Tag Archives: pro-life

One of America’s Great Student Newspapers

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The Pitt News bills itself as “one of Amercia’s great student newspapers”. If only it were. Then again, maybe it is. *shudder*

In the 11 years I’ve been in Pittsburgh, I’ve watched the quality of writing and journalistic integrity of the Pitt News wax and wane with the arrival and graduation of classes. When it’s good, it’s no worse than any other small paper. When it’s bad, it’s awful. Sadly, it’s been bad more often than it’s been good. There have been years when the only feature I looked forward to reading was the comics page. Some years even that sucked. I’ve read articles that would make the journalism department go apoplectic – if Pitt had a journalism dept.

In the last couple years, though, I think the paper inproved a great. Perhaps there was an editor that was more interested in relatively unbiased news than sensationalism and sex columns. Those halcyon days may be over, though. Observe exhibits A and B:

Prices up for birth control

Joseph Mance remembers a time when packets of birth control pills cost $8 each. Today he is trying to spread the word to his student clientele that prices have hiked up once again, this time to the $40 range. “I hate telling these kids, ‘We’re raising your pill price,'” he said with a troubled look. “It’s like pulling a gun on them.”

Telling kids their birth control pills will cost more is “like pulling a gun on them”? First of all, if they’re kids, they’re too immature to be having sex. Secondly, what ever happened to advising people to keep their hormones in check? If expensive birth control is either going to majorly disrupt students’ lives or result in a lot of unintended pregancies, Pitt has much biggers problems than government economic policies. Granted, the Pitt News can’t be faulted for Mance making an ass of himself by allowing himself to be quoted uttering that nonsense, but the article is entirely one-sided. The entire front-page piece is written from the point of view that the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, which is responsible for the price hike, is a bad law, at least as it pertains to offering cheap birth control for the masses. Reporting on the price hike is just fine and a public service announcement, but the second half of the article pertains to the politics of birth control discounts, which should have been presented in a more balanced fashion.

Gay sheep should look to Jesus, not science for cure

…[S]cientists have attempted to change the sexual orientation of sheep to help farmers, who have accused gay sheep of causing them financial loss. The scientists gave the sheep injections, adjusting the hormone levels in their brains and, amazingly, some previously gay rams became attracted to female sheep. Naturally, the gay and lesbian community was not happy. Their fear is that this success could be a gateway to experiments involving human sexuality and may one day be used to “breed out” homosexuals entirely. Personally, I think this experiment is debauchery. The scientists responsible should be tarred and feathered – or maybe tarred and wooled. Altering sexuality is a very slippery slope. But it seems as though these scientists have forgotten an important fact: If those sheep would just accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior, they could easily overcome their homosexuality.

At least this tripe was printed as opinion rather than news. Still, any newspaper that would print this should be embarassed and ashamed. It’s a sophomoric attempt at satire of Christian bioethics that reads like a secular Jack Chick‘s poor imitation of a “A Modest Proposal“. The kind of Christian presented in this article is straw man. Sure, there are Christians like the charicature the author presents; after all, stereotypes don’t appear out of thin air. Still, the author needs to realize that we’re not all fans of the 700 Club, any more than all gays are fans of Will and Grace.

You don’t have to be Fred Phelps to think active homosexuality is wrong. You also don’t have to hate or fear science if you’re a Christian. Heck, you can even believe that homosexuality has a biological component and still think it’s wrong to perform homosexual acts.

Christianity aside, arguing that a disorder of lower animals is natural and therefore acceptable in humans is ridiculous. Lots of lower animals practice cannibalism and incest. Will it soon be PC to defend those behaviors?

In summary, this article isn’t just bad satire, it’s ironically full of the kind of disgusting malice and prejudice that seems to have offended the author, and the ignorance and denial he specifically mentions.

Be sure to let the editor of the Pitt News know how you feel about these articles. Regarding the latter, you might want to let ACLJ and the Catholic League know, too.

Chastity Lifestyle Education

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Did you hear the new statistic about premarital sex? 90% of people surveyed have had premarital sex.

The results of the analysis indicate that premarital sex is highly normative behavior. Almost all individuals of both sexes have intercourse before marrying, and the proportion has been roughly similar for the past 40 years.

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Utilitarianism 101 for Animal Liberation

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The famous utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer became an early darling of the animal rights movement for his book, Animal Liberation. Imagine, then the betrayal that some felt when Singer came out in favor of not just any animal research, but primate research.

This should not be too surprising if one has studied a bit of utilitarianism, which measures actions by their ends, not their means–it is a consequentialist philosophy, after all. Therefore, while animals do sometimes trump human babies in Singer’s calculus most of the time (which is one reason why many folks detest him), it need not be always the case. In fact, as I recall, Singer did concede in Practical Ethics that in some cases humans could justifiably eat animals if there were not other viable food source (e.g., the Gobi desert or the Arctic circle, I would suppose, where edible plants are in short supply). I guess the animal lib types were too busy hyperventilating about Singer’s otherwise strong support to notice that little fly in the ointment.

Take home message: it’s really hard to pin anyone down if he’s a utilitarian, because if society wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and decides that a particular minority has too much property or is otherwise cramping the style of the majority…well, I mentioned something about the ends justifying the means, yes?

Atrocities have been and will be committed by people of all philosophical and ideological stripes, but perhaps we can at least steer clear of philosophies (like Singer’s) that threaten to hopeless muddle any and all moral lines and let us lie to ourselves about what’s really going on? In this regard, I stand with the animal lib types, though I’m not against animal research per se.

Be Fruitful and Multiply

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Fans of Stuff’s latest about having lots of kids might find these articles interesting.

Bucking the norm, some families think big

It’s barely a blip on the nation’s demographic radar — 11 percent of U.S. births in 2004 were to women who already had three children, up from 10 percent in 1995. But there seems to be a growing openness to having more than two children, in some case more than four.

Family size in America: Are large families back?

We decided to cut through the buzz and find out whether big families really are on the upswing, and — more important, if you’re one of the 50 percent of BabyCenter moms who want a big family — what life is like for multiple-kid moms. Here’s what the experts, both the academic and the real-mom kind, had to say:

How Full Is Your Quiver?

Quiverfull beliefs are absolutist. Purists don’t permit even natural family-planning methods, such as tracking fertility cycles (the only form of birth control condoned by the Roman Catholic Church). Also taboo: any form of artificial fertility treatment. “The point is to have a welcoming heart,” says Mary Pride, a mother of nine whose 1985 book, “The Way Home,” celebrated a return to traditional gender roles. It has sold about 80,000 copies and has inspired many quiverfull families. “You shouldn’t be unnatural in going to a fertility clinic or in trying to avoid having children by regulating when to have sex with your husband,” says Pride.

‘Arrows for the War’

Quiverfull parents try to have upwards of six children. They home-school their families, attend fundamentalist churches and follow biblical guidelines of male headship–“Father knows best”–and female submissiveness. They refuse any attempt to regulate pregnancy. Quiverfull began with the publication of Rick and Jan Hess’s 1989 book, A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ, which argues that God, as the “Great Physician” and sole “Birth Controller,” opens and closes the womb on a case-by-case basis. Women’s attempts to control their own bodies–the Lord’s temple–are a seizure of divine power.

A Joy Complete

Will I never learn? The other day, I attended a Saturday vigil Mass with five of my children and without my husband. Two of the children I brought along have a combined age under 5. I didn’t anticipate any problems. Was that a sign of cockiness or stupidity?

The Vocation of Marriage and Parenthood

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When Funky encouraged me to write a post about my desire for a large family and my friendships with people who already have large families, I could hardly believe my good fortune: this is my opportunity to fulfill my subversive plot to…..(cue B movie horror music)……change Ales Rarus into a MOMMY BLOG!!! (maniacal laughter echoing). It’s only my second post, but this time, it’s personal.

I am not one of those baby-crazy women whose biological clock ticks so loudly that her husband smacks her in the morning when the alarm goes off. In fact, I never really pictured myself as a mother at all when I was growing up – I shelved dolls in place of snuggly, cuddly stuffed animals and dreamed of being a veterinarian. In high school, my career choice shifted, but not my interest in children – I rarely babysat and wasn’t sure I’d ever really marry. After a relationship with a really bad-for-me boyfriend, I felt sure I’d either be a single missionary or a cloistered nun. Sometimes I thought I’d be a concert pianist. The only thing I was sure about was that I wanted to serve God. Of course, if, by some act of God, I ever did get married, I knew I would want to bear my husband’s children.

Enter Squat. The man who turned my world upside-down, taught me what love was and that yes, men were really capable of it, and eventually took me as his bride. We did NOT conceive on our honeymoon, contrary to popular belief. It was the week after we got home.

Now, I had always been pro-life, and supported the Church’s teachings against contraception and whatnot. But at this point, I was scared $#!%-less. I understand how women can be talked into abortions. I was in my 5th year of pharmacy school, freshly married, and dirt poor. And as the youngest of five children in a family that puts the FUN in dysfunctional, I wondered what God could possibly be thinking giving someone like me something so fragile and impressionable as a baby. To top it all off, I was turning my stomach inside out and scraping the contents on the pavement on a regular basis. More than once someone who “knew me when” has told me that if SHE had been as sick, she would have stopped after one.

So how does someone like me end up actually desiring a bunch of babies? How did I go from feeling sure I would turn into my mother and leave my children requiring lifetimes of therapy to trusting that my little ones will probably be OK? How did I go from wishing I were dead to accepting “morning” sickness willingly?

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