Why is the UN censoring pro-life speech?

“They promise..freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption…” (2 Peter 2:19).




Wendy Wright, reporting for C-FAM, notes how, "Youth attending a UN conference on women’s issues this week say UN security officers confiscated their backpacks after discovering pro-life literature.

The confiscated materials were petitions to 'Stop Sexualizing Children,' and were connected to a UN approved workshop led this week by Dr. Miriam Grossman, a child psychiatrist and author of 'You're Teaching My Child What? A Physician Exposes the Lies of Sex Education and How They Harm Your Child.'

The offending flyer announced a project called the 'Girls Coalition to Protect the Health and Innocence of Children,' which is an ad hoc group that sponsored the Grossman event. At the panel, girls from China, Spain and Mexico launched a petition calling on UN agencies to 'Stop Sexualizing Children.' They charge the UN’s promotion of 'comprehensive sexuality education' is harmful to children.

The young people insist they were not leafleting, which is forbidden on UN property, though it is routinely ignored. The young students left UN grounds to make more copies. Upon their return they were stopped by UN security.

One of the students, Kalli Lawrence, said that the guards noticed the group’s distinctive green backpacks and then ordered the students to hand them over. 'The guards had this confused, angry look on their faces,' she reported, 'and they started telling all the security guards, "don’t let any of these yellow papers go through, just take them all and keep them."'

The green backpacks and literature were stored in lockers at a security checkpoint. Students and their teachers were allowed to retrieve some of the backpacks as they left UN property. According to teacher Jody Dunn, some of the backpacks were not returned, those that contained a pro-life documentary called '180'. Dunn then insisted and those backpacks were returned also.

Pro-lifers have long felt the sting of selective enforcement of UN rules. Kali Lawrence said, 'They didn’t stop anyone else that we could see passing out flyers.'

Upon questioning by the Friday Fax, the security officer in charge at the time said guards don’t 'target' items. He went on to say they were not allowed to discuss policies or procedures.

Observers speculate that someone connected to Commission organizers complained to UN security. At the Cairo conference on Population and Development in 1994, without any evidence, former US Senator Timothy Wirth told UN security that a certain pro-lifer was a violent threat. The person was detained and deported.

Alliance Defense Fund attorney Piero Tozzi told the Friday Fax, 'The UN cannot censor speech it does not agree with. Both the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression and the Human Rights Committee have recently emphasized the need to protect this fundamental freedom. Why then is speech by respectful, clean cut kids on a topic vital to keeping young people healthy being censored at the UN?'

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom . . . to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." (See article here).

Why is speech by respectful, clean cut kids being censored at the UN?  Because, the United Nations has succumbed to demonic ideology.  If you doubt this for even one moment, consider that the same UN permits professor (and Catholic priest) Michael O'Flaherty, a radical homosexual activist, to promote the Yogyakarta Principles, a blueprint for usurping parental rights while indoctrinating children in gender-bending ideology.  See my past post here.

Satan does not want us to live in peace and harmony. His intention is to make a physical and spiritual wreckage of all God’s creation. To this end he enlists men in that attempt by their lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes and pride of life. He is especially anxious to seduce the young and to corrupt them so thoroughly that they come to resemble more and more the devils they then follow.

The Catholic Church teaches that, “Educating children for chastity strives to achieve three objectives: (a) to maintain in the family a positive atmosphere of love, virtue, and respect for the gifts of God, in particular the gift of life; (b) to help children to understand the value of sexuality and chastity in stages, sustaining their growth through enlightening word, example, and prayer; (c) to help them understand and discover their own vocation to marriage or to consecrated virginity for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven in harmony with and respecting their attitudes and inclinations and the gifts of the Spirit.” (The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality (Guidelines for Education Within the Family), issued by the Pontifical Council for the Family, No. 3).

This requires self-control, which is why chastity is so important: “One cannot give what one does not possess. If the person is not master of self – through the virtues and, in a concrete way, through chastity – he or she lacks that self-possession which makes self-giving possible. Chastity is the spiritual power which frees love from selfishness and aggression.” (The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality, No. 16).

Satan knows this. And so he wages a battle against chastity through sex-education which radically separates sex from the very idea of the covenanted love of man and woman, a sex education and propaganda which the group POPE (Parents for Orthodoxy in Parochial Education) referred to as, “the spiritual, emotional rape of our children through various and devious methods of mind manipulation” (“Do Sex-Education Programs Corrupt Youth? The Wanderer, April 17, 1969).

Just as Pope John Paul II created a World Youth Day to instill Gospel values in our young people, the Evil One has enlisted men to create a World Youth Conference in which Gospel values are subverted. As Terrence McKeegan, J.D., reported for C-FAM back in 2010, "...at the World Youth Conference, organized primarily by the Mexican government and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the main event for most of [the] estimated 5,000 ‘participants’ was the Interactive Global Forum, a massive expo with hundreds of booths and exhibits. A tour of the booths revealed what passes for ‘age-appropriate’ sexual education in some UN circles. Because the venue for the World Youth Conference had considerably more exhibit space than most UN conferences, it was a unique opportunity for organizations focusing on youth to put their best face forward. In the expo hall, there were dozens of booths with pornographic or sexually explicit materials or presentations.

At the International Planned Parenthood Federation (the largest provider of abortion services in the world) booth, their table featured the sexually explicit brochure: 'Healthy, Happy, and Hot', which garnered headlines last March due to its distribution at a Girl Scouts side event at the UN Commission on the Status of Women.
At a booth by an organization named 'RECREA,' there was a table with a bowl of condoms and a wooden phallus. The walls of the exhibit booth were covered with pornographic and sexually suggestive photos. Nearby there were two glass cases featuring rubber models of male and female genitalia, as well as a bright assortment of condoms.



At the Fundacion Collectivo de Mujeres Jovenes booth,which was staffed by two middle-aged men, the presentation largely consisted of a collection of thong underwear hung up around the booth, as well as a 'snakes and ladders' floor game with puffy dice." 

Did you catch the name of that "game"?  Snakes and ladders.  Who is the serpent?

To sum up: Pro-Life literature is taboo at the UN.  But not wooden phalluses, condoms, pornographic and sexually suggestive photos.

This is the essence of the new anti-Christian sex education in preparation for the Moloch State. As George Kendall explains in Witness for the Truth, this sex education "radically separates sex from the very idea of the covenanted love of man and woman. Sex becomes merely a self-centered appetite to be satisfied and not a gift of self to another. As a result, what this kind of education produces is the lonely, autonomous individual. This is the ultimate in alienation. The autonomous individual is alienated even from his own body, which becomes to him only a thing, too - a thing to be used as a means to his autonomous pleasure. The end result is depersonalization which, if it lasts into eternity without being healed, means eternal loss.

Few have put it as eloquently as Randy Engel did: 'Is it any wonder that the state must wage war against the family? For the state requires not individuals who dream, and think, and pray, but rather what has come to be called 'the mass man' - rootless, unaffirmed, a reactor - a mere reed blowing in the wind - a thing to be manipulated, to be used, to be disposed of, but never, never, to be loved, for the giant has no heart. And since the modern state has no heart, that which men previously have done out of love, must now be done out of fear, and hatred, and brute force.' So clearly, centemporary sex education, 'Catholic' or otherwise, is a profound attack on human dignity and on the human person.." (Witness for the Truth, pp. 399-400. citing Randy Engel "The Family Under Siege," Wanderer, March 6, 1980).


And now I would add, satanic. The United Nations, spiritual headquarters for the Termite Nations of the West, is advancing the concept of the Moloch State which claims total jurisdiction over man. The Moloch State will serve as a demon-state which rejects God's Commandments and His plan for the human family. This demon-state (and make no mistake about it, our leaders increasingly have recourse to demons) denies that there is any transcendent, higher-than-human voice or authority that cares for man. R.J. Rushdoony explains that:

"The Moloch State simply represents the supreme effort of man to command the future, to predestine the world, and to be as God. Lesser efforts, divination, spirit-questing, magic and witchcraft are equally anathema to God. All represent efforts to have the future on other than God's terms, to have a future apart from and in defiance of God. They are assertions that the world is not of God but of brute factuality, and that man can somehow master the world and the future by going directly to the raw materials thereof."

Enter the Man of Sin.

John 5: 43.

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Why should those who produce The Catholic Free Press be surprised that government is now mandating contraception?

In an editorial entitled, "Stop the erosion of religious liberty," The Catholic Free Press, official newspaper of the Diocese of Worcester, Massachusetts, laments that, "The Obama administration has embarked on a systematic effort to erode religious liberty to the point of non-existence by attempting to restrict it solely to freedom of worship.  Through administrative policies and mandates, religious liberty and freedom of conscience in the United States is under attack, as witnessed by the most recent 'accommodation.'..The Obama administration has been chipping away at the right of religious institutions to abide by their beliefs when those beliefs oppose the secularist agenda, particularly in the arena of morality.  This was clearly evident in the decision not to renew a federal grant by the Department of Health and Human Services to the bishops'  Migration and Refugee Services for its human trafficking program because it would not provide the full range of reproductive services, including abortion and contraception, to human trafficking victims and unaccompanied refugee minors...President Obama made the decision to impose the Department of Health and Human Services' Interim Final Rules on Preventive Services, requiring all private health plans, including those of Catholic hospitals, charities and schools, to provide coverage of prescription contraceptives, including abortion-inducing drugs, and sterilization for women.  The so-called "religious employer" exemption that was put forth with these rules is so narrowly defined that it is meaningless.  Unless a religious institution employs and serves only individuals of the same religious tradition, it does not qualify for the exemption.  Therefore, Catholic hospitals and schools who serve people of all faiths, precisely because of their Catholic mission, do not qualify for the exemption.  The recent 'accommodation' offered in response to the outcry that resulted from this mandate, which was unquestionably a direct assault on the Roman Catholic Church's religious liberty, does not lessen the concerns initially raised...We cannot lose sight of the fact that the 'accommodation' does not alter the Obama administration's mandate promoting contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs as a matter of government policy.  It is particularly troubling that the attitude toward human life identifies pregnancy as a disease, posing a threat to one's health.."

How did we get to where we are in the United States?  In the words of Archbishop Charles Chaput, spoken in 2009, "40 years of American Catholic complacency and poor formation are bearing exactly the fruit we should have expected...We can't talk about following St. Paul and converting our culture until we sober up and get honest about what we've allowed ourselves to become. We need to stop lying to each other..."


Once a people appeal to conscience in order to condone sin, it is only a matter of time before such sin is openly mandated.  Long before contraception was being mandated by the government, there were those in the Church - including throughout the Diocese of Worcester - who were unleashing the leaven of infidelity by neglecting to preach against sin or by appealing to a dissenting notion of the primacy of conscience.

Richard Blanchard was documenting this infidelity (within the Worcester Diocese) at the same time I was writing against it in the pages of The Catholic Free Press more than twenty years ago.  For example, in his newsletter "Just The Facts," No. 6, (1993), Richard noted how a Couple-to-Couple team was teaching CCD students preparing for Confirmation in Leominster, Massachusetts (St. Leo's Parish) that, "If your conscience convinces you that birth control is right, even if the Church says its wrong, you can practice birth control and not be sinning."  And then Richard explains: "This has been taught for over 20 years and still is being taught in this diocese [Worcester].  The basis for this teaching is dissent and a dissenting concept of the primacy of conscience which is nothing less than situation ethics."

In the same newsletter, Richard Blanchard noted that, "During the episcopate of Timothy J. Harrington...dissent and disobedience has flourished and taken deep roots....in September of 1984 Sister Anna Kane was appointed Vicar of Religious and Director of the then Office of Women, at the same time she became a member of Bishop Harrington's administrative cabinet.  She became very militant against Humanae Vitae.  Under the administration of Fr. Piermarini, (now Msgr), the religious education department employed Dr. Vincent Forde, Bernard Cooke and Alice Laffey as instructors of the Education in Ministry Program, also known as the Master Catechist Program which has for its goal, master certification for CCD teaching.  All [of these instructors] openly strong advocates against the teaching on birth control in Humanae Vitae."

Within the pages of The Catholic Free Press, Humanae Vitae was openly mocked.  For example, in his "Essay in Theology" column entitled "Humanae Vitae; a troubling silence (CFP, August 13, 1993), dissident priest Father Richard P. McBrien referred to the Church as "a dysfunctional family" because it will not change its teaching on the sinfullness of artificial contraception to appease those who just cannot or will not accept it.


As a result of 40 years of poor catechesis - or none at all - and outright complacency throughout the Catholic Church in America,  too many people today (including sadly, many Catholics) have come to view conscience as a sort of fortress built so as to shelter them from the exacting demands of truth. In the words of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, "In the Psalms we meet from time to time the prayer that God should free man from his hidden sins. The Psalmist sees as his greatest danger the fact that he no longer recognizes them as sins and thus falls into them in apparently good conscience. Not being able to have a guilty conscience is a sickness...And thus one cannot aprove the maxim that everyone may always do what his conscience allows him to do: In that case the person without a conscience would be permitted to do anything. In truth it is his fault that his conscience is so broken that he no longer sees what he as a man should see. In other words, included in the concept of conscience is an obligation, namely, the obligation to care for it, to form it and educate it. Conscience has a right to respect and obedience in the measure in which the person himself respects it and gives it the care which its dignity deserves. The right of conscience is the obligation of the formation of conscience. Just as we try to develop our use of language and we try to rule our use of rules, so must we also seek the true measure of conscience so that finally the inner word of conscience can arrive at its validity.

For us this means that the Church's magisterium bears the responsibility for correct formation. It makes an appeal, one can say, to the inner vibrations its word causes in the process of the maturing of conscience. It is thus an oversimplification to put a statement of the magisterium in opposition to conscience. In such a case I must ask myself much more. What is it in me that contradicts this word of the magisterium? Is it perhaps only my comfort? My obstinacy? Or is it an estrangement through some way of life that allows me something which the magisterium forbids and that appears to me to be better motivated or more suitable simply because society considers it reasonable? It is only in the context of this kind of struggle that the conscience can be trained, and the magisterium has the right to expect that the conscience will be open to it in a manner befitting the seriousness of the matter. If I believe that the Church has its origins in the Lord, then the teaching office in the Church has a right to expect that it, as it authentically develops, will be accepted as a priority factor in the formation of conscience." (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Keynote Address of the Fourth Bishops' Workshop of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, on "Moral Theology Today: Certitudes and Doubts," February 1984).

In the same address, Cardinal Ratzinger explains that, "Conscience is understood by many as a sort of deification of subjectivity, a rock of bronze on which even the magisterium is shattered....Conscience appears finally as subjectivity raised to the ultimate standard."

And subjectivity raised to the ultimate standard gives rise to dictatorship. For, as Pope John Paul II reminded us in Centesimus Annus, "Authentic democracy is possible only in a State ruled by law, and on the basis of a correct conception of the human person. It requires that the necessary conditions be present for the advancement both of the individual through education and formation in true ideals, and of the 'subjectivity' of society through the creation of structures of participation and shared responsibility. Nowadays there is a tendency to claim that agnosticism and sceptical relativism are the philosophy and the basic attitude which correspond to democratic forms of political life. Those who are convinced that they know the truth and firmly adhere to it are considered unreliable from a democratic point of view, since they do not accept that truth is determined by the majority, or that it is subject to variation according to different political trends. It must be observed in this regard that if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism."

Why should those who produce The Catholic Free Press be surprised that government is now mandating contraception?  The Church in the United States is only reaping what it has sown.

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Father John Unni does not preach chastity...here's why

Jim Jones led his flock to a kind of insanity.  Father John Unni is doing the same.  The People's Temple became a People's Tomb.  St. Cecilia's is becoming a Moloch Church with a utopian "Gospel" which advances rebellion and licentiousness.


In my last post I noted how Father John Unni has urged parishioners at St. Cecilia's Parish in Boston to "shed the burden of shame."  It is most significant that Father Unni does not preach on the importance of chastity.  The virtue of chastity liberates a person from the tyranny of concupiscence which in turn strengthens his or her will for the battles of life.  Saint Thomas Aquinas explains that, "When the lower powers are strongly moved towards their objects, the result is that the higher powers are hindered and disordered in their acts.  Now the effect of the vice of lust is that the lower appetite, namely the concupiscible, is most vehemently intent on its object, to wit, the object of pleasure, on account of the vehemence of the pleasure.  Consequently the higher powers, namely the reason and the will, are most grievously disordered by lust." (Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 153, a. 5).

You might be scratching your head and saying "huh?"  Joseph Pieper, in his excellent work "The Four Cardinal Virtues," puts it nicely:

"An unchaste man wants above all something for himself; he is distracted by an objective "interest"; his constantly strained will-to-pleasure prevents him from confronting reality with that selfless detachment which alone makes genuine knowledge possible.  St. Thomas here uses the comparison of a lion who, at the sight of a stag, is unable to perceive anything but the anticipated meal.  In an unchaste heart, attention is not merely fixed upon a certain track, but the 'window' of the soul has lost its 'transparency,' that is, its capacity for perceiving existence, as if a selfish interestedness had covered it, as it were, with a film of dust...

This kind of interest is altogether selfish, The abandonment of an unchaste heart to the sensual world has nothing in common with the genuine dedication of a searcher for truth to the reality of being, of a lover to his beloved.  Unchastity does not dedicate itself, it offers itself.  It is selfishly intent upon the 'prize,' upon the reward of illicit lust.  'Chaste,' says St. Augustine, 'is the heart that loves God without looking for reward.'  One further comment: For anyone whose function it is to lead and counsel young people, it is this selfishness which characterizes the inner nature of unchastity (as intemperance)." (The Four Cardinal Virtues, p. 161).

Lust destroys peace of mind and causes spiritual blindness.  It enslaves.  Chastity liberates us from concupiscence and makes us more noble.  By refusing to preach chastity, Father Unni is delivering up souls to a sensual world which results in darkness of intellect and will.  He is encouraging the souls entrusted to his spiritual care to live with total disregard for chastity.  And this in opposition to St. Paul's warning that, "..this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from unchastity; that each one of you know how to take a wife for himself in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like heathens who do not know God; that no man transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we solemnly forewarned you.  For God has not called us for uncleanness, but in holiness." (1 Thessalonians 4: 3-7).

Father Unni wants his flock to shed any feelings of shame and to embrace a total disregard for chastity.  The book of Sirach includes the prayer of the just man who wants to live a chaste life:

"O Lord, Father and God of my life, do not give me haughty eyes, and remove from me evil desire.  Let neither gluttony nor lust overcome me, and do not surrender me to a shameless soul." (Sirach 23: 4-6). 

Notice the wording here: "Do not surrender me to a shameless soul."  This is the exact opposite of what Father Unni preaches as he urges his flock to "shed the burden of shame."

The spirit of Christ and the spirit of Antichrist.  The City of God and the City of Satan.

Which do you choose?

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Why are health care professionals suddenly asking patients about gun ownership?

Our Founding Fathers knew full well that politicians could not be trusted and that power corrupts.  They knew as well that governments were always capable of becoming a threat to liberty.  This is why they passed a Bill of Rights consisting of ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution.  The Second Amendment reads, "A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

While the Founding Fathers wanted to preserve the ability of the citizenry to defend themselves against tyranny, there are those who would like to undermine this ability by advancing the notion that gun control is a "public health issue" and that crime is a "disease."  As a result, patients are increasingly being questioned by health care professionals about their gun ownership.  In an excellent article entitled "Doctors to Ask Patients About Gun Ownership," Dr. Miguel A. Faria writes, "In what is described as an effort to curb handgun violence, a group called Doctors Against Handgun Injury, a spin off of the AMA and organized medicine, is calling for sweeping changes in the patient-doctor relationship that would allow physicians, including psychiatrists, to pry into their patients' gun ownership.


In the past, the medical community strenuously fought against any invasion of patient privacy by the government or other third-parties. For example, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) had, in the past and for obvious reasons, been a bulwark in the defense of patient privacy and medical record confidentiality.

Suddenly, events have taken a nefarious course.

The APA has regrettably joined Doctors Against Handgun Injury, the gun prohibitionist coalition.

This coalition --- which also includes the American Medical Association (AMA) and, not surprisingly, the strident (i.e., when it comes to gun control) American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and ten other medical organizations reportedly comprising 600,000 doctors --- has called for a variety of patient privacy-invading measures in the name of gun safety.

Don't be fooled by their innocuous-sounding name and publically stated objectives.

Through a revealing article published in the New York Observer on March 15, 2001, much information has come to light about the gun control campaign of Doctors Against Handgun Injury. They are promoting more stringent gun control measures, what they call "upstream intervention" --- that is, using regular checkups to ask patients about firearm ownership and gun storage in their homes.


Ostensibly, the report states: "To promote public safety, health professionals and health systems should ask about firearm ownership when taking a medical history or engaging in preventive counseling. Patients should be provided with information about the risks of having a firearm in the home, as well as methods to reduce the risk, should they continue to choose to keep them."

The AMA and organized medicine led by the new activist president Dr. Richard Corlin in his inauguration speech on June 20, 2001, dedicated the AMA to battling gun ownership as a public health epidemic. "[Gun violence] is a battle that we cannot not take on." Dr. Corlin said that he had decided to fight gun violence against all odds and despite the risks. "People have told me that this is a dangerous path to follow. That I am crazy to do it. That I am putting our organization in jeopardy. They say we'll lose members." Indeed, Dr. Corlin has put his own personal agenda and self-aggrandizement at the expense of all physicians and the AMA, the organization that claims to represent all of us.

Moreover, he said the AMA will attack gun violence the way it has attacked other public health concerns: "What we don't know about violence and guns is literally killing us," he exclaimed. He blamed "the gun lobby" for the loss of the $2.6 million in federal funding for gun [control] research which was stripped from the CDC budget in 1996 because of biased, politicized, result-oriented research conducted by the public health establishment.

Thus, Dr. Corlin called for increased public spending to allow the government to collect data on gun violence. In other words, he made calls to resurrect the specter of the shoddy research conducted by the NCIPC of the CDC. He parroted the litany: "Gunfire kills ten children a day in America," ignoring the fact that automobile accidents, swimming pools, matches, football and bicycle injuries kill far more children. Are we going to ban them too?

Dr. Corlin continued: "If this was a virus or a defective car seat or an undercooked hamburger that was killing our children, there would be a massive uproar within a week. Instead our capacity to feel a sense of national shame has been diminished by the pervasiveness and numbing effect of all this violence." And then he concluded, "Our goal is to cure an epidemic. If removing the scourge of gun violence isn't bettering the public health --- what is?"

Here Dr. Corlin propounds the erroneous notion that gun control is a public health issue and that crime is a disease, an epidemic --- rather than a major facet of criminology. He forgets that guns and bullets are inanimate objects not constrained by Koch's Postulates of Pathogenicity that prove that a microorganism is responsible for a particular disease.

Conveniently, Dr. Corlin also ignores the benefits of firearms in our society. For example, as many as 75 lives are protected by a gun for every one life lost to a gun; medical costs saved by guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens are fifteen times greater than costs incurred by criminal uses of firearms. Guns also prevent injuries to good people and protect billions of dollars of property every year.

And while Dr. Corlin preached the gospel of gun control, the AMA's spin off organization, Doctors Against Handgun Injury, called for physicians to spy on their patients. This is a regrettable and ill-conceived effort, and a violation of the Oath and tradition of Hippocrates.

This policy constitutes a breach in medical ethics, a boundary violation in reference to abuse of the patient-doctor relationship, and an egregious invasion of privacy.

A boundary violation takes place when a physician breaches the patient's trust and uses his authority to advance a political agenda.

As Dr. Timothy Wheeler explained in an article in the Medical Sentinel, "A patient who seeks medical or psychiatric treatment is often in a uniquely dependent, anxious, vulnerable, and exploitable state.

"In seeking help, patients assume positions of relative powerlessness in which they expose their dignity, and reveal intimacies of body or mind, or both. Thus, compromised, the patient relies heavily on the physician to act only in the patient's interest and not the physician's."

From time immemorial, patient privacy and confidentiality have been ethical concepts that, up until now, were fundamental to all physicians and to the patient-doctor relationship.


The Oath of Hippocrates, in fact, states: "Whatever, in connection with my professional practice or not in connection with it, I may see or hear in the lives of men, I will not divulge, as reckoning that all such should be kept secret. While I continue to keep this oath unviolated, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and the practice of the art, respected by all men at all times, but should I trespass and violate this oath, may the reverse be my lot."


For psychiatrists, who of necessity should be able to obtain very personal and confidential information for their patients' mental health evaluation and treatment, trust is paramount.

Understandably, psychiatrists have claimed a patient-doctor privilege similar to the attorney-client privilege that lawyers legally enjoy and which is a notch above what physicians now possess in patient-doctor confidentiality. This new policy makes a mockery of that claim.

With good reason this push by organized medicine has been received by patients with great concern and trepidation.

With this new incursion into gun politics by the medical profession, it's easy to see why patients may be more reluctant and less candid than ever with their physicians, which may, in turn, be detrimental to their medical care.


With good reason, patients may now perceive that their doctors, in asking them about guns in their homes, are acting more as an arm of the government prying into their personal lives than as their advocates in health care.

It will be easy to discern that physicians involved in this intrusion of privacy are placing the so-called good of society and the public relations goals of their professional organizations above their ethical obligation to their patients as required by the Oath of Hippocrates.



A Historic Precedent


In the momentous article "Medical Science Under Dictator-ship," Dr. Leo Alexander, the chief U.S. medical consultant at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, examined "the process by which the German medical profession became a willing and unquestioning collaborator with the Nazis." He noted the early changes in medical attitudes that predisposed German physicians to first collect data on their patients to conduct what today we call "cost-effective analysis," and then to use the latter information as a vehicle to commit medical genocide under the auspices of the totalitarianism of National Socialism.

Dr. Alexander warns us that "from small beginnings" the values of an entire society may be subverted, leading to the horrors of a police state.

The "small beginnings" in Nazi Germany that Dr. Alexander referred to first led the physicians to collect data from their patients and then violate their patients' privacy and medical record confidentiality by supplying the information to the state." (Full article with citations here).

Why are health care professionals across the United States suddenly asking about gun ownership?  Is the Department of Homeland Security another driving force behind this development?  If a patient acknowledges gun ownership, is this information provided to various government agencies including the DHS? 

I'm not a paranoid individual.  But I do maintain a healthy distrust of government.  You should too.  For as Lord Acton said so eloquently, "Power corrupts.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely." 

Related reading: Americans discerning a chilling loss of rights.

Related reading: America in twilight.

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