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?

Life Imitating Art

This reminds me of this.

Isn't It Ironic

...that a city named for St. Francis of Assisi would officially pass a resolution condemning the teachings of the Catholic Church?

What "Comprehensive" Sex Ed Is Really All About

The Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health is at it again.

In 2006, ICAH held its annual fundraiser at Playboy's executive offices.

That event—view the invitation here [PDF]—included a VIP reception with Playboy CEO Christie Hefner, the daughter of Hugh Hefner, who founded the magazine in 1953. Several years ago, Christie decided that the company could make more money by producing increasingly harder-core pornography—something that even her father was reluctant to do for a long time.

The next year, their annual fundraiser featured a stripper.

At this year's event on June 15, ICAH will be honoring sex advice columnist Dan Savage with the group's "Sexuality Activist Award."

The fact that Savage is being honored tells us everything we need to know about ICAH's values and the advice they believe should be given to kids.

On his website, Savage recommends things like group sex and encourages his readers to enter amateur porn contests. For the sake of propriety, most of the advice he gives I won't even mention obliquely.

He also ridicules a support group for pornography addicts by claiming "porn addiction is bulls***."

This despite reams of evidence showing how devastatingly harmful and addictive porn really is. (For but one example, witness pop singer John Mayer's candid admission that he would rather watch porn than form a new relationship with a real woman.)

In its press statement [PDF] announcing this year's event, ICAH blames "harmful abstinence-only-until-marriage messages that have proven inaccurate and ineffective" for the alarmingly high rates of pregnancy and STDs among teens.

Yet the evidence for successful abstinence education programs continues to mount, and meanwhile, it's increasingly clearer that the message of Condoms, Condoms, More Condoms, And Even More Condoms doesn't, you know, work.

So let's review:

For 3 of the last 5 years, the honored guests at ICAH functions have included the CEO of Playboy, a stripper, and a lurid sex columnist.

And they expect the people of Illinois to believe they have our children's best interests at heart when they push for so-called "comprehensive" sex education.

How stupid do they think we are?

Related Coverage on the Generations for Life Blog

• What Really Goes On In "Comprehensive" Sex Ed Class


• When did Playboy Become Respectable?

[Cross-posted at Pro-Life Action League and Generations for Life]

Render Unto Daley?

Let me begin by saying that I think bottled water is by and large a stupid idea.

Call me old-fashioned if you must, but I still cling to the antediluvian view that it's just fine to drink water out of, you know, the tap.

That said, I recognize that there are times when having bottled water on hand is convenient.

So while I never have, and never will, buy bottled water for consumption within the confines of Haus Jansen, there is an occasional need to buy it for work-related events.

Knowing that we'd need some in the near future, I saw that 24-packs of half-liter bottles were on sale for Jewel for $2.50. And despite the limit of 4, that's still a deal I couldn't pass up.

So I picked up 4 cases on the way to work yesterday morning.

As the cashier was ringing me up, I thought my total sounded high, but it was getting on toward 9:00, and I needed to get to work, so I didn't think much more of it.

But when I got to work, I glanced at the receipt and noticed that there was a "Chicago bottled water tax" of $1.20 tax per case ($.05/bottle).

Wha...?

I then vaguely recalled having heard something a bottled water tax a while back, but I'd never hitherto bought bottled water in the city of Chicago, so I'd forgotten all about it.

I then had to consider my options: keep it, because of the hassle of returning 4 cases of water back to the store. This would mean, of course, having to live with myself knowing that I coughed up nearly 50% [!] of the price of the water in taxes — which utterly kills the deal's couldn't-pass-up-ability.

Or, of course, I could take it back, and then get 4 more cases at another Jewel outside the city limits, where there is no such infernal bottled water tax.

If you know me at all, you'll know which option I chose.

I took it back this morning, and I'll get 4 more cases on the Jewel in Oak Park tonight — a mere block off my normal route home.

Glenn Beck Drifts Further Into Outer Space

I can't say I'm surprised that an ex-Catholic Mormon is encouraging Catholics to commit apostasy.

Who Knew

...that John and Yoko recognized that the Neo-Malthusians' fear-mongering blather about overpopulation was exactly that?



"Oh, I don't care."

Heh!

[HT: Creative Minority Report]

This Is *So* Not Surprising

The Bullwinkle Approach continues to yield astonishingly predictable results.

[HT: Mark Shea]

Previous

• A Punch in the Gut to the Condom Racket

Why Bother Debating the Other Side

...when it's so much easier to just steal their stuff and accuse them of "hate speech"?

Our Tax Dollars at Work

Not far from of our office, on Cicero Avenue, about two blocks south of Peterson Avenue, is this sign:



There's another such sign about a mile west of Haus Jansen, along 26th Street, just east of Harlem Avenue.

I've seen several other such signs around Chicagoland recently. No doubt there are hundreds (thousands?) more elsewhere around the country.

For them that don't know, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is what most of us call simply "The Stimulus". And so, as a result of these signs, we now know that some of the $787 billion of our tax dollars are being used to fund repairs on state and local roads (not to mention the signs themselves).

Could someone explain to me why the good people of Boston, Charleston, Dayton, Louisiana, Washington, Houston, Kingston, Texarkana, Monterey, Faraday, Santa Fe, Tallapoosa, Glen Rock, Black Rock, Little Rock, Oskaloosa, Tennessee, Hennessey, Chicopee, Spirit Lake, Grand Lake, Devils Lake, or Crater Lake (for Pete's sake) should have to pay for roads to be repaired in Illinois?

EEOC to Catholic College: Drop Dead

I can't say as I'm surprised:

Feds Accuse Catholic Belmont Abbey College of Sexual Discrimination for Not Covering Contraception

So much for separation of church and state.

Thankfully, the BAC powers that be aren't backing down.

From the article:

"As a Roman Catholic institution, Belmont Abbey College is not able to and will not offer nor subsidize medical services that contradict the clear teaching of the Catholic Church," said Belmont Abbey President William Thierfelder. "There was no other course of action possible if we were to operate in fidelity to our mission and to our identity as a Catholic college."

After faculty members filed complaints with the EEOC and the North Carolina Department of Insurance, Belmont Abbey says the EEOC told the school in March 2009 that it would close the file on the discrimination charge, as it had not found the school's decision in violation of its statutes. But the agency later reversed itself, and issued a determination letter to the school on August 5 affirming that the ban amounted to gender discrimination, because it pertains only to women.

"By denying prescription contraception drugs, Respondent (the college) is discriminating based on gender because only females take oral prescription contraceptives," wrote Reuben Daniels Jr., the EEOC Charlotte District Office Director in the determination. [emphasis added]

Aside from presenting us with a clear example of bureaucracy run amok, Daniels' comment also provides with what could rightly be called a "teachable moment".

He noted that only women take oral contraceptives. This, of course, begs the question prompts the question: Why is there no contraceptive pill for men?

The redoubtable Dr. Janet Smith explains why in her talk "Contraception: Why Not":

There's a wonderful book out by Dr. Ellen Grant called The Bitter Pill. She was very much in on distributing contraceptives in the 60's in London, but she saw woman after woman coming in with different pathologies that she found were pill-related high blood pressure, blood clots, cysts in the breast, all sorts of things.

So, she said, "I'm not going to prescribe these anymore." She looked into this and she discovered, that when they were first testing for the pill, they were trying to find a male contraceptive and a female contraceptive pill.

And in the first study group of males, they found that there was some slight shrinkage of the testicles of one male, so they stopped all testing of the male contraceptive pill.

You might notice that there is no such thing in the first study group of females. Three females died and they just readjusted the dosage.

Let's read that again:

And in the first study group of males, they found that there was some slight shrinkage of the testicles of one male, so they stopped all testing of the male contraceptive pill.

And this:

You might notice that there is no such thing in the first study group of females. Three females died and they just readjusted the dosage. [!]

Smith continues:

Now, I don't know what that tells you, but it tells me that there's something sinister going on here. Women are still dying from the pill.

If you look at the insert in any set of pills, you can get this from a pharmacist if you can't find it elsewhere, it says such things as the pill will cause blood clots, high blood pressure, heart disease, greater increase of some kinds of cancer, infertility.

Now, these are very small percentages where this happens, but there are some sixteen million women in the United States on the pill. Sixteen million.

And even a very small percentage is still a very large number of women. Not to mention the day by day side effects. These always fascinate me.

Most women, in fact, 50% of women who start on the pill, stop within the first year because of unpleasant side effects. So, these side effects are really largely those of the sixteen million who continue, so you can imagine how bad they must be for the 50% who stop.

It's not Belmont Abbey College that's mistreating women.

It's the Pill.

Baby Steps in the Right Direction

China steps back from one child policy

China is taking the first step towards ending its one-child policy with the authorities in Shanghai encouraging thousands of couples to have a second baby.

For the first time in 30 years, officials in the country’s economic capital have urged eligible parents to plan for a second child. The move was prompted by the growing demographic imbalance in the city and fears that the younger generation will not be able to support the ageing population. [emphasis added]

Did you catch that, overpopulation fear mongers?

Interestingly, this article was posted on July 25, the same date in 1968 that Pope Paul VI, of happy memory, issued the astonishingly prescient Humanae Vitae.

This Is *So* Not Surprising

The Bullwinkle Approach continues to yield extraordinarily predictable results.

Trotting out the Tired Old Overpopulation Myth

The more things change...

...the more they stay the same.

Quoth Qoheleth: "There is nothing new under the sun." —Ecclesiastes 1:9


HT: JivinJ

It's for Reasons Like This I'm Cynical about the Medical Establishment

I linked to this post a few weeks ago on Facebook, and MWhelehan commented:

My own sister-in-law just had her fourth via Cesarean and the doctor asked her several times if she wanted her tubes tied. I thought that was even more invasive than the surgery. But the explanation was, "We've already got you open..."

From an insurance company's perspective, this is a no-brainer: fork over a few more thousand now, but think of the money we won't have to cough up in the future now that she's done having kids!

I particularly love the "We've already got you open" sales pitch. Imagine going to the dentist to get a filling, and he says to you, "How'd you like for me cut out your tongue? I mean, we've already got your open."

Absurd? Of course.

But it only serves to illustrate that which in reality is absurd: the fact that the medical establishment routinely tells women that they should consider having a side effect laden surgery performed on part of their body that is perfectly healthy and merely doing what it's supposed to be doing.

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]

Disaster?

When you hear the word disaster, what do you think of?

To me, the word brings to mind images of tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, plane crashes — well, you get the idea.

Perhaps it's antediluvian of me to say so, but I don't think of the creation of a unique human being with an eternal soul is an event that would ever warrant such a label.

Silly me.

In an article in today's Chicago Tribune (that reads almost as if it could have been written by someone at Planned Parenthood), we read this:

About 50 percent of pregnancies in the United States are unintended. In good economic times, many families are happy to welcome another child, [ACOG Vice President Dr. Iffath] Hoskins said. But when money is tight, an unintended pregnancy can be a disaster.

It's unclear to me whether it's the ACOG spokesmouth who thinks the creation of a new human life could be a "disaster", or if that's just editorializing thrown in by the writer of the article, one Shari Roan.

Regardless, such misanthropic sentiments are self-evidently appalling, and those who harbor them ought to be ashamed of thesmelves.

A little later in the article, Roan writes:

Every dollar spent in the public health sector on contraceptives saves $3 in childbirth and newborn health-care costs for Medicaid.

Did you catch the subtext there? As Mark Shea has quite rightly pointed out:

The solution of rich Western elites to poverty is always and everywhere, "Just enough of me. Way too much of you. Cull your herds and buy Pepsi."

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."

Oh, the Hubris!

Sean Dailey wrote yesterday about what he called — quite rightly, in all possibility — "the most clueless sentence of the last decade", which appeared in an article in the current issue of Newsweek, titled "Sexual Masters of the Universe":

The article, by a fellow named Andrew Romano, is about Bill Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Masters & Johnson of Sexual Revolution fame, using a new biography of the pair, Masters of Sex by Thomas Maier, as a springboard.

Anyway, early in the article, Romano drops this bomb, "As the story of Masters and Johnson makes clear, rescuing sex from the ancient mists of myth, mystery and religiosity left America a happier and healthier place."

Oh, the hubris!

Contrast that last sentence with this excerpt from an article that appeared in an article in First Things last year:

When I’ve taken retreats to Catholic monasteries, I’ve been aware of how surprisingly, and even frighteningly, erotic they seem. The Trappists of Mepkin Abbey in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, worship in an exquisitely beautiful place: high white walls, cold stone floors, a slit in the side of the main sanctuary like a split in the universe through which the reserved sacrament is always visible. The great stone altar is big enough to sacrifice Isaac on. Candles flicker on the bronze face of Our Lady during Compline, and dozens of men chant the Salve Regina before the abbot dismisses with a flick of his wrist and a sprinkling of holy water. Pure desire for God could be wrung from the place like a wet towel. And one can begin to see how sex with another person could be given up for desire for God or made better by mutual longing for God.

There are treasures here with which we can become reacquainted to combat pornography, if we dare. And we may not: Moderns flinch when St. Bernard of Clairveaux seeks to progress up Jesus’ body, kissing his way up to his lips; when Bernini sculpts St. Theresa in the posture of orgasm; when ancient Christians stripped and spit and had their faces hissed at in exorcism before submerging, nude, to be born again.

One commenter, the sui generis Blog Nerd, noted:

Eros, demasked, has once again fled. And now we are left with a religion slowly divested of its blood and guts.

It is no coincidence that the sensual opulence of our Churches started to disappear at the same time as the sexual revolution gathered its strength. The advent of casual contraceptive sex dissipated us. And we lost that longing ache for union in proper order.

When the uninitiated glimpse the erotics of religious ardor in traditional Catholicism they mistake it for "repressed sexuality" -- they couldn't be more wrong if they tried.

Quite so.

I remember hearing Scott Hahn give a talk a few years ago on the Church's teachings about sex. He pointed out that it's not enough to speak of sex as "good"; after all, that puts it at merely the same level as Campbell's soup. Neither is it enough to speak of sex as "great", for that puts it at merely the same level as Frosted Flakes.

Nay, so much more than "good" or "great", sex is holy, because by it and it alone, husband and wife express complete and total self-sacrificing, self-donating mutual love in a way that uniquely allows human beings to reflect the inner life of God.

If one believes sex to be anything less, he gets it hopelessly wrong.

According to This, Jocelyn and I Shouldn't Be Very Happy

Especially as we continue to await the birth of our — gasp! — fifth child in the last 6+ years.

By "this", I mean the results of A New Study conducted by People Who Allegedly Know What They're Talking About who have declared:

Kids Curb Marital Satisfaction

Funny. We're actually pretty "satisfied" with our marriage right now.

Imagine that.

Mark Shea comments thusly:

For our culture terminal narcissism, this is a big deal, since it conceives of marriage, like everything else, as a tool for self-fulfillment and instant gratification. That's why it bothers to undertake studies like this.

Of course, there is another way of seeing it: kids force adolescent narcissists to grow up and realize it's not all about Me. Those who submit to this process of "growing up" discover newer and deeper forms of satisfaction than the pleasure of being a newlywed. Part of that whole "lose your life and you will find it" paradox that is soooooo out of step with our consumer culture.

I'm going out on a limb and guessing that maybe, just maybe, decades of increasingly ubiquitous contraception — and the anti-child ethos from whence contraception cometh — might just have some impact on couples' attitudes toward having children.

You know, the same anti-child ethos that gives us condom ads like these, which apparently won an award at Cannes in 2006: