Monthly Archives: December 2004

At Cross-Purposes

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For one segment of society, the
live birth of a baby at 26 weeks is cause for celebration. For another, abortion
after 26 weeks is exercising the “right to choose”. When and how will
our society resolve this conflict?

World’s smallest baby ready to go home

CHICAGO (AP) — A baby who weighed less than a can of soda when she was born by Caesarean section three months ago is nearly ready to be released from the hospital. She is believed to be the smallest baby in the world ever to survive.

How to stop the attack on abortion rights

THE BUSH administration thinks it has political “capital.” And it plans on spending some to destroy women’s right to choose abortion.

Tucked away in the omnibus spending bill approved by Congress last month was a provision that would allow physicians, hospitals, HMOs and insurance plans to opt out of giving abortion referrals, as they currently are required to. This provision will especially affect poor women, who rely on federally funded health care.

Senatus Populusque Americae?

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Readers of this blog may know the following things about me:

  1. I’m not a fan of George W. Bush
  2. I’ve compared the U.S.A. to the Roman Empire
  3. I believe in a strict interpretation of the just war doctrine that proscribes
    war in most cases.
  4. I didn’t agree with the invasion of Iraq. In fact, I participated in a large anti-war rally in Pittsburgh.
  5. I dislike the fact that the Church co-opted pagan winter celebrations with Christmas in a bid to gain more converts.
  6. I loathe the commercialization of Christmas by Christians. Let the pagans, heathens, and faithful of other religions spend their money how they please. We should be following the examples of Christ and His apostles.

Knowing these things, a reader might be led to believe that I’d agree with the conclusions
presented in “The
politics of the Christmas story” by James Carroll of the Boston Globe.
That reader would be wrong.

Continue reading →

Death: The Final Frontier

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Night Fright

Covered by a blanket
And the darkness of the night
I weep from the terror
And the Reaper in my sight
As I attempt to slumber
The thoughts begin to creep
Into my world of logic
Bringing horrors, dark and deep

My body starts tremble
As my heart begins to pound
Soon I lose sensation
And I cannot hear a sound

Comfortably numb is just a dream
Painfully dumb, I hold my screams
It won’t end!
It can’t end!
How can it end?!?

My tortured soul shouts
As fears tear apart my brain
And an evil chill torments me
As I pray to end the pain

“God, are you up there?”
I whisper to the ceiling
Exhaustion takes effect
And I get a warmer feeling

But the misery isn’t over
Though the terror’s gone away
Cause I’ll have to feel the sorrow
And face my fears another day

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The Natural Function of Marriage

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Natural functions and marriage

Over at MarriageDebate.com Maggie Gallagher has been dealing with one of the standard arguments for "gay marriage", that there can't be an essential connection between marriage and procreation because after all 70-year-old women are allowed to marry even though they can't have babies. Miss Gallagher handles the question very well, but there's a lurking point worth bringing out.

This was a hot topic in a previous debate in my comments. Jim Kalb at Turnabout answers this common argument.

Values

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A post-election poll conducted by Zogby International confirmed that American voters have a far broader definition of “moral values” than the far-right would like us to believe. When asked which “moral issue most influenced your vote”, 42% of respondents chose the war in Iraq, while only 13% said abortion and 9% said same-sex marriage.

This is the same Zogby that’s trying desparately to save face after totally blowing the election prediction. Signers of this petition may have been duped.

Right now, neither party gets the values question right. The Democrats seem uncomfortable with the language of faith and values, preferring in recent decades the secular approach of restricting such matters to the private sphere. But where would we be if Martin Luther King Jr. had kept his faith to himself? The separation of church and state does not require the segregation of moral language and values from public life. The Republicans are comfortable with the language of religion and values. But the GOP wants to narrow the focus to hot-button social issues it then uses as wedges in political campaigns, while ignoring or obstructing the application of such values where they would threaten its agenda.

I like the way Jim Wallis thinks. I don’t agree with all of his points in “Neither Democrats nor Republicans have a clue“, but it’s nice to hear another voice in the desert of the center.