I got the following from the American Family Association:

Procter & Gamble wants to know if you approve of its support of the homosexual lifestyle

Company establishes toll-free number to call

May 2, 2008

Dear Eric,

Procter & Gamble wants to know if you approve its efforts to promote the homosexual lifestyle. It has established a toll-free number for you to call and vote to approve or disapprove its support of homosexuality.

P&G has added homosexual lovers to its soap opera "As the World Turns." It has also added scenes of homosexuals with open mouth kissing. The motive behind P&G's push is to desensitize viewers, especially younger viewers, to the homosexual lifestyle. The ultimate goal of homosexual activists is homosexual marriage.

Thousands of homosexual activists are already calling P&G.

Take Action!

* Call the toll-free number P&G has set up for the public regarding its promotion of the homosexual lifestyle. Call 1-800-331-3774 and click on option 2. Following the recording, click on option 2 again. There is not a live person at this number.
* Forward this e-mail to family and friends and urge them to call and vote.
* Reproduce this letter and distribute to others — Sunday School class, church, coworkers, etc. Ask your pastor to put this information in the church bulletin and newsletter.

NPR is soliciting stories from Catholics on what the Catholic faith means to them, what they find solace in, what they find beautiful, and so forth. Let's contribute some positive stories to them that reflect a solid faith.

(Thanks to Bob L.)

The Wall Street Journal reports that networks are deliberate pushing the envelope of good taste* in broadcast programming, shamelessly making every effort to get away with as much as possible. This perhaps serves as a vindication of conservative groups who have been saying as much for years. "Directors and producers are deploying new tactics to get spicy material into television shows. Exactly what network standards will allow is a particularly touchy subject this season, as broadcasters struggle to walk a fine line between the television audience's growing appetite for steamy fare and the Federal Communications Commission and partisan watchdog groups' shrinking tolerance for it." Viewers are "flocking" to racier shows and leaving "tamer" programs behind.

Advertisers are our big proponents here. '"A lot of marketers don't want to be associated with a show that has too much sexual content," said Brad Adgate, senior vice president of research for Horizon Media, an ad-buying company.' So keep calling them and protesting.

A big controversy is over Showtime's serial killer drama "Dexter". Get it? Dexter, Latin for "right" and opposite of "sinister" (left)? Talk about outrageous perversion; portray a serial killer sympathetically and give him a name that means "right". (His victims are hard-to-catch murderers, so that is part of why he is named "Dexter". But it's still a perversion if you ask me.)

A very good reason not even to watch TV nowadays ...

*Article will expire around 3/14/8

A Newsweek article has me really steamed. The headline is in 1 1/2 inch type, and says

A New American Holy War

emblazoned across two pages.

What is this holy war? Well it describes an interview with Mike Huckabee, now the front runner in the polls. (Yay, by the way.) The interviewer is trying to get Huckabee to say that Mormonism is a "heretical cult" but he refuses to answer, claiming, essentially, he gets into trouble everytime he says anything. The interviewer is happy to oblige; he presses him on the canon of Scripture. Huckabee carefully explains that he doesn't have any evidence that God has given us any new books since 325 A.D. when the Bible was canonized (ok his history is a bit off), and "I don't know that there's any other books." This is enough for the writer of the article to conclude, "So it has come to this: The 2008 Republican Iowa caucuses have descended into a kind of holy war."

Whaaaa....?

Huckabee very gently and politely says -- says what? Essentially, says he's not Mormon. (Of course he doesn't agree with their canon. If he did, he'd be Mormon.) And all of a sudden, BAM, we have a Holy War worth 1 1/2 inch type.

To be sure there are more battles to the war they describe than just Huckabee, but they did specifically identify his declination to accept Mormon scriptures as Holy War.

I fully intend to write them the following Letter to the Editor:

Dear Editor:

Shame, shame, shame on Jon Meacham and Newsweek ("A New American Holy War", December 17th). You blame Huckabee for a "Holy War" (in 1 1/2 inch type, no less). Your sole apparent evidence? He politely declined to agree with the Mormon canon of Scripture. (If he did, he'd be Mormon.) Just because he disagrees with Mormonism doesn't mean he's launching a Holy War against it. It is the height of irresponsible journalism to bait Huckabee (as Mr. Meacham did) into saying something you can distort into "damning" evidence of whatever preconceived crime you want to blame him for. Shame!

If you haven't heard, there is a new pro-life movie coming out on October 26th called Bella. It's about a Latino couple who find themselves unexpectedly pregnant; it recounds the choices that they face and the impact it has on their lives. Believe it or not it won the Toronto Film Festival out of thousands of films! That is really amazing. All sorts of miracles and conversions were elicited by the film during its filming, from the mundane (a scene that had to be filmed with no delay and had to be filmed in clear weather experienced an astonishingly localized break in a downpour) to the profound (the lead actor went to an abortion clinic merely to research his part and ended up saving a baby's life, who was then named after him). These are detailed in the recent Catholic Answers Live shows (Oct 1: ra, mp3; Apr 4: ra, mp3). This is a real effort to try to get solid values back into films, but without being preachy or overtly Christian. Obviously, the film has artistic value since it won the Toronto film festival!

It's opening in over 30 markets nationwide. It is critical though that we support it in the first two weeks since that is how a film is judged. Advertise this to all your friends and fellow parishioners! Promotional tools are available at bellaresources.com. Let's make a big push for this.

The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything

(Thanks to RC)

You might want to check out this review of the movie Evan Almighty. Apparently this modern-day Noah's Ark comedy honors family values and focuses on God and is in the opinion of some thoroughly entertaining.

"god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," by Christopher Hitchens has become a runaway best-seller,* even in the Bible belt. The first printing was 40,000 copies, but already in seven weeks 296,000 copies are in circulation. He's likely to earn $1 million from it. "This is atheism's moment," says the publisher's CEO.

Some of this however is conservatives scoping out the enemy. A bookstore owner comments, "There is a very strong presence of the religious right, and they want to know what's being said and figure out how to move against it."

Hitchens is a Jerry Springer-type figure who uses controversy and abuse to draw attention to himself. tothesource argues that these neo-atheists aren't really rational (despite their claims) but are relying on emotional arguments. “It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail,” declares Sam Harris. Not very scientific.

Aldous Huxley said, "For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaningless was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust."

Ah. We get to the truth. The goal is sexual liberation. Why am I not surprised? (Huxley did later acknowledge this as an intellectual error.)

What about today? tothesource comments, 'And Christopher Hitchens? “Clearly, the human species is designed”—by evolution, mind you—“to experiment with sex.” Indeed, Hitchens assures readers, “The relationship between physical health and mental health is now well understood to have a strong connection to sexual function, or dysfunction.” In other words, inhibited sex makes us dysfunctional; it is downright unhealthy. “Can it be a coincidence,” Hitchens complains, “that all religions claim the right to legislate sex?”'

Certainly atheists are no better than any other party, least of which their opponents.

*Article will expire around 6/28, in about a week

There is another interesting movie out: The Ultimate Gift. The star is a trust-fund kid with all that entails, in particular a sense of entitlement. His grandfather dies and sends him on a series of twelve tasks that challenge his philosophy and help mature him. It's not an explicitly Christian film but it has good moral values.

Reported by the Family Research Council:

Since the Presidential election of 2000, the dominant metaphor in American politics has been the divide between conservative, Republican "Red States" and liberal, Democratic "Blue States." But an analysis of Census data by USA Today reveals a very different dividing line: when it comes to Congress, marriage and parenthood define what's different about Democratic and Republican districts even more clearly than race, income, education or geography. Republican House members overwhelmingly come from districts that have high percentages of married people and lots of children. Democrats' districts, however, are stocked with people who have never married and have few children. The demographic data is illuminating: Republicans control 49 of the 50 districts with the highest rates of married people while Democrats represent all 50 districts that have the highest rates of adults who have never married; Democrats represent 30 districts in which fewer than half of children live with married parents. Republicans represent none; Republican Congress members represent 39.2 million children, about 7 million more than Democrats, an average of 7,000 more children per district. Politicians and pundits who want to really understand political differences in the U.S. should take a hard look at this "marriage and fertility gap."

For the first time, most American homes now house more television sets than people. According to the latest research from Nielsen Media Research, the U.S. household averages stand at 2.73 TVs and 2.55 people. [AP 9/21/06, Focus on the Family's Culture Clips 9/24/06]

Madonna is at it again. NBC is going to air footage from Madonna's "Confessions" tour in which she wears a crown of thorns and is mounted on a mirror-laden cross and is raised up from the stage. This blasphemy must be stopped. To see a video of this, and send NBC an email, click here.

I'll tell ya, this is one lady that is going to have a tough time on Judgment Day.

Today's Close to Home comic is a howl. True to his Christian convictions.

"Paris Hilton pal Brandon Davis's rant about Lindsay Lohan is one of the most loathsome verbal attacks we've heard. See it on blah-blah-blah.com."
—Newsweek's recent Blog Watch column

Ok I gave it away. There used to be such a thing that is apparently so uncommon today I can't even think of what to call it. Propriety? Grace? Seemliness?

If something's "one of the most loathsome verbal attacks" you've ever heard, you shouldn't be promoting it to people. Chances are there is slander and detraction in it, and propagating it is at best in bad taste, at worse a complicity in slander. You just encourage people to satisfy their basest motives.

Detraction is a forgotten vice. I don't know when I learned the definition of it and learned that it was wrong, but it was after college. Slander is when you say something to another about a third party that is not true but is damaging to their reputation. Detraction is when you say something (not well known) to another (who has no business knowing) about a third party that is true but is damaging to their reputation. For example, suppose your brother got a speeding ticket, and you decide to tell your neighbor about it. Most likely your neighbor has no business knowing (unless your brother works for your neighbor and drives as part of his job). Or someone you know is promiscuous, and you tell a new friend about this. If you say something bad about another person to someone, there should be a justifiable reason for it, and a need to know on their part.

The Da Vinci Code is being eviscerated by critics (thanks to Paul Croarkin for the link). I'm not sure I'm even going to bother with Over the Hedge. What a disaster! Ha!

Who would cast Tom Hanks in an action role anyway? Harrison Ford he's not ... Tom is more of the quiet, self-effacing, awkward type.

If you're like me, you wonder if you could come up with a book that says plausible but fictional things about something Dan Brown holds near and dear. Well someone has proposed such a book. The premise: It was Mr. Brown's mother, Constance, who starred in the controversial film Deep Throat, not Linda Lovelace. Touché!

I've been asked to post some additional information on the Da Vinci Code. As the "Homily Helps" at Da Vinci Outreach (from which I'll be liberally quoting) note, "the book’s primary attack is ultimately not on the Church but on the person of Jesus Christ."

These Homily Helps go on to say, "The book claims that Jesus was not the divine Son of God; that He was married to Mary Magdalene and had children with her; and that, by order of the Roman emperor Constantine, the Church “made” him divine at the Council of Nicea."

"In effect, The Da Vinci Code reduces Jesus to a mere “mortal prophet, a great and powerful man” (as the book puts it) who had a girlfriend. Of course, one cannot deny Christ’s divinity and still end up with Christianity. The very person of Jesus—who He is—forms the very foundation of the Christian faith."

"Throughout the work, Brown refers to “the Vatican” as the location of corrupt Church power. For example, according to Brown, it was “the Vatican” who ordered the suppression of women and the “sacred feminine” in the early centuries of the Church. This would be difficult to accomplish given that “the Vatican” (i.e., the Vatican hill in Rome, the site of present-day Vatican City) would not become the seat of Church power until the 12th century. In the early centuries of the Church, it simply did not exist."

"Brown claims that the early Church suppressed women and replaced worship of the “sacred feminine” with a “male God.” This suppression of women is, of course, hard to square with the Church’s obvious veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the unique exaltation she enjoys above all the saints."

"None of the most controversial claims made in The Da Vinci Code have any historical evidence to back them up. In fact, Dan Brown’s primary sources have been highly criticized by historians for their wholly unsubstantiated (i.e., made up) claims regarding the history of Christianity."

Here is a Catholic Answers summary of claims in the book which explain why Catholics should be concerned about The Da Vinci Code:

• Jesus is not God; he was only a man.
• Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
• She is to be worshiped as a goddess.
• Jesus got her pregnant, and the two had a daughter.
• That daughter gave rise to a prominent family line that is still present in Europe today.
• The Bible was put together by a pagan Roman emperor.
• Jesus was viewed as a man and not as God until the fourth century, when he was deified by the emperor Constantine.
• The Gospels have been edited to support the claims of later Christians.
• In the original Gospels, Mary Magdalene rather than Peter was directed to establish the Church.
• There is a secret society known as the Priory of Sion that still worships Mary Magdalene as a goddess and is trying to keep the truth alive.
• The Catholic Church is aware of all this and has been fighting for centuries to keep it suppressed. It often has committed murder to do so.
• The Catholic Church is willing to and often has assassinated the descendents of Christ to keep his bloodline from growing.

John Hellman has an excellent site on The Da Vinci Code if you want more information.

Catholics and other Christians are calling for a boycott (or as some call it, an "othercott") of the Da Vinci Code movie, a move that is being acknowledged in the media. The deal is that on opening weekend May 19th-21st, go to the theater and see the animated feature Over the Hedge, in hopes of knocking The Da Vinci Code off the charts. It's a good idea; I plan on following through with it, and urge all of you to, too.

This movie just plays so fast and loose with history its not even funny. It's fiction, but casts itself in the form of fact. Fictional history which does damage to the reputation of the Catholic Church is portrayed as factual; it's as if someone created an entirely fanciful (and negative) "biography" of a famous person that few could distinguish from fact.

Let's do what we can do to throw this movie off the charts!

Next week is TV Turnoff Week so give that TV a well-deserved rest, and instead say: So many books worth reading, so little time! People in the US watch TV for more than four hours a day. That's equivalent to sitting in front of a TV for two full months nonstop every year. It's not for nothing that TV has been called the plug-in drug, the boob tube, and the idiot box.

I turned the TV off in 1988 and haven't regretted it since. There is life after television. Imagine having four more hours of the day to do stuff. Imagine not having to compete with unrealistic portrayals of life. Imagine some peace and quite in the house, if you can stand it.

It won't kill ya for the week. Give it a try.

The American Family Association reports that the Book of Daniel has been cancelled:

NBC's anti-Christian program The Book of Daniel has been cancelled! Your efforts, combined with those of hundreds of thousands of other AFA Online supporters, had an impact.

NBC's decision to pull The Book of Daniel shows the power of the pocketbook. NBC didn't want to eat their economic losses. Had NBC not had to eat millions of dollars each time it aired, NBC would have kept The Book of Daniel on the air. Because of your efforts, the sponsors dropped the program. NBC then decided it didn't want to continue the fight.

Even an impassioned plea by Daniel's producer Jack Kenny could not match your participation. "Ordinarily, I would never ask anyone to do this, but the AFA and bullies like them are hard at work to try and prevent you from seeing these beautiful shows, and that is censorship—pure and simple. And that is both un-Christian and un-American," Kenny wrote. His attitude is typical in today’s society. Non-Christians telling Christians what is Christian.

People like Kenny don't want people like you to have a voice. They want to deny you the right to get involved. You are supposed to sit back and take the trash. And when you do speak up they call you names.

This shows us that we don't have to simply sit back and take the trash, but we can get involved and fight back with our pocketbooks. I want to thank the 678,394 individuals who sent emails to NBC and the thousands who called and emailed their local affiliates.

Thank goodness. I saw the show and while it didn't leave me frothing at the mouth, I found nothing worthwhile in it and it left me feeling disgusted. The only sins they didn't weave into the pilot were pedophilia and incest. I heard they didn't have a single advertiser for the entire show. Ha!

Censorship indeed. How about discrimination, just as I would at dinner discriminate between a filet mignon and — well, use your imagination.

Steven Greydanus (a faithful Catholic) has a review of Broke back Mountain on his Decentfilms site.. As things go, it is rather a pleasant surprise; he declares the work to be non-polemical and a work of art, rather than mere agitprop. It portrays opposing views respectfully rather than turning them into caricatures. Surprisingly there is no nudity in the homosexual sex scenes. Overall the film is more nuanced than other films such as The Magdalene Sisters. It's still largely objectionable, however.

Those who are tired of the cavalcade of bad news have a new ally: HappyNews.com, which publishes only good news.

I'm a bit cynical — I think that regardless of what they say, people are more drawn to bad news than to good news. Kind of like how traffic will slow down to see an accident.

I did see some good news in the regular news wires today: a pregnant skydiver and her unborn child both survived a plunge into a parking lot when both parachutes failed. God must have been watching out for this person because I can't imagine how a pregnant woman can hit a parking lot at 50 mph and have er baby survive (much less her).

Anyway if you find good news sufficiently engaging to subsist on it, give HappyNews.com a try.

Well, sorta. The debut weekend of of Narnia ($67.1 million) beat the debut weekends of the first two LOTR films ($47.2 million and $67 million, respectively). Of course, Narnia is riding on their coattails (I believe the technical term is "drafting"). But I am pleased to see it do so well, not so much against LOTR in particular, but because there is some Christian values sneaking into the national consciousness at a massive rate.

If you're interested, Broke back appears to have opened in five theaters, taking in half a million, but I'd argue you can't extrapolate that out to the whole country. I wonder what their strategy is in limiting it to five theaters; maybe they want to try to stoke demand for it.
 
 
 
 
 

The Chronicles of Narnia open this weekend with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Watch it!

View trailer

Will it be as big as LOTR? Watch and decide for yourself. I hear good things about it, that it is faithful to the books and doesn't excise a lot of Christian imagery.

ZENIT's The Subtle Magic of C.S. Lewis' Narnia
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

For years I lamented that the largest news organization in the country, the Associated Press, was immune to letters to the editor, and if they published something that had an error, well, that's just too bad.

Well, now you can write them, even via email, at info@ap.org. The web site specifically says that this is for letters to the editor, so it's not like this is wishful thinking on my part. As far as I know letters are not published, but at least you can educate someone and maybe even generate a correction.

So next time you see an erroneous AP article, know that it is possible to write them and request a correction.

Television is becoming less and less responsive to the concerns of parents who want to shield their children from culturally unacceptable elements, whether it is swearing, or sexual situations, or what have you. Others cry "censorship" and make jokes about it that complete miss the point: Our goal is not to stop what other adults see, but to stop what our children see. The point is not to impose our sense of morality on other adults but merely to protect our children.

It's getting to the point that the only way to protect our children from these elements is to just not watch television. As of last week a more compelling reason to do that surfaced, according to a report by the Parent's Television Council:

"Another TV taboo has fallen by the wayside. As of last week, NBC, CBS, Fox and the WB have all agreed to run condom ads during prime time. Spots for Church & Dwight Co.'s Trojan brand condoms have already appeared during the teen-targeted WB series, Smallville. Although the ad campaign focuses on HIV risks and is less suggestive than the ads that have been running on MTV for years, that's not much consolation to parents who think it should be up to them to decide when their children are old enough to learn about sex. You can view the ad at www.trojancondoms.com."

Whaddya know! Good for you and profitable, too.

(Thanks to John Desmond.)

(I know, feast for famine on this blog, eh? Not my fault it went down over the weekend ...)

My colleague Amy made a remarkable assertion; she said, 'During the height of “the scandal” when anti-Catholicism was rampant, 2 of the investigators appointed by the state converted to Catholicism.'

WOW!

That reminds me how the chief rabbi of Rome during WWII converted and took Pius XII's given name.

Proof that things aren't what they seem.

I received this today:

NBC-TV SHOW ANGERS CATHOLICS NATIONWIDE

During the February 22 episode of the NBC-TV sitcom, "Committed," two non-Catholics are mistakenly given Holy Communion at a Catholic funeral Mass. Nate, who is Jewish, and Bowie, a Protestant, don't know what to do with the Eucharist, so they make several failed attempts to get rid of it. For example, they try slipping it into the pocket of a priest, dropping it on a tray of cheese and crackers, etc.

At one point, the priest, who is portrayed as not knowing the difference between the Host and a cracker, goes to grab the "cracker" from a tray of appetizers; he initially balks when he discovers that it is the last one. Then he changes his mind, saying, "Oh, what the hell." By far the most offensive scene occurs when Nate and Bowie accidentally flush what they think is the Host down the toilet.

The Catholic League is predictably outraged, and people are circulating this to urge people to voice their protests. I will probably ruffle some feathers by saying this, but I think there are more important battles to fight. Is this irreverent? Definitely. Something a person of deep faith would write? Absolutely not. Is it intended to offend Catholics or demean Catholicism? I doubt it. Seems to me something that any secular person ignorant of Catholic culture might write for a sitcom. I find it not at all surprising and I am not outraged, and I'm not sure that outrage will do any good before people who will likely genuinely have no understanding why we object to it.

In other words, I think this is the result of a cultural disconnect rather than any deliberately malicious intent. I think what they need is education and perhaps (don't laugh) some sensitivity training.

Anyway, in this cultural landscape, I think we need to pick our battles, and if we are off livid with utter rage every time someone so much as steps on our toes, our rage will soon lose is efficacy and may cause a backlash.

Some people I know were blase about my news about Bill Maher. Personally I think what Maher did is much more offensive than this because it was deliberately malicious and intended to offend. Should be interesting to see what my interlocutors think about this issue.