universities, the National Venture Capital Association, TechAmerica, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, the American Chemical Society, and others, including nearly 100 universities and colleges.

To maintain a pipeline of ideas, the bill puts basic research programs on a path to doubling authorized funding levels over ten years at: the Department of Energy Office of Science, the single largest supporter of research in the physical sciences in the U.S.; the National Science Foundation, which supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering; and the National Institute of Standards and Technology labs, which conduct research to advance the nation’s technology infrastructure and support industry.

The bill will help foster innovation in new energy technologies by: reauthorizing the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is pursing high-risk, high-reward energy technology development; and authorizing Energy Innovation Hubs, which are multidisciplinary collaborations with a single technological focus that currently presents a critical barrier to achieving our national energy innovation goals.

The bill will also help ensure U.S. leadership in emerging and growing fields, including nanotechnology and IT.

The bill supports local efforts to form Regional Innovation Clusters, which will strengthen regional economies and advance the work done in a given field by leveraging collaboration and communication between businesses and other entities.

The bill addresses immediate needs by creating Innovative Technology Federal Loan Guarantees to help small- and medium-sized manufacturers access capital to make necessary updates to become more efficient and stay competitive.

The bill will also assist industry by ensuring that the Manufacturing Extension Partnership program at National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) better reflects the needs and challenges facing manufacturers today. In addition, the bill reorganizes NIST labs to reflect the multidisciplinary nature of technology and better meet the needs of industry in the 21st century.

The bill also will help improve science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education by reauthorizing the Noyce scholarships, which help give K-12 teachers a strong grounding in their fields, so they can more fully engage students. The bill also addresses coordination of STEM activities across the federal government, and improves STEM education at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral levels.

“Throughout the Committee process, there was a lot of legitimate discussion about federal deficits. I agree that we must address the challenges presented by our deficits, but we must also invest in our country’s future. I remember Newt Gingrich saying one of his greatest regrets was not doubling the funding for NSF when he put NIH on the doubling path,” said Gordon. “During committee consideration of this bill, we made some significant changes to the bill’s authorization levels—cutting them by over 10 percent. Though we will maintain a doubling path for our research accounts, we do so on a slightly less aggressive trajectory.”

After a few minor setbacks over the past two weeks, the House proceeded today with further consideration of H.R. 5116. When consideration resumed, Chairman Gordon moved a division of the question on the amendment included in the Republican Motion to Recommit passed by the House on May 13. This effort allowed the House to consider and vote separately on several parts of the Motion to Recommit.

“As I’ve said before, this bill is too important to let fall by the wayside. Today, we took the action necessary to see consideration of this bill completed. And we allowed the Members of the House to be on record voting on provisions gutting funding for our science agencies, voting on whether we should eliminate programs that will help create jobs, voting on whether to eliminate programs that will make us more energy independent, voting in opposition to federal employees watching pornography, and voting on whether universities that ban military recruiters should receive federal research dollars. We have provided all Members, in a reasonable manner, with the ability to vote on each of these items separately instead of all together,” said Chairman Gordon.

For more information on the Committee’s work on COMPETES, please visit our website.

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Where we have no information on any candidates running in a particular district we did not include it. In some instances we only knew that the incumbent was not pro life and needed to be removed and replaced by (almost) anyone else.

The information is listed in two sections. The first section, regarding congressional, state Senate and Assembly, lists the Republican candidates. The second listing is for Democrat incumbents who are known to be abortion activists and or carried legislation inimical to life or family values.

GOVERNOR:
Jerry Brown, Democrat. Pro abortion

Meg Whitman:
Pro abortion. Whitman claims to oppose federal funding of abortion and partial birth abortion. In reality her campaign is headed by former Gov. Pete Wilson who was decidedly pro abortion. Also her statement that she opposes federal funding of abortion leaves out the question of the millions in state funding that goes toward abortion. Also one should understand that this ban does not prevent PBA, but merely the funding of it.
She has also created controversy over her use of EBay to develop a site dedicated to the online sale of pornography.

Steve Poizner: He has publicly stated to the Ca. Federation of Republican Women that he opposes all governmental funding of abortion. He also supports Parental Notification. He thrives on challenges. He is self absorbed, highly motivated to achieve results. Seems to believe that business tactics can be applied to Government.

His book, Mount Pleasant, about his year of guest teaching an American political History class to low income students in a San Jose Public School is a good indication of what he would emphasize as Governor.
_____________________________________________
LT. GOVERNOR
Sam Aanestad
Sam Blakeslee, of Santa Barbara is running for two positions. He is also running for a special election on June 22 for the Senate seat vacated by Abel Maldonado. He should not be running here against Sam Aanestad.
______________________________________________
ATTORNEY GENERAL
John Eastman
__________________________________________
SECRETARY OF STATE
Damon Dunn
______________________________________
TREASURER
Mimi Walters
____________________________________
CONTROLLER
Tony Strickland
________________________________
TREASURER
Mimi Walters
____________________________________
BOARD OF EQUALIZATION
1st District - Rae Williams
2nd District - Barbara Alby
3rd District - Michelle Steel
____________________________________
SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION

Lydia Guttierez
_______________________________
U.S. SENATE

Chuck DeVore, recorded pro-life votes in Sacramento.

Carly Fiorina, Her published statement that she is “Proudly Pro life” has no substance behind it. When I asked one of her representatives how she would vote on the Mexico City Policy, as an example, he didn’t even know what that was. That’s the ban on U.S. funding of international abortions which Barbara Boxer helped overturn. Fiorina is being endorsed by a variety of pro life groups over Devore which is a shame.

REPUBLICANS

CONGRESS

1st Dist. - Loren Hanks
2nd Dist. - Wally Herger, incumbent
3rd Dist - Dan Lungren - incumbent
4th Dist - Tom McClintock - incumbent
7th Dist. - Virginia Fuller and Rick Tubbs running against George Miller
8th Dist - Dana Walsh
10th Dist - Buddy Burk
11th Dist. - David Harmer
12th Dist. - Mike Maloney
18th Dist. - Michael Berryhill
19th Dist. - Richard Pombo
20th Dist - Jim Costa
21st Dist. - Devin Nunez
22nd Dist. - Kevin McCarthy, incumbent
24th Dist - Elton Gallegly, incumbent
25th Dist. - “Buck” McKeon
37th Dist. - Star Parker
40th Dist. - Ed Royce
42nd Dist. Gary Miller
43rd Dist. - Scott Folkens - Apple Valley TeaParty recommended
44th Dist - Chris Riggs
45th Dist - Clayton Thibodeau
47th Dist. - Van Tran
51st Dist. - Nick Papaditch
52nd Dist. Duncan Hunter
___________________________________________
ASSEMBLY

1st Dist. - Karen Brooks
2nd Dist. - Jim Nielsen
3rd Dist. - Dan Logue
5th Dist. - Andy Pugno, lead counsel in support of Prop 8.
7th Dist. - Doris Gentry.
8th Dist. - Michelle Connor
15th Dist. Abram Wilson
21st Dist - Greg Conlon
27th Dist. - Linda Black
28th Dist - Allen Barker
29th Dist. - Linda Halderman
36th Dist. - Steve Knight
63rd Dist. - Paul Chabot
64th Dist. - Brian Nestande
72nd Dist. - Chris Norby
75th Dist. - Nathan Fletcher - has supported some homosexual legislation. Responds “yes” when asked if he is pro life, but whispers it.
_________________________________
STATE SENATE

2nd Dist. - Lawrence Wiesner
4th Dist. - Doug LaMalfa
10th Dist. - Rob Maffet - Tea party Candidate
16th Dist - Phil Wyman
36th Dist. - Joel Anderson, currently Assembly member, running for seat of termed out Dennis Hollingsworth.
__________________________________
DEMOCRATS

ALAMEDA COUNTY SUPERVISOR
2nd Dist. Nadia Lockyer. This woman is Bill Lockyer’s wife. she is, according to her own words, “very pro choice.” Further, she is endorsed by Cong. Pete Stark’s wife also an abortion activist.
____________________________________
DEMOCRATS

CONGRESS

1st Dist. - Mike thompson - incumbent as are all the following listings.
6th Dist - Lynn Woolsey
7th DIST - George Miller. Chrmn Education and Labor Committee.
8th Dist. - Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House
11th Dist - Jerry McNerney.
13th Dist. - Pete Stark, also pro euthanasia
28th Dist - Howard Berman, Original state abortion legislation pre Roe.
30th Dist - Henry Waxman, partnered with Berman to re-direct California’s portion of federal tax funding for abortion to the private sector abortion industry.
33th Dist. - Karen Bass, former state Assembly Speaker. Diane Watson is termed out. While in the state Watson was chrmn of the state Health Committee and treated pro life speakers ruthlessly.
34th Dist - Lucille Roybal-Allard
35th Dist. - Maxine Waters.
36th Dist. - Jane Harman
39th Dist. - Linda Sanchez
47th Dist. - Loretta Sanchez
49th Dist. - Howard Katz
________________________________________
ASSEMBLY

6th Dist. - Jared Huffman
11th Dist - Susan Bonilla
12th Dist.- Fiona Ma. Her office has display of Planned Parenthood awards.
13th Dist. - Tom Ammiano
15th Dist. - Joan Buchanan
18th Dist. - Mary Hayashi
24th Dist. - Jim Beall
27th Dist. - Bill Monning
40th Dist - Bob Blumenfield
42nd Dist - Mike Feuer
44th Dist. - Anthony Portantino. Carries several workforce/education partnership bills.
49th Dist - Mike Eng
53rd Dist. Mitch Ward. Anti Prop 13.
55th Dist - Warren Furutani, also carries workforce/education partnership bills
62nd Dist - Wilmer Amina Carter, supported by Planned Parenthood.
challenger, Gil Navarro, also Planned Parenthood endorsed.
69th Dist - Jose Solorio
_____________________________________
SENATE

6th Dist - Darrell Steinberg
8th Dist. - Leland Yee, supports mental health services in school clinics without parental notification.
10th Dist - Ellen Corbet
20th Dist. - Alex Padilla
26th Dist. - Curren Price
32nd Dist - Gloria Negrete McLeod, carries parent/school partnership contract bills.

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Is the formerly cherished California educational system cheating the students as parents and critics complain or is it right on target according to the educators and Think Tanks?

Well, its a little of both.

California education underwent a major sea change beginning in 1960 with passage of the first Master Plan for Education also referred to as the Donahoe Education Act. Clark Kerr, later to become Chancellor of Cal Berkeley, takes credit as does former legislator John Vasconcellos, for creating and furthering the Master Plan.

Kerr addresses his goals with a more intellectual approach couching his ideas in lofty, aesthetic terms. Vasconcellos uses the patois of the hippy era, blaming mainly parents, and church for a failure to prepare and nurture their children for the hard realities and the pleasures of life.

The original Master Plan was that period’s California Dream Act, long on ideals, short on ways to attain those ideals and lacking in funds. The main premise, however, was that schools must become accountable for the children that parents and society were failing.

What was missing in this plan was a pathway to attaining those goals. The legislators and educators knew that The Donahoe Act was only a beginning. Over the years legislation has been submitted that has tweaked and amended this Act until the Education Code is now several hundred pages long and containing 101,060 numbered sections.

In 1993 Clark Kerr addressed the California Postsecondary Education Commission created by the 1960 Act. The title of his talk was: “Who will take responsibility for the future of California Higher Education.” Once again, it was concern over the latest crop of This caused Clark Kerr, in 1993, to urge creation of a new Master Plan referred to as a Resource Master Plan for Education. He addressed the California Postsecondary Education Commission. The title of his talk was: “Who will take responsibility for the future of California Higher Education.” college aged baby boomers, inadequate educational facilities and funding.

He proposed that a new master plan be written entitled a Resource Master Plan for Education.

Every term dozens of education related bills are submitted to the legislature. Some of these bills are developed by legislators. The majority of them are created by special interests such as unions, community and non-profit organizations, business community, think tanks. This has created partnerships between education and business and community interests, all, now called Stakeholders. Everybody has been invited to jump in and contribute to the preparation of the student for his/her chosen place in the life of the global community.

Education has become the new market place for competition and experimentation in who or what will be able to fulfill the goal. The prize for the competitors is the prestige of being chosen to participate in this lofty idea as well as the financial gain and guaranteed employment. The students? Well, if it doesn’t work there is always life long learning or re-training for the new skills needed in the market place.

The conversation about the future of education usually quickly turns to the realization that not all students will succeed in college. Not all students are academically minded. Most will graduate high school and go into trades or office work. The educators and legislators say, on the other hand, Oh, no, all students have the right to a college education. We must help them attain that. They must at least get to two years of community college at.

On top of that they have to be healthy, physically fit, mentally sound and willing to acknowledge their responsibility to their community and be prepared to fulfill the employment needs of that community. You’ve heard the old phrase - our children are our future? Did you ever think it meant a planned future prepared by the school system and not you? Your job is to be a partner with the school and enforce the school’s plan inside the home.

California recently lost its bid for Race To The Top federal education legislation, but is trying again. The money to be realized would provide the fuel to set the whole humanistic education program well on its way. Also the Education Master Plan is due for re-authorizing later this year.

The irony here is that California considers itself to have been the leader in creating the New goals for education.

Visit the online California Postsecondary Education site: www.cpec.ca.gov and click on a section entitled Accountability; March 22, 2010. Look for their Legislative Update with contains information on 50 education bills that they are tracking.

Also look for their report called STEP - School to Employment Pathways System.

All these education bills are filled with mandates to firmly establish partnerships with Workforce Development legislation mandates, Health clinic services and corresponding nutrition and gardening programs, humanistic character education programs, after school programs, targeted work preparation programs led by unions offering job shadowing in union shops and community organizations beginning in junior high school. Eighth graders are being urged to determine their career lives and being assisted in that by promotional programs from community groups.

Academics such as history and english composition and languages is being re-focused to be merely support for the chosen career path. One must know how to read the manual or research the computer for one’s chosen field of endeavour or prepare reports to one’s supervisor. One must also understand that their future employment might well be within their community, but that community may be global.

Also, the classroom and its instructor will change. It’s called distance learning or individualized learning and it means learning via computer. Your student may be sitting in a room full of students but each may be getting a different version of an education through the computer from a classroom half way across the country.

Most of the current crop of bills are sitting in suspense files in the Senate and Assembly Appropriations Committees awaiting the fate of the next budget fights. These bills come with high demands for new taxes in the form of bonds for which there need be only a majority vote in either the legislature or the ballot box.

Beware of candidates calling for education reform and more jobs. They may be planning something far different than you understand.

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“What some have even called a ‘preferential option" for the poor, does not free us from the need to prudently and wisely consider the most appropriate ways in which this obligation is to be carried out. we do well to reject the confusion that equates a preferential option for the poor with a preferential option for the state.”

Rev. Robt, Sirico, Detroit News, 12-20-1992.
The Church: Lobbyist for the welfare State.

 
"For the first time churches have become aware that they actually have the potential to be communities of health," says Granger Westberg of the International Parish Nurse Resource Center. 

Last Acts Campaign to Improve End-of-Life Care, 1998.

 
The Parish Nurse Program was the brain-child of Chicago based Lutheran Minister, Granger Westberg. Early in his ministry which began in the mid 1950’s, he accepted assignment as a hospital chaplain and began to perceive a need for both hospitals and church ministries to form a sort of holistic healing partnership ministering to the whole person - mind, body and spirit.

During his hospital chaplaincy and later while on fact-finding tours in third world countries, he observed that patient/doctor relationships were missing an important element of communication.

This brought him to the conclusion that churches, along with ministering to the soul should develop an expanded ministry to the physical and mental needs of parishioners. In other words, creating health clinics within the parish context which would act as a type of preventive health care service.

In his observations he saw that:

1. Patients often had social and emotional problems underlying the physical ills which they needed to share with an understanding and compassionate person. The doctors were too busy for this.
2. Parishioners were not comfortable speaking with their ministers about their daily concerns, aches and pains.
3. Patients felt more at ease speaking with women, especially nurses.
4. What if Nurses could be established within parishes thereby creating physical and emotional healing centers right along with the Pastor’s spiritual healing?

And, so, began a life long mission for Pastor Westberg creating parish nurse training programs within the college setting.

This concept was well received within many Christian church circles but received its greatest promotion during the 1990’s when President Clinton and his wife, Hillary, became involved with the promotion of universal health care.

By the late 1990‘s the concept of establishing health clinics within the church setting was further expanded by the passage of legislation authored by then U.S. Sen. John Ashcroft, known as the Faith Based Initiative. This initiative authorized non-profits, which included churches, to receive federal tax funding for partnering with the government to provide health clinic services to the general community.

Parish nursing, funded mainly with private Foundation grants, became eligible for tax funded grants. California, however, resisted what its legislators saw as mixing church and state until a Southern California Republican legislator succeeded in obtaining passage of a bill that mandated California’s participation in funding non-profit and church based government welfare programs.

In 1998, while still a state Senator, Diane Watson, (later a U.S. Congresswoman) Chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee, penned a memo sent out to all interested state and local school and community groups informing them of their opportunity to form partnerships with the state in delivering health services through establishment of health clinics which could be used to gain new applicants for the newly formed Healthy Families Program.

An interesting sidelight to creation of the Healthy Families Program was the involvement of Hellan Roth Dowden, state employee and former Director of California’s Planned Parenthood, as well as numerous other Feminist organizations and unions such as the SEIU. On Watson’s memo Dowden is listed as the contact person for Healthy Families. Her current associations and activities can be found by googling her name.

The memo explained just how community organization volunteers could qualify to become Applicant Assisters and be eligible to receive the $50.00 fee (increased from the previous $25.00 fee) for successfully completed applications for Healthy Families.

Volunteers working in a church setting assisting parishioners to complete Healthy Family applications also qualified to receive this fee. The Assister could either receive the fee or designate her church to receive the fee.

What began as perhaps a very well meaning and compassionate idea of ministering to the whole person, with the Good Samaritan as the prototype, has now assumed the mantle of the big government promotion to burrow into the churches accessing the unsuspecting faithful in the pews for a new source of welfare applicants. And, a nurse shall lead them.

Literature on the Parish Nurse Program indicates that this Parish Nurse person need not be an actual registered nurse although she often times is. If the Parish Nurse is not an actual nurse she must develop a corp of volunteer registered nurses for programs such as blood pressure screenings, vaccinations and other actual medical type services the parish nurse might want to provide that, by law, require a nurse or a doctor.

The foremost qualification for this position is a compassionate disposition, an ability to gain the confidence of parishioners, the time to spend listening to people recite their litanies of mental, emotional, financial and physical woes and, most importantly the ability to reach out and partner with a wide variety of community service provider organizations to which the parish nurse can direct the parishioner for assistance.

The position of Parish Nurse is considered so vital to the well being of the individual within the church that she is given a position of prominence within the parish equating her position with that of the Pastor.

Funding to carry out this program is often provided initially by an outside, non parish, non governmental funding source from which the parish nurse may take a remittance. Often she chooses not to. At some point the outside funding source expires and it becomes necessary for the parish to come up with the funding even to the point of applying for government assistance to continue what has now become a permanent entity within that parish. The parish has now become a partner with the state for the delivery of non religious, humanistic social services.

In 1992, this move toward encouraging church leaders to advocate for government funded welfare and health care programs within churches caused the Reverend Robert A Sirico, Director of the Acton Institute, to write an editorial entitled The Church: Lobbyist for the Welfare State, published in the Detroit News for December 20.

The editorial stated, in part:

“Polls indicate that there is a preference among Americans for social programs to promote self-sufficiency, not dependency. Yet, when Michigan Gov. John Engler last year acted to fulfill his campaign promise to reduce the size of government and proceeded to eliminate 80,000 able-bodied general assistance recipients from the roll, his most vocal critics were welfare advocacy groups headed by prominent mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic religious leaders.

It would be another matter altogether if these governmental transfer payments were actually effective in ameliorating poverty and minimizing crime. Yet, just about everyone, regardless of political stripe, seems to agree there is a crisis in the welfare system and that the massive welfare state doesn’t work - just about everyone, that is, except perhaps a few ill-tutored theologians.

With all the use of that terribly obscure and unnecessarily narrow phrase ‘family values’ in this past election season, perhaps the real issue we are attempting to get at is functional values or how we go about fostering a society whose members learn how to function well and productively.

There is a growing body of literature indicating that governmental programs, owing to their political nature, instill a sense of dependency in those they are designed to help. They create the very situations they profess to cure. With the failure of socialism in central Europe and the intellectual and moral bankruptcy this represents for Marxism, the current debate shifts to the moral legitimacy and practical effectiveness of the welfare state. The welfare state fails in its objectives for the same reason that socialism failed in its - a rejection of sound economic thinking. The key practical problem with the welfare state is the presupposition that it can observe all social problems and needs, and is able to regulate the necessary sectors of society in such a way as to best meet those needs. But no one group of planners, no matter how wise and sensitive to human needs they may be, can see the deepest needs of the human soul, which frequently are at the root of economic problems.

The specific problem this confusion presents to the church is that it disintegrates charity into an entitlement and collapses love into justice. If all relations are based merely on state-enforced justice, what becomes of the virtue of love? Especially when viewed from a religious perspective, the disadvantages of an expansive welfare state are sadly apparent. Promoting the government as the resource of first resort lessens the incentive of people in the pews to become personally involved in needed projects and relegates the church to the role of lobbyist.

To the extent that the church functions as a lobbyist, rather than itself clothing the naked, feeding the hungry and performing the other traditional acts of charity, the church loses a rich source of its own spiritual nourishment. This has, in turn, led to a secularizing of the social assistance systems (schools, hospitals, orphanages, health clinics). This development minimizes the moral influence of religious mediating institutions which are so critical in helping to stabilize troubled families.”

I recently interviewed a parish nurse who had been featured in the Oakland Diocese Newspaper. She had attended a parish nurse training program in her former state of Wisconsin but could not find a position there. She later moved to her current location and recently found acceptance as a Parish Nurse in her own parish in Antioch, California.

She shared her enthusiasm for her work in a community consisting in large part of recent immigrant parishioners of low income and somewhat poor health and nutrition. Her parish and Pastor are well recognized for partnership activities with a community organizing group entitled Contra Costa Interfaith supporting Community Organization - CCISCO which is itself a partner with a statewide community organizing lobby group called PICO - Pacific Institute for Community Organizing. These groups along with SEIU and the California Nurses as well as Planned Parenthood, have spearheaded lobby days in Sacramento to advance the cause of universal health care.

I asked this Parish Nurse if she refers parishioners to the Healthy Families program? She said yes. She, further, affirmed that referrals to Planned Parenthood were also included in those references. I then asked her why a Catholic Church would be referring its parishioners to an organization that promoted abortion and family planning which are in opposition to the Catholic Faith teaching? At that point her whole demeanor changed. She stated that she merely made referrals to those agencies most appropriate for type of service needed by the parishioner. It was not her responsibility as to what services the parishioner actually accepted.

Several years ago a parish in Concord, California, also within the Oakland Diocese provided assistance to the county health department in the refurbishing of an old van to be used as a mobile medical services van for residents of the Monument Corridor. This area is heavily populated with legal and illegal residents. Members of the Concord Parish saw this van as a way to obtain needed health services unobtainable any other way. This Van parked at a local shopping center and at various neighborhood grade schools to deliver health care and referrals. People volunteered to drive patients to referral sites if necessary. Planned Parenthood was one of the referral organizations.

When I inquired about the morality of a Catholic Parish facilitating its parishioners attendance at abortion and family planning programs I was told that providing services to needy people was the first and foremost concern. Abortion was not their problem.

Genesis chapter 3 contains the story of how the devil seduced Eve into eating the fruit of the forbidden tree. He didn’t suggest that Jesus was lying about the fruit. He didn’t suggest she should ignore Jesus warning. He merely pointed out the advantages to her of consuming this fruit. The opportunities it would present to her to gain knowledge which God didn’t want her to have. You know the rest of the story. Eve ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge assuming to herself the right to make her own decisions without outside guidance. Chapter 3 is entitled: The Fall of Man.

So, too, the seducer of the mind has approached the churches to suggest that there is nothing wrong with taking the money from the government. The work of the government is good. It provides social justice to the worker, the poor, the underserved. The church should be able to participate in this work of human mercy and reap the rewards of recognition and acclaim.

Does your church have a Parish Nurse?

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