I AM DONE with that place

"We've had enough of exhortations to be silent! Cry out with a hundred thousand tongues. I see that the world is rotten because of silence."
St Catherine of Siena

There are times when I am sure I have more courage than brains. This is one of them....I am done with The Hive for now. If I am smart (which sometimes I am but not always) I will let the Thought Nazis take over there for awhile. They will be so happy eventually they will drift away and sanity can reign again.

My 87 year old mother received three obscene phone calls from a drunk man during the night threatening to slit the throat of the Catholic Bitch on the Hive.

True to form, I feel very sorry for this man...apparently the third call was enough to flip Mom out and she let him HAVE it....and (according to her) he actually hung up on HER the last call....see, us Italians have no problem being martyrs for the Faith but we will make the persecuters hate the fact that they EVER came up with the idea of trying to stop us in the first place.

On The Hive recently was a post taking a man identified here as JH for posting about abortion.

JH is pro-life, and not about to call abortion anything other than what it is: it is evil. It is murder. It is infanticide.

This is a brave young man. Quite frankly, if I could convince him to become Catholic I know there are a plethora of young women in my parish alone who would be jumping up and down in joy. He loves dogs, kids, America, Jesus Christ and has a truck. I mean, come ON people...oh, and he has just started his own business.

Anyway, he was taken to task by a fellow conservative for writing about infanticide. She feels that it is detrimental to the women who happen upon the site to see something like that and read it - it may hurt them.

So, I spoke up because what else is a Catholic Out Loud supposed to do? Especially if that Catholic is a woman who is also post-abortive?

The reality of our times is that we cover up our crimes against nature through the use of language. It is not infanticide...it is a procedure, a right, a choice, anything but what it is - the murder of an innocent because the circumstances surrounding the baby's conception are out of bounds in some way.

One of my abortions was because I had been brutally raped by a man I thought was a friend - he was, actually, just a party buddy but my concept of friendship was a little warped back in the 1980's so I had felt doubly violated. He was someone I trusted and he held me hostage, beat me, put a knife to my throat and raped me several times over an evening. I became pregnant.

I was so traumatized by the entire event that I nodded dumbly when the woman at the clinic told me I was 12 weeks pregnant and needed to get in right away to have 'the procedure'. She did not suggest any other alternative. I was 23, alone in LA, a drunk and a drug addict and so far away from my Catholic Faith that I had not been to Mass in at least 4 years.

Now, my first abortion had been because my boyfriend had told me I was on my own...it was my body, he told me, and he wanted nothing to do with it. I was so scared and hurt. I had loved him so much. I had given my virginity to him in the hope that he would love me as much as I loved him. When I found out I was pregnant I was sure he would say, "Marry me!". Instead he stood up, threw a hundred dollar bill at me and said, "Take care of it" and walked out of my life.

I was so ashamed.

This was worse, of course. I had fallen into a group of people that were truly lower companions, just as the Big Book of AA describes, because I did not think I deserved to be with any other type of people. I could not tell my family, I had no real friends and once again I was with child.

The reason I feel, today, that it is important to not pussy foot around with language is that I do not believe that all those people out there who claim to be 'pro-choice' really want to face what abortion actually is - the sucking out of the womb of a human being. If they can call it any other thing than what it is then it can be palatable rather than intrinsicly evil.

Well, covering up actions with soothing words does work for awhile. But for the woman who finds herself depressed for no reason, unable to really get close to and trust a man, turning further and further into herself and becoming more readily agreeable to being treated like pond scum by the people around her not telling the truth can actually kill.

In AA we talk about the danger of holding onto resentments by the suffering alcoholic. The resentment I had against myself for the way in which I treated my body caused me to drink more, to eat myself up to dangerous levels of obesity, to shove people who loved me away with both hands and to not be able to truly look at the woman I had become. It was not until I was able to say, "I am a post abortive woman who regrets her choice. It cause me unbearable pain and I have a right to tell the truth about me" was I able to break the bonds of sin and pain and alcoholism.

Of course I was afraid. I was afraid of those people - the ones I jokingly call the Shiite Christians - who would reject and condemn me and let me tell you they are out there. However, the real rejection has come from those who pretend to embrace diversity. Apparently, I am far too 'different' for them. They are mean, angry, nasty people. I know. I have had them ask me what crawled up inside me and died when I speak passionately about the damage abortion does to women. I have had them tell me that America stands for choice and if I don't agree with that then I better not vote (they never have had the guts to say 'or else' but the threat is implied. My response? bring it on, grandpa). I have had them call me a liar. This is all because I broke ranks, you see. I am a woman who has challenged their idea of what true choice is - it is not just hearing one side; rather it is being open to the experiences of those who have been there and done that and have bought the t-shirt one too many times.

BUT I also did something else - a lapsed Catholic on The Hive has posted about what makes a real Christian and when they cross the line into apostacy and I gave him my opinion: when a real Christian walks away from the Eucharist because they want better preaching, a chance to jump up and down and shout 'amen' at the top of their lungs or because they decide they are surrounded by sinners? That is a Christian who has crossed the line.

I did soften that a bit by saying that this is my opinion and, just like butts, everyone has one of those.

It is sad to me that people do not want to face the damage we have done to women with this social experiment in license. The harm continues to pile up and suddenly we wonder why men walk away from their babies, why young girls throw themselves sexually at teachers and why marriages fall apart....every single thing Pope Paul VI said would happen in Humane Vitae has happened and it is scary.

I was one of those young liberal women who thought that the old man in the Vatican was crazy.

Well, who is crying now?