Happy New Year!

Allow me to wish all of my readers, friend or foe, a very Happy and Blessed New Year. To my opponents and critics, I appreciate the support you show by reading my work carefully enough to take it seriously. To my supporters and fans, I appreciate your encouragement, your kind words, and your financial support.
All the best for 2009!
Dr Morse

Political Science

Tis the season to bash abstinence education. Every season, in anticipation of budget quarrels over abstinence ed vs. comprehensive sex ed, you can count on a new study to come out claiming that children are harmed by abstinence ed. This year's entry was reported in the Washington Post.

The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a "virginity pledge," but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.

"Taking a pledge doesn't seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior," said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose report appears in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics. "But it does seem to make a difference in condom use and other forms of birth control that is quite striking."

The study is the latest in a series that have raised questions about programs that focus on encouraging abstinence until marriage, including those that specifically ask students to publicly declare their intention to remain virgins.

However, a virginity pledge is a one-time promise, not a comprehensive program designed to give kids enough information to change their minds and enough activities to change their behavior. Kathryn Jean Lopez, editor of National Review Online, reports her conversation with Valerie Huber:
The National Abstinence Education Association disputed the whole premise of the study, using this obvious tack. Its executive director, Valerie Huber, remarked to me in an e-mail interview: "The author inaccurately equates the holistic breadth of an abstinence education program to the one-time event of a virginity pledge. A pledge and an abstinence program are not synonymous."

KayLo continues:

Does that mean we pass out condoms at school because we're not going to change the culture anytime soon? No. It means kids need support and reasons engage in activities other than sex. Abstinence has to be about saying "yes" to something in order to work. We need to focus on the idea that kids can actually think, and should want more from a relationship than sex. We need to be open to programs that aren't all about copulation, but about character education.

Because, as Huber and others have noted, building strong lines of parent-child communication while developing and maintaining a sturdy ethical core helps kids immensely when it comes to keeping their pants on.

IN other words, we need something like comprehensive abstinence education, that does more than yammer about sex, but which helps kids in the whole of their lives.
I actually prefer to think of it as Comprehensive Marriage Education, which prepares kids for married life, and gives them something to look forward to. I've seen communities that create that kind of supportive environment and it does work. I've written about them here and here. Unfortunately, these kinds of communities are too much like cocoons in today's day and age. That kind of overall support system for sexual restraint and marriage preparation needs to be much more wide-spread than it is now.

Tis the season for porn?

I will be called names for writing this column. It always happens. Raise the issue of the pornification of the culture and its fanatical devotees will come gunning for you. If they hope to be intimidating, they've forgotten what delete keys are for.

It's Christmastime and the Fox News Channel, the most conservative of the major media outlets, is running an ad for PajamaGrams, "the only gift guaranteed to get your wife or girlfriend to take her clothes off." The ads feature soft porn images of women disrobing and tossing slips and bras to the floor. The ads run at all times of the day and night. Thus do we usher in the season supposedly devoted to the Prince of Peace and the Festival of Lights.

We all know how far the pornification has gotten. A mainstream movie apparently treats the subject as cute and fun (Zack and Miri Make a Porno) and it runs at the multiplex next to Four Christmases and Madagascar. Hotels offer pornographic movies and omit the titles from the final bill. Victoria's Secret graces every mall — and its windows resemble the red light district of Amsterdam. Viagra and its imitators are hawked ceaselessly. Television, music videos, and supermarket checkout magazines contain the kinds of suggestive words and images that would once have been labeled soft porn.

We know this. But what is less well understood is the world of hard-core porn that was once the province of dingy "adults only" stores in the harsher parts of town but is now available to everyone at the click of a mouse.

Earlier this month The Witherspoon Institute convened a conference on pornography at Princeton University and invited scholars from a variety of fields to contribute. The statistics are mind-numbing. Pamela Paul, author of Pornified, reported that "Americans rent upwards of 800 million pornographic videos and DVDs per year. About one in five rented videos is porn....Men look at pornography online more than they look at any other subject. And 66 percent of 18- to 34-year-old men visit a pornographic site every month."

Read "The Social Costs of Pornography" (The Witherspoon Institute)

They are not, Paul and others explained, looking at Playboy magazine-like images of naked women. Instead, they are descending into darker and darker realms where sadism, fetishes, and every imaginable oddity are proffered. Sex and violence are offered together. Women are presented in a degraded — not to say disgusting — fashion.

Surely only people with peculiar sexual tastes are drawn to this sort of thing, right? Not exactly. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge, author of The Brain That Changes Itself, noted that pornography use actually changes the brains of consumers. Like other addictions, pornography use breeds tolerance and the need for more intensity to get the desired result. He quoted Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, in which a college kid asks casually, "Anybody got porn?" He is told that there are magazines on the third floor. He responds, "I've built up a tolerance to magazines...I need videos." Tolerance is the medically correct term, Doidge notes, which is why pornography becomes more and more graphic.

The men (and they are overwhelmingly men) who become hooked on this bilge are often miserable about it. They know that it affects their capacity to love and be loved by real women. As Doidge explained, "Pornographers promise healthy pleasure and a release from sexual tension, but what they often deliver is an addiction, tolerance, and an eventual decrease in pleasure. Paradoxically, the male patients I worked with often craved pornography but didn't like it." Hugh Hefner, the godfather of mainstream porn, apparently does not have normal sex with his many girlfriends. Despite the presence of up to seven comely young women in his bed at a time, he uses porn for sexual satisfaction. Think about that.

Internet pornography truly is, as one researcher put it, "a hidden public health hazard." It isn't cute or funny. Relationships are crashing, women are suffering in silence, and men and boys are becoming entrapped by it. The Witherspoon Institute has done a valuable thing by starting a more public conversation about this cultural poison.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Perspectives/Default.aspx?id=363046

'Licensing' morality out of the law

Could lawyers be thrown out of the profession based on their religious conviction against homosexuality?

The State Bar of Arizona is considering whether to require new attorneys to swear they will not let their views on sexual orientation get in the way of providing legal services. Mat Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel and dean of Liberty University's Law School, is concerned.

"I believe that this is a major threat to the practice of law," he contends. "This is an attempt to literally license those out of business and to revoke the license of those who, in fact, have traditional moral values."

Staver believes the campaign is going nationwide and will be a tool used by homosexuals to hold back Christian lawyers. "If they then can hold over your head the license and the ability to practice law, that will be a devastating blow to those of us who believe in traditional family values," he points out. According to Staver, this is an issue that lawyers and law school students cannot ignore. "It's a ticking time bomb," he concludes. "It is a land mine just waiting for someone to step on them."

The Arizona Bar plans to make a decision in January.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Legal/Default.aspx?id=360038

'Choose Life' car tag campaign goes to Texas

Texas could soon join the ranks of states with "Choose Life" license plates.

A proposal will go before the next session of the Lone Star State's legislature. Joe Pojman, executive director of the Texas Alliance for Life, is confident in the results.

"We think we have the votes to pass it," he contends. "[We believe] it has tremendous...grassroots support and we are optimistic that going into our legislative session, which begins in January, that we can get this bill past the legislature and to the governor's desk for his signature."

Pojman describes how the license plate fee would be split up. "Eight dollars would go for administrative costs to the Department of Transportation," he notes. "Twenty-two dollars would go to a special fund that would be administered to non-profit charitable organizations, pregnancy resource centers, maternity homes, and Gabriel projects that help pregnant women who are considering adoption."

So far, 19 states have Choose Life license plates; three more have approved them and will soon make them available.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Politics/Default.aspx?id=363072

Planned Parenthood investigation called for in Indiana

An Indiana state representative wants a full-fledged investigation of Planned Parenthood facilities in that state.

The call is from Representative Jackie Walorski in the aftermath of a recorded undercover investigation by Lila Rose, president of Live Action Films, that revealed staffers trying to help what they believed to be a 13-year-old girl who was impregnated by a 31-year-old man, get an abortion -- allegedly pushing aside the responsibility to report it as statutory rape.

"Indiana state laws...are in place to protect that minor, and there were so many egregious violations from the employee not wanting to know the age of the supposed man that impregnated this minor, which in this case was a statutory rape charge, which is a felony in Indiana," she explains. "And then we have a mandatory reporting of a sexual abuse crime in Indiana which is a misdemeanor. They blew through that as well."

Walorski, who notes that two clinics were caught red-handed, wants her call for an investigation to be taken seriously because of the number of potential victims. "I think that an agency like Planned Parenthood in the state of Indiana services, I believe something like, 95,000 women a year; and of those 95,000, just a little over 11,000 are girls under the age of 17," she points out.

She hopes the state will cut off Medicare funds to Planned Parenthood if the allegations prove to be true. ChristianNewswire.com notes Rose's footage is the second video revealed in a series of investigations that document "how secret abortions keep young girls trapped in cycles of sexual abuse."

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Legal/Default.aspx?id=363036

Maternal Mortality: Death by Childbirth

Third world mothers face health risks that have been eliminated from the industrialized world. Mercator Net interviews Dr. Robert Walley, the founder and executive director of MaterCare International and an emeritus Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada.

Dr. Walley: Mothers in the developing world are experiencing unimaginable suffering due to a scandalous lack of effective care during pregnancy and childbirth, with the consequence that many thousands are dying. The World Health Organisation estimates that there are over 500,000 maternal deaths annually, of which 99 per cent occur in developing countries. There is no accurate data to substantiate these numbers, the reason being that most developing countries do not report information on births, deaths, the sex of dead people or the cause of death. However, figures from my own experience at a mission hospital in Nigeria, where the in-hospital maternal mortality ratio was 1,700 per 100,000 live births, illustrates the enormity of the situation.

Some 200 million women are pregnant, world-wide, each year. Most mothers deliver in villages without access to safe, clean facilities and without a trained person to assist them. Most maternal deaths occur during the last trimester and in the first week following delivery. Practising in Canada prior to going to Nigeria in 1981 and since then, I have never had a mother die under my care from a direct obstetrical cause, or been present at such a death. Maternal deaths in Canada are at the level of what is called irreducible minimums, 1/100,000 live births. However, at the mission hospital maternal deaths were almost a daily event. I recall one weekend during which there were four deaths of mothers who had arrived at the hospital, two in extremis from haemorrhage, one in agony from obstructed labour, and another with a ruptured uterus after days in labour because she was young and consequently her pelvis was too small. Others would arrive unconscious due to pregnancy-induced hypertension, or suffering from malaria or severe anaemia resulting from malnutrition. Most mothers die in Africa alone and in terror in villages, as they have no way of getting to the hospital. These deaths of mothers and babies are the greatest tragedies of our times especially since they are readily preventable and treatable.

The disparity in maternal mortality and morbidity rates, between developed and developing countries, is greater than any other commonly used measure of health status. Pregnancy related deaths are one of the major causes of death and disability occurring among women in the reproductive age group. This loss is twice that of any other diseases including AIDS, malaria, TB or sexually transmitted diseases. There is no single cause for male mortality in this age group that comes close to the magnitude of maternal mortality and morbidity. The tragedy is that the solutions to this suffering have been known for decades and cost very little. ...

MercatorNet: It is 21 years since the Safe Motherhood Initiative was launched in Nairobi to address this problem, and 8 years since it was made one the UN's Millennium goals, and yet the director general of the WHO said recently that "the world failed to make a dent" in it. What is your analysis of this failure?

Dr Walley: A report in the British Medical Journal in July 2007 said that at the present rate of progress the 5th Millennium Development Goal will not be met for 275 years -- in 2282, not in 2015 as intended. The reasons are poverty, lack of compassion, lack of political and professional wills, a conspiracy of silence, and a lack of imagination. That any woman should die giving birth in the 21st century is an international disgrace.

The responsibility in my view lies partly with national governments but also very much with Western governments, the UN and other international agencies e.g. those of the European Union, DFID (UK), CIDA (Canada) and USAID and, of course, the radical feminist movement, which cares little for motherhood. These are compromised by their desire to control populations in developing countries. While billions of dollars have been and are being spent on reproductive health programmes (a euphemism for birth control) only a small fraction is focused on providing emergency obstetric services that ensures that women survive their pregnancies -- services which are freely available to all mothers in rich countries.

We have known the causes of maternal deaths for over 100 years -- haemorrhage, infection, hypertension, obstructed labour, septic abortion -- and we eliminated them in the our rich world by providing essential obstetrical care to mothers one at a time. The former Director General of WHO, Dr. Halfdan Mahler, commented in Nairobi in 1987, “We know enough to act now, it could be done; it ought to be done; and in the name of social justice and human solidarity, it must be done.” It hasn’t been.

MercatorNet: What we do hear a lot about is "unsafe (illegal) abortion", along with some alarming statistics. Is this a major cause of maternal deaths and ill health? What's the real answer to this problem?

Dr Walley: Abortion unfortunately has been around forever. In our times it has been promoted as choice, as a right; we are all familiar with the arguments which has brought us to the devastating numbers found in developed countries. Septic abortion is said to account for 8 per cent of maternal deaths in developing countries but, again, nobody knows as statistics are not kept. Nevertheless, abortion is a sad fact of life resulting from poverty, lack of education, coercion and a lack of alternative help. In panic the woman goes to the open door of the abortionist who may be a traditional birth attendant in the village, but is frequently is a health provider who has limited skills and equipment, who procures the abortion for money. However, the numbers are exaggerated to promote an agenda which is to have abortion legalized as a human right.

Read the whole interview here.

Bill Duncan on Jerry Brown

Ruth Institute Academic Advisory Board member Bill Duncan posted this analysis of CA AG Jerry Brown over at National Review On-line.

In a December 19 press release, the attorney general said: “Proposition 8 must be invalidated because the amendment process cannot be used to extinguish fundamental constitutional rights without compelling justification.” ...

To understand the depth of the betrayal here it is necessary to remember how we got to this point. In May 2008, the California supreme court announced that the state’s constitution contained a hitherto unseen mandate redefining marriage to include same-sex couples. In response, pro-family groups had gathered the requisite signatures to put Proposition 8 on the ballot. This measure would add a definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman to the California constitution, thus correcting the state court’s misunderstanding of that document.

The California supreme court decided not to wait for the people of the state to weigh in on marriage and allowed licenses to issue to same-sex couples beginning in June. The attorney general also did his part in opposing the amendment by changing the official ballot description from a neutral description (that the amendment would define marriage) to say that Proposition 8 “eliminates the right of same-sex couples to marry.”

On November 4, it became clear that despite every effort by the judicial and political classes of the state to prevent their doing so, California voters had affirmed the principle that our inherited understanding of marriage as the union of a husband and wife deserved constitutional protection.
...
Opponents of the measure, including the city and county of San Francisco, then filed suit saying that Proposition 8’s single-sentence amendment was such a major change to the state constitution that it should have been approved by the legislature before going to voters and was thereby invalid. (This same legislature had twice voted to overturn California’s marriage law, enacted by voter initiative, despite a clear constitutional provision saying that a voter initiative could not be overturned by a legislative vote.) This is the case in which the attorney general has now decided that defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman is beyond the pale.

Ken Starr will be part of the legal team defending Proposition 8 on behalf of its proponents. It should be remembered that these proponents were granted the right to defend the marriage law only because the California supreme court gave them special permission to be part of the case. Without that permission, Proposition 8 would have gone without a voice in court.

All of this serves to confirm the worst fears of Proposition 8’s supporters. The political and legal elites of the state have done all within their power to endorse the idea that support for traditional marriage is the rankest kind of bigotry that does not deserve even a nominal word in its favor by government officials....

A court order invalidating Proposition 8 would also give the supreme court a super-constitutional power, above the amendment process provided for in the text of the constitution, to determine what subjects are germane to constitutional lawmaking by the people of the state. There is no other way to understand this new theory that a manufactured and unenumerated “right” can become so “fundamental” that it can no longer be the subject of a simple amendment. And, of course, who will decide whether a right has attained this stature? The California supreme court.

Benedict XVI on Marriage

In the course of calling for a "human ecology," Pope Benedict XVI said this about marriage:

while the Church needs to "defend the earth, water, air, as gifts of the creation that belongs to all of us [... ], it must also protect the human being from his own destruction."

"It is necessary that there be something such as an ecology of man, understood in the proper manner," he said.

This human ecology, he affirmed, is based on respecting the nature of the person, and the two genders of masculine and feminine.

"It is not outmoded metaphysics," Benedict XVI affirmed, "when Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman, and demands that this order of creation be respected."

He said it has more to do with "faith in the Creator and listening to the language of creation, the contempt of which will lead to the self destruction of humanity."

The Pope warned against the manipulation that takes place in national and international forums when the term "gender" is altered.

"What is often expressed and understood by the term 'gender,' is definitively resolved in the self-emancipation of the human being from creation and the Creator," he warned. "Man wants to create himself, and to decide always and exclusively on his own about what concerns him."

The Pontiff said this is man living "against truth, against the creating Spirit."

"The rain forests certainly deserve our protection, but man as creature indeed deserves no less," he added.

Compulsory Tolerance

Spero News author James Thunder shows that the tolerance demanded by the gay lobby comes at the expense of everyone else's freedom.

Representations have been consistently made by the gay community that allowing gays to marry will not affect heterosexuals. They note as one example of this that they will not push the government to require religious denominations to conduct gay marriages. Ah, but we now have at least two examples where gay people have persuaded our government to compel the private sector to help gays date, mate and procreate.

Specifically, he notes that the recent bullying of eHarmony amounts to forcing a company to provide a service they don't want to provide.

a company has been compelled by our government to start a new service, and fund it and market it for at least two years, to promote gay dating and mating.

On the next day, November 20, a California trial court issued a ruling allowing a case brought by a lesbian against eHarmony to proceed as a class action. The plaintiff’s attorney stated to the press that the New Jersey settlement did not change his case since eHarmony’s agreement with New Jersey to set up a separate website (with an acknowledgement on the main website that they were affiliated), was separate, not equal. He also decried the two-year minimum requirement for eHarmony’s operation of the gay options since eHarmony could choose to discontinue at any time after two years. Presumably, therefore, the California plaintiff will seek to make eHarmony stay in the gay matchmaking business permanently.

In another area of law, antitrust, companies are required to divest lines of business, never to establish them. Yet here we have the government requiring a company to start a new line of business with the prospect that it may never be able to cease that line of business unless it goes bankrupt.

Governor Corzine or Attorney General Milgram should renounce this settlement and defend eHarmony.

He also writes about the lesbian artificial insemination case, which I have written about extensively.

The Court ruled that the doctors had no right of free speech or freedom of religion under either the California or United States Constitutions to refuse elective medical treatment, including the establishment of a pregnancy, of a homosexual. The doctors and the clinic violated the law even though they had referred the patient to another doctor. The concurring opinion by Judge Baxter expressed concern for sole practitioners who had religious objections, but observed that that issue was not present in the North Coast case.

Thus, under this decision, and under the Unruh Law, as revised in recent years to include sexual orientation and marital status, our government compels medical personnel to help unmarried or gay or lesbian patients establish a pregnancy. Doctors -- and prospective doctors -- are told by our government to leave their consciences at the door or join medical groups that include doctors who have no consciences.

He concludes with a reference to Sir Thomas More and the play, "A Man for All Seasons."

Are we not free to refuse (for business or moral reasons) to help unmarried persons, regardless of their sexual orientation, date, mate and procreate? Are we not free to promote heterosexual marriage without being compelled by our government to promote relationships among homosexuals?

We have seen this scene play out before. Henry VIII was determined to have a male heir. In contemporary parlance, it was his reproductive right. He chose to exercise this right by using a woman who was not his wife and making her his wife. He had a right to marry – whomever he wished. Furthermore, the king was responsible for new legislation by which the law and Parliament recognized this right to marry and this right to reproduce -- and compelled the private sector to recognize this woman as his wife and their children as his heirs. A private subject who had long since resigned his office of Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, conscientiously remained silent, simply silent.

Sir Thomas More's story, told by Robert Bolt in “A Man for All Seasons , ” was revived on Broadway this year (until December 14). I suggest our legislators, prosecutors and judges watch the 1966 movie version. Thomas More declared, “I do none harm. I say none harm. I think none harm. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, then in good faith I long not to live.” And Henry executed him.

The difference between race and sexual orientation

According to Pastor Wayne Perryman: the difference is between behavior and a trait.

Homosexuality and heterosexuality is a sexual behavior expressed, it is not a physical status like black or white skin.

Having said that, Am I Homo-Phobic if I do not like, accept or feel comfortable with the gay’s sexual expression (behavior)? Homo-Phobic meaning: fearing or hating the gay person or the homosexual individual who engage in such behavior? Before answering this question, please let me share with you other behaviors that I am uncomfortable with.

I do not like (or I am uncomfortable with) heterosexuals who affectionately make out in public when they can do it in the privacy of their homes – Am I Hetero-Phobic and hate heterosexuals?
I do not like (or I am uncomfortable with) individuals who cheat on their spouse – This means I must have a Spousal Cheater-Phobic and hate or fear spouses that cheat....
Just because I do not like certain behaviors or that I am uncomfortable with certain behaviors, does not mean that I fear or hate the person who engage in such behavior....
As stated before, gays often compare their experience with the African American experience, but African Americans have never had the option of putting their black skin in the closet to escape or avoid persecution - and we were never hated because of our behavior, we were hated simply because we were black.

I would put it this way: the legal claim is that sexual orientation is an immutable trait, and forms the basis of a protected class. However, sexual orientation is not directly observable, only behavior is observable. Therefore, in practice, it is behavior that is being protected, not the unobservable trait of having a homosexual orientation.
BTW, I like Pastor Perryman's blog.

Maine begins battle to preserve traditional marriage

Christians in Maine are mobilizing for a major fight against same-sex "marriage."

Maine has a Defense of Marriage Act that currently protects the traditional view of marriage. Bob Emrich, founder of the Maine Marriage Alliance, tells OneNewsNow that homosexual activists are pushing to overturn the law.

"And it looks like they're poised to do just that. The gay rights organizations in the state and in New England have made it very clear that that's their desire, and that they have listed enough legislators as what they call marriage-friendly," he explains. "According to their claim, they have enough already on their side to overturn the law."

The Maine Marriage Alliance plans to wage a major battle in the legislature to stall the effort by homosexuals because it takes a simple majority vote to overturn the law, while it takes a two-thirds vote of both houses to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot.

Emrich calls the church the Alliance's best asset. "The church in the state of Maine is waking up to this issue, is seeing the urgency and realizing the need to be involved," he points out.

He believes it will take a huge grassroots push to keep homosexual marriage from being legalized in Maine.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Politics/Default.aspx?id=358538

Porn company dupes advertisers, gets caught

A pro-family organization is responsible for dismantling what it calls a pornography scam involving major advertisers.

WorldNetDaily reports Florida Family Association founder David Caton discovered that major American companies were giving their advertising dollars to support the porn industry, and most of them were unaware of it. A pornography company based in Belgium, says the report, "slipped onto the vendors' site lists with non-entertainment, scientific descriptions that masked their true content."

"We learned that an international pornography company is attempting to move the industry from a subscriber-based type of user service to an advertiser-based service," Caton explains.

The switch in advertising strategy allowed the pornographer to offer the inappropriate content free-of-charge because of advertising support, so even children could access it through generally safe websites. Caton contends the operation was a blatant deception.

"The Internet sites that they had had applied for various advertising network buys," he points out. "They got their description changed so that the people who were buying the big mainstream companies did not know the content of these particular websites."

Once Florida Family Association notified the companies -- including Allstate, Bank of America, and JC Penney -- the advertisers cancelled their ads and are taking steps to prevent promoting porn in the future.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=358622

Defending the family with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Sixty years after it was adopted by the United Nations, the Declaration is still a robust shield for the family.

It is now clear that modernization and economic development come with great costs to our families. The spread of technical rationality in the form of globalization, the digital age, economic efficiency, and artificial reproductive technology can inject a variety of separations into the family. These include the separations of work and family, sex and marriage, reproduction and marriage, and reproduction and parenting. The cultural individualism of Western societies aggravates these separations. Although modernization and economic development offer much to overcome poverty and increase health, such gains can be lost if they come at the price of increased divorce, non-marriage, and their negative consequences for children, women, and even men.

Some people believe that the human rights tradition is also a part of modernization and is therefore a threat to families. I believe that when this tradition is rightly conceived, it protects the right of children to their families and therefore is a defense against the possible, but not inevitable, negative consequences of modernization.

So I ask, what was the meaning of the family in the most basic document of the human rights tradition – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? And how can this view of the family help guide the modernization and development process?

Historians tell us that an air of practicality dominated the Commission on Human Rights that wrote the Universal Declaration.(1) With the endorsement of Eleanor Roosevelt, the Commission’s first chair, attempts to ground the basic concepts of the Universal Declaration with reference to God or the idea of nature were either rejected or significantly qualified.

The Lebanese philosopher and statesman Charles Malik resisted these expediencies. He proposed inserting the sentences, "The family deriving from marriage is the natural and fundamental group unit of society. It is endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights antecedent to all positive law and as such shall be protected by the State and Society."(2) Malik believed that the words "natural" and "endowed by the Creator" assured that the marriage-based family would be seen as endowed by its own "inalienable rights" and not viewed as a human invention subject to the caprice of either the state or current public opinion.(3)

Malik was not successful in getting this entire statement into the Universal Declaration. However, Article 16 did retain part of his formulation when it declared that, "The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State (Article 16, 3)."(4) This is less than Malik wanted, but more than first meets the eye.

The connection between marriage and family was deleted, principally out of the mistaken fear that it would stigmatize children born out of wedlock.(5) But the words "natural," "fundamental," and "group unit" were retained and are not meaningless. Furthermore, they point to some model of natural law. For Malik, it was the role of society and the state to protect the family, but he also argued that neither society nor the state created the family or endowed it with its basic rights. Family rights are independent of these social entities and, at best, society and state recognize and give public visibility to preexisting natural rights resident in the very nature of the family.

New models of natural law

It is widely acknowledged that Malik tried to ground the Universal Declaration in some kind of natural law theory. Although he was not completely successful, he did not entirely fail. Appeals to nature may have a more important role in grounding its ideas about marriage and family than the Commission believed. I will argue that a flexible natural law theory is in fact implied by the Universal Declaration, even as it stands. I also believe that such a flexible theory can be found in a variety of older philosophical and religious systems and is also consistent with much of modern knowledge.

Central to this flexible natural law theory is the importance of kin attachments and kin altruism to the strength of families. Kin altruism refers to the attachments and investments that biologically related family members have to each other by virtue of their shared biological inheritance. Rightly understood, however, kin altruism is a finite, in contrast to an ultimate, good. By this distinction, I am suggesting that kin altruism is not the measure of all goods for families but rather a highly central good to be enhanced by law, culture, and religion, and to be balanced with other goods.

Religious systems may carry and, indeed, strengthen the value of kin altruism as does Judaism, Islam, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, even more tenaciously than did early Christianity. In recently editing a book called Sex, Marriage, and Family in World Religions (2006), I learned how the value of kin altruism was particularly strong in Confucianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. It not only functioned between family members in this life but extended beyond the grave in a cosmic cycle of intergenerational reciprocity and care between the living and the dead.(6)

But the importance of kin altruism for human life also can be discerned by natural observation and rational analysis. It is a value that philosophy, law and religion have frequently cooperated with one another to articulate, defend, and implement. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights reflects this grand tradition, and its contributions to culture, law and public policy would be even stronger were the importance of kin altruism to family stability made clearer on its pages.

It is a matter of cultural variability as to whether families are patriarchal or egalitarian; extended, joint, or nuclear; polygamous or monogamous; multigenerational households or two-generation parent-child systems. But within all this pluralism of family forms, there has been in the past a persistent core value that is widely cherished around the world. This is the principle that the individuals who procreate an infant also should be, as nearly as possible, the ones responsible for its maintenance, care, and socialization. This value was based on the widely held assumption that the people who conceive a child, when they recognize their relation to it, will on average be the most invested in its nurture and well-being.

The centrality of kin relatedness to the investment in and care for children was elaborated in Aristotle’s Nichomachian Ethics and Politics. It is assumed in the folk psychology of early Christianity. It was systematically brought into Christian theology in the thought of the great medieval Roman Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas. It is assumed as part of the political theory of the Reformers of the Protestant Reformation - Luther and Calvin. It influences the Roman Catholic social teachings of the late 19th and early 20th century, especially the encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII and Pius XI. And it is from this source that Malik appropriated the ideas of kin altruism and the natural family for the Universal Declaration, but now presented by him as philosophical concepts.

Using the concept of kin altruism and the natural family in human rights documents, international law, and public policy requires a flexible understanding of natural law. The world of nature is full of proximate causes and conflicting tendencies, an insight that Charles Malik held as well.(7) But when the conflicting tendencies of human sexuality are guided by culture, law, and religion to consider the needs of children, then the natural inclinations toward kin altruism should and can have a commanding role in ordering our unstable natural urges. Such a view is consistent with the images of natural law now developing in the thought of contemporary philosophers and theologians such as Mary Midgley (8), Jean Porter (9), Stephen Pope (10), Larry Arnhart (11), and Lisa Cahill (12). If we are to make use of Malik and the Commission when they referred to the family as "the natural and fundamental group unit of society," we must have something like this more flexible understanding of natural law in mind.

Philosophical and legal reflections

The power and function of kin altruism has been clarified by recent advances in the academic discipline of evolutionary psychology. From ants, to mammals, to those unique mammals and primates called humans, contemporary evolutionists have discovered the proclivity of biological parents to invest, favor, and even in some instances sacrifice themselves for their biological offspring.(13) Modern genetics helps us explain this process more concretely. Because of the long period of dependency of the human infant and child, the natural tendency of kin altruism needs the reinforcement of culture and the legal institution of marriage.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights gave considerable weight to this insight, but not by being prejudicial to single-parent families and other possible family patterns that the accidents of life create. Mothers and their infants – which Aristotle, Aquinas, and evolutionary psychology all hold to be the primordial family – rightly receive special protections in the Declaration (Article 25, 2) but without sacrificing the centrality of the trilogy of what the Abrahamic religions called the one-flesh union of mother, father, and child.

The idea of the family as the fundamental group unit of society is a concept that was repeated time and again in most of the great human rights documents since the Universal Declaration. It is repeated in an altered version even in the controversial United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.(14)

One of the most interesting and hopeful recent legal statements is the Parliamentary Report on the Family and the Rights of Children presented by the Information Mission to the French National Assembly.(15) This report presents a perspective on the new French bioethics. It concentrates on the rights of the child to be born in a society that protects its chance of being raised by the people who conceived it. The report resists a large number of trends in international family law, including making cohabiting couples and other non-traditional families equivalent with married couples before the law. It rejects legal support for the use of assisted reproductive technology for other than medical reasons and for single individuals. It is not clear if the Mission’s proposals will become law and how they would be adjusted to other negative directions of recent French family law, for instance its pact civile de solidarite, a system of registration for various forms of cohabiting persons. But its recommendations do suggest that law has a role in resisting the family disruptions of first set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

But law cannot stop family decline by itself. It must be part of a larger work of culture where law joins with religion, the human sciences, the market, public policy, and the arts to once again honor the natural family and equip persons to have the skills, commitment, supports, and rewards necessary to form and maintain it.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/defending_the_family_with_the_universal_declaration_of_human_rights/

'Right of conscience' regulation faces hurdles

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has introduced legislation to protect medical personnel who object to providing services based on their religious beliefs.

The regulations implement over 35 years of civil rights laws governing healthcare, allowing medical personnel -- including doctors, nurses, and pharmacists -- to refuse to perform services to which they object. Otherwise, there was the threat of some hospitals being forced to close, according to Dr. David Stevens of the Christian Medical Association.

"If you can imagine...your Catholic, Baptist, or other religiously affiliated hospital in your own community not [being[ open, that was where this was heading [along] with an effort to force [out of healthcare] all those who do not do abortions...," Stevens explains.

Pro-abortions forces had already made headway in forcing their views upon medical professionals, so the regulations are needed, says the Christian CEO. "Two out of five of our members say they have either been fired or lost a promotion opportunity or discriminated against in some other manner based upon their religious beliefs," he notes.

Stevens expects a move in the next administration to overturn the rules, and he believes it will take a strong grassroots effort to keep them intact.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Politics/Default.aspx?id=358766

Benkof: A different strategy on same-sex marriage

BY DAVID BENKOF

A strong case can be made that more same-sex couples would be protected if the gay and lesbian community in New Jersey and elsewhere would jettison the whole marriage campaign and focus on a new, national strategy of "mutual commitments."

IN NEW JERSEY, litigation and lawsuits on behalf of the gay and lesbian community have resulted in civil union status for same-sex couples. Many observers predict that full marriage rights can be achieved in the Garden State as soon as next year.

But in celebrating such advances for gay rights, most of my fellow gays and lesbians have lost sight of the serious setbacks for same-sex couples in states far more hostile to same-sexers than New Jersey.

A strong case can be made that more same-sex couples would be protected if the gay and lesbian community in New Jersey and elsewhere would jettison the whole marriage campaign and focus on a new, national strategy of "mutual commitments" to protect same-sex couples not only in states like New Jersey and Massachusetts, but also in places less welcoming to gays such as Georgia, Nebraska and Texas.

The 30 constitutional amendments banning gay marriage, including Proposition 8 in California, are a direct result of the lawsuits-for-marriage strategy practiced by gays and lesbians since the mid-Nineties, including successful suits in Massachusetts, California and Connecticut. So achieving marriage in three gay-friendly states (two now that Proposition 8 has passed in California) came at the expense of barring marriage in 10 times as many states, many much less hospitable to same-sex couples.

Worse, 18 of the constitutional amendments, in places like Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin, bar not only marriage but any kind of rights specifically for same-sex couples. That means that even in gay-popular cities like Austin, Texas, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, there can be no benefits for gay and lesbian couples unless and until those statewide amendments are repealed — an unlikely scenario.

'Mutual commitments'

Brilliantly, a coalition of concerned politicians from both left and right have come together in Salt Lake City with a plan that can be a model for those concerned about the problems faced by same-sex couples anywhere. Guided by Democratic Mayor Ralph Becker, the "mutual commitments" plan was approved with both liberal and conservative support in the city council and the state legislature. It provides a package of rights, including hospital visitation and health care, to any two people who can show financial interdependence. The pair can be a mother and adult daughter, two straight male roommates or lesbian lovers.

The government doesn't ask — and doesn't care — which.

The Salt Lake City plan relieves the distress of same-sex couples in a way that conservatives and traditional family advocates can embrace. It gives no special recognition to couples based on sexual orientation, but it does enable everyone to designate which one person gets their mutual rights.

This is a profoundly conservative idea. Conservatism is about freedom, so why should the government decide who can visit me in the hospital? I should be the one to make that decision.I propose that my fellow gays and lesbians, in New Jersey and elsewhere, immediately halt all litigation and lobbying to achieve same-sex marriage, and instead push to achieve mutual commitment laws in as many cities and states as possible.

With the promised new bipartisan spirit in Washington, a federal mutual commitment law should also be within reach, covering things like Social Security benefits and survivor's benefits for veterans.

I'm afraid most gays and lesbians may dismiss this proposal, because even though mutual benefits would help far more same-sex couples than a few more marriage victories in gay-friendly states, they are not completely equal.

As Garden State Equality's Steven Goldstein put it two years ago, his side "will settle for nothing less than 100 percent marriage equality."

When New Jersey and other gay-friendly states brook no compromise for the status of same-sex couples, traditionalist voters and legislators in more gay-hostile areas restrict any rights for same-sex couples in their states.

The result is great if you live in Massachusetts; not so good in the South or Midwest.

Weighing the greater good

Surely I'm not the only gay person who thinks the lack of same-sex marriage in an otherwise gay-friendly state like New Jersey is less important than the needs of same-sex couples in every state for rights to hospital visitation, health care and inheritance, among others.

Yet it was precisely our community's push for marriage litigation and lobbying that resulted in the restriction of many of those rights nationwide through constitutional amendments.

It's time for the gay community to reevaluate its priorities and embrace the Salt Lake City plan, which could help the same-sex couples who need it most a lot sooner than a dozen lawsuits ever could.

http://www.northjersey.com/opinion/36362824.html?page=all

'Catch 22' custody crisis for Christian mom

A Virginia mother is fighting off attempts by her former lesbian partner to gain visitation rights to a child.

Lisa Miller, a former lesbian and now a born-again Christian, faces jail time for refusing to surrender her daughter to her ex-girlfriend in Vermont. WorldNetDaily reports that Miller could go to prison for refusing to allow her daughter to spend an unsupervised Thanksgiving holiday with her former lesbian partner Janet Jenkins.

When Isabella Miller, Lisa's daughter, was 17 months old, Lisa left the homosexual lifestyle and became a Christian. However, when Miller gave birth to Isabella, she was in a civil union with Jenkins. Miller allowed Isabella to visit Jenkins a couple of times after their separation, but she then determined it unhealthy for her daughter and refused to let the unsupervised visitations continue.

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided not to hear the case, but there are additional hearings next month and another chance the case will go to the high court. Liberty Counsel's Mat Staver wants the court to take the case because Virginia and Vermont are struggling with competing marriage laws.

"And more important, people like Lisa Miller and her Christian daughter Isabella are hung in the balance, and their lives are really torn back and forth between these states that want to impose homosexuality or same-sex unions into another sister state," he points out.

Staver contends Lisa Miller is caught in a lose-lose situation. "She either protects her child and does not permit unsupervised visitation in an activist lesbian household in Vermont, or she protects the child and faces the fear of a court order to take the child away and putting her in the custody of an activist homosexual -- and that's a 'Catch 22' no parent wants to be in," he concludes.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Legal/Default.aspx?id=355646

Good news, Bad News on the black family

According to the NYT, The good news is that more black children are living with two parents.

The number of black children being raised by two parents appears to be edging higher than at any time in a generation, at nearly 40 percent, according to newly released census data....
According to the bureau’s estimates, the number of black children living with two parents was 59 percent in 1970, falling to 42 percent in 1980, 38 percent in 1990 and 35 percent in 2004. In 2007, the latest year for which data is available, it was 40 percent.

The bad news is that it may be just a statistical artifact of having changed the definitions:

The Census Bureau attributed an indeterminate amount of the increase to revised definitions adopted in 2007, which identify as parents any man and woman living together, whether or not they are married or the child’s biological parents....
“The unmarried parent was invisible,” Professor Cherlin said. Given a new category, “living with both parents, not married to each other,” he added, “I think the news is that the Census Bureau estimates that about 3 percent of American children are living with two unmarried parents. Because of the increases in living-together relationships, this is probably a higher figure than a generation ago.”

Now, if we just increase the actual marriage rate, the kids would really benefit.

Puberty-halting drug 'tragic,' 'ethical bankruptcy'

A professional group wants to use drugs on sexually confused children.

The Endocrine Society wants to use the drugs to delay puberty for children with gender-identity problems. Caleb Price of Focus on the Family tells OneNewsNow the drugs are designed to give adolescents more time to decide which gender they prefer for themselves.

"Well, there's been an increasing push in the medical and psychological communities to try and somehow more easily facilitate gender-confused people to transition to the gender of their choice," he explains.

Price says Focus on the Family has caught a lot of heat for referring to this philosophy as "ethical bankruptcy." He contends teens are not stable enough emotionally to make a decision of such magnitude.

"We see this as a situation that's tragic, foolish, and unconscionable for a professional medical group to encourage young people to move forward on a road where they might be making a decision about changing their gender," he adds.

According to Price, the drug treatment program is another example of parents and physicians bowing to political correctness and to the demands and feelings of young people.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=354740

Global porn bust rescues dozens of abused children

A worldwide child porn investigation has resulted in 170 arrests, 61 of them in the United States.

Eleven girls were rescued during Operation Joint Hammer, ranging in age from three to 13 years old. According to news reports, dozens more were located in Europe, where Operation Koala eventually led authorities to producers, distributors, and customers in nearly 30 countries. Pat Trueman, special counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund, is thankful and hopes the trend continues. "One hundred seventy people sounds like a lot, but in reality it's a drop in the bucket," he says.

The multibillion-dollar-a-year business is fueled by those who use it, and Trueman knows that experimentation with child porn increases the desire and the demand. "The more perverted you are, the more perverted you will become -- and your lust is never satisfied," he adds. The result, says the former federal porn prosecutor, is "an endless number of children who are molested" in order to meet the demand.

Trueman says there needs to be more prosecution. "What we need is more tools for the law-enforcement community," he contends. "Much of this material starts right here in the United States, and yet [we have] just a fraction of the resources, financial and otherwise, that we need to go after those trafficking in child pornography."

The multibillion-dollar pornography business represents thousands of abused children.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Legal/Default.aspx?id=354820

No more 4-3 marriage decisions

By David Benkof

So far, 4-3 decisions have marked the implementation of same-sex marriage in all three of the states (Massachusetts, California, and Connecticut) to have done so (although California's voters reversed that state's high court decision). Such split decisions do not bode well for our democracy.

A key turning point for Proposition 8, which was once well behind in the polls in liberal California, was a television commercial featuring leading gay-marriage proponent and San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom declaring that gay marriage will happen "whether you like it or not." Well, Americans have a funny way of deciding on their own whether something will happen if they don't like it.

Gays and lesbians often compare the state court decisions favoring same-sex marriage to the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision allowing interracial marriage in every state and especially the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring that segregated schools were inherently unequal. But there's a key difference between those civil rights cases and today's gay-marriage decisions. The civil rights cases were both unanimous, and thus carried a legitimacy that, while some still resisted, eventually held sway throughout the United States.

By contrast, all the gay marriage decisions have been 4-3, with stinging dissents from the justices who disagreed. Earl Warren, the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court when the civil rights cases were decided, would not have approved. In the two decisions cited above, he pushed for the court to be unanimous, and was willing to wait to rule until the court could speak with one voice on the outcome. It's a much smoother way to go about achieving social change.

But aren't gays and lesbians desperate and thus willing to accept split decisions if that's what it takes? First, we've already seen the split decision in the nation's largest state overturned. If gay-marriage decisions are overturned, that does little good to the gay community.

More importantly, gays and lesbians in states like California aren't desperate for rights and benefits. Because the domestic partnership law provides all the rights and benefits that the Golden State provides married couples, the opponents of Proposition 8 spent $37 million to try to retain little more than self-esteem for gay and lesbian couples. The gay community has far more pressing needs, especially in states where same-sex couples have no rights, to be waging huge self-esteem battles. And in any event, should self-esteem really be coming from the government?

David Benkof is a freelance writer who can be reached at DavidBenkof@aol.com.

They're Having Babies. Are We Helping?

By Patrick Welsh

The girls gather in small groups outside Alexandria's T.C. Williams High School most mornings, standing with their babies on their hips, talking and giggling like sorority sisters. Sometimes their mothers drop the kids (and their kids) off with a carefree smile and a wave. As I watch the girls carry their children into the Tiny Titans day-care center in our new $100 million building, I can't help wondering what Sister Mary Avelina, my 11th-grade English teacher, would have thought.

Okay, I'm an old guy from the 1950s, an era light-years from today. But even in these less censorious times, I'm amazed -- and concerned -- by the apparently nonchalant attitude both these girls and their mothers exhibit in front of teachers, administrators and hundreds of students each day. Last I heard, teen pregnancy is still a major concern in this country -- teenage mothers are less likely to finish school and more likely to live in poverty; their children are more likely to have difficulties in school and with the law; and on and on.

But none of that seems to register with these young women. In fact, "some girls seem to be really into it," says T.C. senior Mary Ball. "They are embracing their pregnancies." Nor is the sight of a pregnant classmate much of a surprise to the students at T.C. anymore. "When I was in middle school, I'd be shocked to see a pregnant eighth-grader," says Ball. "Now it seems so ordinary that we don't even talk about it."

Teenage pregnancy has been bright on American radar screens for the past year: TV teen starlet Jamie Lynn Spears's pregnancy caused a minor media storm last December. The pregnant-teen movie "Juno" won Oscar nods. And there was Bristol Palin, daughter of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, bringing the issue front and center during the recent presidential campaign. But I've been observing the phenomenon up close for a couple of years now, and the picture I see is more troubling than any of those high-profile pregnancies make it seem.

The somber statistics about teen motherhood are the reason the day-care center, run by the local nonprofit Campagna Center, was opened in T.C. Williams two years ago. The idea is to keep the girls in school, let them get their diplomas and help them avoid the kind of fate described earlier. I've been a teacher for more than 30 years, and I want the best for my students and to help them succeed in every way possible. I know that these girls need support. But I can't help thinking we're going at this all wrong. On the surface, Alexandria seems to be striving to stem teen pregnancy. Every high school student is required to take a "family life" course that teaches about birth control, sexually transmitted disease and teen pregnancy. The Adolescent Health Center, a clinic providing birth control, was built a few blocks from the school. The city-run Campaign on Adolescent Pregnancy sponsors workshops for parents and teens. But none of this coalesces to hit the teens with the message that getting pregnant is a disaster. And within the school, apart from the family life class, the attitude is laissez-faire, as if teachers and administrators are afraid to address the issue for fear of offending the students who have children.

Once a girl gets pregnant, though, the school leaps in to do everything for her. But I wonder: Is it possible that all this assistance -- with little or no comment about the kids' actions -- has the unintended effect of actually encouraging them to get pregnant? Are we making it easier for girls to make a bad choice and helping them avoid the truth about the consequences?

And for many, it does seem to be a choice. "There's a myth that these pregnancies are accidental," says school nurse Nancy Runton. "But many of them aren't. I've known girls who've made 'I'll get pregnant if you get pregnant' pacts. It's a status thing. These girls go around school telling each other how beautiful they look pregnant, how cute their tummies look."

Pregnancy pacts, too, were in the news earlier this year when a group of girls in a Massachusetts high school reportedly made one (though some denied it). But that's only one way the situation at T.C. reflects what's happening across the country. The birth rate among teens, after falling 36 percent since 1990, went up 3 percent in 2006, the first increase in 15 years. And most of the rise is due to pregnancies among Hispanic girls.

Lots of white teens nationally have babies, but that's not really the case at T.C. Teen motherhood here is mostly a class issue -- and given Alexandria's demographics, that means the teen mothers are virtually all lower-income blacks and Hispanics with few financial or other resources. Moreover, the number of Hispanic girls with babies is double the number of black girls, which also reflects a national trend. According to Sarah Brown, director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, Hispanics now have the highest rate of teen pregnancy and births of any racial or ethnic group in the country.

In our school of 2,211 students, we now have at least 70 girls who are soon-to-be or already mothers. Many T.C. teachers and administrators have decidedly mixed emotions about the situation. Social worker Terri Wright says that for many girls, getting pregnant before they turn 18 is a rite of passage. "They don't wear sweatshirts or baggy dresses to conceal their pregnancies," says Wright. "I get invitations to baby showers. Girls bring me pictures of their kids dressed up like little dolls."

"There is zero shame," agrees school nurse Runton. One girl walked into a colleague's class last month, announced that she was pregnant and began showing her sonogram around. Another 16-year-old proudly proclaimed that she was "going on maternity leave." The teacher tried to explain that maternity leave is a job benefit that doesn't apply to high school students.

Click here to continue this article.

FAITH EQUALS FERTILITY

Religious people have more babies than non-believers--and not just for the obvious reasons. Anthony Gottlieb looks into a philosophical puzzle.

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Winter 2008

If a Martian were to look at a map of the Earth’s religions, what he might find most surprising is the fact that such a map can be drawn at all. How strange--he might say to himself--that so many of the world’s Hindus are to be found in one place, namely India. And how odd that Muslims are so very numerous in the Middle East. With the disconcerting curiosity that is so typical of Martians, he might wonder what explains this geographical clustering. Do people move countries in order to be close to others of the same faith? Or do people simply tend to adopt the religion they grew up with?

The answer, of course, is the latter--on the whole. There are exceptions: Jews moving to Israel, for example, and there are many other cases of religious migration. Still, the huddling of the faithful is mainly explained by the fact that religion runs in families. If you have a religion, it is probably the same one as your parents. Earlier this year a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that nearly three-quarters of American adults professed the religion in which they were raised. But instead of finding this glass to be three-quarters full, newspapers preferred to notice that it was one-quarter empty. It was the minority of Americans who either switched religions, or abandoned religion altogether, who were highlighted in reports of the survey (“Poll Finds a Fluid Religious Life in US”, ran a headline in the New York Times). Plainly it does not count as news that religion remains largely a family affair. Yet it should do, because of its largely unnoticed consequences. Some religious groups are dramatically outbreeding others, in ways that have an impact on America, Europe and elsewhere.

Consider the Mormons, who grew from six people in a log-cabin in upstate New York in 1830 to 13.1m adherents around the world in 2007. At the beginning of the 20th century, Mormons were a fringe sect in America, with decidedly unusual beliefs. (They officially hold that God once had a body; that people exist as spirits before they are physically conceived; and that Jesus will one day commute between somewhere in Israel and somewhere in the United States.) Today Mormons are about to overtake Jews in America; in fact, they may already have done so. And they almost had their own presidential candidate, in the person of Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts. The rapid rise of Mormons in America, growing by an average of 40% every decade in the 20th century, is mainly due to their large families. The American state with the highest birth rate is Utah, which is around 70% Mormon. In America, on average, Mormon women have nearly three times more children than Jewish women.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews, however, do have plenty of offspring. This fact is changing the face of Israel, where such families have three times more children than other Israelis. As a result, at least a quarter of Israel’s population of under-17s is expected to be ultra-Orthodox by 2025, according to Eric Kaufmann at Harvard. A similar but more gradual increase in the religious right has been taking place in America for decades, and not just because of Mormons. Conservative Protestant denominations as a whole grew much faster than liberal ones in 20th-century America, and it has been estimated that three-quarters of this growth is due simply to higher birth rates. Were it not for the fact that Evangelical Christians reproduce faster than other Protestants, George Bush--who attracted most of the Evangelical votes--probably could not have made it back to the White House in 2004.

Like other demographers, Eric Kaufmann expects western Europe to become markedly more religious in the course of the 21st century, as a result of the relatively low fertility of unbelievers and immigration from more pious places. Not only do denominations with traditionalist values tend to have higher birth rates than their more liberal co-religionists, but countries that are relatively secularised usually reproduce more slowly than countries that are more religious. According to the World Bank, the nations with the largest proportions of unbelievers had an average annual population growth rate of just 0.7% in the period 1975-97, while the populations of the most religious countries grew three times as fast.

If they want to spread their gospel, then, one might half-seriously conclude that atheists and agnostics ought to focus on having more children, to help overcome their demographic disadvantage. Unfortunately for secularists, this may not work even as a joke. Nobody knows exactly why religion and fertility tend to go together. Conventional wisdom says that female education, urbanisation, falling infant mortality, and the switch from agriculture to industry and services all tend to cause declines in both religiosity and birth rates. In other words, secularisation and smaller families are caused by the same things. Also, many religions enjoin believers to marry early, abjure abortion and sometimes even contraception, all of which leads to larger families. But there may be a quite different factor at work as well. Having a large family might itself sometimes make people more religious, or make them less likely to lose their religion. Perhaps religion and fertility are linked in several ways at the same time.

Mary Eberstadt, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, has suggested several ways in which the experience of forming a family might stimulate religious feelings among parents, at least some of the time. She notes that pregnancy and birth, the business of caring for children, and the horror of contemplating their death, can stimulate an intensity of purpose that might make parents more open to religious sentiments. Many common family events, she reasons, might encourage a broadly spiritual turn of mind, from selfless care for a sick relation to sacrifices for the sake of a child’s adulthood that one might never see.

Eberstadt argues that part of the reason why western European Christians have become more secular is that they have been forming fewer stable families, and having fewer children when they do. This, she suggests, may help to explain some puzzles about the timing of secularisation in certain places. In Ireland, for example, she notes that people started having smaller families before they stopped going to church. And, she argues, if something about having families can incline one to religion, this might shed some light on another mystery: why the sexes are not equally religious.

According to Rodney Stark, an American sociologist of religion, the generalisation that men are less religious than women “holds around the world and across the centuries”. In every country--both Christian and non-Christian--analysed by Dr Stark, based on data from the World Values Survey in the 1990s, more women than men said they would describe themselves as religious. There is no agreed explanation for this striking difference. Perhaps the fact that women play a rather larger role than men in the production and rearing of children has something to do with it. If family life does contribute to religiosity, then having larger families might backfire on unbelievers. It might make them more religious. And since faith is still largely a family affair, their children would then be more likely to be religious, too.

http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/faith-equals-fertility

A pastoral message to homosexual Catholics in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles

By Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and the Auxiliary Bishops of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

As Bishops of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, we are addressing this message first of all to the homosexual members of our Church. Given the controversy generated by the passage of Proposition 8, we want to reassure each of you that you are cherished members of the Catholic Church, and that we value you as equal and active members of the Body of Christ. At the same time, we would like to address this message to all the members of the Catholic Church in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, and to all men and women in the wider community.

The passage of Proposition 8 in the State of California does not diminish in any way the importance of you, our homosexual brothers and sisters in the Church. Nor does it lessen your personal dignity and value as full members of the Body of Christ. The Church's support of Proposition 8 was our effort to resist a legal redefinition of marriage. Our support for Proposition 8 was in defense of the longstanding institution of marriage understood as the life-long relationship of a man and a woman ordered to the good of the spouses and to the procreation and education of their children.

We are disappointed that the ballot information about Proposition 8 stated that the purpose of the initiative was "to ban gay marriage." From the very beginning, this was not our purpose.
When the United Nations was established in 1948, it proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which set in place some 30 Articles to embrace all rights of all peoples on the earth. Article 16 deals with marriage. In the context of the time when it was written, it is clear that the basic understanding of the family, as envisioned by the United Nations Declaration, was one founded on the marriage of one man and one woman.

Subsection 3 states: "The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State." It is this universal understanding of marriage and family which Proposition 8 desired to guarantee in California.

Such an understanding of marriage is found in at least three major religious traditions which have described the origin, meaning, and intent of marriage in their sacred writings. In the Hebrew Scriptures, we find explicit reference to marriage between a man and a woman in 51 verses located in 19 books. The Christian Scriptures have 14 verses dealing directly with marriage in six books. The Muslim Koran records 14 passages dealing with marriage.

Thus, our faith communities and their sacred writings are in agreement about the application of the term "marriage." And there are other faith communities which, in their own sacred writings, concur with this understanding. Our faith communities have never understood this term to be applied to other types of relationships between people.

These sacred writings and traditions, spanning thousands of years, support the fundamental truth that God created the human family as male and female, sending them forth to be fruitful and multiply. This is the understanding of marriage which has prevailed throughout human history, and has been enacted in the laws of peoples, nations, races and religions everywhere. It is this truth that is at the heart of Proposition 8.

Proposition 8 was not crafted as a concern for civil rights but as an effort to resist a redefinition of marriage. "Marriage" is not a merely religious concept, but is so fundamental to human experience that it cannot be redefined legally.

The Catholic Church has historically opposed attempts to deny or to limit the exercise of the basic rights which are known through the natural law and which are expounded in Sacred Scriptures and in the charters and declarations of world bodies. Our efforts in this country to espouse equal rights for all citizens have frequently created adverse reactions for our Church: our somewhat belated efforts to prohibit slavery; our insistence on equal educational opportunities for all children; our strong support of immigrants' rights; our struggles on behalf of unborn children and those at the end of life's journey, and so many others.

In 1997 the United States Catholic Bishops' Committee on Marriage and the Family published Always Our Children: A Pastoral Message to Parents of Homosexual Children and Suggestions for Pastoral Ministers, urging the Christian community and especially parents of homosexuals to offer them understanding and pastoral care.

Proposition 8 was never intended, directly or indirectly, to lessen the value and importance of gay and lesbian persons. Your intrinsic value as human beings and as brothers and sisters continues without change. If we had ever thought that the intent of this proposition was to harm you or anyone in the State of California, we would not have supported it. We are personally grateful for the witness and service of so many dedicated and generous homosexual Catholics. We pledge our commitment to safeguard your dignity.

Here in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles we began our spiritual and pastoral outreach to homosexual people over 20 years ago. And we were pilloried by many for doing so. We began the various Serra Residences for victims of HIV and AIDS when the public understanding and fear of this illness repulsed so many.

As we have come to learn over these past decades, there are many groupings of people residing under one roof across California. Some of these groupings are related family members, while others are companions and friends. There are now 17 rights for such companions and friends specifically included in the State of California's legal structure.

We are saddened that some people who opposed Proposition 8 have employed hurtful and accusatory language, and even threatening actions, against those who voted for Proposition 8. This is most unfortunate since such strategies obscure the basic matter at issue: the preservation of the ordered relationship between man and woman created by God.

Supporting marriage as it has always been understood diminishes none of us.

We welcome thoughtful and civil dialogue with you so that we can deepen our realization that all of us cherish God's creative life which we equally share. We are committed to find ways to eliminate discrimination against homosexual persons, and to help guarantee the basic rights which belong to each of us.

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony
Bishop Thomas Curry
Bishop Gerald Wilkerson
Bishop Edward Clark
Bishop Gabino Zavala
Bishop Alexander Salazar
Bishop Oscar Solis

http://www.the-tidings.com/2008/120508/homosexuals_text.htm

Colson - 'a converted, broken sinner' - honored by Bush

Prison Fellowship founder Chuck Colson has been honored with the Presidential Citizens Medal. The honor, which was awarded last Wednesday during an Oval Office ceremony, recognized Colson's work to bring the gospel of Christ to prisoners, former inmates, and their families.

Colson, who was a top aide to President Richard Nixon, was the first member of that administration to go to prison for Watergate-related crimes. Colson became a Christian and, after his release from prison, founded Prison Fellowship, which conducts outreaches to inmates and their families.

The ministry's success, says Colson, is an act of God. "The credit, if any is due for what's happened in Prison Fellowship, goes of course to God first; but then to the staff of people we have," he shares. "We've got a wonderful team that have [sic] been working at this -- the donors, the...50,000 volunteers across America that are involved in the ministry.

"As I told the president, I received [the Presidential Citizens Medal] on behalf of all those, like myself, who have had broken experiences, but know that redemption is possible...mainly the ex-convicts and convicts that I work with."

Colson was among 23 individuals who were recognized during a private ceremony in the Oval Office. The medal is one of the highest honors the president can give a civilian, second only to the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=352114

Marriage, Adoption and What's Best for Children

by Marcia Segelstein

A recent piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution highlights the ever-growing research that children are substantially better off when raised by their married parents.

Writer Jim Wooten cites the work of Robin Fretwell Wilson, a professor of Family Law at Washington and Lee University School of Law in Lexington, Virginia. Wilson spoke recently at a summit on Children, Marriage and Family Law. She analyzed research studies about what is best for children, and the results were crystal clear. “In virtually every study, weighing every variable – family structure, age, income, race, education – the evidence is overwhelming that children do better in families where married adults are rearing their biological children.”

But what about adopted children? Perhaps because Wilson herself was adopted as a child, she has paid special attention to this issue. In preliminary results, she found that adoptive parents “invest more [of themselves] in adoptive chidlren, on average, than biological parents do in their children.” She believes that adoption “shows that adults can be bound to children and protective of them…But what distinguishes adoptees from kids in boyfriend households that are fraught with peril for some kids is that both adults are committing to the child, permanently, for good, and with identical connections to the child. And they mean to be conneccted to the child, not just to one another.”

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Blog/Default.aspx?id=354276

Forged consent note for abortion leads to lawsuit

An Atlanta abortion clinic is facing a lawsuit over an abortion performed on a minor.

The boy and girl wanted to marry and have the child, but the mother of the 15-year-old's boyfriend insisted on an abortion, found a clinic that would do it, and sent them on their way. But Fenn Little, the girl's attorney, says there is a problem with that in Georgia.

"There's a parental notification law [that] requires parental consent for a minor to have an abortion -- and it requires some actual notice," he explains -- 24 hours notice, in fact.

The girl arrived at the clinic with a faked consent note forged by the boyfriend's mother on the day of the abortion. "[B]ecause it's a misdemeanor in Georgia to violate that notice law, [the solicitor] actually brought charges, and the lady was convicted and sentenced to the maximum term allowable [12 months]," says Little.

The girl's parents knew nothing of the abortion until two weeks afterwards, and have now sued Northside Women's Clinic saying it broke Georgia law.

Attorney Little sees some irony in the situation in that the girl's mother previously had taken her to have her ears pierced -- but was turned away. "WalMart sent them back home to get proof that she was the daughter to sign the parental authorization to get her ears pierced," he shares. "So you can get an abortion [without proof of parenthood], but you can't get your ears pierced."

Little hopes to prove in court that the clinic in question routinely performs abortions on minors and does not follow the law.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Legal/Default.aspx?id=352856

Planned Parenthood protecting child rapist ... again

Another incident has surfaced involving an underage girl receiving an abortion and no attention being paid to the child molester who impregnated her.

The incident happened at a Planned Parenthood clinic in the nation's capitol. Information on the incident comes from American Life League's Katy Walker.

"Counselors in Washington, DC, encountered a 13-year-old girl going into a Planned Parenthood in the downtown DC area [who] was accompanied by her mother and her aunt," Walker explains. According to the pro-life activist, following the abortion the aunt shared some information with sidewalk counselors outside the clinic.

"[S]he informs them that this little girl has been raped by the mother's boyfriend, and the mother wants to keep the boyfriend," says Walker.

Police were called, but the frightened girl would not provide information.

Walker contends similar cases are commonplace. "[T]his kind of stuff happens every day in Planned Parenthoods across the country -- every day," she argues. "They're covering for statutory rapists."

All states have laws requiring reporting of child abuse to authorities, and abortion facilities for the most part are not complying. That was the conclusion of an extensive investigation several years ago by Life Dynamics, Inc., a Texas-based pro-life group.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=354222

Case against sidewalk counselor in Oakland

From an email from a friend:

Dear Friends of Life,

Please read the article below. This case will set precedence in Oakland and throughout California.

Note below that Rev Walter Hoye apparently did nothing wrong.

I have personally met Reverend Hoye. He is a warm, loving and Godly man. He is being persecuted for defending life. He is being used as a cruel example to enforce the new "bubble, Mother May I" Law in Oakland.

What can we do?:

Prior to the trial on Dec 19, today if you can, write and fax the District Attorney Tom Orloff, let him know that we are aware of the truth behind this case, and we will be observing the trial and will hold him accountable for a fair trial for the Reverend Hoye.

The Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff is located at:
1225 Fallon Street, Room 900
Oakland, CA 94612
Telephone: (510) 272-6222
FAX: (510) 271-5157

Thank you for staying engaged. Let us continue to bond together and hold our public officials accountable. Together we are a strong voice.


D.A. CONSPIRES WITH CITY, ABORTIONISTS TO SILENCE PRO-LIFER

City Attorney Calls Obstruction by Pro-Aborts “Creative”

OAKLAND, CA: More details emerged Friday of the scheme by government officials and abortion providers to silence pro-life advocate Walter Hoye of Berkeley. At a pre-trial readiness hearing in Oakland Superior Court, the Alameda County district attorney demanded that Rev. Hoye plead guilty to one misdemeanor count and agree to stay-away from local abortion clinics for an unspecified period of time in exchange for dismissing three other bogus criminal charges against him. Rev. Hoye refused and will go to trial next week.

Rev. Hoye, who is African-American, feels a special calling to work for the end of the genocide-by-abortion taking place in the African-American community. As part of his efforts, he stands in front of an abortion clinic in Oakland with leaflets about abortion alternatives and a sign reading, “Jesus loves you and your baby. Let us help.”

Rev. Hoye’s peaceful witness enrages the all-white cadre of clinic “escorts,” who surround him to impede his movement, block his sign with large sheets of blank cardboard, and make raucous noise to drown out his quiet offers of assistance.

As this interference did not deter Rev. Hoye, the clinic then worked with Oakland city council members to pass a “Mother May I” ordinance, prohibiting approaching within eight feet of women entering abortion clinics without their consent. The penalty for illegally approaching a person to talk or hand out a leaflet is one year in jail and/or a $2000 fine.

On May 13, 2008, Rev. Hoye was arrested for allegedly violating the ordinance. One of the witnesses against him was an Oakland city attorney who was secretly watching from a car. In an e-mail to the clinic director, the city attorney said the escorts’ use of signs to block Rev. Hoye “was creative and seemed to be effective.”

The district attorney then expanded the complaint to include four counts, two for “unlawful” approaches and two for allegedly using “force, threat of force, or physical obstruction” against two of the clinic escorts. At a pre-trial hearing in July, Rev. Hoye’s attorneys cross-examined these “victims.” The escorts admitted that Rev. Hoye never used force against them, threatened them, or blocked them. They proudly testified that they routinely block Rev. Hoye to prevent patients from seeing his sign. Nevertheless, the DA has not dismissed the charges against Rev. Hoye.

“The district attorney’s office appears to be using these trumped-up charges as leverage to pressure Rev. Hoye into giving up his free speech rights,” said Hoye’s attorney Mike Millen. “The threat of four years in jail is a potent one, but my client is more interested in getting the truth out, both on the sidewalk and in the courtroom.”

Rev. Hoye will be back in court on Friday, December 19, 2008, where a trial date will be set.

Protecting pocketbooks from embryo research

Missourians are fighting back against passage of a November ballot issue providing state tax dollars for research on human embryos.

Ed Martin of Missouri Roundtable for Life says the measure, which would result in killing tiny human beings, won passage with only a fraction-of-one-percent majority.

"It was passed after almost $35 million were spent by pro-cloning proponents to pass it -- and the opposition obviously was much less than that," he shares. Martin's organization has launched a petition drive to put the issue back on the ballot in 2010 in an effort to reverse the 2006 vote.

"It became clear that one of the impacts -- and a major one, at that -- was the creation of law and policy that made it possible for tax dollars to be used for human cloning as well as for abortion services actually," the activist explains.

Martin points out that someone wanting to start a business must go to banks for financing. But in this case, he adds, clone research businesses want taxpayers to hand them the money.

Missouri Roundtable for Life has also filed lawsuits to block $21 million in state funds from going to the research. One of those suits was dismissed last month.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Politics/Default.aspx?id=352034

Iowa latest target for homosexual marriage

The Iowa Supreme Court has heard arguments from homosexuals in a challenge to the state's marriage laws.

Douglas Lapier, an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund, argued against homosexual marriage." "For over 170 years in Iowa, marriage has been defined as a union between one man and one woman," he explains. "It's [a] well-settled law in the state of Iowa." Lapier notes that a member of the court asked the pro-homosexual attorney what would happen in terms of polygamy and incestuous marriage if the court ruled in favor of homosexual marriage.

"The plaintiffs simply could not satisfactorily answer that question, which means that there is a great risk that if they open up the doors to same-sex marriage in Iowa, there's no telling what they're opening up their doors to next," he contends.

The case is now in the hands of the court, which is supposed to act as a referee and apply law, according to Lapier. "The Supreme Court of Iowa has to decide whether or not they have any business in deciding the definition of marriage as a matter of public policy, or if that should be left to the legislature and the people of Iowa," he concludes.

Last August, a Polk County judge legalized homosexual marriage for four hours before issuing a stay pending a higher-court decision.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Legal/Default.aspx?id=350948

Pro-lifers urge United Nations to honor life

Several organizations have attended a United Nations meeting with a serious task as the 60th anniversary of the Declaration on Human Rights is being celebrated. Numerous pro-life organizations collected signatures for a petition, calling on the United Nations to honor life. Concerned Women for America's Wendy Wright was there. "Petitions were signed by over 400,000 people in over 168 countries that were presented to the U.N.," she explains.

Wright was asked what prompted the drive, besides the U.N.'s recent leaning toward pro-abortion ideas. "This petition drive was started after it was discovered that Marie Stokes, a British abortion group, was collecting their own petition that they planned on presenting...claiming that the right to abortion should be interpreted as being in the Declaration of Human Rights," she points out.

That group collected about 600 signatures. The declaration actually says, "Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the security of person."

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=351104

Pro-Abortion Wish List

A friend emailed a November 2008 document compiled by many of the major pro-abortion groups (e.g., NARAL, Planned Parenthood, ACLU, Center for Reproductive Rights, ACOG, NOW). It is sort of "wish list" of what they want from an Obama Administration. The document is titled: Advancing Reproductive Rights and Health in a New Administration: Steps for Improvement and Change.

Here is an excerpt:

Strike Budgetary Restrictions That Block Women’s Access to Abortion Care.
Bans on public funding for abortion services have severely restricted access to safe abortion care for women, disproportionately affecting poor women,women of color, and certain immigrant women. The President’s budget should strike language restricting abortion funding for (i) Medicaid-eligible women and Medicare beneficiaries (Hyde amendment); (ii) federal employees and their dependents (FEHB program); (iii) residents of the District of Columbia; (iv) Peace Corps volunteers; (v) Native-American women; and (vi) women in federal prisons. The budget submitted to Congress also should omit language known as the Federal Refusal Clause (Weldon amendment) and call on Congress to reject this language in its annual health spending bill. The Weldon amendment denies federal funding if an “agency, program, or government subjects any institutional or individual health care entity to discrimination on the basis thatthe health care entity does not provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions.”

Vatican Issues Instruction on Bioethics

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN and ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

The Vatican issued its most authoritative and sweeping document on bioethical issues in more than 20 years on Friday, taking into account recent developments in biomedical technology and reinforcing the church’s opposition to in vitro fertilization, human cloning, genetic testing on embryos before implantation and embryonic stem cell research.

The Vatican says these techniques violate the principles that every human life ­ even an embryo ­ is sacred, and that babies should be conceived only through intercourse by a married couple.
The 32-page instruction, titled “Dignitas Personae,” or “The Dignity of the Person,” was issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal office, and carries the approval and the authority of Pope Benedict XVI.

Under discussion for six years, it is a moral response to bioethical questions raised in the 21 years since the congregation last issued instructions.

It bans the morning-after pill, the intrauterine device and the pill RU-486, saying these can result in what amount to abortions.

The Vatican document reiterates that the church is opposed to research on stem cells derived from embryos. But it does not oppose research on stem cells derived from adults; blood from umbilical cords; or fetuses “who have died of natural causes.”

The document does not prohibit the use of vaccines developed using “cell lines of illicit origin” if children’s health is at stake. But it says that “everyone has the duty” to inform health care providers of personal objections to such vaccines.

The church also objects to freezing embryos, arguing that doing so exposes them to potential damage and manipulation, and that it raises the problem of what to do with frozen embryos that are not implanted. There are at least 400,000 of these in the United States alone.

“Our advice is that freezing should not take place,” said Bishop Elio Sgreccia, president emeritus of the Pontifical Academy for Life. “Because once it is done, you’re in a situation where to correct the error implies a further offense. Once you have them, what do you do with them?”

The Vatican’s intended audience is not only individual Roman Catholics, but also non-Catholic doctors, scientists, medical researchers and legislators who might consider regulating stem cell research and other recent developments in biomedical technology.

In the United States, President-elect Barack Obama has said he will end the restrictions on federal financing of embryonic stem cell research that were instituted by President Bush.
Among the new developments discussed in the document are the attempts by scientists to find alternative techniques of producing embryonic-like stem cells that could ultimately be used in medical treatments, without involving human embryos, said the Rev. Thomas Berg, executive director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person, a Catholic ethics institute in New York. He said such techniques could “allow us to get past this cultural divide on stem cell research.”

Father Berg said he was pleased to see that the Vatican document did not prohibit such techniques, although it cautioned that there must be absolute assurance that human embryos were not destroyed in the process.

The document does little to clarify the Vatican’s position on whether couples can “adopt” surplus embryos that have been frozen and abandoned. Such “prenatal adoption,” although rare, has been promoted by some Catholics and evangelical Christians. The document says that while “prenatal adoption” is “praiseworthy,” it presents ethical problems similar to certain types of in vitro fertilization ­ in particular, surrogate motherhood, which the church prohibits.

Experts said that there was little new in this document, but that it might still come as a surprise to many Catholics who were unaware of the church’s ban on in vitro fertilization.

Kathleen M. Raviele, an obstetrician and gynecologist in Georgia who is president of the Catholic Medical Association, said she tells her patients: “God creates through an act of love, and that’s not what’s happening in the laboratory. It’s the technician who’s creating. What in vitro does, is it separates the creation of a child from the marital act.”

But the Vatican’s opposition to in vitro fertilization seemed neither moral nor intuitive to Josephine Johnston, a research scholar at the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institute in Garrison, N.Y.

“For a married couple who go to get in vitro fertilization, the Vatican’s idea that it’s not done with a serious amount of love and commitment is very bizarre to me, because it’s such a deliberate act, done in the cold light of day, with enormous amounts of thought and intention attached to it,” she said. “The idea that it’s not done within the spirit of marital love, I find very strange.”

Archbishop Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer, a Jesuit who is secretary of the doctrinal office, said at a news conference in Rome that the document would probably “be accused of containing too many bans.” Nonetheless, he said that the church felt a duty “to give voice to those who have no voice.”

Laurie Goodstein reported from New York, and Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

The Demise of Dating

By CHARLES M. BLOW

The paradigm has shifted. Dating is dated. Hooking up is here to stay.

(For those over 30 years old: hooking up is a casual sexual encounter with no expectation of future emotional commitment. Think of it as a one-night stand with someone you know.)
According to a report released this spring by Child Trends, a Washington research group, there are now more high school seniors saying that they never date than seniors who say that they date frequently. Apparently, it’s all about the hookup.

When I first heard about hooking up years ago, I figured that it was a fad that would soon fizzle. I was wrong. It seems to be becoming the norm.

I should point out that just because more young people seem to be hooking up instead of dating doesn’t mean that they’re having more sex (they’ve been having less, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) or having sex with strangers (they’re more likely to hook up with a friend, according to a 2006 paper in the Journal of Adolescent Research).

To help me understand this phenomenon, I called Kathleen Bogle, a professor at La Salle University in Philadelphia who has studied hooking up among college students and is the author of the 2008 book, “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus.”

It turns out that everything is the opposite of what I remember. Under the old model, you dated a few times and, if you really liked the person, you might consider having sex. Under the new model, you hook up a few times and, if you really like the person, you might consider going on a date.

I asked her to explain the pros and cons of this strange culture. According to her, the pros are that hooking up emphasizes group friendships over the one-pair model of dating, and, therefore, removes the negative stigma from those who can’t get a date. As she put it, “It used to be that if you couldn’t get a date, you were a loser.” Now, she said, you just hang out with your friends and hope that something happens.

The cons center on the issues of gender inequity. Girls get tired of hooking up because they want it to lead to a relationship (the guys don’t), and, as they get older, they start to realize that it’s not a good way to find a spouse. Also, there’s an increased likelihood of sexual assaults because hooking up is often fueled by alcohol.

That’s not good. So why is there an increase in hooking up? According to Professor Bogle, it’s: the collapse of advanced planning, lopsided gender ratios on campus, delaying marriage, relaxing values and sheer momentum.

It used to be that “you were trained your whole life to date,” said Ms. Bogle. “Now we’ve lost that ability ­ the ability to just ask someone out and get to know them.”Now that’s sad.

E-mail chblow@nytimes.com

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Conservatism and the Culture Wars

Politics is an arena of conflict. I want a certain set of policies and laws. You want something different. We fight it out in public debate and in the electoral process. Welcome to the rough-and-tumble world of sound bites, negative advertising, and hardball tactics.

It’s wrong to wring our hands over the shrill and intensely competitive nature of politics. The alternatives are so much worse: tyranny or indifference. But there also needs to be something that prevents significant political disputes from turning into civil wars. Today, the red state vs. blue state divide has people anxious. Are we careening toward an ever-deeper split, one that threatens the underlying unity of our nation?

My short answer is yes. We are entering a time of ever increasing cultural tension, and the cause should be plain to see. As Edmund Burke observed, “A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper, and confined views.”

In the main, we don’t see the obvious fact that progressives are socially divisive. We forget that revolutionaries seek revolutions, because we tend to think of progressives as idealists, people who just want to make the world a better place. That’s why communism, unlike fascism, never becomes the emblem of evil. Tens of millions may have been killed by commissars, but we continue to give the left credit. They’re morally serious folks. Communism was just idealism gone astray.

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke helps us see beyond our usual moral sentimentalism. He recognized the way in which abstract principles can become objects of devotion. The great patrons of liberty and equality in revolutionary France loved their ideas of justice, so much so that they would willingly destroy the actual goods of their imperfect society in order to implement an imagined state of perfection. Nothing is so selfish as to attack reality—and to do so on the basis of one’s own ideals.

Burke had an epithet for these selfish idealists. They were “men of theory,” and they so often seem to have the rhetorical advantage. The imagined world is shiny and spotless, unlike the real world and its hopelessly compromised institutions. It’s easy to compliment your moral insights when you juxtapose the ideal with the real.

“The pretended rights of these theorists are all extreme,” he wrote, “and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false.” And more than false. Reflections on the Revolution in France is a very passionate book, urgent and strident in tone, because Burke thought the “men of theory” wicked.

The wickedness comes from a crucial fact about progressive politics: Our social world needs to be destroyed in order for moral and political ideals to be realized, unsullied by the past. It is a simple fact that every real society gives men and women social roles, and these roles fit into a hierarchy, a preconceived order justifying social arrangements. We can ascribe specific rights equally. We can say that every adult has a right to vote, or that every citizen has a right to trial by jury. But we can’t say that everyone has a right to be equal—unless we’re prepared to destroy the cultural forms that give people their diverse roles and identities.

Of course, that was exactly what the progressives tried to do in France after 1789. With increasing violence, the revolutionaries used the power of the state to destroy the old system of society. The destruction was not just a matter of abolishing aristocratic titles, confiscating church property, and executing the monarch. The revolutionary project in France, like every modern revolutionary project, sought to destroy the sentiments that give inward form to the outward system. It’s not enough to throw down the mighty and lift up the lowly. One must drive out all thoughts of inequality, extirpate the arrogant sense of superiority, reverse every cowering feeling of inferiority.

Enlightenment philosophy played a crucial role in achieving the ideals of the French Revolutions. “All the pleasing illusions,” Burke wrote, “which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments that beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason.” Thus the pattern was set: For every progressive political agenda, a culture of critique must replace a culture of loyalty.

The conquering culture of critique works with cold determination: “All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of the moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature. . . , are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.” Unmask, disenchant, critique—these are important, foundational political acts, as our university professors now openly champion. They undermine the sentiments and convictions that make men feel old moral sentiments, even after the old system is swept away.

Burke’s insight in the imperialism of theory helps explain why culture wars seem to be escalating. Economic progressives are not terribly influential, as Obama’s cabinet appointments demonstrate. But the cultural progressives are very much in ascendancy. Every desire has an equal right to its fulfillment. And this ideal can only be realized if every desire feels free to speak its name.

Therefore, establishing an empire of desire requires more than political triumph, more than legal protection. Like all progressive ideals, it requires the destruction of the sentiments and pieties that lead people to think otherwise. This ideological project takes on the familiar distortions of all modern propaganda. “Words take on new meanings,” James Kalb writes in The Tyranny of Liberalism, “hatred comes to include opposition to liberal initiatives, while inclusiveness requires non-liberals to abandon their principles and even their identity. Tolerance treats objections to liberalism as attacks on neutrality that are oppressive simply by being made.”

Recently, I wrote that Barack Obama won in November largely because he convincingly represents stability in economic affairs and foreign policy. On questions of culture, however, he will have a very difficult time. The progressive ideal of liberated desire—like all progressive ideals—requires us to fundamentally remake culture. This means aggressively intervening into education and the family in order to destroy the sources of traditional sentiments about sex, gender, and religion.

Social conservatism is different. It wishes to use the power of the state to prohibit certain forms of vice. Criminalizing abortion is an obvious example. I’d also like to see a reassessment of no-fault divorce. This political agenda is not surprising. It’s the nature of laws to embody moral principles (such as the protection of innocent life).

Yet, because conservatism is based in traditional realities rather than progressive ideals, it need not revolutionize culture and suppress dissent. Put concretely, nobody who wants to change our laws about abortion needs to censor the pro-choice idea. Nobody who wishes to prohibit gay marriage wants to prevent anyone from feeling offended or oppressed by the opinions of those who think otherwise.

Because conservative political goals are limited, they don’t require trying to take control of the San Francisco school system. A conservative would like for everyone to adopt his outlook. That follows from believing that something is true. But the conservative is not selfish in the sense Burke identifies. He does not love broad, abstract ideals at the expense of actual social realities. Instead, he draws his strength from real, living traditions, encouraging focused, lasting reforms that fulfill and purify rather than critique and erase. The conservative has no need to gain control of the state in order to remake culture—a shockingly arrogant, willful, and invariably tyrannical project. He already has one.

I’m not naive. There are obviously social conservatives who have a modern cast of mind—conservative revolutionaries with Stalinist tendencies. And there are certainly many American liberals with a deep commitment to our traditional constitutional constraints on the use of governmental power. People do not exist to represent “isms.”

Nonetheless, conservatism and progressivism have fundamentally different tendencies as ruling principles. Conservatism wants to protect, nurture, and perfect aspects of the social norms we already have. Drawing its strength from what exists, it has room for dissent. Progressivism pours Agent Orange on the cultural landscape to make space for something new, something it imagines to be better. Seeking what is ideal, it often excludes dissent as a matter of moral principle.

I hope my moderate liberal friends will concede that social conservatism has the capacity to create social and political stability in our pluralistic society. It wishes to win the culture war, but unlike the progressive cultural politics of the present day it does not demand unconditional surrender and complete submission. But I’m not holding my breath. One principle seems to be a constant for American liberals: no enemies on the left.

R.R. Reno is features editor of First Things and professor of theology at Creighton University.

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1244

Men obsolete in test-tube world

Men are biologically vulnerable in the new world of reproduction.

It is a world where deaf people select deaf babies and where scientists ''mix'' animals and humans.

And it is much closer to reality than many may think.

Academic lawyer Baroness Ruth Deech described the landscape of modern reproduction in a public lecture yesterday at the Australian National University's college of law.

Baroness Deech was the first chairwoman of Britain's reproduction technology regulatory body, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.

She said one day reproduction technology might allow women to grow their own sperm.
''Who needs men?'' she joked during her lecture.

''I'm awfully sorry to any young men here... biologically you're on the way out. It would therefore be a good idea to make yourselves attractive and useful around the house.''

Baroness Deech talked about Britain's new Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act and what it would mean for reproduction.

The new law would allow scientists to take an egg from an animal such as a cow and implant human DNA into the egg.

The move sparked demonstrations outside Parliament.

''The public got the idea that someone was going to grow half man, half animal,'' Baroness Deech said.

''That's not the case. We're talking about an egg and a sperm so small that the human eye can't see it. It's only for research and it can only be kept 14 days.

''That will allow much more research to go ahead, because there will be a greater supply of animal eggs which can be used to study the growth of the human body and disease.''

Baroness Deech drew criticism from deaf lobby groups after voicing her concerns about deaf people choosing an embryo that would result in a deaf baby.
''I thought that was outrageous,'' Baroness Deech said.

A case in Canada involved a deaf, same-sex couple who advertised for a man who had five generations of deafness in his family. They used his sperm with the partner who had four generations of deafness, and had two deaf children.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the birth of the world's first in-vitro fertilisation baby, Louise Brown.

''IVF and embryology go to the heart of all our feelings, conscious and subconscious about parenthood, about new life, about what we're here for,'' Baroness Deech said. ''When Louise Brown was born in 1978, this amazing event caused shock, surprise, elation in some quarters, but also great fears. I think it's hard for us to remember now just how shocking it was.''

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/men-obsolete-in-testtube-world/1384499.aspx

Ohio Christians keeping 'Christ' in Christmas

Two women from Ohio are spearheading a billboard campaign that encourages people to say "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays."

Last year, Joanne Brown and her friend, Linda Bennett, noticed that employees at many retail stores did not say "Merry Christmas." The pair, part of a group called the Merry Christmas Billboard Ladies, raised money to put up billboards encouraging people to say "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays."

This year, Brown and Bennett are raising money to place billboards that say "I miss hearing you say Merry Christmas" and "It's OK to say Merry Christmas." Both billboards are signed "Jesus."

During an interview on the Fox News Network, Bennett said the campaign is one way to combat America's rampant political correctness. "We were just trying to see how [we would] feel if it was our birthday and people started saying 'happy holiday' instead of 'happy birthday,'" she explains. "We feel that Jesus wants to be honored with Merry Christmas."

So far, ten of the billboards have been erected in Ohio. Brown and Bennett have received interest in similar campaigns from people in other states.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=350582

'Responsible' online pornographers - an oxymoron

The Family Online Safety Institute has apparently struck a sweetheart deal with pornographers. Pornography companies have the opportunity to become associate members of the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI). Bob Peters of Morality in Media explains how the system works. "FOSI says to the pornographers, 'We want you to use our rating system so that parents can block you out if they choose to do so. In return, we are going to recognize you as responsible online companies,'" he notes.

According to a Morality in Media news release, an associate member should exist to support FOSI's two objectives -- "protecting children from potentially harmful material and protecting free speech on the Internet." Peters calls it an oxymoron that pornography companies could qualify to protect children, even if they use explicit labels through the Internet Content Rating Association.

"Now in my opinion, pornographers -- and particularly the hardcore pornographers -- aren't responsible whether they use the rating system or don't use it," Peters contends.

Moreover, he notes that a person can circumvent the system and access the pornography, including children. "You know we talk about going to a place where you'll shovel coal for the rest of your eternity -- and that's where I think this particular bargain was birthed," he concludes.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=350490

Youth Violence and Family Breakdown

The Institute of Marriage and Family Canada is trying to get their fellow Canadians to take the data on family breakdown seriously.

Read about it here. (You may need to hit "Run Program."

Catholic in Congress Praised for Being Great Dad

WASHINGTON, D.C., DEC. 11, 2008 (Zenit.org).- The first Vietnamese-American member of the U.S. Congress is winning praise for more than just his political views; the Knights of Columbus have pointed him out as a "newsworthy dad."

Anh Joseph Cao was recently elected to the House of Representatives for Louisiana. A young escapee from Vietnam and a former seminarian, the Congressman affirms that today, his family is the center of his life.

"I could not live without my wife and two daughters" the 41-year-old Republican told the Fathers for Good Web site. "To watch [my daughters] grow into beautiful girls has been the joy of my life.

"With a personal history that has led him from escaping his homeland in 1975, to years studying to be a Jesuit priest, and then working as an attorney in New Orleans, Cao said that his Catholic faith has been a force of stability."

My faith has been the center of my life all these years," he said. "I go to church almost every day to discern what God is calling me to do with my life."

Fabulously Observant: The Jewish case against same-sex marriage

By David Benkof

Just as many Jews tend to gravitate to liberal positions on a variety of issues, the segment of the Jewish community favoring same-sex marriage has grown larger and louder in the past few years. That's unfortunate, because if any issue has a "Jewish view," it's this one, and that view opposes redefining marriage. Some reasons:

• First and foremost, same-sex marriage is against Jewish law. "So what?" many have argued, "we don't try to ban pork or outlaw spending money on Shabbat." But unlike those two transgressions, the prohibition of same-sex marriages - both religious and civil - is a Noahide law, as explained in the Talmud (Masechet Hullin). That means the ban on same-sex marriage, like the bans on adultery and murder, also apply to non-Jews. We therefore have a strong interest in rejecting such nuptials, regardless of the religion of the participants.

Even the increasingly liberal Conservative movement is on the record favoring man-woman marriage. Every paper on homosexuality ever passed by that movement's Law Committee has either rejected same-sex marriage or taken no stance on it. Every paper embracing same-sex marriage has been voted down.Rather than accusing people who support the traditional definition of marriage of imposing Jewish law on people of other faiths, it's more useful to understand that support as an attempt to get the US government to reflect our values, which people on every side of every issue try to do all the time.

• What gays call "marriage" is not the same thing as what Jews call marriage, especially regarding fidelity. While some same-sex relationships, especially among lesbians, are sexually exclusive, many male couples, including those in "marriages," have arrangements with each other that allow for mutually agreed upon infidelity under certain circumstances. Some couples will allow a partner to cheat while he is out of town, or as long as both partners are present, or - and I am not making this up - as long as the infidelity is on the couch and not the bed.

While some biblical characters were polygamous, monogamy has been the rule for Ashkenazi Jews since Rabbenu Gershom's edict a thousand years ago banning polygamy. Even if a Jewish husband and wife decide that the wife can have sex with other men as long as it's on a couch or whatever, that's still adultery and unacceptable under Jewish law as well as our community's social norms.

Gay marriage would still harm the meaning of marriage in society if gay infidelity was private. However, many gay couples are quite open about their mutually approved "adultery." Last summer, after I wrote an opinion piece about this problem in the San Francisco Chronicle, I received more than a dozen letters from gays and lesbians defending their right to define marriage as a non-exclusive relationship. One of these letters was so brazen, it's worth quoting at length. Like the others, it was signed by name (Richard Dupler of Oakland, California):"I've been with my partner 10.5 years... We have not been sexually exclusive, ever. The relationship has been open, and honest, from the start.

"We are getting married August 17, and I doubt seriously that the sexual part of our relationship will change. Just because we're calling it marriage, doesn't mean we have to conform to widespread ideals and beliefs about marriage, we only have to follow the law. What works for some likely doesn't work for others.

"This freedom to marry, which we take very seriously, should also mean we are free to define that marriage the way we see fit."

I'm not suggesting we punish the entire gay community for the non-monogamy of some of its members. I'm saying we shouldn't redefine marriage to include adultery by mutual consent - a very rare arrangement among heterosexuals, but something that barely fazes gays. Even gays and lesbians in monogamous relationships tend to see nothing wrong with consensual adultery, even when a couple has children.

Don't believe me? Ask some gay people you know what they think of marriages in which each partner is openly and publicly allowed sexual indiscretions as long as certain rules are followed. Then ask some straight people. I am confident you will find the same gulf in attitudes I have found.

• Same-sex marriage hurts children. Gays can be wonderful parents, but children whenever possible should have both a mother and a father. Think of it this way: A lesbian can be a very good mother, but she cannot be a good father. Jewish tradition specifies different roles for mothers and fathers. For example, the Talmud states that a father should teach his child to swim. The Midrash says mothers should introduce their children to Torah. There are also intangible notions of what it means for a girl to become a woman, and how a man should treat a woman, for example, that one learns best from one's mother and father.

However, under same-sex marriage in Massachusetts and California, legislatures and courts have required adoption agencies and fertility doctors to ignore whether a family provides both a mother and a father in providing services. In Massachusetts, in fact, if an adoption agency gives mother-father families even a slight tiebreaker preference, it faces being shut down by the government.

The more same-sex marriage succeeds, the quicker the idea will take hold throughout the government and society that favoring man-woman marriage is a kind of bigotry akin to racism. Teachers will be punished if they teach that marriage is a union of a man and a woman. Students who express distaste for same-sex marriage and state that they only want an opposite-sex spouse may even be reprimanded for being closed-minded.

I know that liberal Jews in particular are unlikely to be persuaded by some of the arguments above. But I hope everyone can agree that they are legitimate arguments, and that those of us who agree with Judaism's prescription for man-woman marriage are not narrow-minded bigots trying to make gays into second-class citizens. Rather, we are individuals using our free-speech rights and our votes to help shape a society that is consistent with our values.

DavidBenkof@aol.com

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1228728145856&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Diary of a nameless, faceless egg donor

Jennifer Lahl interviews Jane Doe.

Lahl – Yesterday the Wall Street Journal had a story on, " Ova Time: Women Line Up to Donate Eggs -- for Money". This seems like a good time to remind people of the dangers of egg donation and tell your story. You made the decision to sell your eggs at a time when you weren't sure if or when you would have your own children. What seemed at the time a nice thing for you to do didn't turn out so well. How many eggs were taken from you and what do you know about any pregnancies which resulted from your donation.

Jane - They got between 50-60 eggs from me. The couple was Asian and wanted an Asian egg donor. They retained rights to all my eggs and any subsequent embryos created using my eggs and the husband's sperm. What little I know was that there was a pregnancy and perhaps twins. I didn't follow-up any further than that. The woman had premature ovarian failure therefore she needed to use an egg donor.

Lahl – Tell me what medications were used, how you were instructed in administration of the drugs and any short or long term risks, or problems you should look out for.

Jane - I believe they used the regimen described in your talk – I gave myself Lupron injections for synchronization with the woman who would get my eggs, followed by stimulation to mature the eggs, then an injection to release the eggs for the retrieval process. The instruction was done by the egg donation agency. None of the women were health care professionals. I searched the internet and medical literature and didn't find any evidence of long-term side effects. I was warned about possible effects such as ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, but they were very confident that nothing would go wrong based on anecdotal and personal experience. I was told they never had any complications. Some of the women were donors themselves in their 30s and had gone through 5-6 cycles already. I don't recall them telling me anything about future infertility or cancers, only that they never heard of anything going wrong.

A few days before the eggs were to be retrieved I had to fly to the fertility clinic to have lab work and an ultrasound to see how many follicles were developing. Two days prior I took medication to mature the eggs. I think Clomiphene was one of the drugs. They stimulated me too much based on the lab work, even though I didn't have severe "hyperstimulation syndrome" symptoms. They were measuring the progesterone or estrogen levels and it was way over the target--they even commented on this. I requested they back off on the stimulation but they were adamant that in order to have a good result, I needed to follow the protocol. I don't think they took into account ethnicity or weight in their protocol, which is just ludicrous. I injected myself with the last medication that night to help release the eggs. For the retrieval, they did inform me of possible negative outcomes such as bleeding and infection.

Everything went well until the retrieval. I woke up in the recovery room and realized I was weak and dizzy and could not get up easily. I went to the bathroom and I felt extremely nauseous and dizzy. They gave me more IV fluids because they thought I had side effects from anesthesia and low blood pressure. I then started having trouble breathing. They did an ultrasound and said there was nothing wrong with me. They kept trying to get me to go home, which would mean a plane flight, but I could not even stand up. The pain in my belly got worse and I was convinced I was bleeding internally. It felt like there was something irritating my diaphragm and preventing me from breathing. It was a burning sort of feeling in my chest and abdomen. My blood pressure was low and they gave me medication to increase it. Later they admitted me to the hospital and tried to get me to eat. I could not even sit up without extreme distress and painful, difficult breathing. I had only been evaluated by the fertility doctor and the ultrasound tech. I was pretty sure I was going to die. They took my blood pressure and I remember them calling out "40/20", but it was documented as much higher, around 60/30 in my medical records. They decided to take me in for emergency surgery. As it turned out, the fertility doctor had punctured an artery somewhere near my ovary. They did an exploratory laparotomy and flipped through my intestines several times before they found the small but gushing bleeder, and cauterized it. I woke up on a respirator in the ICU and stayed there for a day or so. I knew that bleeding was a risk, but to ignore my obvious signs of bleeding for 6 hours and then try several times to put me on a plane home -- that could have killed me! I got 3 units of blood transfused. Afterwards, the doctor kept reiterating that it was my fault and that this has never happened to her, in the hundreds and hundreds of times she's done this. The overall statistics for bleeding was 1:3000, she said. Then she checked me for bleeding disorders that I knew I did not have. I had a lot of problems with equilibrium after this and was unable to walk long distances after 3 days. Luckily I had a friend with me at the time and eventually I got home.
Read entire interview.

Abortionist faces nine years in prison

California abortionist Bertha Bugarin is going to prison.

For at least five years, Operation Rescue has been working to shut down 11 abortion clinics owned by 48-year-old Bertha Bugarin in Los Angeles and San Diego. According to an Operation Rescue press release, Bugarin preyed on the Hispanic community and endangered women's lives by posing as a doctor.

She was finally indicted and has pled guilty to nine felony counts of performing abortions without a medical license. Troy Newman who heads Operation Rescue, says eight of her staff abortionists have been impounded as well.

"Every single one of these abortionists has lost their [sic] medical licenses. A couple of them are in jail," he contends. "And the abortion clinic owner, because she was forced to go out and try to find another abortionist and couldn't find one, she was actually doing abortions herself even though she didn't have a medical license."

Bugarin faces up to nine years in prison for her convictions. Newman calls it a victory for the pro-life movement. "My prayer and my hope is that every abortion clinic will close down because you cannot make a clean or safe abortion," he adds.

Bugarin's sentencing will begin January 20, 2009.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Legal/Default.aspx?id=349122

Abortion clinics -- 'modern-day King Herod'

A Planned Parenthood clinic in Indiana is being investigated for providing abortions to underage girls and failing to report incidences of statutory rape.

Katy Walker of American Life League tells OneNewsNow why it has not been a good public relations week for the Indiana abortion provider.

"At first they were exposed for offering Christmas gift certificates that can be used for abortions. Now, I mean, that's pretty disgusting anyway you look at it, especially at Christmastime. It's the modern-day King Herod slaughtering the innocents," she contends. "And the second thing that came out this week is that Planned Parenthood was exposed for protecting statutory rapists."

The female staff member responsible for suggesting ways to cover up the rape was suspended, and Walker was asked if that was satisfactory punishment. "Oh, absolutely not," she says. "How many other Planned Parenthood employees are doing the same thing?"

Walker urges prosecutors to launch an investigation of Planned Parenthood and then fully prosecute violators of the law.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=349088

Newsweek accused of 'journalistic malpractice'

A conservative media analyst says a Newsweek cover story suggesting that the Bible condones same-sex "marriage" is evidence the publication is a "fully owned subsidiary of the gay rights movement."

The article by Newsweek's religion editor Lisa Miller contends that "Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be [civilly and religiously] married -- and a number of excellent reasons why they should." The story declares that "religious objections to gay marriage are not rooted in the Bible at all...but in custom and tradition."

Bob Knight, director of the Culture and Media Institute, believes there is ample evidence of media bias on the marriage issue, but calls this example one of the worst he has seen. Knight says Newsweek published a "cartoon version of Scripture that is a gay activist's dream."

"It would be one thing if people promoting the homosexual agenda just said, 'Look, the Bible says it's wrong. We don't buy into the Bible's authority, and so we don't agree with you.' But to try to take the Bible and make it say something it flat-out does not say is journalistic malpractice," he argues. "You're talking about the religion editor at Newsweek magazine and a cover piece twisting scripture, using every gay talking point out there without any effective rebuttal."

According to Knight, the article is an attack on the authority of scripture, evangelical Christians, and absolute truth.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=347656

Moral relativism - the 'troubling' future of America's children

A new study compiled by the Josephson Institute -- a California-based ethics organization -- highlights the problem of dishonesty among America's school-age children.

More than 29,000 students were randomly surveyed for the study -- and Dr. Bill Maier, clinical psychologist at Focus on the Family, says the results are troubling. The study reveals that 64 percent of those surveyed said they had cheated on a test, 36 percent claimed to have used the Internet to plagiarize their school work, 42 percent lied to save money, and overall 93 percent claimed they were satisfied with their personal ethics. On top of that, 30 percent admitted to shoplifting.

"I think this is very troubling, and it's just one more indication of how relativism has infected our society and negatively influenced the behavior of young people," Maier notes. "[W]e've seen over the last generation or so a move to question absolute truth and certainly to question biblical truth -- and it really doesn't surprise me that now we are starting to see the result in the behavior of our young people."

Another upsetting aspect Maier points to is that these students are the future of America. "These are our future leaders, our future business people, our future parents and spouses," he laments. "If they are willing to lie and to cheat and to steal, it doesn't bode well for the future of our society."

Maier also notes that the Christian realm is not impervious to this moral relativism-type of mindset. "Unfortunately we do see these problems in the Christian community, and I think a big reason for that is many Christian families are not living out their faith and don't really understand their own Christian worldview," he contends. "George Barna's research indicates very clearly that, unfortunately, [only] a very small percentage of born-again Christians...believe that there is a concept of absolute truth. That should be shocking to us." Barna is founder of The Barna Group, which monitors trends in the Christian community nationwide.

The fight against the mindset of moral relativism begins at home, according to Maier. He believes parents should start teaching their children at a very young age that money, power, and success are not the most important aspects of life, and that what really matters is a person's character. Maier points to the book of Galatians where the Apostle Paul talks about the fruits of the spirit that the true Christian should exhibit. The psychologist says parents should be teaching and showing, by example, things like love, joy, patience, gentleness, kindness, and self-control. He adds that they should also exhibit characteristics such as integrity, honesty, and service to others.

Another area that Maier says parents need to be diligent in is exposure to media. He contends the moral relativism mindset permeates music, television, Internet, and other such mediums, and that the only way to combat that attack is by becoming grounded in the scriptures and returning to a true biblical ethic.

Focus on the Family has launched an effort called The Truth Project, which is designed to equip individuals with an understanding of who God is and why humans exist. It also seeks to expose the truth behind many of society's vices such as sexual promiscuity and homosexuality. The Truth Project is set up for adult small-group study.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=341232

Homosexual Bible set for market

Gay Bible angers Christians

A gay version of the Bible, in which God says it is better to be gay than straight, is to be published by an American film producer.

New Mexico-based Revision Studios will publish The Princess Diana Bible – so named because of Diana's "many good works", it says – online at princessdianabible.com in spring 2009. A preview of Genesis is already available, in which instead of creating Adam and Eve, God creates Aida and Eve.

"And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Aida, and she slept: and he took one of her ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from woman, made he another woman, and brought her unto the first. And Aida said, 'This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of me. Therefore shall a woman leave her mother, and shall cleave unto her wife: and they shall be one flesh.' And they were both naked, the woman and her wife, and were not ashamed."

The film studio said it would also adapt and direct the revised Bible as a two-part mini-series, The Gay Old Testament and The Gay New Testament, once it is completed.

"There are many different versions of the Bible; I don't see why we can't have one," said Max Mitchell, who directed the science fiction comedy Horror in the Wind, in which an airborne formula invented by two biogeneticists reverses the world's sexual orientation.

"I got the idea for the Princess Diana Bible from Horror In The Wind," he added. "After the world becomes gay, religious people create The Princess Diana Bible, which says that gay is right and straight is a sin. Then they burn all the King James Bibles."

The move has already provoked upset among Christians, with the blogger Douglas Howe at the Idol Chatter site describing it as "inspired by a political agenda and one person's desire to contort not only the text but the very context of it to suit his own perspective".

There was also criticism on Mitchell's Princess Diana Bible site, where one commentator said the choice of title was "very disrespectful to the late Princess Diana … It's just one more thing to link her to what many people believe is immoral. Sad, very sad indeed."

But Mitchell said: "There are 116 versions of the Bible, why is any of them better than ours?"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/01/princess-diana-gay-bible

Discussion on the Newsweek article

Find it here: http://www.onenewsnow.com/Blog/Default.aspx?id=347638

Newsweek: Bible OK with same-sex 'marriage'

Newsweek's religion editor has written a story suggesting there's no biblical prohibition against homosexual "marriage" and actually quite a bit of scripture that supports it.

In her article, Lisa Miller claims that "traditional marriage," as currently defined by moral and social conservatives today, did not exist in biblical times. "First, while the Bible and Jesus say many important things about love and family, neither explicitly defines marriage as between one man and one woman," she writes. "And second, as the examples above illustrate, no sensible modern person wants marriage -- theirs or anyone else's -- to look in its particulars anything like what the Bible describes."

She had previously cited Abraham's adultery with his concubine Hagar as well as Jacob's two wives, with whom he had his sons, the leaders of the twelve tribes of Israel. OneNewsNow turned to Matt Barber at Liberty Counsel for his assessment. "This is biblical relativism on steroids," he contends. "You know, scripture says woe to those who call evil good and good evil, and I say woe to Newsweek for even printing this drivel."

He adds that the notion that the Bible somehow condones or approves homosexuality, much less so-called same-sex marriage, is patently absurd and borders on blasphemy.

"Christ was very clear as to marriage. He said it is between a man and a woman," Barber points out. "The Apostle Paul in the New Testament points out that homosexuality is one of the sexual sins among which, if people engage in that sin, they cannot, quote, 'inherit the kingdom of God.'"

Barber adds that the Newsweek article represents biblical revisionism.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=346636

Liberal Episcopals vote for more homosexual clergy

The Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles has joined seven other dioceses in passing a resolution asking the church to let lesbians as well as homosexual men become bishops.

The vote at the diocesan convention rejected the Episcopal Church's de facto moratorium on electing homosexual bishops since its 2003 consecration of Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, who lives with his same-sex partner. The resolution will be considered at the Episcopal Church's national convention next July.

The Los Angeles diocese also expressed support for homosexual "marriage" with the creation of the "Sacramental Blessing for a Life-long Covenant."

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Church/Default.aspx?id=346018

California's ruling is no good for children

This is late-coming, obviously, but it's still a good argument.

--Reflexively, most of my fellow gays and lesbians embraced the Aug. 18 California Supreme Court decision requiring doctors to inseminate lesbians even if it violates the doctor's conscience. Such is the formulaic GayThink analysis of any issue: When gay equality comes into conflict with anything else, no matter how important--such as the welfare of children or religious freedom--gay equality wins.

But if you scratch beneath the surface and examine lesbian and gay cultural attitudes away from the political context, it becomes clear that deep down the sympathies of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Americans belong with the aggrieved doctors in the California case.

In the abstract, gays and lesbians tend to think of people like the doctors for Women's Care Medical Group as "haters" who are discriminating against people because of their sexual orientation. Because their religious beliefs lead to unacceptable outcomes (gasp, unequal treatment!), they should be forced to violate their consciences or to find another profession.
But in this specific case, the doctors were refusing to help a couple bring a baby into the world without a father. They probably believe, as I do, that children need fathers, and that deliberately denying your own child a father is selfish and cruel. The potential mothers could have chosen to adopt, and I would praise them if they did. But instead, they demanded that the doctors help them make a baby without a dad. The fact that children need fathers is a concept gays and lesbians have quite a bit of sympathy for, if their reactions to some popular phenomena of the summer of 2008 are to be believed.

First, gays and lesbians have embraced the presidential candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama, despite the fact that one of his consistent messages is that children need fathers. His book, "Dreams From My Father," recounts the longing he had in his youth for a father figure and the masculine racial authenticity he felt his father should have provided him. Although he spent barely more than a month with his dad, Obama makes it clear in the book that his father's absence was a challenge and an obstacle as he grew up. Do gay Obama fans think all their hero needed was a good lesbian of color to help raise him? Isn't it obvious that part of the message of Obama's life story is that children need their dads and suffer when they don't have one?

Then there's the summer movie musical hit--"Mamma Mia!"--which gay men, especially, flocked to because of the great songs with a lavender vibe such as "Dancing Queen," the gay character played by Colin Firth, the showstopper performance by gay icon Christine Baranski, and the sexy number on the beach involving a shirtless Dominic Cooper.

But few gay reviewers paid any attention to the main theme of the musical--that girls need their fathers. In the film, the character of Sophie invites the three men her mother's diary suggests could be her dad to her wedding, and at one point she even tells her mother off for having raised her without a father. Do the gay fans of "Mamma Mia!" think Sophie would have felt nothing was missing if only she had grown up with two mothers?

Interestingly, some lesbian parenting manuals make it clear that children are going to long for their missing fathers. Realistically, the 2003 "Lesbian Parenting Book" has a whole section on "father fantasies." Other books provide lots of guidance on how to answer children's questions about why they don't have a father. Obviously, the writers and readers of these books (and Barack Obama and "Mamma Mia!" fans) are aware that many, many children feel deprived of something important when they don't have a dad.

I accept that some gays and lesbians feel that despite that sense, it's still important for lesbians to be able to make a baby without a father. But are they really so overwhelmingly in the right that we should use the power of the state to shut down the medical practices of doctors who agree with Barack Obama and "Mamma Mia!" and the common sense of thousands of years of human history that says that, whenever possible, children need both a mother and a father?

It seems to me that even the biggest supporter of gay rights who really thinks about it will realize that we should be able to live in a country where people who believe children deserve both a mother and a father can perform their jobs without fearing that the government will shut them down.

David Benkof is the author (as David Bianco) of "Gay Essentials: Facts for Your Queer Brain."

http://www.fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2008/082008/08312008/404640/printer_friendly

Do You Need a Marital Checkup?

Study: An Annual Tuneup Could Improve Your Relationship
When most people hear the word checkup, they might think of semi-annualdental visits or physicals, but it turns out an examination might also helpimprove the health of your marriage.
Psychologist James Cordova is convinced annual marital counseling canimprove relationships, and he said a recent study he led proves it.

"Essentially, what we've discovered over time is that marital health, reallyis a health concern. The qualities of a person's marriage and the extent towhich they are doing well in that marriage have a dramatic effect onphysical health and mental health," said Cordova, an associate professor ofpsychology at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.

The Study

In a two-year National Institutes of Health study, Cordova followed 68couples, who varied in age, for six months. On average the pairs had beentogether for 15 years, with the husbands' ages around 47 and the wives' 44.

Half of the married couples were given marriage checkups, which includedtherapy once a year, and the other pairs received no therapy at all.

Cordova found that the couples who participated in the two-session checkupintervention, which included completing a battery of questions andface-to-face assessment, fared better.

"Marital satisfaction improves for couples who have been through counselingonce a year, while control couples didn't improve at all," Cordova said."People that have been through the marriage checkup are improving in allkinds of ways in comparison to couples who haven't."

Participants David Bayer and his wife Kay said they've seen a difference intheir marriage since they joined the study. The two, who have been marriedfor 23 years, said they decided to participate because they were worriedabout the future.

"We had two really close friends get divorced and it sort of hit us whenthey got divorced: 'What happened to them?' So, we're trying to improve onwhat we saw go wrong," Kay Bayer said.
The Bayers said their biggest weakness was communication, but both havelearned to find more effective ways to talk to each other because of thestudy.

Marriage Concerns

"You don't realize the little things that may affect your marriage," KayBayer said. "[I was] learning to speak more clearly to him so he couldunderstand where I was coming from. I tend not to think before I speak onsome issues."

The Bayers' experience was typical of what other couples who took part inthe checkups found, Cordova said.

"They feel more intimate in their relationship," Cordova said of the coupleswho engaged in therapy. "They feel more accepting of each other, more ableto accept one another's warts and all. They're more active in takingdeliberate care of their marriage."

Common Complaints

Cordova said the most common complaint he hears from couples involves notbeing able to fit their marriages into a hectic lifestyle.

"[The] things we help them with [are] to notice that it's an issue, tonotice they're suffering from it and figure out ways to make time," he said.

Cordova said he hopes more couples will focus on what's right in theirmarriages and build on those strengths.

Click here for more information about Cordova's study:http://tinyurl.com/5o89bu

Celebs make musical mockery of Prop. victory

An online musical takes a direct shot at Christians, especially those who believe homosexual conduct is a sin.

Actor Jack Black is responsible for the video called "Prop. 8 - The Musical" that was produced after California's Proposition 8 passed, overturning the state Supreme Court ruling legalizing homosexual "marriage." Dr. Gary Cass of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission has seen the video and understands its purpose.

"[T]hey portray Christ as essentially condoning a very wicked view of human sexuality, and insinuating that Christians are picking and choosing the verses that they want to pick and choose," he explains.

According to Cass, the video distorts the meaning of scripture. He calls it a cynical, sarcastic hatchet job. Since the video went public, Dr. Cass has been flooded with phone calls. "Actually we've had to stop answering the phones because the tone of the messages that we are getting are the most vile and obscene kinds of calls that I've ever received in all my years of doing activism," he notes.

The short video used an all-star cast of Hollywood celebrities to sell its view of Christianity.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Politics/Default.aspx?id=346556

'Day without a gay'

'Day without a gay': Supporters of gay marriage encouraged to call in sick to work to protest Prop 8

Forget that phoney stomach bug or make-believe migraine.

Same-sex marriage supporters are urging people to skip work by "calling in gay" on Wednesday as part of their campaign to overturn Proposition 8.

The first ever "Day Without a Gay" is being organized to show the nation relies on homosexuals and to raise awareness of the drive to legalize gay and lesbian marriage.

"We are all for a boycott if that's what brings about a sense of community for people," said Sean Hetherington, a comedian and personal trainer who came up with the idea with his boyfriend.
While organizers are encouraging people to skip work, they are also urging them to use their gay day effectively and spend time volunteering.

"You can take away from the economy and give back in other ways," Hetherington added.
Day Without a Gay will coincide with International Human Rights Day, and the idea for a gay workers boycott is modelled on similar stoppages by Latino immigrants.

Hetherington and his partner, Aaron Hartzler, came up with the idea after reading that furious gay-rights activists were calling for day-long strike to protest the passage of the Proposition 8 in November.

The ballot referendum reversed the state's previous decision to allow gay marriage.
The couple thought it would be more beneficial to encourage people to give their time to a non-profit organization. They they have received hundreds of emails from people looking for volunteers during the "Day Without a Gay."

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2008/12/09/2008-12-09_day_without_a_gay_supporters_of_gay_marr.html

Their website - www.daywithoutagay.org - has also received more than 100,000 hits in recent weeks.

Not everyone should "call in gay," Hetherington said, urging high school students to stay in class and promising no retribution for people who decide to go to work.

The Economics of Divorce

The continuing decline of the economy is unfortunately taking a toll on so many different areas of our lives. The news headlines are voraciously tackling every possible angle—each day revealing another area affected by the recession.

This past Sunday, msnbc.com reported on perhaps one of the most unfortunate side effects of this financial crunch. It seems that many couples are opting to remain married instead of divorcing—they simply can't afford to divorce. Nationwide, the numbers of divorce filings are dropping.

Pamela Smock, a researcher at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, says that this does "not bode well for all sorts of families. It could keep unhappy couples together."

Jeff Grumley, a marriage counselor from Illinois, said he had seen a 25 percent jump in business in recent months as couples tried to save their marriages, and their money. "I think people feel desperate," Grumley said.

The way I see it, the incalculable damage caused by this phenomenon will be long-lasting. Think of all those poor couples who are undergoing marriage counseling: chances are that a good number of them will end up resolving their differences, leading them to stay married long after the economy recovers!

Let's get serious now.

Thinking rationally, it's difficult for most of us to understand people who would divorce, just because "they can afford it," rather than try to patch things up through therapy. But when egos and feelings get involved, many people – even those who are normally wise and intelligent – stop being rational. Sometimes a financial deterrent is what does the trick.

Our Sages recognized this truth about human nature when they instituted the ketubah—the marriage contract. This contract, whose centerpiece is the husband's obligation to financially compensate his wife in the event of divorce, was intended to make divorce a financial trouble on the husband, so that "it should not be light in his eyes to divorce her."

The economy will rebound. It always does. In the famous Biblical story of Joseph in Egypt, the years of plenty served to sustain and feed the years of famine. But just as the booming years provide a nest-egg that cushion the lean ones, the lessons learned during the lean years provide perspective and clarity for the financial good times.

Empathy, financial prudence and prayer. The realization that we are not completely in control over our destiny; we must always have faith in a Higher Being who is the ultimate power. All these positive traits that we cultivate during difficult times—we must make sure they carry over when these times pass.

And, of course, marriage is most sacred. Termination of a marriage should only be considered after every single possible solution has been exhausted.

Maybe you can afford it in terms of dollars. But the destruction of a family has no pricetag.

www.chabad.org/blogs/blog.asp?aid=772288&jewish=The-Economics-of-Divorce.html

Catholic Bishop: "Go Right Ahead and Arrest Me" Rather than Obey Freedom of Choice Act

ARLINGTON, Virginia, December 2, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Bishop Paul Loverde of the diocese of Arlington weighed in on the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) last week, saying that if he oversaw a Catholic hospital he would neither close the facility nor allow it to perform abortions if FOCA were to become law.

Though there are currently no Catholic hospitals in the Arlington diocese, the bishop spoke defiantly against FOCA, which would force all health care providers to procure abortions at any stage of development, regardless of their moral or religious objection.

"I would say, 'Yeah, I'm not going to close the hospital, you're going to arrest me, go right ahead," Bishop Loverde told a group of mostly young adults at a diocesan event, according to a CNS report.

"You'll have to drag me out, go right ahead. I'm not closing this hospital, we will not perform abortions, and you can go take a flying leap.'"

At a 2007 Planned Parenthood conference, Obama promised that one of his highest priorities as president would be to pass FOCA, rendering illegal all state and federal limits on abortion. This would include abortion clinic regulations, parental notification requirements, bars to taxpayer abortion funding, and the partial–birth abortion ban, in addition to laws protecting doctors' rights to conscientious objection.

"It's quite a title, let me tell you," Bishop Loverde said of the Freedom of Choice Act. "It's a misnomer, it's neither free nor choice, so I don't know where they got the name of the act, because it's just crazy, because it has no freedom, and it has no choice."

Catholic and pro-life voices have raised the alarm on the unprecedented danger the bill represents for unborn Americans, with Catholic officials particularly concerned that U.S. Catholic hospitals will be forced to close en masse in the face of mandatory abortion.

Chicago Cardinal Francis George, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), issued in November a statement on behalf of all Catholic bishops warning Obama that "aggressive pro-abortion policies, legislation and executive orders will permanently alienate tens of millions of Americans, and would be seen by many as an attack on the free exercise of their religion."

One unnamed senior Vatican official recently told TIME magazine that the passage of FOCA would mean "the equivalent of a war" between Mr. Obama and the Catholic Church.

http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/dec/08120209.html

Overturn Prop 8?

by Jennifer Morse

All friends of democracy should be troubled that the same court whose decision to nullify a law passed by the state legislature that was overruled by a majority of California voters in the last election is now being asked to override the decision of the people. Gay rights activists are asking the state’s Supreme Court to overturn voter-approved Proposition 8 that limited marriage to one man and one woman on a technicality. The judiciary should decline this invitation to lawlessness.

The whole point of having a ballot initiative process is to allow voters the opportunity to take matters into their own hands when they feel ill-served by their public officials.

Proposition 8 originated in San Diego, in the aftermath of the City Council’s fall 2007 decision to join the amicus briefs in the cases that ultimately imposed same sex marriage. The San Diego City Council went through the motions of holding public hearings. After several hours of public testimony on both sides, City Council members pulled out and read statements in support of joining the amicus briefs, statements that were obviously prepared well in advance of any public testimony.

Citizens realized that the hearings were a sham.

That episode of being ignored and indeed, insulted by elected officials stimulated the movement that became Proposition 8. A group of San Diego citizens realized that they had to take matters into their own hands to protect their values.

The Proposition 8 campaign was a genuine grass roots effort, with an estimated 100,000 volunteers. This was an outpouring of citizen participation, precisely what the Progressive Era founders of the initiative process hoped for. “Yes on 8” was supported largely by small contributions: over 70,000 individuals contributed.

The opponents of Proposition 8 claim that it is a revision, not an amendment, to the constitution. Now is a fine time to tell us! This measure faced litigation before it was even put on the ballot. The two sides argued over the voter information guide, differing over what the initiative would actually do. That language was amended as a result of that process.

The Attorney General changed the language of the title of the amendment itself. The initiative was originally called simply, “Limit on Marriage Constitutional Amendment.” After Jerry Brown got finished, the ballot language read, “Eliminates the rights of same sex couples to marry.” That change in wording probably cost several percentage points of voters, as Brown surely anticipated. If the gay lobby seriously believed that initiative was a “revision” instead of an “amendment,” they should have said so in July, before both sides spent over $70 million fighting it out in the electoral process.

It is impossible to escape the conclusion that this is a desperate, last-ditch effort, by sore losers. The plain fact of the matter is that the “Yes on Proposition 8” campaign won, in a David and Goliath type fight. The entire political Establishment, the Judiciary, the legislature, and the governor opposed the amendment. All the daily newspapers opposed it. The gay lobby was also backed by academia and Hollywood. In spite of all that, the public sided with traditional man woman marriage, by approximately the same margin as President-elect Barack Obama: 52% to 48%.

Anyone who dislikes the outcome is free to put another amendment on the ballot. That is, as long as the Supreme Court does not debase the initiative process by overturning the results of a fair election.

California’s citizen-driven initiative process is one of the jewels of direct democracy. The Court should not emasculate that process.

http://www.acuf.org/issues/issue121/081203pol.asp

Explanation of the Prop 8 legal challenge

Unless you've been living in a cave in Afghanistan, you know that Proposition 8 won at the ballot box and is being challenged in court. I am often asked, "What is going on? What does it all mean?" Ruth Institute's Academic Advisory Board Member Helen Alvare wrote this very clear explanation of the issues involved in the legal challenge to Prop 8.

A few days after its passage Proposition 8 was challenged by same-sex “marriage” proponents, on the grounds that it was a “revision” to the state’s Constitution, and not an “amendment.” This is important because the ballot initiative process cannot be used to “revise” the state’s constitution. According to Sections 1 and 2 of Article XVIII of the California Constitution, revisions can only be made by a process which requires approval of two-thirds of both houses of the state legislature. Amendments, on the other hand, according to Section 3 of Article XVIII are allowed to be made by ballot initiative.

Of course then, the million dollar question is what marks the difference between a revision and an amendment? Needless to say, supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage -- whose petitions and amicus curiae letters in opposition to such petitions have already been filed with the court -- differ on this point. Both sides reach back into California judicial decisions for the relevant definitional language. They note that constitutional “revisions” alter “underlying principles” of the government and make “far-reaching changes to the nature of our basic governmental plan.” Amendments, on the other hand, make additions or changes within the lines of the original constitution, which, even if they result in “various substantial changes in the operation of the former system, “ add “nothing novel to the existing governmental framework of the state.”

Immediately, you can see that these definitions are not self-evident, let alone self-executing. Both sides, therefore, go further to make arguments based on prior cases in which ballot initiatives were upheld or overturned based upon their judicially-determined status as an amendment or a revision. These are not simple arguments, but their rough outlines can be sketched.
Supporters of Proposition 8 begin by emphasizing the “precious right” of the people to make laws via initiatives, noting in particular that with Proposition 8, the people are merely reinstating the law that prevailed in California since the inception of the state. They also note the brevity of Proposition 8’s language. It is fourteen words and touches one subject; marriage. They contrast this with an earlier ballot initiative determined to be a “revision” which had thousands of words and would have repealed or substantially altered 15 or 25 articles of the constitution, treated four new topics and “substantially curtailed functions of two branches” of the state government. They further argue that Proposition 8 is not like another initiative declared to be a revision – an initiative requiring California to give fewer rights to criminal defendants by conforming to the federal, versus the state, constitution’s interpretation of such persons’ rights. The California Supreme Court found that this was a fundamental transfer of power from a state to the federal government, and a “wholesale diversion” from a stated original purpose of the state’s constitution. ...
Opponents of Proposition 8, on the other hand, argue that it is a “revision” because it severely compromises “the core constitutional principle of equal protection of the law, depriving a vulnerable minority of fundamental rights, inscribing discrimination based on a suspect classification into the Constitution, and destroying the courts’ quintessential power and role of protecting minorities and enforcing the guarantee of equal protection under the law.” They eschew supporters’ reliance on the brevity of Proposition 8’s language, and call its effects to the court’s attention. They write that by “mandating discrimination” and tying courts’ hands from their usual role, the “underlying principles” of the California constitution are discarded and the “system of checks and balances” between governmental branches is fundamentally altered. Within this argument, they make the sub point that “equal protection” is not an isolated or discrete guarantee of the state’s constitution, but a principle that permeates its entire fabric.

Read it all here.

Prop 8 supporters are all idiots

Oh wait. The article didn't exactly say that. Instead it said, "California gay marriage ban driven by religion."

The ban drew its strongest support from both evangelical Christians and voters who didn't attend college, according to results released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California.

Age and race, meanwhile, were not as strong factors as assumed. According to the poll, 56 percent of voters over age 55 and 57 percent of nonwhite voters cast a yes ballot for the gay marriage ban.

People who identified themselves as practicing Christians were highly likely to support the constitutional amendment, with 85 percent of evangelical Christians, 66 percent of Protestants and 60 percent of Roman Catholics favoring it.

The poll also showed that the measure got strong backing from voters who did not attend college (69 percent), voters who earned less than $40,000 a year (63 percent) and Latinos (61 percent).

I wonder if the gay rights activists will start picketing Evangelical churches or Walmarts or Spanish neighborhoods.
Here is the politically interesting part.

The poll found that, overall, 48 percent of voters oppose the idea of making gay marriage legal. Forty-seven percent support it, while 5 percent are undecided.

The results mirror previous PPIC polls from the last three years, suggesting that the $73 million spent for and against the measure did not do much to change public attitudes on allowing gay couples to wed, said survey director Mark Baldassare.

"At no point in time, before or after the election, did we have a majority of Californians saying they supported gay marriage," Baldassare said. "My takeaway from this is that until there is a major shift in public opinion one way or another, it's going to be another issue where voters are deeply divided."

That means that both sides have every incentive to keep trying to persuade the public of their view. We'll be on it!

De-Institutionalizing Marriage

I have been trying to convince people that same sex marriage is not the end of the re-defining marriage road. At the end of the road, is the complete de-institutionalization of marriage. If you define marriage as society's normative context for both sexual activity and child-rearing, it is clear that the push for de-institutionalizing marriage has been under way for some time. The advocates of this view want the Institution Formerly Known as Marriage to be hollowed out, so that nothing but the name remains around an empty shell.
The LA Time just published an article with exactly this view:

Let's fight a larger battle, namely to have government catch up to human behavior. That means recognizing the legitimacy of a wide range of consensual, non-exploitative romantic partnerships, each of which should probably have its own distinct label.

In the U.S., the highest priority should be to give official recognition to cohabitation, which is, in effect, renewable short-term marriage. Married households are now in the minority in the U.S., and cohabitation is increasing, especially among the elderly. Cohabitors are wary of lifetime commitments (in part, perhaps, because such commitments so often prove to be illusory in our culture), but many would probably like the option of getting the same rights and benefits during their cohabitation that married people have.

This would be a step toward stabilizing relationships as they actually occur in 21st century America, and perhaps even toward reducing our disgraceful divorce rate. Trying to force all legitimate partnerships into one defective box -- longterm- oppositesexunion -- denies millions of caring partners the benefits of state recognition and sets up millions of others to fail.

Just to show you that this is not a fringe view, look at the author's credentials:

Robert Epstein is a visiting scholar at UC San Diego and the former editor in chief of Psychology Today.

Take it seriously: there are people for whom same sex marriage does not go far enough, and who see it as a stepping stone toward their ultimate goal of a marriage-free world.

Religious Arguments for and against Prop 8

The San Diego Union Tribune had articles by religious leaders for and against prop 8. here is part of the article in favor of Prop 8, by Bishop Roy Dixon, an African American pastor in southern California.

The next morning, the national news picked up the fact that Proposition 8 was leading and later that it won 52 percent to 48 percent. Then came the angry response from the opposition being expressed in many ways. I asked myself, “If the results were reversed, would we have reacted in the same manner?” The answer is, “NO!”

In 2000, voters passed Proposition 22 with 61 percent of the vote cast, which changed the California Family Code to formally define marriage in this state as between a man and a woman. In 2004, same-sex marriages were performed, which were subsequently judicially annulled. Eventually, this led to a decision announced on May 15, 2008, of the California Supreme Court, which by a 4-3 vote struck down Proposition 22.

I realize that being a senior citizen, I might be missing something and do not understand the present generation.

So, I sought the help of an 18-year-old student to express what I have taught as a pastor and his belief on the subject of same-sex marriage. His response:

“I do not support same-sex marriage and homosexuality. I believe God wants us to keep marriage holy and sacred, between one man and one woman. In the Bible, it states that 'homosexuality is an abomination.' (Leviticus 18:22)”.

Yet, that does not mean we don't want homosexuals to come to our church. We welcome them because all of us have fallen short of the glory of God. God loves all those he created. He does not hate gays, and neither does the church. God is just displeased with the behavior because homosexuality is a sin and against his will.

Here is the Episcopalian view, advocating same sex marriage, and opposing Prop 8.

Many people say they have lots of gay friends, but they just don't approve of their “lifestyle.” In fact, Frank Schubert, the chief strategist who helped raise more than $40 million to pass Proposition 8, says he is not anti-gay, that he has a lesbian sister. I wonder if he celebrated this victory with his sister and her partner?

I feel a bit odd as a straight, white man making the case for gay and lesbian rights. It will seem even odder to some that I do so as a church leader. Nearly half of that $40 million war chest was contributed by Mormons, and we now know the Mormon Church was recruited to the cause by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco. But here's the rub. On Election Day, we voted to take away a right, a right that hurt no one and that did not threaten traditional marriage. In taking that right away, we hurt people and demeaned their humanity.

There are reasonable people who think I am wrong and that the right side prevailed on this issue. However, the ongoing protests so widely criticized by Proposition 8 supporters speak to the level of pain this measure has inflicted. Those who favored the proposition, especially, must own their share of responsibility for that pain.

Dr. Phil Show on Prop 8

http://www.drphil.com/shows/show/1172

Silence 'deafening' over murder by homosexual

A pro-family activist is questioning why there is no outrage over the murder of a college student by a homosexual.

On November 21, William Smithson, 43, of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, was sentenced to life in prison for the September 2006 strangulation murder of 23-year-old Jason Shephard. Smithson, a homosexual, murdered Shephard after slipping him GHB, a date rape drug, then hid the body in the basement of his home. Diane Gramley, president of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania, says it is ironic that homosexuals used the murder ten years ago of Matthew Shepherd to push for hate crimes laws -- yet remain largely silent about the murder of Jason Shephard.

"[It's] a true double standard, because Jason Shephard's murder has been under the radar screen -- and basically, unless you're in Pennsylvania monitoring this kind of stuff, you don't hear about it," says Gramley. "But Matthew Shepherd? Everyone in the country knows who Matthew Shepherd is."

Gramley points out homosexual activists claim Matthew Shepherd was targeted because he was homosexual. But ABC News later revealed that Matthew Shepherd was the victim of a botched robbery -- a finding the media has largely ignored.

The Pennsylvania activist wonders where the outrage is from homosexuals over the 2006 murder. In a press release, she describes the silence from that community as "deafening."

"The murders of both Matthew Shepherd and Jason Shephard were tragic, but one murder is being used by homosexual activists to push their agenda of special rights," she states. "Murder is murder and increased penalties for attacking a specially protected group listed in a hate crimes law is a waste of everyone's time and resources. Such a law creates unequal protection under the law."

She cites two other murders committed by homosexual men that met with relative silence in the homosexual community -- the murder of 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising in Arkansas in 1999, and the 2002 murder of Mary Stachowicz in Chicago.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=338038

Another medical breakthrough with adult stem cells

Bristol University scientists in England have created a living bandage from adult stem cells that will be used to heal common sports injuries. Dr. David Stevens of the Christian Medical & Dental Associations (CMDA) says knee injuries have, until now, been limited to surgical treatments such as removal of torn tissue and transplantation. However, he believes this new medical success could make knee and hip replacements obsolete.

"What they're doing with this living bandage is actually creating a collagen framework, putting adult stem cells from the bone marrow directly on that and using it as a patch in the leg, in the knee joint," Stevens explains. "And what happens is that it grows in and heals a tear that usually is unhealable in many patients."

He adds that researchers have made discovery after discovery for successfully treating illness through adult stem-cell therapies, even at a time when doors are getting ready to open for federal funding of research on human embryos, which are tiny human beings. "

And once again we're reminded that real cures for real people are going to come not through embryonic stem-cell research, which has been very difficult to move forward, but through using the ethical [use of] adult stem cells, which all of us have in our own bodies," the Christian physician concludes.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=335068

Students lie, cheat, steal, but say they're good

Watch the video.

Anger expressed over eHarmony decision

A well-known Christian activist says it's outrageous that the founder of the world's largest online dating site has bowed to the pressure of homosexuals.

eHarmony was founded by Dr. Neil Clark Warren who is a professing Christian. Three years ago, a homosexual filed a lawsuit claiming he was the victim of discrimination when the company refused to accept his advertisement for a same-sex partner. And now eHarmony has agreed to begin matching homosexual couples -- a decision that stemmed from the lawsuit settlement. (See earlier article)

Dr. Ken Hutcherson is pastor of Antioch Bible Church in Redmond, Washington and he is not surprised with the court's ruling against eHarmony. However, Dr. Hutcherson says eHarmony should have taken a stand.

"To bow and say okay…that is turning against God who made his business successful," he argues.

Hutcherson says it is time for Christians to take a stand. "We're simply becoming evan-jellyfish with no spiritual vertebrae…and I'm appalled, I am mad, I am frustrated. I want to fight this and that is something we need to do," he chides.

Hutcherson says the Lord will never bless a business that puts the dollar above God's word. Through a press release, eHarmony said although company officials believed the complaint resulted from an unfair characterization of their business, they ultimately decided it was best to settle the case because of the unpredictable nature of continued litigation.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=335070

Obama keeping promises made to homosexual groups

President-elect Barack Obama is moving swiftly to appoint homosexual activists to positions within his administration.

Politico.com reports that 10 national homosexual organizations are working with the Obama transition team to get more openly homosexual people appointed to the incoming administration. Obama's transition team has also reportedly named at least seven openly homosexual people to transition panels assigned to review federal departments and agencies. Three of the seven homosexuals on transition panels have held high-level positions in the Clinton administration.

Matt Barber, director of cultural affairs with Liberty Counsel and Liberty Alliance Action, says Obama is keeping his promises to the homosexual lobby.

"Obama, throughout the campaign, signaled...very quietly, but nonetheless signaled on his web page and elsewhere that he essentially had signed off on every major demand of homosexual pressure groups," he said. "So it's not surprising that he has now allowed some of these radical activists to become part of his administration."

According to the Washington Blade, Obama officials also named President Bush's former ambassador to Romania, Michael Guest, to a transition panel assigned to review issues pertaining to the State Department.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Politics/Default.aspx?id=335060

Divorce case challenges Oklahoma marriage law

A challenge against Oklahoma marriage laws has been stopped. Two lesbians married legally in Canada and then moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma where Alliance Defense fund attorney Austin Nimocks says the women filed for divorce.

"[O]klahoma voters reject[ed] those types of relationships by a constitutional amendment [and] the court upheld the will of the voters," said Nimocks.Seventy-six percent of Oklahoma voters voted for the constitutional amendment, but Nimocks says the Oklahoma case is only one example of tactics by homosexual activists.

"We're constantly fighting those who want to redefine marriage in this country and they are constantly asking judicial activists to redefine the law to bend to their will," he points out.

Nimocks expects the case to be appealed, but also to be upheld.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Legal/Default.aspx?id=334760

Young evangelist attacked by angry homosexual

The case of an assault against a young Christian by a homosexual in San Francisco is garnering national headlines. On November 14, Promised Land Fellowship church sent 13 members to the Castro District of San Francisco, a neighborhood known for its large homosexual population. The young people gathered at a street corner, joined hands, and began singing "Amazing Grace."

During an interview on Fox network's The O'Reilly Factor, Christine Cloud described the group's intentions. "We are not trying to convert gay people into straight people, but we are down there telling them about Jesus Christ in hopes that they would have that revelation," she explains.

Cloud says an angry homosexual grabbed her Bible. She then describes what happened when she asked the man to return it. "And he turned around, and he said no, and he hit me upside the head with the Bible, knocking me to the ground, and began to kick my legs," she recounts.

The police were nearby, according to Cloud, and they sprang into action. " The police took him into custody, and they came up to me and they asked me if I wanted to press charges against this man, and I said, 'No, tell him that I forgive him,'" she notes.

Members of Promised Land Fellowship go to the Castro District on a regular basis to evangelize the area.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Persecution/Default.aspx?id=333368

German home schooling family seeks asylum in U.S.

A home school advocate is helping a German family who is seeking asylum in the United States. Mike Donnelly is a staff attorney with the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) and says home schoolers in Germany are under great persecution. He also notes many German families home school in secret, but if they get caught, they can face fines in the thousands of dollars, lose their personal property, get thrown in jail, or even have their children taken from them.

One family, according to Donnelly, has suffered so much persecution that the HSLDA is now helping them seek asylum in the United States. The Romeike family was faced with thousands of dollars in fines and the potential loss of their five children if they did not comply with the demands of German social workers who wanted to put their children in government-run schools. "

And so they were able to get here to the United States," he explains. "They relocated to East Tennessee where they have been warmly welcomed by home schoolers in that area, and they are just so happy to not have to be looking over their shoulders wondering when the social workers were going to come and try to take their children or when they were going to get another letter in the mail saying they were going to have to pay another couple thousand Euros or dollars to the German government for home schooling."

Other German home school families have followed suit, and Donnelly says they have hired an immigration attorney as they seek political asylum. He is hopeful that asylum will be granted in these cases.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Education/Default.aspx?id=332244

New Zealand study examines abortion and mental health link

Interesting to note that David Fergusson, the lead author here, is pro-choice.

Find this article online here.

Women who have an abortion face a small increase in the risk of developing common mental health problems such as depression and anxiety, according to a new study from New Zealand.
But the researchers, writing in the December issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry, say their findings point to a “middle-of-the-road” position on abortion - and do not support either the strong pro-life or pro-choice arguments.

Researchers from the University of Otago studied the pregnancy and mental health history of over 500 women born in Christchurch, a city in South Island.

The women were interviewed six times between the ages of 15 and 30. At each assessment, the women were asked whether they had been pregnant and, if so, what the outcome of that pregnancy had been. The women were asked whether the pregnancy was wanted or unwanted, and if this had caused them to be upset or distressed.

The women were also given a mental health assessment during each interview, to see if they met the diagnostic criteria for major depression, anxiety disorders, alcohol dependence and illicit drug dependence. The researchers took other confounding factors which might be associated with increased risks of various pregnancy or mental health outcomes into account.

Overall, 284 women reported a total of 686 pregnancies before the age of 30. These included: 153 abortions (occurring to 117 women), 138 pregnancy losses (including miscarriage, stillbirth and termination of ectopic pregnancy), 66 live births that resulted from an unwanted pregnancy (or one that provoked an adverse reaction), and 329 live births resulting from a wanted pregnancy (where there was no reported adverse reaction).

The study found that women who had had abortions had rates of mental health problems that were about 30% higher than other women. The conditions most associated with abortion included anxiety disorders and substance use disorders. In contrast, none of the other pregnancy outcomes were consistently related to significantly increased risks of mental health problems.

However, the overall affects of abortion on mental health were found to be small. The researchers estimated that exposure to abortion accounted for between 1.5% and 5.5% of the overall rate of mental disorders in this group of women.

Professor David Fergusson, John Horwood and Dr Joseph Boden said their study had “important implications for the ongoing debates between pro-life and pro-choice advocates about the mental health effects of abortion”.

Writing in the British Journal of Psychiatry they said: “Specifically, the results do not support strong pro-life positions that claim that abortion has large and devastating effects on the mental health of women. Neither do the results support any strong pro-choice positions that imply that abortion is without any mental health effects.

“In general, the results lead to a middle-of-the-road position that, for some women, abortion is likely to be a stressful and traumatic life event which places those exposed to it at a modestly increased risk of a range of common mental health problems.”

Reference:“Abortion and mental health disorders: evidence from a 30-year longitudinal study.” Fergusson D, Horwood LJ and Boden JM (2008). British Journal of Psychiatry, 193: 444-451

Hundreds gather for rally against Prop. 8

By Ed Fletcher efletcher@sacbee.com
Published: Saturday, Nov. 22, 2008

Hundreds of people gathered at the state Capitol in downtown Sacramento on Saturday for a rally denouncing passage of the statewide ballot measure banning same-sex marriage.

It appears that a rally of 10,000, which organizers had predicted, did not materialize. An official count, however, was not immediately available.

Cheers sounded through downtown Sacramento as hundreds from throughout California - including contingents from Chico, San Jose and the Sacramento region - applauded and shouted encouragement to speakers. They carried signs that said "Prop. 8 is Un-American" and "No On Hate."

Among the speakers slated to address the crowd was comedian Margaret Cho and Sen. Darryl Steinberg, D-Sacramento.

One of the early speakers at the rally, which began at 2 p.m., was attorney Gloria Allred who told the crowd there was a strong chance the State Supreme Court could overturn Proposition 8, which was approved by voters earlier this month.

The rally comes days after the court agreed to consider whether the measure improperly revises the state constitution.

A decision on the legal challenge could come as early as June.


Pastor Jim's comment:
Finally some evidence that the protest phase is running out of steam. Be encouraged !…..Their next big march – Jan 10 – nationwide. One other thing: Gloria Allred is telling them the Supreme Court will likely overturn Prop 8. If the Court does the right thing, she is setting them up for disappointment --- and rioting, when they don’t get their way.

Fathers for Good

A worthy video. Find it here.

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