News Clips: May 2006 Archives

A woman in England with a due date of 6/6/6 tried unsuccessfully to get the hospital to induce it earlier. "I'm terrified the birth will go wrong or the child will have evil in him or her," the woman said. "Even worse my beautiful baby could be the devil himself — the anti-Christ."

This woman needs a healthy dose of reality! Maybe if we get a priest to bless her with holy water she'll be convinced none of that will happen?

So out of the millions of babies born on 6/6/6, what are the chances that hers will be the anti-Christ?

(Thanks to Dave Barry's blog)

The stolen Nun Bun has turned up — sorta. The cinnamon bun that resembles Blessed Teresa, which was stolen some years ago from its owner, a coffee shop in Nashville, appears in an anonymous photo, sent apparently to taunt the owners (or at least play a game with them).

Staff members at a Tenet hospital in New Orleans may have euthanized some patients during Hurricane Katrina:

The Louisiana Attorney General is also continuing his investigation into whether some staff at Memorial Medical Center may have euthanized patients in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Tenet Healthcare, the parent company, said it is cooperating with the investigation.

This quote was buried in this article about a family whose mother died in that hospital's care. (She was not euthanized.)

This is an example of what happens when euthanasia is taken seriously: People start to take liberties with it. First it's, "I want my right to die, dang it!" Then it's, "He wants his right to die, dang it!" Then it's, "Of course he wants to exercise his Constitutionally-Guaranteed^TM right to die", and off you go. Pretty soon it becomes as routine a circumcision for a newborn. "Oh, you mean you don't want him to be circumcised? Quickly, fill out these forms in triplicate."

To tie this in with the recent post on population growth, if you are in a society with many fewer able-bodied workers than retirees, you are going to get pressure to stabilize the population — and as far as I can tell, the only way to do that is to euthanize the old folks. And that's not good!

Hypocrites!

I never thought I'd hear Newsweek say, "But by not having children, people are voting against the future—their countries' and, perhaps, their own." The article, "The End Of Motherhood?", discusses the danger of the imminent population implosion.

The Netherlands is cracking down on immigration. Only people who can handle watching topless women cavort and gay men kiss need apply. Wanting to insure that immigrants can handle the liberal culture, the Immigration Minister is requiring applicants to watch a film with racy scenes in it, presumably to give the immigrant a taste of life in the Netherlands. If they don't like it — how do you say "goodbye" in Dutch?

To be fair, citizens of the U.S. and various other nations are exempt. And they are preparing censored versions in countries where the material is illegal. But still it is fairly radical.

Of course, how many in the U.S. would love to use this as a litmus test even of existing citizens?

'Da Vinci Code' rakes in $224 million' — CNN says, 'All the protests and all the bad reviews could not prevent "The Da Vinci Code" from recording a $224 million worldwide opening, the second-biggest debut ever at the global box office, its distributor said Sunday.'

The pope has censured Fr. Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionnaires of Christ, who has been accused of long-ago sexual abuse. He has been instructed to retire to a life of "prayer and penance".

The interesting thing is that he had found favor with John Paul. This represents an abrupt papal reversal of fortune.

Catholic Light also has a good blog entry on the subject.

It's good to see the Holy See openly cracking down on such cases.

Randall Terry, former head of Operation Rescue, has become Catholic. He was previously Evangelical.

(I must admit in looking for a photo of him, whom I had never seen before, I was surprised to see someone so young.)

Why did a book from an obscure author become so popular? It's a question lots of people would like an answer to. They say it was a case "of all a reader's wants appearing to be conveniently located in a single book, especially the desire to learn something." Nick Owchar, deputy editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, noted that people "enjoy toying with things that are subversive." Well that's certainly true.

People love scandal. And this provides plenty of it — scandal within scandal within scandal. Scandal of the Christian faith, scandal of Catholicism, scandal of Opus Dei. Feminism, in full force, likes the idea of goddesses and an exalted (and sexual) Mary Magdalene. What's that Scripture says about people with "itching ears"?

Reminds me of the readiness people have to consider negative things about people. Perhaps that is a lesson to us to be sober in our judgments and skeptical of accusations, evaluating our motivations for giving credence to negative information about people and organizations and scrutinizing the evidence carefully — especially when the accusations play into our own biases. It takes time and effort but everything deserves fair treatment.

But will he take the hint?

A Catholic school fired a teacher who informed them that she would be undergoing In-Vitro Fertilization on account of her contract pledging to uphold Catholic moral values.

The clueless teacher, a lifelong Catholic, had no idea that IVF was banned by the church. As for the contract, "I kind of thought that (the contract terms) meant to follow the Ten Commandments, that kind of thing," Kelly Romenesko, 37, said.

The Romeneskos chose IVF after trying unsuccessfully for five years to have children.

They opted to baptize their children Lutheran.

Women's sizes are getting out of hand. What used to be a size 8 is now a "0", in deference to woman who shop for what they wish they could wear rather than what they are &mash; all part of a cult of thinness that pervades our culture. Self-deception is what it is, pure and simple.

Of course, as Dave Barry commented many years ago, women and men think differently when they shop:

When a man shops for clothes, his primary objective — follow me closely here — is to purchase clothes that fit on his particular body. A man will try on a pair of pants, and if those pants are too small, he'll try on a larger pair, and when he finds a pair that fits, he buys them.

The situation is very different with women. When a woman shops for clothes, her primary objective is not to find clothes that fit her particular body.

She would like for that to be the case, but her primary objective is to purchase clothes that are the size she wore when she was 19 years old. This will be some arbitrary number such as ''8'' or ''10.'' Don't ask me ''8'' or ''10'' of what: That question has baffled scientists for centuries. All I know is that if a woman was a size 8 at age 19, she wants to be a size 8 now, and if a size 8 outfit does not fit her, she will not move on to a larger size: She can't! Her size is 8, dammit! So she will keep trying on size 8 items, and unless they start fitting her, she will become extremely unhappy.

Whether this is intrinsic to the way women are wired or conditioned by our culture, I will not venture to say, but it seems to hold true.

Of course, if a woman wanted to find clothes that fit, she would have a hard time given how the sizes are not standard and vary wildly, precisely because so many women want to fit into the size 8 they were as nubile maidens.

I don't know what the solution is. I hesitate even to suggest one for fear that I will be clocked for being insensitive to women. But, can we resolve this madness?

According to ZENIT News, population levels are due to fall to perilous levels. Birthrates, especially in Europe, are falling well below replacement level as governments try to motivate their people to procreate.

An interesting observation they make is:

Commenting on the poll, Libby Brooks noted that another key reason cited for the low birthrate is that couples do not stay together in the same way as in the past. The "modern absolutes of autonomy and independence" may well be hindering the formation of stable marriages and childbearing, according to Brooks.

To me, this primarily implicates the culture of divorce. People value their own wants over the needs of the family.

I'm not convinced though that this has that much effect on fertility. People divorce, remarry, and have children in their new family. Lots of people divorce after having what amounts to a full family by American standards. I think the bigger cause is the contraceptive mentality and the information society. Families used to be agrarian, and they needed hands to help out with the farm. Now children are perceived as a liability instead of an asset, and so it is natural that they would want to limit their family size.