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.

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:

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).

This Is Interesting

Pill inventor slams ... pill

Key graphs:

Eighty five year old Carl Djerassi the Austrian chemist who helped invent the contraceptive pill now says that his co-creation has led to a "demographic catastrophe."

In an article published by the Vatican this week, the head of the world's Catholic doctors broadened the attack on the pill, claiming it had also brought "devastating ecological effects" by releasing into the environment "tonnes of hormones" that had impaired male fertility, The Taiwan Times says.

The assault began with a personal commentary in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard by Carl Djerassi. The Austrian chemist was one of three whose formulation of the synthetic progestogen Norethisterone marked a key step toward the earliest oral contraceptive pill.

Djerassi outlined the "horror scenario" that occurred because of the population imbalance, for which his invention was partly to blame. He said that in most of Europe there was now "no connection at all between sexuality and reproduction." He said: "This divide in Catholic Austria, a country which has on average 1.4 children per family, is now complete."

He described families who had decided against reproduction as "wanting to enjoy their schnitzels while leaving the rest of the world to get on with it." ...

[Dr Jose Maria Simon Castellvi] also pointed to the "devastating ecological effects of the tons of hormones discarded into the environment each year. We have sufficient data to state that one of the causes of masculine infertility in the West is the environmental contamination caused by the products of the 'pill'." Castellvi noted as well that the International Agency for Research on Cancer reported in 2005 that the pill has carcinogenic effects.

It seems we have here yet another instance of Shea's Two Phases of History.

Phase One, you may recall, is:

What could it hurt?

Phase Two is:

How could we have known?

Show Me a Culture That Despises Virginity and I'll Show You a Culture That Despises Children*

Quoth Canadian pro-choice activist Joyce Arthur in a comment on the National Post website:

Yes Matt W, let’s err on the side of life - WOMEN’S lives. Because the right to abortion is not about a woman’s right to choose, it’s about her right to LIFE - which means far more than just mere physical survival.

Behind your view is the assumption that women are obligated to have babies just because they are capable of it. Not so. Women can never enjoy full human rights or equality unless they can control their fertility. That includes the right to have sex for pleasure, which carries a risk of pregnancy regardless of use of birth control. So abortion must be available as a backup.

And, then, the money quote:

The moral status of the fetus, when life begins etc., does not matter, because women need and will have abortions regardless - even women who think abortion is murder.

Andrea Mrozek trenchantly notes:

Who is honestly going to stand up for our “right” to casual sex (and hey, while we’re at it, can we enshrine that it be really good sex too?) over someone else’s life? Guess Joyce Arthur just did. (It’s also a twisted sense of pleasure that sees women heading to a clinic to put their feet in stirrups for invasive surgery, all as a matter of routine “choice”.)

Uh, yeah.

*HT for the meme: Mark Shea

"Schools in the Jesuit Tradition" Is, for All Intents and Purposes, a Vacuous Euphemism

Alas, the hanged, drawn, and quartered body of St. Edmund Campion must be turning over in his grave at the state of Jesuit higher education these days.

This latest instance, via Mark Shea, reminds me of the time some ten years ago when, during Joe Scheidler's (my now-boss's) RICO trial in federal court, Loyola University Chicago's law school allowed NOW to solicit students to help them in their case against him. His daughter, my friend and current co-worker Annie Casselman, was a Loyola undergrad at the time (as was I).

I like Shea's idea, though: Don't give 'em a dime. Not one dime. Ever.

That's why Jocelyn and I have donated exactly nothing to our alma mater.

To be sure, I say this with no joy. Both of us received an excellent education at Loyola, and we were privileged to encounter many Jesuits there who have an undying love for the Faith.

Sadly, however, the increasing sense of disloyalty that has crept its way into the Society of Jesus has made for an environment in many (all?) of their universities in which Catholic identity is largely shelved and certain viewpoints diametrically opposed to Church teaching are tolerated out of a horribly misguided understanding of “academic freedom”.

This Video Won't Last Long on YouTube...

Whenever a video of undercover footage exposing what really happens inside an abortion clinic is posted on YouTube, it's usually yanked soon after for no reason.

So I'm sure this video, just released by Students for Life of America, won't last long either:



(If it's no longer available on YouTube, you can also see it here on Eyeblast.)

Pornography Awareness Week

Today marks the start of Pornography Awareness Week.

Therefore, men, beware! And resolve to use every means at your disposal (chief among them frequent Confession and Holy Communion) to resist its gravitational-like pull.

Along these lines, I'd encourage any and all of this here weblog's readers to sign this pledge to live chastely (which I found out about via the Catholic Dads blog).

I signed it. Will you?

I'm also reposting herein some self-explanatory test I originally borrowed stole from The Dutchman last year:

Nine Myths about Pornography

(by one angry girl designs)

Myth 1: Women who become strippers and hookers choose these careers, so who are we to judge them?

Myth 2: Strippers and porn stars lead glamorous lives, and men have nothing but respect for them.

Myth 3: Porn is an outlet or safety valve for men who might otherwise do Bad Things.

Myth 4: Men like variety in women so porn use helps a man stay faithful to his woman.

Myth 5: Porn is harmless and has no effect on the person using it.

Myth 6: Women who work in porn are empowered, because they get to call the shots.

Myth 7: Porn is for men who sincerely appreciate the beauty of the female body.

Myth 8: Everyone knows porn is just a fantasy, so no one would try to apply it to real life.

Myth 9: Porn enhances relationships.

I'm a Sucker for Satire

Although I'm increasingly skeptical that the mass-exodus prompting event mentioned herein will actually come to pass, the lampooning of a certain subset of the American population is brilliant:

[HT: Mark Shea]

So Much for "Safe, Legal, and Rare"

Sarah and Todd Palin's decision to complete her recent pregnancy, despite advance notice that their baby Trig had Down syndrome, is hailed by many in the pro-life movement as walking the walk as well as talking the talk. ...

Dr. Andre Lalonde, executive vice president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Ottawa, worries that Palin's now renowned decision may cause abortions in Canada to decline as other women there and elsewhere opt to follow suit.

Running to Do Evil

For several years now, my backpack has been something of a Linus-like security blanket; rare is the day I leave the house without it.

It's also become a repository of items various and sundry: a tin of Altoids, more pens than I could hope to use in ten years, a rosary, an 11-week fetal model, numerous bus schedules, pamphlets, brochures, etc.

Just recently I found therein a mailing we (or, rather, my beloved wife Jocelyn, as it was only addressed to her) received from Bayer Pharmaceuticals on May 15, 2007—it was an ad for the IUD Mirena, which touts itself as "birth control that helps simplify your life".

I remember the exact date we got the mailing because it was a mere nine days after our son Joe was born.

Opening up the mailing, there's a picture of a smiling thirtysomething woman, and these words:

Baby bottles. Diaper duty. Family. Finding time for yourself. There are enough things to think about with a new baby—birth control doesn't have to one of them. Enjoy more and worry less with Mirena® (levnorgestrel-releasing intrauterine system), an estrogen-free birth control that is effective in preventing pregnancy for up to 5 years or less if you choose.

My first thought upon was that this brilliantly conceived marketing campaign was a fantastic example of "Running to Do Evil"—a term I first came across in a fine article I read several years ago in New Oxford Review (when I still read New Oxford Review).

Think of how easy it would be for a woman who just experienced a particularly excruciating labor and delivery—but who otherwise may have never given a second thought to contracepting thereafter—to be persuaded to have an IUD inserted.

Enter Bayer, the billion-dollar corporation all-too-willing to provide "birth control that helps simplify your life".

Of course, that means you'll no longer be expressing complete and total self-donating mutual love in a way that uniquely allows a married couple to reflect the inner life of God; in fact, you'll be doing exactly the opposite.

But who cares? From Bayer's point of view, they're making money, so that's helping The Economy, and isn't that what capitalism's all about?

So I put the mailing in my backpack with the intention of calling Bayer to complain, but I never got around to it. When I found the mailing again just recently, I figured there wouldn't be much point in calling, largely because it'd probably take me forever to actually talk to a real, live human being, and even so, I'm not sure what I would have said.

Instead, yesterday, I sent them an e-mail filled out a contact form on their website. (I can't stand it when companies make you fill out a contact form instead of providing an actual e-mail address, but I digress.)

I kept it very simple and very brief:

Shortly after our last child was born, we received a mailing from your company advertising Mirena.

If my wife and I love each other, why would we ever want to use contraception?

I'd be amazed if I get a response, even one that's an obvious form letter.

[Cross-posted at Catholic Dads]

White People Like Being Offended

Watching this:

...when she said this:

It's very, very shocking and very unsettling and one of those moments where, you know, as like a female, you're not sure if you want to cry, if you want to get really mad.

...I couldn't help but call to mind Example #101 of Stuff White People Like—Being Offended:

To be offended is usually a rather unpleasant experience, one that can expose a person to intolerance, cultural misunderstandings, and even evoke the scars of the past. This is such an unpleasant experience that many people develop a thick skin and try to only be offended in the most egregious and awful situations. In many circumstances, they can allow smaller offenses to slip by as fighting them is a waste of time and energy. But white people, blessed with both time and energy, are not these kind of people. In fact there are few things white people love more than being offended. ...

White people also get excited at the opportunity to be offended at things that are sexist and/or homophobic. Both cases offering ample opportunities for lectures, complaints, graduate classes, lengthy discussions and workshops.

And then, of course, there's the reporter's transparently patronizing tone about the pharmacist and his wife having—gasp!—nine children!

I mean, like, doesn't it make you want to cry, or get really mad at them, for exercising their freedom of choice to have nine kids?

[HT: Newsbusters via Jill Stanek]

Lust and Boredom

One of the consequences of The Fall is that man's ability to devise new and different ways to sin is essentially limitless.

As such, when a well-informed, spiritually mature Catholic hears about a particularly outrageous, supposedly "new" trend in sinful behavior, his reaction should, on the one hand, be one of disdain, as it should be for any other sins (including his own). On the other hand, though, he oughtn't be surprised.

This is especially true regarding sexual sins.

Lust, we observe, leads inexorably to boredom. And while other sins do, too, of course, I would contend it happens more so — or at least more quickly — in the case of lust.

Much like a drug addict, the man enslaved to lust is Absolutely. Never. Satisfied. by just one thought, or image, or video, or act (with whatever other person(s) or, well...).

Boredom soon sets in, as he realizes the fleeting satisfaction is gone. After a while on the pleasure/boredom roller coaster, he begins to wonder if dabbling in increasingly edgier porn and/or real acts themselves might finally forestall his heretofore inevitable loathsome boredom.

They won't, of course, but his conscience is too beaten down for him to know any better. For when a man is spiritually blind, all he can do is stumble around, and unless he asks for help, he ends up progressing further into the morass.

I say all this by way of introduction to this story:



Guys with a pregnant hooker fetish haven't always had a pregnant hooker fetish. No doubt, it's the result of having tried lots of progressively worse things before; perhaps this is just the flavor of the month.

But when the novelty of the pregnant hooker fetish wears off, where does their boredom take them?

And what about the women who allow themselves to be used (and then discarded) to satisfy some pathetic loser's messed up fantasy? How kinky do they have to become once a particular fetish becomes passé?

The possibilities are endless—thereby illustrating with shocking clarity why lust can only be justly regarded as a deadly sin.

R.I.P., Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Rod Dreher has a fine tribute here.

Margaret Sanger, Mike Wallace, and Birth Control (and Philip Morris)

Check out this eye-opening interview of Planned Parenthood founder (and Barack Obama's heroine) Margaret Sanger conducted by Mike Wallace in 1957.

Here's an excerpt:

WALLACE: What are your religious beliefs, Mrs. Sanger? Do you believe in God in the sense of a Divine Being -- who rewards or punishes people after death?

SANGER: Well, I have a different attitude about--the divine--I feel that we have divinity within us, and the more we express the good part of our lives, the more the divine within us expresses itself.I suppose I would call myself an Episcopalian by religion and there's a--many other, if you travel around the world you get quite a bit of the feeling of all--all religions--have so much alike in the divine part of our own being. And I suppose you just couldn't just put that into a book or you couldn't put it to a phrase or a sentence.

WALLACE: Do you believe in sin -- When I say believe I don't mean believe in committing sin do you believe there is such a thing as a sin?

SANGER: I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world--that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they're born. That to me is the greatest sin -- that people can -- can commit..

WALLACE: But sin in the ordinary sense that we regard it -- do you believe or do you not believe.

SANGER: What-what would they be?

WALLACE: Do you believe infidelity is a sin?

SANGER: Well, I'm not going to specify what I think is a sin. I stated what I think is the worst sin.

WALLACE: Yes, but then you asked me to say what--and I said what and ah--you refuse to answer me?

SANGER: I don't know about infidelity, that has many personalities to it--and what a person's own belief is--you can't, I couldn't generalize on any of those things as being sins.

WALLACE: Murder is a sin...

SANGER: Well, I naturally think murder, whether it's a sin or not, is a terrible act.

Watch it here. Read the full transcript here.

[HT: Mark Shea via Dawn Eden via Kathy Schmugge]

Two Valuable Insights

I thought it worthwhile to highlight two closely related insights I came across yesterday on two blogs I read regularly.

The first is from The Dutchman at FestungArnulfinger:

I was recently at the wedding of a friend. He’s a lawyer and his wife is also a professional, they are young, healthy, intelligent, good looking, honest, hard-working, decent people. Just exactly the sort of people you expect to be good parents. Yet they have no desire for children. I put this down to their being secular, since I know of no genuinely pious people who desire marriage without children, and I take it as one of the most powerful condemnations of godlessness that in a secular society it is the very best elements of the population who fail to reproduce.

The second is from Mark Shea at Catholic and Enjoying It:

We have a remarkably cartoonish notion of evil in our culture. As though those who do evil get up in the morning thinking, "How can I do Evil with a capital E today?" Almost nobody gets that evil is invariably the pursuit of a good end by disordered means and that, therefore, every evil doer in the world can say with some sort of plausibility (to himself if to nobody else) "I meant well".

Show Me a Culture That Despises Virginity...

...and I'll show you a culture that despises children:

High heeled shoes designed specifically for babies have gone on sale.

The tiny stillettos, called Heelarious, are intended for babies up to six months and come in hot pink, black and leopard print:

Are There Too Many Brown People?

Um, no.

That's why it's nice to know that in response to agitprop like this article, which I wrote about this last week, and this article, which I didn't, there are eminently sensible rejoinders like this:

Ask the average informed first world citizen what he or she knows about the Philippines and they are likely to tell you that it is a poor, overpopulated, Catholic country, and that the “Catholic” part explains all the rest. A recent article in the Washington Post is typical of the media coverage that feeds this view: “Birthrates Help Keep Filipinos in Poverty,” ran the heading. “Contraceptives, Rejected by Government, Are Unaffordable for Many in Majority-Catholic Nation,” the subheading explained. Enough said.

The Post’s pitch faithfully reflects the view of the global family planning industry, which has long viewed the Philippines as “that Asian upstart” for resisting a national population control program. In the past thirty years official aid agencies and non-government groups led by International Planned Parenthood have poured resources into influencing the Philippines government to enact such a program.

Whence comes this resistance? How has it benefited the Philippines?

Certainly the majority Catholic culture explains a lot. Even when other parts of the Catholic world fell in with the birth control mentality, the Philippine clergy were stalwart in their defence of the principles set out in Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae 40 years ago. Asian family values have also played their part.

Now, media messages to the contrary, they stand vindicated. As much of the world confronts a demographic meltdown caused by very low birth rates and ageing populations, the Philippines is in a strong demographic position to build its own social and economic wellbeing -- as well as continue contributing to the workforce of the developed world. That is my ultimate argument in this article.

Read the whole thing.

[HT: Sunnyday at This Is Not a Job for Superheroes]