The group expressed frustration after Archbishop John C. Nienstedt withheld the sacrament from them because they wore rainbow buttons and sashes signaling their support for same-sex “marriage” and homosexuality. The archbishop, who was celebrating his first student Mass at St. John’s on September 26, instead gave a blessing to members of the group, which included students from St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict, as well as three nuns and a priest. Rainbow Sash Movement leader Brian McNeil said the group acted independently of his organization.

Elizabeth Gleich, a St. Benedict sophomore and board member of People Representing the Sexual Minority (PRiSM), said that her group had intended to “make a statement” against the archbishop’s support for traditional marriage. She criticized Nienstedt for “mak[ing] these extreme statements” by denying the group communion. Gleich, who was wearing a sash, was given communion in another line at the same liturgy.

Another PRiSM member, Ana Seivert, complained in a Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) report that the archbishop’s action was “political.” “We weren’t the ones who made it political,” she said. “Once the archbishop denied communion, he made it political.”

Archdiocese spokesman Dennis McGrath said the church has told the Rainbow Sash Movement “for years” that members “cannot receive communion if you wear the rainbow sash, because it’s a political statement, a sign of protest,” according to the Star Tribune. “Going to the communion rail is the most sacred part of our faith, the Eucharist. We don’t allow anybody to make political statements or any kind of protest.”

“It’s a symbol of the GLBT movement en masse, and it was intended as a protest,” McGrath told MPR. “It was pretty obvious.”

Rev. Rene McGraw, a philosophy professor at St. John’s, said that he celebrated a small Mass later that evening and gave all the members of the group communion. “My understanding of church law is that one is not to deny communion to anyone unless he or she is a public sinner, and that has traditionally been interpreted very narrowly,” said McGraw, according to the AP. “My instinct was these are people who were in need, I’m supportive of them, therefore I’m happy to say mass for them.”

However, the Vatican has confirmed that Rainbow Sashers cannot receive communion while publicly standing in opposition to Church teaching on sexuality, as stated by Cardinal Francis Arinze, the Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, in 2005.

Cardinal Francis George, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, wrote in 2004 that: “The policy of the U.S. Bishops’ conference, a policy I did not invent, was to refuse Communion to anyone who used its reception as an occasion to protest against the Church’s teaching.”

St. Paul-Minneapolis Archbishop Emeritus Harry Flynn, prior to his retirement, had been singled out for praise from the Rainbow Sash Movement for welcoming members to communion in his diocese. Nienstedt succeeded Flynn upon the latter’s retirement on May 2, 2008.

Rainbow Sash wearers have successfully approached the rail in other areas, most notably the dioceses of Rochester, New York, Los Angeles, California, and Detroit, Michigan.  The organization usually gears up every year on the Catholic holy day of Pentecost to launch a coordinated effort to receive communion while wearing the sashes, and have even been known to snatch the host and distribute it to members when ministers were reluctant.

Patrick Reilly of the Cardinal Newman Society, a Catholic college watchdog group, criticized the schools for failing to stand in solidarity with the archbishop.

“As long as the University sponsors a club that blatantly opposes Catholic teaching with events like ‘Freedom to Marry Day,’ I can only foresee more embarrassing and scandalous situations like this arising,” Reilly told LifeSiteNews.com Wednesday.

“This is an opportunity for University leaders to explain Catholic teaching, clarify the institution’s Catholic identity, and act in communion with the Archbishop.  To remain silent would seem to condone the students’ actions.

Minnesota’s bishops revealed last month that they would be mailing hundreds of thousands of DVDs to Catholics in the state explaining the Church’s position against gay “marriage,” and urging them to support candidates who favor protecting traditional marriage.

A warm, youthful registered nurse with an energetic smile, Giroux, 48, is a remarkable intersection of proud mother and dynamic pro-life leader. As executive director of HLI America, she counters the agenda of the likes of abortion giant Planned Parenthood; however, abortion is not the end of the story for Giroux. As founder of the Association of Large Families (AFLA), she’s also dedicated to reaching out to “planned parents,” a much larger group of people who are heir to the idea that having more than a few children is not only burdensome, but even dangerous and unnatural.

This mentality, she said in a telephone interview with LifeSiteNews.com, is more at the root of our culture’s problem than even the abortion industry – and it is a root cause that conservatives need to come to terms with.

“We’re really taking on the ‘planned parenthood’ mentality … that less children is better,” said Giroux.

A nurse with 24 years’ experience, she said that she was often struck during her time in the health care industry by women’s negative attitude when asked whether they were pregnant. “It reflected how America has really lost sight of our greatest resource, which is our children,” she said. Giroux blames the mentality that blossomed in the 1960s and 70s that says that families should be limited to allow women to pursue careers.

The idea has penetrated so deeply that doctors now even suggest that having a large family, far from the natural course of married life, is a risk to a woman’s health. “Your doctors nowadays are going to tell you, ‘Don’t have any more than two, your body can’t take it. You don’t want to do that, take the Pill,’” she said. “I hear this consistently.”

The Silent Mourning

However, said the nurse, she has also seen the other end of the journey – the one no one talks about.

“I discovered in my experience that … women over fifty expressed time and time again to me their post-contraceptive regret,” said Giroux. “And what they’re realizing now is that they had their two children, they put them in daycare, and their children are now grown and moved away, and they wish they had more children – or they sincerely mourn and regret the children they willingly prevented.”

Parents later in life not only suffer remorse, she said, but they and their families often end up experiencing the loss quite tangibly. “I witnessed only children at the bedside of their dying parents with no support around them from siblings, because they don’t exist,” she said. She noted also the “terrible, burning regret” and “mourning” she’s seen from sterilized individuals, who can be left barren even after reversing the procedure.

While she is dedicated to exposing the tragic effects of smothering natural fertility, Giroux said she and former Human Life International President, Rev. Tom Euteneuer, came up with AFLA to show the positive “flip side” of that concern. “It is an effort to show people the beauty of having large families,” she said.

Modern society, she said, has been left in the dark about what large families are really like. When large families are mentioned in the national media, “it is usually to mock them” – but in truth, she notes, large families are the “physical and spiritual backbone of America.”

ALFA exists “not to judge people at all,” she said, “but more to make sure that our daughters and granddaughters do not buy into the same lies that were fed to women our age.”

“What we really basically are asking is that families that are open to God’s plan for marriage, love and children and accepting the gifts he sends their family instead of limiting their families through artificial means.”

“The Catholic Issue”

According to Giroux, the fight to get their message out has not exactly been easy.

“I have been called a lunatic more times than I care to remember,” she said, relating struggles she has had to find a foothold even among top conservative and pro-life circles.

Despite some discouraging results, Giroux said she feels the movement is making progress against one of the biggest impediments: the idea that opposing contraceptives is just a “Catholic issue.” More and more research, she says, is pointing to the devastating repercussions of the contraceptive culture on women’s health.

Giroux has teamed up with Angela Lanfranchi, M.D. of the Breast Cancer Institute to expose the link between contraceptive use and breast cancer. For example, she says research has suggested women on the Pill within five years of having their first baby are at 50% increased risk for breast cancer.

“You don’t always get people who want to hear the spiritual side,” said Giroux. She pointed out that women in their 30s have begun succumbing to breast cancer even though it used to be “a post-menopausal woman’s disease” – a change that she said is “directly tied to hormonal contraception and abortion.” “The pathophysiological development of the breast cancer tissue … has nothing to do with anybody’s beliefs.”

“It is time for the pro-life movement to wake up and be bold enough to say, you know what, you’re damaging our children, you’re damaging women, and we’re not going to stand for it anymore,” she said. “It’s not a Catholic issue anymore, it’s a women’s health issue now.”

In addition to the emergency contraceptive known as Plan B, which pro-lifers have constantly warned can kill a newly-conceived embryo, Giroux said that even the hormonal birth control pill may inadvertently be causing the death of countless tiny lives. She notes that scientists have found that during in-vitro fertilization, embryos often died after they could not receive nutrients from a uterine lining thinned by regular hormonal contraceptive use.

One day, she said, public opinion will recognize what damage the pill has done to women both physically and spiritually – a day she thinks is close at hand. She compared the contraceptive industry to the cigarette industry, which was also once virtually free of regulation.

“It took six decades to finally have the lawsuits and the legal liabilities catch up to the sales of cigarettes,” she said. “This is now the sixth decade of pill use. I believe this is the decade the pill and hormonal contraceptives, and the physical damage it has done to women’s health, is going to catch up also with the billions of dollars that are made in profit.”

Click here to visit AFLA’s Web site, FourorMore.org.

While many may think of coerced abortion as a phenomenon found only in countries such as China, pro-life sidewalk counselors across America testify to routinely witnessing young girls being practically dragged into abortion clinics by fathers or mothers unwilling to handle their daughters’ pregnancies.

Eric Scheidler of the Pro-Life Action League said that, from his experience as a sidewalk counselor outside abortion clinics, coerced abortion is an all-too-frequent phenomenon.

“From what I’ve seen outside abortion facilities, many women — especially young women — are being coerced into aborting their unborn babies,” Scheidler told LifeSiteNews.com. “Often the young woman will clearly want to come over and talk to a pro-life sidewalk counselor, only to have her boyfriend, husband or parent push her on into the clinic, sometimes forcibly.

“Again and again, women will tell our counselors, ‘I have no choice,’” he continued. “They’re threatened with being abandoned or kicked out of the house. Sometimes they’re even threatened with murder.”

Scheidler said he expected that efforts to end such coercion, if successful, would make abortion rates “plummet.”

A project of the Justice Foundation, the Center Against Forced Abortions (CAFA), hopes to put an end to forced abortion by empowering young women with their legal rights. CAFA has already found success saving lives by offering young women a letter drafted by Justice Foundation attorneys that outlines to parents the legal rights of their daughters to carry their child to term.

Justice Foundation President Allan Parker said the experience of helping teenage girls escape pressure from parents to abort provided the inspiration to draft a letter informing those who are unaware of their rights.

“What’s the basic premise of Roe v Wade? It’s the woman’s choice … [and] choice implies being able to say yes or no,” said Parker.

The letter informs parents – or any other “concerned persons” – that, “even though abortion may be legal, you do not have any right to force, coerce, exert undue influence, or pressure your daughter to have an abortion,” citing the 1979 U.S. Supreme Court case Bellotti v. Baird. Such force, they note, may “subject you to reporting and prosecution for child abuse. Besides possible criminal prosecution, if you force, coerce, or exert undue pressure, then both you and the abortionist could be held liable for various civil torts, such as battery, negligence, false imprisonment, or other claims.”

Parker said that the letter could prove lifesaving to the children of young mothers unaware of their legal rights.

“Knowledge is power, and there are legal rights that they have,” he said.

But not only teenage girls should receive the information in the letter, he said. The pro-life leader urged the letter to be distributed to pregnancy centers, police stations, government offices such as child protection services, and school counselors.

Jeanneane Maxon, general counsel for Care Net, said that she was “shocked” at the lack of awareness not only among ordinary citizens, but even active members of the pro-life community. Maxon told LifeSiteNews.com that Care Net “often” receives questions from pregnancy centers unaware “that parents and others cannot force their children to have an abortion.”

In a Facebook post Monday, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America expressed frustration at the burgeoning popularity of thoroughly pro-life candidates who have shot to stardom thanks to Tea Party momentum.

“It’s easy to laugh at some of the crazy statements made by the newest Republican U.S. Senate candidate, Christine O’Donnell and others running on extreme anti-abortion platforms,” wrote the group. “But did you know that the day after O’Donnell’s primary victory in Delaware, she raised $1,000,000 online?”

The grassroots Tea Party movement, while largely dismissed by mainstream media and Democrat leaders early on – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously wrote off the movement as “astroturf” – has grabbed the attention of both parties after Tea Party senate candidates snatched the GOP nomination in seven states earlier this month.

The Republicans’ “Pledge to America,” a document released Thursday outlining a congressional agenda for the party, clearly aimed to please Tea Partiers. Party leaders, distancing themselves from “politicians in Washington,” promised to shrink government, reform Congress, and in general facilitate “listening to the American people and fielding their concerns and ideas for turning things around.”

In its statement, PPFA lamented that the Tea Party has ushered in “a groundswell of support across the country for these anti-choice candidates.” “They’re everywhere, raising money and support,” it said, and urged supporters to help the abortion giant “fight them, stop them, and defeat them.”

On Wednesday, the Washington Examiner noted that the Tea Party’s impact in the upcoming midterm elections will mean trouble for pro-choice incumbents, particularly those among the GOP.

Examiner columnist Timothy P. Carney noted that the four top casualties of Tea Party furor – Lisa Murkowski, Mike Castle, Charlie Crist and Arlen Specter – were all pro-choice members or former members of the Republican Party. In contrast, all of the successful Tea Party candidates for Senate are strongly pro-life.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has indicated that the Senate would take up a vote on a DADT repeal next week, which has been embedded in a defense spending measure. The House of Representatives already passed a repeal earlier this year.

But in an interview with liberal pundit Rachel Maddow Wednesday evening, Vice President Joe Biden revealed the lack of a strong consensus among Democrat senators over the DADT repeal.

While Biden said Republicans would only filibuster over the DADT “if they’re as foolish as I think they may be,” he admitted that the 55 Senate votes favoring repeal were scraped together with some difficulty.

“The truth of the matter is, we had to build a consensus for this. Working very hard on the telephone. Calling people. And everybody’s looking forward to the orderly elimination of this law,” he said.

The vice president also mentioned that Republicans will likely offer an amendment to strip the DADT-related provisions – a move that Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) indicated may have enough votes to succeed, according to Politico.

In addition, the bill could be taken down by a presidential veto thanks to an unrelated topic, if the final version includes authorization for weapons programs that Obama strongly opposes.

Both the House and Senate versions of the bill provide for a repeal of DADT only if President Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mike Mullen sign off on the move as reasonable in light of a Pentagon report predicting its effects on military readiness. But while the report has yet to be completed, Gates and Mullen have already joined Obama and signaled support for a DADT repeal.

Meanwhile, the homosexualist group that won a federal suit against the military’s DADT policy has requested that the federal judge issue an injunction barring enforcement of the policy.

Judge Virginia A. Phillips had already indicated that she planned to issue an injunction as she issued the ruling last week. Phillips ruled that DADT violates the First Amendment rights of homosexual members of the military by unduly limiting their speech.

Obama’s Justice Department has yet to file an appeal against the ruling. Because the Obama administration has vowed to oppose DADT, some pundits cast doubt on whether Justice Department attorneys would contravene the decision.

Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) have asked Attorney General Eric Holder to let the ruling stand; however, they admitted in the letter that only a legislative repeal would offer “real finality” on the policy’s end.

But this Utah family is not concerned about redefining marriage as between two men or two women, but as between one man and two, three, four, or more women.

“I just fell in love, and then I fell in love again, and then I fell in love again,” says Kody Brown, a fundamentalist Mormon, in a sneak peek at the upcoming show. Brown considers himself to have three wives: Meri, Janelle, and Christine, and is planning to marry a fourth, Robyn, whose trials learning how to become a member of the “sister wives” appears to form the series’ focal point.

“I knew it would be complicated, but I didn’t know it would break my heart,” said Robyn in the official season preview. But, she says in a later clip, “The wives, they work together as a team, and I want to be a part of that team.” The first three women have borne Brown 12 children; Robyn will bring three more from a previous marriage.

While “Sister Wives” is the first reality TV show examining the life of a polygamous household, it was preceded in 2006 by HBO’s ongoing fictional drama “Big Love,” which follows a Utah polygamist household of one man and three women.

The stars of the new series hope the show will be an opportunity to “come out of the closet” and promote their way of life: Kody Brown told the New York Daily News that “Part of our reason for ‘coming out’ is it’s a story that needs to be told.”

“By telling the story and not getting acceptance, necessarily, but lowering the prejudice, it helps all of society understand it,” he said.

Brown also framed his trouble with the law as a violation of his “civil rights” in an interview with the Salt Lake Tribune last year. “In the past, polygamists have had to be secret due to the threat of indictment or expulsion from work. Our civil rights got thrown out a long time ago,” he said.

In an August interview with the Tribune, Bill Hayes, president of Figure 8 Films and co-executive producer of the show, called the husband and four women “very much a modern family.” “They are open-minded. They are generally adorable,” said Hayes. “They have an unusual lifestyle, but for them, it was their lifestyle.”

Proponents of polygamy, although essentially outlaws in almost all of North America, have recently made headway in gaining acceptance of the practice as a legitimate form of marriage. In a 2007 episode, talk show host Oprah Winfrey invited members of polygamous households to advocate their way of life on her program.

“This is a big step for people to look in and say, ‘You know what? Yes, [plural marriage] may not be my personal choice, but it is a choice,’” said a Maryland businessman identified only as Richard, who says he has three wives, on the show.

Valerie, a woman in another polygamous relationship, told Winfrey that “It can be hard when a wife goes out the door with your husband.” “We have had jealousies and there have been those times and we can’t sugarcoat it and say that, ‘Oh, it’s so perfect and we love it and we love everyone.’ You know, we all have our hard times just like any other people,” she said.

However, Valerie contended that polygamy ought to be decriminalized. “I feel like I should have the right to live this way when this is a world of such alternative lifestyles.”
See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:

NYT: Rampant Polygamy in Gay ‘Marriage’ May Benefit Institution
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/feb/10020505.html

Chen Guangcheng, 39, was arrested in 2006 after he advocated in favor of Chinese women who had fallen victim to forced abortions at the hands of the Chinese government.

Although her husband’s term is up this week, Yuan Weijing told AFP Wednesday that she has not been notified of Guangcheng’s impending release. However, she said, “I plan to go to the prison tomorrow morning and wait at the gate and meet him.”

“Four years have passed, at last Chen Guangcheng can finally come home. Of course I am very happy,” she said.

As a self-taught lawyer, Guangcheng had taken it upon himself to launch a class-action suit against government officials in his hometown of Linyi. He claimed that a policy to crack down on childbirth in the town had lead officials to sterilize parents who already had two children, and force mothers’ to undergo abortions should a third child be conceived. If family members helped a pregnant woman resist, they were tortured until the mother was handed over and the unborn child killed.

Guangcheng had helped publish the story of Feng Zhongzia, a woman from the rural outskirts of Linyi who described the story of her forced abortion to the Washington Post in 2005.

When it was discovered that Feng was seven months pregnant, she said, government authorities responded by kidnapping 12 members of her family, starving and beating them, and telling Feng that “they would peel the skin off my relatives and I would only see their corpses” if she did not hand herself in.  She said she complied and, following the abortion, was forcibly sterilized.

Guangcheng was placed under house arrest in August of 2005, and suffered kidnapping and beatings before being thrown in jail in 2006 on charges of “willfully damaging property” and “organizing a mob to disturb traffic.” Guangcheng’s 2006 trial was severely hampered by the disappearance of three key witnesses, and the beating of lawyers sympathetic to Guangcheng.

Although the government’s previous treatment of Guangcheng could bode ill, one sign that officials do in fact plan to release the blind lawyer lies in the surveillance equipment police are setting up outside his home, as reported by his wife.

“From all the surveillance equipment they are installing, it looks like that after he comes home he may not be completely free,” said Yuan.

Guangcheng was among three Chinese activists nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year by U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) for their work defending the human rights of Chinese citizens.

To contact the Embassy of China in the U.S.:
3505 International Place, NW
Washington, DC 20008
Email: chinaembpress_us@mfa.gov.cn
Tel: (202) 495-2266
Cell: (202) 669-8024
Fax: (202) 495-2138

Linda Meek, 63, whose is no longer employed by Reproductive Services of Tulsa, will face a federal lawsuit for intentionally giving “false and misleading information” resulting in a bomb scare at the facility on August 13. Reports did not specify the circumstances behind the end of Meek’s employment at the abortion mill.

The police report said that an unnamed employee had reported seeing a box she did not recognize as facility waste in a trashcan. After the building was evacuated, Tulsa Police Department bomb technician examined the package, and discovered no explosive device.

Tulsa Police Officer Leland Ashley told the Tulsa World that reports that the employee claimed to hear a ticking sound coming from the package were unconfirmed.

The facility had been the site of an actual bombing and other attacks in 1997.

Neither Assistant U.S. Attorney Dennis Fries nor Meek’s attorney, Allen Smallwood, would tell the World what Meek’s suspected motivation was in initiating the false bomb scare.

Meek is being charged by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and according to officials could face as many as five years in prison if found guilty.  She is scheduled to appear in court on Thursday.

Pro-life Republican state Representative and family practice physician Mike Ritze told the Associated Press (AP) that the bomb scare was part of a growing trend among abortion activists to paint opponents as dangerous.

“Either she did it maliciously to harm the opposition or is trying to draw attention away from the abortion industry,” said Ritze.

Tony Lauinger, chairman of Oklahomans for Life and vice president of the National Right to Life Committee, also told the AP that “there was an apparent rush to judgment” that pro-lifers were to blame for the incident. “We are opposed to violence. We’re opposed to the violence that occurs on a daily basis inside abortion facilities. We are likewise opposed to any violence being directed toward those facilities,” he said.

Planned Parenthood of Oklahoma City declined to discuss the incident but told the news service that, in the AP’s words, it wasn’t the “policy” of pro-abort activists to portray pro-lifers as dangerous.

The ruling, which the judge vowed to follow up with a permanent injunction against the policy in two weeks, arrived less than three months before the results of a Pentagon study evaluating the possible detrimental effects of repealing the policy is due to be presented to Congress.

In an 86-page opinion, Judge Virginia A. Phillips claimed that the defendants, listed as the United States and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, have failed to prove that DADT “was necessary to significantly further the Government’s important interests in military readiness and unit cohesion.” The Log Cabin Republicans, a national homosexualist Republican group, was plaintiff in the case.

Pro-family leaders immediately condemned the ruling.

“It is hard to believe that a District Court level judge in California knows more about what impacts military readiness than the service chiefs who are all on the record saying the law on homosexuality in the military should not be changed,” said Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, a Marine veteran, in a statement late Thursday. “This is a decision for Congress that should be based upon the input of the men and women who serve and those who lead them.”

Phillips argued that the ban violates homosexuals’ First Amendment right to free speech because it disallows them from discussing their sexuality.

“Heterosexual members are free to state their sexual orientation, ‘or words to that effect,’ while gay and lesbian members of the military are not. Thus, on its face, the Act discriminates based on the content of the speech being regulated,” she wrote.

While noting that courts traditionally “apply a more deferential level of review of military restrictions on speech,” Phillips said that DADT fails to win the special protection because it “encompasses a vast range of speech, far greater than necessary to protect the Government’s substantial interests,” as it restricts off-duty socializing and other casual speech.

Phillips also argued that DADT’s restrictions “actually serve to impede military readiness and unit cohesion” by discouraging military employees from reporting anti-homosexual harassment.

The suit was first launched in 2004, but stalled due to the health problems and retirement of the first judge assigned to handle the case, the plaintiff’s attorney, Dan Woods, told the Associated Press.

Defense Department attorneys did not summon any witnesses to defend the policy, presenting only DADT’s legislative history as a defense, and arguing that the debate was a political issue that should be left to Congress.

The House of Representatives passed a repeal of the ban in May that would go into effect if Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, confirm that the repeal is sensible in light of the Pentagon report.

Demonic screaming and moaning, groping, and other forms of psycho-terrorism against pro-lifers from abortionist Christian Fiala’s paid employees have been documented on video since at least 2007, and published by the Catholic Web site Gloria.tv. Footage shows the attackers sexually assaulting pro-lifers, including undoing a man’s zipper, pushing a wooden object into a woman’s crotch, and other disturbing behavior.

Fiala has admitted, in an interview with the Austrian weekly newspaper Falter, to hiring the thugs himself to harass the “religious activists.”

“They look deep into the eyes of the religious activists, dance around them, read the advance directives of the patients to them, and gabber recitatives at them,” said the abortionist, in an article entitled “A man they call baby-murderer.” Fiala also called for the government to forbid the pro-lifers to stand near the abortion facility.

The most recent videos show two men, who were video-taped in a huddle with the abortionist, poking a pro-lifer with the points of an umbrella, pushing him towards the street, cutting up his rosary, tearing away pro-life fliers, and even stealing his wallet. The videos clearly show one of the attackers kicking the pro-lifer, who cries out in pain, in the leg. In June 2009 the pro-lifer’s finger was bloodied after he was attacked with a pair of scissors.

At one point one of the attackers can be seen scrutinizing a row of cars parked along the street, evidently searching for hidden cameras.

A case filed in response to the bodily injury and theft inflicted by Fiala’s thugs has reportedly been pending for a year at the prosecutor’s office of Vienna. After the pro-lifer’s attorney took the case to the Superior Court of Vienna, the prosecutor’s office moved to stay the lawsuit, according to Gloria.tv.

Dietmar Fischer, executive director of Human Life International (HLI) Austria, confirmed that the state prosecutor was seeking to dismiss the pro-lifer’s case against the thugs.

Fischer told LifeSiteNews.com that Fiala has influenced laws in favor of abortion on an international scale, and has already won special protection from the Viennese government, which punishes pro-lifers with a €700 fine or six months in prison if they hand out fetal models to abortion-bound women.

“He is one of the worst abortion propagandists,” said Fischer, who noted he had recently spoken in the Polish parliament to lobby for abortion there.

Fischer suggested that concerned pro-lifers contact Claudia Bandion-Ortner, Vienna’s Minister of Jusitice; Vienna mayor Michael Haupl, and Heinz-Christian Strache, an Austrian MP and leader of the Freedom Party who has moved to create more restrictive abortion laws in the state.

Contact:

Mrs. Claudia Bandion-Ortner, Vienna Minister of Justice
minister.justiz@bmj.gv.at

Dr. Michael Haupl, Mayor of Vienna
michael.haeupl@spoe.at

Heinz-Christian Strache, Austrian MP
Leader, Freedom Party of Austria
hcstrache@fpoe.at

Embassy of Austria
3524 International Court
Washington, D.C. 20008
(202) 895-6700
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