Well, I did say I had another post an abortion coming up. I'm just fisking an editorial I read a couple weeks ago about a parental notification bill that was being debated. I don't mean to be too condemning of the editorial as an editorial; it's not like the person was writing a feature article for The Economist, but for an article that's supposed to be factual in a periodical that's not supposed to be yellow, it would be nice if the writer had not tried so hard to cover every point that none of them ended up getting adequately supported.

Well, it makes my job easier (and hopefully their faulty rhetoric more transparent to everyone), but for the sake of journalism, I mean, it would be good for would-be journalists to learn to value of scope.

I'm omitting identifying details, not so much to protect the actors in this drama as to emphasize the universality of the debate.

The writer starts by saying "Last week, under pressure from active conservative organizations, the [state] Supreme Court announced it would strip young women of their reproductive rights. Well, they didn't quite say that...." Of course they didn't, because it's not true. The matter is whether a law requiring parents to be notified before their children can get abortions.

It's not about women, and it's not about rights; girls don't have the right to engage in statutory rape any more than they have a right to drive or a right to vote.

You might have noticed I'm begging a question. I trust you'll indulge me long enough to answer the question, too, especially since the writer begged it first.

Some legal experts have criticized the law because of how poorly it has been enforced, how difficult it has been for pregnant girls to find a court that will let them file a request to circumvent notification, let alone a judge who would grant it. I'll agree that the law is the law; if we accept parental notification as a compromise between unrestricted abortion and a total ban, at least for the time being, then we're obligated to work within the law. However, short of dereliction of duty, a judge should be permitted the same freedom of conscience as, say, a pharmacist.

Certainly, the improper enforcement of a law may be a valid reason to rescind it, like the Separate but Equal doctrine (which was wrong anyway, but SbE was overturned on the grounds that Separate was never Equal in practice, and I couldn't think of a better example). Is the damage done by giving a pass to men with a taste for the childlike really less, though, than the political "violence" done by not letting schoolgirls sleep with college students or graduates?

It is also said that parental notification laws tend to help least the girls who need the law the most. Why, then, doesn't Planned Parenthood step up to the plate and shave off a few of the quarter billion dollars they get from the government, in addition to donations and service fees, for some pro bono guidance through the legal system? I'm sure plenty of affluent pro-choicers would be more than willing to help defray the legal costs for this for-profit charity. If a female is mature enough to deal with sex intelligently, shouldn't she also be mature enough to approach the legal system with some intelligence?

Ah, but who is really benefiting from the parental notification laws? It's touted as being motivated by concern for women's well being, but isn't it more about preventing abortions? Okay, yes, it is; we believe that abortions are terrible, and that by any standard (permissive or otherwise--safe, legal, and rare, remember), abortion is chosen far more often than it ought to be. What I'd like to know is what masked agenda is behind requiring or allowing parental notification for, well, every other non-emergency medical situation, even as trivial as school nurses handing out OTC painkillers, but not for something that can end up being major, elective surgery. Okay, kids can get prescriptions in some states, and condoms (not that they're a drug), and STD testing, but I won't let anyone use them as a counterargument until they can show STD testing and free condoms are not tautologous to the abortion access question.

Oh, I see: it's the girls "whose families would kick them out of the household for an attempt at controlling the fate of their own bodies." Wait, maybe I don't see. Underage sex, especially promiscuous sex, is about control? Are we talking about abortion as a means of control, or is choosing to give in to your new, erotic impulses supposed to be the act of self-control? I thought sex was about love, or at least pleasure; if it's about power, then all it seems to add up to is plain old rape.

In many states, such as where the writer resides, the age of consent is 17, not 18. Is it this age that is everyone's concern? Am I to believe that they would really be happy if consent were raised to 18, so only high school seniors would get some leeway if their greatest mistake was having an overly seductive boyfriend? Probably not; the real concern is not girls who have an accident on prom night, but girls who usually get described in these debates by the pro-choicers as "14 year old women."

I'm sorry, but a 14 year old female is a girl, not a woman; I don't care if she's physically capable of motherhood. Some societies marry off their girls at that age, and it's a pretty stable arrangement, but I don't believe it's an optimal arrangement, and adults are not merely children who have sex, any more than children are just really short adults. Simply throwing sexual activity into the mix isn't treating schoolgirls like women; treating schoolgirls like schoolgirls but accelerating them to the threshold of adult relationships does not make them more mature; and without maturity, liberation, especially in intimate matters, is really misplaced. Shall we also throw off the shackles of kitchen safety and let a toddler feel his own way through the forest of hot stoves and pots of boiling water?

The writer finishes with "...the fact is that most Americans have a much more complex view of abortion than simply allowing or disallowing it." Too true. Most Americans actually believe that abortion should be restricted or prohibited under most circumstances, not generally available with a few particular restrictions (and if going behind parents' backs shouldn't be one, I can't imagine any others that would be much more plausible).

Gay Groups Fight "Don't Ask Don't Tell"

From the International Herald Tribune:

Three young men who tried to enlist at a U.S. Army recruiting station here appeared to be first-rate military material. Two were college students, and the other was a college graduate. They had no criminal records. They were physically fit and eager to serve at a time when wars on two fronts have put a strain on U.S. troops and the need for qualified recruits is great.

But the recruiter was forced to turn them away, for one reason: They are gay and unwilling to conceal it.

I don't know enough about military politics and policies at the moment to be comfortable saying "Don't Ask Don't Tell" is good or bad. I understand that many soldiers would have trust issues with unit members with SSA, and I do recognize that trust is very important in combat, but I also wonder why more people don't advise them just to get over it. It generally seemed to work for racial integration of the armed services.

Yes, I know race and orientation are completely different issues, but I'm not confident I'm seeing the compelling arguments for personal tastes really mattering in the trenches. If the policy is not to talk about it at all, then I'm thinking none of the arguments is really durable.

Whatever; I'm not interested in sussing out that point at all. I just want to ask Justin Hager, one of the three attempted enlistees, a question about his reaction to the recruiter's rejection:

Don't judge me because of my sexuality. Judge me because of my character and drive.

Why, then, did you tell the recruiter about your sexuality? It's a nonissue as long as they give you want you want? Pretty clear case of the "If it weren't for you" fallacy, if you ask me.

The recruiter obviously wasn't going to ask. Soldiers who are married to each other aren't given any concessions on duty. Even straight sex talk in the mess hall is a no-no. Aside from the matter of SSA itself, they still made themselves unappealing candidates by violating "Don't ask don't tell." The policy means that orientation isn't going to come up, so approval or disapproval shouldn't even be on the scopes.

Did these guys have some weird idea of what would or should have been accommodated to them, or did they just get assigned enlistment from the gay agenda?

If you're ever asked to support the pro-choice movement...

...just tell them "Sorry, life comes before lifestyle."

Battling Ms. Magazine

Via Mark Shea

Amy Pawlak wrote to Mark:

You probably came across the story regarding Ms. magazine publishing a petition of 5,000 names - women who've had abortions and aren't ashamed of it.

This petition will be sent to Congress, the House, and the White House.

I feel it's important that a counter petition - hopefully with 5,000 and more names - also be sent. Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, wrote in a commentary that when she saw a Ms. announcement of the project, "the evil practically jumped right off the page."

If you could link to the petition I'm generating, I'd appreciate it. I know it will probably be a drop in the bucket, but I'm so bothered by this "feature" that I have to do something.

Thanks and God Bless!

What rot.

A weekend activities insert in today's paper contains an adult advice column. Someone had written in asking the "experts" to talk about how AIDS is important to everyone, not just the ones who wind up as statistics.

They started out by summarizing how someone can get AIDS, and pointed out that despite the ubiquity of this knowledge, there are still 40,000 new cases each year, half of which are with people under 25. It's certainly nothing to be happy about.

Well, they feigned mystification at how prevalent the disease still is, even though everybody knows better. They were just trying to be rhetorical, but I think they actually don't understand.

"Why do so many people get AIDS with all this information out there?" the experts asked. "Can't they change their lifestyle? Maybe they could, if they had the means to do so."

What? Young people get AIDS because they don't have the resources to stop sleeping around without enough condoms? Sort of:

"Racism, sexism, and other bigotry serve to repress minorities and other disenfranchised groups. We need to overcome bigotry so no one is hit disproportionately hard by AIDS."

Oh. Not only are rich white Christians keeping condoms out of the hands of college and high school kids, they're also trying to keep them from learning about how they work 80-90% of the time, and from developing some other sort of discipline or self control that doesn't include simply refraining from sex.

I'd say this argument was flimsy, but I wouldn't want to spoil a post I have coming up on abortion.

Since it's Life Sunday and October is Life Month...

Consider the assertion that pregnant women are often in circumstances where they have no choice but to have an abortion.

Don't they? Do other choices just seem more difficult to endure for a longer period of time? Almost two thirds of women who have had abortions said they felt forced into an abortion by circumstances and pressure from people around them.

Her body, her choice?

If you're truly pro-choice, you should be making sure that no woman is without multiple options. A single choice is no choice at all. Maybe you provide one choice yourself, by offering abortions; if Choice is the end you serve by this means, should it not be more important to acknowledge that options resulting in live birth are often workable, even preferable, than to worry about life-only advocates stealing your business?

If not, then aren't you only pro-abortion?

A waning shame of Americans' spirituality is not theocracy

"Your government suppresses the science that doesn't fit its religious, political and economic agenda, forcing present and future generations to pay a terrible price," the ad says.

Suppress? No. Decline to advocate and support? Yes. I will presume that the use of "suppression" is hyperbolic.

There is an understandable but misguided movement to take religion out of the public sphere, to ban religious factors from the political calculus. There is, after all, wisdom in the First Amendment, that secular authority and sectarian authority work best when they work independently.

However, people don't have to be high-ranking clerics or lay religious professionals to have a serious and natural investment in spiritual matters. For most folks, thinking of a transcendent reality is important.

Some folks don't feel such a need. So be it. Some of them think that the ones who do recognize that need are societal dead weight and their indulgence in this vice should be curtailed or at least hidden (which makes me wonder why there aren't more aggressive eugenics advocacy groups in this country, pushing not only to euthanize the chronically and terminally ill but also the severely handicapped). Some look around at a few zealous noisemakers, lump the few thoughtful people who follow a higher wisdom than man's in with the choleric wingnuts on Sunday morning television, and the suddenly hesitant typical religious Americans appear invisible or indifferent at best to religion; and so religion seems a fad finally abandoned by society, or at least successfully marginalized by the choleric moonbats who define themselves as the center of culture.

Well, it's bunk. You don't have to be a scholar of Constitutional law to see that prohibiting the government's entanglement with organized religion has nothing to do with people with a sense of religion participating in government. No, I don't think bishops and priests have a proper place in Congress, or in the president's Cabinet, but it's folly to say that the people at large must also look at religion--the sphere of morality, amongst other things--and politics--the sphere of governing the world--as completely, mutually insoluble things. 'Congress shall not respect or prohibit' doesn't impinge on citizens just because we're a democracy

You don't have to be religious to be moral, but most people go that route, and by and large it's worked as well as any alternative (by which I mean, if you say "Crusades and Inquisition," I reply "Pol Pot and Mao"). No one argues with the basic principles honoring life and property, security in one's person; yet somehow the ones who rely on millennia of teaching inspired by revelation--sorry, superstition--are so dangerous and irrational that only people who claim to derive their morals from pure science (or at least refer vaguely to someone who may have done so, or are willing to subordinate their faith to such self-styled philosophers), whether or not it's a robust or tenable moral system at all. (Hopefully soon I'll have something adequately composed that addresses false triumphalism and psychosis derived from a compelling faith in intentions and premises devoid of effort and reason; remind me to hurry up and you'll see that it makes more sense than it sounds like here.)

What's that? The sound of disenfranchisement? Wasn't I just saying we're in a democracy? We're only not allowed to prevent women and minorities from voting, huh?

(Never mind the bipartisan voting fraud blather. If you didn't like the electoral college, you should've pushed for an amendment before it would have gotten you a different president on the backs of disenfranchised voters from the sparsely populated majority of the country; otherwise you just come off as bitter and ignorant.)

Come on. Is it only science that these folks are upset about being affected by the national leadership's "religious, political and economic agenda?" They look down on Bush because his decision was, to them, primarily religious. If we take religion out of the equation, am I supposed to believe that the president or any of the policymakers under him who tend to perform their duties also shouldn't rely on their political or economic sense, even when politics and economics, not having been barred by the Constitution, are the name of the game?

What else is there? Get elected and then only make policy decisions based on polls in New York City and Hollywood? Are the Flyover States really that Stalinesque, that their will should be thwarted at every turn--wait, if they were Stalinesque, you would be the one unable to choose a leader or express regret over someone else's choice, wouldn't you? Is it the fascists who are holding you down, or the regular folks just living their lives who are so unenlightened they don't even know what you're speaking out against?

Don't say "both" just because some people and the president agree. Consensus is not conspiracy. If you don't like an idea, tell us why you think it's bad. If you don't think someone with a bad idea should get to tell us why he thinks it's good, then the most pressing problem probably isn't his bad idea.

If it's just supposed to be "Jesus and me"...

...and not the Church, a community of believers, then why does the Lord's Prayer start "Our Father," rather than "My Father?"

Nontheistic sources of morality?

James Fitzpatrick at Catholic Exchange has a few words to say about the conservative Christian habit of praising God's mercy every time something good happens and every time something bad happens that could have been worse, but not blaming God for when things are worse than they could have been. The point was more about how the religiously inclined tend to rely on an external, ineffable, personal source for the morality of the world, while atheists don't. I'm not really being representative here but I needed to provide a little context for my own point.

It's often said that without a transcendent and absolute moral reference, then the only alternative is relativism. Broadly speaking, I agree, but on a case by case basis it's possible to resist the grayness that comes from trying to reconcile disparate moral codes (some of the time, perhaps by declining to reconcile at all) on the grounds that if we all have the same moral authority and all our codes aren't wrong then there must be some unifying principle behind all the codes being in some way right. It's not news that someone can recognize, without being told, that it's good to be excellent to each other and it's better to couple excellence with fairness, in all those specific ways like sharing, not stealing or killing, and everything else. From the article:

It is just that they "look elsewhere for a sense of order, valuing the rule of law for its transparency to all rational minds and debating Supreme Court decisions without reverting to mystical precepts of 'natural law.'" [Heather MacDonald] argues that "[s]keptical conservatives do not look into the abyss when they make their moral choices. Their moral sense is as secure as a believer's. They do not need God or the Christian Bible to discover the golden rule and see themselves in others."

I dunno about this "look into the abyss" line. Maybe it's a Nietzsche reference, although any theist will tell you there's a difference between contemplating the divine and contemplating the nil, whether or not an atheist will look for himself to check. I don't expect most atheists to bother with Catholic-steeped philosophy, either, but I do hope that MacDonald isn't on the "Call us Brights! It's more accurate less dour!" bandwagon. Independently discovering the golden rule and seeing yourself in others is a classic example of natural law. Isn't that much self-evident?

Cacophemism

n. The substitution, or event of substituting, an excessively negative word for one that is milder or inoffensive. Antonym: euphemism.


I don't remember why I wanted to define this word. I thought about it months ago but it wasn't until tonight that I remembered to look for a proper opposite of eu-. Oh well.

It's not merely an exaggeration; it's specifically a bad one. It's not just hyperbole, which is obviously nonliteral exaggeration for the purpose of emphasis or drama, but is a concrete overstatement of the real or imagined negative aspect of something for the purpose of shock or dismay.

Dark, I know, but it's late, and 911 isn't a cheery day.

I can almost guarantee it would have seemed suitable in the context in which I meant to present the word. Probably something about politics or postmodern word magic (which I'll get to in a couple weeks, I hope--remind me).

Condoms do not prevent cervical cancer

Why would they? HPV is a common cause of cervical cancer, and HPV lives in the skin, not just in the reproductive tissues, so it can be transmitted just by skin to skin contact. Wearing a condom to protect against HPV is like brushing half your teeth; it's slightly better than nothing, but prophylaxis failure is still likely and will result in an unmitigated infection.

Come on. Try abstinence. Why is it so repulsive an idea in light of the risks? Why are people so insistent that teaching abstinence is naive, doomed to failure? I know several people who have successfully practiced continence. I sometimes suspect the ones who say the continent are a statistically negligible group (i.e. a minority--aren't minorities supposed to be protected and respected?) are trying to assuage their own guilt after naively succumbing to temptation and being surprised with some serious heartbreak and disappointment. Does misery not love company?

I wonder what portion of the "Just get your bad first impression of the activity over with" crowd was also taught, directly or indirectly, that abstinence was not a possible or even worthwhile goal. I know I would have a much harder time being a good boy if I'd always been taught that it was impossible.

Visit Cura Animarum and his wonder puppy, Oliver!

You'll have to go back to August to see the newer photograph of Oliver, but while you're there, please read around. Cura has a regular thing called Thirty Second Thoughts where a wide variety of topics is tackled very pithily. Adding brief and discrete, and even light-hearted, posts to the mix is something I've been struggling to do since day one, and I doff my fedora to ye.

Primitive church, or Church of Rome?

I used to be a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I still like it, but I don't watch the DVDs like I watched the broadcast episodes, so take it as you will.

I do occasionally like to see what the stars and behind-the-scenes folks are up to. Seth Green has had a string of highly amusing TV projects, and Anthony Stewart Head was supposed to have a Buffy spin-off over at the BBC that I've managed to lose track of, for instance--and Joss Whedon's Firefly is not to be missed.

Thus, it was not long ago that I found Robia LaMorte's web site. I was interested to learn she's a born-again Christian. You can read her conversion story under the "God" link. It's a classic and charming tale of a vaguely spiritually minded person in the modern world who is almost surprised into a relationship with God. You can almost hear her laugh when she mentions the Hell's Angels, and I had to smile, myself, when she explained who they really were.

Her faith is evident. She's in a church that's clearly from a Protestant tradition, but I'd like to quote her advice on finding a church:

I recommend a nondenominational, Bible teaching, Spirit Filled Church that is not a specific denomination of Christianity, and believes in all the gifts of the Spirit. That means that everything that happened when Jesus was walking on the earth still happens today. You want a church that is alive and full of the presence of the Holy Spirit. Church is important because being around other people who believe what you believe will strengthen you. The reason that going to church is the first step you take when becoming a Christian is because the Bible says that spiritual growth comes from hearing God's word being taught.

It sounds like she's more charismatic than the average Christian, but aside from her emphasis on the Bible to the point of silence of the sacraments, it sounds a lot like she's describing the Church Catholic.

Should I be surprised, or just surprised that I'm surprised?

I was looking through my archives on the off chance that someone might have left a comment, and I stopped to reread a post I'd made on abortion. I quoted some pro-choice person and argued against her position, but I realized just now that I'd overlooked what might have been the most fundamental aspect of the pro-choicer's thesis. Allow me to repost the passage in question:

Please do not ask the question that way.

Very few abortions take place after viability, and those abortions are for health reasons. There is a difference between believing that abortions are "okay" and believing that a woman and her doctor, rather than state legislators, should make the decision.

Our concern should not be whether abortion is "okay" with us. It should be with who should make the decision.

This person is saying that people in general should not decide whether abortion is murder, and therefore wrong, but only the individuals involved in the would-be abortion should decide whether one should be had or not. Sounds pretty utilitarian to me, or at least presumptuous enough to make me wonder why attention is being drawn away from the moral question.

Some things are private. Some moral situations are not cut and dried. Each should be examined closely by the involved parties instead of being conclusively judged by a broad-stroked and abstract presentation. Many things, however, are so dire that society lays down rules in advance. Murder is one of them. In fact, murder isn't just a crime against the victim, or against the victim's loved ones; it's a crime against the state, against society itself. If the family wants retribution, they can sue for wrongful death after the criminal trial; if they don't, it's not their place to refrain from pressing criminal charges. I'm not saying the arrangement's flawless, but it shows that killing is always a bigger issue than the killer and the killed, which is also why premeditated killing has historically been permitted to the government, either for executing a criminal or for waging war.

If you think it shouldn't only be judges and generals who get to make life and death decisions, you don't want a doctor. A doctor is an expert in medicine and knows a good deal (I would hope) about medical ethics, but if you are trying to decide whether something is fundamentally right or wrong, the least you should have is an expert in philosophy, an expert in morality and medical ethics in particular. Doctors should be in the dialog because it's their profession, but expecting them to get the job done with only the guidance of the patient is like expecting a general practitioner to perform good neurosurgery like Dr. McCoy in the "Spock's Brain" episode of Star Trek.

Currently reading and recently read....

Current:
Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco

Recent:
AA-1025, The memoirs of an Anti-Apostle, by Marie Carre


I thought I first saw FP on my parents' bookshelf in the early 1980s, and the title struck me--and with an author named Umberto, it was just exotic enough to hold my interest--but I was too young to read it then, and as it turns out, it was first published in 1988, so I don't know what I thought I saw.

As for AA-1025, it's a collection of autobiographical notes from a communist agent who became a priest in order to subvert the Church. It's an interesting read--I particularly enjoyed #1025's dismay at Vatican II not being as postmodern/secularly materialist in its results as he'd hoped--but the reader reviews at Amazon are almost as interesting. They're divided between folks who ascribe all the "modernizations" that accompanied the Novus Ordo to the likes of #1025, and folks who find the plot too convenient, and the story elements too trite, to be anything but fiction. In the words of one of the few uncategorized reviewers, "True or not, what it claims has actually come true."

*** UPDATE ***
I forgot to ask: Does anyone have any idea why Belbo's home town is only written as ***, and never actually named? Maybe it does in the last hundred pages of the book, but by now I'm skeptical.

Logical fallacies

Maybe some of you can help me.

I've encountered--you probably have too--some debate tactics that are flawed but don't seem to have a formal name. I'm wondering if proper names do exist, and if not, I'd like to come up with some. I often find that challenging someone on an erroneous logical shortcut is more effective when you can show that someone has already dissected and labeled the error. It's not a logically consistent tactic, itself, but sometimes the appeal to authority is the only thing that works when someone's experienced other lapses in reason.

The first one I've been referring to as the "If it weren't for you" fallacy. Consider two parties disagreeing on some topic. With neither side able to persuade the other, one asserts that the other is at fault for starting or prolonging the argument, so it is guilty of simply being disruptive of or maliciously contrary to the other position (implied to be correct by the conceit of such an assertion), and thus does not deserve to be taken seriously: "We wouldn't even be having this argument if you just did what we wanted!"

The second hovers somewhere between begging the question and Pascal's Flaw. Begging the question--not raising the question--is where an argument makes an assumption in its proof that is not explicitly stated or itself justified.

Pascal's Flaw derives from Pascal's Wager, which states that given the risks and rewards of believing in God versus not believing in God, it would be most prudent to believe in God, whether or not He exists. The Flaw is the logical gaps in the proposition, such as the complete disregard for whether God exists after all, or the presumption that God would be the sort of entity that would reward worship and punish dissidence. It may not be begging the question so much as oversimplifying an argument; while not thoroughly rigorous, the God of Pascal's Wager is one he and his contemporaries would be most inclined to think of.

This second fallacy I've been calling "presumptuous caution." It masquerades as the honest caution one might use in tentatively settling an unresolved debate, such as "Building a new commercial district on the edge of town could revitalize the city, but we shouldn't commit ourselves unless we can determine that enough of our residents would be willing to drive that far to patronize the new businesses."

Presumptuous caution makes such an assertion prematurely, and uses a gap of knowledge or logic as positive evidence for one position rather than as a mitigating condition that can bring us to a decision when no formal resolution is imminent. The above example would take the form "Building a new commercial district on the edge of town could revitalize the city. We're not sure if enough residents would be willing to drive that far to patronize the new businesses. Therefore, the district should not be built at all."

No open communion?

Some people think the closed Catholic communion is a bad thing--it's elitist, uncharitable, whatever. Other churches (some of 'em, at least) practice open communion as a forward-looking, optimistic expression of common faith. I can appreciate that sentiment, and I'm not faulting other traditions for having different practices; their different eucharistic theologies can lead to understandably different standards and expectations.

Please, try to understand the Catholic perspective, though. The Eucharist is a sacrifice--the Sacrifice--and a meal, but it's more than a commemoration/reenactment and incidence of fraternity amongst those like-spirited people who have gathered for the occasion.

It's a nuptial event, an intimate union of God and human. We can no more have universal communion in anticipation of universal union than I could spend the night with my fiancee in anticipation of our wedding night. The effective difference between an early honeymoon and a proper one might be quite fine in many eyes, but please recognize that, to us, it's still no less important for its subtlety.

Excerpted from Mark Shea's combox

"Do you feel that [imagining] offends God? Why are you afraid of God? I imagine God as something good...."

The context was about John Lennon's song "Imagine," which isn't really germane to my point.

If God is good, then no, we shouldn't fear Him like we'd fear a criminal or a rabid animal. However, because God is good, we should fear him in proportion to how we offend him. I do not fear the devil for offending him by doing good, for good is right. If I do wrong, then I should not be too keen on myself or my actions.

We should love and trust God first, of course, but forgiveness is beyond saying "It's okay"--doing something wrong isn't okay--and repenting of sin calls for recognizing that sin is, in fact, rather dreadful.

A relationship, with God or human, shouldn't be based on fear of reprisal, of course, but sin does displease God, and if He's that great and you love Him that much, you should take care not to offend Him just as you'd take care not to hurt the feelings of your loved ones.

The ten verses Marcus Grodi never saw in the Bible

...until becoming Catholic.

I'm reproducing them here without commentary. They deserve to be showcased without any clutter.

1. Proverbs 3:5-6
   "Trust in the Lord with all you heart, And lean not unto your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge Him. And He will direct your paths."


2. 1 Timothy 3: 14-15 (The Church)
   "I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these instructions to you so that, if I am delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth."
   


3. 2 Timothy 3:14-17 (Scripture)
   "But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work."


4. 2 Thessalonians 2:15 (Sacred Tradition)
   "So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter."


5. Matthew 16:13-19 (Peter)
   "And Jesus answered him, 'Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.'"


6. Revelation 14:13 (Importance of works)
   "And I heard a voice from heaven saying, 'Write this: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord henceforth.' 'Blessed indeed,' says the Spirit, 'that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them!"


7. Romans 10:14-15 (Ordination)
   "But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher? And how can men preach unless they are sent?"


8. John 15: 4 and 6:56 (Eucharist)
   "Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me."
   

   
   "He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. "



9. Colossians 1:24 (Suffering)
   "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church,"


10. Luke 1:46-49 (Mary)
    "And Mary said, 'My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden. For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed; for he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name.'"

Priestess Faces Excommunication

Eileen DiFranco, a cradle Catholic who claims to have been ordained, hopes not to be excommunicated for committing "holy disobedience" by trying to say Mass, sponsored by the Church of the Beatitudes, after having been given the usual warnings.

I didn't think an Old Catholic group would go for something so unorthodox, but I guess once you unhinge yourself from the Magisterium, you'll swing with any breeze.

"I feel conscious [sic] bound that if I think that a law is unjust, I am obliged to break it," she said. No word was given about the possibility that egalitarianism might not be the best yardstick to hold against the justice of supernatural vocations.

"I am continually saddened that my brothers are seeing this as a source of dissension instead of a means for bringing people back to church," DiFranco added. Therein, I think, lies the problem. She's not validly ordained, so anyone who comes to her isn't coming to the Church as such. Having more people show up on Sunday morning as nice, but we shouldn't be settling for the empty ritual Paul warns us about. The least we should consider is where these people are showing up. I get that she thinks she's bringing people to the truth, but how hard must it be for her to see that copping an "I can be at odds with core teachings of the Church but still be united with the Church" attitude is just for starters going to be confusing? The Church is not some western democracy; if she'd done enough academic study in her discernment to learn that much...ah, but then she might also have learned how a female priesthood is invalid, and immutably so. Safer to rely on a feeling of being called to spiritual fatherhood, eh?

One man said, after DiFranco's liturgical charade, "It's time for a change." I realize that the 40 years since Vatican II we've spent changing things isn't a terribly long time, but if all these innovations were really that great, shouldn't we be seeing some fruits like increased devotion, mass attendance, and vocations amongst the dissenters? Instead we get circuses and unqualified individuals brushing aside the discernment process so they can grasp the brass ring of priesthood. Doesn't it seem suspicious?

Whatever.

At 3 pm on August 20 of this year, Al Oliver became the first man in the Saginaw Diocese to be ordained a deacon since 1981. The deaconate program had been closed until women would be admitted, but Saginaw's new pastor, Bishop Robert Carlson, had other plans.

Two years ago, Saginaw had two seminarians. Today, they have seventeen.

I'm just sayin'.

With apologies to Stephen Colbert

Newsy, adj. Something, such as a typical MSM item, that would be news if it contained truth, rather than truthiness.

I'm not coining a new term here. A web search will turn up loads of sites where people refer to something that has some quality of news as being "newsy." I just want to emphasize a somewhat less gracious but more precise meaning, increasingly appropriate in recent decades, that more strongly implies that newsiness resembles actual news only superficially, or that it claims to do so but lacks the essence of objectivity and accuracy to a meaningful degree.

I'm tired of ignoring the slow drift to yellow journalism, or having to spell it out each time I'm in a discussion over an article that's much more sloppily assembled than a critical reader should be willing to tolerate.

Agenda-driven "reporting"

Forgive me if I've posted on a related topic before, but it's worth rehashing.

Zombie's got some good coverage of the media fraud at Reuters that's come to the surface recently. While a lot of it is clearly inexcusable, I wonder yet if some of the occurrences are a manifestation of something other than overt malice or sensationalism.

My favorite example is the time when George Bush said that it'd be a lot easier to run the country if he were a dictator. In the earliest publications quoting him, they pointed out that he was joking. Of course: a dictatorship goes against everything we believe in, but if there were no debate, if our government had been designed for efficiency (it was not--checks and balances, remember?), then whoever led the government could certainly get a lot done with all the time he instead has to spend pontificating.

Well, after a while the media would rerun his quote, but they wouldn't point out that he was joking, that everyone he was talking to laughed because they got the joke. Maybe the caption writers thought everyone would remember the context and felt that reminding us of the words alone would be enough for...for something. Whether they were just flirting with laziness (streamlining a story isn't all bad if the original meaning is preserved) or were actually trying to pry Bush into a less tasteful apparent position, the latter seemed to be the effect that was achieved; more than once I heard people "reminding" us that Bush, in the end, just wanted to be a dictator, because the last thing they read about his dictator line made him sound pretty serious.

Were they just short-attention-span types who were confused by reporting that was on the sloppy side of efficient? Were they deliberately misled? Were they willingly misled because it confirmed their suspicions or wishes? Were these suspicions first planted by journalists who made some honest mistakes that fit a political pattern, or by journalists who had a problem with objective reporting, or propagandists who happened to work for the major media and perhaps studied journalism in school?

I don't know, but the "All the news that fits our preconceptions will be printed" era can't end soon enough. Hopefully we can get a little more Matt Drudge and even a little Pajamas Media for contrast. I'm tired of running into people who trust CNN because they watch it, and then dismiss anything different that Fox News says because CNN already reported on it.

It happens the other way, too, but Fox isn't as entrenched yet, so it's a little less frequent. 'Cept maybe to people who only watch CNN, or only read the New York Times, f'rinstance. Folks who think a single news source is comprehensive and infallibly objective are probably even more frustrated by folks who think the same about a different news source.

Catholic Coke Commercial

I'm not up on embedding YouTube clips, so here's an old-fashioned link to a Coca-Cola commercial I first saw on a blog I've already forgotten the name of.

Today's Gospel reading, as you should know by now, was from John 6, about the multiplication of the loaves.

I've heard the notion that the real miracle was the sharing of food that people had already brought, but today was the first time I heard it suggested in the homily.

"We can take it to mean that God created the bread from nothing--after all, he turned the water to wine at the wedding in Cana," he started. Well, yes enough.

He did describe, though, the alleged act of sharing as a miracle of generosity, of God acting through us--instead of upon us--to do more good than we would have otherwise. He gave some other examples, which I don't feel like typing up right now, that made this particular idea more clear

His point's a good one, that we should become instruments of God's grace for one another, rather than simply sitting around and waiting for grace to happen. Without any grace, we can't do anything, but once we have some, we can do good, we can spread the grace around.

On the other hand, making people feel guilty so they share what they have is a little mundane. I have no objection to mundane miracles, but if almost everyone did plan ahead and brought enough food to fill twelve baskets after being shamed into sharing with the folks who didn't plan ahead, wouldn't the really remarkable thing be that so many people were hiding so much food (and hidden so well that none of the Apostles noticed, save for one boy's stash) that they'd have leftovers of that magnitude? Did the crowds really show up that day with lunches prepared but still hoping Jesus would be catering?

I know the Bible's pretty lean on incidental detail, but if we take the less dramatic and less direct interpretation, don't the crowds seem to be a little something other than lucid?

On another note, why don't we call them embryonic humans instead of human embryos?

I briefly locked antlers with Innocencio over at Jimmy Akin's blog (there is some related followup) over embryo adoption. I refrained from posting after a few exchanges because I've been a bit edgy lately so I found it difficult to keep treating Innocencio with the respect he (I presume Innocencio's male) deserves. It's probably from spending too much time watching debates on ISCA get obnoxious and drag on for weeks.

I'll try to clarify why I think the EA-prohibitive arguments are inadequate and then drop the whole matter. If you're interested, you can visit Jimmy or see my older post from a couple months ago to weigh the specific arguments. I'm trying to stay brief here.

Donum Vitae is very specific about how many fertility-influencing techniques are immoral for dissociating various components of the conjugal act, such as the unitive and procreative natures. However, the blacklist isn't exhaustive; there's a thread of silence regarding actual EA. The prohibitions on other techniques are banned on grounds that really don't apply. EA isn't IVF so the fertilization question is moot; it's not surrogate motherhood because it's not pregnancy for a third party. DV does mention embryonic transfer, which would cover EA, but it always cites embryonic transfer with IVF as a single illicit technique, not something condemend by itself.

Not stand-alone proof, but the holes in DV do leave an EA-shaped gap we should examine. Maybe EA's not morally tenable--there are two arguments I still find considerable--but DV doesn't close the book. It would be sloppy reasoning to suggest that DV certainly bans EA even though Cardinal Ratzinger didn't seem think of that possibility, or that he meant to but was also being sloppy.

CCC 2376 (also 2377) says, quoting DV in part, "Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife betray the spouses' right to become a father and a mother only through each other.'" It sounds pretty cut and dried, but it's not that simple. 2376 specifies these dissociative techniques as heterologous artificial insemination and fertilization, neither of which is EA. If it only used these two techniques as examples and intended to rely on the rationale of DV itself, then we're back where we started, except for the two arguments I referred to.

One comes from the DV quote in 2376 about dissociative interference violating the spouses' right only to become parents together. I don't have a solid rebuttal, but maybe someone else could make hay of the few escape hatches I can see. For one thing, a married woman who is raped by a stranger doesn't have the option of "allowing" a child so conceived to die in the interest of maintaining her marriage's integrity. For another, DV is emphatic about protecting life, not just protecting its dignity, so we should hesitate before literally throwing out the baby with...okay, the metaphorical bathwater. For yet another, traditional adoption also circumvents the normal order of a married couple raising the child they conceived normally. I'm not sure the differences from traditional adoption are that meaningful; a child's origin, proper or not, is historical and remote from the adoptive act, and the parents can accept the disruption (albeit a different sort) that opening their home to a needy child would cause. One can also suggest pregnancy itself is sacrosanct, but in light of the rape example and the uniformity of the silence in DV otherwise, I don't think this concern is developed enough to stand on its own.

The other comes from the Magisterium itself. I don't fully grasp how the Holy Spirit works, but it may very well be that CCC 2376 was a comprehensive extrapolation, a small leap of faith and logic to ban the things unspecified that resemble or relate to the things specified. Then again, 2376 and 2377 don't leave room for technological assistance in conception, which DV does provide for.

Since I feel something more serious brewing, here's a dream I had last night to tide us over

The beginning was unclear. I was in the back yard of the house I grew up in. Many weedlike plants appeared to be under cultivation. They were about waist high, but once my sister watered them they soon grew into mature sunflower like plants, and then into ponderosa pines that looked to be almost a century old.

Somehow, as dreams do, things shifted, and I was at some religious...well, it wasn't a retreat in that it was open to the public rather than only to people who'd registered in advance. Most of the people about seemed to be youthful, perhaps college age young adults.

For some reason I decided to go to confession, even though my usual confession day wasn't too long from then. My confessor was the Pope. We didn't have a confessional, but he was sitting behind a fancy desk that would look at home in any church if they made altars out of ebony or mahogany, and I brought one of those portable kneelers up from someplace and set it in front of him.

As I confessed, I saw him taking notes, as if making a list of my major sins (or at least their categories) and then adding details, looking for patterns, or something. My confession wasn't remarkable, for me, but it seemed to drag on, especially because we kept getting interrupted by throngs of youths seeking the Pope's input on one social-spiritual exercise or another. For some reason I wasn't bothered by the fact that many people were overhearing bits and pieces of my confession; maybe I had figured it's just how things are when you try to confess to someone as busy as the Pope.

At one point, the throngs managed to call him away from his desk, and I looked over to see the notes he was taking, but they weren't notes at all. They were drawings.

I'd seen him doodling a bit, but when I first noticed it it looked more like he was sketching ideograms encoding my confession and his assessment thereof. Now that he'd completed many of them, they looked more like coats of arms; not just a decorated shield surrounded by symbolic figures, but a helmet and whole cuirass in fancy textures and colors.

Never figured out what he was on about. I woke up before receiving absolution.

Because I haven't been as whimsical or fun lately as I'd like...

You scored as Neither. You think neither like a man or a woman. What you are you may decide for yourself. Most people will consider you strange, alien, weird or funny. You are probably quite interesting.

Neither 64% Male 57% Either 54% Female 50% Should you be MALE or FEMALE?* created with QuizFarm.com

Gender-specific abortions go unnoticed

Maybe it's one of those things where nobody reports on it until a few grassroots organizations start clamoring to bring global attention to it. They tried to do it in Afghanistan around the turn of the century, with the mistreatment of women by the Taliban, but Osama bin Laden brought attention to himself there before anyone else had much of a chance. They've been doing it all over the blogosphere and now in the national media for Darfur. They did it for the Mexican border porosity issue...well, all right, Bill O'Reilly isn't exactly grassroots, but a few other people were making noises about it as early as the last quarter of 2001.

Read for yourself at Mercatornet about societal pressure decreasing live female births in Asia (yeah I know I'm falling behind), with minimal attention from women's rights groups. Maybe the issue hasn't reached a critical mass in the media yet.

Maybe, though, it's pro-choice people who are being consistent in their philosophy. If a fetus isn't a human, or isn't worth considering as a person, what would the gender matter?

(If you're thinking of a mail-order bride from one of these countries, you better hurry up. There may not be many more coming down the pipe)

Worth repeating...

As we all know, some activist atheist is suing to have the cross removed from the Mount Soledad monument in San Diego because it offends him. I don't know what the current status is.

Since when does anyone have the right not to be offended in this country? What happened to "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it?" Does it have to do with the ascention of Tolerance to the pinnacle of all virtues, so that if someone is offended, it is ironically the offender who is not tolerating something about the offendee? I sure don't see it taken seriously in the public sphere the other way around very often.

Oh, he's just looking out for the Separation of Church and State, you say? You mean the Separation of Religion from Society at Large?

What will it take for us to find standing in court to file a suit claiming that the detheization of all things in our society is tantamount to enforced cultural atheism? What will it take to show that this phenomenon will leave us with nothing distinct from a prohibition of the free exercise of religion?

Bleg, as they say

I could use your prayers.

I've been tapped to help someone who got himself into a bit of a crisis. He's the one who needs your prayers, really, but while I'm sympathetic, I'm not always the most helpful person when it's not a matter of "can I help you carry heavy objects and give you a lift across town?"

So, for both of us. That I can help point him to the graces he needs, and that he'll be ready and willing to accept it.

Belated Happy Independence Day

Not just the Fourth of July.

Call it so if you like--sometimes even I am too tired and lazy to use four-syllable words, and I enjoy them more than I should--but don't forget what it's supposed to mean. Remember the reason for the season.

Easter ain't just about eggs and candy, Christmas ain't just presents and an evergreen tree, and the 185th day of the year ain't just fireworks and picnics and the occasional Sousa march.

(Not that the third holiday's in the same league as the first two.)

Remember what we're commemorating, and why it was ever important. Remember it's not just the Memorial Day analog to Sweetest Day alongside February fourteenth.

"Do you know where your Bible is?" saith the billboard I passed on my way home this afternoon, along with a few excerpts from the Psalms about God on His throne.

Yes, yes I do. It's right next to my Magisterium and my Tradition. Where's yours?

Apologetic for a Random Reader (I)

I'm going to try making an irregular series of posts on apologetics. I have a few ideas in mind, but if or how often I come up with new ones is yet to be seen. We may not need yet another blog going on about Catholic apologetics, especially in the shadow of Jimmy Akin, but I figure scattering the occasional capsulized (if not comprehensive, judging from how this post is shaping up) treatment of some poorly understood, highly maligned, or just widely discussed topic a little more widely across the Internet wouldn't hurt; trying to write something capsulized would probably also be a good exercise for me, especially in light of that last post.

I'm going to start with something simple: Galileo.

Back in the day, the Church had much more of a hand in the goings-on of culture. The Church, in short, is in the business of truth, whether it be worldly or otherworldly. Thus did it take great and skeptical interest when Galileo started preaching heliocentrism: based on plainer readings of the Bible, geocentrism seemed more scripturally sound.

If Galileo were right, then what was the Church's beef with him?

For one thing, he was right for the wrong reason, which used to be something people understood. For another, he could be kind of a jerk.

Galileo came to the conclusion of heliocentrism by observing the orbits of the Jovian moons about their planet and by the observation of the phases of Venus. Robert Cardinal Bellarmine was dispatched to evaluate Galileo's science, having dealt with related issues in the past. Bellarmine was cautious, noting the gaps and flaws in the theory and lack of any conclusive evidence, but conceded that heliocentrism did not necessarily contradict the Bible, yet should not be taught until some proof could be found.

Proof would take the form of the discovery of stellar parallax, but in the early 17th century, telescopes were too crude to detect it. Galileo thought he was right anyway--he had been teaching his misfounded hypotheses as fact all along--but he relented.

In 1623, a friend of Galileo's and a scientist became Pope Urban VIII, and Galileo looked forward to no longer censoring himself over cosmology. Urban gave his blessing for a treatise on the movement of astronomical bodies, with the caveat that Galileo give a balanced treatment of geocentrism next to heliocentrism, and to point out that heavenly motions may not be properly understood by earthbound astronomers.

Galileo agreed, but his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems consisted of a debate between an erudite heliocentrist--a Copernican--and a dullard of a geocentrist--a Ptolemist--in whose mouth he put the pope's words.

The pope, whose position on these matters was well-known, was quite upset, brought Galileo to Rome for an explanation, and eventually put him under house arrest for the remainder of his life--not for his cosmology, but for his attitude.

He continued his research, and wrote the Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Science, in which he took the first steps into modern science by presenting some quantitative analysis of kinematics and materials science.

Archived embryos

I just read an article at Lifeissues by Fr. Alain Mattheeuws, S.J. about The Freezing, Implantation, and Adoption of Embryos. While I'm generally in agreement, and I'm not really in a good position to criticize Fr. Mattheeuws' work, I'd like to emphasize a few things he didn't, and demur on a few related things I've seen elsewhere. You can sort them out for yourself if I'm ambiguous at any point; fair warning.

The first question he covers is whether embryos may be frozen. Donum Vitae appears to be pretty clear:

The freezing of embryos, even when carried out in order to preserve the life of an embryo - cryopreservation - constitutes an offence against the respect due to human beings by exposing them to grave risks of death or harm to their physical integrity and depriving them, at least temporarily, of maternal shelter and gestation, thus placing them in a situation in which further offences and manipulation are possible.

The first part of this argument is, I think, contingent more on the limits of technology than on the limits of moral behavior. We now induce hypothermia in adults for certain medical procedures, and the risk of dying therefrom is quite small, especially next to the benefits to be gained by surgery.

I'm not condoning, however, any experimentation like what the Nazis did to bring us what we know about hypothermia today. I'm only saying that medical technology has gotten us this far, and in the future, something mundane, safe, and materially identical to the cryosleep featured in the Alien and 2001 movies might be feasible for a human at any point in development.

Justifying the extraction and preservation in the first place is another matter. If it's not disproportionately dangerous--which is a big if, one our state of the obstetric art can't yet practically answer, and no valid reason for which I can even think of--then I'm not sure how the deprivation of "maternal shelter" would be materially different from having your five year old spend a weekend in the hospital (which, I can personally attest, is sometimes necessary). We don't think that much of a kid getting homesick. Technical problems aside, would an extraction and reimplantation be significantly different? I'm not asking rhetorically. While there can be no tangible emotional trauma if there's no differentiated neural tissue, there are still spiritual matters that might be significant, and I'm less qualified to judge those than I am Fr. Mattheeuws' article (and less qualified to judge them than he is).

(I'm not sure if I'm using such words as "material" in the proper philosophical way, but I trust you'll take my meaning. Feel free to correct me where appropriate; there are, I'm sure, other places where I mean ontology when I say reality...)

I've piled high quite a few contingents, though, so don't think I'm actively dissenting from Donum Vitae. Outside of the unlikely confluence of a successor of Peter saying I can do so and some incredibly bizarre medical condition developing in my wife, none of my unborn kids is going to take a detour through the freezer section.

What about embryonic children who have already been cryopreserved? Let me address a few excerpts directly:

[Parents] cannot relinquish the responsibility that they have taken on in conceiving these embryos, even if it was with the help of doctors....

Here he's saying that parents cannot store or give them away like mere objects. Entirely true, but there is such a thing as adoption, and it is legitimate. Giving up only the second of five children for adoption in order to keep the bills low would be an unconscionable breach of the family, but it only demonstrates that the appropriateness of adoption would depend on the circumstances.

[T]hey should bring their embryonic children back to the dimension of time and take them out of their frozen state. It is in their hands to avoid adding one evil on top of another: to create a surplus of embryos and freeze them is one evil, to keep them in this state is another. To decide to make them material for science is also an evil.

Okay: in vitro fertilization sinful? Check. Freezing them evil? Check, but not necessarily with more advanced technology; DV prohibits risky operations and zygote-affecting operations that are experimental for the sake of experiment, and not all medical intervention across the board. Leaving them indefinitely on ice sinful? Check: they're placed in an unnatural and isolated state, most often for no primary reason. Harvesting for stem cells or cloning sinful? Check. All things we need not cooperate in. Keeping these points in mind, we move on...

But are they to be expected to implant every embryonic child in the body of its mother in view of bringing it into the world? I don't think this should be a 'moral obligation' for them....The only possibility open to them is implantation and gestation in the uterus of a woman. This possibility moreover does not automatically assure their survival.

If it weren't for the idea that a couple doesn't have to have every child they could possibly have, then NFP would be on the rocks; but on the other hand, they have already conceived children, and if parents weren't obligated to make at least a reasonable effort to bring their unborn children to term, then we wouldn't be opposing abortion, either. We don't have to guarantee success to make an effort; God only expects us to be faithful. How many miscarriages happen in the first week of pregnancy, anyway? Are we to sit on our hands because we haven't yet brought the failure rate well below these natural levels? If we do forsake every possible solution, then we are automatically assuring their death.

"What is more, can we really speak of adoption in a strict sense?...I do not believe that this would be a realistic 'response.'

First, yes we can, if we put our minds to it. The age of the child need not matter, and kids don't exactly come with 18-year warranties, let alone nine-month ones. Second, no, the way things are, it's not the most realistic response. No matter how many willing couples we'd be able to find, at this rate we'd never be able to give every embryonic child a chance at development and birth. It's possible that IVF could lose popularity or be banned, but unless such unlikely events transpire, embryo adoption will never be sufficient. Let me know if sufficiency becomes the primary moral consideration for an act.

Certain moralists consider that adopting embryonic children merely consists in moving a piece of a complex and absurd puzzle within a system that does not respect the origin of human life. It is a delicate question of a material cooperation with a technique which, in itself, is a means disrespectful of man. Others think that a massive and visible adoption of these embryonic children would testify to the respect we owe them and would favor, in the long run, a recognition of the evil that has been done to them and thus of the deadly character of these diverse techniques.

I think we're at the crux of the biscuit. By accepting the final act in a process that on the whole is immoral, are we formally cooperating with the evil? Not necessarily. Hearken back to the hypothermia example I gave earlier. Would it be immoral for me today to use that knowledge to save someone's life? No. What about my doctor in saving mine? Perhaps I'd be biased, but I'd again say no. What about the first doctor to read journal articles on the effects of prolonged cold on the human body, based on Nazi research? Not if that doctor is truly--primarily--interested in helping a patient keep his life or regain his health.

Where are we left when it comes to embryonic children? The science is not mature, and the technology is not what I'd like to call robust, but saving the life of a child is prima facie a good thing.

If I had to pay an open clinic to get an embryo and have it implanted, I'd probably pass because payment would constitute material cooperation, in the form of financially enabling an embryo mill to continue its work. If I felt an embryo mill were just another resource for fertility treatment, one that let me keep a little distance from the obviously immoral activity, then I'd still share the culpability.

If, however, I knew that there were frozen children--children who shouldn't exist, but God permitted to bring to the world anyway--and that they would definitely die if I did nothing, eventually discarded during an inventory purge or donated for ESCR or lost during a power failure or natural disaster; then I would really be inclined to give them something they could still have. They may have been denied a natural conception, but technically it wouldn't be too late to give them a chance at an otherwise normal gestation, and hopefully a full life.

Fr. Mattheeuws himself makes what is to me the same point in another part of the article, pointing out that adopting a child conceived by rape does not make one in any way complicit with the rape.

The personal conditions of [embryo adoption]--her condition as a woman, as a mother, as a spouse--seem little considered. With the 'rescue' option, the ethical illusion is profound: a sign of this is that even outside of the conjugal connection, the body of the woman can serve to this end.

Generally agreed. We can't just have lone people going around adopting embryonic children any more than we can have them adopting air-breathing children. Children are more than pets, and women are more than baby-making machines. Marriage provides for the procreation and raising of children, but it too is more. However, I'm still not seeing a durable difference between the goodness of a married, conjugally active, yet childless couple adopting an air-breather and a married, conjugally active, yet childless couple adopting an embryo. A woman's condition as a person, as a spouse, as a mother, should be considered along with her teleology even in the intent of conceiving her own children normally. I won't be so quick as to say these considerations for embryonic adoption are illusory, but it would be possible to commodify motherhood if we follow that path.

I still don't think it's enough to condemn the idea, though. It's not like the "right becomes obligation" argument against euthanasia, where a bad thing gives way to something worse. We just have something that could be very good, which is vulnerable to exploitation. Maybe weighing the quality of the technology, the likelihood of success, against the degree of moral vulnerability should be a judgment of prudence, but the possibility of exploitation doesn't make the matter different from anything else; it makes it just like everything else.

Donum vitae tells us 'surrogate' motherhood is not morally licit. It is contrary "to the unity of marriage and to the dignity of the procreation of the human person."

I submit, however, that embryo adoption is not surrogacy. Fr. Mattheeuws permits the distinction from traditional surrogacy, but insists that the similarity in the substitutiveness of both EA and surrogate motherhood are definitive and thus morally prohibitive. Let’s let DV define surrogate motherhood for us:

By “surrogate mother” the Instruction means:
(a) the woman who carries in pregnancy an embryo implanted in her uterus and who is genetically a stranger to the embryo because it has been obtained through the union of the gametes of “donors.” She carries the pregnancy with a pledge to surrender the baby once it is born to the party who commissioned or made the agreement for the pregnancy.
(b) the woman who carries in pregnancy an embryo to whose procreation she has contributed the donation of her own ovum, fertilized through insemination with the sperm of a man other than her husband. She carries the pregnancy with a pledge to surrender the child once it is born to the party who commissioned or made the agreement for the pregnancy.

DV explicitly leaves room for technical assistance to conception for conjugating spouses (see question #6 under Homologous Artificial Insemination), we can obviously distinguish IVF itself from surrogacy, and we can see that surrogacy as here defined is a commoditization of the woman’s childbearing capacity, a reduction of it to a mere social service.

I’m not trying to argue that the only problem with surrogacy is the objectifying aspects of the practice. Children have a right to be conceived in love by their parents and carried to term by their mothers. Surrogacy deliberately deprives children of at least one and often all of these things.

Embryonic adoption, on the other hand, does not. It bears little similarity outside of some technological aspects, which DV does not prohibit just for being technological. Embryonic children have already been conceived; the likelihood of their conception having been in vitro, while probable, is moot. If it were merely a matter of being something between regular adoption and custom-genotype surrogacy, then it would be a bad thing. Embryonic adoption won’t save every child, even if we found an adoptive mother for every one, but again, we shouldn’t refuse to try saving any lives just because we can’t save all of them.

Doesn’t saving lives often require the tolerance of lesser “evils?” A woman in a car accident requires a leg amputation. A man having a heart transplant receives an organ cut from another’s corpse, is given a highly addictive narcotic to alleviate the pain. A child is removed from an abusive household. Dangerous mentally ill people are institutionalized against their wills. In all such cases “adding one evil on top of another” really doesn’t suit. All the evils are already added up and piled on top of the child. The child was already conceived by IVF; any siblings have already been implanted or killed or are also awaiting adoption; the genetic mother is not coming back; the child has probably already been archived in a fancy freezer somewhere. The only variable is setting the Petri dish out on a counter and letting the children die today, or waiting until next week for the adoptive parents to come in for implantation. I don’t know about spiritually, but biologically, even an adult who could be successfully frozen would not notice the passage of time. Given sufficient scientific advancement, it might be no more violent than general anesthesia.

DV spells out how we shouldn’t procure children. It does not say there is some point during the accretion of material evils against a child that a third party is morally obligated to throw up his hands, refuse to take part in anything even tangentially related, and let the child die. This attitude strikes me as little different from one where a parent treats a child drinking some under-the-counter chemical the same way he’d treat his keys dropped in lava.

“Shouldn’t we call the Poison Control Center?”
“Don’t bother; he’s as good as gone.”
“This stuff might only be a slow toxin!”
“I said don’t bother.“

If I were a zygote stashed in a freezer somewhere, I’d be pretty hard pressed to come up with a course of action that would be worse than nothing. I’d also be pretty hard pressed to overlook the suggestion that I should die because I would be starting life deprived of too many good things.

Birmingham abortion clinic surrenders license after baby's death

From the article:

A Birmingham abortion clinic has surrendered its license amid allegations that a woman delivered a nearly full-term stillborn baby after a clinic staffer gave her an abortion-inducing drug and performed other medical treatments without a doctor present, health officials said Wednesday.

We have two victories here, my friends. One, an abortion clinic has shut down for the foreseeable future. Two, an abortion clinic has been held legally responsible for medical negligence.

The second point may be more far-reaching than the first. Progressives in America will always have an uphill battle when trying to enshrine a social service as a basic human right, especially when they're explicitly pushing one that's only appicable to half of all humans, like abortion. Well, half of all adults. You know what I mean. Anyway, from what I've seen in the lawsuits being brought against Planned Parenthood (see here, here, and here for starters), they've been carrying on as if this "social service" really were some transcendent phenomenon, too important or too ubiquitous to be infringed by the banalities of sanitation mandates, rape reporting, and the like.

Now there's a precedent for not looking the other way in the interest of protecting the idea of "choice" over the fact of it. Now there should be no secrets, no mistakes, no deceptions, to distract from the fact that in a time when appropriate medical (physical and psychological) care is easy to obtain, abortion has not made women safer and healthier than they were thirty-four years ago.

Relevant Radio had someone on this weekend discussing the constitutional emasculation of modern men. I didn't catch the whole thing, but the guy was talking about how one battlefront in the fight against manliness was fashion: starting with male models, longer hair and earrings were introduced, and so on and so forth, until the sight of men dressing and primping themselves as women do seems perfectly natural, making the next step in the progression seem relatively small, blah blah blah. 1980s hair rock bands with their frilly sashes and animal skin print blouses and such probably have something to do with it, too, but I digress.

It's a bit of a hand-waving argument, I'll admit. Long hair was popular in the 60s to spite convention at least as much as to explicitly subvert gender roles, if such a distinction is meaningful. Jewelry, even on the ears, has not always been the bailiwick of women, nor always strictly decoration. French voyageurs sometimes took multiple piercings to indicate their skill in paddling on one side of a canoe or the other--next best thing to a resume in a society of low literacy.

Still, in modern society, long hair and jewelry have been predominantly the decorations of women.

I think the guy on Relevant Radio was overlooking something else, though, and perhaps it was just a matter of topicality. I don't think it's as simple as emasculation; I think it's the neutering of humans, men and women alike. It's not a new idea, but I'm not coming from the usual "feminism is about making women into better men than men themselves" angle.

We see men who are "metrosexual," adopting both the practices and styles of women. What about women? I don't mean the ones with short hair and combat boots. Look instead at many today's models.

They're thin, painfully so, resembling gangly boys as much as girls. Although the clothing they feature is often girly, it billows around them like they're coathangers on legs. Tops are low-cut or splayed open, revealing more ribs than a barbecue shack and nothing else (not that excessive cleavage is actually appropriate). Nominally hip-hugging slacks or skirts don't hug anything at all, which may be deliberate on the part of the designer as well as on the model. They wear makeup, but not so much anymore to look particularly alluring. All the fashion show footage I've seen in recent years, save for a few ad campaigns for a certain brand of underwear, has featured underfed women, and increasingly, girls who appear to be delaying puberty rather than fighting it off, with little more than mascara to make it look like they're coming off the cover of Crack Whore Magazine instead of making their debut in Milan.

Kids say the darndest things....

A little ISCA gold, as I'd warned you about:

Today I went to my first Pentecost church service. I've been going to a small New England congregational church since January after a near lifetime of not going (long story for another date). During the sermons the minister calls the children forward to explain the Bible readings to them. While she was talking about what happened after Jesus died, my 3 year old son, Alexander gasped, looked around and yelled out "Oh no! Jesus died? What happened?" Clearly his education has some holes but I thought it was funny.

Well, he's only three. Based on what I can remember remembering at that age, he's probably in decent theological shape. Probably also as good a time as any to start filling those holes.

Pro-choice isn't merely pro-abortion, eh?

A lot of us who support choice are ardent believers in parenthood, adoption, and childbirth...

Non sequitur. Quality versus quantity? Adoption will cut down on the number of mouths you have to feed, but if you were honestly keen on the saving individual families some trouble, abortion wouldn't be so imperative a "last" resort.

...as well as believers in the domain a person should be able to exercise over his or her body. I think it's unfortunate that, in the battle to keep Johnny Righteous out of the wombs of America's women, many people see only one side of the pro-choice group, and willfully or inadvertently become misinformed about the beliefs and motivations of those who support women's rights.

Well, you don't want anything in the wombs of America's women at all, do you?

If the "pro-choice group" was really interested in showing the other side, maybe they wouldn't relegate a comprehensive birth regulating program to the propaganda of a few scattered armchair apologists. Moral dimensions aside, an abortion is a more profound medical procedure (especially later in the term, which isn't as rare as one might think) than your usual outpatient things like getting root canals and stitches. For that reason alone abortions should not be pursued cavalierly, but apparently the need for them is so dire, the slippery slope to a culture of life is so steep, that they can't afford to really promote these alternatives.

When every child is wanted, and every parent capable of raising a child, these discussions will be over.

Yes. When you learn to want the children you get, abortion will be unthinkable.

How one decides how much wanting or capability is enough, I couldn't guess. Maybe it would have something to do with being ready and willing to bind oneself to a husband or wife for life and take whatever life throws at you together.

Currently reading...

Augustine's Confessions (abridged)

R. Scott Bakker's The Darkness that Comes Before

Christopher West's The Theology of the Body Explained

Joe Dever and John Grant's The Eclipse of the Kai


It's a bit onerous. I'm usually happiest reading one book at a time. Naturally, some of these books are going pret-ty slowly....

Do you have postmodern progressive colorblindness?

There's a simple test for literal colorblindness. A man (usually it's men) is shown a picture, usually a collection of dots, some of them green, the rest of them red (usually it's green and red). If he can see normally, he'll recognize that the green dots trace out some numeral, the red ones comprising the background. If he's color deficient, he'll see something else, probably just a uniform array of grayish dots.

Similar political tests are also possible. I present one below. I might have presented more, but I personally came across this one early in the week and don't feel like waiting to find or writing tests that distinguish other political antipodes.


Definition: Terrorism works to no small degree on the fear of uncertainty, of not knowing where or when or how a strike will take place.

Assertion: The United States is a terrorist state.

Crux of the argument: Compare the following two statements.
1. Hand over Osama bin Laden by the end of October or we will come get him.
2. We will destroy your civilization! You will not know which business, which school, which courthouse, which train station we will destroy next! Perhaps it will be a dirty bomb! Perhaps it will be anthrax! You do not know, so you will cower before us, and your civilization will fall!

In both cases, we have an ultimatum (#2's really an ultimatum; pretend I didn't leave out the conditional) that includes violence and regime change as the only alternative to compliance.

In the first case, we have a statement that implies or comes with expectable military goals, from a power that endeavors to minimize civilian casualties and collateral damage and intends to help get a nation back on its feet, allowing large and recently repressed segments of its population to go out in public unchaperoned and unbeaten.

In the second case, we have a statement that threatens widespread, low-level, random destruction of civilly strategic but militarily unimportant targets, solely for the sake of keeping the population off balance and disrupting society as a whole. Rebuilding, if it is done at all, would result in something rather despotic, maintained by little more than brute force.

If the difference between these two positions is substantial and important, then you are not blind.

If you cannot see that a concrete deadline, an explicit warning, and the intent of causing minimal damage are different from the promise of explicitly random and widespread violence, then you need to cut back on the New York Times and MoveOn.

Why I'm less than entertained by contemporary entertainment

I have a sister. When she was a teenager, she occasionally would bring home magazines like Seventeen and Teen. I wasn't exactly compelled to pick them up when she was done, but occasionally she'd point out an article, or a quiz, or something, that might make me chuckle.

When I was in college, I had a summer job where I basically went camping all the time. Sometimes I'd be staying alone or with small groups at rustic campsites with nothing but a tent or the promise of warm, dry weather for shelter, and other times I'd be staying at staffed camps that had interactive local history programs.

When I was visiting one of the latter camps, I was informed about a latrine that was supposed to have the best selection of reading material in the entire region. Since I do at times have to use a latrine or plumbed toilet, I thought I'd see what they had to offer.

In the reading rack, amongst other things, was a copy of Vogue. Never having read a bona fide women's magazine before, I thumbed through it.

I'm not sure it should be called disappointment or dismay, but I was mightily unimpressed to learn that American women everywhere were taking as a lifestyle standard a magazine that was no different from what American teenage girls everywhere were taking as a lifestyle standard, except for the fact that articles were about sex instead of prom and quizzes were about men instead of boys.

Yes, it sounded a little more sophisticated; add sex and career to a discussion on makeup and relationships and you've easily doubled its complexity, and even immature adults will develop or appear to develop more mature attitudes through observation and repetition. Children play house. College students drink and make merry with all the gluttony they can muster. In between, we have kids making biological jokes of increasing sophistication as they age (if we can speak of sophisticated jokes about poop or sex at all).

What I don't see much of these days is a graduation beyond obscene material in today's television shows and whatnot. I'm not talking about slapstick comedies or other gross-out shows like Blue Collar TV or America's Funniest whatever. Some of those shows, while crass, are not vulgar or prurient. I'm talking about the ones that pretend to be above it all, and so think they're not subject to the usual guidelines for good taste. After all, a documentary can discuss and display bodily functions, so why can't an entertainment program if it's equally frank and clinical?

For one thing, it's entertainment, so it's supposed to stir up subjective feelings rather than coldly convey knowledge. Whether these two can be safely divorced but remain in the same program is something I don't care to get into at this time.

Maybe they just can't; I was originally only going to answer "why not" with "I don't know, maybe it could, but it hasn't worked so far." Apparently Sex and the City, which seemed to focus on the prurient experiences and preferences of four urban women as much as it did on their careers, on their shoes, and on their actual fulfillment as human beings, appeals to someone. Apparently Grey's Anatomy, which has doctors getting more STDs than a college freshman and also focuses on how, in a nutshell, emotionally dysfunctional the physical relationships (to which I can only say "Duh!"), which the doctors are having with each other, always seem to do so.

Fine, fine, harmony makes for bad drama. So does stupidity. The show Going to Extremes went off the air precisely because the main characters were intolerably angsty and whiny. Angst can be funny with the right wit behind the pen and with an actor with the right sensibilities, but usually it just looks like a Generation X high school melodrama. Maybe Going to Extremes was just badly timed, people having appreciated but tired of thirtysomething but not yet having recovered enough to appreciate, well, the stuff that's put out today.

I'm not saying we should sweep tawdry and sensitive stuff under the rug, pretend it's not there. If we learned one good thing from Free Love, it's that abject fear and superstition about the Physical is not the same thing as healthy respect for it, even if healthy respect requires some comprehension of the sacredness of the Physical, the special reservation with which it should be handled. Not that it absolves would-be factual shows from the same lurid ratings hooks. Important things do deserve to be treated frankly, if the only alternative is tentative vagueness, but it's not the same thing as being casual.

What I am saying is that we're not proving our enlightened maturity by just doing things we weren't allowed to do as children. "Hey, I'm an adult, it's time for me to put away childish things, like Not Smoking and Not Talking About Genitalia." So many of us, when we were young, tried so hard to seem mature beyond their years. How many actually grew up?

Criticism of the critique of The DaVinci Code:

• Dan Brown put a "Facts" page at the beginning of the novel....


• It's only fiction!


• People bought into made up stories two thousand years ago, and they're going to do so today, too.


• The male apostles covered it all up; there's no written evidence, just clues left in artwork


• I like the unearthing of a woman-respecting strand in Christian history

Responses:

• The only thing that is true on that page is that Opus Dei has a building in New York.


• Yes, it's fiction, but it doesn't stop people from believing it, and instructing the ignorant is a spiritual work of mercy. Whitley Strieber gets to couch alleged nonfiction in fiction, but at least he admits that he might just be psychotic.


• If it's all fiction to you, why do you care that we care if people can keep their stories straight?


• There's not even artistic evidence. You've got a youthful looking John, and what else? There's nothing at that English chapel from the end of the book. Where would be the sense in reading the canonical gospels and assuming they're strictly disinformation because of Dan Brown's bald assertions? It'd be like saying a crime suspect's claim to innocence is just what a guilty person would say, never mind that an innocent person would also claim to be innocent.


• Yeah, and it goes all the way back, from Dan Brown writing a Sophie who spends more time getting schooled by old white men than saving the day, to the Gnostic gospels where Jesus spent so much time with Mary Magdalene because she was even less fit for heaven than the male apostles were. Equal-time lip service is not the same thing as equality.

It's just the old lies dressed up in old clothes that happen to have been dry-cleaned and pressed. You can't be free, free from the truth, by trying to live a lie. Look at the more radical branches of feminism: women cannot adequately self-actualize until they overcome what makes them women and they stop having kids, start taking traditionally male jobs, and so on (not that childless independent women are bad; they're just untraditional, although a woman specifically trying to become more masculine isn't what I'd call healthy), except when what makes a woman obviously different from a man--her primary sex characteristics--are what makes her special, which basically means the glorification of her primary sex characteristics all by themselves, instead of her self or her Inner Man.

Maybe learning not to be ashamed of part of what makes you unique is the first step in developing a healthy, holistic self image.

Note to self:

Try bringing the average sentence length down, and add some whimsy.

Readers are welcome to encourage, guide, and remind me.

Early Christian Cacophony

From Amy Welborn's combox:

Burge's Protestantism eeks out in this paragraph:

"Ehrman's more important effort appears in the companion volume, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford). Here Ehrman says that early Christianity witnessed remarkable theological chaos. Everything was in dispute: monotheism, Jesus' divinity, creation. Then, Ehrman says, in the second and third centuries, powerful clerics imposed their views on rivals, ending a golden age of diversity and tolerance. The vanquished rivals supposedly were reformed, suppressed, or forgotten. Other religions and other Christian voices, those outside the mainstream, were crushed. And it is only now, Ehrman says, with the discovery of their lost scriptures, that these long-silenced voices are being heard once again."

The emphasis is mine.

I think "Everything was in dispute" is overstating the case a bit. Some people did actually doubt Christ's divinity, for example, but I think most of the people of greatest historical significance--not just to us today, but the ones closest to the "Jesus Event" itself--were wrestling with problems that today we describe as Trinitarian in scope more than problems with describing the nature of Jesus.

No, I'm not assuming the "winners write the history" position, either. I was just saving it. (:

Let's look at the bold sentence, the one with "...ending a golden age of diversity and tolerance." Which alternate Earth did Ehrman study? Sure, there was "diversity," if you want to call the wide speculations of the Gnostics and other sects denounced from the beginning by the Apostles and other patristic figures a legitimate diversity, then for the sake of the argument I suppose you can, but it's this wedding of diversity to tolerance that catches my eye like a screen door hook latch.

There was little to no tolerance for, let alone acceptance of or respect of, heterodoxy in the early days. I think "respect" and "acceptance" might be closer to what contemporary progressives have in mind when they say "tolerance," which tends to have more of a reluctant quality, and reluctance is not something I'd expect to be a regular part of the practice of something that is supposed to be a good end in itself.

Well, I would, what with our tendency to backslide, but someone who disbelieved original sin might be less expectant.

My use of "denounced" three paragraphs up was not by accident or premisconception. (By the way, "premisconception" is a word now. Like a preconception, it's made prematurely, but like a misconception, it's inexcusably incorrect.) This repressive powerful cleric claptrap did not suddenly occur a hundred years after the Council of Jerusalem. Peter had words against this "diversity," and even more of Paul's are widely available today. The only thing that fits any Constantinian conspiracy is that the Church in the fourth century had temporal power to rely on as well as rhetoric and, most importantly, grace.

If there was a golden age at all, it wasn't when or because there existed a variety of belief as well as worship, all of which was happily accepted as being legitimate or as much within the margin of error of the decades-old Church documents as any other denomination's (if we can call Peter and Paul's sect a denomination) manifestation. Christ Himself said that parents and children would turn against each other because of Him.

Just because there was some variety, because there were fringe elements that were congruently documented by the fringe elements and by the core elements, does not mean that there was legitimate diversity or harmonious acceptance.

Legitimate diversity isn't just difference for difference's sake. Legitimate diversity is what keeps unity from becoming stale uniformity. Maybe a little gratuitous variety is all it takes to create a complementarity that becomes a dynamic unity, but some differences do contain inherent incompatibilities.

Try taking your American electronic devices to Europe to see if I'm wrong. There's nothing wrong with American electrical power standards, and nothing wrong with German electrical power standards, but they won't work together. It just doesn't happen. You can keep them in the same room and be safe as long as you're not trying to make one "tolerate" the other, but once you do, you get smoke and fire and maybe worse. If you bring an adaptor, bully for you, but the presence and function of an adaptor to unify American battery charges with European power outlets do not arise naturally from the juxtaposition of the two technologies.

Is this golden age of variety supposed to integrate with or compete with the single, global Gaia worship that men replaced with all those different pagan systems? Now there is a diversity of belief that contained nearly interchangeable parts, if I may paint with such broad strokes.

Of course, there was still religious conflict, but whatever.

Should we call it "Mercy Eugenics" or "Mercy Genocide?"

Via Amy Welborn:

UK euthanasia legislation fails to gain the support of the people it's intended to help.

I think it's telling that this kind of "help" is not wanted. Question is, is anyone listening?

I imagine something like the liver donation scene in Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life," only darker and more obnoxious:

"Hi, we're from the government, and we're here to help."
"No, actually, I'm fine."
"Of course not."
"What! Wait!"
"Oh, do relax. Here, Mr. Griffiths will just run upstairs and fill the tub, and after you get to know me a little I'll hold you down in it."
"No!"
"Please come off it, sir. Your neighbor across the street, Mr. Foster, didn't complain."
"No--wha? He was only diabetic!"
"Yes! You may as well give up trying to roll yourself out of here; it won't work. Foster was much more mobile than you, and we ended up shivving him on the way home from the pub last Thursday."
"'E couldn't very well have complained, then, could he?"
"I don't think he would have."
"Right, and even if he did, it would have just shown he wasn't lucid enough to agree with you, wouldn't it?"
"Now you're getting it!"
"Yet somehow I still have a problem with this arrangement."

Wool or plastic?

My brown scapular is plastic.

Well, it's actually brown wool, like the scapular traditionally is, but the two pieces are encased in plastic.

Apparently, some folks think that a "plastic scapular" is invalid. If they mean all plastic and no fabric, then I could understand, and if they meant a synthetic fabric instead of wool, then I might even be convinced.

I would hope that they would not think ill of a scapular with the same material configuration as mine, though. It does have the legitimate material, and for me at least, the sharp edges and corners of the casing are more painful when I lie down, roll over, or anything that requires sitting or standing, than the bare wool would be uncomfortable in an entire day of scratchiness.

Shouldn't this point appeal to some of the more reactionary types?