Tuesday, December 30, 2014
Politics and laws are always downstream from culture
If you want to stop abortion, you need to start by changing hearts, not changing laws. Students for Life seems to have that one down.
Labels: prolife
An introduction to Nietzsche
Saturday, December 27, 2014
Pregnancy is not always a walk in the park
In quiet hallways and private corners, I’ve made my confession to trusted friends. Guilty and ashamed, but seeking solace, I have admitted the truth: I hate being pregnant. Now, in the throes of my sixth round of this freely chosen misery, I have decided to speak openly. We religious types rarely, if ever, publicly address the real burden that pregnancy puts on women. Instead, we jump ahead to the value of the life she carries. Unless we find ways to acknowledge this aspect of the experience of women, our defense of the truth that every human life has value risks ringing false.
Labels: prolife
Friday, December 19, 2014
Hella rights
NFP - Not just Catholic Birth Control
SHK ponders.
I read a lot of refutes to Natural Family Planning where people pose the question, “Isn’t that still birth control? What’s the difference between charting and popping a pill?”
Labels: catholic, morality, NFP, sex
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Mind over mind
As Izzy reminds us, we are not our feelings, and we can dominate our feelings.
Labels: a full life, psychology
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
What to do if you're in high school and you like a girl
Bart Kwan style. Number one piece of advice, don't care what other people think. Amen brother.
Labels: a full life, education
En Esch is following me on Twitter
Monday, December 08, 2014
Life without parole - not so great
Kenneth E. Hartman, who is serving life without parole in California, agrees with such an assessment—and for that reason, strongly opposed the referendum to replace capital punishment with life without parole. Hartman runs, from prison, a campaign called the Other Death Penalty Project, on the premise that a sentence of life without parole amounts to “a long, slow, dissipating death sentence without any of the legal or administrative safeguards rightly awarded to those condemned to the traditional forms of execution.”
“Though I will never be strapped down onto a gurney with life-stopping drugs pumped into my veins,” Hartmann has written, “be assured I have already begun the slow drip of my execution [which] won’t come to full effect for 50, maybe 60 years.” Like William Blake in New York, he states: “I have often wondered if that 15 or 20 minutes of terror found to be cruel and unusual wouldn’t be a better option.”
Ending abortion, Seraphic style
In England and Wales in 2011 there were 189,931 feticides and in 2010 338,790 babies were born to unwed mothers. If we assume that all the dead fetuses were created out-of-wedlock (a mighty big assumption) and a comparable number of babies were born to unwed mothers in 2011, that gives us roughly half a million babies carried by unwed mothers in 2011. But in 1911, there were only 38,000 babies born to unwed mothers in England and Wales. Even given the differences in population (from 36 million to 56 million), that's quite a jump, especially when you consider that birth control was illegal and hard to get in 1911.
So here's the thing. As long as sex is touted as The Best Thing in the World, Something That Everybody Should Do As Soon and As Often As They Possibly Can, there is going to be feticide because birth control methods don't work. Possibly they don't work because large numbers of people don't actually use them, or don't use them 100% of the time, but that's beside the point. The point is that large numbers of people--especially young women--have bought the idea that sex is The Best Thing in the World, Something That Everyone Should Do As Soon and As Often As They Possibly Can. Newsflash: in 1911, most young unmarried women were not having sex. They weren't having sex because everybody--doctors, clergy, parents, government, friends, artists--told them not to.
Labels: prolife
Sunday, December 07, 2014
Democrats trying to rebuild as a prolife party in Alabama
Sounds like a worthwhile project to me.
Honestly, it’s not as farfetched as some might think. If you stretch the meaning of pro-life to mean more than pro-birth (as it should be) then the Democratic Party is by far the more pro-life party. Democrats consistently support causes that seek to sustain and protect life through anti-violence and anti-poverty efforts, whereas our Republican counterparts are “pro-life” until the point of birth. They seek only to pass measures to restrict access to abortion, and then expect everyone to fall in line with their particular moral ideology rather than seeking to sever the root causes of abortion–issues such as economic desperation and a lack of access to healthcare.
Pro-life Democrats are virtually impervious to any Republican talking point. By openly advocating an anti-abortion stance, they sweep the rug right out from under the GOP coup-de-grâce, and thus open the door to real dialogue with the voters.
