One reason I started this blog ...

was that it had been an idea which had been bubbling away in my mind for some time. "Catholics" for Choice is a filthy organisation which badly needs to be exposed for what it really is. There's some good material out there, especially C-FAM's brilliantly detailed War on the Faith paper but they come from American sources and largely have an American readership. Many Europeans aren't aware of the fact that Anti Catholics for Choice has parked itself in Brussels and is busily organising away to curtail Catholics' democratic religious rights, impose abortion as the law of the world everywhere and see to it that Catholics in public life have as hard a time of it as it can make possible.

Remember the Buttiglione affair? That was all CFC's doing. It produced the sensationalist "dossier" studded with selective quotations and nasty commentary about the man who was going to be a European Commissioner and it rushed it out to credulous politicians. Now, there may have been legitimate reasons for various activists and so forth to have had concerns about Buttiglione's candidacy but that CFC sponsored witch hunt stank to high heaven.

Witch hunts are CFC's style and Catholics in the UK and Europe should be made aware of the phoney group which conducts them and the aggressive, dirty tactics it uses against its opponents.

Incidentally, do check out CFC's deeply boring, muddy-looking website. It has a section called "opposition watch" - nice eh? How many Catholic organisations have something like that on their websites? "Opposition watch", as you would expect, is full of nasty dossiers, like the Buttiglione one, stuffed with selective quotations, - even possibly false ones - and snide commentary about Anti Catholics for Choice's opponents. One of the dossiers is about the World Youth Alliance.

I'm not the biggest fan of the WYA which is of the slightly nutty, useless but harmless type of organisation but CFC's attack on it is nasty. Emilia Klepacka, who used to work for the WYA is quoted in the document, thusly: “We have many social problems in Europe, and now we need a
paradigm shift … Every abortion is a violation of the human dignity, both the woman’s and the unborn child’s. Therefore it is not to be the choice of the woman.” Footnote 20 cites Faktum, Sveriges Television/Swedish Broadcasting, 10 February 2005 and a boxed text, reads: "Swedish national television recently broadcasted a program on abstinence trends in the US and the antichoice lobby in Europe. Emilia Klepacka, director of WYA Europe, was forthright in opposing all abortion."

Just one problem with that - I've been told by a reliable source that that quotation attributed to Emilia Klepacka was a load of made-up crap. This is what I've been told happened: Klepacka was invited to meet an MEP in her office; when she got there, she found she'd walked into an ambush: a television crew was waiting for her. She made her excuses and left, to put it into tabloidese but not before someone had put words into her mouth. The words were then translated into Swedish, translated back into bad nonsensical English - had the quotation been genuine it would simply have been taken from the original English and would have made sense - Klepacka is as articulate as you'd expect her to be, being a Cambridge graduate.

Klepacka was young and naive, she didn't know what she could and should have done about it: complained to the television company, to the Swedish version of the National Union of Journalists and to the MEP's whip for such grossly unethical behaviour. But making legitimate complaints about quotations is just the sort of thing which CFC would brand complaining early and often.

That quotation in all its nonsensical glory is on Anti Catholics for Choice's grubby WYA document. Given the fact that I have good reason to believe that quotation is made-up crap and given CFC's propensity to being, er, economical with the truth, how can anyone believe a damn thing it says about anything?

You can't. That's the whole point.