Advice for Sarah Palin

By now, most people have seen clips from the various Sarah Palin/Katie Couric interviews, including this last one where Palin was joined by Senator McCain. Much has been said about Palin's underwhelming performance in these interviews; there's a growing return to pessimism and despair on the right, especially from the political punditry class which has a tendency to equate a good TV persona with leadership, however illogical that is.

I myself don't quite know what to make of Palin just now. I'd like very much to believe that she is ready, that she can get up to speed in time for Thursday's debate and be the polished and confident politician she was in Alaska. But it's been somewhat difficult to see that as time has gone on, and the Couric interviews, as well as the Gibson interviews, have caused many people to become quite gloomy over Palin's prospects.

The truth of the matter is that we still don't really know whether Palin is up to the challenge, because the same news media that ignores Obama's gaffes and fawns all over him, running puff piece after puff piece while letting him get away with glaring inaccuracies and downright untruths about his record, has been in "attack dog" mode re: Palin from day one. If the Republicans have made some mistakes in terms of grooming Palin to speak to the press, I think their biggest mistake was in thinking for one minute that either Gibson or Couric were going to be "friendly" interviewers, and were going to set aside their fierce pro-Democrat, pro-abortion partisanship long enough to give a pro-life Republican governor a fair hearing.

Long ago I took Rita Marker's Human Life Issues class. One of the things that struck me was the way she talked about pro-lifers and the media, and how, when, and whether we should agree to talk to the news media, whether at the local newspaper level or the national or even international level about issues pertaining to abortion, euthanasia, and other human life concerns.

While I can't quote Mrs. Marker from memory, I do remember enough to paraphrase her advice, which was roughly as follows: the media isn't friendly to us or to our views. They will go out of their way to photograph a frumpy elderly frowning woman with a rosary at a protest rally or in front of a clinic--even if there are dozens of young, attractive, trendily-dressed people there who are smiling and calm as they pray or speak out for life. They will interview five or six people and only run one clip from someone who said something stupid (or they will shorten the clip to make an otherwise intelligent statement sound stupid). They will quote you out of context to make your views sound extreme, and if they run a newspaper article which attributes to you things you didn't even say, the most you will get is a correction buried inside the section two weeks later when the damaging and inaccurate article has already run.

So, based on that, here's some completely unsolicited advice for Sarah Palin:

1. The mainstream media hates you. They hate you personally, they hate your family, and they hate everything you stand for. While there might be one or two sympathetic people out there who actually do like you, none of them work for the major networks, and none of them will be interviewing you or asking you questions or otherwise helping you along. When you are in front of a camera you are surrounded by enemies.

2. Since this is the case, you must remember that it is not your job to make these people like you. They will never like you. Most of them are so committed to the abortion agenda that they would be hostile to the Pope, if he graciously deigned to allow any of them to talk to him. They will be hostile to you, and the only way for you to handle them is not to waste time being friendly.

3. Though they are hostile and unfriendly, television "talents" are also two things that you should remember because you can turn these to your advantage: self-interested and cowardly. Don't bother cramming all the details of every major piece of legislation passed in the last fifty years into your head so that the next time a Couric or a Gibson calls you out on some obsure fact you'll be ready; instead, learn everything you can about Couric or Gibson (or anybody else who might interview you). Intersperse bits of that knowledge into your answers (e.g. "You know, Katie, John McCain does think we need to fix health care, and as someone who has so tragically lost family members to cancer I know you agree. We may need to work out the details and differences and John McCain can do that in a bipartisan way, but we all know that health care needs fixing" etc.) Some references will flatter them, and others may alarm them, but on the whole knowing that you know about them will impress them more than knowing that you know the history of Smoot-Hawley and its connection to our current global finance issues and solutions proposals or some such thing.

4. When they get aggressive, asking you the same question over and over, don't think this is a good-faith request for clarification; it isn't. I know you already know this ('gotcha' journalism) but don't fall for it on the one hand, or identify it too often on the other. Instead, play the interviewee's favorite trump card, and answer questions like these with questions of your own. (e.g., to Couric's insulting "Are you sorry you said it, Governor?" you might say, "Why do you think I should be sorry, Katie? We've already explained that we're on the same page here, so why do you think I should be sorry?" etc.). Frankly, I'd like to see a lot more Republicans use this method: when silly, stupid, or insulting questions get asked the best response is, "Well, now, why would you ask me that?" Your supporters will get it, you'll turn the tables on the interviewer, and they'll be the ones fumbling for an answer, because they can't say the truth, which is, "We hate you and want you to fail."

5. Go on the offensive in general. I know everybody's been telling you to do this, but do it. The MSM interviewers and reporters are like the meanest, stubbornest, most pig-headed PTA members you've ever encountered, the ones who got hung up on petty bureaucratic questions and were ready to start World War III over school snacks or a change in the recess schedule. I have a feeling you know perfectly well how to steamroll over people like that, so go for it!

Now, I'm perfectly aware that Sarah Palin will never see what I've written here, and I know that I'm probably not saying anything that plenty of other people aren't telling her. I'm just not ready to write off Sarah Palin--not when I feel as though the only time I've seen the real Sarah Palin was during her speech at the GOP convention. And that's frustrating--because I liked that Sarah quite a bit, and was excited about the influence she might eventually have on the party--but it would be maddening to see her lose that chance before she ever really had it.

A Pro-Life Petition

A reader sent me the following petition from the organization C-FAM, the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, which lobbies the United Nations on behalf of the rights of the unborn and of families. I visited the website and signed the petition, which only needs your name, country, and an email address (no further info is required, and you can opt-out of additional mailings if, like me, you can't keep up with organizational emails in your inbox.

Rather than email this petition to everyone on my contacts list (who will probably do what I generally must do with fwd: fwd: fwd emails and delete the petition without reading it), I thought I'd put the text of the letter below. If you'd like to visit the website and consider signing the petition so that on the anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights the UN can be reminded that a lot of us consider the right to life from conception to natural death to be a fundamental human right, please click through the links in the text below.

September 29, 2008


Dear Friend,

The UN will celebrate the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights this December 10th.

To celebrate this occasion, radical pro-abortion groups intend to present the UN General Assembly with petitions calling for a universal right to abortion.

The largest, richest and most powerful pro-abortion groups are even now planning their attack on the unborn at the General Assembly.

Campaigns are being waged right now by International Planned Parenthood Federation and Maire Stopes International, the two groups responsible for more abortions than any other groups in the world. Both are beloved of the powers that be at the UN; and their efforts to promote an international right to abortion are welcomed by many UN Member States, perhaps most of the UN bureaucracy, and powerful US foundations that give millions to promote abortion at the UN and around the world.

We must stop them this December.

I am writing to ask you to sign a petition calling on UN Members States to interpret the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as protecting the unborn child from abortion. Did you know that the Universal Declaration calls for a right to life? Did you know that UN committees now interpret that as a right to abortion? We can stop them.

Please go HERE to sign the petition which we will present at the UN on December 10th, the celebration of the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At the very least we must match what the pro-abortion advocates will present to the UN that day! They will present thousands and thousands of names. WE MUST MATCH THEM!

Go HERE to sign the petition and then please send this email to all of your family and friends. Our goal is to present 50,000+ names to the General Assembly. We need your help right now to block the pro-aborts from making huge progress for abortion at the UN.

We are going to run this campaign for the next six weeks. There is plenty of time to get this petition to everyone in your address book and all around the world. This is an international right. Please help us now.

Imagine the look on their faces when we slam down 50,000 names! Be a part of that. Sign the petition HERE and send this all over the world.

Yours sincerely,

Austin Ruse
President
C-FAM
(The only pro-life group working exclusively on UN social policy)

How We Celebrated the Angels' Feast Day

With angel food cake and these pretty pictures to color. The girls say, "Thank you, Auntie!"

After Math

It's not a stretch to say that math isn't Kitten's favorite subject. She works hard, but has always found math to be difficult. I have lots of sympathy for this, as you might expect from an English major.

Tonight, though, Kitten was looking at a clothing catalog that arrived at our house (yes, I signed up to get off catalog's mailing lists, but was told it could take a few "mailing cycles" for the request to be processed. I'm thinking a "mailing cycle" is roughly as long as a campaign season). She was ooohing and ahhing over some pretty turtleneck sweaters. "Are they twenty dollars for two?" she asked me.

"No," I said, pointing to the text of the advertisement. "It says, buy any two, and they're twenty dollars each."

"Hmm. How much are they normally? Oh, it says twenty-five dollars. So if you buy two for forty dollars you've saved ten dollars...a pretty good deal, I think," she mused.

I just shook my head. To think that all this time I was under the impression that numbers were her enemies.

The 777 Club

In a stunning display of bipartisanship, both Democrats and Republicans put their own parties and their own political futures ahead of the country today, failing to iron out the problems with the bailout bill, failing to pass the bill, but not failing to blame each other with bitterness and carefully aged vituperation (with shades of calumny and a note of venom) for the mess.

In other words, it was business as usual:

Democrats and Republicans argued bitterly over who was at fault for the 228-205 vote that torpedoed a compromise bailout plan that would have allowed the Treasury Department to buy up toxic assets from struggling banks.

Lawmakers shouted news of the plummeting Dow as they crowded on the House floor during the roll call, which dragged on for roughly 40 minutes as leaders on both sides scrambled to corral enough of their rank-and-file members to support the deeply unpopular measure.

Ample “no” votes came from both sides of the aisle, but Democratic leaders managed to persuade more than 60 percent of their members to back the measure, while more than two-thirds of Republicans balked at spending so much taxpayer money just before the Nov. 4 elections. [...]

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chairman of the Financial Services Committee and a leading negotiator in crafting the compromise bill, blamed breakaway Republicans for killing the plan.

Frank noted comments by some Republicans who said a floor speech shortly before the vote by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was needlessly partisan and said he had not “computed that level of pettiness” across the aisle.

“Sixty-seven percent of Republicans decided to put political ideology ahead of this nation,” he said. “The numbers of deeply offended Republicans turned out to be the number you would need to defeat the vote.” [...]

But Republicans who voted against the bill objected, saying the measure did not do enough to protect individual investors and bank account holders.

“New York city fat-cats expect Joe Sixpack to suck it up and foot the bill for their excesses. I think not,” said Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas.

Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., said he had three insurmountable problems with the bill: It was too expensive, it rewarded Wall Street firms by guaranteeing private profits with public funds and it did not address an antiquated regulatory system.

“This throws a life jacket to Wall Street, but it doesn’t teach them to swim and prevent this from happening again,” Kingston said.

I would like to believe that the Republicans are taking a principled stand, here--but this is, as the article says, a "deeply unpopular" bill and it is an election year. I would like to believe the Democrats aren't exploiting the situation for political gain, but I can barely type that with a straight face: the Dems want the White House so badly, and if they're going to sell soft socialism to the American public how better to do so than to call it "the Change we need?"

To the Democrats, I'd like to say: Nice try. You've wanted to turn the markets over to the government since those heady days in the sixties back when most of you still had hair and thought the world's problems could be solved with a little peace, love, understanding, and recreational drug use. You'd like to vote yourselves in as head of healthcare, so it's understandable that you'd seize an opportunity like this and run all the way to the bank with it. Unfortunately, your plan only makes sense to fellow travelers and/or those who never stopped using recreational drugs.

To the Republicans, I'd like to say: Nice try. You've been pretending for a long time now that "The Market" (insert golden trumpet fanfare) will always guarantee the economic safety and security of this nation, that free trade which hands everything to foreign economies and punishes our own is really "free," and that government subsidies in the form of huge corporate tax breaks for giant-large-mega-huge multinational corporations which owe America no loyalty and care little whether we rise or fall is an example of "letting the market work," even though all you're really doing is artificially creating a market where small businesses and family-owned concerns can't compete with the big guys. Well, guess what? This is your so-called Market at work. The crash we're seeing is the natural result of letting the big guys do whatever they want while craven opportunists on both sides of the aisle pocket the chump change in the form of campaign contributions these big guys spread when they're in the mood to share the largess--and when they've attached a sufficient quantity of string to it.

We don't have a Congress anymore. We have a little clique of smiling enablers and yes-men who will do whatever it takes--to keep getting elected. We ought to forget about names like "House" and "Senate" and call them, instead, "The 777 Club."

California's Parental Notification Initiative

It looks as though the State of California is poised to pass a ballot initiative that would require the parents of minor girls to be informed before the girls have abortions:

The initiative would require parental notification, not consent. When a girl younger than 18 asks a doctor for an abortion, the doctor must send a letter to her parents. No matter what opposition a parent might have, an abortion can still be performed 48 hours later.

For those who support parental notification, most said they believed parents needed to be involved or parents "have a right to know."

"My heart aches for any woman who has to go through that," said Velma McIntire, 54, of San Jose who participated in the Field Poll and supports parental notification. "I've had friends and relatives who had an abortion at a young age and they are going through so much counseling now. If a mom has gone through that and their daughters are pregnant, they can say, 'You know? Been there, done that.' So I'm real passionate about that."

She also believes the measure might deter teenagers from indulging in risky behavior if they think their parents might find out.

Predictably, Planned Parenthood and voters in Democrat strongholds oppose the measure, despite the fact that it does not stop girls from getting abortions, contains procedures for girls from abusive homes to avoid the reporting of the abortion, and so forth. Pro-life voters would probably agree that though it's worth supporting a measure like this one, such measures are relatively weak in terms of their ability to deter or stop any abortions from happening--but the idea that even one thirteen or fourteen-year-old girl might be talked out of an abortion by her parents is enough to send shivers down the spines of the radical pro-death-ers who just can't get enough of the killing of unborn humans.

It may seem extreme to say that. But how else can we interpret opposition to a common sense measure like this one? An abortion is not something you can "take back." Once it's done, it's done. The child you've killed will stay dead forever, and if, years later, you are no longer a scared fifteen-year-old but a thirty-year-old mother of two, will you be haunted by your living children's eyes as you think about their brother or sister whom you had killed?

And scared fifteen, or sixteen, or seventeen, or thirteen, or fourteen etc. year olds need their parents. They need someone to say to them, "It's okay. I'm disappointed but I still love you. We can help you decide how to take care of this baby, whether you are going to raise him or we are going to raise him or some loving family who yearns for a child is going to raise him. There are lots of good, positive, life-affirming choices we can make together that don't involve you having someone kill your baby, our grandchild." They need the people who gave them life to show them how it's possible to bring new life into the world, and how that new life will always transform us.

No one but a radical pro-death, abortion-always person could possibly oppose a ballot initiative like this one. Sadly, many who favor abortion are far more extreme in their pro-abortion, no choice for life views than they like to admit.

Abortion and Men

Do you remember the old pro-life slogan, "When they say abortion is between a woman and a doctor, they're forgetting someone?" It was often written on posters that showed an unborn baby in utero, and was a simple reminder that it's not the woman's body that's going to be ripped apart, destroyed, killed in an abortion.

One thing I've been thinking about lately, though, is that the posters might have mentioned two someones being forgotten when a woman has an abortion: the baby, of course, but also the baby's father.

Googling things about abortion and men will bring up sites like this one which mentions some ways that abortion hurts men, or this one which contains the text of an article about the emotional toll that abortion can have on a man. There are websites wading into the issue of post-abortive men and the sort of help they might need. So far, there don't appear to be many resources for men who have suffered the pain of the abortion of their child, though.

And there is pain.

Think of it: it is perfectly legal for any woman, married or not, to kill a child without even consulting the child's father. The father has no rights to stop an abortion from happening, even though the law insists that he must pay child support if the woman chooses not to kill the child. Despite the fact that the child is as much his as it is hers, she may kill the baby, and he can't do anything about it.

Sometimes, though, men are caught up in the abortion mentality as much as women are. They consider the pregnancy a "problem" and an abortion the "solution." Only years later does the buried trauma of having participated in the decision to kill their own child resurface, and sometimes when it does marriages fail, relationships shatter, and men who seemed to have it all together fall completely apart.

I think that pro-life organizations need to target men, perhaps to a greater degree than has been done so far. So many times when I read the heartbreaking stories of women in crisis pregnancies who aborted, only to regret it and suffer terribly later, this motif recurs: I wanted our baby. I thought he would want our baby, too. But he wanted me to have an abortion, and threatened to leave me if I didn't have one.

The men who make such threats are sometimes truly dysfunctional and even abusive people. But often they are just as terrified and confused and unsure as the women. They are afraid of commitment, afraid of the future, afraid of what people will think. Abortion seems easy; fatherhood seems mind-bogglingly difficult. And if they're caught up in the irresponsible lifestyle of sex without consequences, the hardest thing, I think, for many men to face in this situation would be the notion that all of that would be about to change forever.

So pro-life men need to give strong witness, about duty and obligation and sacrifice, about love and responsibility, about the rich blessings and joys of commitment and fatherhood, and how the shallow easy life of irresponsible sex and meaningless physical contact is an illusion created in Hell and marketed on Madison Avenue. They need to remind their younger brothers that being a man means taking responsibility for one's actions; only a weak and immature boy runs from his problems, hides, and chants "Make it go away!" until something amusing and distracting comes on TV or pops up on YouTube. If they haven't been living according to the dictates of chastity, and if they have participated in the creation of a new human life, then it's up to them to welcome that life and do whatever it takes to make sure that child will not suffer for his or her father's bad choices.

By making abortion a "women's issue," we're playing right into the notion that fatherhood is irrelevant and that men should be free to have sex without consequences for as long as they want to--if pregnancy occurs, the woman can "deal with it." Abortion is not just a woman's issue, though, and every one of those nearly fifty million dead American babies has left behind a father. And considering the pain a post-abortive man may suffer, many of those fathers have learned in grief and sorrow that there were consequences, after all.

Evil And Cheap

A reader sends along this link:

Be a Part of Defeating South Dakota's Abortion Ban!

With less than two months until Election Day, South Dakotans are neck in neck in the fight of their lives to protect reproductive freedom. Voters will be heading to the polls on November 4th to decide whether to ban virtually all abortions in the state. This is not the first time an abortion ban has appeared on the ballot. As many of you know, two years ago South Dakota voters defeated a similar ban.

The Campaign for Healthy Families needs your help to persuade South Dakotans to vote against the abortion ban. The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota will be sponsoring volunteers to go to South Dakota and talk to voters.

Join us the weekend of October 3rd- 5th in Sioux Falls, South Dakota

We're looking for volunteers who can arrive in Sioux Falls late Friday afternoon. We will phone bank Friday evening, knock on doors, and talk to voters all day Saturday and again on Sunday before traveling back Sunday afternoon (leaving Sioux Falls at 4 p.m.).

Travel, and most meals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner, including vegetarian options) will be provided. There will also be lots of hot chocolate, coffee, and cookies for those hitting the streets and turning the tide in this critical election effort.

I don't know about the rest of you, but if I were selling my soul to the devil to make sure that babies in South Dakota will still be slaughtered on the altar of Choice as an offering to the powers of darkness, if I were participating in such a wicked, hideous, and evil campaign as to go door to door trying to convince other people that baby-killing is some kind of fundamental right and that the murder of the unborn should stay legal in a state I don't even live in, I'd want--literally, now, I'm not swearing--a Hell of a lot more than travel, meals, and hot chocolate and cookies.

It profits a man nothing if he gain the whole world and loses his soul; it's pretty darned stupid to trade one's immortal soul for a few snacks and a trip to South Dakota.

Not Up For Debate

I watched tonight's presidential debate. I'm not going to talk much about it, for fear of violating the Geneva Convention's prohibitions on torture; surely the deliberate infliction of a painful-yet-soporific state qualifies as torture, doesn't it?

Technology is sometimes a wonderful thing, but I'm starting to think that the various "liveblogging" efforts that go on when something like tonight's event happens are doing to television what television did to radio, and what radio did to newspapers. This is especially noticeable when you are talking about a political event, like a campaign speech or a debate.

Once, in order to hear a politician speak, you had to go where he was speaking. Only then could you see any hesitation, hear any oddities about his voice, see whether he was perspiring, judge his image as well as his words. If you couldn't go in person to such an event, you had to learn about the candidate in the newspapers; you had to read the speeches in crisp black and white, and you wouldn't hear them at all. The politicians knew that, and they spoke with eloquent flourishes that would sound good to the listener but also to the ones who only read the words.

When the radio was invented and became popular you could actually hear these speeches. If I had to guess, I'd say that the biggest change was that speeches, or debates, became somewhat shorter. When a crowd gathered to hear a politician in the old days, the length of the speech and the stamina of the one making it were part of the entertainment. Even at Gettysburg the principle event of the day was not Lincoln's now famous Gettysburg Address, but the two hour speech given by Edward Everett just before, which, according to various historical accounts, was very well-received by the crowd.

But on the radio, a two-hour speech meant that the listener had approximately one hour, fifty-nine minutes and thirty-eight seconds to change the channel; if the speech wasn't shorter than that, if it wasn't interesting, if it wasn't delivered in a crisp, attention-getting way, if there wasn't some likelihood of amusement, then nobody would listen, with the possible exception of the most fiercely partisan of each candidate's supporters.

Even then, though, the words were still important. When you are hearing a speech you only have the words to focus on, and you can pay close attention to what is being said. The words still need substance.

Television changed the game yet again, and that, too, made a difference. Now we could see, from the comfort of our own homes, whether "our" candidate looked and spoke like a confident man of the people, or like an arrogant buffoon who shouldn't be trusted to run a used car lot, let alone a nation. Suddenly the words didn't matter as much; smooth phrases delivered with a strong gesture and a bright smile would get more political credit than hesitant sentences delivered with a furtive glance and a frown--even if the hesitant sentences ended up being right about the policy or issue in question, and the confident ones just dead wrong.

And the trend toward liveblogging or Twittering or texting or otherwise commenting in, or near, real-time on these television debates has the potential to make changes, as well. Now, instead of worrying about how they look or what they say, what image they project or what soundbite will be played in an endless loop on CNN, the candidates have to come up with such things as "YouTube shots" or "combox fodder" for the bloggers and typing heads of the new media. Which means that watching the debates will seem increasingly like a foolish and painful waste of time--why put yourself through the agony of viewing ninety minutes of meaningless posturing and sentences which express no particular thought except to cram as many talking points as possible into Jim Lehrer's idea of two minutes, when you can painlessly scan a couple of your favorite blogs later to see what your favorite writers thought of it all, and maybe read a transcript?

Hmm. Reading the speech or debate transcript, along with a journalist's comments. Perhaps we've come full circle.

Sadly, though, we haven't, because the new technology will probably make people's attention spans even shorter, so that before long debates will be conducted on wireless keyboards, and will consist of exchanges like this:

Dude.



Dude?



Dude...



Dude!



Dude, dude, dude.



Duuuuude...

Then again, maybe that would be an improvement over the current reality of campaign events like speeches and debates. At least the torture would end well before the ninety-minute mark.

Religion and Politics

Is the demand that pastors not discuss or endorse specific candidates from the pulpit a reasonable expectation given churches' tax exempt status, or an unlawful intrusion into the rights of free speech and freedom of religion? This could get interesting:

During sermons this Sunday, some 35 pastors across the country will tell their congregations which presidential candidate they should vote for, "according to the Scriptures."

Their endorsements represent a direct challenge to federal tax law, which prohibits tax-exempt organizations from engaging in partisan political activity.

The clergy have embraced that risk, hoping their actions will trigger an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service, which would then enable a Christian legal advocacy group to take the IRS to court and challenge the constitutionality of the ban.

The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a conservative legal group based in Arizona, recruited the pastors for "Pulpit Freedom Sunday" to press their claim that the IRS tax code violates the free speech of religious leaders.

"I have a First Amendment right to say whatever I want to say, and I've never thought it was appropriate that as a pastor I could not share my political concerns with the congregation," says the Rev. Gus Booth, pastor at Warroad Community Church in Warroad, Minn.

Mr. Booth will endorse Sen. John McCain on Sunday, and has already told his congregation that as Christians, they could not vote for Sen. Barack Obama due to his position on abortion.

I think that this is a generally a good thing for these pastors to be doing, and I'd support it even if they weren't endorsing McCain--thought the endorsement of Democrats by pastors goes on all the time, and nobody talks about removing the tax-exempt status of the pastors who mix religion and politics and come up with a decidedly leftist brew. Pastors and other religious leaders shouldn't have to censor themselves when they are preaching; if a candidate's position on moral issues is clearly opposed to the church's teachings, the pastor should feel free to say so.

That said, aside from issues with direct moral ramifications I don't think pastors or priests or ministers or rabbis should be overly concerned with politics in their preaching. I can't imagine St. Paul in his various epistles going off on a several-page tangent about the Roman Empire's acquisition of some new territory, or loss of some other; it would have been out of place, and it still would be. Those who preach the Gospel should be watchful in regard to the world, but not unduly concerned with purely worldly matters; the temptation to abuse the power of the Cross for temporal gain, especially political gain, is hardly a new phenomenon.

Still, in treading with due caution and for serious reasons into the realm of the political, I'd rather trust religious leaders than secular ones. A religious leader who finds that he has foolishly endorsed a candidate not worthy of endorsement can always repent; a government which takes it upon itself to censor religious expression may not stop at the political, but may, indeed, reach out to stifle that call to moral correction contained in speech against abortion, contraception, homosexual activity, same-sex marriage, and the like until the Gospel may no longer be preached without being muzzled.

Something to Think About

It's looking more and more like harvesting embryonic stem cells was never necessary:

Harvard scientists yesterday reported a new way to turn adult cells into stem cells, without using harmful viruses that can cause cancer.

Using a type of virus employed in gene therapy to deliver genes to mouse cells, researchers were able to transform adult cells into embryonic-like stem cells - capable of developing into any cell in the body. That virus had not previously been used in stem cell production.

"A consequence of this is that you can now make mouse and human [stem] cells that are safer. They don't have genetic alterations, which in mouse models has been shown to be harmful, and cause cancer," said senior author Konrad Hochedlinger of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University.

The work is the most recent in a flurry of discoveries aimed at advancing development of induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, which are seen as an alternative to the stem cells harvested from human embryos. Japanese researchers first reported two years ago that it was possible to create such cells by infecting adult cells with a cocktail of viruses carrying genes.

Of course, the scientists would still like to play with--and destroy--human embryos, because they stubbornly cling to their faith-based notion that these cells will magically cure disease and be much stronger and safer than the adult-cell and ethically acceptable alternative. Poor scientists--I can't imagine having such blind faith in something for which there is absolutely no evidence.

But there's never been a good reason to destroy some lives in order to save others. And it looks as though there was never any need for scientists to kill human embryos in their quest for cures to diseases. So perhaps at some point during the next president's tenure the question of using federal funds for ESCR will be a moot question, made outdated by the strides made in adult stem cell research. Of course, if Obama is the next president, the fact that embryonic stem cells aren't needed won't stop him from spending your money and mine to kill these helpless tiny humans in the name of science.

Let Them Rent What??

I apologize for not getting to this sooner; I promised yesterday to blog about the financial crisis a bit more, but the day slipped away from me before I could do so.

Reader John Jensen brought to my attention this article from First Things in which R.R. Reno takes the position that when it comes to greed, we're all guilty. Spiritually speaking, I'm sure that's true for most of us; few of us are really content with what we have, and the prospect of making more money than we deserve to with little or no effort on our parts is something most of us would find alluring.

Still, I couldn't really agree with much of the article, which seems to posit a moral equivalency between the average homeowner and the banks and financial institutions who bent the rules and enticed some, even many, people to buy more homes than they could afford--or to buy homes in the first place when they weren't really qualified. Reno seems to think of the banks as crack dealers and the people buying houses as their user customers; or perhaps of homeowners as being willing to "prostitute" their home mortgages to get easy money and thus being as guilty as pimps for selling what wasn't theirs to eager banks who got all the pleasure of the loan fees with none of the risks associated with long term servicing. (Ahem, Patrick Archbold, that's as close as I'm getting to the phrase employed in the combox yesterday.)

Consider this section:

But that’s not what folks mean when they denounce Wall Street greed. Instead, they are suggesting a juxtaposition. Main Street, they imply, is somehow modestly and virtuously self-interested, while Wall Street is a place of arrogance that guides an insatiable, perverse desire for money. In other words, it’s not people like me who are responsible for the mess. It’s all the fault of moral monsters who feed on innocent lambs.

This reaction is both implausible and self-serving. By my reckoning, one finds plenty of blind greed on Main Street. What could possibly motivate a person to buy a lottery ticket other than a greedy desire for a payoff that any rational calculation would show laughably unlikely? Who doesn’t know someone who bragged on and on about how much his or her house was worth during the recent go-go years of the housing bubble? Yes, children, there is great deal of panting after profits in Anywhere, USA.

And not just greed, but also stupidity. Anyone who bought a house in the last two years was as stupid as the Bear Stearns traders who bought and held securities backed by sub-prime mortgages, which means very stupid. Buy a house in Florida for $600,000 with 5 percent down in 2006, and you’re pretty much in the same sinking boat. What could have possibly motivated such a stupid purchase? Are rentals unavailable? Did you really believe that house prices would continue to go up at two and three times the rate of increase of family incomes?

We don’t need a degree in psychology in order to know why people bought houses at the peak of the market. The dollar signs clouded vision. The go-go hype from the real estate agents and media and friends who made tons of money buying and selling houses was overwhelming. Anyway, you gotta live somewhere, and the government lets you deduct the interest payments. Banks were intensely eager to give you the money. “And what the heck,” we tell ourselves, “it can’t ever really go down too much, because there are too many home owners like me for the government to let it all go to hell.”

There's a sort of "Let Them Rent Crap!" (if the ghost of Marie Antoinette will forgive me) about this whole section. Some people I know got married or had kids in the last two years--of course they bought a house. Especially the ones with kids. Do you know how hard it can be to rent anything that isn't a slum house when you have kids? Depending on where you live, it can be well-nigh impossible. And as housing prices went up and up and up, guess what? So did rents.

The real problem is that people used to qualify for a home mortgage on one income (okay, well, the real problem is that people used to be able to buy or build a home without a mortgage in the first place because a house didn't take thirty years to pay for, but we'd be going back quite a ways to talk about that). But since more and more people qualified for homes on double incomes, houses--even basic starter homes--could, and did, get more and more expensive. Eventually incomes were going to stagnate, as they've been doing for the past several years, and suddenly the house that was easily affordable became an albatross around the neck for too many homeowners--and this is before we start talking about ARMs and "creative" financing.

So the house you once could afford easily on two incomes you couldn't buy--but you still needed a three-bedroom house because you had kids. So you started to look at these creative ways to buy a house, and they looked pretty good, and you didn't think there was much risk, and your company owed you a raise anyway...

...but you didn't get the raise, and the cost of living went up, and the balloon rate started to balloon...

And you add in the single income families struggling to pay for a tiny house in a bad neighborhood under much the same conditions, and the people who got sent by their corporate overlords to a place where houses cost 40% more than they did where you came from (though the overlords generously gave you a 2.3% salary increase to offset things) and gas prices started to go through the roof and your commute was twice as long as it used to be because the only house you could afford was forty-five minutes away from work on a good traffic day, and....

Where's the greed in all that? Where are the families thinking they'd cash in and make easy money on the place they called "Home?"

I don't see it. Maybe for a tiny handful of investment-property-minded types, this was the case. But most people didn't see the mortgage market as an opportunity to get rich quick, just a bit of a lifeline in an already-brutal economy where jobs have disappeared into the black hole of outsourcing and where living in a home at all was starting to seem like an impossibly greedy dream.

I don't blame Main Street, because the thing about Main Street is that its people want to keep living there. They're not the ones who wanted to gut the neighborhood, sell all the valuables, and turn the rest into a strip mall. They never are.

In the Name of Choice

It's hard to imagine that this is true, but here it is:

HARTFORD, Conn. - Attorneys general from 13 states on Wednesday protested a proposed Bush administration rule that would give stronger job protections to doctors and other health care workers who refuse to participate in abortions because of religious or moral objections.

In a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services, the states said the rule is too vague in defining abortion, and may be interpreted to include dispensing birth control.

"It threatens to drastically discourage and even deter a woman's right to choose," Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said. "This proposed rule unconscionably puts personal agendas before patient care ... failing even to acknowledge the rights of rape victims and others to access birth control and related vital health services."

Other states joining Connecticut in protesting the rule are Arizona, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah and Vermont.

Do you get this, my fellow Catholic Americans? Do you hear what they're saying, my fellow pro-life Christian Americans? Are you listening, my fellow pro-life Americans who are Jewish or Muslim or from other faiths that strongly oppose the murder of the unborn? Our deeply held, centuries-old, fervent and rooted religious beliefs are being labeled "personal agendas" by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. And we're being put on notice that it is unconscionable for us to expect that these beliefs will be respected and that we, especially any of us who happen to work in a medical field, have the right to refuse to participate in the murder of the unborn.

When an unjust law is passed, soon that unjust law is the only law. All other laws, all other rights, all other freedoms shrivel into nothingness; the unjust law is a Medusa's head that turns reasonable objection and the expect for that objection to be accommodated into stone.

Our right to choose not to kill unborn humans is being taken away from us. Our right to expect that among our medical professionals there are some who will not condone or participate in the killing of unborn humans is being taken away from us. Our right, if we have any connection to the medical profession--and so many Catholics and Christians and other pro-life Americans do--to refuse entirely to facilitate the murder of innocent unborn humans is being taken away from us. Soon, it will be impossible to be a doctor or a nurse or a pharmacist in the United States of America unless you are a bloodthirsty abortion enthusiast. And it is being done in the name of "Choice."

It couldn't possibly be more ironic than that, because what we're talking about is removing the right to choose. Doctors won't have the right to choose whether or not they want to kill unborn humans. Nurses won't have the right to choose whether or not they want to help in the killing of unborn humans. Other hospital workers also lose their right to choose whether or not to be associated with the abortion butchers who like to be called "Doctor" as they perform their works of unadulterated evil. Pharmacists lose the right to choose to ask someone else to fill an abortifacient "morning after" prescription. Everyone loses the right to choose life under the kind of scenario the attorneys general of a coven of states would like to see passed.

And under Barack Obama, under the Freedom of Choice Act, this scenario is exactly what we get.

Pray for America. Pray that the right to choose LIFE will remain available to all who oppose the culture of death, especially our medical professionals.

Without Consequences

I can't pretend to understand all of what is going on in the financial crisis that is threatening our nation. My math brain is limited at the best of times, and it doesn't take long, when I'm reading about high finance, before my eyes glaze and I start rereading sentences over and over in a futile attempt to understand the concepts behind the quotes and charts and numbers.

But I do know that St. Paul was the first to warn Christians that the love of money was the root of all evil. And I do know that our speculative way of making money out of nothing as Wall Street is wont to do is not always a wise or sustainable way to conduct ourselves.

The bad mortgages which appear to be at the root of this crisis show how the system may be exploited: take something which is usually a sound investment, change the rules so that the people taking the mortgages are no longer reasonably expected to be able to repay them, continue to sell the unsound mortgages as if they were the same sound investment they always were, collect an obscene amount of profit, and leave someone else holding the bag and screaming to Congress for relief. No matter what Congress does or does not do, the people who unethically and immorally exploited the weakness in our financial system and grew extremely wealthy are not the ones who will be punished. They got theirs, after all. They made the "smart" moves, financially speaking. They raked in the cash. And now that the whole system is tottering on the rotten pillars of these unsound investments masquerading as sound ones, they return to the scene with their hands outstretched, promising to fix things for good, so long as they get more money from the taxpayers and can count on legislative support from our enablers and charlatans in public office.

It could be argued that the biggest flaw in the communist system of government was that communism was always godless communism; the unjust confiscation by the government of private property was part and parcel of the way an atheistic system was going to work. But if that is (possibly) true, it may be equally true that the biggest flaw and danger in capitalism is that here in America it has become godless capitalism, or at the very least secular materialistic capitalism.

Why does that matter? Why would capitalism work among a God-fearing people, and fail to work among a people who accept no reality aside from the material universe?

I think this is true because a capitalist economy, while not a moral evil like a communist system, is nevertheless not a morally good economic system; I'm not sure given our fallen world whether there can be a truly morally good system outside of a voluntary community structure like a monastery or convent. That is, that it is possible to exploit capitalist principles cynically and unjustly, and to create wealth at the expense of the poor, or by ignoring the costs to the public, to taxpayers, to the environment etc. of one's means of making capital, and so forth. A person who believes in God and wishes to treat people justly will be a judicious capitalist, putting his money only where he can be sure his values are reflected, and refusing to invest in or fund any enterprises which are shady or which cause harm to the people, or which are exploitative by nature.

But when a person is indifferent about God, does not believe in Him, or claims belief without actually seeking to live in a manner befitting a believer, he is less likely to care about the ethical ramifications of his investing so long as his investments are growing his wealth at a rate that, however impossibly large, is satisfactory to him; moreover, he will continue to demand that same rate of return even when economic conditions no longer make that rate of return a realistic expectation, at which point he may be tempted to participate in some temporary investments which he knows may well be unsound in the long run, but which he hopes to unload at a profit long before the crash comes. For this type of person, it's a dog-eat-dog world, and his own bottom line is the only thing that counts; the total devastation of large parts of the financial industry which looms may indeed concern him somewhat in the abstract, but such abstract concerns are still centered around his own profits, and so long as he can figure out a way to keep making money once the bottom drops out of the market he will keep playing the game.

When the majority of investors are more like the second person I described than the first, when few people concern themselves with questions like "right" or "wrong," "good" or "evil" and the like, when everyone involved puts his or her own self-interest ahead of notions like just and reasonable profit or avoidance of the shady and underhanded, then you have a situation where enough people can act in an unconscionable way to pillage and plunder and walk away from the smoking ruins (or, as I said above, return in emergency gear demanding money to help rebuild). Many innocent people have been caught up in this, and don't bear the ethical responsibility, but the crisis couldn't have happened in the first place without a "me-first" mentality and a love of money so all-encompassing that love of neighbor was drowned out in the cacophony of the closing bell.

In many ways, this crisis reminds me of another crisis of morality, the crisis many refer to as that which was brought about by a "sex without consequences" mentality which underpinned the so-called sexual revolution. That crisis, too, threw aside age-old notions of honor, commitment, honesty, integrity, and morality in favor of shameless temporary physical contact with no thought whatsoever for the moral and emotional damage being done; the innocent, the children especially, suffered all the consequences their parents thought they could avoid by avoiding the old notions of marriage and family, which were not avoided at all, but only delayed.

And so it is with the financial crisis: the quick gratification of instant wealth was a siren whose song couldn't be ignored, and the allure of "wealth without consequences" became a powerful temptation to far too many people. But there are always consequences to our bad actions. It may be that the innocent will suffer more than the guilty, or that the consequences will be delayed by as much as a whole generation--yet sooner or later, the bill for sin will come due, and will cost far more than we ever gained from our sinful actions.

Forty Days for Life

Today marks the beginning of the Forty Days for Life campaign. I encourage everyone to visit the website, see what is happening in your area, and consider joining either with your presence, or with your prayers and fasting, for the purpose of ending abortion in America.

In addition to praying for many lives to be saved and for many to turn away from abortion over these next 40 days (today till November 2) I'm going to write at least one blog post per day on the topic of abortion and respect for human life from now until November 2.

I'd like to begin by taking a look at the word "choice."

Yesterday, while doing some research on Barack Obama's positions and on NARAL's endorsement of him, I visited NARAL's website. I'll be honest: I said a quick prayer before doing so; I firmly believe that demonic forces are at work in the area of abortion and the destruction of innocent human life, and I didn't want to enter a site full of people who think killing unborn humans is just dandy without some spiritual protection.

I gathered the facts I needed and then left, deciding against linking to them in my post. But I noticed something which I've noticed before: they almost seem to worship the word "choice," considering how often they use it.

Abortion isn't "abortion;" it's choice. Pro-lifers aren't "pro-life," according to NARAL; they're antichoicers. Doctors and nurses who choose based on moral and ethical standards not to train for, provide, or refer for abortions aren't making a respectable ethical decision, in NARAL's world; they're simply interfering with women's choices. And on and on it goes.

This is not new, of course. But it's pretty astonishing when you visit an organization whose initials used to stand for "National Abortion Rights Action League" and realize that they can't even bring themselves, most of the time, to use the word "abortion."

The sad thing is that the word "choice" doesn't even remotely mean what they think it does. Choice, or the act of choosing, implies a selection between two options; in the moral sense, when one option is morally good or even morally neutral, but the other option is actually evil, then the only legitimate choice is to choose the good or neutral option and turn away from and reject the evil one.

Every abortion is a choice for death. Every abortion is a choice on the part of a woman that her child must die, be ripped from her womb, perish without ever seeing the light of day. It is a profoundly evil choice that poisons all who are affected by it.

Sadly, many women make this choice in favor of evil and death without really knowing what they are doing. They buy into the lies of abortionists and abortion-enthusiasts like NARAL or Planned Parenthood who tell them than they are not really choosing to kill, that the life inside them isn't really a life, that the child they are destroying is not really a human worth protecting but a problem to be solved, even if the solution is the execution of the innocent for the "crime" of existence. Motivated by shame or panic or fear, they turn to abortion and are rushed through the process before they ever have the chance to change their minds; real choice, in terms of knowing all their options, being given information about the child's level of development, and having a chance for a waiting period that might make them change their minds is denied to many women--and will be denied to all women if Barack Obama has his way.

Because God chose in His goodness to give us, His creatures, free will, we always have a choice between good and evil. But He is clear: there are consequences for choosing evil, and no one may ever be said to have a right to do so. As He says to us in His Word:

"I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live,

by loving the LORD, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him. For that will mean life for you, a long life for you to live on the land which the LORD swore he would give to your fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." (Deuteronomy 30: 19-20)

God is just. If we choose death, whether for our own children or for those of other women, then He will give to us what we have chosen: eternal death. There is no place in the soul for evil choices to flourish without killing that promise of eternal life to which we are all called. Those who make this evil choice, and those who aid and abet them by their work like the people at NARAL do, must repent sincerely of their evil actions and turn to God while there is still time; for even if they live a long, comfortable, and seemingly prosperous life, they will still one day stand before the Almighty and be asked to account for themselves; and what horror and anguish then, for those who worshiped the false god of death they decided to call "choice."

More Moral Questions About Voting

In recent days Catholic bloggers, myself included, have been tackling the question as to whether a Catholic may support John McCain to the extent of voting for him. This question seems to hinge on whether one believes that McCain's support for ESCR creates a moral mandate for a Catholic to avoid voting for him, lest the Catholic voter commit an act of mediate remote material cooperation with intrinsic evil in the absence of proportionate reasons.

My position on this matter is that I don't think it can be said absolutely and without fear of refutation that there are no proportionate reasons which would make a vote for McCain morally acceptable. I think that this is where the debate tends to get stuck, because proving this lack of proportionality beyond the shadow of a doubt seems to be elusive. Some may end up convinced that this lack of proportionality indeed exists and mandates a vote for a third-party candidate or no one at all, while others may remain convinced that the need to keep Obama from taking office and beginning his term by keeping his promise to resurrect the horrific "Freedom of Choice Act" which would increase the number of abortions in America.

I respect both notions, and find sympathy with both viewpoints. But it can be disheartening to remember that many of our fellow Catholics aren't worried at all about the morality of voting for McCain, because they intend to vote for Obama. Doug Kmiec's new book, titled Can a Catholic Support Him? is talking about Obama, not McCain; Kmiec is currently traveling the country as part of Obama's "faith tour," an effort to convince religious people in battleground states that it's morally fine to vote for the most rabidly pro-abortion and even pro-infanticide candidate ever to run for the presidency.

In the article above Deacon Keith Fournier argues against Kmiec's flawed position in favor of Obama. Kmiec responded, and his response was also printed here. I'd like to take a look at one section of it; responding to a notion that he is ignoring what various spiritual leaders have said Kmiec replies:

Not so, I have relied upon these fine teachers of the faith in order to undertake the proper inquiry into whether there is proportionate reason allowing the choice of a candidate who has an alternative way of promoting human life other than a thus far futile, and in any event, insufficient effort to criminalize some, but not all, abortion practice.

But Kmiec has apparently missed this recent report which says that abortion rates are at a 30-year low, or this one which highlights the drop in teen abortion rates precisely because of what he calls a "thus far futile, and in any event, insufficient effort to criminalize some, but not all, abortion practice..."

The bald truth is that abortion rates will increase under a President Obama. He plans to tear down all of the laws that have successfully been passed which have incrementally reduced abortions in some states; he has always opposed parental involvement laws which might arguably be the biggest reason for the drop in abortion rates that we see at present; he plans to create a culture where opponents of abortion might face federal fines and even prison time for peacefully protesting abortion; he plans to elevate judges to the Supreme Court who will ride roughshod over abortion opposition, and entrench the pro-death position so firmly and irrevocably in our laws that nothing but a collapse of the Republic itself will undo it.

There is, in my mind, no justification whatsoever for a Catholic to cast a vote in favor of Barack Obama. If proportionate reasons are difficult to find for Catholics to vote for the pro-ESCR McCain, I can't even imagine what possible proportionate reasons could exist that would allow a Catholic to vote in good conscience for the most pro-abortion candidate since the advent of legal abortion on demand in America. I've heard people try to justify such a vote on the grounds that it is imperative that we end our involvement in Iraq (a position I agree with), but given that Obama's former adviser, Samantha Power, said that her candidate couldn't be held to his initial timeline I wonder on what optimistic grounds people think Obama will be more competent in getting us out of the Middle East than McCain will be? So on mere hopeful speculation, some Catholics are apparently willing to vote for and support a man who doesn't think a woman's right to an abortion ends with the birth of the baby.

At least when I'm arguing with Mark Shea or Zippy or others over whether a Catholic might or might not vote for McCain without committing a sin, I have some idea where they're coming from. The Catholics who want to support Obama are Catholics I find impossible to understand.

Ten Things I Learned While Cleaning Out My Kitchen

Sorry for the late blogging today; I'm finally returning to my decluttering efforts, which were interrupted by the blazing enervating relentless heat we call summer here in Texas.

I began with my kitchen. I'd love to say that it's all done now, but I can't even type that with a straight face; I've run into dinner hour and will have to quit--probably until tomorrow, since the laundry isn't going to fold itself, more's the pity.

Still, it was a productive hour or so. And I learned some things, ten of which I'm sharing:

Ten Things I Learned While Cleaning Out My Kitchen:

1. Just because your microwave oven broke months ago and you decided you'd rather live without one doesn't mean you remembered to find and throw away that last half-used package of microwave popcorn.

2. The last tiny bit of dried bulk pinto beans you forgot to use up will look pretty dusty--considering that according to the label you purchased them in 2005.

3. No matter how many boxes of cereal you currently have on hand, at least two of them will be at least 99.99275% empty. Nobody ever wants to throw away, or use up, that last 0.00725% of the cereal.

4. Canned goods will be plentiful to the point of frustration until or unless some emergency occurs that causes you to need them; at this point, you will suddenly have only two cans of tomatoes and a can of pumpkin on your shelves.

5. If the shelf where you usually keep plastic wrap and/or waxed paper is unaccountably empty, both you and your husband will keep buying both plastic wrap and waxed paper, until you clean out your cabinet and realize that all the plastic wrap is hiding under that shelf behind the seldom-used waffle maker--and now you have enough plastic wrap and waxed paper to keep Alton Brown or Rachel Ray supplied for a couple of months.

6. You will also find all the "good" hot pads and oven mitts hiding down there because the drawer they're supposed to be in keeps dumping them into the cabinet below, which is why whenever you have a really hot dish coming out of the oven all you can find is a rather thin Christmas snowman-shaped mitt that wouldn't be enough to allow you to touch the oven door safely let alone remove the dish without burning yourself.

7. There was some good, sane, comprehensible reason for you to save a box of pasta that had only three lasagna noodles left in it. Just because you can't imagine what that reason was or what it possibly could have been doesn't mean you didn't have one.

8. If you keep a plastic pretzel container because it will be such a good place to store brown rice, don't be surprised when you discover it nearly empty shoved toward the back of the cabinet shelf just because the brand of brown rice you buy started being sold in plastic containers instead of easily ripped bags (smart move, rice sellers!).

9. It is possible to own a "hot pad sleeve" for a fajita pan handle and not actually own a fajita pan.

10. If you're very good and clean out an entire cabinet or so, you may discover that you forgot about a bag of chocolate chip cookie mix that's still perfectly good to use! :)

Tomorrow I tackle the pantry. Or, as I like to think of it, the "Land of Ten Thousand Lidless Plastic Food Containers." Maybe I'll learn a few more things!

Faint Praise

From the "Strange Bedfellows file" comes this report of Bill Clinton praising Sarah Palin, albeit backhandedly:

Speaking to reporters before his Clinton Global Initiative meeting, the former president described Palin's appeal by adding, "People look at her, and they say, 'All those kids. Something that happens in everybody's family. I'm glad she loves her daughter and she's not ashamed of her. Glad that girl's going around with her boyfriend. Glad they're going to get married.'"

Clinton said voters would think, "I like that little Down syndrome kid. One of them lives down the street. They're wonderful children. They're wonderful people. And I like the idea that this guy does those long-distance races. Stayed in the race for 500 miles with a broken arm. My kind of guy."

Palin, the governor of Alaska, became an overnight star when Republican presidential candidate John McCain tapped her for his running mate. Her family, including her Down syndrome baby, Trig, her pregnant 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, and her husband, Todd, four-time winner of the 2,000-mile Iron Dog snowmobile race, have garnered intense media interest.

"I get this," Clinton said. "My view is ... why say, ever, anything bad about a person? Why don't we like them and celebrate them and be happy for her elevation to the ticket? And just say that she was a good choice for him and we disagree with them?"

There's an art to putting one hand on the shoulder of your enemy while stabbing him in the back with the other; it's an art at which former president Bill Clinton excelled, frankly. My favorite poet would have called this an instance of damning someone with faint praise; in one fell swoop (nodding at another favorite poet) Clinton manages to dismiss Sarah Palin as a political trick while also dissing those voters too simple and naive to see through the charade. Since nobody wants to own up to being a rube, this is an effective bit of work on Bill's part; he's like the smiling neighbor in the front row of the magician's show at a traveling carnival, gently pointing out the wires and the misdirection to the simple fools who thought they were really seeing something.

If every Democrat were following Bill's lead, the Republicans might have something to worry about. But the Democrats so far continue to miss the mark in their extreme hatred for Sarah Palin and the normalcy she represents, too blind to understand that the voters Bill is gently calling dupes are the ones that the rest of them are attacking.

Parental Involvement Laws Work

What happens when parental involvement laws, which require a minor seeking an abortion to tell her parents first, are passed? Let's see:

The study for the Family Research Council was conducted by Michael New, a University of Alabama political science professor and senior FRC fellow. And it comes as abortion, as well as the makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court, has emerged as a more prominent campaign issue since the vice presidential nomination of Republican Sarah Palin, who opposes the procedure even in cases of rape and incest. [...]

New analyzed national data from 1985 to 1999, compared the types of state parental involvement laws, and attempted to assess their effect on abortion rates. In the period studied, the overall abortion rate fell 50 percent, New says, suggesting that "parental involvement laws are an important causal factor" in the decline. He says his most dramatic finding was the drop in the rate of abortions among minor girls. Between 1985 and 1999, the abortion rate for girls between the ages of 13 and 17 dropped from 13.5 for every 1,000 girls, to 6.5 per 1,000.

Thirty-six states currently have parental involvement laws, ranging from requiring minor girls contemplating an abortion to notify a parent, to compelling them to obtain consent from both parents - currently the law in three states. The states with the most stringent consent requirements, New says, have been the "most effective in reducing abortion rates among minors."

Parental involvement laws work. They enjoy support even among some Americans who describe themselves as "pro-choice." Yet Barack Obama voted "No" to prohibit minors from crossing state lines for abortion and he voted against notifying parents of minors who get out-of-state abortions. Illinois has a parental notification law, yet this law, which was passed in 1984, has never been enforced and continues to be held up in court. So in Illinois a pregnant thirteen-year-old girl, whose pregnancy is proof of statutory rape under Illinois law, can get an abortion without her parents even knowing about it--yet this same thirteen-year-old Illinois girl cannot get a piercing without written permission from her parents, or a tattoo at all!

It is absolutely insane for girls to be put at risk of infection and even death from an abortion without their parents even knowing they've had one. It's bad enough that they're being encouraged to engage in sexual behavior from the time they hit puberty onward; it's bad enough that they're indoctrinated to believe that killing their own child is no big deal and that "better" birth control will "solve" this problem in the future. But the fact that their parents are being shut out at a time when these troubled and confused young women need them the most, and are being sacrificed on the altar of Sex Without Consequences as the price we pay for so-called adult liberty to engage in every manner of temporary, meaningless physical contact that Planned Parenthood can dredge up from the depth of their perverse and foul imaginations and force into the unresisting minds of pure and innocent children is beyond outrageous.

Parents should have a right to be informed when their minor daughters are pregnant and are considering an abortion. Most Americans would agree with this, but not Barack Obama. The fact that parental involvement laws work to reduce abortions is terrifying to the lackeys of Planned Parenthood; every time abortion rates drop, Planned Parenthood and the other purveyors of death lose serious amounts of money, money which then can't flow freely into the coffers of their accomplices in Washington.

Parental involvement laws don't infringe at all on the so-called "right to choose," yet the rabidly pro-abort legislators and politicians oppose them just the same. Abortion is big business; the merchants of death don't want any loving families and welcomed (if early) grandchildren eating away at their profits. And Planned Parenthood's pocket-legislators know only too well that if they want the campaign dollars to keep rolling in, they'd better oppose such common-sense abortion-reduction measures as well.

Looking for God on Wall Street

The recent and continuing gloom among America's financial movers and shakers has led some of them to turn their backs on Mammon and seek a different spiritual reality:

Religious leaders said attendance was up at lunchtime meetings in New York's financial district last week, with many more people in business attire than usual.

That is hardly surprising, said Reverend Mark Bozzuti-Jones of Trinity Church Wall Street, given that people don't know if their employers will survive from one day to the next.

"The economic financial crisis is a reminder that we cannot put our faith in riches, that we cannot put our faith in money," Bozzuti-Jones said in his sermon at lunchtime on Friday, which he devoted to coping with the financial crisis. [...]

"People are just sitting there, praying or crying and definitely exhausted. There has definitely been an increase in the number of people who have come in," he said in his office after the service.

The church was putting on special workshops and seminars over the next few weeks including "Coping with stress in an uncertain time" and "Navigating career transitions."

While I would never raise an eyebrow at anyone's sincere desire to find God in the midst of crisis, I can't help but think of the parable of the sower when I read stories like these.

It's a human response to want God's comfort in times of distress. But the rush to church in the midst of disaster is sometimes a bit like what happened when the seeds fell on rocky ground; the seeds sprang up at once, but their roots could not go deep enough to sustain them, and they were scorched and withered by the sun.

The impulse to go to church during hard times--but never at any other time--is like this. It isn't a deep or rooted faith, but a mere human need for comfort, that prompts this impulse, and unless a deeper faith can supplant the relatively shallow one this faith will not endure during the good times.

Because while hardships and tragedies can test our faith, and while depth of suffering sometimes leads people to give up on God, it is one of the mysteries of life that the opposite is often true: that those who suffer, and endure tragedy, and accept tribulation at the hands of the Lord often have the deepest roots of faith; and many a man has fallen away from the religious habits and practices of his youth because times are good, and money is plentiful, and pride and self-centeredness lead him to believe that all the good things in his life are solely his own doing. Did he not make wise and judicious investments? Did he not plan his future, build his grain silos, capitalize on every opportunity, accept a certain amount of careful risk all for the increase of his own financial position? Has he not reached this pinnacle of wealth and material success on his own, with no help from anyone, and certainly not from a God he has almost come to despise as a kind of mythical excuse for weakness and carelessness on the part of those who haven't reached a similar level of success?

So when Wall Street falters, and fortunes are lost in a moment, and even the wisest and most careful of investments begin to look like foolish speculation, it's a good sign that some of those affected first by this reality will turn to God--a good sign, but not a great one. For as it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, it's also much, much easier for rich men to seek this Kingdom when their own kingdom is crumbling around them, and when the enemy is at the gate; but for a truly miraculous event, the men of Wall Street would have to be looking for God in the midst of plenty, and seeking Him while their own kingdoms of money and power were perfectly intact, perfectly placid, and perfectly capable of meeting all of their material needs.

Happy Birthday, Little Bro!

I would like to take this opportunity to wish my youngest brother a very happy birthday!

I hope when I called earlier this evening that you were out celebrating and having a terrific time. We all love you and wish you'd eat some extra cake for us since we can't be there to share it with you.

Happy birthday with love!

The Breakfast of Chumps

I've really been enjoying the "Eat This, Not That" blog feature at Yahoo, even though it falls under the category of "Men's Health." Let's face it, the inability to judge accurately the calorie and fat content of a restaurant meal is hardly a male-only problem.

And this recent entry was particularly interesting:

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of eating breakfast. Studies show that people who take time for a morning meal consume fewer calories over the course of the day, have stronger cognitive skills, and are 30 percent less likely to be overweight or obese. Beyond that, people who skip breakfast are more likely to drink alcohol and smoke, and they’re less likely to exercise.

But just because breakfast is the most important meal of the day doesn’t grant you permission to go into a feeding frenzy. But that’s exactly what many of the country’s most popular breakfast joints are setting you up for, by peddling fatty scrambles, misguided muffins, and pancakes that look like manhole covers.

These foods are loaded with unhealthy fats, added sugars, and refined carbohydrates, which catapult your blood sugar, sap your energy levels, and tell your body to store fat. [...]

Worst Pastry
Cinnabon Classic Cinnamon Roll
813 calories
32 g fat (5 g trans fat)
117 g carbs

You wouldn’t start your day with three brownies, would you? As far as your body knows, that’s exactly what you’ll be doing if you wake up with this cinnamon-swirled disaster area. In fact, because Cinnabon offers no healthy alternatives, you’ll have to invite friends (or enemies?) to share the risky roll, or steer clear of Cinnabon altogether.

I used to work at Cinnabon, years ago. We employees probably ate at least one of these things each shift. Given my height and normal activity level, that thing constitutes about half of my daily calorie allotment. But if I'd ever thought about it, I probably would have assumed a cinnamon roll wasn't any worse than a blueberry muffin, when it's nearly three times worse!

Of course, it was pretty sobering (read the whole article, do!) to find out that a certain golden arches' combo breakfast had 1360 calories, or that a popular restaurant's specialty pancakes topped the "worst breakfast" list at 1543 calories, with enough sugar and fat to feed a small village in the third world for a month. I'm exaggerating. By a week or so.

I know that stay-at-home, homeschooling moms probably aren't eating out as often as the rest of the country, but it's pretty amazing to find out just how bad for you some of the restaurant food out there really is. I'm appreciative that the authors of this feature, David Zinczenko and Matt Goulding, are shining some light on a source of caloric and dietary danger that many of us take for granted--especially when we actually do go out to eat.

Another Joe Altogether

Are Catholics abandoning Obama? Is Joe Biden the reason? Gerald Warner thinks so:

More, as promised, on Senator Joe Biden (why should Sarah Palin get all the coverage?). Remember, you read it here first: on September 11 this blog reported a mounting backlash from Catholic bishops against Biden, Barack Obama's "Catholic" pro-abortion running mate. At that time I estimated eight bishops had come out to denounce Biden; the total is now 55. Beyond that, Biden is being trashed across every state of the Union by Catholic newspapers, TV and radio stations, and blogs. It is a tsunami of rejection. [...]

Archbishop Chaput of Denver had already announced Biden should not receive communion because of his pro-abortion views. Defiantly, Biden took communion in his home parish in Delaware in late August. On September 2 the Bishop of Scranton, Pennsylvania (a crucial swing state) banned him from communion in his diocese. That is effective excommunication. Then came the crucial provocation. On NBC's Meet the Press programme on September 7 Biden grossly misrepresented the Catholic Church's teaching on abortion and audaciously cited St Thomas Aquinas in his own cause.

That did it. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had already done the same thing on the same programme, in her instance citing St Augustine. Even the torpid US bishops could not have false doctrine glibly broadcast by public figures, misleading their flock. So the counterattack described here last week began, culminating in a statement from the US Bishops' Conference. The bishops of Kansas City have also issued a pastoral letter on the subject. It is open season on Biden.

It may be that Catholic voters, willing--however reluctantly--to vote for Obama despite his rabidly pro-abortion views, find those same views (as they should) totally unacceptable when articulated by one of their own, who should presumably know better. It may be that after John Kerry's ill-fated run any aura (always false) of the interesting, thoughtful dissenter that once clung to pro-abort politicians has been tainted with that stench of opportunistic self-interest that even a kindergartner would find off-putting. It may be that Catholics are actually listening to the Church, and notice when bishops who before now had never met a Democrat they didn't appear to like all of a sudden have, and have been vocal about their disapprobation. It may even be that Catholics recognize that Joe Biden isn't necessarily a good representative of the faith, given his endless ability to get things about our faith completely, embarrassingly wrong on national television.

Sadly, there's a part of me that suspects that there's only real reason Joe Biden is being abandoned by those Catholic voters who usually vote Democrat is because he's not Hillary Clinton. Sobering as it is to realize, Hillary's husband would never have won two terms in the White House if not for our fellow Catholic voters, who twice helped hand him the victory.

A Public Service Announcement

In my interest in the issue of candidates who do/do not support the government funding of abortifacient contraception, I wrote to a few third-party candidates to see what they had to say about this matter.

The only one I've heard from is Joe Schriner, who sent me the following in an email:

"I would be opposed to this (federal funding of abortifacient contraception--EM), in line with our strong stance on Life in general. If you would, would you send me more on the particular details of this. Thanks... Joe Schriner"

So if you are looking for a doomed quixotic third-party candidate to support, and if your state allows write-in candidates, you can rest assured that Mr. Schriner does not support any form of abortion including the government funding of abortifacient contraception.

For those who can only vote for candidates on the ballot (those six states which don't allow write-ins) I'm still hoping to hear back from Chuck Baldwin's campaign headquarters. I will let you know if I do.

In the meantime, I think it's good to remember that we're all wrestling with "Decision '08" as the news media likes to call it; no good Catholic is careless about his vote, and all of us want to do what God wants us to do to promote the culture of life and work to end abortion. Though we may reach different conclusions based on our understanding of prudential concerns, we're all in this together.

A Great Temptation

As I've been discussing the question of morality and voting with Zippy Catholic over at Mark Shea's blog, and specifically the question of whether voting for a pro-abort or pro-ESCR candidate involves the mediate remote material cooperation with evil without a proportionate reason to justify it and is therefore objectively sinful, I must admit that I find it nearly impossible to weigh this possibility dispassionately.

I want it to be true, for my own selfish reasons.

I want it to be true, because then I can turn my back on this thing called "voting" for the foreseeable future, and retain the moral purity of never, ever, ever voting for anybody again in either major party (because we know that neither major party will ever, ever run a 100% pro-life candidate who eschews all abortions including in cases of rape, incest, life of the mother; all abortifacient contraception; all aborted-fetal-cell stem lines in government funded vaccines, and all use of ESCR).

I could then feel free to rain down bipartisan imprecations on both parties with the equanimity of someone who is beyond such mortal foolishness. I could sit in my lofty tower of moral abstraction and say, when the candidates get more and more pro-abortion with each succeeding election, that it's the fault of all those benighted fools who keep voting when our government has clearly moved to such a level of bloodthirsty support of child-killing that we ought never to give them the slightest stamp of approval, not even when one candidate pledges to end most abortions and the other pledges to make abortion a near-mandatory rite-of-passage for teen girls. I could have "Don't Blame Me" engraved on our car's bumper, and I could write witty aphorisms like "Don't Vote; It Only Encourages Them" and then design and sell merchandise at Cafe Press for the select few wise enough to keep company with me. I could write lengthy, cantankerous letters or e-mails to my congresspeople to express my dissatisfaction with their willingness to overlook the abortion holocaust, giving specifics, and then rest in the comfortable certainty that at least I've done something.

I could then, no matter who is elected, express my deep dissatisfaction with all of their policies without ever having to answer the question, "Did you vote for him?" in the affirmative. I could denounce the government on Monday for failing to protect our allies in "A," chastise them on Tuesday for threatening to go to war with "B" to protect "A," call them cowards on Wednesday if the saber-rattling dies down, and by Thursday have two essays prepared, one of which will excoriate them for idealistic non-interventionism, and the other of which wittily yet soberly compares the spread of Democracy to the spread of a rash, so that whatever happens over the weekend I'll be ready on Monday to say whatever needs to be said.

And I won't have to apologize for "our guys," because there no longer will be any "our guys." Sure, there might be some professional presidential candidate living in his mother's basement between elections who espouses policies of dazzling moral purity with only the slightest whiff of kookery in the details whom I can humorously call "my guy," but everyone will know that I don't mean it in any truly vulgar partisan sense.

I know this about myself. I'm not necessarily pleased to admit it, but there it is: the desire to be an above-it-all postpartisan snob has always been within me, and it was never strongest than when I cast votes for various third-party candidates with the supercilious glance of pity on my way out of the polling booth to that obvious gloomy Democrat over there, or that equally obvious jingoistic Republican speeding through the touchscreen menu as if he were ordering fast food (which, by the look of him, he did too often, poor man).

Mystery writer Dame Agatha Christie knew human nature pretty darned well, and she once had a character express the idea that the beginning of evil came with the thought "I am not like other men," because in one blow the person thinking such a sinful thought had lost two of the chief virtues: humility and brotherhood. So against the mediate remote material cooperation with evil that a vote for McCain might be, I have to wonder: is the potential damage to my soul from voting third-party, or sitting home in quiet contemplative comfort of the foolishness of the American voter on election day, a proportionate reason for me to vote for McCain? Would this reason also apply to people like me who would find this same great temptation a seductive reason to drop out of the political process altogether?

It's an honest question. I'm not looking for reasons or excuses to vote for McCain or not vote for him, or even not to vote at all. But I have to admit that my first thought in realizing that I might not have to show up and vote this time around was a kind of relief, a sense that for once I could skip the folly of the polling-station without committing the sin of apathy out of prideful indifference.

Prostituting Their Art

So, Barbra Streisand pontificates on the election, here:

On her blog, she writes:

"Maybe he was sick of the lack of media attention…maybe he had enough of the late night talk show hosts poking fun at his age…maybe he realized that belonging to a party that has been associated with rich, white men was not going to connect with voters in this historical election year."

No excuse.

"Whatever the reason, John McCain’s Hail Mary -- in the form of Vice Presidential pick Governor Sarah Palin -- sent a very clear message to America about how he views female voters. Women, he thinks, will vote another woman into office regardless of the candidate's values, experience and political positions."

She decries his choice, writing "The oldest Presidential nominee in history, chose a running mate -- a person that is just a heartbeat away from the Presidency -- that has no foreign policy experience, no national experience and limited state government experience…. a virtual unknown who has only been Governor for a less than 2 years of a state with a population of fewer than 680,000 people…a woman who condemns a woman’s right to choose."

The singer says McCain's ploy simply won't work. Keep reading to find out why...

"As someone who has spent over 40 years advocating on behalf of women both politically and philanthropically, as someone who was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton and as someone who cares deeply about the health and welfare of all women, hear me Senator McCain: This calculated, cynical ploy to pull away a small percentage of Hillary's women voters from Barack Obama will not work. We are not that stupid!”

Earth to Barbra: McCain wasn't talking to you. And yes, you are that stupid, since there are a whole lot of smart pro-life women who think that our right to choose has to do with choosing not to listen to your tired old screeds and your equally tired music (honestly, does anyone still like nasal droning set to indifferent tunes with insipid lyrics?). We just don't think we get to choose to kill our kids. Heck, we wouldn't want to, and since we happen to think our genetic material is worth passing on to a few more generations, the "Sterilize yourself into irrelevancy!" cry of old feminism hasn't ever really caught on with us.

And we're young. You, dear Barbra, are in your late sixties. Your brand of feminism is dying out, especially since people like you don't often have grandchildren to pass their ideas along to. My father's about your age, and he has eighteen grandchildren so far. And counting. His ideas about the world, and my mother's ideas, have a much better chance of enduring than yours do. So however much you prostitute your art by becoming a political shill for abortion on demand and every other ill your side has come up with, you'll ultimately never be anything but what you are now: an aging celebrity, slipping year by year into the dreadful hollow of irrelevance.

And then there's Brad Pitt, who has decided to give money to the cause of gay marriage; apparently his personal support of adultery wasn't enough:

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Brad Pitt has donated $100,000 to fight California's November ballot initiative that would overturn the state Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage.

It's the first time voters will be asked to decide the issue in either California or Massachusetts _ the states where gays have won the right to wed.

"Because no one has the right to deny another their life, even though they disagree with it, because everyone has the right to live the life they so desire if it doesn't harm another and because discrimination has no place in America, my vote will be for equality and against Proposition 8," Pitt said Wednesday.

Of course, Mr. Pitt doesn't have a problem with discriminating against people who are opposed to gay marriage on religious grounds, and will ignore the harm done to children by forcibly indoctrinating them in school to believe that two moms or two dads aren't any different from a mom and a dad, and that there's really no reason except bigotry to think otherwise. But the leftist lightweights in the media always believe in imposing their own values; they also impose their artistic nightmares and total lack of morality, decency, and taste.

Brad, you need to look into your mirror, smile that would-be charming smile, and repeat to yourself, a hundred times a day: "Nobody cares what I think. Nobody cares what I think. Nobody cares what I think..." Or else, you'll be prostituting your art before, long, too, and by the time you're as wrinkled as Barbra you'll be as nakedly partisan, and just as irrelevant. If you aren't already.

You Mean, Corporations Really Don't Care???

The Chinese baby-milk scandal continues:

Beijing - As Chinese officials warned Tuesday that contaminated milk powder may have sickened more than the 1,200 babies already identified, the scandal revealed more than a recurrent regulatory problem, Chinese and foreign experts suggested.

Rather, they said, it pointed to a deeper malaise in Chinese society where private profit often trumps the public good as the country races to create a market economy that has outstripped government regulators.

"China has the problems of any transitional economy," says Yanzhong Huang, a global health expert at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J. "But the deeper and more fundamental challenge China faces is a systematic lack of business ethics."

"You cannot fully police the whole food chain," adds Dali Yang, a politics professor at the University of Chicago. "A lot depends on changes in social norms. People have to recognize that integrity does matter."

Three babies have died so far, and many more are seriously ill. All because the company wanted to boost the milk's protein value cheaply:

Investigators say it appears that milk merchants, selling to Sanlu the raw milk they had bought from farmers, had added the chemical – normally used in plastics and fertilizers – to boost the milk's apparent protein content.

Two brothers who owned a milk collection center in Shijiazhuang, Sanlu's home base, were arrested Monday on charges of adulterating the milk they had sold to the company, the state news agency Xinhua reported. Two additional milk suppliers were also arrested later that day. Seventeen others have been detained, including one man suspected of illegally selling melamine.[...]

Not only did Sanlu fail to detect the melamine in its milk powder, the company has also so far failed to explain why it did not publicly reveal the problem until Sept. 11, although it had received complaints from worried parents as early as last March, and identified the contamination on Aug. 6.

The incident became public only after Sanlu's New Zealand partner, Fonterra, which holds three seats on the company board, informed New Zealand diplomats who told Chinese government officials in Beijing of the problem.

Fonterra has "been trying for weeks to get official recall, and the local authorities in China would not do it," New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark told her country's state TV broadcaster on Monday. "At the local level ... I think the first inclination was to try to put a towel over it."

China, of course, is a Communist nation. But this problem is the sort that could easily happen in a "pure capitalist" nation, the kind where there's no government oversight and only the market is allowed to determine the safety or price of goods.

It's important to remember that corporations exist outside of such labels as "democracy" or "republic" or "communist nation" or "monarchy" or "oligarchy." Multi-national corporations owe no loyalty to the company where they are headquartered, especially if their factories are halfway across the globe and their target market in yet another country, or scattered throughout several countries. And these giant multi-nationals exist for one purpose: to make money.

Sometimes the desire to make money collides with the need to follow local safety regulations, but there will always be someone, somewhere, greedy enough or dishonest enough to ignore corporate policy for the sake of a profit increase.

It would be nice to think such things couldn't happen in America, but they have before, and can again. We may not be able to trust the government all that much, either, but it's better to have a government which is an adversary of big business than a government who is on board with it.

This is something I wish people would remember when they clamor for government run health care. We see time and again in countries like China what happens when the government is on the same side of the cover-up as the business; and health care, though we hate to admit it, is big business in America.

This tragedy in China may be a warning sign of the dangers of letting corporations get too cozy with the government. Even healthcare corporations. Because when it comes to protecting the bottom line, corporations really don't care.

Rejecting the Culture of Death

I'm still mulling over the various notions floating around about this upcoming election, and whether or not one ought to vote for McCain. I'd like to say up front that I deeply respect everyone's individual conclusions in this matter. Too often, when we weigh and measure the moral implications of our actions we can place burdens on our neighbor that are far beyond our power to levy.

I am, obviously, neither a moral theologian nor a student of moral theology, aside from those studies which come up from time to time in the course of a Catholic's life, as we try to navigate real-world situations and determine what the most morally correct option for our course of action might be. The arguments and discussions about the morality of voting for a candidate who supports at least some intrinsic evil, though, always seem to come back to whether one is doing so:

1. in spite of but never because of the candidate's support of evil;
2. with the express intention of limiting a graver evil;
3. always respecting the notion of proportionality.

The Church seems at the present time to be discussing these matters, too, especially here in America, and so far what has been written would seem to bear out what I've written above. I think that a person, abhorring McCain's ESCR stand, could nonetheless legitimately conclude that the graver evil would be for Barack Obama to be elected and tear down what little protection for the unborn we've managed to put in place these last eight years. I would encourage anyone who is truly unsure about this to seek spiritual guidance from a holy priest, if at all possible; combox debates may be fun and interesting, but we'd be foolish to consider them a source of absolute moral authority.

Whatever one decides, and indeed, whatever the outcome of this election may be, I think it's going to be the case that Catholics are going to need to work harder and harder to reject the culture of death. I know that people are already doing amazing things, from sidewalk counseling and prayer in front of abortion clinics to participating in the various March for Life events to providing pro-life resources to Catholic and other religious schools and colleges to lobbying for specific bills and legislative actions to writing letters to providing material support for women in crisis pregnancies and so on; there is always a great deal to be done, and there are always heroic people signing up to do it.

But it may be time to start thinking about what does and doesn't work in the pro-life movement, and to start to figure out ways we can be more effective in keeping the sanctity of life at the forefront of our efforts.

Some of the things we've been trying to do are the same things we've been trying since Roe v. Wade first became the law of the land. Perhaps we need to try some fresh, new ideas to get the word out to more and more Americans that life begins at conception, that abortion is murder, that ESCR and other early killings are still killings of the innocent, and that America has become a nation which, instead of protecting the innocent unborn, the handicapped, and the elderly, now preys upon them, calls them worthless, and makes them easier and easier to kill.

When the dust settles in November we have to be ready to get up again and start working to build a culture of life, one family, one person at a time. It's entirely possible that our future as voters in America is chancy at best; there may come a day when a candidate like Obama is opposed by a Kay Bailey Hutchinson, or some other pro-abort Republican who makes no pretense of valuing the unborn. I hate to be a pessimist, but we ought to start preparing now for that future; it could be closer than we think.

Fordham University Nominated for "Society of Judas Iscariot" Award

In the post below this one, I mentioned that there were other things Catholics should do besides voting to work to protect the innocent unborn.

One radical idea is that Catholic universities could stop giving honors to infamously pro-abortion recipients:

NEW YORK, September 15, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In a brash move defying the U.S Bishops' speakers policy, Fordham University's Stein Center for Law and Ethics announced that pro-abortion Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer is the 2008 recipient of the Fordham-Stein Ethics Prize. Breyer infamously wrote the majority opinion in Stenberg v. Carhart, which struck down state laws banning the practice of partial-birth abortion.

The Fordham-Stein Ethics Prize is scheduled to be bestowed upon Justice Breyer at a dinner in New York on October 29, 2008.

Three weeks ago The Cardinal Newman Society President Patrick J. Reilly wrote to inform Rev. Joseph McShane, S.J., President of Fordham University, of Justice Breyer's record. Reilly urged him to rescind the offer of the Fordham-Stein Ethics Prize to Breyer. No response was given.

"This amounts to nothing less than Fordham University thumbing its nose at the US Bishops, whose opposition to such honors is clear," said Reilly.

There is no excuse whatsoever for any Catholic university to honor a man who struck down state laws prohibiting partial-birth abortion. Not even in the deeply and horrifically flawed Roe v. Wade did the Court make it impossible for the states to regulate abortion, and banning a medically unnecessary procedure that kills a child who is literally inches away from birth ought to be completely within the power of any state that finds this practice as barbaric, immoral, depraved, and totally without justification as the vast majority of American voters do.

We Catholics have to stop fawning all over politicians and lawyers and judges of whatever religion, inviting them to speak, showering them with honors, all while ignoring that their hands are incarnadine with the blood of the innocent. We have to stop caring more for worldly achievement and celebrity status than we do for the Gospel of Life. We have to quit prostituting the truth to pay for a good speaker, in the hopes of raising money for yet another whited sepulcher that used to be a Catholic institution of higher learning. We have to stop pretending that these schools are even remotely "Catholic" in any meaningful sense, and start cutting off donation dollars, refusing to send our children to be corrupted by their filth, and demanding that the bishops force them to remove the word "Catholic" from their advertising materials.

When it comes to supporting intrinsic evil, how many innocent Catholics are supporting, materially, so-called "Catholic" colleges and universities that are anything but Catholic? How many have responded generously to financial appeals never dreaming that their money is being used to honor the denizens of the Culture of Death?

There is nothing at all ethical about awarding a Catholic "ethics" honor to a judge who wrote the majority opinion in a decision which allows babies to be killed in this horrific manner. If a dear priest friend of my family were still alive today, Fordham would be getting a little prize of its own: Father used to send people like Fordham's president his own little creation, the not-quite-coveted "Society of Judas Iscariot" award for actions traitorous and disgraceful to the Catholic Faith.

What Ace? Which Sleeve?

I've got a confession to make.

Though I've been discussing the 2008 Presidential election from an abstract and theoretical viewpoint, I've known all along that I've held a high-value card secreted somewhere above the elbow of my best lever-pulling (or today, touch-screen attire) shirt.

I live, as some of you may remember, in Texas.

Yep. This Texas. The one that, no matter how the electoral college pie is sliced, plans to put its full portion on a plate served up to the Republican candidates (sans Minority Whip cream, if they have their druthers).

So among my many possible options in this election is the option that has always been rather attractive to me: not voting.

Oh, I might show up at the polls, anyway. I might place a vote for some state or local office--assuming that I can find one where the candidate isn't "pro-choice," which is a sad reality for those of us in this area of the state; I've never yet and never will vote for Kay Bailey Hutchinson, for instance, though she's not on the ballot this year. But as far as the presidential contest is concerned, knowing that there's no way that the State of Texas will go to Barack Obama, my sitting out the election might have a more positive effect than my voting, since if enough of us make that choice McCain's margin of victory in Texas won't be anything to swagger about.

But I've been quiet about the fact that this is an option I have, because I know that many of you aren't in this position. You might live in a genuine swing state, or you might live in a state where any cut into Obama's victory, however futile, might just be a message worth sending. You might be in that position where enough votes for McCain would tally up to an actual limiting of the evil of a president who doesn't just favor partial-birth abortion, but post-birth abortion as well.

Now that Zippy Catholic has brought up the non-swing-state option, though, I figured that it was time for me to 'fess up that this has been, and continues to be, the way I've been leaning. Texas will go to McCain, come hell or...well, literally, high water. My vote for McCain doesn't make Texas one iota more or less likely to go to McCain, and it means that I'd have to put pressure of an uncomfortable organ yet again to overlook the fishy smell rising from the "R" side of the ballot; while I know that the Republicans are still the party most likely to help end abortion, I also know that there are other things they stand for that I find appalling. After years of being used by them to defeat the Democrats while being expected to be appeased with the occasional pro-life gesture, I'm only too happy to turn the tables, and use the GOP to help end abortion without actually giving them the only measure of support they actually want from me: my vote.

Some might say, "Well, what about Sarah Palin?" I certainly hope Governor Palin has a bright, pro-life future ahead of her in the GOP; I also would be much more willing to consider voting for her in four or eight years than I am to consider voting for McCain now. But alas, she's not the nominee presently, and while I respect those who will vote for McCain solely to help Sarah Palin's future in the party, I don't think I have to do likewise, considering the whole "Texas will go to McCain quite easily" calculation.

Another question might be "But why not give your vote to some doomed quixotic third-party candidate, to send a real message to Washington?" I've done that in the past, and haven't completely ruled it out, but there's one thing that must be clear: while voting for such a candidate may be emotionally satisfying, by the rules of most states' vote-counting mechanisms, voting for a candidate who is not actually on the ballot means that your vote will not be counted. Even states that allow write-in candidates won't necessarily record votes for them; one piece of info I found said that unless the state's vote-counting equipment suspected that such a write-in candidate was approaching the tally that the regular candidates were receiving, they'd automatically not be counted. So while voting for doomed quixotic third-party candidates may be fun, especially at parties over the next four years when you solemnly pronounce your opinions on politics and then casually mention that you voted for Horace C. Quackenfeathers of the Duck Hunters for America Party in the last election, there's not really any practical value in doing so.

But Catholics are free to decide how to vote, using their well-informed consciences. I still believe strongly that there can't be said to be a proportionate reason that allows a vote for Barack Obama given his absolute and bloodthirsty extremism on the abortion issue; whether a proportionate reason of the "limiting evil" variety exists for you personally to vote for McCain is something only you can determine; a vote for a third-party candidate who is on the ballot in your state may send a message, but a write-in vote probably won't; and since the situation exists that both major candidates support something that is intrinsically evil (McCain with ESCR) a Catholic is free to decide not to participate with his vote at all this time around, as well.

In the end, it should be remembered that there are hundreds of other ways we can influence public policy aside from voting once every four years in a Presidential election. However you decide to vote, I think it would be a good thing for pro-life Catholics to consider working over the course of the next four years to educate and inform, teach and guide, pray and sacrifice, march and demonstrate, and do whatever else needs to be done on behalf of our unborn brothers and sisters who need our voices raised in unison to protect them from the evil public policies that dictates that their lives have no value.

In Scattering, and Tempest

The good news about Hurricane Ike is that so far the death toll has been much lower than was feared. The bad news is that many survivors are stranded without homes or food, and the areas nearest to them suffered damage, power loss, and other catastrophes that only adds to the misery of all:

More than 4 million people, several oil refineries and many businesses around Houston remained without power. Government agencies will distribute ice, water and packaged meals from tractor-trailers.

Long lines snaked around the few gas stations that were operating in and around Houston, where the car is king, but officials said tankers were rolling in with fuel. Even with gas, many stations remained without power.

"Tanker trucks are coming in to make sure service stations are given fuel," Ed Emmett, chief executive for Harris County, which includes Houston, told reporters.

The relief roll-out appeared to defuse tensions that had flared between the Federal Emergency Management Agency and local officials after Houston Mayor Bill White vowed to hold FEMA accountable for delivering on its commitments. [...]

In Galveston, shocked and bewildered residents staggered through the streets as food and water grew scarce. There was little sign of any federal relief efforts.

"FEMA ain't been by, nobody," said disabled retiree Vivian Matthews, who was stranded at her flooded apartment for two days. "They don't give a damn if we live or die."

When so many people have been affected by this kind of damage and destruction, it's easy to get frustrated with the slow pace of help. But unfortunately the sheer size of Ike, the widespread path of destruction it left behind, and the difficulty for rescue workers, volunteers, and others to deliver aid and supplies to the suffering people means that the misery will go on for quite a while.

A storm of a completely different sort is looming on the horizon, as Wall Street is shaken by the winds of a kind of change nobody wants to believe in. The political parties were quick to offer their conclusions about the looming financial crisis: it's the other guy's fault:

"Unfortunately, what we are seeing on Wall Street is the legacy of the Bush-McCain economic policies that have failed this nation," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said in a statement, adding: "These events are a stark reminder that America needs a fresh and improved approach to governing, not one led by a leader who insists that the fundamentals of the economy are still strong, as Sen. McCain insisted today."

But House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) took a different tack, blaming the current congressional majority for the mess. "All across America, families are struggling with the fallout from the turmoil in the housing and financial markets -- another sign that the destructive tax-and-spend economic policies promoted by this Democratic Congress are failing to meet the needs of workers, seniors, and small businesses," Boehner said.

America is a nation of many blessings, gifts of health and peace and prosperity. But it's humbling to realize how easy it is for us to behave like various people in the Bible, as we come to believe that this is all of our doing, that we can provide for the needs of all people, continue to be financially secure, stockpile our grain and plan to build new storage for the abundance, all without remembering that our gifts come from God, and that we should be thankful for them. In time we can start to think that we're owed good things, that we're owed abundant food and clean water even in the nightmare after a monster hurricane, that we're owed that secure retirement that just got wiped out in the worst day on Wall Street in years. We've spent so much time thinking it's all in our hands, believing that we could control our own destinies, enrich ourselves, even turn back the rising flood waters (yes, we can!) that it's more than a little shocking to be confronted with the reality that, no, we can't, and never could.

Like Job, we are reminded that we weren't around when the Earth was called into being, when the sun first played its rays across a newborn planet, when creation exploded in color and joy and fell into sin, when kings and empires rose to glory, glittered in brief triumph, and then crumbled into unremembered dust. We can no more order our existence than we can order the sea to stop rising in advance of a tempest, or reclaim money that has been scattered to the wind in a moment's display of capitalism's weakness (for, heresy though it may be to say it, capitalism has weaknesses as well as strengths).

None of this is meant to diminish the pain of those who suffer loss, whether that loss occurs as a result of nature's violence or of man's greed. It's an expression of solidarity with them, for we too know that we do not control our days or hours, that we exist in peace and tranquility only by the grace of God, and that whatever suffering He has in store for us will come in its time, just as the joys and graces have come in theirs. But seeing the reactions to the hurricane, or to the Wall Street shakiness, I find myself hoping that when the day of tribulation does come I won't first start looking for someone to blame, but be able to hold on to that tranquility, that peace that passes all understanding, and is able to say to Lady Sorrow what it does to Lady Joy: His Will be done.

Of Cannibals, Lesser Cannibals, and Lesser-Lesser Cannibals

Several fascinating discussions over at Mark Shea's blog have kept me pretty busy lately; I'll be thinking out loud about what's being discussed over there at least a few times this week.

Let me start out by saying that I'm completely in agreement with the principle that Catholics in America today should not have to choose, in our general election, between candidates for higher office (including, but not limited to, the presidency) who support all abortion, some abortion, few abortions, or little abortion--but that there should not be a choice at all for no abortion. It is unjust that our only choices are between those who believe strongly in killing many of the innocent, those who believe in killing some of the innocent, and those who believe in killing some others of the innocent.

But that is the political reality today.

It may be emotionally satisfying to label Barack Obama a "greater cannibal" because he supports such atrocities as partial-birth abortion and infanticide, and John McCain a "lesser cannibal" because he supports ESCR. But both men support the continued governmental funding of abortifacient means of contraception (such as Norplant, Depo-Provera, the Pill, IUDs etc.) for women who qualify for government health care under programs like Medicaid, and in fact no candidate anywhere, not even a doomed quixotic third-party candidate, has come out vocally in opposition of this practice, at least not that I can discover. When we look at those candidates actually running for president in this election, especially the six candidates listed as "major candidates" by Project Vote Smart, we see that most of them would not go so far as to end government funding of abortifacient contraception; it is slightly possible that this gentleman might, though, and for the sake of argument I have contacted his campaign to find out.

In addition to candidates who appear on the ballot, of course, there are some states (all but six, in fact) that allow write-in candidates. The rules vary, but it's theoretically possible that you could, in fact, find a write-in candidate who definitely opposes government funding of abortifacient contraception. This means that you could vote without involving yourself in the mediate remote material cooperation with evil, but you will in no way be attempting to limit the evil of either a greater cannibal or a lesser one actually being elected.

Of course, you don't have to vote for a candidate who has any hope of winning. The doomed quixotic third-party or write-in vote has always, and will always be, an honorable option for the voters of America. But it is absolutely crucial that in making such a selection, one does not eschew the act of voting for the greater or lesser cannibal only to vote for the lesser-lesser cannibal; if one's position is that it is immoral or sinful to support the greater or lesser cannibal, than it must be equally immoral to vote for the lesser-lesser one!

It seems to me that in the various voting guides that have been issued by the Church, the option of voting for a lesser (or even lesser-lesser) cannibal in order to try to limit the harm that the greater cannibal(s) will do if elected is considered a morally possible option. But if you are one of the people who believes that it is never morally possible to vote in a national election for a candidate who supports any type of killing of the innocent, then you must not overlook the killing of the innocent that takes place as part of government-funded contraception, and you must not vote for any person who does not explicitly reject this.

To do otherwise, to vote for a pro-abortifacient-contraceptive, "lesser-lesser cannibal" for government office, is to commit an act of mediate remote material cooperation with evil without even the pretense that one is doing so in hopes of preventing the greater cannibal, or even the lesser one, from being elected (since voting for a doomed quixotic third-party candidate precludes this possibility by definition). At this point it would seem that the important thing is not voting in a morally consistent way, but simply being able to reject both major political parties as being unworthy of the support of any serious follower of Christ. Which they may well be, but one weakens one's position by turning around and voting for a doomed, quixotic, lesser-lesser-but-still-cannibal cannibal.

Now, it should be said that it's possible that the "lesser-lesser" cannibals out there are actually among the greatest, because the number of babies killed by government funded abortifacient contraception could be as great or even greater than the number killed by surgical abortion, though I don't think we can know that for sure. But since all or nearly all candidates support government funding of abortifacient contraception anyway, they're all at least this degree of cannibal, and it's hard to find one who isn't.

Of course, the question as to whether one's only moral choices in elections like these is either to find and vote for (or write-in) some candidate who isn't at all a cannibal, if such can theoretically be found, or else to stay at home and pray that the greatest cannibal isn't actually the one who wins the election, is far from settled as far as I'm concerned. But that's probably a subject for a later post.

Perfect vs. Good

A fascinating discussion, in which I've been privileged to participate, has been taking place here and here at Mark Shea's blog on the general topic of voting and Catholic morality. Specifically, the question concerns the following matter: is it morally acceptable for a Catholic to vote for a candidate who supports that which is intrinsically evil?

The formulation which seems to be developing among those who think that Catholics should not vote this way might be stated as follows:

• Catholics must never support intrinsic evil
• Catholics must never vote for someone who supports intrinsic evil
• Catholics must especially not vote for someone who supports killing innocent humans
  
• Obama supports this intrinsic evil (abortion, infanticide, etc.)
• McCain supports this intrinsic evil (ESCR)
• Therefore, Catholics must not, from a moral perspective, vote for either of these candidates.

I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint, but unfortunately, my mind working in the odd way it does, I soon came up with a dilemma, which is this:

• If Catholics must never vote for someone who supports intrinsic evil, and
• If contraception is intrinsic evil, and
• If Catholics must especially never vote for someone who supports killing innocent humans, and
• If many if not most forms of contraception are abortifacient, and
• If every candidate running for President, including 3rd party candidates, supports the continued federal government funding of abortifacient contraceptives through Medicaid and other federal programs, then
• Catholics may not morally now vote for any person who is running for President, and
• Catholics will be unlikely for the foreseeable future to be able to vote for any person who is running for President without objectively doing that which is immoral.

Now, there are three problems with this sort of reasoning. The first two can be discovered by looking at this excerpt from the statement from the USCCB on Faithful Citizenship:

34. Catholics often face difficult choices about how to vote. This is why it is so important to vote according to a well-formed conscience that perceives the proper relationship among moral goods. A Catholic cannot vote for a candidate who takes a position in favor of an intrinsic evil, such as abortion or racism, if the voter’s intent is to support that position. In such cases a Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in grave evil. At the same time, a voter should not use a candidate’s opposition to an intrinsic evil to justify indifference or inattentiveness to other important moral issues involving human life and dignity.

35. There may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate’s unacceptable position may decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons. Voting in this way would be permissible only for truly grave moral reasons, not to advance narrow interests or partisan preferences or to ignore a fundamental moral evil.

36. When all candidates hold a position in favor of an intrinsic evil, the conscientious voter faces a dilemma. The voter may decide to take the extraordinary step of not voting for any candidate or, after careful deliberation, may decide to vote for the candidate deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods.

The two problems I see here are: 1) It is clear that the U.S. bishops believe that deciding not to vote for any candidate should be an "extraordinary step," not the default mode for voters in America until abortifacient contraception is no longer funded by the government or supported by candidates, and 2) section 35 outlines the possibility of voting for a candidate in spite of his unacceptable position and for other "morally grave reasons." I'll get back to that in a moment, but first, I want to point out that if it were indeed morally wrong ever to vote for any candidate who gives any level of support for any intrinsic evil, the bishops could not permit the option.

The third problem has to do with both the Catechism's words on voting and the notion of limiting evil. The Catechism, #2240, says this:

"Submission to authority and co-responsibility for the common good make it morally obligatory to pay taxes, to exercise the right to vote, and to defend one's country..."

And from Father Z's blog comes this letter from the Kansas City bishops on principles of moral responsibility of voting, which contains the following:

Limiting Grave Evil

In another circumstance, we may be confronted with a voting choice between two candidates who support abortion, though one may favor some limitations on it, or he or she may oppose public funding for abortion. In such cases, the appropriate judgment would be to select the candidate whose policies regarding this grave evil will do less harm. We have a responsibility to limit evil if it is not possible at the moment to eradicate it completely.

"We have a responsibility to limit evil if it is not possible at the moment to eradicate it completely." I'm repeating that line because it seems to be particularly germane to the matter at hand, which leads to a new syllogism of sorts:

• If Catholics have the moral obligation to exercise their right to vote, and
• If Catholics have a responsibility to limit evil when it's not possible to eradicate it, and
• If morally grave reasons exist to choose the candidate whose position in favor of intrinsic evil are less extreme and who will work to limit or eliminate other intrinsic evils, and
• If the decision not to vote at all is not the clear moral choice (i.e., between two candidates who both favor intrinsic evil neither one of whom will eliminate intrinsic evil in any way), and
• If no candidate even in third-parties is completely free from the support of intrinsic evil, then
  
• The Catholic voter may indeed vote for the candidate who, despite a position in favor of some intrinsic evil, is credibly pledged to eliminate or limit other intrinsic evils.

Let's go back to those "morally grave reasons" for a moment. What kind of reasons could be morally grave enough to allow a Catholic to vote for a candidate who expresses at least some level of support for some intrinsic evil?

I think the candidate would have to be seen as being capable of and committed to the elimination of some other intrinsic evil, or of preventing further harm from taking place. So if a candidate were credibly thought to be more likely to appoint SCOTUS nominees who might eventually limit or even overturn Roe v. Wade, that would be a "morally grave reason" that would not make the candidate's support of, say, ESCR or the federal funding of abortifacient contraception, a situation that would mandate not voting for that person.

Of course, now we get to the point where we're talking about prudential concerns. Will McCain, for instance, appoint SCOTUS judges who are strict constructionist and likely to support the right to life? Is it credible to believe that he will? Will McCain and his administration do anything else to attempt to limit or eliminate even some abortions? Is it credible to believe that he will? Are other things McCain supports intrinsically evil or morally unsound? How does that enter into the calculations?

These are conversations we should have, I think. But unless someone can illustrate otherwise, I am starting to think that the idea that Catholics have a positive moral obligation never to vote for any candidate who supports any intrinsic evil is not founded on sound moral theology. I should note that I'm not at all opposed to having the opposite illustrated or explained, especially with recourse to various Church documents, so if you believe I'm wrong here, I'm completely happy to let you prove it!

Neither Can the Floods

Anyone who lives in the path of Hurricane Ike is keeping an uneasy eye on the weather; this is a big storm, and even those of us who are quite a distance away from the Gulf may experience some inconveniences from the drenching rain that could be poured out on the dry summer-cracked land here in the DFW area.

But that's nothing, compared to the hellish conditions developing along the coast:

Hundreds of thousands have evacuated Galveston and a band of coastal Texas counties, while Houston residents stockpiled supplies and awaited what may be a direct hit on the country's fourth largest city -- with winds of perhaps 115 miles per hour expected at landfall.

The risk of staying was made blunt by the weather service in a warning Thursday: "Persons not heeding evacuation orders in single-family one or two story homes may face certain death," from the 20- to 25-foot storm surge that Ike is expected to push ashore, the agency said.

The National Weather Service reported at 1 p.m. Central time (2 p.m. EDT) that Ike was about 165 miles southeast of Galveston and about 270 miles east of Corpus Christi. Presently the storm is a Category 2 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale, but forecasters said it is strengthening and could be a Category 3 by the time the center of the storm makes landfall late Friday or early Saturday morning.

I don't know about you, but to me the words certain death in a local weather forecast seem pretty grim; I can't imagine anyone not heeding the evacuation warnings or not taking this storm seriously. Human nature is unaccountable, though, and I'm sure that just like every other time something like this happens some person or other, or more than one, may try to "ride it out," with the assumption that this will be a near miss instead of the worst-case scenario that officials are warning about.

And that person (or those people) could be right, but he/they could also be horribly, tragically wrong, finding out only too late that they weren't paying attention and didn't appreciate the danger.

So often our approach to faith is a little bit like this. And to be fair, God's will isn't always expressed to us as clearly as a weather warning. Sometimes we seek His will, but remain uncertain as to whether we're really doing it, reexamining our motives and actions, having recourse to prayer and frequent reception of the sacraments, and always ready to hear Him should He make His will known to us in a way we're not expecting.

But sometimes we seek our own wills. Sometimes we do what we really want to do despite the warnings and problems that can arise. We might take on too many responsibilities at once, or become careless about prudent financial matters, or spend too much time and attention on the computer or the phone or the craft store or the local moms' group. When the first signs of trouble begin, when clouds form on the horizon in feelings of stress or overextension perhaps, or waves crash over us in a few bounced checks or a few too many projects going at once, we can pay heed to those signs and seek higher ground--or we can insist that we know what we're doing, that God obviously wants us to be involved in all these things and so He will provide, and blame the devil's mischief for making us feel like we should reexamine our priorities or prudential decisions or plans.

Stubbornly, like the man in the anecdote, we keep ignoring the rising floodwaters; even when we're sitting on our rooftops we pretend that all is well; and finally when the waves threaten to overtake us and we've ignored the boat and helicopter God sent to get us out of our predicament, we complain to Him that He didn't really let us know in time that we weren't doing His will, after all.

Fortunately for us, many waters can't quench God's love for us, and neither can the floods drown it. He lets us learn from our mistakes, and calls us to grow closer to Him, so that the next time we find our wills diverging from His we won't have to be submerged before we figure things out.

My prayers today are with all the people along the coast in the path of this storm. I hope that they did heed the serious warnings and go as far as they could away from the peril that threatens them. May God be with them, especially those who evacuated and will return to devastation when this is all over, and may He show them that the power of His love is greater than any of life's storms.

UPDATE: As of the most recent reports, Hurricane Ike is over 500 miles wide. For comparison, the State of Texas is 660 miles wide by 790 miles long. This is a hurricane that is almost the size of Texas. It's 70% bigger than a normal hurricane, so even if it stays a Cat. 2 or becomes a Cat. 3 it could do much more damage than a "normal" sized hurricane in these categories. Those being told to evacuate really should do so.

Thumbs Down

The kindest thing I can say about Roger Ebert's recent foray into political writing is that it is disturbingly incoherent. A man who can spot a weak plot point or inconsistent character development at twenty paces (or the twenty-minute mark) should be able to write a political statement with at least some semblance of order; there should be some kind of point to it, even if the point is ultimately a rather bad or silly one.

But Ebert's "review" of Sarah Palin wanders all over the place: from a gratuitous American Idol reference to college to European travel to "saving the Republic," which phrase is as melodramatic and out of place as a faded B-movie actress at an A-list party, occurring as it does amidst such a tangled mess of light-as-fluff partisanship masquerading as something worth the bother of writing down.

Take, for instance, this section:

And how can a politician her age have never have gone to Europe? My dad had died, my mom was working as a book-keeper and I had a job at the local newspaper when, at 19, I scraped together $240 for a charter flight to Europe. I had Arthur Frommer's $5 a Day under my arm, started in London, even rented a Vespa and drove in the traffic of Rome. A few years later, I was able to send my mom, along with the $15 a Day book.

You don't need to be a pointy-headed elitist to travel abroad. You need curiosity and a hunger to see the world. What kind of a person (who has the money) arrives at the age of 44 and has only been out of the country once, on an official tour to Iraq? Sarah Palin's travel record is that of a provincial, not someone who is equipped to deal with global issues.

But some people like that. She's never traveled to Europe, Asia, Africa, South America or Down Under? That makes her like them. She didn't go to Harvard? Good for her! There a lot of hockey moms who haven't seen London, but most of them would probably love to, if they had the dough. And they'd be proud if one of their kids won a scholarship to Harvard.

Setting aside the fact that the price of travel in 1961 (when Ebert was 19) is pretty irrelevant to the question of the affordability of foreign travel in the recent past, overlooking the fact that today's middle-class college grads are drowning in a mountain of debt that makes all but the most necessary travel a frivolous luxury out of the reach of many, we must still consider that Sarah Palin married right out of college and had her first child a year later, which kind of makes backpacking around London, Paris and Rome out of the question. Some people need European travel to find maturity and sophistication, but others find that maturity in the more old-fashioned way, by getting married, starting a family, taking on parental responsibility and working for the sake of their future. And once you've made that a priority, other things recede in importance; driving a Vespa around Rome may be fun when you're nineteen and single, but few parents would willingly chose to tour Europe with several small children in tow, even if the cost weren't completely prohibitive.

But apparently in Ebert's mind a lack of foreign travel is an absolute barrier to the vice presidency. Of course, Palin's trip to Kuwait to visit the Alaska National Guard troops stationed there is waved aside in his essay as more proof of her provincialism.

The thinly-veiled contempt on the left for ordinary people radiates through pieces like Ebert's; while he claims to want a vice-president who is better than he is, it's clear from the essay that what he really wants is a vice-president exactly like him: a traveler, a global-warming enthusiast, an Iraq war opposer, and someone who appreciates the Ivy League as it should be appreciated (whether one had the privilege of going to an Ivy League school or not). Which is fine, except that it makes the corresponding howls that the rest of the country only likes Sarah because we can relate to her ring as hollow as any of the plots of the last several M. Night Shyamalan movies.

I admire Roger Ebert in many ways. Few people have ever reached his level in terms of the creation of thoughtful and interesting movie reviews. But when it comes to his political opinions, I'd suggest he consider a rewrite; at the very least, much of that wandering disdain could have been left on the cutting room floor.

God Bless America

Today is the seventh anniversary of the terror attack on America. There will be moments of silence, prayers, memorial visits, quiet reflection, and contemplation as we remember that terrible day.

Our family was away on vacation with relatives on September 11, 2001. One of the oddest things about that time was not the day itself, when like most Americans we were shocked and horrified at what we saw on television, but returning home several days later to see that our town had changed while we were gone.

There were American flags and ribbons up everywhere. There was a little extra kindness and friendliness in everyone's voices, a sense that everyone was trying just a bit harder to be neighbors. And there were signs, all over the town, that read simply "God bless America."

Stores had this message out front. Handmade signs stood in yards and at street corners. Everywhere you looked was this message, this prayer: God bless America.

Nobody worried, at least not then, that the message was politically incorrect. Nobody screamed about "Christianists" trying to impose their faith on the rest of America. Nobody got the ACLU to sue the local drugstore for creating an environment hostile to atheists. Nobody complained about the overtly religious tone of various political leaders' statements, and even the Hollywood elite sang "God bless America" with prayerful fervor.

Churches were packed to the rafters as mourning citizens came together to search for peace or a sense of meaning. The American Red Cross had to tell people that they had enough blood, for the moment, because so many people lined up to donate. People opened their wallets with generous goodness to help those affected by the tragedy; more importantly, they opened their hearts, and became the instrument of God's blessing to many.

Heroes were made that day, heroes and martyrs and even, perhaps, some unknown saints. An appreciation for the work and bravery of our firefighters and police and rescue workers grew, as we heard inspiring tales of heroic deeds and selfless sacrifice for others. The whole world watched, and prayed with us, "God bless America."

How quickly that prayer vanished. How quickly we returned to our entrenched secularism of the modern age, where "God" is doubted and resented, "bless" is a meaningless verb that signifies that the person using it is a right-wing religious wacko, probably Evangelical, who wants to impose his or her morality on everyone else, and "America" is just one of many countries, who is creating resentment at home and abroad by her prosecution of an unpopular war, and by her failure to follow Europe's shining light and abandon her provincial notions about the sanctity of human life, the importance of marriage and family, and the very idea that "right" and "wrong" are not absurd constructs in a post-Enlightenment context. How quickly we returned to partisan sniping and hostility, to suspicion of each other, to an abandonment of that sense of neighborliness and kindness, to the same old dreary irreligious materialism peddled by so many, that robs us of any notion of higher purpose or selfless service.

How quickly the churches dwindled back to the usual membership; how quickly the voices raised as one returned to a cacophony of squabbling; how quickly they took down those signs that said, "God bless America."

But we need His blessing, nonetheless. We need His blessing, if we're not going to fade and fall like all the empires that have abandoned Him in pursuit of their own temporal goals. We need His blessing, if we're going to be able to see His presence in every human being, from the unborn to the small child to the disabled to the adolescent to the suffering to the adult to the elderly to the dying, at every stage, under every condition. We need His blessing if we're going to avoid killing the unborn or the inconvenient or the aged or the ill because they are invisible or because they demand sacrifice from us. We need His blessing to seek detachment from the material goods that have become a national addiction, and to help us turn away from the immorality that parades across our televisions, blares from our radios, and confronts our children at eye-level on the lurid magazines at the checkout counters of our grocery stores.

We need His blessing if we're to remember to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us; we need His blessing to avoid turning our true and honest patriotism into the sin of nationalism or the kind of jingoism that delights in war and worships country as a false god. We need His blessing to remember to pray for our soldiers on the battlefield and our leaders who call the shots, literally. We need Him to bless us as we put aside selfish fears and soul-killing hatred and turn to love and honor and sacrifice, instead.

We need for God to bless America.

Election as Disney Movie

America, you can breathe easier now; actor Matt Damon has finally shared with us his deep and wise thoughts about this election:

"I think there's a really good chance that Sarah Palin could be president, and I think that's the really scary thing," Damon, the Academy Award-winning star of "Good Will Hunting" and "The Departed," told AP Television.

Having Palin, the onetime mayor of Wasilla, Alaska and self-proclaimed "hockey mom" as McCain's right-hand woman is preposterous, Damon said.

"It's like a really bad Disney movie. The hockey mom from Alaska and she's the president and it's like she's facing down Vladimir Putin and using the folksy stuff she learned at the hockey rink and it's absurd," he said. "It's totally absurd, and I don't know why more people aren't talking about how absurd it is."

I must say, I'm impressed. I didn't think Matt Damon knew the word "absurd," aside from its context in relation to his career. Of course, like most of the liberals commenting on this he's apparently unaware that Palin is actually the Governor of Alaska; they all seem to think that she went straight from being mayor to being McCain's running mate, when everybody knows that only the mayor of New York City is entitled to seek the Oval Office.

Still, it's amusing to see the genre of the Disney movie brought up in this context. I can only imagine the kind of titles/scenarios Disney might come up with for each of these candidates:

Now You See Him, Now... : Young Illinois Senator Barack Obama is in trouble! When his daughter's science experiment goes awry, he becomes invisible...but only some of the time. Appearing and disappearing out of nowhere, he can only manage to vote "present" on several key pieces of legislation! How will he make sure that everybody in America can see him? A fun family film, with cameo appearances by several Washington officials who've made convenient invisibility an art form.

Mr. McCain: So long as the maverick Senator keeps his contact lenses in, all is well with the Republicans in Congress...but when he loses a lens, or even both, heaven help us all! Join in the crazy fun as John McCain inadvertently cooperates with Democrats, reaches across the aisle because he can't see where he's going, and even signs on to the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform bill while ordering lunch. Can his friends and family keep him seeing clearly? And when he accidentally runs for President--and wins--will the wily Dems steal his vision correction long enough to get their people in the Cabinet? Contains a twelve-minute bonus feature explaining why normally it isn't funny to laugh at the nearsighted, but is acceptable to do so as long as the whole point is to make fun of Republicans.

Sarah Poppins: Washington's out of control like a spoiled three-year-old on a two-day candy bender! Who could possibly make senators and representatives, lobbyists and lawyers, journalists and activists sit up straight, wash their hands, and stop talking with their wallets full? Lucky for America, an experienced hockey mom/mayor/governor/journalist/former beauty contestant is up to the challenge. She's ready for anything--even the criticism of the dreaded Hollywood Left! Rated G, but extreme liberals may find some scenes disturbing.

Flubber-er: When a longtime Democratic congressman finally gets his chance at the vice-presidency, only one thing stands in his way: his strange tendency to babble uncontrollably whenever a microphone is nearby! A gifted high-school science whiz offers to help, but a mixup in the formula only makes the problem worse. With election day approaching and excuses about "laryngitis" wearing thin, Senator Flubber-er has to prepare for his biggest challenge--a debate with an attractive and smart female vice presidential candidate. Can his disastrous problem be solved in time, without his old high school dean (played by Matt Damon) catching on?

I've got to hand it to Matt Damon; that was a lot of fun. :)

Biden on Hillary

Hmm. So Joe Biden thinks Hillary Clinton might have been a better pick for VP than he is? From CNN:

“Make no mistake about this, Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. Let’s get that straight,” Biden said testily when a voter told Biden he was glad the Delaware senator had been chosen and not Clinton.

“She’s a truly close personal friend and she is qualified to be President of the United States of America, she’s easily qualified to be Vice President of the United States of America and quite frankly it might have been a better pick than me,” he continued.

"I mean that sincerely, she’s first rate.”

Now, Biden didn't endorse either Hillary or Obama after his own bid for the White House came to an end. And he's currently Obama's running mate, which makes one wonder whether he realized that saying HRC would have been a better pick is a bit like questioning Obama's judgment in the matter.

But in reality, I think Biden's been trying to have it both ways; by not endorsing either candidate he might have hoped for a position in either administration, whether as vice-president or a cabinent member. And by going out of his way to say such nice things about Hillary, I can't help but think that maybe he's thinking ahead to 2012, should the Obama campaign fail to win the White House this fall.

Then again, this is Joe Biden, a master of the unfortunate comment or misplaced statement, so maybe I'm giving him way too much credit.

Implosion

Thankfully, the title of this post has nothing whatsoever to do with this. Of course, I didn't think the world was going to end this morning anyway; one of the advantages of being a Christian is knowing that whatever else the End Times have in store for us, the creation of a black hole in Switzerland followed by the immediate extinction of all life on Earth, not to mention Earth itself, our solar system, and possibly some of our closest neighbors doesn't really fit in with the apocalyptic writings of the Book of Revelation. I don't understand particle physics very well at all, but even relatively simple explanations made it pretty clear we weren't in any danger of sci-fi level doomsday scenarios from the LHC.

The same, alas, cannot be said for the Obama campaign, which is going on the attack to deny that they meant anything at all by the use of the word "lipstick" by their candidate. Any seasoned political campaigner could probably have told Obama that this was exactly the wrong thing to do; by striking a "hard-hitting rebuttal" pose, Obama made sure that the story would remain in the news far longer than such a piece of trivia deserves. But I think we're getting a glimpse of something we needed to know about Barack Obama--he can't stand to be in the wrong, and so first he has to deny that "lipstick on a pig" was a slur directed at Sarah Palin, and then he has to up the ante by accusing the Republicans--I am not making this up!--of swift boat politics over his porcine cosmetic reference.

For the record, I think it's pretty silly of the Republicans to go after Obama for this remark; even if he did mean to insult Sarah Palin, it's not that big of a deal to use this phrase (though I still think that, this being the twenty-first century and all, we could come up with a few new phrases to express the concept of attempting to make something unattractive look more appealing). But Obama could have tossed this off with a laugh and an "I'm sorry if feelings were hurt" sort of generic apology-non-apology, and that would have been the end of it; instead, he's palpably running scared, on the defensive, and seeking to portray himself as the outraged victim over what was a rather petty, clumsy remark in the first place.

Not only are the Obama supporters nearly hysterical over the mere existence of negative press about their candidate, but some of them have truly gone off the deep end. Governor David Patterson of New York has decided that "community organizer" is now code for "black," and is accusing the McCain campaign of racism:

At the Crain's Business Forum this morning, Paterson drew attention to a phrase used numerous times by speakers at the Republican National Convention to describe Barack Obama's leadership experience: community organizer.

"I think the Republican Party is too smart to call Barack Obama 'black' in a sense that it would be a negative. But you can take something about his life, which I noticed they did at the Republican Convention – a 'community organizer.' They kept saying it, they kept laughing," he said.

Paterson sees the repeated use of the words "community organizer" as Republican code for "black".

"I think where there are overtones is when there are uses of language that are designed to inhibit other people's progress with a subtle reference to their race," he said.

I'm sorry, but saying that "community organizer" is code for "black" is simply ridiculous. It smacks of desperation, and shows just how rattled the Obama supporters are by his softening in the polls, by Sarah Palin's popularity despite (or maybe because of) their attack machine, and by the dawning realization that they could actually lose this campaign.

In this post today Mark Shea links to an article by an Obama supporter who wakes up to this possibility, and then blames it all on the media (I'm not linking directly to the piece because it contains some rather strong language). The media! Yes, apparently the Obama supporters will wake up the day after the election muttering imprecations against America's news reporters, because if they'd only done their jobs and exposed McBushPalinCainReaganNixonHitler for what they really were, then no sane person in America would ever have voted for them, and NPR would rule the land as the voice of reason and sanity, and all the social programs a liberal utopian could ever have dreamed of could have been funded by taxing Nascar out of existence.

The Large Hadron Collider may not have imploded, or manufactured black holes, or otherwise caused dire irreversable damage to the world. But the Obama campaign is taking up the slack, spiraling out of control in an ever-accelerating loop as they keep crashing head-on into the reality that a firm commitment to liberal elitism has never won an election yet.

Humor Is Best Left To Professionals

Politicians sometimes make the mistake of trying to be funny. This almost never works. Most politicians don't know how to be funny. If they knew how to be funny they'd be comedians, as there's much more money and prestige in being a comedian than in being a politician; just ask Stephen Colbert, professional comedian and former hypothetical vice-presidential pick for a hypothetical Huckabee ticket. I'm sure Colbert was busily thinking up ways to back out, humorously, from the slot, during the nerve-wracking (for him) day or so when Huck actually looked like a possible contender.

But politicians, many of whom are former lawyers, aren't generally funny, and are never at their best when attempting to tell a joke. They usually end up missing the mark, offending people, or both. Most of us would get sued by angry mobs if we told the kind of offensive or lame jokes politicians tell routinely, but that's where being former lawyers comes in really handy. Still, it would be better for them, and for us, not to mention the angry mobs, if they'd quit trying to do it.

Take the latest in the Obama vs. Palin contest. Obama seems, among other things, to have forgotten that he's not actually running against Palin, but aside from that the problem with his "lipstick on a pig" joke is that it's not funny. Now, I don't think the McCain campaign needed to draw attention to it, but maybe they're doing so out of misplaced mercy; it's their way of letting Obama know that the 80s called and wants its joke back. The 1880s, that is, which is the last time the "lipstick on a pig" phrase was actually funny; the word "lipstick" was new enough then that it probably conveyed a pretty hilarious mental image, and provoked the appropriate giggling reaction.

Today, when America's second female vice-presidential candidate is clearly the only one in the race who wears lipstick (anymore, anyway; remember those awful early years of C-Span, when senators showed up in makeup for the cameras? I bet Joe Biden does. McCain not so much, as I'm sure his advisers would have told him to stay away from anything more than a light gloss. But I digress), it's pretty foolish to use a joking phrase, however antiquated, that specifically references a female cosmetic product. The only way this could have been worse would be if Obama had suddenly channeled Prince Charles and referenced a female hygiene product, but if that had happened the Secret Service would have needed to whisk him away from the women in the crowd before some sort of riot broke out. Come to think of it, it's pretty safe to joke about lipstick in front of a crowd of feminists; most of them don't wear it, and haven't since their commune days in the heady late '60s.

The point I'm completely failing to make here (though by example, not so much!) is that there's a right way and a wrong way to do political humor. Obama's sudden lapse into "Lipstickgate" is one example of the wrong way, and my preceding paragraphs provide another example of political humor done badly.

Fortunately, I have an example of political humor done well, from the incomparable Dave Berry of the Miami Herald:

ST. PAUL --

The Republican convention reached a dramatic conclusion Thursday night when, moments after John McCain finished his triumphant acceptance speech, nets high above the convention floor opened up and released thousands upon thousands of red, white and blue golf balls.

''We thought we'd try something a little different,'' one convention planner said later, as wounded delegates were carried out on stretchers, some of them still clutching PROSPERITY signs. ``Next time we are definitely going back to the balloons.''

But other than that, the convention went pretty well. The Republicans came to Minnesota worried about whether they could match the megawatt buzz generated in Denver by the Democrats' ticket of Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Ben Affleck. But the Republicans are leaving here with energy of their own, thanks to the McCain-Palin ticket, which combines the experience of a longtime maverick war-hero senator with the fresh-faced 'n' feisty toughness of a small-town Alaska hockey-mom snowmobiling mayor governor who can kill and field-butcher a mature grizzly bear using only a nail file and her teeth.

The Republicans are also feeling good about their message, which is that Washington is bad and whoever is in charge there needs to be run out of town on a rail. Interestingly, this is also the Democrats' message. We are now in our fourth consecutive decade in which both of our major political parties are just totally FED UP with Washington. I frankly don't see how Washington can survive this onslaught much longer.

See, now that's the way to do it. Lipstick on a pig, referencing the "pit bull" joke Sarah Palin told at her own expense? Not funny. "...a small-town Alaska hockey-mom snowmobiling mayor governor who can kill and field-butcher a mature grizzly bear using only a nail file and her teeth..."? Funny.

I hope Obama will leave the jokes to the professionals from now on. I'm probably not sage enough to take my own advice, but at least I've got the principle of the thing.

This Scares Me; Obama on Education

Barack Obama gave a speech today in Ohio, on the subject of education. The word "homeschooling" doesn't appear in the speech, but I wouldn't expect it to; Democrats aren't all that friendly to the idea that any citizen anywhere can actually educate his or her own children without constant government oversight, mandates, and grants.

But some of what he did say is rather frightening to read, such as this:

We need -- we need a full-throated commitment to public education. And that's why, last November, I proposed an education agenda that moves beyond party and ideology, and focuses instead on what will make the most difference in a child's life.

My plan calls for giving every child a world-class education from the day they're born until the day they graduate from college. It's a plan that starts with investing in early childhood education -- (applause) -- because we know that children in these programs are more likely to score higher in reading and math, and because they start school prepared they are able to keep up. They don't fall behind. They are more likely to graduate high school and attend college. They're more likely to hold a job and earn more in that job. So that's a key component of the plan: closing the achievement gap by investing in early childhood education. It's also -- (applause) -- it's also a plan that will finally put a college degree within reach for anyone who wants one by providing a $4,000 -- (applause) -- tax credit to any middle-class student who's willing to serve their community or their country. We have to make sure that every young person can afford to go to a public college or a university if they've got the will, if they've got the grades. (Cheers, applause.)

Wait a minute. From the day they're born??? Good Lord, who does he think he is, anyway? And just what kind of governmental interference with at-birth education can we expect in Obama's America? Teachers with flashcards and Mozart CDs in the labor room? Tests in the nursery to see if the infant shows signs of indifference to NPR or C-Span?

I'm joking, of course, but what scares me is that Obama isn't. Expect an army of hospital-gestapo types to all but follow you home to make sure you are properly stimulating and "pre-educating" your newborn; it will come.

And the mention of that perennial favorite, early childhood education, should also send a shiver down a homeschooling mom's spine: do we really have to begin formal instruction of our children at the age of two? Isn't it better to let them play and explore, learning in an unstructured environment with plenty of free time, than to be forced to teach them on some kind of arbitrary schedule complete with educational objectives and tests?

Here's more:

Now, giving our parents real choices about where to send their kids to school also means showing the same kind of leadership at the national level that I did in Illinois, when I passed a law to double the number of public charter schools in Chicago. Keep in mind that John McCain will say he's arguing for choice by allowing money and students to drain out of the public schools. I believe in public schools. (Cheers, applause.) But I also believe in fostering competition within the public schools. And that's why, as president, I'll double the funding for responsible charter schools.

But I also know you've had a tough time with for-profit charter schools here in Ohio, and that is why I'll work with Governor Strickland to hold for-profit charter schools accountable, and I'll work with all our nation's governors to hold all our charter schools accountable. (Applause.) Charter schools that are successful will get the support they need to grow; charters that aren't will get shut down. (Cheers, applause.) I want experimentation, but I also want accountability. And we'll help ensure that more of our kids have access to quality after-school and summer school and extended school days for students who need it, because if they can do that in China, then we can do that right here in the United States of America. (Applause.)

So, no vouchers with Obama; but he will make sure that kids are in school for longer and longer time periods. Ugh. I'm sorry, but anyone who makes China a model of how to take care of children is not someone I'd have much confidence in, frankly. We all know what this is: the day-care model of public education, where parents are pushed farther and farther away from the children who are raised by the nanny-state and conditioned to favor liberalism and big-government solutions to every problem. They may not end up learning any more, but unlike Sarah Palin, the left will approve of them, and see them as intelligent to the extent that they can regurgitate the left's favorite talking points.

And there's more:

Imagine a future where our children are more motivated because they aren't just learning on blackboards, but on new whiteboards with digital touch screens; where every student in a classroom has a laptop at their desk; where they don't just do book reports but design PowerPoint presentations -- (applause) -- where they don't just write papers, but they build websites; where research isn't done just by taking a book out of the library, but by e-mailing experts in the field; and where teachers are less a source of knowledge than a coach for how best to use it and -- and obtain knowledge. By fostering innovation, we can help make sure every school in America is a school of the future.

And that's what we're going to do when I'm president. We will help -- (cheers, applause) -- we will help schools integrate technology into their curriculum so we can make sure public school students are fluent in the digital language of the 21st century economy. We'll teach our students not only math and science, but teamwork and critical thinking and communication skills, because that's how we'll make sure they're prepared for today's workplace.

In other words, we'll ramp up the process of making sure your children will only be capable of becoming corporate wage slaves; we'll also teach them that the technology behind the book report is way more important than actually reading the book and understanding it well enough to discuss it intelligently. We can't have that in the classrooms of America; too many teachers would be embarrassed. And e-mailing experts solves the problem of children having too much access to books other than the Unlikely Melodramatic Teen High School Romance series books, which won't teach them anything they didn't already learn from the on-site Planned Parenthood liaison.

All of this, of course, makes me extremely glad we are able to homeschool; but again, as I said at the beginning, Obama doesn't mention homeschooling. Our freedom to continue to do so without governmental interference or oversight is much more at risk when the Democrats are in charge; they want to "improve" No Child Left Behind, by which I suspect they mean that they'd like to make it "No Child--or Parent--Left Alone To Teach."

UPDATE: Drudge links to this video; the McCain campaign on Obama and education. Worth a watch, I think.

The Audacity of Hoping Somebody Out There Will Hold Joe Biden Accountable For Once

Joe Biden has done it again. Speaking today about stem-cell research, he said the following (HT: The Corner):

“I hear all this talk about how the Republicans are going to work in dealing with parents who have both the joy, because there's joy to it as well, the joy and the difficulty of raising a child who has a developmental disability, who were born with a birth defect. Well guess what folks? If you care about it, why don't you support stem cell research?”

Catholics Against Joe Biden has more, and some analysis:

And before someone comments about my adding the word "embryonic" in brackets to Sen. Biden's comments, that's the ONLY way his comments make any sense, since Gov. Palin - as do most pro-lifers - supports stem cell research deriving from other sources that do not require the destruction of human embryos.

Unfortunately, Sen. McCain does not appear to be among the pro-lifers who oppose ESCR. But then, he's not out there on the campaign trail actively promoting the destruction of unborn human life either.

Mr. "Life begins at conception unless I'm on 'Meet the Press' at which case I'll start talking about Thomas Aquinas and the Summa and quickening until you can't stand the sound of my voice anymore and move on to a question I can really answer such as why the Republicans are big fat meanies who hate the poor and the oppressed and Public Radio..." apparently hasn't checked out what the Catechism says about the evils of embryonic stem cell research, either. Senator Biden, the clue-phone is ringing and it's for you: pro-life people reject "solutions" to disability that involve (1) killing the disabled person, whether in utero or in Florida (or both) and (2) killing other people at the earliest stage of human development to try to improve the lives of the disabled person.

So you see, there's no inconsistency at all for a person to welcome a Down syndrome or autistic or cerebral palsy baby and categorically refuse to explore "healing" for these conditions that requires somebody else's baby to die. It doesn't matter if that "somebody else" left her babies frozen in a clinic with no intention of ever returning for them; it's horrific to contemplate murdering them under the illusion of finding cures for everything but Democratic Senatorial Logorrhea (which can then be marketed for a significant profit, of course). The real inconsistancy comes in claiming to be a good Catholic while supporting both abortion on demand and ESCR, but we're supposed to be too polite to point that out.

Perhaps the next time Joe Biden decides to appeal to parents of disabled children for support for the killing of other people's children, someone present will be impolite enough to point out the sheer audacity of evil contained in such a suggestion. One can always hope.

The Culture War

Remember the culture war? That endless divide between Americans over such hot-button issues as abortion, gay marriage, gun control, and the like? The war that was supposed to be over as we all moved toward an enlightened post-culture-war political future where we all smiled, got along, taught the world to sing and bought it a Coke?

Apparently the news is out: we're still fighting:

It wasn't supposed to be a culture-war election, and not only because Iraq and the economy had shoved values issues into the background. The Republican candidate, at least back in his early, presumptive days, was notoriously uncomfortable talking about religion, and many conservative Christian leaders were equally uncomfortable about him. The Democratic candidate, by contrast, was at ease with his faith, biblically fluent, and reportedly doing an excellent job of reaching out to the elusive values voter. [...]

But something happened on the way to the party conventions. At a much ballyhooed discussion at Saddleback Church, one of America's biggest megachurches, the Rev. Rick Warren quizzed both candidates on their deepest convictions. McCain came across as confident and certain, particularly on the hot-button question of when life begins. Obama seemed to struggle with nuances. In front of a predominantly evangelical audience, certainty played better than nuance. McCain came out of Saddleback with a bounce and new confidence. Maybe he could talk this talk, after all? And, lo, when the conventions came, there was much faith-related talk as well as some important faith-related choices. [...]

The Palin pick was McCain's way of reigniting the culture war, a limited culture war, while not getting too directly involved in it. Depending on how it works out, it will be deemed a brilliant or disastrous strategy. At the very least, it is a risky one.

It's amazing. This was supposed to be a kinder, gentler election; Americans were supposed to overlook, with benignant charity, the contradictions between Barack Obama's words of hope and inclusion and his disturbingly extremist support for both partial-birth and post-birth abortions; they were supposed to become fired up about the candidate of change, and not delve too deeply into this candidate's past connections and racist-rhetoric mentor; they were supposed to elevate symbol over substance, and look at such things as the "seal of the Candidate" and the planned Brandenburg Gate address as proof that Barack was presidential, inevitable, poised on the brink of history, singularly placed to engineer change we could believe in; in short, that he was The One.

But apparently, conservative Americans, particularly those of us who are proud to be social conservatives and even, when necessary, single-issue voters, never got our copy of the script. We refused to accept a definition of "bipartisanship" which meant that conservatives had to surrender everything, in exchange for airy promises and a slightly less open contempt from our counterparts on the left; we failed to see Barack as The One, and saw instead the hubris behind the attempts by his campaign to create around him the aura of inevitability; we heard the word "change" a lot, but started to have the uneasy suspicion that once again, this Democrat was only referring like so many others before him to what would be left in our pockets once his programs and plans led to calls for tax increases on "the rich," increasingly defined as anyone who does not currently rely on government assistance in some form or other (that is, most of us).

The selection of Governor Palin as his running mate made John McCain a whole lot more palatable to a whole lot of us seemingly overnight. And it did something else, too; it caused the left to reveal prematurely the real face under the mask of all of this talk of bipartisanship, eschewing the old ways, learning to respect each other and get along, and moving past the endless skirmishes in the cultural war that rages on. It caused them to show us what life for conservatives during an Obama presidency would really have been like:

Hatred for motherhood, for pro-life values, and even for special-needs children. Hatred for people who take the Christian religion seriously; a concerted effort to weaken our ability to affect the body politic by defining us as "Christianists" and marginalizing us at every opportunity, most especially by parading an endless series of left-wing quisling Christian pastors whose ideas owe more to Marx than to Jesus Christ. Hatred for guns and the people who use them for such innocent pursuits as hunting or self-protection; hatred for people who think sex belongs in marriage, not in the instructional materials handed out in the second grade. Hatred for people who don't embrace gay marriage as normal and natural and healthy; hatred for people whose large families are decried as abnormal, unnatural, and unhealthy. Hatred for any woman who strays away from the feminist agenda; hatred for any man who appreciates his wife's traditionalism and desire to raise her own children.

The level of absolutely vile loathing poured forth following the Palin pick is a wake-up call for all of us: we're the ones being asked to lay down our arms in the culture war, but the object is not to seek real compromise. It is to force us to surrender, to force us to embrace the brave new world where gay marriage is normal but more than two children born in a family isn't, where guns are contraband but condoms mandatory, where the disabled are targeted for elimination before birth and marginalized if they're allowed to live; where a woman's place is in the workplace, and her only value measured in the tax dollars confiscated from her paycheck to support a growing number of liberal programs designed to keep enough people in a state of poverty and dependence to be certain that there will always be enough Democratic voters to ensure Democratic victories in any election.

The culture war isn't over, and never will be so long as the innocent are deprived of life, and the moral values of liberalism, socialism and relativism attempt to replace Judeo-Christian principles and common sense as the philosophical underpinnings of our nation. If this election has taught us anything else, it has certainly reminded us that the calls for a cease-fire in the culture war originate from those who want us to turn our backs on the unborn, on marriage and the family, and on those values that made our nation great; it has also taught us that accepting that call and refusing to fight for America means losing her forever.

The "Anti-Wedding Planners"

From the "right problem, totally, completely, hideously wrong solution files" comes this story:

We are convinced that there is no justification for wedding insanity. We feel qualified to make this judgment as single women who have never been married or engaged, and have never planned an event more complicated than happy hour. But we have seen what happens to some intelligent, strong women when confronted by the multibillion-dollar Wedding Industrial Complex: Those few unattractive tendencies, weaknesses generally kept under control -- bossiness, melodramatic romanticism, obsession with looks, agony over superficial details -- coalesce into a toxic distillate. What chance does anyone have against an industry that seduces the rampaging feminine id? The masses need to be liberated.

What if . . . we become Anti-Wedding Planners? What if we find a couple who shares our opinion and lets us plan their unorthodox, fabulously cheap anti-wedding, located -- we dream -- in a bus depot or a Laundromat? We envision the glorious reversal of typical wedding cliches: the symbolic release of dirty city pigeons in lieu of doves, bouquets of dead leaves, a buffet of peanut butter or grilled-cheese sandwiches. The wedding itself would be a statement, a metaphorical loogie aimed right at the wispy veil of wedding-obsessed America. It must be anti-industry, but pro-romance, because real love means knowing, This is my soul mate, even if (s)he's wearing a garbage bag.

I sympathize with the writers for correctly identifying one of the big problems with weddings today. The average couple spends about $30,000 just on the wedding, which is about $27,550 more than the average couple can actually afford in my opinion. The whole thing becomes a lavish and opulent display, one's own private Hollywood red carpet day, complete with wasteful expenditure and a "Star Is Born" feeling centered around the bride, who is supposed to Have Everything She Ever Dreamed Of Because This Is Her Day, Expletive Deleted!

Only it's not her day, as I've discussed before. And so much time and attention gets put into weddings, but so little into marriages, that we could almost postulate a connection between the increasing costs of weddings and the decreasing duration of the marriages.

Unfortunately, the self-styled "Anti-Wedding Planners" don't end up solving much. They still have to go to extremes to plan the "wedding protest event" they end up planning; the couple who marries is a cohabitating couple who are united by a relative who gets ordained over the Internet, and while the guests who send regrets are suspected of being snobs who won't come if there isn't going to be an ice swan and crystal champagne glasses, it's possible that they're simply prudent people who wonder about the duration of such a match.

It's entirely possible to have a simple, quiet wedding. In a church. With a real priest or minister officiating. And cake and coffee in the parish hall afterward.

But however admirable it may have seemed to the writers of the article to take on the wedding industry, the reality is that until people start taking marriage more seriously, weddings will continue to be frivolous and spectacular, whether the spectacle is that of the traditional sort, or of a lavish protest march that may not have cost much, but that contains the same elements of vulgar parade as the typical wedding.

Mother and Governor

Sorry for the late and light posting today! I'm finding Mondays, now that we're back in school, a bit more challenging.

This New York Times article is an interesting read for those women who are still concerned about whether a woman like Sarah Palin can really juggle motherhood and a political life:

No one has ever tried to combine presidential politics and motherhood in quite the way Ms. Palin is doing, and it is no simple task. In the last week, the criticism she feared in Alaska has exploded into a national debate. On blogs and at PTA meetings, voters alternately cheer and fault her balancing act, and although many are thrilled to see a child with special needs in the spotlight, some accuse her of exploiting Trig for political gain.

But her son has given Ms. Palin, 44, a powerful message. Other candidates kiss strangers’ babies; Ms. Palin has one of her own. He is tangible proof of Ms. Palin’s anti-abortion convictions, which have rallied social conservatives, and her belief that women can balance family life with ambitious careers. And on Wednesday in St. Paul, she proclaimed herself a guardian of the nation’s disabled children. [...]

Ms. Palin’s three-day maternity leave has now become legend among mothers. But aides say she eased back into work, first stopping by her office in Anchorage for a meeting, bringing not only the baby but also her husband to look after him.

Many high-powered parents separate work and children; Ms. Palin takes a wholly different approach. “She’s the mom and the governor, and they’re not separate,” Ms. Cole said. Around the governor’s offices, it was not uncommon to get on the elevator and discover Piper, smothering her puppy with kisses.

“She’ll be with Piper or Trig, then she’s got a press conference or negotiations about the natural gas pipeline or a bill to sign, and it’s all business,” Ms. Burney, who works across the hall, said. “She just says, ‘Mommy’s got to do this press conference.’ ”

Ms. Palin installed a travel crib in her Anchorage office and a baby swing in her Juneau one. For much of the summer, she carried Trig in a sling as she signed bills and sat through hearings, even nursing him unseen during conference calls.

Todd Palin took a leave from his job as an oil field production operator, and campaign aides said he was doing the same now.

I'm glad that details like this are coming out. Whatever else we can say about Sarah Palin, I think the idea that she's a typical career woman is definitely wrong.

Obama's Women

While on the one hand pooh-poohing the idea that Sarah Palin will appeal to women voters, the Obama campaign decided on the other hand that they were going to have to go aggressively after those women voters, just in case they're wrong:

Barack Obama's campaign plans to employ high-profile female supporters in an effort to blunt GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's potential to persuade women to vote Republican.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano and Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius all were scheduled to campaign for Obama in the coming weeks. Republicans say they hope Palin, who made her national debut with a feisty speech on Wednesday, could put some female voters in play.

''We respect her. She's a skilled politician, as she proved last night,'' Obama strategist David Axelrod told reporters aboard the campaign plane Thursday. ''She's deft at going on the attack.''

But it's not clear exactly how Obama and his running mate Joe Biden should respond. They keenly remember how women rallied around one-time Democratic front runner Clinton when they perceived she was a victim of sexism. They don't want to appear with a weak response, either, and certainly they also don't want to send independent women flocking to the GOP.

So the Democratic campaign is having trouble making up its mind. Just like a...oh, never mind.

Is it just me, or does this move seem a little desperate coming from a campaign that's been out in front up to now? Given that the Democrats have a positive knack for snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory, one can't help but wonder if they've thought this through. Against a down-to-earth, God, country, family kind of woman, a woman whose most feminist act has been to take her baby to work with her, they're going to juxtapose Hillary, Napolitano and Sebelius? I mean, really, their female contingent:


Against ours?

I think this proves that what has the left so very riled up about Sarah Palin is that they think they have the lock on "women's rights" and "women's roles." They don't approve of a woman managing to sidestep their grievances, their issues, and especially their commitment to abortion, but still managing to become a mayor, governor, and now vice-presidential nominee.

But the strategy of sending out the--forgive me, but I have to say it--"unholy trio" above to try to weaken female support for Palin has "backfire" written all over it. Few women outside of the elitist liberal conclaves find women like Hillary, for instance, all that inspirational; Sebelius is a disgrace to her fellow Catholics, while Napolitano is as extremely pro-abortion as Obama, voting against banning partial-birth abortion and against parental consent for minors to have abortions. The only women the three of them will ever appeal to are the kind of women who are already supporting Obama; women who would consider supporting Palin won't be convinced not to do so by these aging pro-abortion feminists and their tired, decaying agenda.

I think the Democrats are terrified of underestimating the damage Sarah Palin may cause their campaign; but what they don't realize is that the more desperate they sound as they combat her, the more the American people will see that desperation as the incontrovertible mark of the losing side.

Past and Future

A little while ago, I stumbled across this vintage magazine article from Mechanix Illustrated, titled "What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008?" The article, written in November of 1968, contains the usual mixture of amusingly wild imagination and startlingly accurate guesses; the whole thing is fun to read, and I'm glad when people take the time to archive things like that on the Internet.

Here's a portion of the article that's not too far off, though the details are a little funny:

The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer. These electronic brains govern everything from meal preparation and waking up the household to assembling shopping lists and keeping track of the bank balance. Sensors in kitchen appliances, climatizing units, communicators, power supply and other household utilities warn the computer when the item is likely to fail. A repairman will show up even before any obvious breakdown occurs.

Computers also handle travel reservations, relay telephone messages, keep track of birthdays and anniversaries, compute taxes and even figure the monthly bills for electricity, water, telephone and other utilities. Not every family has its private computer. Many families reserve time on a city or regional computer to serve their needs. The machine tallies up its own services and submits a bill, just as it does with other utilities.

Money has all but disappeared. Employers deposit salary checks directly into their employees’ accounts. Credit cards are used for paying all bills. Each time you buy something, the card’s number is fed into the store’s computer station. A master computer then deducts the charge from your bank balance.

Computers not only keep track of money, they make spending it easier. TV-telephone shopping is common. To shop, you simply press the numbered code of a giant shopping center. You press another combination to zero in on the department and the merchandise in which you are interested. When you see what you want, you press a number that signifies “buy,” and the household computer takes over, places the order, notifies the store of the home address and subtracts the purchase price from your bank balance. Much of the family shopping is done this way. Instead of being jostled by crowds, shoppers electronically browse through the merchandise of any number of stores.

The portion on medical care, however, is just wishful thinking:

Medical research has guaranteed that most babies born in the 21st century will live long and healthy lives. Heart disease has virtually been eliminated by drugs and diet. If hearts or other major organs do give trouble, they can be replaced with artificial organs.

Medical examinations are a matter of sitting in a diagnostic chair for a minute or two, then receiving a full health report. Ultrasensitive microphones and electronic sensors in the chair's headrest, back and armrests pick up heartbeat, pulse, breathing rate, galvanic skin response, blood pressure, nerve reflexes and other medical signs. A computer attached to the chair digests these responses, compares them to the normal standard and prints out a full medical report.

No need to worry about failing memory or intelligence either. The intelligence pill is another 21st century commodity. Slow learners or people struck with forgetful-ness are given pills which increase the production of enzymes controlling production of the chemicals known to control learning and memory. Everyone is able to use his full mental potential.

And other details from the article, like domed cities, self-driving cars that can travel at speeds of 250 miles per hour, robotic household servants, and vacations under the ocean or on orbiting space hotels make me wonder just how liberally the people who thought of those things were indulging in the recreational pharmaceutical culture of the late sixties.

When I was reading the piece, I was initially struck by the optimism of it. The late sixties were years of cultural and political unrest, violence at home and abroad, an explosion of societal dissolution, tumultuous and unmoored from the past; yet in articles like this one that were quite popular during the time span all anyone seemed to see was a very bright future for what it was still politically correct to call mankind. Compare that to the relentless doom and gloom we hear today, and I can't help but wonder: when did we Americans lose our sense of optimism, our belief that we could accomplish anything, and our drive to explore, expand, improve, and enrich not our own lives, but the lives of our fellow men?

But as I read through it again, I discovered the seeds of the loss of faith. All of the great advances and dreams the writer created in his scenarios of that far-distant year of 2008 were based on a belief in science and technology, a belief, in fact, that science and technology could and would solve every problem man had ever had, from the need to work (the author thought people would only work four hours a day in 2008 because of all the increased productivity), the need to worry about food (because factory farms would run as efficiently as all other factories) or shelter (because the pre-fab plastic home would be readily affordable for the masses), to transportation, health, education, and all the other challenges people face in the world. Science, the new god rising from the ashes of the old faiths and creeds that had plunged the world into war and brought us to the brink of destruction, would be a much more benevolent deity; people would live cheerful, easy, happy, productive lives, and the only worship required of them would be the two hours of daily study needed to be initiated into the new mysteries of the technological super-paradise which the author mentions.

Clinging with a simple, naive, and primitive faith to the notion that Science would solve all, rule all, control--but kindly!--all, and eradicate once and for all the problems and troubles and pains and sorrows and sufferings and despairs that have plagued men since the Garden of Eden, the people at the dawn of the computer age trusted that forty years into the future the most perplexing problem would be which frozen dinner to microwave, or what three-dimensional television program to tune in to of an evening. But Science has proved to be as false a god as all false gods that promise salvation without suffering, or speak of redemption while denying the Fall.

True science is always a servant of God, not a god in its own right. Science, being limited to the physical and sensate world, can only solve material problems--and even then, not always, and not without costs. But the problems that lurk deeply in every civilization do not spring from material wants, and can't be solved by applying rational and/or materialistic solutions to them; the greatest troubles and pains men carry are always the ones borne by the soul, and will no more be solved by science than a baby's existential fear brought on by his mother's absence can be eradicated by pretty toys or amusing distractions.

I can't say what life will be like in 2048, but at least I know one thing: the false hope man placed on Science as Savior from about the middle of the twentieth century on has begun to dim in the face of the evidence that material solutions to immaterial problems will never work, and by God's grace the attempt to make of Science a deity or demigod will seem as odd and amusing a notion to the people of 2048 as some of the ideas of 1968 seem to us now.

Dunces on Parade

Okay, which is the less intelligent of these two things:

1. Driving toward the Capitol with a cache of weapons and stopping to ask police for directions:

The man stopped to ask police for directions near the Capitol building at about 11 a.m. EDT Friday, at the intersection of 2nd and Independence Avenue Southeast, according to Capitol Police spokeswoman Sgt. Kimberly Schneider.

The officer responding noticed a rifle case on the car seat and inspected the jeep, discovering the IED, rifle and ammunition. A canine unit was enlisted to help.

"They've all been rendered safe right now because they're in the custody of Capitol Police," Schneider told reporters at a briefing Friday.

The officer took the unidentified man into custody; the vehicle is still being searched.

Or...

2. Writing an article for Salon--I am not making this up--in which you complain that John McCain's speech last night was nothing but empty rhetoric with the word "change" thrown in a lot:

Of course, his handlers may well have felt that they didn't need to craft a speech telling us what the maverick actually intends to do as president because -- as Rick Davis admitted the other day -- they think this election is about cultural divisions rather than issues. Evidently they also believe that if McCain simply says the word "change" often enough, he can pilfer the Democratic theme. [Emphasis added--EM.]

Perhaps those tactics will win over voters with short attention spans, but at least some people are likely to ask what McCain means when he talks about change. The problem is not that he lacks credentials as a critic of both his own party's corrupt culture and Washington's broader pathologies, but that he has abandoned so much of what once marked him out as different.

Shorn of the boilerplate conservative clichés like charter schools, the real subjects of McCain's speech were attitude and character rather than programs.

Writer Joe Conason might want to reflect on the wisdom of writing an opinion piece where you could swap out the names of the candidates and parties without changing the veracity of the whole thing. I don't know about the rest of you, but when I think of empty speeches with the word "change" thrown in a lot, John McCain's name isn't exactly the first one that comes to mind.

Though I'd be inclined myself to vote for example number one as the more brainless activity, I must admit that unintelligent criminals are hardly a new phenomenon. It's been pretty amazing these last few days to see the reckless extent to which members of the media tear aside the mask of placid objectivity and replace it with the slavering scowl of rabid partisanship; as a group activity, I think the level of unintelligent reflection and choice demonstrated by this folly on the part of the mainstream media doesn't fall far short of the sort displayed by the person bent on destruction who thinks to pack guns and an IED but forgets to bring along a map.

Blasphemy on the Left

Several left-leaning sites and people are engaging in the reserved elitist substitute for thigh-slapping and guffawing over a would-be clever line some wag has come up with:

"Jesus was a community organizer, and Pontius Pilate was a governor."

Three quick things before I head out to choir practice (wonderful music today! Where Charity and Love Prevail, Love Divine all Loves Excelling, and the Mozart Ave Verum Corpus among others!!):

1. When you compare Barack Obama to Jesus, doesn't it strike you that all you're doing is reinforcing those pesky rumors that you see the man as a Messianic figure?

2. Don't you think it's just a tad blasphemous, not to mention ridiculously inaccurate, to reduce the role of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Son of God who came to Earth to suffer and die on behalf of sinful humanity, to a late twentieth/early twenty-first century professional political agitator?

3. Compare and contrast the following:

Community organizer: The leaders and organizers of the Industrial Areas Foundation build organizations whose primary purpose is power - the ability to act - and whose chief product is social change. They continue to practice what the Founding Fathers preached: the ongoing attempt to make life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness everyday realities for more and more Americans. [Emphasis added-EM]

Jesus Christ: Do nothing out of selfishness or out of vainglory; rather, humbly regard others as more important than yourselves, each looking out not for his own interests, but (also) everyone for those of others. Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus, Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2: 3-8)

No, Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, was most decidedly NOT a community organizer. And Barack Obama, who washes his hands of the blood of the innocent unborn, has far more in common with a certain Roman procurator we won't name than the people who support Obama to the point of blasphemy should be comfortable remembering.

Zen and the Art of Asbestos Removal; or, A Study in Community Organizing

One major question seems finally to be on everyone's mind, following Sarah Palin's brilliant speech last night: so what the heck is a community organizer, anyway?

While I wish the country had asked the question some time ago, I'm amazed to see as I visit blogs and websites that many people still think "community organizer" means "fresh-faced college student doing glorified community service, of the paint houses/clean up trash/hold neighborhood watch meetings variety."

Nothing could be further from the truth.

A community organizer is a paid political agitator. Linked to Saul Alinsky and the Industrial Areas Foundation, community organizers believe in power, especially liberal Democrat power. Consider this, from the IAF website:

The leaders and organizers of the Industrial Areas Foundation build organizations whose primary purpose is power - the ability to act - and whose chief product is social change. They continue to practice what the Founding Fathers preached: the ongoing attempt to make life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness everyday realities for more and more Americans. [...]

The IAF develops organizations that use power - organized people and organized money - in effective ways. The secret to the IAF's success lies in its commitment to identify, recruit, train, and develop leaders in every corner of every community where IAF works. The IAF is indeed a radical organization in this specific sense: it has a radical belief in the potential of the vast majority of people to grow and develop as leaders, to be full members of the body politic, to speak and act with others on their own behalf. And IAF does indeed use a radical tactic: the face-to-face, one-to-one individual meeting whose purpose is to initiate a public relationship and to re-knit the frayed social fabric.

One of the partners of "community organizers" and the organizations they work for, IAF and other similar organizations, is the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, which lists its 2007 grant disbursals here (scroll down; the file is a PDF file). As I wrote about back in July, CCHD was one of the grant organizations helping fund Obama's work back in the early days in Chicago; writer Stephanie Block also notes a connection between CCHD and ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), the organization Obama was associated with. About these types of organizations, Block writes:

The community organizing embraced by Senator Obama is an inheritance from Saul Alinsky who founded the Industrial Areas Foundation and wrote about his organizing principles in two books, Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals. Today’s major organizing networks - ACORN, PICO, DART, Gamaliel and, of course, Alinsky’s own Industrial Areas Foundation - owe their structures and their methodologies to Alinsky. The old time organizers who founded these networks were either trained through the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) or by IAF organizers.

Alinsky’s principles are deeply unethical, however. He teaches, for example, that in politics, the ends justify the means. Specifically, he teaches organizers to seek political power by any means that accomplishes that end. Local agendas are used to serve a larger, organizational agenda that is sometimes diametrically opposed to the values of its membership. Faith-based institutions are evangelized into liberationist theory through a variety of mechanisms. These are serious problems for the religious bodies who have become institutional members of the Alinskyian networks.

Some people, especially on the political left, take a more positive view of community organizing than this; however, in this positive article about Obama and his community organizing experience, the following anecdote is rather revealing:

Perhaps his most confrontational effort was to pressure city authorities to remove asbestos from the apartments in 1986. When the on-site manager didn't take action, Obama nudged the residents into confronting city housing officials in two angry public meetings downtown. These generated "a victory of sorts," Obama said later, as workers soon began sealing the asbestos in the buildings. But the project gradually ran out of steam and money. In fact, some tenants still have asbestos in their homes, according to current resident Linda Randle, 53, who worked with Obama in the '86 anti-asbestos campaign.

So a campaign led by Obama some twenty-two years ago during his "community organizing" days shows two things: one, that being a community organizer is a bit like the playground game of "Let's you and him fight," and two, that success is apparently defined by getting the community to go to meetings, not necessarily accomplishing the objective (in this case, asbestos removal).

Hmmm.

And they say our vice presidential candidate lacks experience.

The Unbearable Irrelevance of Vox Nova

For those of you who may not read it, Vox Nova is a blog that promises to offer "Catholic Perspectives on Culture, Society and Politics." There are currently twelve regular contributors to the blog who come from diverse backgrounds and offer their thoughts and insights on the news of the day.

Such an enterprise would seem like a promising endeavor, especially given the mention of non-partisanship as a goal in the section about the blog. Christians ought not to be strict party partisans, but capable of calling both political parties to avoid evil and seek to do good in the polis as in all of society, as a guiding principle of civil responsibility.

Unfortunately, in recent weeks the blog has sunk more and more into the spirit of fierce partisanship, with several--though decidedly not all--of the bloggers turning their not inconsiderable talents away from the higher-minded purpose the blog aims for, and instead engaging in activities that can only be described as shilling for the Democratic candidates for president and vice president and bashing the Republican ones.

This, of course, seems odd to many of the rank-and-file Catholics who read the blog, however occasionally; the unpleasant partisanship aside, there remains the not quite convenient fact that this particular Democratic candidate is the single most extreme pro-abortion candidate who has ever run for this office. I understand the argument some Catholics make in regard to voting for pro-abortion candidates and pro-abortion parties; it can be roughly expressed as a syllogism:

1. Catholics can't vote for abortion.
2. Catholics can vote for candidates who support abortion despite, but never because of the candidate's support for abortion.
3. Catholics can vote for pro-abortion candidates when no moral alternative exists.
4. The Republican Party's support for war, torture, and the death penalty means that they are not a morally acceptable alternative to the Democratic Party.
5. The Democratic Party's support for abortion is less harmful than the Republican Party's support for war, torture, and the death penalty.
6. Therefore, it is right for Catholics who clearly oppose abortion to vote for the Democratic Party candidate for president despite his support for abortion.

Now, I don't really accept this syllogism myself. Provisions 1-3 are in line with Catholic teaching as far as I know (and as always I'll accept correction if I'm wrong) but I think things fall apart at 4 and 5. The only one of the three things mentioned that is as intrinsically evil as abortion is torture, and I think that it would be necessary to prove that John McCain's definitely supports torture, and that his support for torture was as well-defined, committed, and unequivocal as Barack Obama's support for abortion (and infanticide) before you could say that the two parties were in a state of moral equivalence. Further, given the immediate and direct harm of abortion I'm not sure you could say that Democratic support for abortion is less harmful than the Republican position on the other issues, though if it could be proved that McCain unequivocally supports torture you might be required to overlook the immediacy and directness of the harm of abortion in order to avoid proportionalism (and to be honest, that's one of the many areas in which I'm happy to accept correction).

But the level of support by some of the writers of Vox Nova for Barack Obama is troubling. I would think that if you were truly faced with two candidates who gave unequivocal support for intrinsic evil, you might in good conscience decide to vote for neither one; or, if you honestly believed that your civic duties as a Catholic in America in the twenty-first century required you to vote for one or the other of the two major party candidates, I would think that you would do so with reluctance, with apologies, and with the most lukewarm support possible. Further, I think you would go out of your way to avoid partisan attacks on the other party, since you are recognizing that both parties are actually supporting what is intrinsically evil and that it thus could not be said in any sense of the word that one party was morally superior to the other or that it would definitely be a good thing, from a Catholic moral perspective, for either candidate to be elected.

The Vox Nova bloggers have not taken this position; they have, instead, begun to attack the most pro-life candidate we've seen on the national stage in a considerable time, Governor Sarah Palin. Among the more absurd charges raised by the pseudonymous "Morning's Minion" (who used to post using his real name at Amy Welborn's old "Open Book" blog back in the day) and supported by some of the others is the idea that Palin is really an apostate Catholic, since she was baptized Catholic and then raised Protestant as a child when her parents left the Church; there have also been weird attempts to tie Palin to some things some pastor who visited her church one time said, and draw an equivalence here to Jeremiah Wright.

The incomparable Mark Shea takes them to task here, pointing out:

...Again, only a Pharisee could see in that something to condemn as "apostate". A charitable Catholic should celebrate it when Apollos worships and proclaims Christ, even when he has not been fully instructed in the Way.

Priscilla and Aquila took Apollos in and instructed him more fully. Morning's Minion prefers the more partisan route of declaring a 12 year old an apostate and then rashly reprinting whatever summary from a hostile witnes he can find in order to destroy Palin by any means necessary. That's called "being a full-orbed Catholic", doncha know.

I think MM senses that beating up a twelve year old for "apostasy" is a non-starter. That's why the Inquisition must continue until condemnation is achieved. Remember: the hatred precedes the reasons for it. So other firewood is hastily gathered. He can't follow Andrew Sullivan in simply denouncing her as an anti-semite for listening to somebody who evangelizes Jews. Even MM knows that Catholic Bibles contain Paul's remark that the gospel is "for the Jew first, and also for the Gentiles" and Jesus' comment that he was "sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel". So while "evangelizing Jews" may play with the hyperventilators in Blue States, it doesn't work with people who actually know something about Catholic theology.

The truth of the matter is that an authentically Catholic perspective on politics is never very comfortable with knee-jerk partisanship. I may be pretty thrilled with Sarah Palin and what her selection means for the future, not of the Republican party, but of the kind of conservatism that welcomes Christian thoughts and actions especially on social issues; but I'm not going to turn into a cheerleader for the GOP on that account, and will still have to decide whether to vote for John McCain or not. The fact that I'm even considering it is all Gov. Palin's doing, but I'm still weighing the various areas where I find myself diverging from GOP ideas in general and McCain's positions in particular, and I'm far from having made a committed decision.

So I find it terribly off-putting that a blog written by Catholics would contain so many partisan Obama cheerleaders in spite of Barack Obama's committed, on-record support for abortion and infanticide. The Catholic faith is enduring; partisan politics become yesterday's news as soon as an election is over, and taking a too-strong position in support of someone who is comfortable with something that all Catholics should find morally abhorrent is the quickest path I know for an otherwise promising blog to dwindle into irrelevance.

Worth a Thousand Words

America, this is what pro-life looks like:

Here:

And here:
And here:
Sarah Palin's speech tonight was extraordinary, powerful, delivered with poise, grace, and charm. It's going to be discussed, analyzed, and studied to death over the next few days, and I doubt the media's determination to dig up dirt on Governor Palin or her family will abate any time soon.

But the most powerful witness to the value of human life tonight was the very presence of little Trig Palin, whose life is considered valueless by those who believe that unborn babies who have Down syndrome or some other challenge or even who simply are inconvenient to their parents ought to be slaughtered like animals and thrown away like trash.

And Trig's unborn niece or nephew was, thanks to the media's 24/7 coverage of Bristol's pregnancy, also a silent witness to the value of human life, since he/she is also being welcomed with joy, not "disposed of" in the dark empty despairing silence of a bloodstained abortion mill.

The pictures say it all. Whatever else happens in this election, I'm glad Sarah Palin and her family graced that stage tonight, to bear witness to the sanctity of human life just by being there.

UPDATE: A commenter on ABC's website said of this speech that it looks like we just found out who will be the first woman President of the United States.

Open Season?

Did someone declare it open season on mothers while I wasn't looking?

Consider this article:

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Millions of poor children in the United States may be getting fat before age 10 because their mothers are stressed out and the youngsters seek escape in unhealthy comfort food, researchers said on Tuesday.

The stress is rooted in poverty and can be brought on by money woes, work loads, insufficient health insurance and other factors, said Craig Gundersen of the University of Illinois, who led the study.

"People will eat in response to feeling stress," he said in a telephone interview, and in this case children may be eating more in response to stress-related trouble at home. [...]

"We found that the cumulative stress experienced by the child's mother is an important determinant of child overweight," the research team reported in a study published in the September issue of Pediatrics.

Now, I'm sure that household stress and tension do contribute to emotional overeating, and also that emotional eating can contribute to weight issues, including obesity.

But this study focused on children under the age of ten!

Are five-year-olds really scarfing potato chips and snack cakes because Mom is a bit gloomy? Are two-year-olds raiding the fridge at midnight because their mothers seemed anxious or depressed during the day? Are seven-year-olds hitting the bottle--the Coke bottle, that is--because the lady of the house snaps at the slightest noise or signs of clutter in the after-school hours?

It would be one thing if this study determined that stress and tension caused mothers on occasion to bring home fast food instead of cooking a healthy meal, but the study specifically mentions children younger than ten "escaping" into comfort foods, and the mother's level of anxiety, depression, or other stress being a significant factor in the child's decision to do so.

Don't get me wrong: if mothers are unusually stressed or are suffering from psychological difficulties, they should be able to get help. But if children under ten are pigging out on junk food is the problem really an emotional eating reaction to deep parental stress--or simply a lack of general discipline coupled with busy parental schedules, too many convenience or fast food choices by the adults in the child's life, and perhaps in some socieoeconomic levels, a misunderstanding about basic principles of healthy eating, portion size, and the like?

It's so easy to blame moms for everything from children's eating habits to teen pregnancy and everything in between. It's hard, sometimes, to step back and realize that children have a tendency to act like children, whether that means sneaking an extra scoop of ice cream when mom isn't looking or sneaking out of the house to be alone with a boyfriend or girlfriend. The sad thing about this kind of focus is that what children really need is for the adults in their lives to model discipline, good judgment, and a firm grasp of consequences, yet nothing undermines a mother's sense of control faster than suggesting to her that even her normal, human moods and demeanor may be permanently damaging her children--or at least their eating habits.

Sarah Palin Scares Chuck Norris

Oh, not really. But if you like that sort of thing, Maclin's been collecting some of the best ones from this website.

Humor is a good idea. It has been known to keep angry redheaded female conservatives from spontaneous combustion.

Misogyny and the Sexual Revolution

The whole Sarah Palin affair and the reaction of the media to her has been rather instructive, hasn't it?

One of the things I've been pondering is how deeply misogynistic many on the left are revealing themselves to be. One example is this one posted by Matthew Archbold at CMR, who as a stay-at-home dad is particularly upset by the notion being expressed in the mainstream media that women really should learn that their place is in the home...

This is the twenty-first century, right?

Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm a big supporter of traditional motherhood. As I've written before, though, I recognize that some women some of the time may find it possible or even necessary to make different arrangements for their families. I would never, for instance, criticize the Archbold family for the decision they have made, and I once met a lovely woman who was in the Navy but whose husband was a true homebody and, if I remember correctly, an artist or musician. It wouldn't work for every family--but it definitely worked for them!

It seems a bit surreal to hear the talking heads on the morning shows wondering if Gov. Palin can really be a mom and a governor, or a mom and a vice-president. It seems especially surreal coming from the I-am-woman-hear-me-roar-I-can-be-a-wife-and-mother-and-doctor-and-lawyer-and-Native-American-chief-and-still-have-cookies-for-the-bake-sale contingent of liberal feminism which exudes like an unlikely perfume from the emanations of the mainstream media.

But there's a reason for all the sudden apron-waving and shoe removal among the left and its feminists.

Sarah Palin isn't a threat because she's a mom and a governor, or a mom and a potential vice president. Sarah Palin is a threat because by her actions and example, and those of her family, she rejects the values of the sexual revolution.

Think for a minute about what the left is always saying about sex and reproduction. It boils down to the fact that they're in favor of sex but not of reproduction; more specifically, they insist that for a woman really to be free she must be able to, as they put it, control her fertility, with pills and plastic, implants and shots, and with cheap easy abortion as backup so that she'll never have to put her life or dreams or talents on hold because of an inconvenient pregnancy.

Now, I don't know the details of Sarah Palin's life nor of her church's beliefs on the matter of birth control. But you don't generally have five children by being strongly committed to the contraceptive mentality, and the left has picked up on this.

So Sarah Palin is a threat to the misogynistic left because she does not appear to have "controlled her fertility," and yet she is the Governor of Alaska, and soon, God willing, could be the Vice President of the United States of America.

Sarah Palin illustrates by example that the women of America have been sold a lie. You don't have to "control your fertility" to follow your dreams, to live the life God calls you to, to use your talents, and to achieve whatever you set your mind to.

I could have told them that, of course. The women of America could look at my amazing mom, or at other women like her, to learn that the bearing and raising of children doesn't even remotely turn you into some kind of drudgery-absorbed cretin who knows nothing of the outside world and can't converse intelligently on any topic more challenging than diaper contents or proper cleaning methods. The myth of the stupid shiny housewife, incapable of independent thought or action, would have died an ignominious death a long time ago if the pro-abortion, pro-contraception feminists of the world hadn't take such pains to keep it alive. The lesson still being taught to young women today is this: you can be your own person, have your own life, and be a success so long as you take our magic pills; otherwise, you'll be like one of those women on TV who is agonizing about spots in her toilet or wringing her hands over the ring around the collar.

And behind that attitude is, of course, a near-pathological misogyny that only loves women when they've taken chemical or other means to make themselves just like men, but hates and fears women deeply when they retain their most intrinsically female property, the ability to conceive and bear children.

Sarah Palin stands as a sign of contradiction. She didn't have to stop being a woman, or stop being a mother, to do what she has done. She didn't have to buy into the contraceptive mindset, and she absolutely refused to "choose" abortion when the delightful surprise named Trig came along. Simply by her existence she threatens the contraceptive ideology that has always been more against women than it is for them, though too many women embraced it and sought to make its poison their food.

The welter of vehement rage and scorn being poured in her direction is proof of this. Those who hate Sarah Palin the most are terribly afraid of her, because they're afraid that other women will also suddenly recognize the ugly misogyny that has always lurked underneath the contraceptive imperative of the sexual revolution.

Loving the Sinner

The vitriol of the left, and of the media elite, continues to amaze me.

Consider this little gem from Alan Wolfe at The New Republic:

It may seem like ages ago but during the Clinton administration, conservative traditionalists were everywhere. The nuclear family is sacrosanct. Women should shun the workforce and become full-time moms. Kids should obey their parents and, if they choose not to, discipline, including harsh measures, ought to be applied. Sex outside of marriage is strictly forbidden. Our culture is spinning wildly out of control, and sexual liberation, the worst byproduct of the God-awful 1960s, is the cause. And, by the way, abortion is murder and should be forbidden.

All that is left, if the Palin controversy is any indication, is abortion. Palin's defenders, far from being traditionalists, are moral relativists. We should not rush to judgment. It is important to understand the pressures that families face. Love is all you need. Forgive in order to forget. People are entitled to their privacy, even, if not especially, in the bedroom. The state should not be in the business of telling people what to do. It sounds like the language of the left, but it has also had long resonance on the libertarian right. When the McCain campaign said that Bristol Palin had a choice, it was correct. These days we all have choices. The fact that we do has always bothered conservative traditionalists. [...]

And that is not all. In rushing to Sarah Palin's defense, the leaders of the Christian right have made it abundantly clear how they define a Christian. We don't care if you sin. We are not bothered if you put your ambition ahead of the needs of your children. If you have lied or broken the law, we will look the other way. It all comes down to your stand on guns and fetuses. Vote the right way, and you have our blessing. If any proof were needed that James Dobson is a political operative rather than a spiritual leader, his jumping on the Palin bandwagon offers it.

Aside from the appallingly poor quality of the writing (tense changes mid-paragraph? That's not style, that's just sloppy!) it is amazing how revealing this little mess of non-sequiturs and snobbish slamming really is.

Mr. Wolfe wouldn't know a moral relativist if it stared at him in the mirror every morning, which it probably does. There is absolutely no contradiction whatsoever between hating sin and loving sinners, and insisting that sex outside of marriage is a sin doesn't mean branding those who engage in it as harlots and lechers, particularly if they appear to be striving to do the right thing in the aftermath, as this young couple seems to be doing:

Discipline is still an excellent thing not just for children but even for adults, who aren't entitled to hedonism and selfishness any more than children are; and the sexual revolution, with the wreckage of divorce, abortion, poverty, diseases both physical and psychological, and other associated traumas it has left in its wake is still the scourge of the modern age.

I think what's really eating at Mr. Wolfe, and others like him, is that they equate moral principles with hatred. Because the religious believers in this country think that homosexual activity is immoral, for example, we must hate same-sex attracted people. Because we stand up for the right of an unborn human being to live, we must hate people who have abortions. Because we agree with the ancient notion that sex outside of marriage in its various forms, including adultery and fornication, is a moral evil and is sinful, we must hate people who commit adultery or people who conceive a child out of wedlock. Because we insist that it is important for children to be raised by loving parents whenever possible we must hate all women who ever work outside the home.

This reaction is similar to the behavior of a spoiled child, who thinks that because his parents are expressing their disapproval of his wild actions and removing his privileges for a time that they must hate him. There could be no other reason, right? Admonishing or correcting a recalicitrant or disobedient child must come out of hatred for that child, and any later proof that the parents instead actually love their child very much despite his temporary moral failings can only be proof of relativism or hypocricy...

...unless you live in the real world, where people don't always live up to their best principles, where the struggle to follow God and avoid evil may be won and lost and won again without in any way diminishing the rightness and goodness of those principles, where the loving hand of support from a fellow Christian to a brother who has drifted briefly onto the wrong path is no more a contradiction than Our Lord's behavior in the story of the woman caught in adultery. Did His refusal to stone her to death Himself mean that God doesn't really care all that much about adultery or other sexual sin? It's a ridiculous notion, isn't it, especially in light of His command to her to go and sin no more. But His example of mercy toward sinners is the standard of Christian behavior when we are confronted by sin; because, after all, we are like the men who drifted silently away from the scene when Jesus said that the one who had no sin could throw the first stone...

What the irreligious left will never understand is that it is the duty of all Christians to fight evil without branding as evil those people who become caught up in evil. It is not for us to sit in judgment upon our fellow men--but that in no way absolves us of the responsibility to call sin what it is, to avoid it ourselves and confess it in penitent tears when we fall into it, to encourage our brothers to turn away from it and to help them by word and example to do so. The evil that is sin can't be approved, applauded, tolerated, celebrated, or viewed as just one more option for people to choose; the broken people who become entangled in evil should be reminded, admonished, exhorted, loved and forgiven as often as they seek to turn away from what is displeasing to God and return to following Him.

But the irreligious left continues to insist that the only reason to oppose evil is because we hate the people who commit it. And that profound and sad misunderstanding is the source of so much of their hatred...for us.

Average Joe Democrat

I caught some of tonight's RNC convention coverage, though I missed President Bush's speech. It was annoying that Fred Thompson's speech wasn't even being covered by several of the networks, who were running their own commentary by their reporters during the speech, but I ended up seeing most of it on PBS. Thompson sounded good--better, as many have pointed out, than he did on the campaign trail.

But the speech I found interesting was Joe Lieberman's.

Don't get me wrong: I'm very glad that McCain wasn't able to select Lieberman to be his vice president. I don't agree with Senator Lieberman on the issue of abortion, and if McCain had indeed selected a pro-choice running mate, inside or outside the party, it would have made many people like me drop out of this election entirely.

I do question the pundits who say, though, as they did tonight, that McCain really, really, really wanted a pro-choice running mate. What was that we were talking about earlier today, regarding projection?

But as glad as I am that Lieberman won't be on a Republican ticket, his speech was worth hearing. In some ways it was rather surreal, given that he directly addressed Democrat and independent voters at one point, and compared Obama unfavorably to the country's first black president, Bill Clinton, at another. The crowd was eating it up; several times uproarious cheers erupted as Lieberman lauded McCain for his service, bipartisanship, and leadershop and, in one very deft, Alexander Pope-esque moment, damned Obama with very faint praise, indeed.

The Obama supporters have been vocal and visible, and their over-the-top use of messianic imagery to cast Obama as "The One" has been extremely easy to spot on the Internet as well as elsewhere. But there are a lot of "average Joe" Democrats out there who haven't necessarily committed their votes to him, and Obama's tendency to look down on corndog-eating, God-n-guns blue collar types who didn't get elite educations and who come from small towns with silly names isn't helping him any with this segment of the Democratic population.

The average Joe Democrats needed to hear this call from another "average Joe," telling them they could cross party lines in this election, vote their consciences, and align their votes with a war hero and a hockey mom who get them, who understand their lives, appreciate their concerns, have lived their struggles and can share a beer and pizza with them as they listen and take to heart what these voters are going through today. Obama should be careful not to underestimate the possibility that plenty of these voters can't relate to him at all, and who heard in Lieberman's voice tonight some of their own unexpressed frustrations and disappointments with their party.

Time will tell how effective this Lieberman speech was. I think plenty of average Joe Democrats were listening tonight, and will be thinking and talking about this for days to come.

Wasilly Can You Get?

On CNN last night, Anderson Cooper asked Barack Obama about the notion that as mayor of Wassilla and then governor of Alaska Sarah Palin would have more experience than he in handling a natural disaster. Obama's response:

"My understanding is that Gov. Palin’s town, Wassilla, has I think 50 employees. We've got 2500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe 12 million dollars a year – we have a budget of about three times that just for the month,” Obama responded.

Our ability to manage large systems and to execute I think has been made clear over the past couple of years and certainly in terms of the legislation I’ve passed in the past couple of years, post-Katrina.”

Only, if you go here to the video, and you skip ahead to about the 7:50 mark, you'll hear Cooper's question and Obama's answer--and Obama clearly says "Wasilly," not "Wassilla."

It could be an honest mistake from a man who confused Veterans' Day with Memorial Day and also thought we had 57 states in the Union. Or it could be a slam at small towns, and at the idea that people who run them have any sort of experience that counts.

What I find so obnoxious is the idea that running a town is like running a campaign. When you run a campaign you're directing a group of people who are all motivated toward one goal, and who are committed to the success of the man at the top, so to speak. Maybe running the fictional town of Mayberry would be like running a political campaign, but in the real world you have to deal with situations that have nothing to do with coordinating volunteers, stuffing envelopes, making phone calls and buying advertising.

Further, of course, there's the obvious point that Palin transitioned just fine from running a town to running Alaska. Obama, to paraphrase what Mark Steyn said that has been quoted continuously, has written two autobiographies and has been successful at running his mouth.

Word of advice to the Obama campaign: you might want to make sure your candidate can correctly pronounce "Wassilla." I have a feeling that if he keeps trying to portray Sarah Palin as an uneducated, unsophisticated woman from small-town hicksville, he's going to have a lot of reasons to remember, and regret, that name.

Speaking of Phyllis Schlafly...

...she's apparently a bit annoyed with Sarah Palin. Apparently, Governor Palin had to cancel a planned appearance at a Republican National Coalition for Life gathering:

Phyllis Schlafly, who in the mid-1970s almost single-handedly derailed what had been the expected ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, told ABC News that a McCain aide notified her late Monday that Palin would not be attending the event.

"I think this is clearly somebody in the McCain campaign who doesn't understand where the votes are coming from," Schlafly said. "They only told me this at 10 o'clock last night, and it was a call from somebody down the line in the McCain campaign."

However, to be fair to Governor Palin:

Palin's appearance was set up before she was picked for the GOP's national ticket, McCain aides stressed. And her spokeswoman, Maria Comella, told ABC that Palin needed to pass on the antiabortion event to work on her speech to the Republican National Convention.

Somebody should see to it that Governor Palin has time for a personal phone call of apology to Mrs. Schlafly, even though it was her selection as the vice presidential candidate and the last-minute pre-convention work that entails that led to the cancellation of her appearance at this event. Pro-life women of our generation owe an awful lot to the giants of the past, and we need to make sure they know how much their tireless efforts for women and the unborn are appreciated by those of us whose lives benefited greatly from their hard work.

Palin and Projection

It's been instructive--though rather sad--to read commentary from all sorts of people about Sarah Palin, her family, the situation involving her eldest daughter, and how all of that relates (or doesn't) to the vice presidency.

It's also been instructive to see the various media reports on the Sarah Palin pick, especially with all of the discussion about her family obligations and Bristol's pregnancy. As the Curt Jester has wittily pointed out in his media guide on the matter:

President Clinton committing adultery and having sex with an intern - Media says move along.

Presidential Candidate John Edwards committing adultery while his wife has cancer - Media says move along.

Sarah Palin's 17 year old daughter committing fornication and keeping the baby - Media says what a moral outrage and front page story!

And to add to the Curt Jester's point, I'd just like to mention that according to data posted online, Bristol will turn 18 in October; I don't know if that's accurate or not. But if it is, then Bristol Palin is only about four years younger than Monica Lewinsky was when she was "involved" with Bill Clinton. Just something to think about.

To get back to my point, though: the reactions to this whole matter are all over the place.

This New York Times article--one of no less than three on Palin they've posted today--is particularly illustrative:

But since then, as mothers across the country supervise the season’s final water fights and pack book bags, some have voiced the kind of doubts that few male pundits have dared raise on television. With five children, including an infant with Down syndrome and, as the country learned Monday, a pregnant 17-year-old, Ms. Palin has set off a fierce argument among women about whether there are enough hours in the day for her to take on the vice presidency, and whether she is right to try.

It’s the Mommy Wars: Special Campaign Edition. But this time the battle lines are drawn inside out, with social conservatives, usually staunch advocates for stay-at-home motherhood, mostly defending her, while some others, including plenty of working mothers, worry that she is taking on too much. [...]

In interviews, many women, citing their own difficulties with less demanding jobs, said it would be impossible for Ms. Palin to succeed both at motherhood and in the nation’s second-highest elected position at once.

“You can juggle a BlackBerry and a breast pump in a lot of jobs, but not in the vice presidency,” said Christina Henry de Tessan, a mother of two in Portland, Ore., who supports Mr. Obama. [...]

“People who don’t have children or who have only one or two are kind of overwhelmed at the notion of five children,” Ms. Schlafly continued, mentioning that she had raised six children and run for Congress as well. “I think a hard-working, well-organized C.E.O. type can handle it very well.”

All of this is interesting, to me, because I think that women in general have a fairly high tendency to engage in the psychological phenomenon known as projection, especially when the subject under discussion involves another woman.

Projection, of course, involves seeing one's own faults, problems, negative emotions, challenges etc. reflected in other people whether there's objective evidence to see those things or not. A couple of classic examples would be a dishonest person believing that everyone else is trying to lie to him, or a thief being overly concerned about his property. But for women, I think, the tendency to empathize and identify with other women makes the temptation to engage in projection--and the inability, sometimes, to realize we're doing it--a rather subtle thing.

So the mother of two quoted by the New York Times can't imagine anybody being the vice president while juggling a breast pump (never mind that as governor Sarah Palin has been in the habit of taking the baby to work with her; and it's not a new habit, because she reportedly took Piper to work with her when Piper was an infant, too). Meanwhile Phyllis Schlafly, quoted in the last quote above, thinks that an organized mom can raise five (or six) children while being active in politics, because this is what Phyllis Schlafly did herself.

And any examination of the comments on various sites that are discussing this matter reveals more of the same. A woman whose Down syndrome baby has been colicky and fragile fumes that no one should ever work while trying to raise a Down syndrome baby--but I knew a woman who continued her work as a college professor and mother of many after their youngest baby, a Down syndrome baby, was born. And that baby is now a lovely young woman, so clearly it's not a definite rule that mothers of Down syndrome babies can't work and care for their infants too, is it?

Another woman insisted that it's not fair to ask Bristol and Willow to help out with little Trig--he's not their baby, after all, and moms shouldn't use older siblings as unpaid help. But I loved helping take care of my younger siblings, especially one curly-headed moppet of a baby sister who absolutely adored being taken for walks or given baths by her big sisters; and another woman wrote bemusedly that her youngest of many probably hadn't had his feet touch the ground yet, and that she had to fight her older children for the privilege of some baby-cuddling time. So it's not a definite rule that older siblings feel imposed upon and badly treated by being asked to help with the little one (and as it turns out, Bristol will benefit from the experience as she prepares to welcome and care for her own baby).

Still others claim that the only proper response to a seventeen-year-old's pregnancy would have been for Sarah Palin to drop out of public life altogether to protect her daughter, or that the fact that Bristol is pregnant just proves that the Palin family is out of control and heading for disaster, or that Sarah Palin must be a cold and unfeeling mom to expose her daughter to the nation. I don't know quite what experiences or bad situations other people have endured, but I'm sure that some people have experienced these sorts of situations, and perhaps they wish things had been handled differently in their own cases--but what exactly that says about the decisions the Palin family have made and are making is unclear.

Some of us look at Sarah Palin and see a fairly ordinary woman--perhaps a bit stronger or more "rugged" than some of us are, but still a woman who wants good things for her family, who hopes to help her country, and who is confident that she can do both. Maybe that's a kind of projection, too, but it's a pretty positive one.

For the rest, though, I wonder how many have asked themselves this question: do I think Sarah Palin shouldn't be vice president simply because I know I, personally, couldn't handle the job given her circumstances?

Time and Nonsense

The breathless headline on the Time article asks, Was a Would-Be Saint Gay?

Now, every Catholic person who has ever practiced the faith could technically be called a "would-be saint," since the call to holiness is both personal and universal and we're all supposed to be trying to get to heaven. But in this case, Time is talking about someone specific:

Newman, whose ideas on conscience and faith have influenced Christian theology ever since, is expected to be beatified next year following the Vatican's recent certification of a Newman miracle — when a Boston man's cure from a crippling spinal disease could not be explained medically. The final step of canonization — full Sainthood — will require proof of an additional miracle achieved through the intercession of Newman's spirit. The Vatican announced plans this month to move Newman's remains from a small gravesite in the central English town of Rednal to a specially built sarcophagus in the Oratory Church of Birmingham, where, officials say, they will be more accessible for venerating faithful.

But British gay rights activist Peter Tatchell sees ulterior motives in exhuming the Cardinal: "embarrassment" because of his relationship with St. John. "They were inseparable, they lived together for half a century, effectively like husband and wife," says Tatchell. "There were repeated allegations during [Newman's] lifetime about his circle of homosexual friends. It is uncertain whether their relationship involved sex. It is quite likely that both men had a gay orientation but chose to abstain from sexual relations. But abstinence does not alter a person's sexual orientation." Tatchell says that the two men's bond, and Newman's abiding wish to have his final resting place next to St. John's, make separating their remains "an act of dishonesty and betrayal by the homophobes in the Vatican."

First off, let me answer Time's question: Was a would-be saint gay? The answer: No. If I were feeling particularly impolite, I'd expand on that answer: No, you idiots.

Did Cardinal Newman suffer from same-sex attraction? I don't know. I'm not a Newman historian, I haven't examined the evidence, and frankly I doubt if any really compelling evidence even exists. But I can assert with full confidence that Cardinal Newman wasn't "gay."

Why? Because to be "gay" means more than suffering from the affliction of same-sex attraction disorder. It means more than embracing the often agonizing cross of strong affectionate feelings for members of one's own gender while living a life of committed celibacy. It means more than dealing with the quite-often painful realities that the disorder may bring in its wake, while placing one's humble trust in God and seeking to serve Him and to follow His commandments, including the ones about sexual activity.

No, being "gay" means insisting that the disorder which causes one to be sexually attracted to one's own gender is no disorder at all, that it is perfectly normal and healthy not only to have these feelings but to act on them, that sexual activity with the members of one's own gender is something to which one is entitled, that society must conform by marginalizing all those who disagree and by redefining and reordering such institutions as marriage and the family to accommodate one in these beliefs, and that any detriments one suffers, whether physical, mental, emotional, or all three, stem from "homophobia" and not from the naturally negative consequences of engaging in dangerous sexual activity with members of one's own gender or in equally dangerous rationalizations of the fear, self-loathing, anger, emptiness, and destructiveness that rise up again and again no matter how affirming and congenial the people around one are.

So Cardinal Newman can't possibly be described as "gay." But the gay activist quoted in Time fits the definition of "gay," especially as he sees the decision to move the grave of Cardinal Newman not as being an ordinary step in the canonization process but a calculated move to separate the cardinal from his lifelong friend, with whom he pretty much certainly did not have any kind of illicit sexual relationship. Then again, Mr. Tatchell thinks that Pope Benedict XVI is also a closeted "gay," and says this about him:

Pope Benedict he (sic) is the ideological inheritor of the Nazi homophobia. He’d like to eradicate homosexuality, but since he can’t put LGBT people in physical concentration camps, is doing his best to put them in psychological concentration camps.

Frankly, one would think that Time could find somebody other than a pope-hating gay activist to complain about the Cardinal Newman grave move; or that if they couldn't, they'd realize that there really wasn't any story here. But I've learned never to underestimate the mainstream media's commitment to advancing the gay agenda or to bashing the Church, and I know that they absolutely love it when the opportunity to do both lies buried in the same ground.

Miss Palin and the Puritans on the Left

By now the news of Bristol Palin's condition is known to all, and has had time to be discussed in various places. I can honestly say that Rod Dreher is doing an excellent job with this.

I know that some people are very troubled by the whole situation. That's perfectly natural; we should be troubled by fornication, whether it's being committed by teenagers or adults, because it's a serious sin. For Catholics, presuming the other two conditions are present, it's a mortal sin requiring sacramental confession before the parties to it can receive Communion again. For Christians like the Palins I'm sure that fornication isn't laughed at or considered "normal teen behavior" either.

But the fact that Christians reject the cultural values of the "sex without consequences" crowd does not mean that Christians never commit sexual sins, fornication among them. Our fallen nature reminds us of the sadness of its reality in many ways, and Christians are far from being immune to sin and its effects.

Two big differences exist between Christians and others, though: one, we recognize unmarried sex--or, indeed, any sex outside of marriage--as sinful, and two, we are clear that it is the sexual activity, and not the resulting pregnancy and baby, that are sins. Many times in the Bible we see that God has chosen to bring a good result out of a bad situation. Does this mean He condones sin? Of course not! But He is bigger than sin, and can turn even our sinful choices into His purposes. King David's actions in regard to Bathsheba were truly reprehensible, yet God chose Bathsheba to be the mother of King Solomon; that is only one example of a sinful union becoming, after repentant sorrow and humble remorse on the part of the sinner, one that God chose to bless.

In our age, Miss Palin could have made what the world sees as an "easy" choice, and covered up her unmarried activities by means of an abortion. It is good that she and her boyfriend did not choose to compound sin with sin, and are instead rising to the challenge of early parenthood. I think that all of us here could say that we do not want our sons or daughters to end up in this position, that we want them to make good moral choices all their lives and never commit the sin of premarital sex; but if they made so wrong a decision, I know most of us would also want them to do exactly what Miss Palin is doing--or, if not "exactly," at least the part about having the baby. (So early a marriage is not exactly unknown in rural areas, or all that unusual in Alaska, but depending on the circumstances it might not be desirable in other situations.)

From what I've seen so far, there are two sorts of people who are being critical about all of this. The first sort are blaming Sarah Palin for her daughter's condition: if, the reasoning goes, she hadn't been an "absentee mother" this would never have happened. Sadly, human history provides plenty of examples of daughters being raised by excellent, attentive mothers who nevertheless rebel just long enough and just seriously enough to end up in the same condition. I'm not saying that Mrs. Palin's work as governor these last twenty months might not have contributed to Miss Palin's bad choices, but there's really no evidence of that on the surface, and our duty in regards to charity positively forbids those of us who call ourselves Christians to engage in gossip and unkind speculations in the absence of any compelling evidence. Indeed, it is malice of the worst kind to blame the sins of children on their parents without certain knowledge that the parents have been deliberately neglectful or incompetent.

But the other sort, the hysterical in an Andrew Sullivan way sort, are the neo-Puritans and neo-Victorians on the left. Their criticism--in fact, their attack of the vapors--is pretty amusing in some respects. They tend to disagree with us about the morality of sexual activity, and are pretty much in favor of teens having sex. They're fine with kindergarten sex ed programs, with the infamous "condoms on bananas" excercise in grade school, with Planned Parenthood having direct access to everybody's kids in school. They sniff at abstinence programs, and insist that the rest of us ought to be "realistic" and expect our children to be "active" by the time they're Miss Palin's age, if not considerably younger. But tell them that Miss Palin is in the family way, plans to have the baby and marry his/her father, and oh! what hand wringing and fainting and passing around of smelling-salts there is. In their world, sex without consequences is normal, to be expected and encouraged, and even a civic virtue; but sex with consequences? You must be joking--horrors!--surely nobody does that anymore. They're not shocked that Bristol has engaged in reproductive activity--they wouldn't be shocked if her thirteen-year-old sister were engaging in that sort of activity! But they're aghast and dismayed at the prospect that the reproductive part of the activity is being permitted to continue, and even anticipated with something approaching joy.

The same attitude that caused them to look askance at a forty-four year old female governor welcoming her Down syndrome baby with love and thanksgiving causes them to elevate their eyebrows to an alarming and painful height over the family's calm acceptance of this latest bump on the road of life. No Christian I know takes the matter of premarital sex lightly, nor should we, but the moral instruction and remonstrance that parents engage in when confronted with a situation like this involving an unmarried daughter or son will naturally be private, and will also naturally take a back seat to the need to prepare for the arrival of the little one whose existence must never be regretted, however regrettable the circumstances.

I hate to have to admit it, but Barack Obama's statement today took exactly the right tone:

“I have heard some of the news on this and so let me be a clear as possible: I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics,” the Democrat said forcefully. “It has no relevance to Governor Palin’s performance as governor, or her potential performance as a VP. And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories,” he continued.

The candidate who himself was born to a teenage mom, reminded reporters, “You know my mother had me when she was 18, and how a family deals with issues and you know teenage children, that shouldn’t be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that’s off limits.”

I'm sorry if the temperature of the netherworld just dropped precipitously, but I have to say this: I agree with Mr. Obama. I probably couldn't agree more.

Back to School

We had our first day back at school today--yes, on Labor Day, but with a whole three months of vacation I didn't think we needed an extra day off.

Subsequently, though I have several things to say about the Bristol Palin situation among other things, I won't be getting to writing any of it until a bit later--probably this evening.

Your patience is greatly appreciated, as is your readership!