Why Do I Get the Feeling

...that the type of people who style themselves "conservatives" who fail to see that stuff like this is self-evidently boorish and obnoxious would also fail to see that stuff like this:



...is sick and wrong?

"How Ayn Rand Ruined My Childhood"

An interesting column ran in Salon last week entitled "How Ayn Rand Ruined My Childhood".

Reading it, I was reminded of something Mark Shea has often said: namely, that libertarianism is a philosophy for people with no children.

It also reminded me that choosing how to live one's life is not a matter of choosing whether or not one will subscribe to a dogma (or set of dogmas), but, rather, choosing which particular dogma (or set of dogmas) one will subscribe to.

And, it also reminded me of this.

Tom Morrison is a Mensch

He's forgoing his pension:

Newly elected state Rep. Tom Morrison raised some eyebrows Tuesday during freshmen legislators’ orientation in Springfield when presented with paperwork to join the General Assembly’s lucrative pension system.

That’s because he opted out -- a move officials can recall happening just once before.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” one administrator asked him.

The 35-year-old Palatine Republican, who succeeds six-term state Rep. Suzie Bassi in the 54th House District, realizes that forgoing his pension won’t make a dent in the state’s $13 billion deficit or $80 billion unfunded pension liability.

But Morrison says he’s a proponent of self-sacrifice and leadership by example, and he wasn’t willing to become a financial burden on a system he wants to overhaul.

The district Tom represents is the one in which Jocelyn grew up (and where her parents still live). I know him personally, and he's a heckuva guy.

Oh, and if you're wondering how the State of Illinois came to be saddled with an $80 billion unfunded pension liability, the article goes on to provide some clue:

After four years in office -- the amount of time it takes to become vested -- a current legislator becomes eligible to receive a pension of 12 percent of his salary, along with 3 percent increases if retiring after age 60.

That pension payout spikes to 27 percent of salary after eight years of in office, 45 percent after 12 years of service and finally the maximum 85 percent after 20 years.

Can you say "unsustainable"?

Another clue is here.

Some All Too Often Ignored Points about Church History

...from Mark Shea:

What simple-minded believers in this simple minded “Evil Empire Clerics vs. Plucky Rebel Alliance Laity” myth never seem to understand is that it was just as often the laity who were eagerly tanking up on the Blood Libel and chucking Jews down wells for the supposed crime of drinking the blood of Christian children while it was the clerics who were telling everybody to cool off and stop believing urban legends.

So, for instance, the simple tale of slavery turns out to be fraught with complexity, not least because it was not all laypeople opposing it (lots of laity got stinking rich off it) and it was not all clerics supporting it.  Slavery, it turns out, was an immemorial institution throughout all of human civilization and the way in which the Church engaged it simply cannot be boiled down to laity good/cleric bad.  Lots and lots and lots of laity had as little patience for the Church’s nuanced arguments for the dignity of the slave as readers like the one above have for the Church’s nuanced arguments for the distinction between the dignity of the homosexual person and the sin of homosexual intercourse.

Indeed, one of the ironies of the Church’s history is that, for most of it, the main charge brought against the Church is not that it is too conservative, but that it is too liberal.  It is the laity that, again and again, rushes off all agog for some form of extremist rigorism.  Had the Church listened to the “opinions and wisdom of the rest of the body of Christ” during the Donatist enthusiasm, we would have excommunicated large portions of the Body of Christ because they did not measure up to the hyper-rigorism of the Donatists, who held that any priest who did not measure up under persecution could not validly consecrate the Eucharist and any bishop who did not measure up could not validly ordain.  We would have caved in to Lollards who insisted that anybody not in a state of grace could not function as an agent of the state and need not be obeyed by citizens of that state.  Asking whether the cop who is arresting a mugger is in a state of grace may seem spiritual to some of our more ethereal members of the Body of Christ, but for most of us it is, as Chesterton noted, “wanting in actuality.”  Most Catholic heresies down through the ages have been attempts to keep as many people away from the grace of God as possible, urging the faithful to stay away from the Eucharist, shut up, and give up the hope of salvation.  The “wisdom” of the first antipope in history was that the Pope was a wuss who welcomed people back to communion far too easily, when what they needed was merciless rejection by the pure.

Indeed, the reason for the Church’s creation of a system of Inquisitions was precisely that laypeople were, in their profound wisdom that needed no guidance from celibate old men, already running around doing it on their own as vigilantes and lynch mobs.  Turns out the Church thought that having a system whereby the facts were obtained and evaluated in an orderly way was better than something like this.

Of course, most people get their history from Monty Python and therefore could not tell you five intelligent words from a primary source about what actually took place in an Inquisition (and yeah, there were more than one and they weren’t all in Spain).  Similarly, most people don’t seem to know that though God does indeed sometimes raise up “ordinary pwople to challenge the istitutional church of the time”, He also raises up clergy to challenge the easy assumptions of fat, dumb, and happy ordinary people, who are quite certain that, whatever Gregory X says, Jews are drinking the blood of Christian children; or that whatever out-of-touch Dominicans may say, Indians are natural slaves; or that whatever pantywaists like the pope and bishops say, the nuclear murder of thousands of Japanese or the torture of prisoners in the War on Terror is the glorious work of God; or that whatever the Church says about the value of human life, abortion is a beautiful right and the sole core value of the Democratic party.  Looking around at our violent, selfish and sex-besotted culture, I’m not immediately persuaded that we glorious laity are a civilization of St. Catherines who are prevented from flourishing in sanctity by the evil machinations of Benedict XVI.  This optimistic self-assessment, while quite in keeping with the enormously high self-regard of the Baby Boomers, fails to premise itself on much resembling “reality”.  One forms, rather, the impression that Benedict is a thoughtful, gentle, and holy man who is doing his best to speak the Church’s beautiful teaching to a braying horde of crazies compact of talk radio lackeys, cokeheads, horndogs, warmongers, sex maniacs and addicts of therapeutic moralistic deism who let Oprah or FoxNews do all their thinking for them.  That he maintains his gentle and thoughtful composure in the midst of such a TV-addled culture with the attention span of fruit flies is astounding to me.

Read the whole thing.

"Clarity on Torture"

Sean Dailey has an editorial currently up on the website of Gilbert Magazine that's titled, appropriately enough, "Clarity on Torture".

Here's an excerpt:

Do we really need to get into the nuts and bolts of what constitutes torture?

Yes, we do. Most will agree that taking a power drill to a man’s shoulder or pulling out his fingernails with pliers for punishment or to extract information is torture. But when the subject is waterboarding, clarity vanishes again. Some consider waterboarding to be mere psychological torture — which, as we’ve already established, is morally indistinguishable from physical torture.

But waterboarding is not a harmless dunk in the tub, as former Vice President Dick Cheney once likened it, and it is not psychological torture. In waterboarding, a subject is strapped to a gurney. His feet are elevated slightly above his head. A cloth is draped over his face. And water is poured on his face so that it enters his nose and mouth and flows into his lungs. CIA interrogators are instructed to pour the water immediately after a detainee exhales, to ensure he inhales water, not air. They use their hands to “dam the flow” of excess water from a detainee’s mouth. And detainees who are scheduled for waterboarding are put on a liquid diet, to minimize the risk of death should they inhale their own vomit.

This procedure became official American policy in our so-called War on Terror, but it was not always so. Waterboarding has been condemned by the United States government since at least 1898, when American soldiers were court marshaled for waterboarding prisoners during our occupation of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War. In World War II, we hanged Japanese war criminals for waterboarding American and Allied troops. In the 1980s in Texas, a sheriff and three of his deputies were convicted by the Justice Department for waterboarding prisoners to extract confessions.

And yet, there are those exceptions: American security is at stake. If waterboarding saves even one life, isn’t it worth it?

If torturing a terrorist suspect saved a city from destruction, or if it saved even one life, it would still be a barbaric, savage act, unworthy of a civilized society. If expediency were enough to justify an immoral act, then abortion would be justifiable.

Read the whole thing.

You Don't See That Every Day

Like many schools, the grade school down the street from Haus Jansen has a sign in front on which are displayed various messages — most often, school announcements: "Spring Break: March 29 - April 2" or "Congratulations Mr. Brown on 32 years of teaching", or platitudes: "Knowledge is power", etc.

But notice the message that's there now:



Of course, our local school district isn't alone:



I wish every entity that the State of Illinois owes money to would likewise shout it from the rooftops. It might just help wake people up to how mind-bogglingly corrupt and financially mismanaged this place is.

John Stroger Thanks You for Driving with Care

On my way to work each morning, I pass this sign along Lawrence Avenue, just east of Austin Avenue:



I don't recall when, precisely, I first noticed this sign, but I do recall noticing one day about a year ago that it was hanging upside down (apparently because the bolt on the top had come out).

John Stroger hasn't served as Cook County Board President since June 2006—and, what's more, he's been dead since January 2008—so I figured it would just be a matter of time until the sign was removed. (For those unfamiliar with Cook County politics, the story of how the reins of powers were passed from John to his son Todd is an instructive primer.)

Silly me.

Instead, workers on the taxpayers' dime remounted the sign so that it once again appeared right side up, as it's pictured above.

Although I can't help but wonder, in light of last week's primary results, how long it will remain up.

I've written before about this sort of thing, which most people who grew up in and around Chicago likely take for granted—to wit, the ubiquitous appearance of names of elected office bigwigs on publicly financed signage.

I began to notice this when I first moved to Chicago in 1996 and saw "Mayor Daley's X Project" or "Mayor Daley's Y Task Force" or "Mayor Daley's Z Special Event" signs all over the place. (Although I must admit I've never seen a sign for "Mayor Daley's Rat-Infested Public Housing Complex".)

That's strange, I thought.

Little did I know that's just the way things are done around here.

March for Life

If any of this here weblog's readers will be in Washington, DC for the March for Life on Friday, feel free to stop by and say hi.

I'll be one of the ones holding the Generations for Life banner a block west of 4th St. and Madison Dr. NW, starting at 12:00 noon.

I'm also giddy that I'll get to hear the uber-intelligent Robert George speak at the Rose Dinner Friday night.

The best description of George that I've seen comes from a review of his book The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis, in which Daniel Moloney writes:

A few of the essays show secularist professors hopping in the ring with George, only to find that the diminutive professor of political philosophy does a fair impression of Hulk Hogan—he doesn’t just win; he throws the opponent out of the ring and begins to chase after him with a chair, so relentless is he in argument.

George is also a co-author of the Manhattan Declaration, which, if you haven't already signed, you should. (I signed it a few weeks ago.)

"What Does It Mean, Really, to Be a Catholic?"

Reading Bishop Thomas Tobin's letter to Rep. Patrick Kennedy, I couldn't help but call to mind this comment posted a few years ago by Dale Price on Amy Welborn's old blog in regard to a column by another member of the American episcopate:

Holy Deus Lo Volt, Batman!

Usually I need coffee reading a bishop's column. This is like eating the beans straight from the bag.

To see a bishop publicly rebuke a Catholic elected official in his diocese who blathers that it's no big deal that he disagrees with the Church about abortion is, to say the least, a breath of fresh air. All the more so now that one of his congressional colleagues has floated the idea that the Catholic Church should be stripped of its tax-exempt status.

Here's hoping there will be more shepherds like Bishop Tobin who will lovingly yet firmly tell the pro-choice elected officials in their dioceses that they need to go to Canossa.

Another Bubble Zone Update

We learned on Friday that Mayor Daley intends to sign the free-speech choking Bubble Zone ordinance.

In an attempt to justify his decision, the Mayor remarked, "There has to be some civility left in our society."

How ironic. The mission of sidewalk counselors is to try to prevent mothers from having their children killed — and, in the process, sparing them a lifetime of pain and regret — and they're the ones who are uncivil?

Watch No Greater Joy, our documentary on sidewalk counseling, and judge for yourself:

Bubble Zone Update

The City Council passed the Bubble Zone ordinance yesterday by a vote of 28-13. It will go into effect November 17 unless Mayor Daley vetoes it.

Since last week, we've been encouraging people (regardless of where they live) to call his office and ask him to oppose it. So many people have called that when you call his office now, instead of having a real, live person answer the phone, it goes to an automated menu which asks you to press 1 if you're calling about the Bubble Zone. It then allows you to vote no by pressing 2.

You can — nay, should — make your voice heard by calling 312-744-3300 between 8:00am and 5:00pm CDT.

Here's the video of the press conference at the conclusion of our protest yesterday — at which 150 people showed up:

If You Happen to Be Near Chicago City Hall Tomorrow

Join our Bubble Zone protest!

"Do You Support a Woman's Right to Choose?"

Note: I had intended to cross-post the following entry on Friday (I had originally posted it on the Generations for Life Blog that morning), but in my exuberance at the big news of the day, it slipped my mind. So I'm posting it now.

***

This morning as I was waiting to catch the train to get to work, I was approached by a guy named Robert Marshall, who is planning to run for the U.S. Senate seat now held by Roland Burris. He asked if I would sign a petition to put his name on the Democratic primary ballot.

So I asked him the first question I ask anyone who tells me he's running for office:

Do you support a woman's right to choose?

The first question I used to ask was: "Are you pro-life?" But I soon realized that this is the wrong question to ask, because

To the Surprise of Exactly No One, the Chicago City Council Backs the Bid

The first five words speak volumes:

Giving themselves a standing ovation, aldermen eagerly jumped onto Mayor Richard Daley's Olympics bandwagon Wednesday, unanimously approving a measure that places the responsibility for cost overruns on taxpayers if Chicago hosts the 2016 Summer Games.

What a bunch of utterly shameless sycophants, the lot of them.

Bill Maher: Embryology Expert?

Last night I found out that Bill Maher was on The Tonight Show (for one of Jay Leno's final shows, apparently), and I caught most of it.

I find watching Bill Maher somewhat like watching a train wreck: I don't want to look, but I don't want to not look, either — mostly because of a perhaps unhealthy curiosity about whether his next stupid bloviation will be as outrageous as most everything else he says.

I haven't yet been able to find video of the the segment, nor a transcript thereof, but Mary at Freedom Eden has a detailed account of it, and the quotes as she recounts them are as I remember.

Maher's pontifications on stem cell research took the biscuit:

Maher mocked President Bush on embryonic stem cell research. In the process, he made a fool of himself. Maher complained that "President 'Jesus Loves Me'" wouldn't allow embryonic stem cell research. [Which, of course, is completely false, but this sure is a popular canard, eh? —JJ] He talked as if he were an expert on the subject. That, of course, was ridiculous.

He asked Leno if he understood it. Leno kind of stuttered. Then Maher began his BS lecture.

He called an embryo "a little specklet of goo."

He didn't mention that an embryo is a genetically complete human being. There's a lot of value in that "goo."

Maher said an embryo is "a two-day old dividing cell, or as conservatives call it: a baby."

He called the embryos used in stem cell research "leftovers at fertility clinics."

About the research, he said, "This is something that can help people that are really alive." At no point did Leno question Maher's claims or note that adult stem cells have been used to successfully treat and cure disease. Embryonic stem cells have not.

Together, like good propagandists, Leno and Maher perpetuated the myths.

Leno ended the interview by saying he's always been proud to have Maher on the show, even when he wasn't popular and just a speck of goo.

During this time, the two yukked it up not a little, and the audience followed suit, natch.

But for the virtue of hope, it's at times likes these that I would find myself gravitationally drawn toward despair over what the future holds for our culture.

I'm Shocked — Shocked, I Tell You — That Hillary Clinton May Not Have Been Telling the Truth

Last month Secretary of State Hilary Clinton told Congress that half of the women she had seen in Brazilian hospitals "were fighting for their lives against botched abortions." After her comments she was asked to produce evidence as to when she had visited the hospitals or statistics to back her claim, but neither she nor her staffers have been able to produce any evidence.

Clinton, who last year falsely claimed that she had been involved in a sniper attack as First Lady when she visited Bosnia, is now making another claim: half the women in Brazilian hospitals are "fighting for their lives against botched abortions." ...

The National Catholic Register contacted Department of State spokeswoman Laura Tischler to see if there was any record of Clinton’s trip to Brazilian hospitals. Tischler said, "I am unable to confirm where or when the trip she referred to in her testimony was — where specifically in Brazil she was visiting or when the trip occurred."

Read the whole thing.

[HT: JivinJ]

The Morning-After Pill: Not All It's Cracked Up to Be

When I first heard about the federal court decision last month ordering the FDA to make the morning-after pill available to 17-year olds — a decision gushingly lauded by ACOG, natch — I couldn't help but call to mind this post on the Life Training Institute blog last year.

Therein, Rich Poupard (aka Serge) writes about a web seminar (at one time accessible here) in which Dr. James Trussell made some astonishingly candid admissions about the failure of emergency contraception to reduce the rate of unintended pregnancy.

Trussell's page on Princeton's website notes that he is "a senior fellow at the Guttmacher Institute and a member of the board of directors of the NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation, The Guttmacher Institute, the Society of Family Planning, and a member of the National Medical Committee of Planned Parenthood Federation of America". It further notes that Trussell "has actively promoted making emergency contraception more widely available as an important step in helping women reduce their risk of unintended pregnancy..."

Poupard notes that Trussell acknowledged, among other things, the following:

1. Trussell previously hoped (published in 1992) that EC would reduce unintended pregnancies and abortion by half.

2. 15 years later 11 studies have consistently showed no decrease of pregnancy rates from use of ECs.

3. Trussell also stated that a future decrease in pregnancy rates from EC use is highly unlikely - an astounding admission. ...

4. Due to difficulties in estimating the expected pregnancy rates, the published efficacy in the package insert of EC is almost certainly too high.

He then trenchantly notes:

This is amazing stuff. Since there was extensive news coverage of the effort to get Plan B to OTC status, why the silence in the wake of information that Plan B will not effect pregnancy or abortion rates? Imagine the outcry if a heart medication was thought to reduce heart attacks by 95% - and was made over-the-counter in order to increase its availability to reduce heart disease. A year later evidence comes out that no study had ever found that it had any effect on heart attack rates, and that the only thing that could be said about it is that it is "probably better than nothing". There would be a great outcry, congressional hearings, and accusations that the evil pharmaceutical companies were gouging unsuspecting patients. However, so far there has not been a peep among those concerned about "women's health" that they could be promoting an expensive medication that may not be effective.

Instead, we get this:

On Wednesday, Nancy Northrup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, praised the agency's apparent change of heart.

"We commend the FDA for taking swift action to ensure that its decisions on Plan B are based solely on the drug's safety and efficacy," said Northup, whose group had brought the lawsuit against the FDA. "It is a key step for the agency as it seeks to restore confidence in its ability to safeguard public health and leave politics at the lab door."

Obama, Camille Paglia, and Groupthink

My fellow Catholic Dads blogger Nod has a great post regarding some comments made recently by Camille Paglia about the Obama administration.

I would have loved to have written more in the comments section thereof, but hadn't the time, so I focused very briefly on one question he raised, which, it seems to me, is a terribly important one:

Why do so many fall into the trap of groupthink and blithe rationalizations?

To which I wrote:

The short answer, it seems to me, is:

Because it's easy. Resisting groupthink, on the other hand, is hard.

And most of us are lazy.

Ka-ching for Planned Parenthood

When I see dreck like this:



...I can't decide whether to do this:



...or don sackcloth and ashes and recite the penitential psalms (followed, perhaps, by the imprecatory psalms).

Throwing Good Money After Bad and Failing to Avoid "Ethical Drawbacks"

I just did a tag-team interview (along with my boss, Joe Scheidler) with a reporter from FOX 32 News for a story on Obama's decision to lift restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research throw good money after bad — which, incidentally, will result in the killings of yet more tiny human beings.

I'm told the story will air during their 9:00 pm news tonight.

Speaking of which, I couldn't help but notice this sentence in an article in Friday's Chicago Tribune about the latest advance in adult stem cell research (induced pluripotent stem cell — iPS cell — research, to be precise):

The [iPS] cells offer the benefits of embryonic stem cells without the ethical drawbacks.

So not killing human beings is seen merely as avoiding an "ethical drawback"?

Mmm-kay.