The Dawn Patrol

Eat at Your Own Risk

Catholic seminarian Jeff Geerling tells his blog readers how to enjoy "Venal Sin on a Tortilla."

Jeff is also the sound man and webmaster for the delightfully named Priestie Boyz. I wonder if they perform the great rap ode to the Eucharist, "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right to Partake."

10:34 PM |

I Am the Morning DJ on WOLD

Personal to every reader who remembers the Dive, Voxx Records, The Bob, USA Network's "Night Flight," or IRS Records' "The Cutting Edge": If you want to feel young, then, whatever you do, do not click here.

Hat tip—make that a big, throaty wheeze—to Saint Kansas. Did I tell you about my last operation?

11:11 AM |

For Better or for Verse
A Guest Post by Robert N. Going

[Robert N. Going of The Judge Report posted the following in the comments section of an earlier post. I assume no liability for damage to your computer screen from coffee or any other beverage which this may cause you to spew. — Dawn]

Once I rendered a court decision as a three page limerick, then thought better of it (Thou Shalt Not Get Too Cute) and converted it to much less-interesting prose.

From the archives of Family Court, Montgomery County, N.Y. (the Judge sitting as Acting Supreme Court Justice):

?Bob and Carolyn split. It was fate.
They divorced back around ‘98.
Their marriage a shambles,
They set out on new rambles,
To frolic, perhaps to re-mate.

The lawyer his file did close.
“Nothing left of this case, I suppose.
“All issues resolved.
“No problems to solve.
“It’s as dead as a case ever goes.”

Two years later, and now Bob is back
He has a new cause to attack
“The vows must be said,
“A new wife I must wed.
“And it seems a divorce I do lack.”

“But divorce you we did, I recall,
“We submitted the papers one Fall.
“The Judge took his time,
“But the papers did sign.
“You’re divorced! You’re divorced! That is all!”

“While from Carolyn I’m free from strife,
“It seems there was more to my life.
“I meant not to fool ya’,
“But there’s also a Julia
“With some claims of being my wife.”

She had troubles, it seems, of a sort,
And Bob, wishing to be a good sport,
Took a walk down the aisle,
Later left, single file,
Without an assist from a court.

So later, when Carolyn came,
He wished not to mention his shame.
So to Carolyn wed,
And with Julia not dead,
He was playing a dangerous game.

“So let’s get this straight,” lawyer said.
“With Julia undivorced and not dead,
“You then took the course
“Of seeking divorce
“From a woman to whom you’re not wed?”

“I guess you could say that is true.
“But tell me just what could I do?
“I couldn’t just tell her
“What kind of a feller
“She married. Now tell me, could you?”

So Bob must divorce number one,
With number two already done,
Was there any redress
For this whole freakin’ mess?
His problems had only begun.

So the file so carefully closed
Was summoned from its sweet repose
What could Lawyer do
With this sticky old goo?
“An annulment, I guess, I suppose.”

Since Carolyn didn’t yet know
That her wedding was only for show,
She hadn’t quite weighed
The Default she had made
With the true facts. She might seek more dough.

And Julia, with no thought of makeup
With Bob, might just start to wake up
To her property rights,
And might set her sights
On what Carolyn got in the breakup.

The Court, though amused, took its time,
And replied in Decision sublime,
“There’s nothing I’ll do
“Till the whole bloody crew
“Is before me!” (in Limerick rhyme).

12:01 AM |

Thursday, September 29, 2005

Follow the Leader
A Guest Post by Colin O'Brien

Belief in God, in His mercy, forgiveness, and love, is often looked at as the reward, the goal, or the thing that will bring us to happiness. In a world that holds up individual happiness as the objective in life, and which suggests that we make the right choices to attain that happiness, it is mistakenly believed that faith in God is a quick fix for the problem of attaining happiness. That attitude suggests that, once I have attained faith, I will find happiness, contentment, peace of mind, and fulfillment of dreams. God often, however, has other plans for us.

For that reason, I suspect, there are those who hold out the naïve hope that they can find happiness by other, less demanding means. As I have written before, I tried to find the freedom and happiness in all sorts of places, but was unable to do so. I explored the fulfillment of my own desires, and often attained that satisfaction; the terror of the life I lived was that of an insatiable hunger that grew all the time I tried to satisfy it. The very behaviors I believed would fulfill my longings and desires proved unsatisfactory, and caused me to despair of my ability to love, to feel security and happiness. I came to believe that love and joy were never to be mine, and that I could only escape the loneliness I felt at the time of my death. That I have been found by and reintroduced to God, however, does not mean that my life has suddenly become an easy, comfortable existence.

Although I have come to know great joy as I have grown in my faith in and love for God, I have by no means reached a destination, or a point where I can say, "I have faith now, and I can go about the business of getting happy." Where the world reminds us to work hard now and always plan for tomorrow's happiness, God reminds me, "Be still and know that I am God," (Psalm 46:11) and, "Put not your trust in princes, in man, in whom there is no salvation. When his spirit departs he returns to his earth, on that day his plans perish," (Psalm 146:3-4).

Any time I let my mind worry about what will become of me in the future, I walk away from God. Though I know this to be true, it is still easy to worry and to become afraid. Fortunately, God understands this and is always there to assure me, to save me, and to remove those things that come between us. The more this becomes clear to me, the easier it is for me to be still and to ask for His guidance and protection.

A simple metaphor can be used to explain why I do this. There was a time when I was drowning and found myself unable to swim away from the turbulent waters that surrounded me. My friend jumped in, rescued me, and pulled me to safety. I jumped in again countless times, and my friend was always there to pull me out to safety, and to tell me how to avoid the same calamity in the future. He never got angry with me, or grew impatient, or gave up on me. When I came to see all that He has done for me, I recognized the debt that I owed Him, one that I could never pay off. Fortunately, the only thing He asks of me is to follow Him and to trust that He knows what is best. Out of gratitude for the life He gave me, I gladly seek His friendship.

This post originally appeared on Colin's blog, Fallen Sparrow.

8:54 PM |

The Storms that Herald the End?
A Guest Post by Maclin Horton

The subject of the end times came up at dinner the other night, apropos of the recent hurricanes: it seems that one of my daughter’s teachers suggested that they might be a sign of the end. I doubt that, myself. For one thing, hurricanes of this strength are far from unheard of, although it’s true that these have been unusually close together in time, were unusually strong at least while they were still well out at sea, and have struck in unusually close proximity to each other. Ivan, Dennis, Katrina, and Rita were all very strong storms, and they all struck a section of coastline from the Texas-Louisiana border on the west to the Alabama-Florida border on the east, a span of roughly four hundred miles, perhaps an eighth (I’m looking at a map and guessing) of the coastline bordering the Gulf of Mexico. I think those of us who live in that area can be forgiven for wondering if there is some design at work here. Still, if the events have been unusual, they can’t be said to have been so improbable as to be anomalous, and the fact is that more and more severe hurricanes struck the United States in the decade of the 1940s.

There’s a simple reason why Americans are engaging in apocalyptic speculation: these hurricanes have affected us dramatically. I don’t remember hearing any of us talk this way in 1998, when Hurricane Mitch, a late-season (October 29) monster, struck Nicaragua and killed some 11,000 people.

I’m a resolute agnostic as regards the end of the world, and in fact tend to believe that the more widespread the belief that it is near, the less likely it is to be so. Sooner or later, of course, someone is going to be right in predicting it, but every age has provided ample reason for those living in it to believe that wickedness is so widespread that it meets the criteria of prophecy, that the end must be soon or else the world will be utterly given over to evil, and so I neither make nor believe any very specific predictions.

There is, however, one thing that gives me pause. The old familiar wickedness of the human race we know very well: the wars, the tortures, the oppression, the lust and the lying. C. S. Lewis once speculated that the quantity of good and evil in the world remains more or less constant, but gets distributed differently in every age: so (for example) our age is horrified by the brutality and cruelty of punishments once handed out for very minor crimes, but has positively encouraged people to abandon on a whim marriage vows made before God, and to throw over the whole concept of sexual morality. Perhaps it all adds up to equal measures of virtue and vice.

But we have invented a new crime. We propose to meddle with the very substance of human life. We propose to destroy human embryos in order to improve our own health. We propose to tinker with the genes of the newly conceived so that when they grow up they will look like we want them to look and behave as we want them to behave. We propose to grow duplicates of living people in a laboratory for purposes of our own.

Once, back in the 1970s when I was more or less testing the waters of Christianity after a long absence, I had a conversation with an Episcopal priest known for his “liberal” views. I had the feeling that he was trying to impress me, under the mistaken impression that I was looking for a modernized and contemporary religion, long on secular enlightenment and short on revelations and commandments. I only remember one specific thing from the conversation; as best I remember, he said something like this: “We (the Episcopal Church) don’t hold the sort of only-God-can-make-a-tree position that the Roman Catholics do. We would see nothing wrong, for instance, in genetically engineering people with gills so that we could mine the bottom of the sea.”

I was dumbstruck and horrified by this, not yet being aware of the apostasy happening within every Christian community at the time. Ten years or so later I related the conversation to a great-aunt of mine, who as far as I know had no religion and was in her late 80s at the time. She considered what I had said for a moment, then replied simply “Well, I suppose people will always want to have slaves.” She saw plainly what the Christian bien-pensant could not.

Perhaps our experiments with cloning and genetic engineering and all the rest of it will prove to be unfeasible. Perhaps they are just slavery under a new name, and perhaps God will let us get away with it, as he has let us, individually and collectively, get away with so much. But it seems to me that they have the potential to distort beyond recognition the elementals of human life: the bond between parent and child, husband and wife, brother and sister, one generation and the next. And I find myself hoping, if not expecting, that God himself will put an end to these obscenities, since it seems unlikely that we will voluntarily turn aside from this path, those of us who oppose it being, apparently, in the minority.

11:38 AM |

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Pressed Into Service
A Guest Post by Colin O'Brien

[Colin (left) is a friend I met at church who has written a beautiful testimony about his return to faith. You'll find it on his blog, Fallen Sparrow—start at the bottom of the page and read up. The following entry originally appeared on Fallen Sparrow. Expect more guest entries as I continue my retreat this week, including ones from Maclin Horton of Caelum et Terra and my stepfather. I'm thankful to have such talented readers filling the gap. — Dawn]

A man named Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus, was coming in from the fields, and they pressed him into service to carry the cross" (Mark 15:21).

What must have Simon thought as this happened to him? He had been working all day, minding his own business, when a group of Roman soldiers grabbed him and ordered him to carry the cross. He was probably tired and hungry, and possibly reluctant to get involved in the chaotic events that were really none of his business. It is not inconceivable that he just wanted to get home to his family and to observe Passover, but there he was, thrust into the unfolding drama of the Crucifixion by forces beyond his control.

I have often felt that my relationship with God is not unlike this. Much of the time, I simply want to go about my daily business, to keep my head down and work and be left alone, but God has other plans for me. Being called by God often feels like being pressed into service, because it entails setting aside my own plans and my own desires in order to carry the cross in some way. This is often inconvenient, and occasionally even unpleasant, but it is always rewarding. But, even more significantly, it is in those moments of being pressed into service that I come closest to God.

Why is that? As with Simon, whenever I suffer the pain of having to carry the cross, I am walking with Christ, who suffered still more for me. It is the suffering that draws me into the miraculous event of Christianity, and it is the suffering that serves as the reference point for the joy I feel at having come to know God's love, mercy, and forgiveness.

A dear friend of mine who, like me, suffered the eternal death of alcoholism says that he was given the experience of alcoholism so that he can share the hope and joy of recovery with others who still suffer. It is precisely because I have known pain, loneliness, suffering, madness, depression, and the desire to die that I now pursue joy, life, forgiveness, and love. Had I not known the one, I might not seek the other.

It is easy to look at our sufferings and inconveniences as evidence that God does not love us, or does not exist. But what if, as with Simon of Cyrene, we are merely being given a cross to carry so that we might know Him better, and be counted among His saints?

7:48 PM |

Thread-Letter Day

I would like to congratulate Buscaraons blogger Xavier Basora, as the guest post he wrote has officially spawned the longest-running comments thread in the history of The Dawn Patrol. It's now at 149 comments—most, I believe, from Philip and Tapetum, who are still going at it (politely, I might add) after nearly three weeks.

10:33 AM |

Read-Letter Day

Wonderful news—my lost e-mails have been restored. Thanks be to God—and Panix.

10:28 AM

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

How I Became the Catholic I Wuz—Part 13

Continued from Part 12:

During my college years and early 20s, I sought out sexual experiences with men as a distraction from the emptiness I felt inside.

The emptiness was self-defeating, I knew. I wanted desperately to love and be loved by one man, but I couldn't really imagine why anyone would love me. As a result, I was caught in the downward spiral of the addict, seeking to fill the empty space with something that I knew would leave me emptier than before.

My journals of that time are filled with self-loathing. All my problems, I believed, stemmed from low self-image. If only I could feel better about myself, I could conquer my depression. My need for validation—which I pursued through casual sexual experiences—would likewise disappear. No longer would I hunger hopelessly for a man I desired who would show me that I was desirable.

I voiced my feelings to anyone who would listen—family, friends, and a succession of therapists—telling them how I felt trapped within my low self-image.

They all told me the same message that I could find in every self-help book and women's magazine—the message of our feel-good consumer culture: "Don't be so hard on yourself. You've got so much going for you."

They would list my attractive qualities and tell me to count my blessings. I was just going through a hard time, they said. Things would get better. All I had to do was believe in myself.

And so, I would believe in myself—until the next disappointment came along. Then I'd feel like an even bigger failure.

Life had wounded me. I felt oppressed, impotent, painfully aware that there was nothing I could do to heal myself.

I was absolutely right.

My problem lay in how I perceived my own weakness. I was acutely aware of it, and longed with all my heart to be rid of it.

What nobody told me was that the answer was right in front of me.

The emptiness that I perceived as a black hole was what Christians call a God-shaped vacuum. The fact that I was aware of this, as painful as it was, actually put me at an advantage. Unlike those who engage in self-destructive behavior without any inkling of the consequences of their actions, I knew that there was no future in my in-the-moment lifestyle.

My mistake was in doing what I was told to do—believing in myself.

"Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay," wrote G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness."

Indeed, just when I thought I was at my strongest—the times when I most believed that I had the self-confidence to face life as a single young woman, with all its possibilities and pitfalls—I was weakest.

The reason for my weakness may be found in Chesterton's examples of self-confident individuals. Actors who can't act. Debtors who can't pay. They are people whose existence depends upon putting forth a front without the resources to back it up. The very nature of self-confidence is that it springs from within. It can't be put on. To put it another way, you can't transform a pair of $14.99 Fayva slingbacks into a pair of $600 Manolo stilettos with a mere coat of shoe polish.

The solution for my younger self, then, would not have been to put on self-confidence, but to remove my idea that lack of it was a bad thing. I needed what G.K. Chesterton calls "the good news of original sin." We are all fallen, whether we realize it or not. The amazing thing is that, in spite of our fallen nature, we are given a great grace: the ability to act as a force for good in the world.

Even at my lowest point, I had this gift that God gives to all—this treasure in an earthen vessel, as Paul put it in 2 Corinthians 4:7. But in my darkness, I cared only about the value that men who didn't even know what was really inside me placed on this treasure—not the value that it would hold to a truly loving man some day. And I had no concept whatsoever of the value it held in the eyes of God.

Labels: Wuz

11:45 PM |

Nuns' Hood

On the grounds of the prayer house where I am spending the week, there's a flight of wooden stairs. I went up them today on the advice that, a half-mile down the road, I would find the Delaware River. I did not expect that "the road" would turn out to be...

...this. A bicycle path with trees on one side and...

...a gorgeous, still brook on the other. It took my breath away. I thought of Psalm 42, "As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God."

Speaking of deer, I'm told there are 26 on the grounds. There is also...

...a labyrinth. I plan to walk it tomorrow.

Note to John R. and other readers who like Batman: One of the sisters here is a cousin of this man. She told me that he was very humble; at the time of his death last July, few residents of the small Connecticut town where he lived knew of his accomplishments.
8:12 PM |

Who Cares?
A Guest Post by The Raving Atheist

As part of its "Who Decides?" campaign, NARAL Pro-Choice issues a report card for each state based on compliance with the organization's abortion-hungry agenda. She's a demanding teacher. Even in this post-Roe era, over a third of her students have flunked and the average grade is only a D+. California, of course, got an A+, and New York an "A", but Miss NARAL decidedly does not grade on a curve.

Not surprising, I suppose. But what baffles me is a statistic that's just sort of dropped in by way of an "Access Fact" box immediately beneath each grade. "98 percent of Kentucky counties have no abortion provider." "93 percent of Wisconsin counties have no abortion provider." What, exactly, is the relevance of the percentage? Who cares?

Technically, NARAL doesn't. If you read its report card methodology, you'll discover that the number of facilities plays no part in the grade. They refuse to come right out and say that a state is "bad" if it doesn't have an aboritorium in every county. After all, it's all about "choice." If 98% of the citizens decide they don't like abortions, don't need abortions, and don't choose abortions, it shouldn't be so shocking that "98% of ______ counties have no abortion provider."

But they throw it in anyway, just beneath the grade. And there it sits, ominously. Since the figure is over 90% for nearly half the states and over 80% in two-thirds, the intent is plainly to scare the reader into thinking "how terrible!" and into considering ways to get the numbers down to something respectable like 4% or 5%. (Perhaps we're were supposed to further consider whether the county is even the proper subdivision; maybe it would be better to have a clinic in every town, block, supermarket, or next to every ATM machine). Obviously there's some huge, untapped demand that isn't being met, some craving which, if "access" were proportionately increased, would ratchet the number of procedures up from a mere 1.3 million annually to a more proper 10-20 million level.

No no no—of course NARAL doesn't want that. Yes, their grading methodology does subtract points for laws that "codify the state's preference for childbirth over abortion," and yes it does subtract points for laws that force people to perform abortions over their moral objections. But they still like their abortions "rare." It's just that when they use that term, they're distinguishing it from "medium" and "well done.

1:09 PM |

Prayer Request—Via the Raving Atheist

No, this is not the promised guest post from the Raving Atheist—that'll come later—and it's not a joke.

A Christian reader of the Raving Atheist's blog who goes by the name Prayer Tulip has put out the request for prayers for the salvation of her dying 20-year-old son, Matt. RA has posted her request on his blog, closing the comments section to prevent inappropriate postings. He is also approaching Christian blogs and asking them to ask readers to pray for Matt.

RA's atheist credentials are still intact, as far as I know, and I give him a lot of credit for spreading Prayer Tulip's request. If one of my favorite readers wrote to me and told me that an atheist's wish for her dying son would be fulfilled if only I would post her claim that there is no God, I don't think I could do it.

The following is the request in Prayer Tulip's own words, taken directly from RA's blog. (I've made a minor grammatical correction and changed "Rehab" to "Rahab," as I believe that's whom she meant.) James writes, "The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much." When we pray, that righteous Man—Jesus, through his Holy Spirit— prays with us.

Prayer Tulip writes:

As I sit here beside my son in this hospital, Lord, I know Your strength is made perfect in our weakness. You said in Your Word that the effectual fervent prayer of a rightous man/woman avails much. I know I, will never be perfect, while on this earth, and I know that when you see me you don't see my sin, you see The One who died for me, Jesus, and that makes me perfect in Your eyes. Please, Lord show me what you would like me to see/learn through all of these hard days of my son's sickness. I am holding him not tightly only loosely because he belongs to you. Show yourself strong Lord. You have made many promises and you do not lie. Please spare my son and allow him to use this for your kingdom, and give me strength to endure.

UPDATE

The purpose of these updates is for prayer for Matt's salvation. I believe that as long as there is breath in someone, that there is always hope. So far prayers have been answered in that Matt has death to think about right now. He has become resistant to Vancomycin AND is running a high fever. The doctor has changed his antibiotics and now he is on 3 different kinds all hours of the day and night. He stays nauseated. His blood cultures are all coming back positive.

As his mom [I] cannot just say, "He has made his choice to reject God", and just go on about my business. I do not know how anyone could do that, even in the face of his sin. There was hope for Saul, Rahab, Jacob, etc. Do we wrestle with flesh and blood? NO. When I see sin in someone's life, it's like watching a drunk on skid row moving slowly in the face of a Mac truck not realizing that he will be killed if he does not get up and get out of the way. Do I tell him the truth? Yes. Do I abandon him? NO. Do I fervently pray for him? YES. And, like David did for his son, I will stay on my face for Matt constantly until there is no breath in him, then and only then will I know that I did all that I could do. One of those things that I do is ask other people to pray.

joanie

10:12 AM |

Monday, September 26, 2005

Parental Guidance

"I asked a six-year-old boy, ‘If you were going to go to heaven, what would you take along with you?’ And he said, ‘My mother and father.’ I asked him why, and he said, ‘Because I think they’d have more time for me up there.'"

— Art Linkletter on problems facing the family, via WI Catholic Musings

6:16 PM |

Whit and Wisdom

Kathy Shaidle explains in two short essays why you should read an 800-page book by someone you've never heard of—my hero, Whittaker Chambers: Part One and Part Two.

12:01 AM |

Sunday, September 25, 2005

Frigid Daughters of the Sexual Revolution

The Telegraph of London reports that women are trying to get pregnant via in vitro fertilization because they don't want to do it the old-fashioned way:

Michael Dooley, a gynaecologist, obstetrician and fertility expert, said that in the past five years he has seen a 20 per cent increase in the number of patients seeking "inappropriate or premature" IVF treatment.

"Many of these couples are simply not having sex or not having enough sex," he said. "Conception has become medicalised. It's too clinical. There has been a trend away from having sex and loving relationships towards medicalised conception."...

Emma Cannon, who runs the fertility programme at Westover House, said:...Some people are horrified by the idea that they have to have sex two to three times a week."

Cannon explains that her patients are commuter couples who don't have time for sex, but it's hard to believe that there aren't problems in the marriages as well. After all, if a spouse really want to have sex, he or she will forgo the extra trip to the gym.

The idea that there is a reason for the couples' lack of sex other than mere lack of time is borne out by another comment of Cannon's:

"I told one of my patients who is going through IVF that another IVF patient had just conceived naturally. She said: 'What? She's having sex? Bloody Luddite.'"

Another expert likewise suggests the couples' problems are more than just not being able to pencil sex into their schedule—testing, after all, takes time:

Dr Tim Evans, the founder of Westover House and the Queen's GP, said: "People are increasingly trying to control it [conception]. They are testing, testing, testing when they should just have sex."

So, this is what the sexual revolution has come to. Women get married at 35 or 40, having contracepted for their entire sexual lives, and they discover that they do not know how to have a marital relationship—one that by definition, so long as the two partners are capable, involves having sex.

And people think Catholics are backwards for using natural family planning (NFP), which they do either to combat infertility or to space out births?

I look at the observant-Catholic married couples I know, and say what you will, no doctor warns them that they're missing out on sex. And I don't just mean that from the number of little ones they bring to Mass. You can tell from their affection for one another.

Nor does one have to be Catholic for one's relationship to benefit from natural family planning, as Mormon fertility specialist Joseph B. Stanford, M.D., writes in his First Things article "Sex, Naturally":

Sexual union in marriage ought to be a complete giving of each spouse to the other, and when fertility (or potential fertility) is deliberately excluded from that giving I am convinced that something valuable is lost. A husband will sometimes begin to see his wife as an object of sexual pleasure who should always be available for gratification. This tendency is reinforced by the dominant perspective on sexuality in our society, which idealizes unlimited sexual titillation and gratification freed (at least theoretically) from any consideration of pregnancy. Sterilization and hormonal contraceptives especially feed into this prevalent and highly distorted male perspective (which is also adopted by many women). Couples can also easily lose sight of why they have made a decision to avoid pregnancy and then not discuss the issue for months or even years, developing an approach to their sexual relationship largely divorced from even the thought of procreation....

[T]here is a strong "courtship/honeymoon" effect among NFP users, even after years of marriage. Abstinence from genital contact during the fertile phase evokes a sense of periodic "courtship," after which the couple enjoys a periodic "honeymoon" that increases the appreciation and enjoyment of the sexual union. Available research suggests that the overall frequency of intercourse among married couples using NFP is about the same as among most married couples using contraception, but that it is distributed differently. I have known couples in my practice using contraception who routinely have daily intercourse, but these couples do not have anywhere near as satisfying a "sex life" as those couples I see who use NFP. Simply put, NFP enhances marriages in a way that the use of contraception does not.

I find that the following benefits come to those couples who use NFP: 1) they come to a deeper appreciation of fertility as a gift from God rather than a biological phenomenon to be manipulated or a curse to be avoided; 2) they are usually able to consciously and rapidly achieve pregnancy when they so choose ("surprise" pregnancies are rare for NFP users); 3) they reevaluate their choices about fertility on an ongoing basis; 4) in their intimate relationship, each spouse sends to the other the implicit and powerful message: "I accept all of you, including your fertility"; 5) they learn to assume and to exercise joint responsibility for decisions about their fertility; 6) they learn that times of abstinence from genital contact can strengthen their relationship.

Most people who start to use NFP do not do so because they expect to experience the benefits to their relationship and spirituality that I have just described. Research suggests that a majority are initially interested primarily for the health benefits-the absence of medical side effects and the insight into the normal functioning of the body. Others begin use of NFP because of a prior religious commitment. Regardless of the reason for beginning use of NFP, most research has shown that, compared to other family planning methods, a relatively high proportion of users continue to use it. And after some months of use, most users will tell you that they have noticed some of the benefits to their relationships that I have described.

8:13 PM |

Friday, September 23, 2005

My mother just told me that she wanted to print up my blog for a nun she met, only she couldn't because the second word of it was "fart." Oh, well.

I'm most likely not going to be near a computer until Sunday. Have a great weekend. Be good!

4:26 PM |

(Taxpayer-Funded) Fart for Art's Sake

"My ancestors got the Pieta, and all I got is this lousy barbecue grill on astroturf."

—Saint Kansas
1:05 PM |

Jews' and Christians' Holocaust Suffering:
'A Covenant in Blood'

Some commenters were offended when, in honoring Simon Wiesenthal, I quoted Msgr. John M. Oesterreicher on why the Nazis' genocide should make Christians realize a kinship with the Jews that they have "too long forgotten." These commenters, in trying to make their point, stated that Nazis either were practicing Christians or mostly did not oppose Christianity.

I would urge such commenters to quit while they're ahead. If something offends you, just say so. Don't try to back yourself up by spouting falsehoods.

The following are excerpts from Patricia Treece's biography of St. Maximilian Kolbe (left), A Man for Others (Marytown Press, 1982). If others have similar stories of the persecution of Christians alongside Jews at the hands of the Nazis, I would welcome them in the comments section below.

Edward Gniadek was arrested by the Gestapo on January 12, 1941. In March, after being kept only in solitary confinement, he was put in a cell [at Warsaw's Pawiak prison] with a Jewish Pole he recalls only as Singer. He says:
After a few days, Fr. Maximilian Kolbe was added to our cell. He was wearing a Franciscan habit and was clean-shaven. The presence of Father Kolbe, who differed so greatly from us by his calm, the things he told us, and conversation with him, calmed me and had the best possible effect on my nerves, which were very bad since each day I lived under the anxiety of being interrogated again—I had not only been beaten but had witnessed the torture of others—or being sent to a concentration camp.

About the second or third day after Father Kolbe joined us, one of the Gestapo men looked into our cell. He rushed in, somehow infuriated by the sight of Kolbe in his habit, from which hung the usual Franciscan rosary with its crucifix. I saw everything, but it was Singer afterwards who gave me the exact words, for I know no German.

The Scharfuhrer [platoon leader]—that was his rank—grabbed the rosary and, jerking on it, began haranguing Father Kolbe, who made no reply. Then the man pointed scornfully to the crucifix and snarled, "Do you believe in that?"

"Yes, I believe," Father Kolbe answered him serenely.

Aroused to a fever pitch,the assailant slapped the priest hard in the face. He grabbed the crucifix, again demanding, "You really believe, eh?"

"Yes, I believe," Father Kolbe answered calmly.

With each affirmation, the SS man became angrier and more violent (I don't know—maybe it was the priest's calm and determination). Anyway, after each reply he struck Father Kolbe in the face again and again.

But finally, seeing that Father Kolbe could not be shaken, he gave up and stomped angrily from the cell, slamming the door.

I must say again that, during everything, Father Kolbe showed not the slightest agitation. After the Scharfuhrer left, he simply began walking to and fro in the cell, praying silently. On his face were the red marks of the blows. My nerves were very shaken by what had happened and I said something—I can't remember what. He turned to me and said, "Please, I beg you, don't be upset; you have a lot of worries and troubles of your own. What happened just now is really nothing because it's all for my little mother (he meant the Mother of God)." The way he said this you would actually have thought nothing at all had happened.

That same day, one of the lower-ranking guards who was Polish came in with a prisoner's uniform, recommending that Father Kolbe put it on. He said that if Father Maximilian had been wearing the uniform, he would never have been beaten. Lots of prisoners wore their own clothes, but the religious habit drove the Nazis into a frenzy and provoked such incidents.

* * *

[This later section of A Man for Others takes place in Auschwitz, where Fr. Kolbe was transferred:]

To some extent, priests and Jews were lumped together in the SS mind. Mieczylaus Koscielniak, who became a good friend of Kolbe's, remembers an incident that explains the connection:
In May 1941, we were working in a torn-down house when one of the prisoners found a crucifix. SS Storch got ahold of it and he called Faither Nieweglewski.

"What is this?" he asks the priest. Father remains silent, but the guard insists until he says, "Christ on the cross."

Then Storch jeers: "Why you fool, that's the Jew who, thanks to the silly ideals which he preached and you fell for, got you into this camp. Don't you understand? He's one of the Jewish ringleaders! A Jew is a Jew and will always be a Jew! How can you believe in such an enemy?"

Father Nieweglewski is silent.

Then Storch says, "You know, if you'll trample this Jew"—and he throws the crucifix on the sand—"I'll get you transferred to a better job."

When the priest refused, the SS man and the capo threw him a couple of times on the crucifix; then they beat him so badly that, shortly after, he died.
Such martyrdoms were not unusual. Fr. Joseph Kowalski was doomed because he would not step on a rosary crucifix; Fr. Peter Dankowski, from Zakopane, was tortured and killed on Good Friday by a capo who sneered, "Jesus Christ was killed today and you also will perish this day."
* * *
[Continued from the same book:]

Jewish Auschwitz survivor Eddie Gastfriend agrees [...] that most priests managed to hold onto their ideals and not become brutalized. Interviewed by newspaperman Tom Fox, Gastfriend, a Pole who is now a merchant in Philadelphia, says:
There were many priests in Auschwitz. They wore no collars, but you knew they were priests by their manners and their attitude, especially towards Jews. They were so gentle, so loving.

Those of us Jews who came into contact with priests, such as Father Kolbe (I didn't know him personally, but I heard stories about him) felt it was a moving time—a time when a covenant in blood was written between Christians and Jews...

4:27 AM |

Thursday, September 22, 2005

Fore!tune Teller

Jeff Miller has seen the Pope's future.

6:02 PM |

What 'Is' Is

According to Jon Sanders, Bill Clinton's had a change of heart. If only. As my great-grandmother would have said to him, Zolst leben un zein gezunt!

3:02 PM |

Carny Against Carnage

Part-Time Pundit John Bambenek, along with Pro-Life Blogs, has started a Carnival of Life, which, if you're not familiar with blog carnivals, is a sort of one-stop shopping for links to the latest prolife blog posts. The second Carnival of Live is up now on Part-Time Pundit. It's pretty brief right now, but I'm sure it'll swell as more of the hundreds of members of Pro-Life Blogs catch on.

12:27 PM

How I Became the Catholic I Wuz—Part 12

Continued from Part 11:

In the fall of 1985, when I was 17, I moved into New York University's Weinstein dorm, just off Washington Square Park. The next couple of years were too much, too soon.

I was shooting off in all directions, trying to gain a foothold in journalism and the music business. I did so many internships that I ran out of intern credits and simply worked for free, or got paid a few bucks that I immediately blew on sushi. For over a year, I interned as an editorial assistant for top-rated WCBS-FM oldies DJ Bob Shannon. I was also the production assistant (read: gofer) for the Washington Squares' debut album, which led to short internships for their record label—owned by future Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg—and their publicity agency, Susan Blond. In addition, I interned as an assistant publicist and booking agent for Tramps nightclub, New York's home of Chicago Blues and Buster Poindexter—even though I was too young to legally be allowed into the club. (Not that I would have gotten my employer into trouble—my alcohol intake at the time was limited to rum-filled chocolate balls.)

On top of all that, I was writing like a fiend. Desiring an excuse to sit down with cute rock musicians (like Athan Maroulis of Fahrenheit 451, brother of future "American Idol" star Constantine), I got my foot in the door at Jim Testa's Jersey Beat fanzine. Almost immediately, an interview I did with the Fleshtones for Jersey Beat was spotted by Greg Beaudoin, editor of The Bob, which was then one of the largest and most popular of the fanzines.

With my permission, The Bob picked up the Fleshtones piece and I became one of its regular contributors—a step into the world of professional rock journalism. Then, through Bob Shannon, I met Jeff Tamarkin, editor of the record-collecting magazine Goldmine, and became the youngest writer for that magazine—all while I was still in my teens.

The odd thing is, I wasn't a journalism major. I was in NYU's music business program, hoping to work in the artists-and-repertoire department of a record label, where I could inflict my musical tastes upon the masses. There, once again, I was trying to get onto a train that had left town.

Hoping against hope that someone will
tell me I look like Marianne Faithfull
Age 18 - 1986
I was fast becoming obsessed with the music of the post-Camelot, pre-hippie mid-Sixties—the era of the Beatles, Byrds, Kinks, and like-minded lesser-knowns. Even the new bands that I liked were mostly revivalists from the garage/psychedelic scene that was dying even as I was rushing out five nights a week to catch its last gasps. All my favorite rock clubs closed during my first year of college—the Dive, Danceteria, Irving Plaza (which eventually reopened), Peppermint Lounge, and Folk City. As much as I would have liked to discover the next Beatles, I should have realized that the truth was—as a Decca exec famously told Brian Epstein—guitar groups were on the way out.

Writing, on the other hand, came very easily to me, and I knew I did it well. But almost everyone in my family knew how to write—my mother, father, sister, mother's parents, great-aunt—so it didn't seem like any special skill. Besides, I wanted to get out into the world, meet people, and do things—not stay behind a typewriter.

I do wish some wise adult had shaken me: "You're a writer, damn it!"

Really, what I wanted to do was escape. I was terribly lonely, and I had the cyclical depression that had plagued me since my early teens, where I would be all right for a while and then spiral hopelessly downward. I used myriad methods to distract myself from the emptiness I felt inside: obsessing on the music of a bygone era, immersing myself in the record industry, interviewing and writing up rock bands, eating rum-filled chocolate balls by the half-pound, and, not least, searching for a boyfriend.

Labels: Wuz

3:41 AM |

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Remembering Who—and What—the Nazis Sought to Destroy

As we remember the great Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who died yesterday at the age of 96, I would like to recommend the late Msgr. John M. Oesterreicher's essay "Auschwitz, the Christian, and the Council," especially this excerpt:

In 1938, I saw a photograph of the entrance to a German village that, like many others, had -- instead of the customary road sign or invitation to strangers -- a notice forbidding access to Jews: "Jews are not welcome here!" This dismal board was bad enough in itself. It may be that the village president had been told by higher authorities to erect the warning at the village gate, but certainly no one had commanded him to plant it next to -- a wayside cross. Obviously, neither he nor the other villagers were aware of the abysmal irony of this juxtaposition. Here hung the Crucified -- "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews," the inscription above His head proclaimed --, imploring with arms wide open: "Come to me, all of you who labor and are burdened. I will give you relief" (Mt 11:28).There was the rejection, directed not only at Jewish passers-by but also at Him who, one might have thought, had found a lasting abode in the hearts of many villagers.

We must not read too much into a story like this. Yet, it shows how little the National-Socialist revolution was understood in those days. It shows how few realized that, to the masters of the Third Reich, Synagogue and Church were one and the same enemy. The really "final solution of the Jewish problem" was to be the doing away of the entire biblical heritage, of gospel and Church, of grace and mercy; the physical slaughter of the Jewish people was only a giant step toward this goal. To put it differently, Jews were made to "pay" for having been the instruments of God's revelation, Is it not appalling that rancor against salvation history should have made Adolf Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg and the rest pierce two thousand years of conflict between Christians and Jews, years of mutual recrimination and bitter hostility, to see their solidarity when, even today, there are still Christians as well as Jews who do not think or feel in terms of their common brotherhood? An inner mutual bond like this is not of our making, nor is it left to our choice. It exists whether we like it or not. For our own good, however, we had better like it.

I can understand that Jews find no comfort in the thought that the Nazis held them responsible for the coming of Christ, that the victims of Auschwitz were, therefore, unwitting martyrs for His sake. For centuries, they had been pursued as Christ-killers. Suddenly, they were attacked as Christ-bearers. Here is an antithesis, an irony a Jew cannot but find hard to take. It may even be offensive to him to think of his kinsmen tortured by the Nazis as forced witnesses to Jesus. A Christian, however, should go down on his knees. The thought that Jews were made to bear the Christian's burden should shake him into the realization of a kinship he has too long forgotten.

1:09 PM |

How I Became the Catholic I Wuz—Part 11

Continued from Part 10:

I can't tell you exactly when it happened, but sometime in the fall of 1984, when I was a 16-year-old high-school senior (having skipped a year in my haste to graduate), I hopped a train to see Steve at his East Village apartment.

Since I met him nearly two years earlier, when he showed up with his friend John Holmstrom—the former Punk magazine publisher—to meet me and my friends, Steve had stayed in touch via the occasional letter. I don't know what sparked my visit, or why it took me so long to make the trip to see him, as I'd been visiting the Village every Saturday.

I was somewhat in awe of Steve because he wrote for the ultra-hip fanzine Stop!, plus he worked for a major record label. But more than that, he knew his pop culture, be it the Sixties garage-rock that was increasingly becoming my obsession, or the underground cartoonists who were then like rock stars in the eyes of downtown bohemia's intellectual elite. I was terribly eager to learn about all the cool things I'd missed living out in suburbia, and I wanted to learn from him.

Steve had another side that I also found intriguing, in an edgy kind of way. He made a side income writing for pornographic magazines, including Screw and Penthouse Letters. (The "letters" were fictitious, Steve would later explain to me.)

I wasn't a fan of pornography and knew there were good feminist reasons to oppose it. Walking east from the PATH station to Steve's place, I passed the woman from Feminists Fighting Pornography who stood every Saturday at a table at Broadway and Eighth Street, shouting in her Noo Yawk accent, "Women! Foight back! Soign the petition!" Beside her was a giant blowup of the cover of Hustler that showed a woman's legs sticking out of a meat grinder.

At the same time, I knew that pornography magazines helped fuel the creative counterculture that fascinated me at the time. (The same can't be said today, when, as Traci Lords has noted, pornography is everywhere.) Magazines like Screw helped pay the rent of great cartoonists, including Drew Friedman (who would later draw for The Weekly Standard, among many others) and Pete Bagge. Likewise, porn mags supported some of my favorite up-and-coming rock bands long before they hit the mainstream.

But more than that, the idea that Steve was involved with the pornography industry gave his cornfed-Nebraskan demeanor an air of danger. It added to the pleasant sense of rebelliousness that I already felt going into New York City by myself to see a man who was twice my age.

* * *
The only place to sit in Steve's studio apartment was his king-sized bed. We hung out for a while and brought one another up to speed on what had happened in our lives since the one time we'd met. Finally—and I must have known this would happen—he asked if he could kiss me.

I knew for certain that I was attracted to men. More than that, I was capable of being overwhelmingly attracted, with a crush so intense that it virtually blinded me and made me swoon.

I did not feel that way with Steve. But neither was I repelled by him.

He was—there. Pleasant-looking. There was nothing particularly unattractive about him. And that, combined with my lack of a crush on him, made him safe.

Ever since Gord had dumped me—because, I thought, he was put off by my prudery and lack of experience—I'd felt like I couldn't get arrested. Looking at photos of myself from that time, I see that I wasn't unattractive, but at the time I was convinced that I was chubby and plain. None of the boys I liked at school would have anything to do with me. There seemed to be some sort of "it" factor that I lacked.

Steve fed my ego when I was at my most vulnerable. If he found me attractive, chances were someone else—someone I'd be crazy about—would too. In the meantime, I thought, I could gain some experience with him, so that boys I liked would no longer see me as goofy or—worse—uptight.

But first came the uncertain moment when I told Steve that I was a virgin—and planned to stay that way.

He assured me that he just wanted to "neck." Anytime I wanted, I could just turn on the red lights.

I agreed. Steve went to his LP collection and pulled out the Flamin' Groovies' Teenage Head. He adored the idea of making out like a teenager.
* * *

At Steve's apartment, with his stegosaurus
Photo by Steve/March 1985
I visited Steve several more times during my senior year of high school. During that time, neither of us ever removed one another's clothing or touched one another under clothes. I was too quick with the red lights for that—and he would always stop, as he had promised.

I told my mom that I was friends with Steve—I had a hard time hiding anything from her, because we were so close—but I didn't tell her we were more than friends. She later told me that she knew, but she didn't push it. A new Christian, she was just starting to walk the walk at that time. While she was concerned for me, I think she was uncomfortable at the thought of dictating chastity.

I had mixed feelings about what Steve and I were doing. On the one hand, it gave me something exciting to tell the other girls about in my high-school lunchroom. On the other, it got to be boring after a while. I knew Steve wasn't the one, and it was pointless to take things farther. But I also liked the feeling of being a grown-up: getting away for a secret rendezvous at a real New York City apartment—not just somebody's parents' basement—and having a bit of suspense over how far things might go.
* * *
There are certain points in one's memory where time seems to stop. They're sticking points—a nexus between past and present—and one keeps returning to them. As I look back upon when I was sexually active, I keep returning to those afternoons with Steve. Not because they were sexually exciting—they weren't. Compared to experiences I had later, the Steve sessions were about two notches above a trip to the dentist.

No, the experiences in that studio apartment on First Avenue stick in my mind because they represent a contradiction that is essential to nonmarital sex. It's something that I don't think purveyors of "sex-positive" culture will ever understand. (I think sex within marriage is positive, but I'm referring to the views of those who take it out of that context.)

From the sex-positive perspective, the Steve sessions were perfect "outercourse," as safe as safe could be. Save for saliva, no body fluids were exchanged. There was no genital contact.

But from a Christian and particularly Catholic perspective, I was doing the absolute worst thing that I could possibly do to my soul. It was, truly, unsafe sex. In a way, it was worse for me even than if I were actually having intercourse, because if I were doing so—as bad as that would have been for me—there would have been more of a chance that I'd realize what was going on.

As it was, I was like the person who takes a little poison each day and eventually becomes immune. Poison is never good for you; having the ability to ingest it without dying isn't a reason to do so on a regular basis.

In my case, I was learning to detach, to feel as though I could separate the physical actions of sex from its emotional consequences. I was also learning to be vicarious—to treat my partner as an object, to the point where my enjoyment consisted in seeing the effect I was having on him. It was a feeling of control, and it enabled me to further detach, so that I could move my partner without being moved myself.

The advantage to all this was that I could have the excitement, ego boost, and physical companionship of sex—however temporary—without getting hurt. I always knew the separation would come and I'd be alone again. If I could limit how close I was to my partner in the first place, then the separation wouldn't be as pronounced, and I wouldn't crash.

I was so afraid of crashing—with good reason.
* * *
February 1986. I was a 17-year-old freshman at New York University, and had long since moved on from Steve, but we were still friendly. He invited me to the book-release party for Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead Is Purely Coincidental, by Drew Friedman.

At the party, Steve greeted me warmly. He wanted me to meet the publisher of the marijuana-lovers magazine High Times.

As Steve brought me over to the publisher, he said, "Is it OK if I tell him about us? About how you used to come over, and we'd make out, and because you were a virgin, you'd put on the red lights?"

For a moment, I was thrown off-guard. "Sure," I said.

I never hated Steve for what he did to me. In his and my situational ethics of the time, he was a model of honesty and respect. But I think of what it meant to him, to be this pornography writer telling people about his experience with a virgin, and—like Jack Nicholson's character at the end of "Carnal Knowledge"—it seems terribly sad.

Labels: Wuz

3:49 AM |

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Radar's of the Lost Art

Jeremy Gerard, articles editor of Radar magazine, offers two more headlines for the Christian Slater story:

Judge Sets Christian Right But Turns the Other Cheek

and

Judge to Groper Christian: Tush, Tush

Jeremy's own headline-writing résumé is as impressive as they come. A veteran theater critic, he was Variety's New York bureau chief for five years, writing such headlines as this, when Bill Clinton first began courting the Hollywood crowd:

Bubba to H'Wood: Don't Be Cruel

And this banner, for the story of an outrageous box-office scandal involving Andrew Lloyd Webber and Glenn Close:

Sunset BULL-evard

He's also written a fine headline for a New York piece on "The Producers" and a great one for a piece about the growing influence of blogger theater critics, which you can see for yourself.

My favorite of Jeremy's headlines is the one he wrote for a Dallas Morning News piece years ago about the controversial plan to replace Shakespeare in the Park with a concert series:

Bard Barred? Or Band Banned?

3:37 PM |

Thanks to my attempt to ban libelous Anthony from commenting, I appear to have banned everyone and my own mother, as the saying goes. Well, the part about my own mother is true anyway. If you tried to post a nonlibelous comment earlier and were banned, please try again.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Sigh.

12:32 PM |

Space Theodicy

Be the first one on your block to see this. Congratulations to Godspy contributor John Zmirak on his new book that the animation promotes, The Bad Catholic's Guide to Good Living.

3:18 AM |

How I Became the Catholic I Wuz—Part 10

Continued from Part 9:

As I got deeper into adolescence, my depression worsened. It was cyclical. I would be fine for days or weeks, but eventually I couldn't hold it back any longer, and I would crash—crying alone in my room at night, or trying to stick my wrists with something sharp. I never actually managed to hurt myself; I was too much of a scaredy cat. But I wanted at those moments to feel physical pain, to somehow bring the pain I felt inside to the surface.

I'm not sure where the depression came from. Part of it could have been genetic; my mother had suffered from it, as had her mother and other relatives of mine as well. I know too that having a broken home had a lot to do with it. And it didn't help that I was a brainy teen who wanted friends but had little interest in peers who didn't share my erudition—or at least my love of below-the-radar rock acts.

But it was more than that—I felt an emptiness, which wasn't answered by anything I could find at home or with relatives. Although I wouldn't say that a lack of religious observance in a family necessarily causes depression, in my case, it certainly didn't help.

My mom and I had long stopped lighting candles for Shabbat. With the exception of an aunt and uncle who were Orthodox Jewish and therefore in a completely different sphere of spiritual practice, none of my family believed in a personal God—at least, not a God who was directly and intimately involved with every aspect of our daily lives. Those who were religious believed that faith had its place, but they could go from one Shabbat to the next without seeming to acknowledge God at all. My mother was keenly interested in God, but until she received her faith in Jesus, she viewed Him with a certain amount of detachment—more as a source of ethics and tradition, than as One who had made promises and kept them.

To take my mind off the depression, I sought escape—through eating (I gained 20 lbs. in my first few months of high school), listening to music, getting away to Greenwich Village on Saturday afternoons, and—on those rare occasions when my stars were all aligned—dating.

My first "boyfriend"—that is, the first guy who lasted longer than a few yucky kisses—was a 16-year-old I'll call Gord, who I met at a Unitarian youth-group weekend. I was 14 and had gone on the retreat specifically in hope of meeting a boy who'd be brighter and hipper than my classmates. Gord was hip all right—a hardcore punk—and bright: He and a buddy founded a gang of pranksters that they called the UDL (Unitarian Defense League), a sort of "Clockwork Orange" for the suburban set. He was also cute, with his Johnny Ramone haircut, and would have been six feet tall if his smoker's slouch didn't take away two inches. It didn't bother me that the name of the rock band Gord played in was Johnny Saline and the Abortionz—I didn't know what saline did, and at any rate I was prochoice. (It will probably surprise no one to know that today Gord is a contributing writer to Salon.)

Gord and I dated for about three weeks before he stopped returning my calls. The last time we went out was the only one where we did a lot of kissing. We were at a double bill at the Rock Hotel on Jane Street: Borscht and Kraut. (Even then, I thought that was inspired. Come to think of it, I think the band that completed the bill may have been the Meatmen.) I had to leave early because my longsuffering mom was making the hourlong drive into the city at midnight to pick me up, so Gord took me for a walk around the block.

We were in the Meatpacking District, the empty streets lined with dark warehouses. Gord started kissing me. I was very self-conscious because I'd only been kissed a couple of times before, and those times by boys who obviously didn't know what they were doing. From the way Gord kissed, I could tell that he did know what he was doing, and I wasn't sure how to handle this new stage of our relationship.

I don't recall articulating to Gord my plans to wait to have sex until I was really In Love, but he must have picked up on it. At least, that was my guess. All I knew was that, once he saw me into my mom's car, that was the last I saw of him. He was experienced, and I was too slow for him.

As the months went by and I kept rehashing my dates with Gord in my head, the conclusion was clear. Even if I was going to save sex for when I was finally In Love, I had to get more experience. I'd show my dream man that I wasn't a prude. That way, I'd keep him interested until the magic moment when everything would fall into place.

Labels: Wuz

3:04 AM |

Monday, September 19, 2005

Give 'er Enough 'Grope'

The story in tomorrow's National Edition runs something like this:

Christian Slater turned down the real-life role of inmate Monday, taking a plea deal that will allow him to avoid jail time for grabbing and squeezing a woman's buttocks on an Upper East Side street in May.

Edison Alban, a spokesman for the Manhattan district attorney's office, said all charges against Slater, 36, will be dropped if he stays clear of trouble for the next six months.

My headline is this:

Slater gets off groping charge with a big 'but'

11:53 PM |

'Rev'ed Up

"I don't drink decaf unless it is absolutely necessary for social decorum. Decaf is evil. I am not exaggerating. Coffee by its nature has caffeine. To decaffeinate is to remove an essential good, albeit an accidental good, from the coffee. Therefore, decaf is evil because of the lack of good that ought to be present. Now, where is my grinder?"

— Fr. Shane Tharp of Catholic Ragemonkey

8:51 PM |

Flipping the Bard

If you liked "Hamlets warned of Ophelia," you'll love this. Make sure you click on scenes one, two, and three. Brilliant, Nightfly.

7:14 PM |

How I Became the Catholic I Wuz—Part 9

Continued from Part 8:

I replied immediately—instinctively, without even thinking.

"Yes, Mom, you should."

I felt the need for the hard sell, so I added:

"We read it in Mr. Snyder's class. It's good."

That was enough for her. She picked up the paperback and put it in her already overstuffed leather purse. I didn't really expect her to give it more than a cursory read, if at all.

The rest of the Rutgers visit was uneventful. I already had my heart set on entering the music-business program at New York University and living in a Greenwich Village dorm. Probably this trek out to New Brunswick was a waste, but at least I had a fallback if NYU wouldn't take me.

My next memory is hazy. I vaguely remember Mom sitting up in bed later that night, calling me over so she could read me a beatitude from that free New Testament: "Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you..." But that may be a false memory, based on her own recollection of events.

All I remember for certain is that Mom very suddenly decided that she wanted to follow Jesus.

She had followed so many different spiritual leaders and New Age paths over the years since the divorce that one could be forgiven for thinking Jesus was just the next in line. I think that everyone else in the family thought that—at least, everyone she told about it; she kept it at first from relatives who might get angry. (In Jewish families, saying one has found Jesus is often looked upon as the equivalent of saying, "Hitler didn't need to finish the job—I've finished it for him.")

I never doubted the sincerity of Mom's conversion, because I knew that Christianity was qualitatively different from any of the other paths she had followed. It allowed for only one truth—not many. I also knew from being acquainted with the Gospels that there was a there there, a complete design for living that could fulfill a person—if one had faith.

Whether Mom could be fulfilled by Christianity any more than she had been by other forms of spirituality was an open question. But if this didn't do it, I doubted she would return to her old, peripatetic existence. Besides, she was running out of options—there was no way Islam would suit her personality, and she'd already been less than wowed by the Book of Mormon and the Bhagavad-Gita.

So I threw my support behind Mom, even as she announced she was going to be a Catholic. I knew nothing about Catholics anyway, other than that they had funnier rituals than ordinary Christians. At any rate, her reasoning behind the choice seemed sound: She felt she might as well go with the original.

Soon, Mom started to do some wacky things. She had this feeling that she had to give away her things to people who needed them more. Up to that point, I'd always assumed that everything that was hers was mine. It was extremely annoying to find that some book, record, appliance, or coat of hers that I'd wanted for myself had found its way to some poor person who "needed" it. I worried that she'd wake up one morning and decide to give everything away.

Mom joined a charismatic Catholic church that was all happy-clappy/huggy/healing/speaking-in-tongues/you-name-it. Add to that the Catholic rituals, which were already strange to me, and it was actually weirder than some of the New Age centers to which she had taken me. I took an immediate dislike to the place and avoided it whenever possible, much to Mom's disappointment. But I couldn't deny that with her new faith, new house of worship, and new friends she'd made there, she was really happy—happier than I'd ever seen her. She had a place where she felt she belonged, and fellowship with people who gave her emotional support.

As she took instruction for initiation into the Church—from the brilliant Msgr. John M. Oesterreicher, a converted Austrian Jew—Mom asked my father for help. She wanted to have her marriage to him annulled.

I really had no concept of what was going on—why Mom needed any kind of annulment when she was already divorced. My father was extremely distressed and asked me what I thought. His concern was that if there were no marriage, then my sister and I were illegitimate.

Faced with such a bizarre situation, all I could do was parrot to Dad what Mom had told me—that an annulment would have no effect on her children's legitimacy. It was true, as I understand now, and I'm glad she went through with the annulment. But at the time, at 17 years old, I felt caught in the middle of yet another divorce—over a decade after the first.

Clearly, whatever Mom was going through in becoming a Catholic, it was far bigger than anything spiritual change she'd ever undergone. I was happy for her, but I also felt that—even though she was still the same Mom who loved me—I'd lost a certain level of companionship. I couldn't share my spiritual ambivalence with her anymore. There was no ambivalence on her side, and I couldn't believe that what had worked for her would work for me. She had been touched by something—if not God, then a belief so strong that it made God real in her mind. As a result, she believed life had a happy ending. I had no such revelation, and—in the face of increasing loneliness and depression—no such optimism.

Labels: Wuz

2:41 AM |

Sunday, September 18, 2005

My new "Blog On!" column will be at this link shortly (the old one's still up as I write this). It's about the Raving Atheist.

Today's Daily News also has a headline I suggested, for a story on the latest payola probe: "SLEAZY LISTENING."

For a future column, I'm looking for blogs that are covering local politics, such as the New York City mayoral race—suggestions?

1:28 AM |

How I Became the Catholic I Wuz—Part 8

Continued from Part 7:

My earliest attitudes about sex were shaped from what I saw in the lives of my sister (five years older) and especially my mother, whose marriage to my father ended when I was six.

From both of them, I learned that a woman can be highly intelligent and beautiful, and yet have a tremendously difficult time meeting a responsible, gentlemanly man who wishes to be married for life.

Since it was just me and my mother in the house from when I was 12 onward, when my sister went off to college, my perspective on my mother's dating life was especially poignant. Ours was the postfeminist "One Day at a Time" lifestyle, where Mom would run each new boyfriend by me to insure that he was comfortable with the fact that she had a kid. It was my job to be tolerant, open to the possibility that this man might turn out to be Mom's Mr. Right.

In the best of circumstances, it's hard for the daughter of a single mother to acclimate herself to Mom's search for a husband. When that search brings forth men who don't treat Mom well—who treat her like the bridge across a river, rather than the destination on the other side—it's just devastating.

This was the Seventies and early Eighties, the age of SNAGs—Sensitive New Age Guys. They really were snags, too. My mother attracted them because she was New Age herself, doing kundalini yoga and attending lectures by various gurus. They were ethical and they treated her with what passed for respect in the singles world, but they seemed unable to give of themselves. Certainly, they never saw the beauty that I saw in my mother. I wondered if there were any men capable of seeing and appreciating inner beauty.

In both her search for a husband and her search for a fulfilling spirituality, Mom was, in my eyes, fueled by a longing to fill the empty space—what I would now call the proverbial God-shaped vacuum.

I felt the vacuum too, and I likewise longed for male companionship. But I was determined not to get hurt the way I saw my mother get hurt. Having premarital sex seemed like a surefire way to get burned. So, I decided early on that I would not have sex until...marriage? That would be great. However, I didn't think I could wait until then. Instead, I resolved that I would wait to have sex until I was really In Love.

The problem, and I was well aware of this, was that I didn't know the first thing about what a healthy love relationship was like—how it began or how it was sustained. Sex, then, became a symbol of a feeling that was unattainable. If I thought I was in love and had sex, and then it turned out that the feeling really wasn't love, what was left?

The solution, I believed, was to put sex off for as long as possible, until I was absolutely sure that it was worth the risk of disappointment.

* * *
One day in the autumn of 1984, when I was a 16-year-old high-school senior (having skipped a year) looking at colleges, my mother took me to check out Rutgers University's New Brunswick campus. As we walked through the student union, our eyes fell on a table of Good News Bibles. One of the volunteers at the table said, "Take one. It's free."

Mom thumbed through one of the books curiously. It contained the New Testament only. We were both a bit bemused to find a Christian table—we didn't have a lot of contact with evangelists other than the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses who knocked on our door from time to time.

By that point, I had long stopped a being practicing Jew, and I thought Mom's current guru—a Sai Baba pal named Hilda Charlton—rather tiresome. Hilda used to talk about how we all had to get ready because there would be a big famine, but not to worry because the space people would come to save us.

"What do you think?" asked Mom, holding the Bible with an ironic smile. "Should I take one?"

If only, I thought. If only Mom would find something reasonable to believe in and stick with it. It seemed like that would solve most of her problems right there. She'd still be single, but at least she wouldn't have that gnawing hunger.

But I couldn't imagine her giving up many avenues of truth for just one. It wasn't in her nature.

As for myself, I had looked at the Gospels a few years before, when my rather daring eighth-grade social-studies teacher, Owen M. Snyder, had ventured to teach them in the context of cultural history. I had also read them as a child. Nothing magical had happened in my heart, as much as I wished for something to give meaning to my life. I had no fear of being converted.

Labels: Wuz

1:00 AM |

Saturday, September 17, 2005

Shocking Coldness

Bill Hennessy details how a New York Times piece meant to humanize the abortion industry does just the opposite.

Comment on Bill's blog.

UPDATE: Andrea of Least-Loved Bedtime Stories is right that Bill's characterization of the women themselves does no good—but I think he's right to call the abortionists on what they're doing.

9:13 PM

How I Became the Catholic I Wuz—Part 7

Continued from Part 6:

And so, on Martin Luther King Day, 1983, at the age of 14, I found myself leading three older teen pals farther east than I'd ever been in the East Village, to meet Punk and Stop! magazine-publisher/underground-cartoonist John Holmstrom. He'd agreed to meet me because...I don't know why. Probably because it wasn't every day that he got a call from a high-school freshman girl eager to know what Sid Vicious was really like. And I'd gotten my friends together for the outing because...I loved being a catalyst.

I was always a loner, but a very bad one, because I missed being around people. From an early age, to satisfy my desire to be around people and yet not have to keep up emotional intimacy with them, I'd find ways to get people excited about doing something together—and then be a fly on the wall when they met up.

It wasn't that I disliked emotional intimacy—if I were good at being superficial, I'd have had more friends. My problem was that I longed for intimacy so much that the thought of making and keeping deep friendships seemed overwhelming. Being able to bring people together made me feel important and wanted—and, since the people I brought together enjoyed one another's company, it didn't demand a commitment from me emotionally.

We met up at the Odessa Restaurant: me, my pals—fellow "Uncle Floyd" fans John C. and Derek, and high-school classmate Leila—Holmstrom, and a Stop! magazine contributor I'll call Steve. Holmstrom was in his mid-30s and had that classic, Charles M. Schulz-style nondescript-cartoonist look—like the schoolmate who might appear perfectly innocent while secretly scribbling wildly exaggerated caricatures of faculty members in compromising positions. Steve was 30 and had the cornfed look of a native Nebraskan. Only his slightly faraway look and somewhat blunted affect gave away that he'd spent more than a few late nights boozing and rocking in Gotham dives.

I have little memory of the actual meeting, only a mental picture of us all sitting for a couple of hours and having a great time chattering away. My friends, one of whom was an aspiring cartoonist, asked most of the questions. What I remember feeling was this excitement, that I did it. I got two adults to let me and my friends pick their brains about an era of music that fascinated me. Best of all, I wasn't there with my mother, but as an independent individual. These adults were treating me as an equal, in a restaurant in the super-hip East Village.

At school, I was treated like a toddler—having to ask for a pass to go to the bathroom. In New York City, I was an adult—and could find people who would treat me like one. That feeling of freedom and possibility made a great impression on me.

I remember that as my friends and I walked back to the PATH train, I asked Leila if she thought Steve was cute. She didn't.

It didn't matter. I had already given him my address. Long-distance phone calls were expensive those days for the daughter of a social-worker single mom, so I wrote letters.

Labels: Wuz

3:30 AM |

Friday, September 16, 2005

Bell Won't Save Planned Parenthood

On the anniversary of Becky Bell's death, Planned Parenthood digs up her bones in its usual attempt to paint her as a victim of parental-notification laws. It quotes her parents from a 1991 "60 Minutes" interview where they blamed politics for their daughter's death from a supposed illegal abortion.

Know why the article uses quotes from 1991? Because after that, Becky's parents stopped talking to the press*:

Shortly after [the National Right to Life Committee] started distributing copies of the autopsy report and calling for a review of the coroner’s report concluding the death was a result of a “septic abortion” (which the post-mortem contradicted), Mr. and Mrs. Bell dropped out of sight...

Attaboy and Jill Stanek have more on abortion advocates' exploitation of the teen, who died of pneumonia and who, according to an autopsy, had not been touched by abortion instruments.

For more information on Bell, read "A Tale of Two Abortions." Also, visit the Blackmun Wall, which compiles stories of women who died from so-called "safe and legal" abortions.

*UPDATE, 9/17/05: The Bells did resurface to speak at a Planned Parenthood rally and possibly other events as well, and are still blaming parental-consent laws for their daughter's death. (Thanks to Raving Atheist for the tip.)

If you're new to this forum, please read the comments rules at left, including the Harris Protocol, before commenting. Thank you.

10:53 PM |

Some weekend viewing for you: While searching for Jack Benny video clips, I found this page, which includes the incredibly politically incorrect "Tijuana Jail" sketch from an early-1960s TV special. I was crying laughing when one of the jailbirds explained why he was arrested—it had to do with boiling coffee twice...

The page also includes two wonderful clips of the We Five, both times miming to a live recording. Great viewing for all you Bev Bivens fans out there.

And of course all those Kingston Trio clips make one realize just what an easy mark they were for the Folksmen.

7:29 PM |

'Love Leaves a Memory No One Can Steal'

Tylor Lauck has died.

(Make sure you read the comments on that post, which are very touching. For more on Tylor, see "Love That Never Dies," a couple of entries down this page.)

5:49 PM |

Daily Bard

Pardon the self-glorification, but my dad's been known to read this blog and I thought he'd like to see this praise in today's Daily News letters column for a headline I wrote for the National Edition:

Saratoga Springs, N.Y.: Throughout the years, the Daily News has excelled in the fine art of crafting headlines. The late William Brink’s 1975 masterpiece, "Ford to city: Drop dead" stands atop them all. But you manage to sneak in literate references that can always bring a chuckle. A number of years ago, the ailing Transit Authority was bailed out. Your headline - "Sick transit’s glorious Monday" - was a delight to Latin scholars. And you continued this wonderful tradition Wednesday with the headline for an article concerning small North Carolina towns being alerted to the impending hurricane: "Hamlets warned of Ophelia threat." Thanks to your literate staff! Keep them coming!

Bob English

5:21 PM |

Love That Never Dies

Trevor Romain says goodbye to Tylor Lauck.

(I wrote about Tylor a couple of months back.)

4:15 AM |

How I Became the Catholic I Wuz—Part 6 Continued from Part 5:

It was easy to become obsessed with rock and roll. I was a born introvert, a born escapist. I liked to watch people but didn't feel I belonged with them. Music provided both the passive excitement of a spectator sport and the active fun of research—distracting myself from my daily life by reading up on bands, exploring the hidden depths of my favorite albums and 45s, and combing through record stores.

Since I couldn't make music myself, being a music fan also afforded me the unique pleasure of being a loner among kindred spirits. I could listen to Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, pretending that I was the only soul who understood suicidal singer/songwriter Ian Curtis's existential angst—and yet knowing there had to be other listeners who felt the same as me.

There was also the bittersweet feeling of trying to catch a train that had just left town. I knew it well from when I was 10 in 1979, living in Texas, and discovered Monty Python. I used to go to the Galveston Public Library, peruse the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature for listings of old magazine articles on the troupe (I told you I was a brainiac), and make photocopies of those articles off the microfilm. Then I would read the articles and pretend I was one of the lucky few grownups who caught "Monty Python's Flying Circus" when it first aired in the United States. Then I could have seen them perform live at New York's City Center—oh, joy!

Likewise, with older friends turning me on to punk and new wave, my imagination was free to run wild, imagining the not-so-distant past when, as the X-Ray Spex sang, the world turned Day-Glo. At 14, having moved to New Jersey, I started taking the train on Saturday afternoon from South Orange to Greenwich Village (via Hoboken). There, I'd blow my allowance on Judy Jetson-style earrings and old copies of Punk magazine from street vendors—one of whom was Punk's former publisher. I went with friends at first, though by 15 I was going by myself.

Punk was an indispensable artifact of New York's late-Seventies rock scene during its most chaotic, rebellious, and exciting time. Its pages were packed with interviews, underground comics, and inside gossip on the Ramones, Blondie, and other local bands, as well as Brits like the Sex Pistols and the Clash. It took the reader to late-night aftershow parties where everyone got sick, beaten up, fondled, or all three. It was cool.

Although Punk had folded by the time I scored a collector's-item copy from its one-time publisher for $3 (which he immediately spent on goodness-knows-what), a variation of it lived on. My older friend Derek turned me on to Stop!, which was published by another of Punk's former publishers, John Holmstrom. It had the same underground cartoonists and many of the same writers, but it focused more on retro pop culture, with features on "The Honeymooners," "Bullwinkle," and "The Three Stooges." The concept was ahead of its time for the early Eighties—this was long before Nick at Nite and others corporatized Baby Boom nostalgia.

For some reason—and to this day I'm not certain why—when I was 14, I located John Holmstrom's phone number in a copy of Stop! and called him. Even stranger, I asked him to meet me and three of my older teen friends for lunch—and he agreed.

Looking back, it makes perfect sense why I'd want to meet Holmstrom. Today, I'm a rock historian; I'm always interested in hearing about music history firsthand. I'm also a writer, so I like learning the inside scoop about magazines that have helped shape popular culture, plus I like meeting editors—especially if I might write for them someday.

That still doesn't explain why I would haul three pals to a Ukrainian restaurant in the East Village on Martin Luther King Day, 1983...

Labels: Wuz

3:49 AM |

Thursday, September 15, 2005

Atheist Takes a Shine to Pledge

A judge ruled the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional yesterday because of the words "under God." The Raving Atheist must be raving with joy at the thought of schoolchildren finally being free from outside religious influence during the school day.

Or is he?

1:19 PM |

Croc to Go
A Guest Post by S. McMillan

I welcome this opportunity to expand my earlier statement in a comment box that pro-choice feminism "lacks moral standing to make convincing arguments" about other issues of interest to society.

I mean that freedom, reason and morality are intertwined; a corruption of one affects the others. If we hold that it is morally permissible to take innocent life on demand, then we have destroyed the moral basis for the obligation to feed, clothe, house and pay people a just wage. If some can be killed for arbitrary reasons ("arbitrary" means "based on or subject to individual judgment or discretion"), then the moral obligation to value all others is fatally undermined as well.

We can't divorce morality from reason and reality without landing, eventually, in the soup. And so, I think the Feminists for Life are undoubtedly right to give the Life issues priority. A feminist social vision can then expand from a sound foundation, and not from a quaking bog of misplaced (out of order) concepts of social justice. Here’s a little cautionary tale illustrating this point:

The Frog and the Crocodile

Once upon a time a frog wanted to cross a wide river. She saw a crocodile idling near the shore and asked if she could hitch a ride on her back.

"Sure, sister," replied the crocodile as she flexed her short arms and drew closer.

The frog hopped on and the two moved slowly across the river. When they were very near the other side, the crocodile turned around and snapped up the frog, dangling her over the water by her Barbie-like green legs.

"What!" cried the frog, bobbing and sobbing and flailing in the air. "You said you'd help me get to the other side!"

"Well," said the crocodile, "We've swum a long way, Baby, but you knew all the time I’m a croc." Chomp, gulp.

3:01 AM |

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Cows, Milk, and Straw Men
A Guest Post by See-Dubya

Hugo Schwyzer meditates on the old conundrum: Why buy the cow, when you can get the milk for free?

Hugo, a professor, describes himself as a progressive evangelical Christian, and he knows a thing or two about changes in sexual mores over time. And he has put that knowledge to work annihilating an enormous, empty straw man:

"I'd go so far as to suggest that for those of us raised in a more sexually tolerant and affluent culture, when we go to the altar with our college degrees and our IRAs and our own set of past physical experiences, we can offer our new spouse the radical assurance that we are truly marrying them for who they are, not for what we will finally be allowed to do!"

"I didn't get married to have licit sex," he insists. "I didn't get
married because I'd starve without a wife."

Um, duh. Nobody, I repeat, frickin' nobody has ever told me, "See-Dub, me and Elvira are really hittin' it off good. And me and her would like to have us some sex, but the Bible says we gotta get hitched first. So for that reason and that reason alone, we are going to the drive-through chapel this evening and then we will spend the rest of our lives together. But whatever, we got to go have that sex right now."

Doesn't happen. And if it ever does happen, it happens to people with such amazingly constricted time horizons that they must be mental children.

Oh, people do dumb things for sex, all right. People in the Middle East explode in crowded pizzerias and buses for a shot at their 72 virgins. But even they won't get married for it.

Maybe people are getting married too young, but I think this is caused more by economics and culture than religion. On the other hand, enjoying the "free milk" for too long has led many people to start planning for marriage too late. I'd be interested in hearing more of Schwyzer's argument on this, but only if he were to represent more seriously the traditional Christian view of chastity.

Hat tip to XRLQ.

1:10 PM |

Get Thee to a Punnery

I've already blocked out the memory of the tiny headline I wrote last night about small towns in the Carolinas evacuating in anticipation of a hurricane. I fear it was something like, "Hamlets warned of Ophelia."

1:02 PM

Blog-Post Title of the Day

No, the above isn't the title of the day. This is, from the teenage twins at The Rebelution: "Ruining Our Lives with Fun."

3:20 AM

How I Became the Catholic I Wuz—Part 5

Continued from Part 4:

From about the time of my parents' divorce, when I was six, I was a budding existentialist. Charlie Brown and Linus's brick-wall conversations from Peanuts were a big influence. I used to annoy my fourth-grade teachers by raising my hand and, when called upon, asking simply, "Why are we here?"

Despite having a broken home and being treated as the brainiac oddball by my peers, I managed to avoid serious depression until I was 13. Then, one day, it hit me full force.

I had a terrible crush on a teen who was six years older, the kind of crush that only an eighth-grader can have. The teen, wisely, had no romantic interest in me. I could not tolerate this and concluded that I was a miserable failure in love and life.

I can still remember the moment when I came home from school one day and, as I was going up the stairs, realized I was choked up. It was more than being choked up—it was a painful knot in my chest. I realized I'd been feeling that way all day, but hadn't been conscious of it.

The choked-up feeling went on for a week, as I wished I were dead. Today, I think the feeling must have been heartburn—which, if you've ever suffered from it, you know is a pretty rough thing for a kid to have. But at the time, I simply thought my heart was breaking.

Looking back, it would be easy to write the whole thing off as one of the first of many teenage crushes—except that I really did wish I were dead. There was a serious lack in my life, a failure to understand what made life worth living.

As far as I was concerned, the purpose of life was happiness. My life was coming up short on the happiness meter. Every failure to get what I wanted exacerbated the situation. As time went on, I would store up those failures and use them as ammunition with the aim of convincing myself that the future was not worth the risk.

As I entered high school in the fall of 1982, my spiritual life was centered around rock and roll. I had stopped going to temple, given away my tarot cards, and lost interest in my mother's New Age explorations. With the help of a new circle of older teen friends I'd met through our mutual fandom of "The Uncle Floyd Show," I was delving intensely into the punk and new-wave music that I'd missed during my Moody Blues obsession.

I was also reading up on Sixties radicalism. This again was my mother's influence, but I connected it with the anger that I felt against authority—specifically, school, with its demeaning rules and its promotion of what I saw as bland conformity.

When I was a freshman, a "moment of silence" was briefly introduced in New Jersey schools. I was outraged at this intrusion of religion into the public sphere, certain that it would soon degenerate into enforced Christian prayer. Not that I had anything against prayer, but the idea that Insane Anglo Warlord (the then-popular anagram for Ronald Wilson Reagan) could impose his brand of it in the classroom frightened me.

One morning soon after the moment of silence was initiated, I came to school early, armed with a stack of photocopied homemade flyers and a roll of Scotch tape. The flyers—screaming, "PROTEST THE ONE-MINUTE HATE"—urged students to defy the silence order. (The Orwell connection struck me as profound.)

I posted the crude broadsides throughout the hallways. They were gone within an hour, much to my chagrin.

To be continued...

Labels: Wuz

2:26 AM |

How Does the National Abortion Federation Spell Relief?

I think we all know the answer.

A friend writes:

Last week, I said it wouldn't be long before someone offered free abortions to hurricane victims. Well—National Abortion Federation to the "rescue."

And, oh yeah—send us money to pay for the freebies!

12:45 AM |

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

How I Became the Catholic I Wuz—Part 4

I wrote in the previous installment of this series:

Throughout my childhood, I noticed that I always had an intense reaction upon stepping outside on the first day of fall. I don't mean the first calendar day of fall, but rather the first day that the air had a slight chill.

There was something in the air on that day, just once a year, that gave me an intense feeling of sadness and longing. Yet, the sadness wasn't like depression or hopelessness. It was a feeling of loss, but loss made somehow beautiful by the realization that I had once held something of value.

My most distinct memory of that wistful feeling—perhaps the last time I felt it strongly—is the afternoon of September 11, 1981, eight days after I turned 13. I was standing outside my mother's apartment in South Orange, N.J. It faced a park. I was wearing the pretty blue Indian-cotton gown that I'd picked out when my grandmother had taken me shopping for my bat mitzvah dress—the ceremony was that evening. I felt very feminine and grown-up.

In a short while, my mom would take me to Temple Israel. I'd chant the Torah portion I'd learned phonetically from a tape the cantor had made for me, and give a short sermon on the Haftarah (the reading from the prophets). For now, I stood for a few minutes, felt the golden late-afternoon sunshine on my face, and tried to feel spiritual.

I say, "tried to feel spiritual," because by then I was long beyond my simple childhood certainty that God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. I was becoming a bat mitzvah (literally, "daughter of the commandment") because my mother and father had a strong cultural connection to Judaism, which they instilled in me. Also, it meant showing myself to be a responsible young woman in front of all my extended family, who would be very happy to see me upholding my heritage. And—while the reception would cost my mother a lot of money—I was certain to come out of the event with lots of gifts.

The ceremony's religious significance was by no means lost on me. Unlike my classmates' ceremonies, which appeared to me as superficial preludes to lavish parties, I wanted my bat mitzvah to be meaningful and uplifting. But my concept of God had lost its focus.

God was no longer present for me as He was when I was a child—when I believed He was everywhere. I had never really believed in a personal God; now I didn't even believe that He was involved with people in general. I had unwittingly turned into a sort of Deist—believing that there had to be Something out there, but that the Something was detached and distant. The beauty of the Jewish service for me was the way its ancient traditions hearkened back to a simple faith, the faith of my grandparents and great-grandparents—something I wished were true, but couldn't really make myself believe.

What I did believe in was the supernatural, which as I understood it was not God per se but a sort of vague New Age force.

The force that I imagined was, like my conception of God, detached and toothless. But it was more fun than God, because one could choose it rather than be chosen by it, and through knowledge of it one could attain a sort of enlightenment.

My interest in the New Age was influenced largely by my mother, who—following my parents' divorce when I was six—was a full-time spiritual seeker, 1970s style. At various times, she belonged to an ashram, attended est lectures, and hung out with Paul Masson-imbibing potheads who would lazily expound for hours about chakras and vibrations.

To be different from Mom, I delved deeper into the occult, combing the library's 133 section for books on parapsychology and witchcraft. By seventh grade, I was taking out up to 20 books a week, combing through them for information on spells, tarot, palm reading, psychic powers, and the like.

I think my obsession with the occult stemmed from feelings of loneliness and isolation. I was a bookworm, and the kids at school either teased me or ignored me. My sister, five years older, was off at college; even when she had been home, she'd far preferred the company of her friends to me. It was just me and my mother at home, and Mom suffered frequently from loneliness and depression—not to mention her weekly migraines.

Doing tarot or reading palms gave me a sense of power at a time when I felt powerless. The idea that there was something more than the material world gave life an undercurrent of excitement. That I could somehow tap into it made me feel special, and I wanted so much to feel special.

That September afternoon as I anticipated my bat mitzvah, basking in the golden sunshine and cool breeze, I felt like that vague spiritual force was around me, but just out of reach. It made me feel melancholy. A cheesy song was going through my head—well, it sounds cheesy now, but I thought it was deep and meaningful back then:

My life will be forever autumn
'Cause you're not here...

It was "Forever Autumn," sung by Justin Hayward on Jeff Wayne's concept album War of the Worlds. I was enamoured of Hayward's group the Moody Blues at that time because I believed they were onto deep spiritual truths. That was my mom's influence again—she had most of their LPs—but once more, I had to take it further, finding albums she didn't have.

A year later, I would be celebrating my 14th birthday in the same park that I looked out upon that afternoon, with new friends—older, lapsed-Catholic teens who gifted me with cassettes of cutting-edge punk and new wave bands. Instead of perusing the occult book stacks, I was reading Abbie Hoffman's Revolution for the Hell of It and Steal This Book. For some time, I gave up looking for deeper spiritual meaning in music. It was enough that it provoke a catharsis—making me cry, making me excited, or just making me separate my identity from that of my parents.

To be continued...

Labels: Wuz

2:37 AM |

Monday, September 12, 2005

Susan Torres's Baby Dies

Please pray for the family of Susan Torres, whose baby has died.
5:28 PM |

Golden Moments
A Guest Post by Colleen

God will be present, whether asked or not. (Latin proverb)

June 1997. I am sitting at the end of a pew in a pretty Catholic church in Colchester, Vermont. In front of me is a young father with 3 little boys. The two older boys are playing quietly on the floor. The 2 year old, in his father’s arms, has had his silence ensured with Cheez-its. Unable to concentrate on the homily, I watch with growing fascination as the little boy’s fingers become more and more thickly encrusted with soggy bits of orange cracker. All of a sudden, father and son are enveloped by a shaft of golden light coming through the stained-glass windows, turning the young man’s reddish beard into glowing fire. The little boy seems to notice it too, for he begins stroking his father’s beard lovingly, leaving little bits of cracker behind. His father never bats an eye, as the crumbs, those that do not stick to his beard, fall onto his shirt and into his lap but he does briefly turn and kiss the little boy.

I did not know why that vignette moved me so and I might have forgotten it completely but for the fact that I saw the family frequently. Even so, nearly a year went by before I began to understand.

Then it was Palm Sunday. I had had to drag myself out of bed because I had been ill with pneumonia for most of the month and had not been able to go to work or to Mass. I was still ailing and was also depressed—wondering if I would ever feel well again. But I simply could not let the holiest days in our Christian life go by unmarked.

I had not been sitting in my pew very long when something hit me in the back of the head. While the little blow had not hurt, it was too hard to have been an accident. I turned around and found myself staring straight into the twinkling eyes of Charlie Brown. Yes, the Charlie Brown. An infant, perhaps 8 months old, with the roundest, baldest head I have ever seen. When he saw he had my attention he threw back his head and began to laugh and so did I. His mortified young parents, who clearly had been prepared to apologize, also began to laugh, as did the others with them. For the first time in weeks, I felt happy again.

Reflecting on this incident, I wondered why something so... so insignificant had had the power to shake me out of my doldrums. I thought back to my Cheez-its encrusted little boy bathed in golden light, sharing a moment so tender with his father that it had practically brought tears to my eyes, and I suddenly realized that we are constantly surrounded by what I have come to call "golden moments." They communicate something we need to hear, when we need to hear it. Once our senses have become sharpened and we start noticing them, they come thick and fast.

It is very difficult to convey the quality of them to another person. How can I describe how special it was to be caught in a "pink-out"? Anyone who lives where snow is deep and winter winds fierce knows what a white-out is and how fearsome it is to be caught driving in one. But I was driving through an apple orchard in spring one Saturday morning when a sudden gust of wind sent thousands of apple blossoms swirling around my car. Though I could not see beyond the end of the hood, I was filled with joy. A pink out! Each blossom sang "look at the beauty around you! Look up! Pay attention!"

God speaks to us always and everywhere. All we need to do is pay attention.

3:47 PM |

My "Blog On!" column yesterday spotlighted the blog world's efforts to raise money for Hurricane Katrina victims.

2:02 AM

Get Your Clicks

A couple of links for you this Monday morning:

Amazing, the thing one learns from the Internet. I never knew until today that my friend John Zmirak grew up thinking he was the Antichrist. (That's one of those read-at-risk-of-laughing-out-loud links.)

If you're in London, I envy you. You can get tickets to see Stan Freberg interviewed for BBC radio. (Thanks to the anonymous tipster who sent this in.)

1:54 AM |

Sunday, September 11, 2005

God's House at Ground Zero
A Guest Post by Ground Zero Worker Robert N. Going

Some things I left out of my account of my conversation with Frank Silecchia, the guy who found the cross:

He had a can of orange spray paint. He was alone going from room to room looking for survivors or bodies and marking them as he completed the search. After he finally got up off his knees after seeing the cross, he went to the nearest pillar and painted: "God's House." In the days that followed it became a place of quiet refuge for the workers, and visiting dignitaries were brought in to see it.

When they received permission to remove the cross from the soon-to-be-demolished building, Frankie invited all his fellow-laborers to inscribe a sentiment on it, including names of friends who had died there.

One man hesitated.

"I don't know if I should," he said. "I'm Jewish."

Frankie hugged him. "It's for everyone."

Which is how the Star of David came to be carved into that rusty crossbeam.

1:11 PM |

Sign of the Cross

"He pointed out of the window of the room in which we stood, saying that he 'remembered seeing that cross' out there—pointing to the steel girder cross that somehow emerged from the collapse of the towers."

— James Kushiner in Touchstone's Mere Comments, on Rudy Giuliani's speech at a press conference that he and I attended two days ago.

On this day of remembrance, please pray for those who did rescue and recovery at Ground Zero. They have seen unthinkable carnage and destruction—and delved into it so that people might have their loved ones' remains or an item to remember them by. One of those workers was Robert N. Going, who describes his experiences in his Ground Zero Diary.

12:48 AM |

Saturday, September 10, 2005

Oh Babe, What Would You Say?

Don't follow this link unless you want those nearby to hear you laugh out loud.

My favorite captions are 6 and 7.

11:11 PM |

Society's Child
A Guest Post By Kate B.

A few posts down, Dawn asked the following question:

"Specifically, I would like to know, if a woman feels no instinctive maternal love towards her child, can she be called psychologically healthy? Or is the complete lack of instinctive maternal love a sign of mental illness?"

I'd like to expand that question. Why? Too often—in fact, almost completely—we focus on the woman considering abortion as if she somehow got into that situation alone, or as if she would be alone in dealing with the consequences. Thus, we say that whatever she decides to do about her pregnancy is solely her choice, or solely her problem. But she didn't get pregnant alone. There was a man involved, somehow. The two of them had parents, teachers, friends, siblings, etc, all of whom contributed to the couple's understanding of sex, reproduction, birth control, and responsibility, and all of whom will still be around after the pregnancy ends, however that happens. One could even say that the couple in question are, together, the baby of an enormous extended family. We—the society that formed that couple—are its family. We gave birth to them.

Nonetheless, we continue to talk about the issues surrounding abortion as issues of the pregnant woman's personal choice. When we do this, we separate ourselves from the consequences of her choice, and also from our own responsibility in influencing her choices. The line between respect and abandonment, between "It's her choice, not mine," and "It's her problem, not mine," is spider-silk thin, if it exists at all.

So I would like to expand Dawn's question. Are we, as homo sapiens, instinctually communal, or must it be learned? And if a society—at the cultural and political levels, as well as at the levels of neighborhoods, churches, and families of which societies are made—feels no instinctive love, or at least an urge to protect, its children, can it be considered sane?

In other words, can a respect of humans that seems based solely on individual autonomy be considered sane?

If it can't, the typical pro-choice, "It's her problem, not mine" line of reasoning needs to be re-examined. As does the (I hope) atypical pro-life stance "It's her problem (because she shouldn't have gotten pregnant/had sex/gone to public school/etc.), not mine."

We need to decide if the hands-off approach is sane, in light of our nature and instincts. If it isn't, we need to come up with hands-on approaches for the couple in question and their children.

Because it can't only be about the woman—she didn't get here alone.

1:49 AM |

Friday, September 9, 2005

Planned Parenthood's Game of Hide and Seek

Planned Parenthood yesterday demanded that the Bush administration release records from Judge John Roberts's career as Solicitor General.

Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood went to Kansas's high court in an effort to block Attorney General Phill Kline's request for records of late-term abortions and abortions performed on minors. Kline argues that the records are necessary because there is probable cause that Planned Parenthood and late-term abortionist Dr. George Tiller covered up statutory rapes and illegal late-term abortions.

I see an obvious solution.

The Bush administration should tell Planned Parenthood, "We'll show you ours—if you show us yours."

Records, that is.

2:36 AM |

Thursday, September 8, 2005

Sex-Ed Advocates' Dilemma:
Making Boys 'Responsible' When Only Girls Have 'Choice'

By Guest Blogger Xavier Basora (cross-posted at his blog, Buscaraons):

I came across this article when I logged off from Hotmail. Reading through the article I was struck by a number of interesting tidbits. The curious combination of fatalism and confidence among teen boys that they would accidently impregnate a girl despite not wanting to

More fascinating—in one of those it takes modern social studies to affirm the obvious—is that the whole "reproductive health" information has been skewered in favor of the girls and that boys have been completely marginalized. Gee, sounds like an awful lot like schools with their anti-boy attitudes, doesn't it?.

David Landry of the Alan Guttmacher Institute—Planned Parenthood's think-tank arm—suddenly laments how health-care professionals don't have frank discussion with teen boys about sex. Why should they? After all, it's the absolute woman's right to decide whether or not she keeps the baby or not. Moreover, contraception is gynocentric and impedes the reciprocal nature of sexual behavior. So contraception inadventently shields boys from the consequences of impregnating their girlfriends—thus, further entrenching the teen boys' total indifference to fatherhood and other forms of responsibility.

Further, nowhere does the article ever raise another option—abstinence. After all, why should society encourage self-control and patience with respect to sex? That would put Planned Parenthood out of business as it could no longer justify the exorbitant tax subsidies the American federal government grants for sexual "health advice," abortions, and contraception.

Another social-scientist-states-the-obvious paragraph is when it highlights how a boy's attitudes towards sex and whether or not he favors pregnancy influences the girls' attitudes towards birth and abortion. That's potentially more omninous, because if boys have positive views of pregnancy, that means they'll inordinately influence their girlfriends to keep the babies. Worse, the boys would reimpose patriarchial authority and that's far more horrifying! Imagine! Stable loving families with loving parents who dote on their kids.

Even better is the gratuitious class snobbery: boys most likely to be positive towards pregnancy are from 'less-educated' mothers. Nice subtle potshot at moms who adhere to traditional values or typical views of sex, pregnancy and birth.

I thought the Guttmacher Institute's pious prescription of including teachers and parents in talking about ~~sex~~ reproductive health very sly. After all, the parents—especially the less-educated mom—need to be ~~brainwashed~~ included in the discussion...sponsored by Planned Parenthood.

It's not surprising to read Planned Parenthood's disingenuity about teen boys' role in sex, pregnancy and abortion.

7:14 PM |

Words Escape the AP

Joel Helbling observes that both the Associated Press and Reuters (the news organization that refuses to call the 9/11 attackers terrorists) are resolutely calling hurricane evacuees "refugees"—despite criticism from President Bush and Jesse Jackson.

Tom Petty could not be reached for comment.

Please pray for the victims of Katrina, as well as those in the relief and recovery efforts. One organization that is helping and deserves your donation is Catholic Charities.

5:29 PM |

Robert Redford—The Way He Was
Or, What's Too Painful to Remember...

...Robert N. Going refuses to forget.

4:21 PM |

Warmplay

If you're wondering what I'd rather tipsy twentysomethings listen to than Coldplay, Joe Mannix—whom I followed when I was a rock journalist—has a new CD out, which you can hear on his Web site. (Make sure you turn off the automatic player in the top frame before clicking on the MP3 links, or you'll hear two songs at once.) Mannix's music in recent years has been too mainstream for my taste, but he's still got a fine Irish tenor, and I'd take his arpeggiated acousticisms over Chris Martin's grievous grammaticisms any day.

1:18 PM |

Spelling Is Going to the Dogs

Spotted at Newark Liberty International Airport—"puppy" bagels. Now I've seed everything.

3:19 AM |

Birthday Present

With Joel last Sunday, blissfully oblivious to the fact that I'm cropping the top of his head out of the shot. He came to town for my birthday, the sweetheart.

3:11 AM

Wednesday, September 7, 2005

Are the Harry Potter Books Morally Objectionable?
A Guest Post By Joseph S.

Some Christians find the Harry Potter books morally objectionable because they treat witchcraft sympathetically, and supposedly encourage young people to explore the occult.

Some critics go on to claim the books are morally objectionable because they have a bad message, that evil is rewarded and good thwarted, etc., but those critics appear to me not to have read the books, because they're just plain wrong about that.

I'm willing to discuss the issue of whether the books have a bad message, but what I'm more interested in is the claim that the books are objectionable simply because they treat witchcraft sympathetically.

There is a strong anti-witchcraft tradition in Christianity, but I think the word "witchcraft" is being used to denote two different things, and the critics don't appreciate the distinction.

The traditional Christian view is that witchcraft involves trafficking with demons, evil spirits, and that is obviously sinful. Anti-witchcraft hysteria was highest in the late middle ages, after modern science had begun, and this is not surprising as it may seem. Once the explanatory power of science was appreciated, and the universe came to be seen as a lawful place, violations of those scientific "laws" (which were really just observed regularities) could only arise through supernatural agency -- heavenly miracle, or evil spirit. With the decline of the alchemists, the attitude was that "magic doesn't work", and if it did work, that must be evidence of use of demons.

In the Harry Potter books, magic is natural, and it follows its own laws and restrictions, and does not involve the agency of supernatural beings. It is like a technology -- morally neutral. The critics contrast the Potter series with C.S. Lewis's Narnia books, and Tolkien's Lord of The Rings, but in all three fictional worlds there are good and bad magicians, and good and bad magic.

There is a whole area of culture which can be denoted "the occult", which I won't attempt to define here. But granting that it is an unhealthy area, and that young people should not be encouraged to explore it, I don't see that the Harry Potter books do encourage this. The "magic" in the books is morally neutral, publicly taught, and forbidden to underage or insufficiently trained wizards. The only parts that resemble "the occult" are explicitly condemned as "Dark Arts" and practitioners, if caught, are punished.

I'm sure some Christian critics of the Harry Potter books are genuinely concerned that young people will "play at" magic and then get somehow sucked in to an unhealthy obsession with evil things. But really, "magic doesn't work". (If it does work in the sense that they were afraid of in 1692, the deal-with-the-devil kind of magic rather than the alchemical kind, there's no hint of that in the Potter books.)

The Potter books are fantasy, and in my opinion they are most excellent examples of that genre.

In the comments, I'd especially like to hear from people who think the Potter books are morally objectionable but recommend the Narnia books. One rule: Anyone who has not read at least one of the books in the Harry Potter series may comment, but should disclose that.

[Note that the above views are those of guest blogger Joseph S. I myself gave up on Potter about halfway through the first chapter of Book One. Narnia rules — Dawn]

4:19 PM |

Luck Be a Lady

This is for Saint Kansas, who I know will appreciate it:

As I was riding the PATH train home last night, reading an advance copy of the latest book by the man a friend of mine affectionately calls "Joey Ratz," I was distracted by the man next to me a and his girlfriend, who was lounging with her head on his chest.

The couple were in their 20s, smelling of sweat and beer. The man was a Cockney stringbean who probably does a decent Jude Law impression. The woman was a slightly zaftig New Yorker with long brown hair. From their conversation, I gathered that they had just seen Coldplay at the Garden.

The woman lifted her head at intervals to exclaim some variation of,

"That was so f---ing awesome!"

After a couple of those, she got specific:

"Chris Martin was f---ing amazing."

This was followed by another brief interval. Then she said, with due gravity, in a dramatically low tone:

"Gwyneth Paltrow is a lucky woman."

1:36 AM |

A Few Notes About Commenting and Bans

You don't need to leave an e-mail address or Web site to comment. If you've done so before and don't want to do so again, type "xxxxxxx" or some such in the e-mail and Web site spaces, to keep your computer's cookie from automatically inserting the information.

I would like to set up a Typekey system or some such for requiring valid e-mail addresses with comments, but am not sure if this is possible with Blogger. I'd welcome advice on this from those in the know.

When I ban commenters, the imperfect system is liable to ban innocents as well. If you find yourself banned from commenting and aren't certain why, please drop me a line (dawn at dawneden.com). If it's a mistake, I'll remedy the situation.

I've recently banned a few commenters for reasons other than the usual ones (profanity and ad hominem attacks). One commenter had been banned earlier, then wrote me a rather nasty e-mail. This commenter was able to come back because my bans rotate. (Haloscan only allows me 20 at a time.) I've rebanned the commenter because the commenter never apologized for the nasty e-mail. I don't feel any obligation to give a platform to people who openly bear personal animosity towards me.

Likewise with the other bans, which were of people who've written blog entries about me that were not merely critical, but malicious personal attacks. Disagree with me all you want, but if you write, "Dawn Eden smells like a zoo and robs children of their candy money," don't expect a soapbox on my dime. This holds even on those rare days when I do smell like a zoo.

Many thanks, as always, to those who comment politely and make the comment threads enlightening.

1:22 AM

Tuesday, September 6, 2005

No Argument
A Guest Post from The Raving Atheist

The most frustrating thing for an atheist is to debate a believer who refuses to answer the question, “What is God?” It’s the threshold issue in any theological argument. The discussion can’t get started unless the parties address it.

My assumption about people who won’t discuss it is that they have absolutely no argument to make.

Religions with respectable intellectual traditions such as Catholicism, however, do eagerly offer their definitions and the conversation eventually turns to the question of God’s existence. I concede that is not an easy question for unbelievers. Even the hardcore atheist David Hume admitted that "the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence." It is hard to fathom why there is anything at all in the universe, much less so much stuff. Nor is it apparent why everything everywhere, even in the most remote recess, follows the same rules.

I have my answers but they are not the point of this post. Suffice it say that science has not let me see God, and I know that I am not God. On the questions of my own existence I am more certain. I know that I exist and can trace my existence to its beginnings. Science has let me see an embryo, and I know that I was one. Had I been aborted at conception or thereafter I simply would not be. Modern embryology admits of no other answer. The abortionist would have known where to find me, and would have destroyed me, and not a kidney, precisely because he knew exactly what I was. What everyone was.

So the abortion debate is substantially simpler for me. It is rare that you can point to your adversary as a refutation of his own argument. Not surprising then, that the pro-choice side frequently attempts to frustrate the debate by refusing to address the threshold question. Despite all the talk about importance of treating abortion as a scientific rather than religious issue – not to mention the supposed reverence for a fully informed choice -- this is the advice one chapter of Planned Parenthood gives for "Expressing Your Pro-Choice Position":

"Don’t engage in 'when is it a baby' conversations."

Scour the national Web sites for Planned Parenthood or NARAL Pro-Choice for any meaningful discussion of when life begins and I guarantee you will come up empty. Isn't it astonishing that the organizations which pretend to be clearinghouses of information for women facing the most "tragic" and "difficult" choice offer no virtually no discussion of the question that makes it so?

As I said, my assumption about people who won’t discuss it is that they have absolutely no argument to make.

Please read comments rules at left, including the Harris Protocol, before commenting. Thank you.

4:11 PM |

Monday, September 5, 2005

Congratulations to Dawn Patrol reader Stephen Sparrow for his excellent article in Ignatius Insight, "Eugenio Zolli's Path to Rome."

Rabbi Zolli is also mentioned in an older article by another reader, Dimitri Cavalli, on Jewish praise for Pope Pius XII.

11:32 PM

Bough Wow

That can't be good for the tree. Or can it?

(Comment on k_sra's blog.)

4:11 PM

Sunday, September 4, 2005

My Daily News "Blog On!" column featuring the blog world's chicest geeks is now on stands as well as the News' Web site. Many thanks to those who recommended bloggers for inclusion. Due to limitations of space, I was unable to include two additional superb square hipsters: Christopher Johnson and Joe Manzari.

3:04 PM

Maternal Love—Is It Instinctive?

From a commenter arguing in favor of abortion rights:

"Maternal love is not instinctive. It's learned and chosen."

I would like to ask two groups of people to comment on this:

1. Mothers

2. Licensed psychotherapists, psychologists, or psychiatrists

Specifically, I would like to know, if a woman feels no instinctive maternal love towards her child, can she be called psychologically healthy? Or is the complete lack of instinctive maternal love a sign of mental illness?

When you give your answer, please explain on what evidence it's based, e.g. personal experience, professional experience, studies, or any combination of those things.

Please note: To keep this comments thread relevant to the post, only commenters who fit into the above two categories—either mothers or psychology professionals (or both)—should comment. Others will be deleted. Also, please stay on topic, answering the questions above. I'd like this particular thread to be a vacation from outright prolife-vs.-prochoice arguments. Thanks in advance, very much, for your participation

12:53 AM |

Saturday, September 3, 2005

For my birthday, I've asked Alex and Brett Harris of The Rebelution to be comments monitors. Be good!

7:02 AM

Friday, September 2, 2005

Planned Parenthood Pads Its Pockets With Katrina Money

[Updated, 4:46 p.m., with link at bottom to crisis-pregnancy centers that need your help.]

It's official.

Planned Parenthood, the government-subsidized so-called nonprofit that made a $35.2 million profit last year, is shamelessly milking Americans' compassion for Katrina victims—by using the disaster as an excuse to raise money.

Is Planned Parenthood offering evacuees food? No! Water? No! Shelter? No! First aid? No!

The front page of Planned Parenthood's Web site features a heart-tugging photograph of hurricane victims lining up on a New Orleans sidewalk. The victims in the foreground are black. The text reads:

Help Those Affected by Hurricane

Planned Parenthood staff are on the frontlines aiding patients in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. You can help. 100% of your tax-deductible contribution will go directly to supporting our efforts.

Clicking the "more" link leads to an page that reads:

Help Those Affected by Hurricane

Planned Parenthood clinics in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas are doing everything possible to attend to the needs of patients in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Women and families escaped the storm with their lives,

Note it says "women and families." Not just "victims," or "women, men and children." Women first, then families—men and children nowhere in sight. It's like that famous New York Times headline parody: "World Ends; Women, Minorities Hit Hardest."

The pitch continues:

leaving behind birth control and other items critical to their well-being.

It's really all about birth control. If Planned Parenthood were providing "other items critical to their well-being," they'd say what those items were.

The pitch translates to: "You've seen those masses of displaced black people on TV. Give us money and we'll make sure that, when they come to your town, they don't breed!"

[UPDATE: If you're not familiar with Planned Parenthood's racist roots and its current efforts to target minorities for birth control and abortion, follow the links in this earlier post.]

It continues:

Those desperate for care are rushing to their nearest health center to get the care and treatment they need. Despite the horrific events of the past few days, affiliates and health centers in this region are determined to serve all those that come through the door.

Support Planned Parenthood and their patients during this time of great need. 100% of your tax-deductible contribution will go directly to helping Planned Parenthood affiliates and health centers in this region serve women and families who have nowhere else to turn.

If those refugees have nowhere else to turn but Planned Parenthood, they're really in trouble.

Please, pray for the victims, and donate to organizations that are providing them with real relief—including crisis-pregnancy centers.

1:37 AM |

Thursday, September 1, 2005

What Would Rudy Do?

Robert N. Going, who volunteered at Ground Zero for several months following 9/11, believes that what the Gulf Coast needs is another Rudy Guiliani:

All hell broke loose [in New York on 9/11]. They had emergency plans and equipment, but those got wiped out, too. What did it take, one maybe two seconds for him to improvise? By giving orders, he created order out of chaos.

One just can't imagine the NYPD driving past thousands of dehydrating people and giving them no help, no information, no instructions, no water.

How hard would it be for SOMEONE to tell the dispatchers to put out an APB saying "Five hundred buses will be arriving in twelve hours to bring you to safety at such and such an intersection." It doesn't even have to be a great plan or a good plan for that matter. ANY plan would do to restore order and give hope.

How long should it take to say, "We need the National Guard and we need them NOW!" I know the Governor of Louisiana's heart is bleeding over all the suffering, but how about shutting down the tears and DOING SOMETHING.

In New York it seemed like every piece of construction equipment in the northeast was mobilized and in place in the first 24 hours. In New Orleans days have gone by and they still have not made any concerted effort to stop the leak. It seems that even though they had a plan to drop 3,000 pound sand bags into the hole, the straps they needed to carry the bags were still in Baton Rouge....

On the fringes, things seem to be under control. The Red Cross has huge contingency plans and a nation-wide network of experienced people who can set up shelters everywhere on a moment's notice. Ditto the Salvation Army and the Southern Baptists whose portable kitchens for thousands pop up wherever needed. The manner in which the City of Houston has opened its doors is heartwarming.

But the governments of Louisiana and the City of New Orleans? Pathetic.

Read the whole thing. If you haven't donated already, or if you want to donate more, Instapundit has a list of links to charities.

5:56 PM |

Soul Queen of New Orleans Missing

UPDATE: Irma Thomas is OK, thank God. Thanks to Charles G. Hill for the tip.

Irma Thomas, the great soul singer whose version of "Time Is on My Side" moved the Rolling Stones to record the song that would be their first U.S. Top Ten hit, is among the missing in New Orleans.

Other music legends missing include Fats Domino. [UPDATE, 7:29 p.m.: He's alive.] Allen Toussaint is holed up in the Superdome.

I interviewed Thomas, the "Soul Queen of New Orleans," by phone in 1992 for her EMI best-of CD. (A fellow fan's online bio of her starts with a quote from those notes.) She was exceedingly kind and gracious to me. Please, keep praying for all the storm's victims.

1:01 PM |

Please Help Victims of Hurricane Katrina

Today is a day when blogs around the world are soliciting donations for relief in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. One organization that is doing good work is Catholic Charities. If you would like to recommend another charity, please do so in the comments. Don't forget to pray for the victims and their families as well.

Here is a prayer I found on the Internet by Renée Miller:

A Prayer for the Victims of Hurricane Katrina

O God, we remember when the disciples of Jesus were terrified after a long night on a turbulent sea. When they cried to you for help, you stilled the sea and brought them to safety. We ask now that you comfort and still the hearts of those suffering from the effects of Hurricane Katrina. We pray for those who have been displaced and who now must return to homes destroyed or damaged by the storm. We pray for those whose lives were lost and for those who now must grieve the loss of a loved one. We pray for those who are attempting to offer help and relief to victims. While we wonder why such devastation can occur, where lives and property can seem held so capriciously in the hand of what is uncontrollable, we know, O God, that you count every hair on our head and that our names are written on the palm of your hand. Let your loving grace wash over those who must now face damaged lives, homes, and possessions. Hold them close to yourself until they are sure of the security of your loving embrace. Calm their hearts and still their souls, O Lord. We ask this for the sake of your love. AMEN.

One or more additional posts to come later today.

1:55 AM |

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