BatesLine

Last night I finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final installment of the seven-book series. Wow. All I will say at this point is that I am very impressed with the way J. K. Rowling tied everything together. There's a depth here that I've never seen in recent children's literature, with many echoes of classical literature.

I went looking for serious online discussions about plot points and literary allusions. Initially, I found some blogs that were inhabited by "fanfic" types -- people who will take a science fiction or fantasy universe and extend it with their own stories. Some of them were rather upset with the way things turned out -- not so much the main conclusion of the book but the fact that the romantic couples they had been cheering for didn't come to pass.

I found better. Here are some links that will be of interest to fans of the series, but only if you've already finished the book, because they are full of spoilers.

First, Rowling has given an exclusive interview to NBC, and you can find it on the MSNBC website. They've cut the interview into a couple of dozen separate stories all linked from that page. Now that the final book is out, Rowling is very happy to clarify plot points and to tell us about details that for various reasons were left on the cutting room floor. (For example, she "knows" much more about the futures of the various characters that she left out of the epilogue, which she didn't want to become too unwieldy.) At some point in the future, she plans to take her notes and publish a definitive encyclopedia of the Harry Potter universe.

Second, Entertainment Weekly did an entire issue about the final book release, including an interview with the actor who plays Harry in the movies about his reaction to reading the final book.

I found both of these via an unofficial but well-designed fan site called The Leaky Cauldron.

I finally found a couple of sites providing some serious literary discussion of the series and the final book, delving into structure, literary technique, and classical and religious allusions, from a Christian perspective: The Sword of Gryffindor by Travis Prinzi and Hogwarts Professor by John Granger. Prinzi is a Presbyterian and is getting a graduate degree to become an English teacher. Granger is an Orthodox Christian and a Latin teacher.

Granger wrote a book, Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader, and you can find brief descriptions of those five keys here. With the release of Deathly Hallows, he has posted a series of 25 thought-provoking discussion questions; I'm starting to go through them with my son as a starting point for our own discussions.

Both Prinzi and Granger started out as "Harry Haters" before becoming fans of the series. In an interview, Granger tells how he first encountered the books:

I read the first book in order to explain to my oldest daughter, who had been given a copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, why we don't read serial trash like this. I assumed it was something like Goosebumps. I didn't know anything about Christian objections to the book. I read it – and loved it. Ms. Rowling is a classicist and an acerbic critic of Muggledom. The alchemy and profound Christian imagery of the books I thought (and still think) were wonderful and edifying.

PETA president Ingrid Newkirk to Michael Moore (PDF file), on the release of his new film about America's health care system:

Although we think that your film could actually help reform America’s sorely inadequate health care system, there’s an elephant in the room, and it is you. With all due respect, no one can help but notice that a weighty health issue is affecting you personally. We’d like to help you fix that. Going vegetarian is an easy and life-saving step that people of all economic backgrounds can take in order to become less reliant on the government’s shoddy healthcare system, and it’s something that you and all Americans can benefit from personally.

PETA's never been known for tact.

(Via Weasel Zippers.)

Oh, heck, let's pile on with some Weird Al:

John Gravois, writing an open letter to Oprah Winfrey in Slate, praises Karen Cerulo's book Never Saw It Coming as an antidote to the Oprah-promoted "law of attraction" craze:

The Secret tells us to visualize best-case scenarios and banish negative ones from our minds. Never Saw It Coming says that's what we've been doing all along—and we get blindsided by even the most foreseeable disasters because of it.

Americans don't like thinking about likely negative outcomes. Only 30% of us have wills, despite the fact that 100% of us are going to die.

We dislike thinking about negative outcomes so much, we resent anyone who tries to make us face up to the hard facts:

But unfortunately, we go to great lengths to make people who think negatively feel unwelcome....

Just think of all the pejorative and even pathological terms we have for doomsayers. Like, for instance, doomsayer. Also alarmist, naysayer, paranoiac, complainer, defeatist, downer, and killjoy. Rack your brain: It is hard to think of a laudatory term for contemplating the worst-case scenario.

He forgot fearmonger, nattering nabob of negativism, and Ken Neal's favorite, grump, which he could use as both noun and verb.

But we need naysayers to keep things running smoothly:

Cerulo argues we have a lot to learn from two groups of people who have emancipated themselves from the pressure to think positively. She points out that medical workers and computer technicians—the professional troubleshooters of the world—keep our bodies and mainframes running by being paragons of pessimism. When doctors and IT workers take up a case, they begin by dispassionately assuming the worst and then move up from there.... While this may sometimes make doctors and techies a drag, it also helped them avert worldwide disasters like the SARS outbreak and the Y2K bug.

Say it loud, I kvetch and I'm proud.

Usually it's the other way around. Since Republicans gained control of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, several significant bills have been passed and signed into law which advance the cause of the sanctity of human life. In 2006, a bill providing for informed consent passed both houses by a wide margin and was signed into law by Democratic Gov. Brad Henry, who was then looking ahead to his re-election campaign.

This year, veto-proof majorities in both chambers approved a bill (SB 714) that would have restricted abortion in state-owned facilities. This time Henry, now term-limited and a lame duck, vetoed the bill. I'll take that to mean he isn't running for U. S. Senate or any other office in this pro-life state, and that his retirement plans depend on making nice with a key national Democratic constituency, namely the abortion industry.

Brandon Dutcher sums it up nicely:

We know that Brad Henry doesn't want to go down in history as the lottery governor. Well, perhaps he'll be able to shed that moniker after all. Perhaps he'll be remembered as the abortion governor.

Would that the governor would remember: These blobs of tissue are only four years away from being revenue units for Oklahoma's vaunted pre-K program!

Please contact the State Reps and State Senators who voted for SB 714 and encourage them to vote to override the veto. You'll find the list of State Senators voting yes, with their e-mail addresses, in Oklahomans for Life's latest legislative alert (PDF).

Meanwhile, the U. S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, upheld a federal law banning partial birth abortions. For all the other problems with the Bush administration, his court appointments made this decision possible. Ruben at ProLifeBlogs noticed an interesting remark in Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissenting opinion -- she doesn't think the doctrine of stare decisis ought to apply to this ruling.

ProLifeBlogs notes that Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) is promoting his bill to provide federal funding for research using stem cells extracted from living human embryos, and he had this to say:

Think about it: If you were treating someone with embryonic stem cells, would you rather use stem cells that came from a healthy embryo, or a dead embryo? The dead embryo died for a reason. There's something wrong with it. Chances are, the stem cells that come from that dead embryo aren't so great, either. So why does anyone think a dead embryo holds the secret to curing juvenile diabetes?...

If this year's debate goes like last year's, then we can also expect opponents of S. 5 to make a lot of unfounded claims about adult stem cells. To repeat, I'm all for adult stem cell research. Adult stem cells are being used successfully today in treating several blood-related diseases. Our scientists should continue this area of research.

But adult stem cells have their limits. They can't do everything that embryonic stem cells can do.

As it turns out, the secret to curing juvenile (Type 1) diabetes isn't in embryonic stem cells at all:

Diabetics using stem-cell therapy have been able to stop taking insulin injections for the first time, after their bodies started to produce the hormone naturally again.

What kind of stem cells? Embryonic cells, you ask? Nope. (Emphasis added.)

In a breakthrough trial, 15 young patients with newly diagnosed type 1 diabetes were given drugs to suppress their immune systems followed by transfusions of stem cells drawn from their own blood.

The results show that insulin-dependent diabetics can be freed from reliance on needles by an injection of their own stem cells. The therapy could signal a revolution in the treatment of the condition, which affects more than 300,000 Britons.

(Via Dan Paden.)

MORE: The Times writer added this irrelevant detail to the story:

But research using the most versatile kind of stem cells — those acquired from human embryos — is currently opposed by powerful critics, including President Bush.

Penraker notes the distorting effect of media bias:

Damn George Bush! He and his cronies are sentencing millions of people to death!

Or so they would have you believe. This is the worst, most repulsive kind of journalism - the kind that actively tries to mislead the public by leaving out information. Nowhere does it tell you that Bush explicitly endorses the kind of research on adult stem cells that produced this breakthrough. It tries to mislead the public into thinking that this result was brought about by the type of stem cell research Bush opposes.

Some readers will fix on that line while skimming this story and come away with the impression that this was the result of embryonic stem cell therapy.

Not only does the statement misdirect the reader's attention, Michael Williams points out that it's flat out wrong:

The claim in the first phrase above is false: embryonic stem cells are no more "versatile" than stem cells taken from, e.g., amniotic fluid. Furthermore, embryonic stem cells tend to turn cancerous and cause brain tumors.

So why are leftist politicians and reporters such enthusiastic promoters of research that has yet to show promise of a cure and so dismissive of research that has accomplished a great deal already? Here's Williams's answer:

Why are so many people so eager to slaughter babies and harvest their stem cells despite the fact that embryonic stem cells can't cure anything? I can think of only two explanations. First, scientists who have invested their careers in this direction want to keep the grant money flowing. Second, pro-abortionists recognize their need to increase acceptance of abortion among an increasingly pro-life population.

I'm reminded of a bit in the satirical book The 80s: A Look Back (published in 1979): The humane objection to clubbing baby harp seals for their pelts vanished when it was discovered that the brain fluid of clubbed baby harp seals cured cancer.

At some point, with enough funding, they're bound to find some cure involving embryonic stem cells. Many Americans, pragmatists that we are, will conclude that the destruction of embryonic human life is worthwhile, which will encourage a more cavalier attitude toward life in the womb.

But if more Americans come to understand that all the cures to date have come from non-embryonic stem cell research, the push for embryonic stem cell research will dry up.

Melungeons. Rom. Ramapo Mountain People. Irish Travellers. Lumbee Indians. Black Irish. Black Dutch. Indians speaking Welsh. Ancient Irish script in West Virginia. Runes in southeastern Oklahoma.

Patrick Mead is weaving a fascinating story of hidden people groups -- nomadic or isolated peoples here in the US -- and stories that defy the standard theories on how and when different groups came to North America. Interwoven with stories of various hidden groups, Patrick tells his own story of discovering his Scottish Traveller and Melungeon heritage -- getting his father to spill some closely-held family secrets -- when he contracted a rare lung disease that white people aren't supposed to get.

RELATED (4/12/2007): Julie R. Neidlinger writes about a case in North Dakota in which a juror admits to using a defendant's Roma (Gypsy) Bosnian ethnic background against him during deliberations. "I used my own experiences with ethnic groups, specifically Bosnians and/or Gypsies, to influence the jury.... I told the jury that I had personal experience with Bosnians and that they stole from my business and in the same experience lied to me regarding the theft and their conduct. Even though I had never met Mr. Hidanovic, or any of the witnesses, Mr. Hidanovic and the witnesses' race was discussed in a negative way.... I interjected into the deliberations the concept that if Mr. Hidanovic wasn't guilty of this crime he was guilty of something else."

An incredible dispatch from Las Vegas over the JYB newswires:

For Marvin McJimpsey, Vegas is truly Sin City. His faith prohibits playing cards, but his job as a blackjack dealer at the Luxor Casino requires him to shuffle, deal, and slide cards across the green felt to eager gamblers who don't seem to appreciate the profound conflict of conscience McJimpsey's job entails.

McJimpsey belongs to the Seventh Day Adventists, a conservative Christian denomination whose doctrines forbid drinking, gambling, and dancing.

"Dude, are you deaf?" demands Jeff Chen, a florist from Pasadena, who has a four showing. "I said hit me!"

"I'm sorry, sir," replies McJimpsey. "You'll have to take the card yourself. For religious reasons, I'm not allowed to touch them." After walking around the table to pick up his card, Chen cashes out leaves the casino, complaining that someone with religious objections to touching cards "probably shouldn't be dealing blackjack for a living"....

Find out why the casino can't fire McJimpsey, and more, at JunkYardBlog.

Publishing O. J. Simpson's "hypothetical" murder memoir damaged Judith Regan, but it wasn't the final straw:

O.J. Simpson's kill-and-tell book sickened America, but it was the crass sullying of New York hero Mickey Mantle that finally toppled publisher Judith Regan, according to New York magazine....

"The supposed sullying of Mantle's name hit the cover of the Daily News," says the New York magazine piece, published tomorrow. And "[Harper Collins' CEO Jane] Friedman hit the roof."

"By this point, Friedman was sick of playing nice," the mag continued. "News Corp. executives were appalled, as was [News Corp. mogul] Murdoch."

"Mickey Mantle felt like another major blunder," says one executive of the book, which was to be called, "7: The Mickey Mantle Novel." "It just reinforced the sense that [Regan was] an irresponsible editor."...

The magazine said talk of Regan's firing at the holiday party was met with applause by many News Corp. staffers.

"Friedman told editors that she had fired Regan," says the article. "When she said it, people began to clap."

(Via Mike McCarville.)

Yesterday, Michael Spencer posted five reasons he doesn't like Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. He writes as an admirer of King, not a detractor, reflecting on reactions to the annual observance from African-Americans and from white Evangelicals.

Spencer says that the observance has been treated as the exclusive possession of African-Americans, when it belongs to all Americans:

My African-American students almost universally resent that we do not dismiss school in deference to “their” holiday. (If any holiday should be celebrated by GOING to school, this one should.) When we’ve been asked to have MLK programs, students protest if the program is not all African-American, and for African-Americans. Virtually every image of MLK, Jr. day on the media is dominated by African-Americans.

It’s an American holiday. Dr. King said he wanted to see the day we stopped celebrating skin color and made up a community of love based on character. To make MLK, Jr. day an African-American holiday has the potential to increase the resentment many Americans- particularly in poor, rural areas like ours- already feel toward minorities.

If we can’t celebrate it as an American holiday, then let’s just don’t.

Neither, says Spencer, should it be a liberal holiday to celebrate liberal solutions:

Dr. King’s ideas on social justice hardly resemble the solutions of today’s race baiters and misery pimps. The dignity of suffering, the advocacy of truthful speech, the refusal to whine, the call for conscience and action: these things, not government spending on more and more government programs and employees, are what Dr. King advocated. A role for government? Sure. Government as the savior and solution to every injustice? No way.

He goes on to say that the day ought to celebrate and acknowledge King's legacy in the progress that has been made in the 43 years since his march on Washington, but too often is marked with speeches that suggest that King's work was all in vain; that teaching the history of the civil rights movement would be more valuable than another day off; and that white Evangelicals need to fix their attitude toward the man, warts and all:

We ought to be glad King’s vision was of the peace of Christ and treating people as the images of God. We should thank God he was willing to suffer, be bold and go to the cross. We should see him as an American martyr and thank God for his faith, Christ’s power in his life and his love for all persons, especially his enemies. We can learn a lot from him and we should embrace him.

Spencer suggests marking MLK Day by reading his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," so I did, for the first time. It is a reply from King to white ministers who wrote him to question his promotion of non-violent civil disobedience. In response to their criticism, he defends his decision to come to Birmingham, where he was regarded as an "outside agitator," and his decision to lead sit-ins and marches to challenge the laws of segregation. Here are a few excerpts that grabbed my attention, which I present in hopes that you'll read the whole thing.

King explains how pressure from "gadflies" is sometimes required to bring about negotiation:

You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

Then he responds to their counsel to have patience, to wait for southern whites to decide to obey the Constitution's guarantees of equal protection:

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six- year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

Regarding the morality of disobeying unjust laws:

Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there fire two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all." Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distort the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.... Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong....

King cites openness as an essential element of civil disobedience and sets out honorable examples of such disobedience in history:

I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's anti religious laws.

King expresses his disappointment with "peace at any price" moderates:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

... and his disappointment with the white churches of the South:

So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Also in this week's issue is a Jamie Pierson op-ed responding to the "Birth Control Is Harmful" billboards that Catholic-affiliated Respect Life Tulsa has placed around town. Jamie talks about double standards, and birth control, in her opinion, levels the playing field in the power struggle between men and women. I've got some comments, but given the subject matter, I'll put them after the jump....

Interesting bit stuck into the Whirled's story about newly-elected Oklahoma State Representative John Enns, a Republican from Enid. Enns sustained a spinal injury in a farming accident two years ago which left him unable to walk. He gets around mainly in his wheelchair, but through therapy he has regained some ability to use a walker. Among his legislative interests, the story mentions stem cell research:

Enns also wants to do what he can about furthering stem-cell research. It is something that he is told could help him with his condition. Scientists are thinking that stem cells could possibly help grow nerve tissue in his spine.

Enns, who has degrees in biology and chemistry, said he believes stem cells could be taken from adults as well as umbilical cords, and do not have to come from embryos. He blames the media for emphasizing the embryo source rather than other means of obtaining cells.

I appreciate Rep. Enns for making that point in his interview, and I have to give credit to the Whirled Capital reporter, Mick Hinton, and the editors for making that point a part of the story.

ELSEWHERE on the stem cell research front, there's this item from BBC News about a study showing that progenitor cells (similar to stem cells) on the surface of the heart can be used to regenerate heart blood vessels in the presence of a certain protein, thymosin beta 4.

Lead researcher Dr Paul Riley said: "We found that, when treated with thymosin ß4, these adult cells have as much potential as embryonic cells to create healthy heart tissue."

Dr Riley said using thymosin ß4 could lead to a more effective way to repair damaged hearts.

He said: "Our research has shown that blood vessel regeneration is still possible in the adult heart.

"In the future if we can figure out how to direct the progenitor cells using thymosin ß4, there could be potential for therapy based on the patients' own heart cells.

"This approach would bypass the risk of immune system rejection, a major problem with the use of stem cell transplants from another source.

"And, it has the added benefit that the cells are already located in the right place - within the heart itself."

(Via Dawn Eden, who is understandably proud of her father, who discovered thymosin ß4. How wonderful it must be for her as an advocate for alternatives to embryonic stem-cell research to be related to someone who is making those alternatives not only possible but a reality.)

On Evangelical Outpost, Joe Carter looks at seven votes in the U. S. House of special concern to social conservatives, then compares the voting records of the current Republican House committee chairmen with those who would replace them if the Democrats win a majority of seats in November. While not all the Republican chairmen have stellar records on this set of votes, all but two are over 50% (Jim Leach of Iowa and Howard Coble of N. C. only voted the right way on 3 of 7), and 8 of the 13 chairmen voted the right way on at least six of the seven votes. Meanwhile, most of their Democratic counterparts scored a big fat zero. (Three exceptions: One chairman voted the right way once, another voted the right way twice, and Ike Skelton of Missouri, ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, who scored a 71.)

I've heard politically-active evangelicals around here say that "the lesser of two evils is still evil." Carter leads off with a quote from Thomas à Kempis book The Imitation of Christ: "Of two evils, the less is always to be chosen." To choose otherwise is to let the greater evil prevail. Refusing to choose, waiting instead for some ideal to fall from the heavens, is to make a choice for the greater evil.

Overall, under Republican leadership in the House, the desired result for social conservatives was attained in five of these seven measures. (A sixth, regarding embryonic stem cell research, was stopped by President Bush's veto.) Looking at the scores of these current and potential committee chairmen, I have no doubt that under Democratic leadership, legislation that protects the sanctity of human life and the traditional definition of marriage would never make it out of committee.

We've seen exactly that situation here in Oklahoma, where, despite a professed pro-life majority in both houses, a Democratic Senate committee chairman, supported by the Democratic Senate majority leadership, blocked pro-life bills from being debated on the Senate floor. The lead story October 2006 issue of the Oklahomans for Life newsletter (PDF) tells how this year's landmark pro-life legislation nearly didn't make it to the Governor's desk:

Senate Democrats were determined to prevent any pro-life legislation from being enacted this year. Senate Democrats facilitated the killing of seven (7) prolife bills that had passed the House this session. The bills were killed by a Democrat committee chairman, serving at the pleasure of the Democrat Senate Leader, who, in turn, serves at the pleasure of the Senate’s Democrat members.

When the Republican House of Representatives reinserted five of those bills in another piece of legislation which had already passed the Senate (and, therefore, did not have to go through committee in the Senate again), the Senate Democrats resisted as forcefully and as long as they possibly could. They were fully prepared to ignore the rules of the Senate by refusing to allow the Republican author of SB 1742 to present the bill for a Senate vote.

The Democrat Leader of the Senate told the bill’s author as late as May 17, the day before the bill ultimately passed, that the bill would not be granted a vote on the Senate floor. It was only when Republicans made it clear that they would attempt to force the issue through a procedural
motion (which would have been voted on in public) that the Democrats relented and agreed to let the vote occur.

With great reluctance, the Democrat Leadership of the Senate allowed the bill to be voted on when the political pressure had built to such an extent that they could no longer contain it.

Once the bill was allowed to come to a vote, SB 1742 passed the Oklahoma Senate 38-8.

At the state level and at the federal level, which party will have control of the chamber is as important as which individual will represent your district.

Here's the conclusion Joe Carter draws:

Social conservatives have reason to be disappointed in the Republicans in Congress. As these scores indicate, though, we will be even more disappointed should the Democrats gain majority control. The GOP doesn't deserve to win; but if the Democrats regain power, it will be society that loses.

RELATED: Paul Weyrich points to the Bush Administration's solid record on judicial appointments and says you can expect strict-constructionist nominees like Samuel Alito never to get a hearing in a Democrat-controlled Senate. "I understand, and am sympathetic to, the reasons not to retain the current crowd in office. But there are two very big reasons why they should be re-elected. If they do not improve their performance in the 110th Congress, recruit primary candidates and replace them."

AND THIS: Are social conservative voters budding theocrats? Bill Rusher hits the nail on the head:

What has happened is that, in the past thirty years, a large number of Americans whose deepest beliefs and concerns are not political but religious have concluded that they have no choice but to gird themselves for participation in the nation's political wars. There are quite enough such people to influence the election returns, and they have been doing so.

But -- and this distinction is crucial -- their posture is essentially defensive. They are not seeking to turn America into a theocracy. They are simply trying to preserve, and where necessary restore, the politico-religious balance that has been traditional in this country. It is the intellectuals, with the critical support of the courts, and above all the Supreme Court, that have successfully eroded that balance, seeking to marginalize religion and convert the entire civic framework of the nation into a purely secular arena, on the pretense that this is required by the First Amendment's supposed erection of a high "wall" between church and state.

Those who imagine that it is religion's defenders who are the aggressors here are simply not paying attention to the increasingly sharp attacks on religious faith that can be found today in such influential places as The New York Times.

I know this is an old story, but anyway: NBC will be airing episodes of Veggie Tales on Saturday morning, but they've made some alterations. Initially, NBC claimed that the edits were to meet the time constraints of commercial TV, but later they 'fessed up:

“NBC is committed to the positive messages and universal values of ‘VeggieTales,’” the statement said. “Our goal is to reach as broad an audience as possible with these positive messages, while being careful not to advocate any one religious point of view.”

Terry Mattingly at Get Religion comments:

This is a really interesting claim, since the key statement that has been banned is the VeggieTales motto used at the end of each episode, which is: “Remember kids, God made you special and he loves you very much.”

This statement was removed to avoid advocating “any one religious point of view.” This would be the controversial doctrinal point of view which maintains that God loves children. Of course, NBC leaders may have assumed that the statement that “God made you special” could be taken as an attack on evolution. That’s the ticket. Meanwhile, I should stress that Bob the Tomato does not do anything faith-specific while making this closing benediction, such as falling on his knees and making the sign of the cross. Bob the Tomato (see second image) does not have knees or arms.

What else was cut? Veggie Tales creator Phil Vischer provided some details to The Tennessean:

Eliminated lines from one episode included “Calm down. The Bible says we should love our enemies.” In another episode, Vischer said, NBC allowed the line “the Bible says Samson got his strength from God.” But the next line — “And God can give us strength, too” — was out.

The changes included cuts in dialogue where characters utter the word “God” and were so last-minute and awkward, Vischer said, that in some cases “it makes the stories not work very well.” For the sign-off, where the original words were simply voiced-over, “the lips don’t match, so it kind of looks like a Japanese cartoon with lips moving” out of synch with the words, he said.

A commenter on the Get Religion post points out the absurdity of NBC acquiring the rights to air Veggie Tales, but then stripping out the religious content:

This is like “Gunsmoke without the guns”....

But it still strikes me as mind blowingly stupid and ultimately self-defeating for NBC. They pay good money for a unique property that comes to them with a built in audience. They then proceed to deliberately remove the one thing that makes the property unique and valuable while simultaneously alienating said built in audience.

It reminds me of what CBS did when they gave Riders in the Sky their own Saturday morning show. The Riders perform cowboy music in the tradition of Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and the Sons of the Pioneers, leavened with a lot of comedy that appeals to grownups and kids alike. (If they ever come to your town -- here's a list of tour dates -- take your family -- great music and a lot of fun.) I first got to know them through their weekly Riders Radio Theater. Every episode of the show features a sendup of the old Saturday morning cowboy serials, complete with bad guys (the mustache-twirling melodramatic Slocum and his goon Charlie) and their Gabby Hayes-like geezer of a sidekick, known as Sidemeat.

(This article, from 1997, does a good job of explaining what Riders in the Sky are all about.)

So CBS thought they'd be great for Saturday morning. They could do their cowboy stuff on TV -- but no guns. Not "no shooting guns" but "no guns visible at all." And the villains weren't allowed to be really villainous. This from the network that aired Gunsmoke.

(It must be noted that, even when they're allowed to have guns, the Riders' weapons of choice are Ranger Doug's hypersonic yodel and Sidemeat's biscuits -- "the hardest substance known to man.")

Not only do the networks not "get religion," I don't think they "get" much of anything outside of the very narrow perspective of Hollywoodland.

People who can't find something interesting to do in Tulsa just aren't looking hard enough.

Tulsa is home to a chapter of the Altarnet Film Society, a group that exists to promote films "that have a transcendent theme, story, or experience." The AFS website asks and answers the question:

Could there be films that positively communicate wonderful deep concepts? Is it possible to have stories that encourage the heart and inspire personal greatness without being cheesy or corny? At AFS we have discovered that there are just such films, some only a minute long, others 10:00, still others 30:00 long. Let’s screen them together and then talk about what we have just experienced!

The Tulsa chapter holds a screening the last Saturday of each month, and this Saturday they'll be showing Secession, written by Tulsa-based blogger Earnest Pettie, a graduate of OU's film school. Here's the film's synopsis:

An under-appreciated, under-loved housewife decides to move out... or rather, in... to her own pantry. In a war of wills, her husband and son must come to terms with this housewife's unorthodox decision.

It's based on a short story that Earnest wrote, and it was directed by Kate Christensen. Following the film, Earnest will take questions.

The screening will be Saturday night at 7:30, at the Agora Coffeehouse, just northeast of the fountain in the Fontana Shopping Center, 51st & Memorial.

MORE: On his MySpace blog, Earnest wrote about the travails of location shoots for his latest production, "A Man and His Mustache."

AND YET MORE: Here's a short trailer for A Man and His Mustache.

BatesLine has saluted the paintings of William Bouguereau on several occasions in the past, so I was excited to read in the latest Urban Tulsa Weekly that Tulsa's Philbrook Museum is hosting an exhibition of Bouguereau's work and that of his students, beginning on Sunday and running through the end of the year.

Holly Wall's story about the exhibition puts Bouguereau's life and career in the context of the artistic trends of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Popular in his lifetime, his work was obscured within a few years after his death by the rise of impressionism. At long last it's respectable again to enjoy realism in painting.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Lost amid the veto politics this week was the fact that Congress also moved in other ways on ethics and medical research. Mr. Bush signed a bill passed unanimously by the House and Senate that outlawed "fetal farming," or the practice of raising and aborting fetuses for scientific research. The Senate also passed legislation that would have encouraged greater research into exploiting the stem cells scientists need without destroying embryos, as well as research into adult stem cells. That bill failed in the House, mainly because Democrats think they can use stem cells as a political issue against Republicans this fall.

The bill, S. 2754, passed the Senate unanimously, but for some reason needed a two-thirds vote to suspend the rules and pass the bill in the House. The vote was 273-154, with nearly all Republicans voting in favor, and two-thirds of the Democrats voting against.

Only stem cells from non-embryonic sources have found therapeutic uses. Pro-Life Blogs has a list of recent stories about adult stem-cell breakthroughs.

From an e-mail alert from Tony Lauinger, chairman of Oklahomans for Life:

On Tuesday, July 18, the Senate will vote on H.R. 810, a bill that would force taxpayers to fund research using stem cells obtained by killing human embryos. This bill, which is strongly opposed by Oklahomans For Life and National Right to Life, would overturn President Bush's pro-life policy against federal funding of any research that requires the killing of human embryos.

The Senate will vote the same day on two good bills, S. 3504 and S. 2754.

S. 3504, the Fetus Farming Prohibition Act, would make it a federal offense for a researcher to use tissue from a human baby who has been gestated in a woman's womb, or an animal womb, for the purpose of providing such tissue. Some researchers have already conducted such "fetus farming" experiments with animals -- for example, by gestating cloned calves to four months and then aborting them to obtain their kidney and heart tissues for transplantation.

S. 2754, the Alternative Pluripotent Stem Cell Therapies Enhancement Act, would require the National Institutes of Health to support research to try to find methods of creating pluripotent stem cells (which are cells that can be turned into any sort of body tissue) without creating or harming human embryos.

Please urge Senators Jim Inhofe and Tom Coburn to vote against H.R. 810, and in favor of the ban on fetus farming (S. 3504) and the ethical-alternatives bill (S. 2754). Tell your senators that you are in favor of research, but not the kinds of research that require the killing of human embryos.

The NRLC has a Legislative Action Center page to make it easy to communicate with your U. S. Senators, or you can call the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121.

I'm happy to see one bill (S. 2754) with a positive focus on stem cell research that doesn't involve destroying embryonic human life. All the breakthroughs in the therapeutic application of stem cells have involved stem cells derived from adult tissue or umbilical cord blood, not from embryos.

I'm fairly confident that Coburn and Inhofe will do the right thing on these bills, but there are some ostensibly pro-life Republican senators (like Majority Leader Bill Frist) who have been seduced by the celebrity supporters of the destruction of embryonic human life. They need to hear from us.

It's worth remembering, too, that the issue is one of funding. Embryonic stem cell research is legal, but adult stem cell research has been more successful at attracting private funding because it has shown the most promising results.

MORE on the issue, found via Pro-Life Blogs:

Buried toward the end of a pro-embryo-destruction story in the July 24 issue of Time:

The good news for all sides is that over the course of this long argument, researchers have learned more about how stem cells work, and the science has outrun the politics. Adult cells, such as those found in bone marrow, were thought to be less valuable than embryonic cells, which are "pluripotent" master cells that can turn into anything from a brain cell to a toenail. But adult cells may be more elastic than scientists thought, and could offer shortcuts to treatment that embryonic cells can't match.

Researchers have discovered that many tissues and organs contain precursor cells that act in many ways like stem cells. The skin, intestines, liver, brain and bone marrow contain these stem cell-- mimicking cells, which could become a reservoir of replacement cells for treating diseases such as leukemias, stroke and some cancers. "Brain stem-cells can make almost all cell types in the brain, and that may be all we need if we want to treat Parkinson's disease or ALS," says Dr. Arnold Kriegstein, who directs the University of California at San Francisco's Institute for Regeneration Medicine. "Embryonic stem cells might not be necessary in those cases." When it comes to treating heart disease, "if you could find a progenitor cell in the adult heart that has the ability to replicate," says Douglas Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, "then it's likely easier to start with that cell than begin with an embryonic stem cell, which has too many options."

Cheerleaders for adult stem-cell research point to progress on everything from spinal-cord injuries to diabetes. Scientists at the University of Minnesota have used umbilical-cord-blood stem cells to improve some neurological function; in a paper published last month, Dr. Carlos Lima in Portugal wrote about restoring some motor function and sensation in a few paralyzed patients. At a recent conference of researchers from around the world, a team from Kyoto University in Japan reported success in taking a skin cell, exposing it to four key growth factors and turning it into an embryo-like entity that produced stem cells--all without using an egg. The Kyoto group has submitted its work for publication, after which it will be open to the scrutiny of the scientific community. If successful, it could turn stem-cell science from a tedious, finicky process into a relatively straightforward chemistry project.

(Found via Pro Ecclesia.)

Here is how House members voted on H.R. 810. All four Oklahoma Republicans voted against; lone Democrat Dan Boren voted for the bill.

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost reports that supporters of H.R. 810 are trying to achieve Clintonesque moral hair-splitting:

Congressional bill H. R. 810 seeks to codify the Clinton workaround by circumventing the Dickey Amendment. They don�t want to have the blood on their hands (hence their refusal to fund embryo destruction) but once the human has been killed, they�ll fund the subsequent research.

The fact that so many legislators can be duped into believing that ESCR will ever lead to cures is simply astounding, and shows the paucity of intellect and discernment on Capital Hill. Ignorance, however, is excusable; cowardice is not. If the �party of death� (which includes 93% of the Democratic party and 21% of the GOP) truly believes in this research, then they should at least have the courage to sign the death warrant for the humans being destroyed.

Columnist Michael Reagan sums up the state of embryonic stem cell research (ESCR):

Far from curing everything from Alzheimer�s Disease to spinal cord injuries, and a whole host of other medical problems as proponents promise, all ESCR has produced thus far is cancerous tumors in lab animals. And even top ESCR scientists now admit that any progress in the field is 25 years away, after they stop killing lab animals, that is....

The ESCR community based most of their inflated claims on the work of South Korean scientist Huang Woo-suk, who claimed to have created the world's first cloned human embryos and extracted stem cells from them, raising hopes of cures for diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Dr. Huang was widely acclaimed as a world-class stem cell pioneer and treated as a hero until investigations disclosed that he had fabricated key data in two papers published in the U.S. journal, Science. He has now admitted the fraud and has been indicted along with five of his associates.

I think Dan Paden has this exactly right:

The real issue when it comes to the hard-core homeless is this: a sense of independence carried to an almost pathological extreme, such that eventually, one has no friends, no relatives, no support network, or at least none of these that are willing to help. Imagine, you who belong to a thriving church, who thrive on close family connections, being out of work and not having anyone who will tip you off to an opportunity in their company, no one who will recommend you to anyone, no one who will take phone calls for you, no one who will so much as let you sleep in their garage while you beat the streets looking for work--and that you'd rather have it that way than put up with the way that they want you to do things, rather than have to listen to their advice.

Social capital may be more important to survival and success than financial capital. I think about all the help we've had over the years from family, friends, fellow church members, and political allies.

For example, we have in our home an impressive amount of baby clothing, equipment, and toys for which we didn't pay. Some of them were gifts, but most of them are loaners. There's a $200 baby hammock -- never would have spent the money for it, but someone in our church had one, their baby had grown out of it, and they were happy to lend it to us for a few months. When our baby has grown out of it, we'll give it back, and the owners will likely pass it along to another church family with a new baby.

You don't get that kind of help unless other people feel they know you and can trust you, and you build that kind of knowledge and trust by being faithfully and consistently involved with other people over a long period of time, helping others with what you have to offer.

In order to build social capital, you have to do some things even when you don't feel like doing them. You have to avoid speaking your mind when it might be hurtful. You have to try not to burn bridges, even when you really want to. And when you do screw up and burn bridges, you try to rebuild them, even if it means eating your words.

I'm reminded of C. S. Lewis's depiction of the Grey Town in The Great Divorce. Because its residents could build a new place to live just by willing it into being, people would part company over the most minor offences, moving further and further away from each other. No interdependence, no community, complete autonomy. (The Grey Town, as it turned out, was Hell.)

A few days ago I told you about Yale University's admission, as a special student, of an official from Afghanistan's brutal Taliban regime and about Yale alumnus Clint Taylor's creative way of expressing displeasure with the university.

To provide continuing coverage of the nailing of Yale and to keep public scrutiny and pressure on the university as they consider admitting Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi as a full-fledged undergraduate, Taylor and a few others have set up the Nail Yale blog at townhall.com. The blog's witty tagline: "Fighting the Talibanality of Evil in the Ivy League." You'll find a link in the blogroll on the right side of my homepage.

Defenders of Yale are accusing Taylor and other critics of SRH's admission of being xenophobic. Taylor responds:

"Xenophobia" is the weakest, most ridiculous attack against our campaign the Yale Taliban's few defenders have managed to come up with yet. It's baseless and desperate. Debbie and I have stated again and again that there are so many qualifed people in the Middle East--democrats and reformers instead of theocrats and fascists--who could have taken Mr. Rahmatullah's spot in Yale's special student program.

Our beef is about Mr. Rahmatullah alone. The man served the Taliban. That's evil. You know why we're having this discussion about Mr. Rahmatullah and not about any other foreign student in the special student program? Because Mr. Rahmatullah is the only one who has business cards from the Taliban bearing his name. That's not xenophobia. That's just basic moral clarity.

Hooray for basic moral clarity, and a hearty "Boola, Boola" to Yale alumni who are continuing in the proud tradition of God and Man at Yale.

To the young lady who waited on me in the department store this evening:

I felt sorry for you, as I walked toward your counter with my purchase. From 30 feet away I could see the bright red spot there at the fold of your nostril. That's a spot that's prone to clogged pores, I thought. It was obviously inflamed, festering. It almost seemed shiny.

When I got to the counter, I realized it really was shiny, and it was a tiny red gem, not a zit. (It might have been a carbuncle, albeit not the kind you lance.)

You seemed to have a flawless complexion, and you must spend a lot of time caring for it. Why would you mess it up with a piece of jewelry that looks like a bad skin condition? Are you wearing it to demonstrate solidarity with your acne-afflicted peers?

I don't get it. Do any of my fellow fortyish fogeys get it?

There's an oddly ambivalent editorial about abortion in today's Daily Telegraph, Britain's leading conservative broadsheet, citing the University of Oslo study on the psychological effects of abortion. The paper calls for tightening abortion laws by making the gestational age limit earlier than the current 24 weeks. The article's headline is "The shame of our abortion laws." The editorial is careful not to condemn abortion:

Abortion, like miscarriage, involves the loss of a baby; unlike miscarriage, the loss is the result of a conscious decision. And the operation itself, as Germaine Greer has taken to reminding her fellow feminists, is a gruesome one. No wonder that a fifth of women continue to feel depression, shame or guilt.

At this point we should stress that those feelings may be (and probably are) inappropriate. This newspaper has never offered a view on the morality of abortion per se.

So, according to the Telegraph, the feelings of guilt, shame, and depression are inappropriate, and they say that presumably because they believe there's nothing wrong with having an abortion. Yet they chide Prime Minister Tony Blair for not supporting an earlier cutoff for late-term abortions:

In the short term, more post-abortion counselling is needed. In the long term, the need for it should be reduced by a change in the law. The current limit of 24 weeks is appallingly high; yet Tony Blair, a practising Christian, has opposed efforts to reduce it even slightly. It is he, rather than women who have been pressurised into having abortions, who should feel ashamed.

While I'm glad to see the Telegraph support any further restrictions on abortion, the reasoning in this piece is incoherent, and it reflects an incoherence that I observe in the British Conservative Party, and in the Republican Party in the "blue states". There's a recognition that sound traditional values are being violated, to the detriment of individuals, families, and society, but there's an unwillingness to contradict the spirit of the age by bluntly calling a practice wrong, immoral, or evil.

Voters who hold to traditional values in Britain and in Blue State America have no political home. No major party is speaking to their concerns and priorities, so they stay home on election day. The Conservative Party in Britain and the Republican Party in the US should be the natural homes of these voters, but they're kept at arms' length by the entrenched party apparatus. In Red State America, these motivated values voters have been able to dominate state and local Republican organizations, but the older, once-influential Republican organizations in the Blue States are designed to resist grassroots influence and keep the same people in control of an ever-shrinking party.

The British do obituaries better than anyone else. Far from foisting the duty off on entry-level reporters, British newspapers seem to put their best writers to the task of remembering the recently departed. Even if you've never heard of the deceased, the obituary will draw you in with vivid detail and anecdote. It's not unusual to see an obit of someone who was never particularly famous, but nevertheless lived a fascinating life. For example, today the Telegraph has obituaries of Kenneth Swan, proprietor of a cruise line that featured on-board lectures on ancient history, Steve Marcus, saxophonist with Buddy Rich's band, and American playwright August Wilson. The death of the chemist who invented Valium provides occasion for a glimpse at the societal impact of anti-anxiety drugs.

As distinctive as British obits are, I never expected to read a death notice as blunt as the Telegraph's post-mortem of American pop-psych author M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled:

Its opening sentence, "Life is difficult", introduced a tome which argued, uncontentiously and sensibly, that human experience was trying and imperfectible, and that only self-discipline, delaying gratification, acceptance that one's actions have consequences, and a determined attempt at spiritual growth could make sense of it. By contrast, Peck himself was, by his own admission, a self-deluding, gin-sodden, chain-smoking neurotic whose life was characterised by incessant infidelity and an inability to relate to his parents or children. "I'm a prophet, not a saint," he explained in an interview earlier this year....

Latterly he suffered from impotence and Parkinson's Disease and devoted himself to Christian songwriting, at which he was not very good.

He married Lily Ho in 1959; they had three children, two of whom would not talk to their father. She left him in 2003. He is survived by his second wife, Kathy, an educationalist he picked up, while still married, after a lecture at Sacramento, and by his children.

(Hat tip to Joey McKeown.)

You can find Telegraph obituaries here -- free registration required.

Via Mister Snitch!, there's news of a woman, 19 years a paraplegic, who has regained some feeling and movement in her legs following infusion of stem cells from umbilical cord blood.

Mister Snitch writes: "If this, again, is valid, it probably also marks the beginning of the end of principled resistance against stem cell research in this country. The political tide will quickly swing overwhelmingly in favor of more research, and quickly."

I am not aware of any opposition to any form of stem cell research. The principled resistance is to embryonic stem cell research (ESCR). Extracting stem cells from an embryo results in the end of that human life; extracting stem cells from cord blood, bone marrow, fat cells, or mucous membranes -- "adult" stem cells -- does not destroy the living human being from whom the cells are taken.

Adult stem cell research has produced real therapeutic benefits, but for some reason it is overlooked by celebrity proponents of embryonic stem cell research. Perhaps it's because it undermines the argument that ESCR is essential. Some ESCR supporters seem desperate to find some positive benefit that can justify the destruction of human life, but so far, all the results have come from non-controversial adult stem cell research.

It reminds me of the lifeboat scenario used to teach "values clarification": There are too many people in a lifeboat, so you have to decide whose life is worth saving and whose should be sacrificed. Ideally, you figure a way so everyone can be saved and no one has to be thrown overboard. That's what adult stem cell research offers.

If there is any political tide resulting from this development, it ought to sweep away federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and deposit those dollars with researchers who are achieving cures using stem cells from cord blood and other sources that respect the sanctity of human life.

Karol, a Russian immigrant herself, notes that there are now more abortions than live births in Russia each year and says that "Russians are the only people I've heard actually be pro-abortion and unapologetically so." She reports some jaw-dropping conversations that reveal an amazingly casual attitude toward abortion among her Russian friends and acquaintances.

The history lesson this week at Audience of One was about
temperance activist Carry A. Nation, which gets Brian to musing about America's love/hate relationship with alcohol.

In the entry following that one, Brian, a middle school administrator, writes what he'd like to put in the annual start-of-the-school year letter to parents, about grades, homework, projects, and behavior.

That's right, its not all about the grade you get. This isn't high school and you aren't polishing a transcript to show off to colleges. At this age it is about learning skills and establishing habits that will carry you through those high school and college years. Organization. Prioritizing. Goal setting. Finding your passions. Learning social skills. How to make sense of a mass of information. Of course you want your child to make good grades. So do I. But what we both should really want is for him/her to LEARN. Its not the same thing. If you focus on learning the grades will take care of themselves.

Read the whole thing for more wise words.

Memorial Bible Church, on 61st Street east of Memorial, will host a rally celebrating this year's passage of significant pro-life legislation -- an informed consent law, a parental notification law, and a law concerning unborn victims of crime. The event is from 2 - 5 p.m., Sunday, August 14, and many of the legislators involved in the passage of this legislation will be in attendance. The Tulsa Beacon has details.

The passage of these bills demonstrates that it does matter who gets elected to the legislature and which party controls the legislature. None of this would have happened if the Democrats still ran the State House. Despite the large number of pro-life Democratic voters and pro-life Democrats in the legislature, in the past, the Democrat legislative leadership bottled up pro-life legislation in hostile committees. This year, the Republican leadership in the House took the initiative, and with the help of a handful of pro-life Democrats in the Senate, Senate Republican leaders were able to get the bill through the legislative process, bypassing the committee of virulently anti-Christian Sen. Bernest Cain.

This is an achievement worth celebrating, a reminder that progress is possible in politics. Hope to see you there.

Tulsa blogger Matt Galloway has a lengthy, fascinating, and instructive entry on trendsetters, the adoption of new technology, and how to reach the people who are the trendsetters. The Influentials who set the trends are increasingly resistant to traditional marketing approaches, but guess what? The Influentials are blog readers and blog writers.

I couldn't believe my ears when I heard this on the radio. Sen. Bill Frist, once considered a contender for the 2008 presidential nomination, pretty much killed his chances by stating that he believes that parents should have the option of destroying their unborn children if it's for a good cause.

Specifically, Frist now favors federal funding for stem cell research involving the destruction of human embryos. He insists, however that the "parents" should make the choice. Um, if they're parents then doesn't that make what they're destroying a .... y'know?

Joel Helbling has details and analysis worth reading.

If you assumed that the "Reverend" Fred Phelps was a right-wing Republican, you assumed wrong:

Rev. Phelps has run in numerous Democratic primary elections for governor of the state of Kansas in 1992, 1994, and the last time in 1998, when he came in last with 15,000 votes out of a total of over 103,000 votes cast, or 15%.

Phelps and family campaigned for Bill Clinton in 1992 and was invited to and attended Clinton's inaugural ball in 1993.

Hat tip to Karol, who says she's never been happier to find out someone is not a Republican. Me, too.

A friend e-mailed asking for comment on the Supreme Court's rulings on the two Ten Commandments cases before it.

Very well.

Were you really expecting coherent jurisprudence on religious expression in the public realm from this Court?

After reading in USA Today about the premiere tonight of the PBS documentary series P.O.V., I made a note to tune in:

High-schooler Shelby Knox � who pledges celibacy until marriage � spearheads a campaign for comprehensive sex education.

Unfortunately, the sound was out on the local PBS affiliate, and efforts to notify someone about the problem failed.

The gist of the USA Today story was about liberal bias in public broadcasting amidst plans for cutting Federal funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). I was curious to see if a bias toward left-wing views of sexual morality was evident in tonight's documentary. Now I'll have to find out second-hand.

CPB mainly funds program development -- the operation of your local public broadcasting outlet is paid for by listeners, local sponsors, and state and local government.

Actor Robert Redford isn't happy about the proposed CPB cuts:

The United States "was built on a foundation of diversity and of protecting the rights of all people," Redford said. "When I see any attempts by one group to take all absolute power to corrupt our democratic principles that might be narrow or ideologically driven, then I know we're in trouble. PBS belongs to the public."

How does cutting funding to CPB "corrupt our democratic principles"? Is there a fundamental right to have the propagation of your opinions funded by the government? And if PBS belongs to the public, shouldn't it cater to majority tastes? Somehow I don't think that's what Redford has in mind. PBS doesn't need to cater to majority tastes because the market handles that quite efficiently. The market even does a pretty good job of "narrowcasting" to smaller but substantial minority interests, thanks to cable and the Internet. What public interest is served by government funding for one TV station out of 100?

Cutting CPB funds won't mean the end of NPR or PRI or PBS. No one is going to declare Sesame Street blighted and bulldoze it. Boohbah and Teletubbies will still be there to hypnotize children, annoy parents, and enhance the recreational use of controlled substances. Barney's position is, alas, secure. Click and Clack will still dispense automotive wisdom. You'll still be able to wake up each morning to the reassuring tones of Bob Edwards -- no, wait, NPR fired him for being too old. If a program is good enough to attract an audience, companies and viewers will see value in contributing toward its production and broadcast.

A couple of weeks ago I critiqued Ken Neal's op-ed attack on the pro-life stance on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. I acknowledged that he made a valid point about in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and the creation of "surplus" embryos that are routinely frozen or destroyed. If those embryos are human life, as I believe, then we have to question the practice of IVF on moral grounds. The ends -- having a baby -- can't justify the means if the means involve destroying human life.

Today, Joe Carter of Evangelical Outpost examines the ethics of IVF and other means of dealing with infertility from a Christian perspective. He links to an article on reproductive technologies by Daniel McConchie of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity. McConchie suggests that by taking certain precautions IVF can be used in a way that does not involve destroying embryos or exposing them to a greater level of risk than would be encountered in nature.

There's a vigorous discussion in the comments to Joe Carter's post, and rather than try to duplicate that here, I'm going to turn off comments on this entry. If you have a comment, please post it over there.

Another stem cell research advance that doesn't require destruction of human life: Australian researchers have harvested adult stem cells from the nose which have the potential to be developed into heart, liver, kidney, muscle, and blood cells.

(See my earlier item rebutting Ken Neal's op-ed in Sunday's Tulsa Whirled for more links and information about the ways adult and cord-blood stem cells are already being used therapeutically.)

A while back I alerted you to Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn's Star Wars-themed lunchtime talk on sexually transmitted diseases, featuring free pizza. The intended audience was young Capitol Hill staffers. Both Washington papers covered it. From the the Washington Times:

Mr. Coburn, a family physician, later said he doesn't do the slide show for shock value but sees it as a way to get medical facts to young people.

'They don't get enough information,' he said. Most new cases of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) occur among people younger than 25, and if people know the science, they can modify their behavior, he said. ...

Yesterday, as he has done before, Mr. Coburn advised adults to refrain from having multiple sexual partners and engaging in unsafe sexual activity.

'What would happen in this country if the young women would say no [to sex] until they're 20?' he asked. 'Disease would go down, the pregnancy rate for unwed mothers would go down, the social costs for the next two generations would go down.'

Mr. Coburn also encouraged sexually active youth to use condoms.

'Condoms make a difference,' he said, cataloging the effectiveness of condoms in protecting against fluid-borne STDs such as HIV/AIDS and gonorrhea.

The problem is that condoms don't offer much prevention against several other diseases, such as herpes, human papillomavirus and syphilis, that are transmitted by skin contact, he said.

The Washington Post reports the audience reaction when the first diseased body part photo appeared on the screen:

This image was now projected up on a wall of the U.S. Capitol, and the mood shifted instantly. None of the 160 or so audience members shrieked, or giggled, or ran out of the room. They're not 15 anymore, and this is a professional environment. The chatter stopped; everyone looked straight ahead, or down at their BlackBerries. A large number of women crossed their arms over their chests. Most everyone seemed encapsulated in the bit of air around them, afraid to move or touch the person sitting next to them. The half-eaten slices of pizza, now cooling on laps, seemed deeply unappetizing.

Lest you think Capitol Hill staffers are too worldly-wise to need this sort of instruction, the Post piece includes this anecdote from a previous lecture:

"You keep mentioning the word 'monogamy'," a staffer named Roland Foster recalls one young woman asking after a lecture. "What is that?"

"That's when you have sex with only one partner," Coburn responded.

"You mean at a time?"

Editorial page editor Ken Neal, in Sunday's Tulsa Whirled, displays both ignorance and disingenuousness on the issue of federal funding for stem cell research. Where to begin with this mess?

It's difficult to understand President Bush's opposition to embryonic stem-cell research.

The president appears to believe that "life" is being destroyed to "save life" if the fertilized human eggs headed for destruction are used for medical research.

Ken, if it's a fertilized human egg, it is life -- a distinct human being that will, unless it's destroyed, grow into a potential Tulsa Whirled subscriber. (You're losing those quickly enough as it is, Ken.)

Much has been made about this president's intelligence. Yet he has demonstrated a very high intelligence, often outthinking and outmaneuvering his opponents. There is nothing stupid about this president.

But he appears to have a mental block on stem-cell research. Or perhaps it is a desire to please the radical right wing, which does seem unable to understand stem-cell facts. The president continually discusses adult stem-cell use, apparently thinking adult stem cells are as therapeutic as embryo cells.

They aren't. They can play a role in fighting disease, but the real potential lies with embryo stem cells. Those stem cells hold
the possibility of curing many problems, including Alzheimer's disease, various spinal cord problems, Parkinson's disease and other maladies for which science might develop cures if given permission and money.

Right, Ken, adult stem cells aren't as therapeutic as embryonic stem cells. They are far more therapeutic. There are actual cures using stem cells from sources that don't require the destruction of human life, but none to date involving embryonic stem cells. Patients with congestive heart failure have been treated with their own stem cells (from bone marrow), resulting in improved heart function. A seven-year-old girl with a severe skull injury was treated with fat-derived stem cells which resulted in new bone formation -- she no longer has to wear a protective helmet. Cord blood stem cells have been used to cure infants who have Krabbe disease, a rare and fatal genetic disorder.

(Hat tip for above links to Joel Helbling, for his handy tabular synopsis of stem cell research from December 2004 through February 2005, based on data from the Stem Cell Research Foundation.)

Back to Ken Neal:

Bush steadfastly opposes "killing life to save life," and if that were an accurate statement he would deserve support in that position.

Yet that statement is tantamount to setting up a straw man to beat on.

No one plans to kill in order to save life.

The president's position is particularly perplexing because he has already approved federal funds for use of embryos fertilized in fertilization clinics before Aug. 9, 2001, provided these embryos were headed for destruction anyway.

This is precisely what science wants: The right to experiment on embryos conceived outside the womb since then. Question: Are embryos conceived before Aug. 9, 2001, any less "life" than those conceived after that date?

To be consistent, the president would have to make that contention.

Here Ken is either sloppy or deliberately deceptive. The date of conception was not an issue in President Bush's directive, which allowed the use of federal funds for research on stem cell lines derived from human embryos prior to the date of his order. That means that the embryos had already been destroyed by that date. Bush's order was intended to remove federal funding as an incentive to destroy any more embryos, regardless of when they had been conceived.

Speaking of straw men, the President isn't challenging science's "right" to experiment on human embryos -- although he should. The issue before the government is federal funding for such inhuman experimentation. Isn't that a chilling way to put it? "Science wants the right to experiment with embryos."

Ken wants freedom for scientists, complete freedom from ethical constraints:

Science is continually advancing in the ways that stem cells taken from embryos, umbilical cord blood and human adults can be used. It is constantly learning. But in order for it to learn, even develop uses for stem cells from other than embryos, it must have the right to experiment without Big Brother looking over scientists' shoulders.

Calling Dr. Mengele! All is forgiven. The Tulsa Whirled is ready to set you up with a new lab and plenty of victims, um, subjects, and without any nosey Big Brothers looking over your shoulder worrying about the sanctity and dignity of human life.

Ken goes on to make a valid point about in vitro fertilization:

All over the country, fertility clinics work daily to help couples conceive. To do that, potential mothers are given fertility drugs resulting in the release of many human eggs. In most cases, there are surplus eggs, most of which are fertilized in a petri dish. Some of these are implanted into prospective mothers, but most are either frozen or discarded.

This is true.

Why not use these embryos for scientific research? Bush and those who support his position never discuss this situation. If one truly believes these fertilized eggs are life, then there would be a hue and cry to find women who would accept them and carry them to full term and develop babies. Some estimates are that there are 400,000 surplus fertilized eggs in these clinics.

There is an organization called Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program devoted to this purpose.

Or, one would expect a demand to ban fertilization in vitro in order to bring a few of the eggs so fertilized to life. Why are Bush and those who support him so quiet about this?

Fertilization clinics routinely "kill" hundreds, perhaps thousands of embryos, which "pro-life" proponents choose to ignore.

Ken's back with another straw man to beat up. In fact, many pro-lifers make exactly this point. You may recall reading about someone who lost her job earlier this year in part because she thought this fact should not be obscured.

Back to Ken, who is now worrying about President Bush's legacy:

Future historians are apt to wonder why this country chose to follow ignorance and fall far behind the rest of the world in developing cures for dreaded diseases. It is as if an earlier president had banned government research into smallpox, leaving the war on that killer disease to other countries because he had misguided moral scruples against such research.

President Bush should quit listening to a small, but noisy, part of his constituency, remember he is no longer running for office and do the right thing on stem-cell research.

Ken Neal apparently believes that the President is as disingenuous as he is. President Bush actually believes in the sanctity of human life, beginning at conception. His moral scruples aren't misguided, and he is doing the right thing on stem-cell research by announcing his plan to veto federal funding for the destruction of human beings in the name of progress.

In the June 9 issue of the New York Review of Books, Joan Didion has a wide-ranging 8000-word essay of the details of Terri Schiavo's life and death. As familiar as I am with the controversy, it was still eye-opening to see all the key issues, medical details, and turning points outlined in one place.

Here's Didion on the use of language in the public debate over Terri's fate:

During the period this spring when the spectral presence called "Terri" dominated the national discourse, such areas of confusion between what was known and not known and merely assumed or repeated went largely unremarked upon. Taking a position, which had become the essence of that discourse, demanded impenetrable certainty. There were two entire weeks during which it was possible to hear the Schiavo case debated all day and all night and still not get it straight whether there was, as people were actually shouting at each other on the cable talk shows, "anybody home." ("You're wrong, Pat, flat line, nobody home.") Theresa Schiavo was repeatedly described as "brain dead." This was inaccurate: those whose brains are dead are unable even to breathe, and can be kept alive only on ventilators. She was repeatedly described as "terminal." This too was inaccurate. She was "terminal" only in the sense that her husband had obtained a court order authorizing the removal of her feeding tube; her actual physical health was such that she managed to stay alive in a hospice, in which only palliative treatment is given and patients without antibiotics often die of the pneumonia that accompanies immobility or the bacteremia that accompanies urinary catheterization, for five years.

Even after the removal of the feeding tube, she lived thirteen days. The removal of this feeding tube was repeatedly described as "honoring her directive." This, again, was inaccurate: there was no directive. Any expressed wish in this matter existed only in the belated telling of her husband and two of his relatives (his brother Scott Schiavo and their sister-in-law Joan Schiavo), who testified in a hearing on a 1998 petition that they had heard Theresa express the thought that she would not wish her life to be artificially prolonged. One time she was said to have expressed this thought was when Michael and Scott Schiavo's grandmother was on life support. "If I ever go like that, just let me go," Scott Schiavo said that he had heard Theresa say. "Don't leave me there." Another expression of the thought, Joan Schiavo testified, occurred when the two women were watching a television movie about a man on a feeding tube: according to Michael Schiavo's attorney, George J. Felos, what Theresa said was this: "No tubes for me."

This may be the first time that the blue-state readership of the New York Review of Books encounters some of the facts and connections that were well-known to readers of Blogs for Terri but which never seemed to make it into the mainstream media coverage of the case. Didion challenges the conventional wisdom on many fronts -- here, the idea that a "living will" is the answer to the dilemmas presented by Terri's situation:

There was considerable fuzziness here, not least in the reverence accorded the "living will," which seemed increasingly to be another of those well-meant and seemingly unassailable ideas that do not quite work the way we are encouraged to think they work. The chances of being admitted conscious to a hospital without being pressed to produce a living will have become virtually nil, yet any "living will" prepared in advance (as in "advance directive," exactly the document we are pressed to produce) requires us to make specific medical decisions about situations we cannot conceivably anticipate. According to studies cited last year in the Hastings Center Report by a medical researcher and a law professor at the University of Michigan, Angela Fagerlin and Carl E. Schneider, almost a third of such decisions, after periods as short as two years, no longer reflect the wishes of those who made them. The "health care proxy" or durable power of attorney, through which we assign someone we trust to make the decisions we can no longer make, is the better document, but it optimistically presupposes that we will each have with us at end of life "someone we trust."

The further problem with such directives is that they can be construed as coercive: no one wants to be a "burden." Few of us want to be perceived as considering our own lives more important than the ongoing life and prosperity of the family. Few of us will sit with a husband or wife or child in a lawyer's office or a doctor's office and hesitate to sign the piece of paper that will mean, when the day goes downhill, the least trouble for all concerned. For all the emphasis on the importance of "choice," the only choice generally approved by the culture is to sign the piece of paper, "not be a burden," die.

Whatever your position on the Terri Schiavo case, and whether you paid close attention or not when it was happening, this piece is worth your time and attention.

(Hat tip to Galley Slaves for the link.)

Not the best of the six by any means, but still a very impressive movie. Even knowing how it must end, and even knowing how each scene must end, I still found myself surprised, and I jumped and my jaw dropped at Anakin's actions during the confrontation between Windu and the Chancellor.

The part of the evening that really got my heart going, though, was the trailer for "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe." The title isn't revealed until the end of the trailer, and it was fun to watch my son's face as he began to recognize bits of the story, and he looked back at me with a huge grin of anticipation.

One thing about "Revenge of the Sith" especially bugged me, and it's bugged me since the very first movie:

They were able to build spectacular cities, intelligent and versatile robots, massive and fantastic space vehicles that could leap in and out of hyperspace, and a Death Star that could take out a planet with a single blast.

So how come no one in the Star Wars universe ever figured out how to build a simple guardrail?

The right of the disabled to choose to continue to receive food and water is being contested in court in the United Kingdom.

The Daily Telegraph reports that the General Medical Council (GMC) is appealing a 2004 British High Court decision that gave a terminally ill Lancaster man the right to insist on receiving food and water through a tube, regardless of the opinion of his doctors.

Last summer, the High Court ruled in favor of Leslie Burke, who was diagnosed over 20 years ago with a degenerative neurological condition that will eventually cause him to lose the ability to swallow, while still retaining full awareness. Burke does not want to die of thirst, a process that can take two to three weeks. Because he may also lose the ability to speak by that time, he wants to ensure that his wishes are followed while he can still express them. Burke went to the court to challenge GMC guidelines that would let the doctors, not him, decide whether he should have a feeding tube:

GMC guidelines published in 2002 tell doctors it is their responsibility, rather than that of the patient, to decide whether to withhold or withdraw life-prolonging treatment.

Paragraph 81 effectively allows doctors to withdraw artificial nutrition or hydration from a patient who is not dying because it "may cause suffering, or be too burdensome in relation to the possible benefits".

At the time, the GMC said that the court ruling was unnecessary, that nothing in its standards would require or encourage a doctor to withhold food and water. Now the GMC has filed an appeal, arguing that the ruling gives a patient too much power:

Yesterday, Philip Havers, QC, for the doctors' governing body, said the judge's ruling had effectively "extended the reach of patient autonomy" and redefined the test as to what treatment was in a patient's best interests.

Mr Havers said there was "no evidence" that any member of the medical profession was likely to treat Mr Burke, or apply the GMC's guidance, in the way that he feared.

Follow that? The GMC is saying we're pretty sure we'll give you food and water, but we don't want the law to require us to do it if we don't want to.

In written submissions, however, Mr Havers told the Master of the Rolls, Lord Phillips, sitting with Lords Justices Waller and Wall, that Mr Justice Munby's conclusions put doctors in an "impossibly difficult position".

The result would be that a patient could require a doctor to provide a form of treatment that the doctor considered of no clinical benefit if not harmful.

"Such a conclusion is not in the best interests of patients," said Mr Havers - both as a matter of principle and because it would gravely undermine the "therapeutic partnership based on joint decision-making between doctors and patients".

It would also put the doctor "in an impossibly difficult position, for a doctor should never be required to provide a particular form of treatment to a patient which he does not consider to be clinically appropriate".

Requiring doctors to provide such treatment would undermine the relationship of trust that doctors have with the public they seek to serve, Mr Havers added. It would also be inconsistent with the Hippocratic oath that doctors used to take.

Notice that the GMC is classifying food and water as "treatment," not as basic necessities of life. Notice, too, the gobbledygook about how giving a patient the right not to die of thirst would undermine the "therapeutic partnership" and the "relationship of trust" between patient and doctor.

I think Leslie Burke would not care much about the state of his "therapeutic partnership" with a doctor who is trying to starve him to death.

Read what Burke had to say after last summer's court ruling:

Mr Burke said it seemed as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. "I am ecstatic," he said. "I can't tell you what it means to me.

"Anybody could be in the same situation so this has far-reaching consequences. It could happen to somebody in a car accident, not just people with a disability.

"A doctor could decide to withdraw hydration and nutrition and effectively starve a person until they die.

"Doctors have told me I'm going to deteriorate to the stage where I need to be hospitalised and need artificial nutrition and hydration. This could be in 15 or 20 years, but my communication and speech is already deteriorating and is a problem now.

"I won't be able to communicate my wishes either way and this could just be withdrawn without my consent. I would be fully conscious the whole time and it could take two or three weeks to die.

"It's not any way to treat vulnerable people. In a civilised society, it can't be right to allow vulnerable people to effectively starve to death."

Hear, hear. Let's pray that the appeals court agrees.

I get Steve Fair's "Fair and Biased" updates via e-mail (subscribe at okgop -at- aol.com), and the current update contains the following item from Roll Call magazine about Oklahoma's junior senator:

You won't want to miss the next big blockbuster thriller, "Revenge of the STDs," coming soon to a theater near you.

A takeoff on "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith," the STD flick -- yes, it's about sexually transmitted diseases -- is a tradition sponsored by Oklahoma GOP Sen. Tom Coburn. (He held six annual safe-sex slide shows during his three terms in the House.)

Coburn has been sending around a "Star Wars"-themed flier touting this year's slide show with a picture of Yoda declaring, "Stop the STDs, we must," and Darth Vader warning, "Never underestimate the power of the STDs."

The spacey flier opens much the same way "Star Wars" does: "Not so long ago, there were only two known sexually transmitted diseases. Today there are more than 25 STDs which infect more than 19 million Americans each year. ..."

Coburn notes that many people are not aware that the human papillomavirus infects 5.5 million Americans each year. "Studies have shown that condoms do not provide effective protection against HPV infection," Coburn states, adding in a "Dear Colleague" letter that as a physician he personally has witnessed the "ravaging effects" of STDs. "In many cases, STDs lurk undetected in the body for months or years before unleashing their terrible effects," he writes.

Coburn is inviting all Members of Congress, staff and interns to attend the slide show on May 26 (one week after the opening of the final installment of the "Star Wars" saga) at 11:45 a.m. in HC-5 of the Capitol. "A free pizza lunch will be served but attendees should be advised that some slides contain graphic images."

Sen. Coburn has been under fire from the Senate Ethics Committee for wanting to continue practicing as an OB/GYN, as he did during his years in the U. S. House. If you can look beyond the Star Wars gimmickry, this presentation illustrates one of the benefits of having legislators who are still connected with a profession. Coburn can speak on this public health threat from experience; other senators are getting information from lobbyists from Planned Parenthood or SIECUS or other pressure groups. Coburn is able to challenge the conventional wisdom about condoms, and to call his colleagues' attention to the fact that condoms can't protect against HPV, which causes cervical cancer, a fact that deserves consideration as Congress debates funding for abstinence-based sex education.

I hope Coburn gets a good turnout, but I wonder about the wisdom of choosing pizza for the entree.

Matt of Overtaken by Events tells us about another non-profit organization with an innocuous name and a positive reputation that has been captured by the forces of political correctness. The YWCA's position page advocates for unrestricted abortion, for the registration of firearms and a ban on handguns, and is "pro-LGBTQ rights," using after-school programs to "promot[e] awareness with workshops on sexuality."

Matt writes: "If you were confused when little Sally came home from her swimming class and burned her training bra, wonder no longer."

Several pro-life bills passed the Oklahoma House last month but have been bottled up in committee in the Democrat-controlled State Senate. In his weekly Capitol Update, Rep. Kevin Calvey reports that some of these proposals are going to be considered after all, having been attached as amendments to a Senate bill that came through the House corrections committee:

Senate Bill 807, by State Sen. Glenn Coffee, R-Oklahoma City, and State Rep. Fred Morgan, R-Oklahoma City, would target criminals involved in pornography and the abuse of women and children.

The bill was amended in committee to include three pro-life measures. The measures include the Oklahoma Unborn Victim of Violence Act (a �Laci & Conner Peterson� law) (previously introduced by Rep. Pam Peterson (R-Tulsa)) and the Women�s Right to Know and the Family Protection Act (previously introduced by me, Rep. Kevin Calvey).

Among other reforms, the bill would allow individuals who attack pregnant women and cause the loss of the unborn child to face criminal charges for the death of the baby.

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act is modeled after federal legislation passed last year, prompted by the murder of Laci Peterson and her unborn son, Conner, in California.

The amended Senate bill would also institute an �informed consent� law requiring that women be given all pertinent information about the potential consequences of abortion, information on fetal development and the gestational age of the unborn child at least 24 hours before the procedure occurs.

The amended bill passed also requires parental notification before an abortion can be performed on a minor. Morgan said parents have a right to know if a daughter is pregnant and warned that the lack of parental notification can encourage the abuse of children.

He noted there have been cases where grown men have molested underage girls and then taken them for an abortion without the parents� knowledge to hide the crime.

Another section of the bill would make it a crime for any school employee to have a sexual relationship with a student. Under the bill�s provision, any school employee engaged in a relationship with a child younger than 20 could be charged with rape.

The bill also outlaws �drive-by porn,� ensuring that individuals with pornographic films displayed on a car�s television monitor while driving could face fines of up to $500 per violation.

Senate Bill 807 passed the House Corrections Committee on a unanimous vote and is now headed to the floor of the Oklahoma House of Representatives.

If the House passes the amended bill, I believe it will go to a conference committee next, and not to the Senate Human Services Committee, the lair of Sen. Bernest Cain.

You'll find an archive of Calvey's Capitol Update on his website. (This week's has been sent out by e-mail, but hasn't been uploaded to the website yet.)

Yesterday, in an entry about the 1982 "Baby Doe" case in Indiana and the Terri Schiavo case, I wrote:

Preventing similar tragedies in the future will require ... that we understand the laws as they are today and then work with legislators to build in safeguards against the kind of judicial tyranny we saw at work in Pinellas County, Florida.

Proving that great minds think alike, Corie Schweitzer, of Insane Troll Logic, e-mailed to let me know that she has begun that task in Texas:

I think it would be a fitting tribute to Terri to work on finding out what each state's laws regarding end of life issues with respect to incapacitated persons and then working to have those laws changed to ensure that, in the absence of many safeguards to ensure that the incapacitated person's explicit wishes are explicitly known, that no one may be deprived of their life.

Corie contacted her state representative and state senator, who pointed her to the applicable section of law. She began looking through the statutes for potential problems, and here's one she found:

� Subsection C says that the decision to withhold life support "must be based on knowledge of what the patient would desire, if known" [emphasis mine].

1) It does not define what exactly constitutes "knowing" what the patient desires, since the statute is already dealing with patients WITHOUT AN ADVANCED DIRECTIVE. The law should specify exactly what kinds of evidence could be presented as proof of wishes and what could not be presented.

Corie has some good suggestions for how to work with your state legislators to address the problems you find. She deserves encouragement and emulation. I will look forward to following her progress in Texas and hope that she will serve as an example to pro-life bloggers in the other 49 states.

Think a living will can protect you against being dehydrated to death against your wishes? Think again.

In a situation recalling the recent death of Terri Schiavo in Florida, an 81-year-old widow, denied nourishment and fluids for nearly two weeks, is clinging to life in a hospice in LaGrange, Ga., while her immediate family fights desperately to save her life before she dies of starvation and dehydration.

Mae Magouirk was neither terminally ill, comatose nor in a "vegetative state," when Hospice-LaGrange accepted her as a patient about two weeks ago upon the request of her granddaughter, Beth Gaddy, 36, an elementary school teacher.

Also upon Gaddy's request and without prior legal authority, since March 28 Hospice-LaGrange has denied Magouirk normal nourishment or fluids via a feeding tube through her nose or fluids via an IV. She has been kept sedated with morphine and ativan, a powerful tranquillizer. ...

In her living will, Magouirk stated that fluids and nourishment were to be withheld only if she were either comatose or "vegetative," and she is neither. Nor is she terminally ill, which is generally a requirement for admission to a hospice.

Magouirk lives alone in LaGrange, though because of glaucoma she relied on her granddaughter, Beth Gaddy, to bring her food and do errands.

Granddaughter just got tired of looking after Grandmama:

"Grandmama is old and I think it is time she went home to Jesus," Gaddy told Magouirk's brother and nephew, McLeod and Ken Mullinax. "She has glaucoma and now this heart problem, and who would want to live with disabilities like these?"

What's shocking is that the hospice would comply with Gaddy's request without verifying her legal authority to act on her grandmother's behalf. I used to think well of hospices, but I'm starting to wonder if there's a chain of them owned by the Soylent Corporation.

So the hospice pulled the tube, then put it back three days later at the request of relatives who did have that authority. Within hours Gaddy applied to a probate judge and was granted emergency guardianship for the weekend, long enough to order the feeding tube pulled. Mae Magouirk has gone without food and water for over 10 days.

Georgia law requires that a hearing for an emergency guardianship must be held within three days of its request, and Magouirk's hearing was held April 4 before Judge Boyd. Apparently, he has not made a final ruling, but favors giving permanent guardianship power to Gaddy, who is anxious to end her grandmother's life.

That's putting it mildly. There are other relatives ready to step in and care for Magouirk, but again a judge, one judge, stands in the way of saving a life.

Hat tip to the Bayly Brothers.

UPDATE: Jack Lewis provides a helpful timeline of the situation.

Jared of Mysterium Tremendum is retiring from the blogosphere for a time to finish his novel. His final entries focus on the art of writing -- a collection of links to his best pieces on writing and literature, a quote from C. S. Lewis on the importance of consistency and discipline in writing stories, and writing tips from Lewis.

I especially liked an entry called "The Primacy of Artistry in Christian Art." There's an excerpt from a conversation between C. S. Lewis, Kingsley Amis, and Brian Aldiss, in which Lewis explains that in writing Perelandra he did not build the story around what became the central theme:

Lewis: The starting point of . . . Perelandra was my mental picture of the floating islands. The whole of the rest of my labours in a sense consisted of building up a world in which floating islands could exist. And then of course the story about an averted fall developed. This is because, as you know, having got your people to this exciting country, something must happen.

Later in the conversation:

Lewis: . . . I�ve never started from a message or a moral, have you?

Amis: No, never. You get interested in the situation.

Lewis: The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.

Jared says that most of the books you find in the Christian fiction section were written in the opposite direction -- the author started with a topic or a moral and then tried to construct a story around it.

We have plenty of Christian medical/legal/military/crime thrillers, but the problem with so many of them is not that they are a type of story but that the story itself seems only tangentially important to their purpose. ...

Christian Writers, just write good stories, let the story take over. If you let the story tell itself, your faith will out.

The same thing could be said about Christians working in drama, music, or any other art form. Christians have too often excused mediocrity, as if it were impossible for a follower of Christ to create something beautiful and excellent, as if sincerity relieved an artist of striving for excellence. Your creation is going to reflect your worldview, and if you make it excellent, you will glorify the Lord, and you will draw others who come for the beauty hear the message between the lines.

Indeed, beauty and excellence in the work of a Christian artist is itself a message: That the artist serves a Lord who is worthy of nothing less than his finest efforts.

UPDATE: Joe Carter of the Evangelical Outpost has been writing along similar lines, asking whether Christians can save the visual arts:

For Christians to be able to save the visual arts we must first stop treating �Christian art� as a distinctive genre, as if the value of an artwork depended on whether it fell on the �correct� side of the sacred/secular divide. Art must have an intrinsic dignity as a work of art. What makes it worthy of the modifier �Christian� is not a matter of theme or content but that it is produced for the pleasure of our Lord. We create because we are made in the image of our Father and, like our own children, we should honor him with the gifts of our creativity.

Carter has been running a series called "The Gallery," posting a work of art each Sunday. Easter Sunday's post was Bouguereau's "Les saintes femmes au tombeau" ("The holy women at the tomb").

Mark Steyn writes in the Spectator (free registration required) about a case from California in the 1990s which was very similar to Terri Schiavo's case:

[Robert Wendland] was injured in an automobile accident in 1993 and went into a coma. Under state law, he could have been starved to death at any time had his wife requested the removal of his feeding tube. But Rose Wendland was busy with this and that, as one is, and assumed there was no particular urgency.

Then one day, a year later, Robert woke up. He wasn�t exactly his old self, but he could catch and throw a ball and wheel his chair up and down the hospital corridors, and both activities gave him pleasure. Nevertheless Mrs Wendland decided that she now wished to exercise her right to have him dehydrated to death. Her justification was that, while the actual living Robert � the Robert of the mid-1990s � might enjoy a simple life of ball-catching and chair-rolling, the old Robert � the pre-1993 Robert � would have considered it a crashing bore and would have wanted no part of it.

She nearly got her way. But someone at the hospital tipped off Mr Wendland�s mother and set off a protracted legal struggle in which � despite all the obstacles the California system could throw in her path � the elderly Florence Wendland was eventually successful in preventing her son being put down.

You can find more about Robert Wendland's case here.

Steyn says there's a large portion of the populace who just don't want to think about situations like this and comfort themselves that the Schiavo case is nothing special -- tragic, yes, but it happens every day. They take some comfort in the media assurances that all the legal processes were followed. He equates it to a child sticking his fingers in his ears and singing "la-la-la, I can't hear you."

Michelle Malkin called Steyn's column, "hands down, the best piece written on the case. Ever." I'd agree, for this next paragraph alone, especially the last sentence (emphasis added):

One consequence of abortion is that, in designating new life as a matter of �choice�, it created a culture where it�s now routine to make judgments about which lives are worth it and which aren�t. Down�s Syndrome? Abort. Cleft palate? Abort. Chinese girl? Abort. It�s foolish to think you can raise entire populations � not to mention generations of doctors � to make self-interested judgments about who lives and who doesn�t and expect them to remain confined to three trimesters. The �right to choose� is now being extended beyond the womb: the step from convenience euthanasia to compulsory euthanasia is a short one. Until a year or two back, I spent a lot of my summer Saturdays manning the historical society booth at the flea markets on the town common, and I passed many a pleasant quarter-hour or so chit-chatting with elderly ladies leading some now middle-aged simpleton child around. Both parties seemed to enjoy the occasion. The child is no doubt a �burden�: he was born because he just was; there was no �choice� about it in those days. Having done away with those kinds of �burdens� at birth, we�re less inclined to tolerate them when they strike in adulthood, as they did in Terri Schiavo�s case.

Elsewhere, Don Danz looks at the legal issues surrounding "what Terri would have wanted":

One of the primary problems in discussing Terri's case is that many people simply have the issues confused which, not surprisingly, results in inappropriate conclusions. I've heard and read a hundred times, "Well, I wouldn't want to live that way." People who express this are stating a personal fact that is wholly irrelevant to Terri's situation. It's best to just walk away as logical discussion is not likely to follow. The primary issue is what did Terri want and what should be done when there is no objective evidence of her desires?

There was no written evidence of what Terri wanted to be done in her situation or in any similar situation. Five people testified as to Terri's verbally expressed desires: Terri's mom and one of Terri's friends who said she would want to live and Michael, Michael's brother and Michael's sister-in-law who said she wouldn't want to keep on living. Some people find her mother and friend more credible, while other people are more inclined to believe Michael's brother and sister-in-law. Personally, I think it's a wash between the four of them, which leaves us with Michael. ...

Now for just a little legalese. The standard which the courts must determine whether Terri expressed her desire to have her feeding tube removed is by "clear and convincing" evidence. This is the highest burden in a civil case. It means that, even if everyone agreed that it was more probable than not that Terri would want her feeding tube pulled, the court still could not order removal. Only if the evidence was clear and convincing that such were her express wishes, would it be proper to allow her to die in that manner.

It is my contention and that of many conservatives that under the clear and convincing standard, looking at the case as a whole, and being cognizant of the very narrow primary issue, there is insufficient evidence to support the pulling of Terri's feeding tube and allowing her to die.

Dan says he's not finished with this entry, so we'll check back.

The Penitent Blogger is annoyed with a Fox News interview about the autopsy, and the claim that it will be able to determine whether Terri could have recovered:

Of course, what was NOT discussed during these interviews was whether discontinuation of all rehabilitative therapy at the insistence of Michael Schiavo, would have contributed to Terri's state debilitating to the point where recovery would have, in time, become impossible.

Why, in the minds of the judiciary, the doctors and much of the public, was it more desirable to deny Terri adequate care, let her die, perform an autopsy and then state, "oh well, she was too far gone; she would have never recovered?" Why was is not more desirable to let Terri live a bit longer, perform full neurological testing, resume the therapy she should have had throughout these many years, and come to more definitive conclusions at a later time? Why jump headfirst off the bridge of death rather than stretch out the safety net of life?

Robert Williams of Dead Man Blogging has some powerfully provocative posts in the aftermath of Terri Schiavo's death. He asks whether it is a worldview-shaking event for Christians, as 9/11 was for the nation:

When those towers fell, we saw the world differently. Maybe I�m overreacting, but when Terri Schiavo died of thirst, I saw the world differently.

• I see a nation that recognizes no higher authority than �we the people� and the laws we make.
• I see an executive and legislature dominated by the judiciary.
• I see a Republican party unable or unwilling to act effectively. Janet Reno was willing to defy the courts and seize Elian Gonzales to send him back to a communist state, but nobody was willing to defy Judge Greer and save Terri Schiavo. I see that the lesser of two evils is still not good. I see that I didn�t even get half a loaf. I see that I voted to win, but still lost.
• I see a fallen, godless culture. I see a culture that doesn�t need to be engaged or transformed. It needs to be supplanted, replaced, defeated, destroyed.

What do you see?

In an earlier post, he asks some questions about the relationship between church and state which deserve every Christian's consideration.

Karol Sheinin asks whether, given the state of marriage in this country, it's reasonable to give a spouse full control over an incapacitated person's fate:

A good friend of mine recently married a friend to let him stay in the country. They had an engagement party. They got married, didn't tell her family, and then went home to their respective apartments. If something would happen to her, this man would have control over her fate.

A friend's sister got married. She had work to tie up at her job and her husband went ahead to Europe where they would meet to honeymoon. On the flight over, he met a woman for whom, a year later, he would leave his wife. ...

Call me unromantic. Tell me I don't know. But the truth is, marriage is in crisis. It's time to reconsider whether a spouse, with a 50% chance of being an ex-spouse, should have the level of control that they currently do. I vote 'no'.

Finally: As usual, Charles G. Hill speaks volumes with a single sentence.

Dave Curell, one of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) pastors who kept vigil outside the hospice where Terri Schiavo was starved to death, committed an act of civil disobedience by trying to enter the hospice without the permission of the administrator and spent the night in the Pinellas County jail. In a lengthy entry, he describes the work they did outside the hospice, the decision for civil disobedience, and what went through his mind as he went forward with that decision. He sets the scene shortly after their arrival:

In this environment our role was quickly defined. As we told people we were pastors we were welcomed and invited to do what pastors are supposed to do: care for the sheep. The lack of pastoral presence was obvious from the first. As one man we met early put it, �Where are the pastors? Where the hell are the pastors?� Even the Roman Catholic faithful welcomed us as they lamented the absence of their priests. They were as sheep without a shepherd.

The days were long and the ministry opportunities were constant. It was as if everyone there--police, protestors, and press--had their chest cavities opened for work on the heart. We were all laid bare by the reality that a woman who had committed no crime was being dehydrated and starved to death in the building next to us and that the �justice� system of our country had ordered it.

On the eighth day after Terri's death sentence began, when hope of government intervention was all but gone, Dave made the decision to get arrested. He spent some time writing a statement and praying in his hotel room then returned to the hospice:

I finished writing and got into the car to drive back to the protest site. My head started spinning. I arrived, greeted David Bayly, and told him of my intentions. For the next hour I was on overload. David introduced me to a reporter and I gave her my statement. I proceeded to the gate and invited anyone who was interested to hear my statement before I entered. My friends were there and a couple of members of the press. I remember one cameraman vividly because he would not point his camera at me and it was obvious that he despised me. I am thankful for this man most of all because he humiliated me to such a point that, as I began the process of my arrest, I was completely undone.

I've been reading Witness by Whittaker Chambers and am nearing the end of the book. That last sentence strikes me as something Chambers could have written. If Curell had gone forward for arrest filled with pride and self-righteousness at his bravery, the witness he bore would somehow have been cheapened. Instead, he went to his arrest as a broken man, representing the broken state of a nation in which a woman could be starved to death by court order.

Curell finishes his account by recounting the cool reception he received from his five-year-old daughter, who had learned of his arrest. I encourage you to read the entire article.

From Blogs for Terri: She passed away at around 10 a.m. Eastern Time this morning. There is word that her parents were not allowed to be with her at the end.

May the Angels lead you into paradise;
may the martyrs greet you at your arrival
and lead you into the holy city, Jerusalem.
May the choir of Angels greet you
and like Lazarus, who once was a poor man,
may you have eternal rest.

Kevin McCullough has a sharp rebuttal to an all-too-typical angry attack on those of us who are supporting Terri Schiavo's right to live. Kevin's correspondent hits all the usual talking points, some of which have appeared in comments on this site, and Kevin's response is worth reading.

Kevin has also assembled a moving audio montage about Terri, backed by Phil Collins' "Another Day in Paradise" -- you'll find it here, and Kevin is offering it to any radio host who wishes to use it on air.

Here is a stunning essay in the Harvard Crimson by Harvard student Joe Ford. Joe has severe cerebral palsy, bad enough that people assume he is cognitively disabled because of his articulation and muscle tone. Only have time enough for one excerpt:

The result of this disrespect is the devaluation of lives of people like Terri Schiavo. In the Schiavo case and others like it, non-disabled decision makers assert that the disabled person should die because he or she�ordinarily a person who had little or no experience with disability before acquiring one��would not want to live like this.� In the Schiavo case, the family is forced to argue that Terri should be kept alive because she might �get better��that is, might be able to regain or to communicate her cognitive processes. The mere assertion that disability (particularly cognitive disability, sometimes called �mental retardation�) is present seems to provide ample proof that death is desirable.

Essentially, then, we have arrived at the point where we starve people to death because he or she cannot communicate their experiences to us. What is this but sheer egotism? Regardless of one�s religious beliefs, this is obviously an attempt to play God.

Hat tip to Sierra Faith.

No one can say now that Terri Schiavo was on artificial life support. She has survived ten days without food or water, and it is reported that she is still responsive to visitors and that there are indications that she is not completely dehydrated. It may be that she is being sustained in some miraculous way, and we need to pray that God will deliver her from the hands of those who seek her death.

Many have said that Terri isn't there any more, just an empty shell, and it's time her family let her go to be with Jesus. There are complaints about the hypocrisy of conservatives for seeking Federal intervention in what should be a state matter. Certain blasé bloggers prefer to shrug their shoulders -- it's tragic, sure, but there are plenty of other tragedies in the world.

Here is what seems so outrageous to me. This is why I cannot let go of this situation: Despite credible testimony that Terri is responsive and therefore not in a persistent vegetative state, despite credible testimony that she could take nutrition and water by mouth, Judge Greer refuses to hear any new testimony, refuses to permit new testing, refuses to consider that his finding of fact from nearly 10 years ago may have been in error. He is so determined that this woman die that no one is permitted to attempt to give her nutrition and water by mouth. If Terri were miraculously to get up from her bed and try to get herself a drink, I wouldn't be surprised if the judge ordered her bound and gagged. Her death seems to be the only satisfactory outcome to Judge Greer.

We need to continue to pray that God would sustain Terri physically and emotionally, as well as her parents; that God would change Michael's heart; and that God would change Judge Greer's heart, too.

Tim and David Bayly, the PCA pastors who have been blogging from outside the hospice, are headed back to Ohio. Their last entries from the scene are well worth reading and pondering. One of these entries is a doctrinal statement on euthanasia, footnoted with Scripture and the PCA's doctrinal standards. (In the excerpt, I've interpolated the text of the footnotes.) The statement makes an important distinction between treatment and care:

Today there are mounting pressures upon medical professionals, pastors, families, and individuals to hasten the death of those under their care or authority. Such hastening sometimes takes the form of direct action, such as a lethal injection. More commonly, it takes the passive form of neglect or withdrawal of the necessary means of preservation of life. (Westminster Larger Catechism, Questions 135,136.) Such means include medical treatment, both extraordinary and ordinary. But they also include basic provisions historically understood as care: warmth, cleanliness, food, water, and love. Christians must distinguish between "treatment" and "care."

Where medical treatment which is not gravely burdensome is necessary for an individual to continue to live, the withdrawal of such treatment--except in cases where death is imminent and inevitable and to continue such treatment would pose a grave risk or cause more of a burden to the patient than it would alleviate--is a violation of the image of God which all men and women bear.

Loving care for all members of the human community is a fundamental Christian teaching and an obligation of Christian discipleship. (1 Timothy 5:4-8; James 1:27) Therefore it ought never to be withheld. This includes providing liquids and nutrition through spoon-feeding or tubes where the patient is unable to take them by another manner. Withholding such necessary means for the preservation of life must, therefore, stand under Scripture's condemnation, (Exodus 20:13; Matthew 25:31-46; James 2:14-17) even in the case of those who are perpetually comatose or in a persistent vegetative state. Christians should also ensure that members of the human community are upheld with the warmth and love of human contact.

Although it doesn't bear directly on Terri's situation, the final post from the site has some interesting observations on the way Protestants and Catholics worked together outside the hospice.

Be sure to keep an eye on Blogs for Terri for the latest news and what you can do to help.

David Bayly has all the day's developments from outside Terri Schiavo's hospice.

Dr. Boyle at CodeBlueBlog is a radiologist. He has looked at the CT scan of Terri's brain from 1996 and takes issue with the oft-repeated assertion that Terri's brain has "liquefied":

First of all, the University of Miami's appellation for this scan is inaccurate. "Cortical regions" are not and can not be filled with spinal fluid. The sulci (spaces between cortical ribbons) are enlarged secondary to cortical atrophy and these sulci are filled with cerbrospinal fluid.

The most alarming thing about this image, however, is that there certainly is cortex left. Granted, it is severely thinned, especially for Terri's age, but I would be nonplussed if you told me that this was a 75 year old female who was somewhat senile but fully functional, and I defy a radiologist anywhere to contest that.

I HAVE SEEN MANY WALKING, TALKING, FAIRLY COHERENT PEOPLE WITH WORSE CEREBRAL/CORTICAL ATROPHY. THEREFORE, THIS IS IN NO WAY PRIMA FACIE EVIDENCE THAT TERRI SCHIAVO'S MENTAL ABILITIES OR/OR CAPABILITIES ARE COMPLETELY ERADICATED. I CANNOT BELIEVE SUCH TESTIMONY HAS BEEN GIVEN ON THE BASIS OF THIS SCAN.

He notices a shunt in her left ventricle, and that raises all sorts of questions, questions that can only be answered by a repeat CT scan, as well as an MRI and a PET scan. He sees all the classic signs of hydrocephalus.

Dr. Boyle also looked at the 1991 bone scan report:

Certainly IN A CHILD (which Schiavo, obviously was not), the combination of posterior rib fractures, vertebral compression fractures, and distal femoral periosteal elevation is ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY DIAGNOSTIC for child abuse and any radiologist who missed this diagnosis would be subject to disciplinary action from his peers and state licensing board.

The Evangelical Outpost points out the effect on this case of Florida's abolition of common-law marriage and adoption of no-fault divorce laws.

David Wayne, the Jollyblogger, asks if Christians are viewing this situation, and in particular, Michael Schiavo, from a cross-centered perspective:

Viewing Michael through a cross-centered lens won't change the sinfulness of his actions. Viewing Michael through a cross-centered lens won't change our obligation to rescue those being led away to slaughter. Viewing Michael through a cross-centered lens won't change our obligation to voice our opposition to the laws that make the starvation of a person like Terri possible.

But we are also faced with how we are to respond to Michael as a person. Put more precisely, how does the gospel guide our response to Michael as a person? If all should go his way, how should the Christian community react to him in the future? ...

I fear that, for the rest of Michael's life, Christians will be praying for his comeuppance more than they will for his salvation. Christians will be mostly concerned that Michael receive justice for his part in this rather than mercy.

I also fear that Michael will receive a lifetime of hate messages from professing Christians. ...

I have to confess that, until now I have not looked at Michael through gospel eyes, or through a cross-centered lens. I have committed the sin of moral indignation, forgetting that I am the chief of sinners. I have also forgotten my favorite of Jonathan Edwards' resolutions:

8. Resolved, to act, in all respects, both speaking and doing, as if nobody had been so vile as I, and as if I had committed the same sins, or had the same infirmities or failings as others; and that I will let the knowledge of their failings promote nothing but shame in myself, and prove only an occasion of my confessing my own sins and misery to God. July 30.

None of us should dare think that Michael has sunk to a level of "vileness" to which we ourselves have not sunk.

Read the whole thing.

(Hat tip to Michael Spencer, posting at Boar's Head Tavern for the links to the Evangelical Outpost and Jollyblogger entries.)

My friend John Eagleton, an attorney here in Tulsa, just called me with an idea for saving Terri Schiavo's life, now that the Federal appellate court has ruled against the Schindlers' appeal. He says it will require some guts on the part of the executive branch, either in Florida or at the federal level, and a prosecutor willing to fudge a little.

Everyone is guilty of breaking some law. A prosecutor could charge Terri with a crime, issue a warrant for her arrest, and take her into custody, at which point the state would be responsible for maintaining her well-being until she can stand trial. That would mean medical care and food and water. The state would not be allowed to starve to death someone in custody awaiting trial. Of course, the trial would have to be stayed until such time as Terri is competent to defend herself.

Seems to me that venue would matter in this case -- the prosecutor would have to cooperate, as would the judge to whom her criminal case would be assigned. Which crime is used for the charge would matter, too. How would you keep Michael Schiavo from bailing her out so he can continue to starve her to death?

As Dave Barry says, "I am not making this up." X-ATI Guy links to the website of Wait Wear, which offers a line of pro-chastity T-shirts and underwear. The underwear comes in bikini-cut, "bum bottom classic" and boy brief styles and sports slogans like "No vows, no sex," "I'm saving it," and "Traffic Control: Wait for Marriage."

I appreciate the intention, and it certainly sends a better message than, say, a thong with a built-in condom pocket, but I'm inclined to think that the pro-abstinence message will be lost once he and she are down to their skivvies. And if there is any hope of stopping the countdown to ignition at that point, it will be undone by the presence of words which invite the other party to gaze intently at the groinal region of the wearer.

As tiny as the lettering is, one of the slogans ought to be, "If you can read this, you're too close."

Wait Wear underwear is available in Atlanta at Tease, 1166 Euclid Ave. and other fine stores nationwide.

UPDATE: Oh, my. Wait Wear wants their customers to send in pictures of themselves wearing Wait Wear products. For their online gallery. Right. Online pictures of teenagers in their underpants is a well-known encouragement to chaste thinking and behavior.

As X-ATI Guy responded to a commenter: "'Chastity is not a joke.' Agreed. But proclaiming your chastity on your underpants is."

PCA pastor David Bayly continues his thorough and thought-provoking reporting from the Pinellas Park hospice where Terri Schiavo is being starved and dehydrated to death. From his latest dispatch:

Perhaps one of the more pressing questions facing many at the site is what role disobedience to the law should play in seeking to preserve Terri's life....

The police presence is so heavy--increasingly so as time goes by--that any action seems hopeless practically, and thus only useful as a statement. Yet many are questioning whether such a statement should be made. Should a hopeless-but-righteous action not be taken because it appears hopeless?

On the other hand, the desire of the Schindler family not to have their daughter's suffering become more of a circus is also significant, and until such time as appeals are exhausted, it would seem their wishes should be respected.

Still, there is more.... Terri's case has come to represent abiding and fundamental principles of justice and righteousnes. What is at stake in her treatment by society will influence our nation for years to come.

In the end, while we follow the will of God established in His Word and applied by the Holy Spirit to our lives, our hope remains in Him and His power alone.

Earlier, Bayly posted news from those who have visited Terri inside the hospice and some analysis of the cynical gamesmanship he sees in Judge Whittemore's ruling on the Schindlers' motion to reinsert Terri's feeding tube:

In court yesterday it was clear that David Gibbs was making a charged decision in answering Judge Whittemore's question about Judge Greer's status in his complaint and whether he wanted to attach Judge Greer personally to the complaint. Gibbs hesitated, then stated that he saw no reason to attach Greer personally and only sought to deal with his rulings in his legal capacity as a judge. Though Gibbs did say that he might wish to expand his suit later to include others, including the possibility of charging Michael Schiavo with perjury, he confined himself to the record in his initial filing.

I remember praying for wisdom for David at that point in the trial. It seemed like Judge [Whittemore] was asking, �Are you really going to go after my fellow judge personally?� Today, it looks like Judge Whittemore had indeed set a trap with his insistent questions, a trap which last night he sprang shut by saying that since no new issues were raised there was nothing beyond the previous court record to consider and because that was completely against the Schindler family, there exists no possibility of winning after further review and thus there is no cause for injunctive relief.

Clang. The cynic springs his trap. But it�s not David Gibbs or Terri Schiavo whose soul lies in chains as a result of Judge Whittemore�s legal niceties.

Psalm 140:5-8 (ESV) 5 The arrogant have hidden a trap for me, and with cords they have spread a net; beside the way they have set snares for me. Selah 6 I say to the LORD, You are my God; give ear to the voice of my pleas for mercy, O LORD! 7 O LORD, my Lord, the strength of my salvation, you have covered my head in the day of battle. 8 Grant not, O LORD, the desires of the wicked; do not further their evil plot or they will be exalted! Selah

There's more, and Bayly is updating regularly throughout the day.

Another insightful report from PCA pastor David Bayly, who is keeping vigil outside the hospice where Terri Schiavo is being starved to death by judicial fiat.

Before other observations, we must start with the grave observation that Terri has now been deprived of nutrition and water--has, in a word, been starved--for over three full days. This is incipient murder. No opinion poll, judge, politician or law on earth can make it anything else. May God have mercy on America for this blot upon our national conscience. Judges of America, there is a higher tribunal, a bar before which you will one day answer. But just as Daniel includes himself in his prayer of repentance for the national sins of Israel, so all Americans must seek God's forgiveness for this sin WE are committing.

Bayly observes: "A strange brotherhood of Roman Catholic believers and Reformed Protestant believers has developed at the site." He speaks admiringly of the Christ-like character evident in some of the protesters, such as this man:

David Gibbs, the Schindler's attorney, has a brother who pastors a Baptist church in this area. Members of the church have been wonderfully faithful in demonstrating for Terri. One young father, (what was his first name?) Adams, was exceptional last night. He witnessed with such kindness for hours to the lone anti-Terri protestor (actually, just a hurting young man) that by the end of the night the protestor was saying that he supported Terri and wanted to see her fed.

In an earlier entry, Bayly gives a report from the Federal courtroom in Tampa. Michael Schiavo's attorney is arguing that the law passed by Congress is unconstitutional. Gibbs must file a brief in reply, and it has to be thorough enough to respond to the judge, but ready early enough to help save Terri. For whatever reason, the judge has not granted injunctive relief to keep Terri alive while arguments are heard.

In case you're wondering, yes, Federal Judge James D. Whittemore is a Clinton appointee.

As soon as Terri's Law was signed by President Bush, Terri Schiavo's parents, the Schindlers, filed a motion in Federal court to have Terri's feeding tube reinserted. For whatever reason, the assigned judge, James D. Whittemore, did not grant the motion immediately. The hearing will be at 3:00 p.m. at Tampa's Federal courthouse.

David Bayly, a blogger and PCA pastor who has been keeping vigil outside the hospice, writes:

By faith we have the avenue of greatest power at our disposal. Will you join us in prayer to God the Father Almighty for Terri and the Schindler family?

Patsy Brekke posted a comment on that entry worth meditating on:

You are right, we need to look up and out, to the Cross, to Christ, to God the Father of Life first and foremost - not to man, politics, the media or our own wisdom and strength.

Lowborn men are but a breath,
the highborn are but a lie;
if weighed on a balance, they are nothing;
together they are only a breath...

Find rest, O my soul, in God alone;
My hope comes from Him.
He alone is my rock and my salvation;
He is my fortress, I will not be shaken.
My salvation and my honor depend on God;
He is my mighty rock, my refuge.

Trust in Him at all times, O people;
pour out your hearts to Him,
for God is our refuge.

from Psalm 62

The House just adjourned, having passed the Senate version of Terri's Law (S. 686) by a vote of 203-58. All but a handful of Republicans voted in favor, joined by about 40 Democrats present. The bill now goes to the President for his signature.

Watching C-SPAN's coverage of U. S. House debate on Terri Schiavo bill. Jim Moran, a Democrat from Virginia, speaking from the well of the House, told his colleages that 10 courts and 19 judges have heard all the testimony in the case and all reached the same conclusion. Utter baloney -- only one court and one judge heard all the testimony and saw all the evidence, and that's the heart of the problem.

Barney Frank, D-Mass., is managing the opposition to the bill. He just declined to give one of his speakers a turn, reserving time for later, making some comment about an imbalance between the two sides, which would seem to suggest that there is more support for congressional intervention in this case.

If you don't have access to cable TV, but do have broadband, you can watch the debate via C-SPAN's website.

When I read something like this, I feel like I was born too late and missed out on all the good stuff. Jeffrey Hart, who at age nine had a season pass to the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, remembers the fair, "the last great fair, innocent in its faith."

It believed in Progress as a comprehensive idea. We no longer have that kind of belief. We believe in advances�in transportation, medicine, communications, computers, longevity, and so on, but not in Progress as a central animating idea, one that gives meaning to life.

Hart takes us inside the Perisphere to Democracity, the planned model city (residences, industries, and offices carefully segregated from each other) of America's future, then out to the Amusement Zone with its parachute rides, Zombies, and freak shows.

Hat tip to Power Line's Big Trunk, whose entry includes links to an earlier essay by Hart and to a collection of images from the fair.

Google News shows nearly 200 news stories covering a study recently published in the Journal of Adolescent Health. The story the mainstream media seems so anxious to report is summed up in the Tulsa Whirled's headline: "Virginity pledges are ineffective in curbing teen STDs, study finds." The story in the Whirled is actually out of the Washington Post, where it bears the slightly more balanced headline, "Teen Pledges Barely Cut STD Rates, Study Says."

How could this possibly be? It appears to hinge upon what teens are taught and made to understand about the meaning of abstinence:

David Bayly, who is outside the hospice in Pinellas Park, Florida, where Terri Schiavo is put to death by starvation and dehydration, has been posting some challenging observations on the interaction between protesters on both sides of the issue, the media, and the authorities. Here's a sample from yesterday:

...[N]on-Christians at the scene could easily come to the conclusion that Christians trust primarily in the power of government. There was little sense of reliance on a transcendently powerful, sovereign God in press conference performances (though an evening sermon by a Pastor Rob Schenck did provide such hope). Our trust, it seems, is in Messrs. Hastert, DeLay, Bush, etc. The arm of God is puny in the eyes of some, the arm of man all-too-powerful. This attitude seemed reflected in public prayer sessions which occasionally descended into Potemkin prayer villages. Perhaps the desire for ecumenicity blunted the power of prayer times, though ecumenicity was solely Christian and did not extend to denying the name of Christ.

Bayly, a PCA pastor, would like to see more of his compatriots on the scene:

How wonderful it would be to have 100 normal, thoughtful, engaged Reformed evangelicals here to witness. Opportunities are frequent and powerful, but there don't seem to be many here who are seeking to engage the other side. There's a fair bit of niceness to the other side and a fair bit of anger, but not much attempt at engagement.

And here's an observation from earlier today:

Many opportunities to witness here. Fantastic opportunity. Sadly, however, several conversations with media personnel and pro-Michael demonstrators have been cut short by angry and intrusive pro-Terri demonstrators. Dave and I are wearing navy sportcoats, and it may be that pro-Terry demonstrators feel free to interrupt us assuming we're journalists they're helping by adding to the color of our stories.

Pray for Terri, pray for those who are causing Terri's death to have a changed heart, and pray for those who are demonstrating to bear witness in word and deed to God's power and goodness.

The defiance of Judge George Greer continues to block every effort to allow some other body to consider the facts of Terri Schiavo's situation, rather than relying on Greer's own very suspect findings of fact. Greer rejected the subpoena ordering the appearance of Terri Schiavo before a congressional committee and ordered the execution to proceed.

As you pray and seek for other ways to help Terri, here are some sources of information, in addition to Blogs for Terri and Terri's Fight:

Last night through the fog of congressional maneuvering, Google News seemed to be the best way to find an aggregate of the latest developments. Here's a link to a Google News search on "Schiavo" sorted by most recent.

David Bayly, a PCA pastor and a blogger for World Magazine, is in Pinellas Park, Florida, keeping vigil outside the hospice where Terri Schiavo is now being starved and dehydrated to death. He is reporting from the scene as news filters out to the crowd gathered there. Tomorrow he'll be joined there by other PCA pastors and World Magazine publisher Joel Belz.

I'm seeing conflicting information about the status of legislative efforts to prevent the starvation execution of Terri Schiavo, which will begin, by order of Pinellas County, Florida, Judge George Greer, at 1 p.m. Eastern Time today.

The U. S. House passed a bill (HR 1332) on Wednesday that would give a Federal court an opportunity to review the facts of such cases. According to the Tampa Tribune, a unanimous consent request to hear the bill in the Senate failed because of the objection of Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, a pro-death advocate. The newspaper reported that the Senate succeeded later in passing a private relief bill applying only to Terri, but by then the House had recessed for the month. There's talk of reconvening the House, but many members have already gone back to their districts. Blogs for Terri still seems to hope that this is possible.

Meanwhile the Florida Senate defeated a bill, by a vote of 21-16, which would have set a higher standard for withdrawing food and water from a PVS patient -- there must be either a written advance directive from the patient, or clear and convincing evidence of the patient's wishes. Nine Republicans voted with the Democrats to stop the bill.

As I've said before -- local and state elections matter to the cause of protecting human life. Primary elections matter to the cause of protecting human life. Terri's situation is the result of an elected judge who rejects crucial evidence, the elected sheriff and district attorney of Pinellas County, who refuse to intervene in an apparent case of abuse and neglect, and the Florida legislature, which passed legislation about five years ago categorizing food and water as "life-extending" treatment. Don't assume that if your state legislator is Republican that he's on the right side of this issue.

Last night the U. S. House of Representatives passed, by voice vote, HR 1332, the Protection of Incapacitated Persons Act of 2005. This bill gives an incapacitated person, or the "next friend" of an incapacitated person (a term that would include parents), the right to pursue a cause of action on behalf of the incapacitated person in Federal district court. The Federal court would be authorized determine "whether authorizing or directing the withholding or withdrawal of food or fluids or medical treatment necessary to sustain the incapacitated person's life constitutes a deprivation of any right, privilege, or immunity secured by the Constitution or laws of the United States." Unlike HR 1151, this bill makes no reference to habeas corpus.

The determination would be made de novo -- that means the court would hear the case as if it had never been heard before and would consider arguments and evidence. In a situation like Terri Schiavo's, it would mean an incapacitated person's life would not be in the hands of one judge only. Yesterday's NRO piece by Rob Johansen documents Pinellas County, Florida, Judge George Greer's shortcomings in considering medical evidence and explains the bizarre reality that Judge Greer's findings of fact can only be reversed by Judge Greer.

Judge Greer has decreed that Terri's slow death will begin tomorrow at 1 p.m. Eastern time. Everything now depends upon the U. S. Senate taking action quickly. Please contact Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (phone 202-224-3344, fax 202-228-1264) and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (phone 202-224-3542, fax 202-224-7327) and urge them to move this bill forward. If you're a Floridian, there is legislation pending in Tallahassee that needs your help -- click here for more information.

NOTE: Action is urgently needed on the Incapacitated Persons Legal Protection Act. Please contact Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (phone 202-224-3344,
fax 202-228-1264) and Speaker of the House Denny Hastert (phone 202-225-2976, fax 202-225-0697) and plead with them to expedite passage of this bill.

Today on National Review Online, Rob Johansen has a thorough rebuttal to those (like one persistent anonymous commenter on this blog) who claim that Terri Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state and that her brain has liquefied. Johansen reviews the decisions made by Judge George Greer, the qualifications of the expert witnesses whose testimony he allowed and of those he disallowed. Regarding the PVS diagnosis, Johansen has been interviewing neurologists:

Almost 50 neurologists all say the same thing: Terri should be reevaluated, Terri should be reexamined, and there are grave doubts as to the accuracy of Terri�s diagnosis of PVS. All of these neurologists are board-certified; a number of them are fellows of the prestigious American Academy of Neurology; several are professors of neurology at major medical schools. ...

One such neurologist is Dr. Peter Morin. He is a researcher specializing in degenerative brain diseases, and has both an M.D. and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Boston University.

In the course of my conversation with Dr. Morin, he made reference to the standard use of MRI and PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans to diagnose the extent of brain injuries. He seemed to assume that these had been done for Terri. I stopped him and told him that these tests have never been done for her; that Michael had refused them.

There was a moment of dead silence.

�That�s criminal,� he said, and then asked, in a tone of utter incredulity: �How can he continue as guardian? People are deliberating over this woman�s life and death and there�s been no MRI or PET?� He drew a reasonable conclusion: �These people [Michael Schiavo, George Felos, and Judge Greer] don�t want the information.�

My friend Dave Russ sends along a link to this 20-question Southern dialect quiz based on Harvard's survey of regional dialects. The quiz looks mainly at word choice: Is the generic term for a soft drink soda, pop, or Coke? Do you carry groceries in a bag, a sack, or a poke? Is the second person plural "you all," "y'all," "youse guys," or "you'uns."

I had a strongly Southern score, which I partly owe to my Connecticut Yankee eighth grade Latin teacher, who taught us to conjugate verbs after this fashion: "I love, you love, he loves, we love, y'all love, they love."

Dave, a Mobile native, only scored a 60, his dialect no doubt compromised by years in southern California and south Florida. I outdistanced him with a 76. Top that, y'all!

Andrew Dobbs of the Burnt Orange Report, a left-leaning Texas political blog, was appalled by news of infant euthanasia in the Netherlands. His dismay at that news led him along a chain of reasoning to a conclusion he did not expect to reach:

Mikki went to the annual banquet for MEND Pregnancy Resource Center this evening along with several friends. (I hated to miss it, but I had to attend the City Council meeting and then rehearse with Coventry Chorale for an upcoming evensong service.)

The speaker tonight was Valeska Littlefield, who has been leading the charge in Oklahoma for informed consent legislation -- to insure that women who are considering an abortion go into it understanding the developmental stage of their baby and the short-term and long-term medical risks. She is executive director of Pregnancy HopeLine, a 24-hour referral network for all area pregnancy resource centers, and Life Network of Green Country. That website provides information for women who find themselves in a crisis pregnancy situation. The hope is that by providing information and support to women in crisis, abortion will truly become rare.

Valeska told about getting an abortion as a young woman, not because she wanted to, but because her parents insisted. When her younger sister later became pregnant, but went to a crisis pregnancy center and decided to keep the baby, her parents kicked the sister out of the house and changed the locks. Valeska resented the fact that her sister didn't get an abortion, but also grew to hate and distrust women, because the woman who was supposed to protect her -- her own mom -- didn't. Mikki got choked up all over again relating this to me.

Some years later Valeska was invited by a friend to attend a fashion show. It was a benefit for MEND, and Valeska learned about the organization and joined a 12-week support class for post-abortive women. She went through the class three times in the process of grieving and healing. Valeska said she's thankful for all those who fight abortion for the sake of the unborn, but she's in the fight for the sake of the women who have been wounded by abortion.

Related resources:

• Here's MEND's January newsletter (Adobe Reader required).

• The blog After Abortion is a resource for women who have had an abortion. You can find the guiding principles for the blog here.

No time or energy to blog tonight. I'll be on the air again with Gwen Freeman on Tulsa's Talk Radio 1170 KFAQ from 5:30 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Central time. As always, you're encouraged to check out the blogrolls to the right on the home page. On my main blogroll, the most recently updated blogs are at the top.

Some links of note:

• Tulsa Topics has thorough coverage of yesterday's council meeting (here and here) with links to video and a comparison of the standards used on the 71st and Harvard protest petition and the recall petitions.

• HFFZ has more commentary on the meeting.

• Here's KTUL's coverage.

• And some discussion on the recall on TulsaNow.org

• Dan Lovejoy liveblogged a conservative (Dinesh D'Souza) v. libertarian (Doug Bandow) debate on America's role in the world.

• The Penitent Blogger wants those who have hijacked the Episcopal Church to find themselves another name:

  The reality, therefore, is that traditional Episcopalians have the right to refer to themselves as such, while those members of ECUSA who have hijacked the Church from Her faithful and abandoned two millenia of Scripture, history and tradition should stop calling themselves Episcopalians and should choose another term which more adequately describes the new religion they have invented.

  (For some reason, I'm thinking of cowbirds right now.)

• In the comments to an earlier post, Charles G. Hill manages to combine two prominent BatesLine topics in a single sentence. If you're an observer of Tulsa land use policy, click that link.

• Scott Sala got some training on how to collect petition signatures. In NYC, it's complicated enough that you need some good training to make sure the petition is treated as valid.

• Kevin McCullough alerts us to the firing of a professor at the University of Colorado. No, not pro-terrorist pseudo-Indian Ward Churchill, but Phil Mitchell, an award-winning history professor, who is Christian and conservative.

Hmm. Guess I blogged anyway.

Just got an e-mail from the office of Tulsa's congressman, John Sullivan. Rep. Sullivan is one of the co-sponsors of H.R. 1151, the Incapacitated Person's Legal Protection Act.

In the U. S. Senate, the same bill has been introduced by Florida Sen. Mel Martinez as S. 539. Half of the four co-sponsors are Oklahoma's senators, Tom Coburn and Jim Inhofe. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) and Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania) are the other two sponsors.

Isn't it nice to be represented in Congress by men who know the right thing to do and will do it without needing to be pressured and prompted?

If you are not so blessed, get on the phones to your congressman and senators and urge them to support H.R. 1151 and S. 539 and to help move these bills along through the legislative process. Time is of the essence -- the court order that allows Terri Schiavo to be starved to death is still in force and will take effect in just 9 days.

Here is the Family Research Council's summary of the legislation, which is S. 539 in the Senate:

The right to counsel is a right even criminals enjoy, so why shouldn't Terri and others like her have that precious right? The bill, called "Incapacitated Person's Legal Protection Act" will not apply to circumstances where an advance medical directive is in effect. Terri never signed such a directive.

The Act simply provides a final avenue of review of the case to insure that a disabled person's Constitutional rights are protected. It is hard to believe that Terri's Constitutional rights have been protected by her husband and his attorney, euthanasia advocate George Felos. Terri's husband has refused to allow her to be represented by separate counsel. He has also refused to allow the rehabilitation therapy that some prominent experts say would help Terri to improve. He has often prohibited her own family and priest from visiting her.

And now the clock is ticking. A judge has ordered that Terri's husband can stop Terri from being fed on March 18. Euthanasia advocates say that she should be "allowed to die" - and FRC agrees. That time will come for one and all! But Terri should not be killed - and what else do you call starvation?

Rob Johansen of Thrown Back reviews Judge Greer's latest rulings in the Terri Schiavo case, denying nearly everyone of her parents' requests, including the request that she be allowed to die at their home, instead of in a hospice and that she be allowed to receive her last communion by mouth. Greer has yet to rule whether Terri should be fed by mouth when the feeding tube is removed. Johansen shows that these rulings aren't about ending artificial life support but making absolutely sure that Terri ends up dead:

Judge Greer's rulings against the Schindlers on the matter of feeding by mouth and viaticum seem to me most indicative of his frame of mind: By precluding attempts, as a "last ditch" measure, to feed her by mouth, the Judge shows that his object is not merely to stop what he might argue (erroneously) is an "extraordinary" means of support, but to see to it that she dies. One might make an analogy to someone on a respirator: frequently respirators are removed from patients, but sometimes they continue to breathe on their own without support. It is as though a judge were to order not only that a respirator be removed, but that the patient's mouth and nose be sealed with duct tape, just to make sure he can't get any air by any means.

Charles G. Hill writes about the Incapacitated Person's Legal Protection Act, a bill in Congress that would extend habeas corpus protection to ensure that there is due process when there is a dispute about the wishes or interests of an incapacitated person regarding medical treatment. The constitutional basis of the bill is the Fourteenth Amendment: Under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, "No State ... shall deprive any person of life ... without due process of law...nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

You can help Terri and others in similar situations by writing your congressman and encouraging him to support this bill, H.R. 1151. Here's a link to help you contact your U. S. Representative and your U. S. Senators. And here's the press release from the bill's House sponsor, Dave Weldon (R-Florida).

This topic isn't on my usual beat, but I have to give credit to a local TV station for handling it with a degree of maturity and depth. It got me thinking about why people would do such a thing, and that got me thinking about the nature of genuine intimacy.

It's not even a ratings period, as far as I know -- maybe February sweeps extends a few days into March? -- but KTUL, Tulsa's ABC affiliate, did a story about "swinging" couples earlier this week. What was notable -- and commendable -- about the story was that, after a bit of obligatory luridness, they spoke to a Christian counselor about the effect of this form of adultery on relationships and emotions:

A commenter on an earlier entry wrote:

I'm afraid it's too late for Terri Shiavo [sic] for a more political campaign. It should be a lesson to all of us; If you state your wishes for euthanasia, get it in writing.

So the claim here is that Terri Schiavo stated a wish to be euthanized if confronted with the kinds of disabilities she now suffers, and that there would be no controversy if only she had committed her wish to writing.

Assuming that's true, for the sake of argument, is euthanasia what Judge Greer has ordered for Terri in just over two weeks' time?

As one of over 200 bloggers writing to support Terri Schiavo's right to receive food and water, despite her physical handicaps, I appreciate the hard work of the organizers of Blogs for Terri. I admire their efforts to think outside the box -- to find some creative way to break through the fog of mainstream media misconceptions about Terri's condition, to help Floridians understand what is really going on, so that they can apply pressure on all branches of Florida government to see that justice is done. What I'm about to say is offered in the spirit of constructive criticism.

I was pleased to see the effort to place a newspaper ad in the St. Petersburg Times, the daily paper in Pinellas County, where Terri is being warehoused by her husband. The purpose of the ad was to put out the truth about Terri and direct readers to online resources where they could get the details. I was pleased to see that the fundraising effort succeeded. I was disappointed to hear of the Times' threats to censor the ad, but happy to learn that the Tampa Tribune agreed to run it as is.

But when I saw the ad, my heart sank. As I thought about it, I started to think about the problem in a different way, which pointed to an entirely different approach.

NOTE: Blogs for Terri has a fact sheet on Terri Schiavo's condition and the history of her legal situation. If you're just learning about Terri's situation, the fact sheet is the place to start.

If you think the title of this entry is too melodramatic, just read the order Judge Greer issued today (Adobe Reader required). Terri's parents had asked for an indefinite stay pending their appeal of his February 11 order, a hearing of their petition to remove Michael Schiavo as guardian, and their intention to seek review of the case by the U. S. Supreme Court. Although the judge has given Terri three more weeks to live, he has set a "date certain" and will no longer grant any more stays to prevent his execution order from being carried out. If Terri's parents want a stay, they'll have to make their case to an appeals court. From the order:

The Court is persuaded that no further hearing need be required but that a date and time certain should be established so tha tlast rites and other similar matters can be addressed in an orderly manner. Even though the Court will not issue another stay, the scheduling of a date certain for implementation of the February 11, 2000 ruling will give Respondents ample time to appeal this denial, similar in duration to previous short-time stays granted for that purpose. Therefore it is

ORDERED AND ADJUDGED that the Motion for Emergency Stay filed on February 15, 2005, is DENIED. It is further

ORDERED AND ADJUDGED that absent a stay from the appellate courts, the guardian, MICHAEL SCHIAVO, shall cause the removal of nutrition and hydration from the ward, THERESA SCHIAVO, at 1:00 p.m. on Friday, March 18, 2005.

DONE AND ORDERED in Chambers, at Clearwater, Pinellas County, Florida, at 2:50 p.m. this 25 day of February, 2005.

Note the language of that next to last paragraph -- "shall cause," not "may cause." Judge Greer has sentenced Terri Schiavo to be starved to death for the crime of being unable to feed herself.

It is good news that the judge has granted three more weeks. Keep praying.

Meanwhile, Philadelphia Daily News columnist John Grogan has had second thoughts about Terri's situation. Although he still believes that Terri lacks awareness, he points out that Terri is not dying and is not comatose. He also mentions that allegations of physical trauma causing Terri's condition haven't been fully investigated, and that her parents believe she could swallow again with therapy:

An AP story, found via Drudge:

In an investigation conducted secretly for months, the Kansas attorney general is demanding that clinics turn over the complete medical records of nearly 90 women and girls who had abortions.

Two abortion clinics are fighting the request in Kansas Supreme Court, saying the state has no right to such personal information. But Attorney General Phill Kline insisted Thursday he is simply enforcing state law.

"I have the duty to investigate and prosecute child rape and other crimes in order to protect Kansas children," Kline, an abortion opponent, said at a news conference.

Kline is seeking the records of girls who had abortions and women who received late-term abortions.

Sex involving someone under 16 is illegal in Kansas, and it is illegal in the state for doctors to perform an abortions after 22 weeks unless there is reason to believe it is needed to protect the mother's health.

So Kansas may see men held accountable for exploiting young teenage girls, and abortionists held accountable for killing babies that had reached viability. A salute to Phill Kline for having the guts to enforce the law in the interests of protecting the innocent.

It appears that Florida Governor Jeb Bush has found a way to intervene on behalf of Terri Schiavo and stave off her husband's attempts to starve her to death.

The Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) has filed a brief with Circuit Judge George Greer. The judge didn't allow a DCF attorney to speak during today's hearing, and DCF isn't saying what's in their filing, which is sealed, but the lawyers for Michael Schiavo and Terri's parents both said it had to do with allegations that Michael Schiavo abused Terri. This goes to the question of whether he is fit to act as her guardian and to make decisions about her care.

Judge Greer extended his stay until Friday at 5, and said he'd be considering whether to allow further tests to determine the level of Terri's awareness.

My friend Dave Russ sent along the official summary of HB 701, a bill that will help Terri and other similarly afflicted people:

Withholding or Withdrawal of Nutrition or Hydration from Incompetent Persons: Declares that an incompetent person is presumed to have directed health care providers to provide the necessary nutrition and hydration to sustain life; prohibits a court, proxy, or surrogate from withholding or withdrawing nutrition or hydration except under specified circumstances; provides that the presumption to provide nutrition and hydration is inapplicable under certain circumstances; conforms provisions to changes made by the act; declares that the act supersedes existing court orders otherwise applicable on or after the effective date of the act.

Effective Date: upon becoming law.

Florida readers, contact your legislators and urge them to move this bill along. Here's the committee that currently has the bill. Here's a link to the bill's status. And everyone, keep praying, especially for Judge Greer.

A commenter called MikeC, writing in response to a post on, of all places, the humor blog IMAO, proposes a common-sense approach to the ethics of Terri Schiavo's situation. The concept is brilliant, although his explanation isn't as clear as I'd like, so I'm going to paraphrase it:

Look at the two parties in this case -- Terri's husband and Terri's parents -- and the result each party is seeking. Then ask, for each party, what are the consequences of getting it wrong, if the judge grants their request.

What if Michael Schiavo succeeds in removing the feeding tube, but is wrong in his claim that Terri is a vegetable? A thinking, feeling woman will die a slow and painful death from starvation and dehydration.

What if the Schindlers succeed in taking over Terri's care, but are wrong in thinking that there is hope for rehabilitation? As MikeC put it, "they get to pay a bunch of medical bills and live with false hope." Terri, if she truly is PVS, isn't going to know or care.

If the judge decides for the husband and he's wrong, the consequences are cruel and irreversable. Terri will pay the ultimate price for her husband's error. If the judge decides for the Schindlers and they're wrong, the Schindlers will toil in vain, but they alone will bear the consequences.

WriteWingBlog has links to several testimonies from people who have first-hand experience with acute rehabilitiation or with a misdiagnosis of PVS. Hyscience's Richard has a moving story to tell, and you can understand why Terri's situation matters so much to him. And Rus Cooper-Dowda's story is amazing -- like something out of Kafka -- you must read it:

In February of 1985, I woke up in a hospital bed in Boston, MA. I couldn't see very well and I couldn't move much -- but boy could I ever hear!

I heard a terrifying discussion then that I will never, ever forget.

Around the end of my bed were a "school" of doctors in their white coats, planning when to disconnect my ventilator and feeding tube. I immediately started screaming, "I'm here!!" No one but me heard me.

They did notice my sudden agitation. They heavily sedated me. For a time, everytime I woke up I would make as much noise and move as a much as I could to show them I was "in there."

And they would, in response, heavily sedate me...

I then started spelling the same word in the air, "Don't! Don't! Don't!...."

The doctors decided that the letters I was spelling in the air were repetitive seizure activity and just happened to occur most often when they were in my room discussing killing me...I even took to writing them backwards to make it easy for them to read...

I was using Technorati to see what bloggers are saying about the Tulsa World's threats against BatesLine. Chellee of Telling Deeds posted an entry calling the World's missive "wonderfully fascist" and praising Joel Helbling's wonderful parody of it.

What caught my attention was this comment from "Apathy Bear":

Yeah, I just checked out this guy's site. His blogroll's got some interesting links. "Club for growth" is not a good sign... Also, the guy's name-dropping people like Hugh Hewitt and Michelle Malkin. Malkin, for example, is an apologist for the Japanese internment of WWII. On the surface, Bate's claims appear legit; I have my reservations, however. I'll look into it some more. Something tells me that we're not getting the whole story from Mr. Bates.

Be sure to check out his take on the Terri Schiavo deal. I'm smelling the unpleasent reek of fundy mindrot here...

For the most part, left-leaning bloggers who've commented on the World's threats have focused on the copyright issue. They recognize that the matter affects every blogger, regardless of your ideology. So this comment shouldn't be taken as typical, but it is revealing of a certain mindset. He appears to have reservations about my credibility, reservations which are based entirely on his finding that I have conservative bloggers and organizations on my blogroll. It's as if he were saying, "I'd believe him if he were a Daily Kos reader, but Club for Growth supporters are shifty and dissembling." It really is another form of the World's blindness -- the idea that anyone with a different perspective must be stupid, unbalanced, or disingenuous.

And what about my "take" on Terri Schiavo is evidence of "fundy mindrot"? If "fundy" means someone who believes in the inerrancy and authority of the Bible, I plead guilty, but it doesn't seem to have eroded my mental ability enough to keep me out of MIT or Phi Beta Kappa or to stop me from writing software for the last 25 years.

Anyway, what's "fundy" about believing that you shouldn't kill a human being by depriving her of food and water? I'd hope every one would agree with that.

Chellee's reply was quite decent:

I saw that the site has definite conservative ties. I'm not one to defend conservatives, except when it comes to constitutional issues. I believe in freedom of speech, and threatening someone in the name of copyright to shut them up doesn't sit well with me.

Judge Greer issued a temporary stay until 5:00 p.m. Wednesday. Terri's parents are seeking the opportunity to have new neurological tests performed, taking advantage of recent advances to determine her level of awareness. Greer will hear their request Wednesday at 2:45.

The effort to raise money for an ad in Sunday's St. Petersburg Times to raise public awareness is nearing its goal. You can contribute here.

There's a video I haven't seen before, showing Terri responding with laughter and other vocalizations as her dad reminisces about how, when she was a girl, she would upset her mom by letting her lazy eye turn in. If you believe that Terri is comatose or in a persistent vegetative state, you need to watch this minute long video. And if you won't watch it, ask yourself -- are you just afraid of changing your mind?

I've seen an increasing number of references to a website that has the trial court's determination of Terri's condition. But it's the trial court's findings that are at issue -- suppression of evidence, ignoring evidence. Judge Greer's findings of a persistent vegetative state don't line up with the videos and the testimony of caregivers about Terri's responsiveness and vocabulary. As I understand it, even if Judge Greer had some hidden conflict or bias that is coloring his judgment in this case, his findings of fact wouldn't be overturned, as long as he follows proper procedure. We need to pray that he will have a change of heart or that he'll be removed from the case. The videos don't show someone who has constantly been in a PVS for 15 years. Doesn't Terri deserve a judge who will give her the benefit of the doubt?

Here's a list of e-mail addresses for submitting letters to Florida newspapers. And there's a link to an example letter.

More in later entries.

PiratePundit has some original reporting on a Texas case in which a hospital wants to stop treatment of an infant with a genetic disorder and to evict him from the hospital, despite his mother's wishes that treatment continue.

In Texas, a baby has been in effect sentenced to die. He is hospitalized with a disease called thanatophoric dysplasia. A website devoted to genetic disorders says that �Infants with this condition are usually stillborn or die shortly after birth from respiratory failure; however, some children have survived into childhood with a lot of medical help.� The child in question, Sun Hudson, is four months old and has obviously survived the danger of stillbirth and has not died shortly after birth. Sun�s mother wants him to live. Doctors at the hospital where Sun was born no longer want to supply him with the �lot of medical help� he needs, and plan to shut off his oxygen supply.

PiratePundit interviewed the mother's attorney and writes that this story is not about money (the patient is covered by Medicaid), not about an untreatable condition (the hospital boasts on its website about the resources of its genetics clinic for dealing with such conditions), and it's not about pro-life politics (the attorney isn't a pro-lifer and points out that Sun Hudson has already been born).

This is about one judge who has by any objective standard allowed no due process to the child who may soon be killed or to the child�s mother. Attorney Caballero subpoenaed hospital records of Medicaid payments for the child�s treatment. The judge quashed the subpoena (meaning that he voided it) and refused to allow the mother to view those hospital records. Caballero subpoenaed the person in charge of records who could testify about the medical bills and payment. Judge McColloch quashed that subpoena. Instead, the judge ruled that the mother, in seeking to save her child�s life from a deliberate cessation of medical treatment, had �no cause of action�. The judge made that ruling based only on the petitions filed, not allowing the mother�s attorney to conduct any discovery under the normal rules of court procedure. ...

Finally before the probate court, the mother was not given the opportunity to call any witnesses or present any evidence in an evidentiary hearing. Instead, the judge ruled that the hospital may discontinue treatment of the child, based on facts not even alleged by the hospital, specifically that the judge believed the child was suffering �significant pain.� According to Caballero, when he asked how the judge had reached that finding of fact without ever having heard any testimony or conducting a hearing on the merits of the case, the judge replied, on the record, that he �probably got it from the newspaper.� Having visited the baby in the hospital, Caballero flatly denies that the child is in pain. After reflection, Caballero asked Judge McColloch to recuse himself from the case. McColloch refused.

So this poor baby is stuck with a judge that doesn't seem interested in the facts. As I understand it, the appeals court will defer to the judge as the trier of fact, as long as he made no procedural errors. This is the same problem that Terri Schiavo faces -- you may have an unjust judge who suppresses important evidence, but you're stuck with him and his rulings as long as he follows procedure.

Hat tip to the Dalek Weblog, which I found because they also have an entry about the Tulsa World's legal threats against BatesLine: "Is Tulsa the new Bunker Hill?"

The judge has denied all stays of execution, and it may be beyond the Governor's powers to grant clemency. Today at 1 p.m. Eastern time, the attorney of Terri Schiavo's estranged husband will order the removal of Terri's feeding tube and allow her to starve to death in a Clearwater, Florida, hospice.

There are still things that can be done to try to save her from that fate:

Here's what we need to do in order of priority:

1. Support (give and get readers to give) to place the [St. Petersburg Times] ad.
2. Email and telephone support HB701
3. Deluge Jeb Bush [Jeb Bush, jeb.bush@myflorida.com, 850 / 488-4441, 850 / 487-0801 (fax)]
4. Deluge President Bush
5. Blog like crazy to keep the information circulating.

The purpose of the ad, which would go in Sunday's St. Petersburg Times, is to break through the mainstream media and get the attention of Tampa area residents to hear the facts about Terri's condition.

I'll be making some phone calls to Tallahassee in the morning to the governor and legislators. I hope you will, too.

And if you're still not sure if Terri ought to be allowed to live, if you still buy the idea that Terri is comatose or in a "persistent vegetative state," please click here and see for yourself.

This item is from the satirical news blog ScrappleFace:

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has, at least temporarily, saved the life of Terri Schindler-Schiavo, the Florida woman whose former husband, Michael, had planned to disconnect her feeding tube on Tuesday.

The 11th-hour reprieve came in response to a plea from the Schindler family to have Terri classified as a silver rice rat (Oryzomys argentatus), considered an endangered species by the state of Florida and the USFWS. ...

"If we can apply to get Terri classified as a different endangered species each month, we can give her several more years of life," Mr. Terry said. "I know it sounds dehumanizing, but under our laws a rat has more of a right to life than this woman."

Go read the whole thing.

(You've got to love a humor blogger who includes Calvin's Institutes and the works of B. B. Warfield in the list of Amazon recommendations on his home page.)

Dawn Eden has an entry about Planned Parenthood's objection to a Bush administration requirement that organizations must explicitly oppose prostitution in order to qualify for global AIDS funds. Not too surprising that PP would object to any policy aimed at encouraging sexual restraint.

What I found really shocking was something mentioned in a quote from an article by Population Research Institute president Steven Mosher:

"While USAID is not perfect," Mosher writes, "many in the agency would have difficulty accepting the notion, bruited about by both [the World Health Organization] and [International Planned Parenthood Federation], that abortion ('termination of pregnancy') should be used to prevent the spread of AIDS. After all, half of all babies born to HIV-positive mothers do not have the disease. As for the half that do, their plight does not justify killing them in utero, any more than it would justify killing them after birth. The position of WHO and IPPF that the spread of AIDS can be checked by abortion is no less reprehensible as saying that abortion should be used as a means of population control�an idea that many nations have forcefully rejected as genocidal."

Read that a couple of times, and let it sink in: The World Health Organization and the International Planned Parenthood Federation advocate killing the babies of HIV-positive mothers because there is a chance that the babies might be HIV-positive. Forget about the success in Uganda and elsewhere of programs that encourage abstinence and fidelity. The abstinence approach for containing AIDS is no good for Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood's approach means plenty of victims to offer to their god, not to mention plenty of funding to "process" all the victims.

And, good grief -- the WHO is supposed to be in the business of preventing deaths caused by infectious disease -- encouraging immunization, developing safe supplies of drinking water, improving sanitation and nutrition. This approach to AIDS prevention is like preventing the spread of chicken pox by pumping Zyklon B into kindergarten classrooms.

US taxpayers have already donated over a billion dollars to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. The Gates Foundation has given $150 million.

Here's one paper from the WHO website that advocates abortion as a way to "prevent" mother to child HIV transmission: "Anti-Retroviral Regimens for the Prevention of Mother-to-Child HIV-1 Transmission: the Programmatic Implications." I'm sure there's more documentation to be found. Dumpster-divers, on your springboards!

Next week, a Florida hospice may stop giving food and water to a young woman who, because of injuries to her brain suffered 15 years ago, cannot feed herself. They will let her starve to death, because her husband wants her dead, and because a judge will tell them that it is OK to starve her, because her husband says so.

I say "young" -- she's my age, 41. Her name is Terri Schiavo. You have probably read about her in the news or heard about her on TV, but what you have read and heard is probably wrong.

Terri Schiavo is not comatose, nor is she in a "persistent vegetative state". She is awake, and she responds and interacts with those around her, although her ability to express herself and to interact is limited by her injury.

Terri Schiavo is not on life support. She is not on a ventilator, a heart machine, or dialysis. Her autonomous bodily functions all work without assistance.

Terri Schiavo does not have a terminal illness. She doesn't need anything more than you or I do to keep on living. She just needs help getting food and water in her.

Terri Schiavo is not a burden to her husband; at least she need not be. Her parents made a very generous offer that would keep him financially whole and allow him to "move on," if only he would commit her to their care. He rejected the offer. He just wants her dead.

Because of her injuries, Terri cannot speak and she cannot feed herself, but it's possible that some of that ability could be restored with proper therapy, creating new pathways in the brain to replace those that were damaged. That seems to have happened for Sarah Scantlin, a Kansas woman with similar limitations, who began speaking again last month after being unable to speak for 20 years. Sarah had a nurse working with her to encourage her to try to speak. Terri has been denied access to therapy by her husband, who simply wants her dead.

I have had nightmares -- maybe you have, too -- where I find myself in a dangerous situation and I try to shout for help, but I can't. For all my exertion, no sound comes out of my mouth.

Imagine that situation in real life. You are completely aware of your surroundings, but for some reason are unable to move, unable to speak. You are hungry and thirsty, but no one is coming to feed you, and you have no way of summoning help. You are as helpless as a baby, more helpless really, because Mama isn't coming to see what's wrong. She would if she could, but Mama isn't being allowed to come and help, and you are fully aware of this.

We don't know Terri's degree of awareness, although the videos of her reactions to her parents and other loved ones makes it apparent that she is aware. We learned recently that some brain-injured patients who appear oblivious to their surroundings are in fact hearing and understanding what's happening around them. Brain imaging revealed the same sort of activity in these patients' brains as in a healthy person's brain when the patient was listening to a loved one recount memories of shared experiences. The same sort of test could reveal Terri's degree of awareness, if only her husband would permit it.

Someday it could be you -- fully aware but unable to communicate. Wouldn't you want someone to speak out on your behalf if they tried to starve you, to cause you to suffer a prolonged and agonizing death?

You can speak out for Terri and others like her. If you're from Florida, contact your state legislators and urge them to expedite passage of HB701, the Florida Starvation and Dehydration of Persons with Disabilities Prevention Act. If you're not from Florida, you can help, too: pray, urge friends and family in Florida to act, and correct misstatements about Terri's condition in your local media.

You'll find much more information and points for action on blogsforterri.com and terrisfight.org.

Over on the right side of the home page, I've posted the blogroll for the Terri Schiavo blogburst, an effort to use the blogosphere to rally support for her plight and pressure on those who could act to stop her from being deprived of food and water, which is scheduled to happen on February 22, just five days away. Click here at Hyscience to find out how you can join the effort.

Wittenberg Gate is sponsoring a bloggers' round up, collecting the best blog entries about Terri's situation and posting them on Sunday.

Hyscience also links to an affidavit from one of Terri's nurses in 1997 about Terri's responsiveness and commission at that time. If she had received adequate physical therapy, who knows how much she may have improved.

A remarkable story from Hutchinson, Kansas:

HUTCHINSON, Kan. - For 20 years, Sarah Scantlin has been mostly oblivious to the world around her � the victim of a drunken driver who struck her down as she walked to her car. Today, after a remarkable recovery, she can talk again.

Scantlin's father knows she will never fully recover, but her newfound ability to speak and her returning memories have given him his daughter back. For years, she could only blink her eyes � one blink for "no," two blinks for "yes" � to respond to questions that no one knew for sure she understood.

"I am astonished how primal communication is. It is a key element of humanity," Jim Scantlin said, blinking back tears.

Sarah Scantlin was an 18-year-old college freshman on Sept. 22, 1984, when she was hit by a drunk driver as she walked to her car after celebrating with friends at a teen club. That week, she had been hired at an upscale clothing store and won a spot on the drill team at Hutchinson Community College.

After two decades of silence, she began talking last month. Doctors are not sure why. On Saturday, Scantlin's parents hosted an open house at her nursing home to introduce her to friends, family members and reporters.

This is a remarkable story, coming at a time that a judge in Florida is ready to allow Terri Schiavo to die of starvation and dehydration, simply for being in the same condition that Sarah Scantlin was in a month ago.

Scantlin still suffers constantly from the effects of the accident. She habitually crosses her arms across her chest, her fists clenched under her chin. Her legs constantly spasm and thrash. Her right foot is so twisted it is almost reversed. Her neck muscles are so constricted she cannot swallow to eat.

Note that last problem. The story doesn't say, perhaps doesn't say on purpose, but if she cannot swallow to eat, she must be getting tube feedings, same as Terri Schiavo. No one seems to consider that "artificial life support" in this case. Maybe that's because, in this case, her caregivers actually love her and want the best for her. The story mentions that Sarah Scantlin began to speak again because someone was trying to encourage her to speak:

The breakthrough came when the nursing home's activity director, Pat Rincon, was working with Scantlin and a small group of other patients, trying to get them to speak.

Rincon had her back to Scantlin while she worked with another resident. She had just gotten that resident to reply "OK," when she suddenly heard Sarah behind her also repeat the words: "OK. OK."

Quite a contrast from Terri Schiavo's situation -- her husband has kept her away from every opportunity for rehabilitation.

Let's go back to the lead sentence of the article for a moment: "For 20 years, Sarah Scantlin has been mostly oblivious to the world around her." How in the world do they know that? Just because she was unable to speak -- "locked in" -- evidently without the motor skills to speak or communicate beyond eye blinks doesn't mean she was unable to take in everything around her. Let me point you to a story in last Tuesday's New York Times:

Thousands of brain-damaged people who are treated as if they are almost completely unaware may in fact hear and register what is going on around them but be unable to respond, a new brain-imaging study suggests. ...

"This study gave me goose bumps, because it shows this possibility of this profound isolation, that these people are there, that they've been there all along, even though we've been treating them as if they're not," said Dr. Joseph Fins, chief of the medical ethics division of New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center. Dr. Fins was not involved in the study but collaborates with its authors on other projects.

Fascinating that last week's study and this news should emerge as Terri Schiavo's life hangs in the balance. It's as if Someone is trying to send a message.

Hat tip: Catholic Ragemonkey.

Here's what other blogs are saying about this story, according to Technorati.

Be in prayer, too, for a pro-marriage rally today at City Hall Park in New York City, a protest of a New York judge's decision that same-sex marriage is required by the state's constitution. Radio talk show host Kevin McCullough is one of the instigators of the rally. After the rally, Kevin will be talking about it on his show, which you can listen to live on the web, beginning at noon Central Time, and in continual repeats for the next 24 hours.

Some people object to applying the label "pro-abortion" to anyone. "Pro-choice" is preferred, "pro-abortion-rights" is acceptable, but even the head of the local Planned Parenthood chapter back in Tulsa told me with a straight face that she considers herself "pro-life." All she and her allies want is to ensure that abortion is, in the words of Slick Willie, "safe, legal, and rare."

If no one is really pro-abortion, then why do abortion clinics get a special exemption from rules that apply in every other surgical environment? Dawn Eden calls attention to a letter from Virginia State Senator Ken Cuccinelli (a Republican) about the failure of his abortion safety bill, which was "passed by indefinitely" in the Senate Health and Education Committee by a 9-6 vote. Cuccinelli begins his letter with the story that moved him to propose the bill:

Please imagine a young woman who goes into a surgeon's office to have a simple procedure performed. The surgeon performs the procedure, but punctures a large blood vessel during the surgery, causing the young woman to lose a significant amount of blood. Perhaps the surgeon is not aware of the bleeding or does not make an attempt to mend the blood vessel, nor does he call 911 for emergency help. He leaves her in the chair, tells a nurse to look after her, leaves the office and goes home for the afternoon. A while later, when the nurse on duty cannot revive the young woman, she calls 911. When the paramedics arrive, they cannot get a gurney to her because the halls and doors are too narrow. When they finally reach her, it is too late to save her. The final indignity occurs when they have to literally fold her body around corners and doorways to get her out of the building.

I am sure you are thinking that the scenario I describe simply does not happen in our world of modern medicine. And you would be right about nearly any medical facility licensed to do business in the Commonwealth. I say "nearly any" because the unfortunate truth is that something like this occurred two years ago in a Northern Virginia abortion clinic that resulted in the death of a young woman. While the details are still unknown, when I heard about this tragedy I was moved to do something to ensure that it would not happen again.

In following up on this tragedy, I learned some startling facts. I did not know that abortion clinics are not regulated, nor are they required to be inspected by the Virginia Department of Health. If there is a problem at an abortion clinic, it is only uncovered if someone lodges a complaint. I also learned that the same abortion clinic mentioned earlier had three other emergency ambulance visits in the six months prior to the death of one of their patients. It turns out that just about all of the Northern Virginia abortion clinics were making similar 911 calls to save their own patients.

Be sure to read the whole letter.

You'll notice the pattern: Destroying innocent life takes precedence over medical safety, letting a patient make an informed choice about surgery, and letting parents to know about and consent to surgery on their children. Our nation's leaders have also given abortion a special exemption when it comes to the right to assemble peacably and protest, and I don't know any political movement other than the pro-life movement that has been targeted for harassment using the RICO statutes. Under Cuccinelli's bill, abortion clinics would have been subject to about 40 regulations -- the same sort of regulations that outpatient surgery clinics must comply with. Who could believe it's really too burdensome to prohibit dermatologists from performing abortions?

As I read of the bill's death by committee, my first thought was that surely the Democrats are still in charge of the Virginia Legislature, and that's why such reasonable legislation can't make it out of committee. This sort of result is a regular event in the Oklahoma Senate, where Democrat Senate Health Committee chairman Bernest Cain blocks pro-life legislation, despite the strong pro-life convictions even among members of his own party. (Sen. Cain, you'll recall, is an embittered ex-Christian who compared Christians to Nazis and the Taliban a couple of years ago. That his Democratic colleagues allow him to retain his responsible position puts the lie to their claim that at the state level at least, Democrats are still in step with Oklahoma values.)

But Virginia's problem seems to be an infestation of RINOs. Republicans have a majority in the Virginia Senate, and of the nine votes to kill the bill, two Republicans, Committee Chairman H. Russell Potts and Frederick M. Quayle voted along with all seven Democrats. Potts is talking of leaving the Republican Party to run as an independent for Governor, and he broke with his Republican colleagues to support a record $1.5 billion tax increase. (Interesting how self-professed social-liberal-but-fiscal-conservatives usually turn out to be fiscal liberals.) Quayle made the news last March when he proposed an amendment to a bill banning nudist camps for teens; Quayle's unsuccessful amendment would have allowed camp owners to be designated in loco parentis, so that teens would be able to attend nudist camps without their parents or guardians present.

This underscores the importance of Republican party primaries. It isn't good enough to hold a majority if key members of your caucus are philosophically out of step with the party's central values and work to undermine good legislation. Conservative activists need to identify good Republican primary challengers to these RINOs and help them get an early and strong start.

It's often argued that we must tolerate RINOs because there are seats too liberal for real conservative Republicans to win. Sen. Cuccinelli is an example of how wrong that thinking is -- a pro-life stalwart and a key advocate of TABOR (Taxpayer Bill of Rights) legislation, he won in Fairfax County, a liberal, affluent area in the suburbs of DC.

There ought to be consequences for these two Republican state senators who stood in the way of a floor debate and vote on such reasonable legislation. A failure to act will undermine the confidence of grass-roots conservatives in the party and will come back to bite the GOP as candidates seek volunteers and contributors among conservative activists.

Kevin McCullough reports on New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's announcement that he supports gay marriage, made at a black tie event hosted by a national gay and lesbian organization. (Click the link and scroll to the bottom of the page, past the Super Bowl coverage.)

In his comments, Kevin gets to what I think is the heart of the issue, a point that is often missed even by advocates of the traditional definition of marriage:

The advocates of "gay marriage" or redefining marriage to include same sex unions wish to have society, and even those of different religious persuasion be forced to recognize their sexual unions and more than that to give approval of such unions in relationship to employment, housing, etc.

Make no misunderstanding about this...this issue has nothing to do with supposed "equal rights". Gay couples can already, in every state, create any legal and binding contract that spells out everything from inheritance, to hospital visitation, to tax incentives. No this is not about equal rights... this is about mandated sanctity, and the desire to ultimately punish anyone who believes this behavior to be morally wrong.

Exactly. The movement is all about forcing everyone, whatever their moral or religious convictions, to treat such a relationship as if it were a real marriage.

On the same topic, Scott Sala, blogger and Republican activist in New York City, says he's had enough of having a RINO as mayor:

This is huge. Not just nationally, but locally. If ever - EVER - there was a time for Republicans to take back their party in this city, this is it.

I signed up last week to volunteer for Bloomberg's campaign, out of party support when a signup sheet went around at a Young Republican event. Tonight, I emailed the guy to scratch my name off permanently.

This announcement will cause Bloomberg to lose his final allies on the Right in NYC. His only friend now is his money. The $250K he sent to the Conservative Party so they won't run a candidate? Return it!

All we Republicans need now is a Club For Growth ready to wage a "Pat Toomey" against Manhattan's "Arlen Specter." Who is this Toomey? That's what's irking me. Let's pull Badillo back in. Retract your endorsement, Herman, please.

Scott for Mayor!

NOTE: Kevin McCullough has reupped as an advertiser on BatesLine. Kevin told me yesterday that of the many blogs he's advertised on, from well-known to obscure, BatesLine ranked second in terms of click-thrus for the cost. That means BatesLine is great value for your advertising dollar. Thanks, Kevin, for the vote of confidence! And if you'd like to advertise on BatesLine, start the process by clicking here.

Be sure to show your appreciation for Kevin's support of BatesLine by clicking his ad. From the ad you can click through to read his blog and also to listen online to his daily radio talk show on WWDJ and WMCA New York. You can hear the show live from noon to 3 Central Time or as it repeats continually between live shows.

ReligionJournal.com reports that a small-town Illinois pastor was questioned by FBI agents about a sermon he delivered on Memorial Day last year, in which he compared the victims of abortion to the casualties of war:

"I shared the number of people who have died in wars versus the number who had died through 'legal' abortion since 1973," Steele said. "I stated that we are in a different type of war that is being fought under the 'presupposition of freedom.'"

Steele said that he went on to name an abortion clinic in Granite City, Ill., a city just outside St. Louis, and pointed out that they perform as many as 45 abortions per week.

Somebody in the church that day apparently misunderstood Steele's "different type of war" comment to mean that he was actually calling his congregation to a physical war against abortion clinics, so he or she placed an anonymous phone call to the FBI.

A comment, in a different sermon, about his willingness to go to jail for the truth added fuel to the fire:

The informant allegedly told the FBI that in addition to Steele calling for a war against abortion clinics, he also said he was willing to go to jail over such a cause.

Steele said that he had spoken about his willingness to go to jail, but that he made those remarks in a different sermon that dealt with homosexuality from the same sermon series.

"I had mentioned a pastor in Canada who had been arrested for speaking about homosexuality in his church," Steele said. The pastor said he went on to tell his congregation that "if speaking the truth means that we go to jail, then by golly, that's where I'm going to be and I'm going to save you a seat next to me."

In the end, no formal investigation was done. The FBI agents were gracious, the pastor was gracious, and the matter was dropped. No harm, although anticipating the FBI's visit must have been nervewracking for the pastor.

It's possible the informant was confused or possessed of an overactive imagination. It's also possible that this was intended to be a means of harrassment, creating a chilling effect to keep this pastor and others from preaching on social issues. It will be worth watching to see if there are more investigations of pastors, and how diligent the FBI is at filtering out complaints intended to intimidate faithful preachers.

(Hat tip: TownHall.com)

A few days ago I wrote a bit about Headline News's coverage of Terri Schindler-Schiavo and the U. S. Supreme Court refusal to hear an appeal in her case, apparently clearing the way for her husband Michael Schiavo to remove her feeding tube and allow her to starve to death.

Dawn Eden published a letter purporting to be from Michael Schiavo (actually it was a satirical piece written by her mom), which generated a lot of comment, including a protest by someone going by the handle "Tulsa Human", complaining that the piece is one-sided and unfair and ignores the "key fact" that "the courts have ruled consistently that Terri Schiavo is in a Persistent Vegetative State, and has been for over 14 years."

I replied in a comment:

I think I speak on behalf of many humane Tulsa humans in thinking that Rachel Rose's satire fits Michael Schiavo's public actions to a "T".

Mr. Schiavo's behavior bears an uncanny resemblance to the pro-abortion types who say a child would be better off dead than adopted out to a loving family. Terri has her parents and a whole community ready to care for her, if her husband would only let them. I understand that he has withheld money for rehabilitation, rehab that might have allowed her to regain the ability to swallow and restore her ability to function in other regards, and might yet if it were permitted to go forward. Someone explain to me why he doesn't step aside and hand her over to the care of those who love her.

It turns out he was given exactly that opportunity, under very generous conditions. Today, Terri's parents, the Schindlers, released the text of an offer (in PDF format) that they made to Michael Schiavo's lawyers back on October 26, 2004. In the letter, Terri's parents and sister ask Michael Schiavo to let them take her and care for her. In return, they would not seek any money from him, they would allow him to keep all the assets of the marriage, including the malpractice awards. If he chose to divorce Terri, he would still inherit, upon her death, any money he is now entitled to as her husband. Terri's parents would forego any legal action against Michael. Terri's parents would be open to any other term Michael might wish to include, short of paying for his "previous legal fees and costs." In short, he could wash his hands of the whole matter, move on with his life, and he would not lose any money in the bargain. For all the grief he has caused Terri's parents, this was an extremely generous offer for them to make, and clearly it was made with no other motive than to do all they can to save Terri's life and to seek to improve her condition.

Michael Schiavo's attorneys verbally refused the offer. Terri's parents hope that he will reconsider.

The website terrisfight.org has a timeline of Terri's ordeal and addresses some of the myths in the case, including:

• that she is in a persistent vegetative state -- she displays voluntary action and interacts with her environment
• that she is on artificial life support -- as a letter to the Miami Herald (registration required) says, "There is nothing artificial about getting fed."
• that years of therapy haven't helped -- her husband has denied her therapy since 1991.

Regarding Tulsa Human's claim about Terri being in a persistent vegetative state (PVS): This article from Crisis magazine describes one neurologist's observations from 12 hours spent testing Terri -- observations that are inconsistent with a PVS diagnosis.

The latest edition of Charles G. Hill's long-running series, "The Vent," is entitled, "When it's time for Roe to go."

He provides some useful perspective:

But consider this: in the first twenty-two months of the Iraq war, we suffered about 1400 troop deaths, all of whom were mourned. In twenty-two hours, about three thousand "fetuses" are put to death, and this is considered business as usual.

Now that's what's disturbing. Even some Democrats find it horrendous. The old mantra of "safe, legal and rare" fails on at least two counts: abortion is hardly rare, and if you happen to be the one aborted, it's not even slightly safe.

UPDATE: Don Danz sends along this comment:

There must be something with liberals not having a bloody clue. Your entry (Which war is bloodier?) made me think of an interview Jimmy Carter did with Chris Matthews on MSNBC's Hardball, where President Carter said that the Revolutionary War was "the most bloody war we've fought." The Revolutionary War is, of course, known for being the exact opposite--the least bloody war we've fought. The article is here. And, I blogged about it here.

I was getting a tire replaced today, and there was a Whirled from Friday in the waiting area, which was fine -- since I don't read the Whirled I hadn't seen it yet.

At the bottom of the front page of the Satellite section is a sharply-written column protesting the treatment of men on cable channels like Lifetime that target a female audience. The writer is Tulsa School of Arts and Sciences sophomore Hannah Hartney. (TSAS is a charter school.)

Fifteen-year-old Hannah has the genre nailed:

The channels have taglines such as �Television for Women,� which suggests an empowering, positive message for the ladies. Yet whenever I flip past that channel, I see women being �empowered� by being clocked over the head with a telephone, dragged around by her hair and being forced to listen �Television for Masochists� might be a more apt designation. Or perhaps, �Television for Femi-Nazis Who Fly into a Vicious Rage at the Slightest Whiff of Testosterone,� since Public Enemy No. 1 in the majority of these movies is the male half of the population.

According to this Menstrual Militia, if a woman is in any sort of relationship whatsoever with a red-blooded straight male, he will either:

A. Abuse her / her children
B. Kidnap her / her children
C. Squeeze the toothpaste from the top end of the tube instead of the bottom
D. Try to get her money . . .

. . . ergo proving that men are ruthless devils and should be shot on sight � but not until the end of the movie, of course, when he�s
holding your children hostage and the bad �80s rock soundtrack is at its peak.

(If I were adhering to DNF*, I'd have a pithy closing observation, but I don't and so I can't.)

*Dustbury Normal Form.

I was in McDonald's multitasking lunch -- having a salad, reading Witness, and watching the big screen showing CNN Headline News out of the corner of my eye.

They ran a story about the Supreme Court's decision to deny certiorari in the case Jeb Bush v. Michael Schiavo. The Supreme Court's decision not to hear the case means Michael Schiavo will be able legally to murder his wife Terri by having her feeding tube removed and thus starving her to death. The Headline News story showed home video of Terri, with eyes open, smiling, reacting, at the same time the newsreader referred to her as "comatose."

A McDonald's employee, a young woman who was sweeping the floor nearby, saw and heard what I described, looked up at the TV, and said to no one in particular, "That's messed up."

Indeed.

A website devoted to saving Terri's life -- terrisfight.org -- is down at the moment, swamped with traffic. You can read a statement from the Terri Schindler Schiavo foundation, responding to the Supreme Court decision here. And Ace has a few comments on the subject.

Dawn Eden has an article about Planned Parenthood's Teenwire website in Crux Magazine, a new online magazine on culture from a Christian perspective, aimed at young adults.

The article, "Everybody's Doing It" is a good overview of what Dawn has uncovered and reported on her blog about her research into what Planned Parenthood is telling teens (and younger) about sex. This quote from the middle of the article seems to some it all up:

At this point, one could be forgiven for thinking that Planned Parenthoodʼs goal is not to prevent teen pregnancy, but rather to sexualize children.

Dawn has a lot for you to read on her blog, including the playlist from her latest DJ gig and an account of a solo carriage ride through the streets of New York, still dressed up for Christmas.

(The title of the former entry, "The Night Ray Stevens Cleared the Dance Floor," reminds me of my one and only stint as a DJ, at a fraternity party the first week of my freshman year. I and another freshman -- who actually understood what a DJ was supposed to do -- filled in for a senior who had been injured in a bike accident. As the party moved into the wee hours, I was determined to chase the last few couples off the dance floor so I could go to bed. I was pretty sure that "I Am the Walrus," with lyrics like "Yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog's eye," would kill whatever romance lingered in the air. But two or three couples were still out there, slow dancing, swaying back and forth, as if I were playing, "I Only Have Eyes for You.")

Came across a couple of entries that more or less end up making the same point.

In NRO's The Corner, Kathryn Lopez posts an e-mail from a reader about a recently-published acting manual (The Power of the Actor: The Chubbuck Technique) which acknowledges the natural protective instinct toward a child in the womb and the emotional impact of abortion on a woman. One excerpt from the book:

She needed an inner object that would duplicate the severe trauma of a mother violently losing her baby. We'd worked together for many years and I knew that she'd had an abortion. This experience caused her such acute distress that it produced out-of-control shaking and weeping whenever she talked about it. I suggested she use the abortion as the inner object for the scene. She did and out poured all of her rage, sadness, terror and horrific guilt that most women feel when they have had to abort their unborn child.

And this: Dawn Eden has been reading Witness by Whittaker Chambers and came across a very moving passage about his wife becoming pregnant and their decision not to abort the child, despite peer pressure within the Communist Party to do so. Their decision was a triumph of God-ordained human sentiment over the cold, inhuman dictates of an inhuman ideology: "Reason, the agony of my family, the Communist Party and its theories, the wars and revolutions of the 20th century, crumbled at the touch of the child." Dawn has an extended excerpt, which you can read here.

Ukraine-blogger Discoshaman of Le Sabot Post-Moderne will still be writing about the political situation as the repeat presidential runoff approaches, but he is returning to his usual assortment of topics, including theology from a Reformed (Calvinist) point of view and American politics. In this recent entry, he comments on Jerry Falwell's plan to reestablish the Moral Majority:

Evangelicals have a chance to do both the country and themselves a favor -- let this thing die a mercifully fast death.

I desire to see true spiritual revival in our nation, with an accompanying improvement in the moral atmosphere, the sort of transformation that happened 100 years ago in Wales.

But Jerry Falwell's approach didn't work before and won't work now. (See the book Blinded by Might, by two leaders of Falwell's Moral Majority in the '70s and '80s.) In fact, he's a distraction. Voices from the past like Falwell and Pat Robertson make for convenient, walking, talking strawmen for the left-leaning mainstream media to present as the authentic voice of modern Evangelical thinking and then to tear down.

Falwell should gracefully retire from the public arena and leave the field open for abler voices. Will he? Not if he is in love with seeing his face on television. Not if he's drooling over the thought of restarting the vast flow of money that can be generated through passionate direct mail appeals -- "send us $20 and we'll transform American society."

How can Evangelicals convince the mainstream media that Jerry Falwell is not our pope? Not giving him any money would be a start.

Sad news that Boston radio talk show host David Brudnoy has died, age 64. For the last 18 years, Brudnoy was an evening talk show host on WBZ, and was on other Boston TV and radio stations for 15 years before that.

I don't remember listening to Brudnoy in college. I think I first came across him during business trips and visits to friends back east in the first few years after graduation. WBZ, a 50,000 watt clear-channel station, can be heard throughout the northeastern US at night. Whether I was in Boston, Providence, or Philadelphia, I'd tune in to catch his show.

What I tuned in to hear was an intelligent man with a pleasant voice interviewing authors about books on politics, history, and culture -- books he had actually read before the program -- and engaging in thoughtful discussion with callers. Brudnoy's politics were libertarian, a welcome contrast to the dominant left-liberal trend in Boston politics. Even if the show's topic was something I had not known or cared about before the program, I always came away happy that I took the time to listen, feeling that I knew something that I hadn't known an hour earlier.

Brudnoy was a homosexual, which he revealed after nearly dying 10 years ago from an AIDS-related infection, but he did not make his sexual preference the focus of his identity or his radio program.

To give you a flavor of his show, here's a link to a transcript of a segment about Scientology. And here's his review of Michael Moore's film "Bowling for Columbine." Talkers Magazine ranked him as one of the 25 all-time greatest radio talk show hosts -- their profile of Brudnoy is here.

Activist talk radio is important, especially in a town like Tulsa, where the media has been dominated by a single viewpoint for too long. There's a need to rally support for important causes, and to cultivate a sense of outrage to replace the sense of resignation in the face of rampant abuse of power -- to give people the confidence that they can change things. That's something Michael DelGiorno does so well on KFAQ every morning, and I'm thankful that he's there to do it.

David Brudnoy wasn't an activist talk show host, although he was an able and articulate advocate for his point of view. He dealt with plenty of controversial issues, but never in a polemical way.

Tulsa could use a show like Brudnoy's, too, as a complement to the activist approach. I've always thought that if I ever had the chance to host my own radio talk show, David Brudnoy's approach to talk radio would be a model from which I would draw.

UPDATE 12/13/2004: Two obits on conservative websites say what I was attempting to say much more clearly and colorfully. National Review Online has published an obituary by Thomas Hibbs. Hibbs writes:

Brudnoy was simply the best radio host I've ever heard in any market or on any part of the AM or FM dial. In most markets, FM talk is National Public Radio, where guests have an opportunity to develop their positions at a leisurely pace and where there tends to be little in the way of heated exchange and little listener interaction. AM talk is loud, fast-paced, with a lot of give and take between host, guest, and callers. It's a caricature to describe NPR shows as inducing somnolence and AM radio as generating headaches of the sort caused by having too many teenage siblings in a car at one time. But there is a kernel of truth in each description. Brudnoy combined the virtues of both styles of radio talk while avoiding their vices.

In most major markets, talk radio is increasingly dominated by the national shows, such as NPR, Rush, Hannity, and Ingraham. Brudnoy could and did devote a great deal of attention to national politics, but he spent as much time on local issues and seemed especially to relish the personalities and political and cultural intricacies of Boston. ...

He was a model of the way to hold one's own position, to argue vigorously on its behalf, and yet to engage other points of view with tact and seriousness. And listeners found themselves caught up in the argument, agreeing or disagreeing with Brudnoy on any number of topics. A libertarian who articulated his views with rigorous clarity, Brudnoy did not feel the need to score ideological points at every step in the conversation. Besides, one never had to agree with him to profit from listening.

The American Spectator has a tribute by W. James Antle III. An excerpt:

There were plenty of hosts who could effectively mock the Clinton administration, rail against Hillary's health care power grab, and attack the day's legislative outrages (remember midnight basketball?). What set Brudnoy apart, aside from eloquence and polemical skills that put most of his peers to shame, was his ability to go beyond such well-worn subjects. His show was no less interesting when he was interviewing antique collectors, obscure academics, and authors of books on subjects that would have otherwise made my eyes glaze over.

Many libertarian pundits praise liberty and excoriate the state, but talk about nothing except politics and government. Brudnoy celebrated life -- films, theatre, travel, wine, classical music, literature -- and demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of virtually all subjects, with only one notable exception -- he was charmingly ignorant of professional sports and relentlessly tweaked Boston for its obsession with athletics.

Which is not to overlook how scathing he could be in his political analysis. Brudnoy's position on welfare payments to unwed mothers was, shall we say, Charles Murray-esque. He skewered multiculturalism by insisting, "One culture, one country." He derisively referred to the Clintons as "Bubba and Evita" and was equally critical of the "Almost Lifelike Al Gore."

NRO also has David Brudnoy's 1995 article for the magazine about living with AIDS and his brush with death the previous year.

James Lileks had a great "Bleat" on Wednesday, some thoughts about where Clarence Darrow, celebrated defender of Scopes and Leopold and Loeb, and his rejection of moral responsibility have led our society. I liked this paragraph, on the important distinction between public and private conduct (asterisk added):

I am the last person to roam the streets in my Cotton Mather costume, and I've lost my enthusiasm for the adolescent glee that comes from pointing out other people's hypocrisies. All I have are my pathetic attempts to draw a distinction between private and public � that is, Howard Stern saying those oh-so-naughty! words on the public airwaves vs. Stern saying what he wants on subscription radio, or Hustler Honey sex-shows in the Superbowl half-time vs. private rentals from the satellite hot-mama feeds. I suppose it comes down to this: you should have to seek these things out instead of having them come to you. Otherwise the coarsening of the public arena continues unabated, and the good & decent fathers who fought hard for Howard Stern�s right to say sh*t � literally � find themselves without an argument when the billboard across from their kid�s elementary school uses the same words. Today�s crusading moderate is tomorrow�s prude.

During a recent visit to the northeast, it was startling again to see all manner of "adult" magazines on open display at newsstands on the street corner, with no attempt even to conceal the covers. I bragged to a friend who lives up there about QuikTrip, Tulsa's homegrown convenience store chain, which many years ago completely banned pornography from its stores. It's nice to know I can bring my children into any QuikTrip and not worry about what they might see. (I'm also proud of QuikTrip for making the security of employees and customers a priority in the design of their stores and their operating procedures, for their top-tier gasoline, for clean restrooms, for cheap sodas, for carrying the Tulsa Beacon, and for those tasty Hotzi breakfast sandwiches. But I digress. Ain't that right, Lamar?)

Most of us out here in red-state America aren't asking for everyone to be moral. We just ask for decency in the public sphere -- decency, from the Latin word which means "fitting" -- which is really about common courtesy and respecting each others sensibilities. When we are told that we must allow our bourgeois sensibilities to be confronted by tawdriness and turpitude, preferably funded by our own bourgeois tax dollars -- well, we don't take kindly to that, and we go vote for people and parties that do understand the meaning of decency.

P.S. www.lileks.com is one of my favorite sites on the web. Be sure to visit the Institute of Official Cheer, his collections of motel postcards, restaurant and diner postcards, and a tribute to his hometown of Fargo, North Dakota, in 1950. And buy his books: Interior Desecrations and Gallery of Regrettable Food I asked for and got both of them for my birthday!

About a month ago, I wrote, "if you are concerned about our fallen culture's attacks on the dignity and sanctity of human life, of marriage, and of sex, you need to bookmark the Dawn Patrol and visit once a day." Apparently, a lot of people have been taking that advice -- more likely from National Review's The Corner than from me -- and Dawn Eden has risen in the blog ecosystem from "Marauding Marsupial" to "Large Mammal" over the last month. That puts the Dawn Patrol in the top 600 blogs in the world, and the actual rank might be even better than that, since her stats are divided between two different URLs that point to the blog.

Dawn continues to dig into Planned Parenthood's activities -- most recently linking to a study showing that PP and other abortion providers aren't reporting cases of statutory rape (child sex abuse) to the authorities, and writing about a New Zealand woman who almost bled to death using a do-it-yourself abortion pill method recommended by Planned Parenthood.

I particularly want to call your attention to a couple of recent entries. Having written about some of the promotional items that Planned Parenthood uses to promote its message to teens, she turns her attention to some of the funnier items put out by a pro-abstinence supply catalog. She begins:

On these cold and lonely December nights, when I think about how nice it would be to be able to sit by the fire with my husband�that is, to have a husband...and a fireplace, though the husband alone would do in a pinch...

At this point, I'm expecting something like the "Top 10 Reasons a Fire in the Fireplace is Better than a Man." (Reason 5 -- A fire doesn't go out just as you're getting warmed up.) Instead she introduces us to Abstinence Gum, Abstinence Balloons, Abstinence Mints, and this:

But if you really want to celebrate your chastity in a fun and stimulating way that will not remind you at all of anything having to do with sex, there's the Abstinence Sucker:

"Want a unique giveaway item for your next class or abstinence presentation? These suckers, in cherry flavor, are a fun way to get the message to teens: Don't Be a Sucker! Save Sex For Marriage. Bulk pricing available."

Cherry flavor. Lovely.

Then there's this -- really the latest in a series she started last spring of spiritual lessons drawn from the ordinary stuff of life -- "The Truth in Small Things" (see here, here, and here), although she doesn't label it as such . It's so nicely put together that I'm afraid I'll spoil it by excerpting it. I'll just tell you that she draws some profound relationship lessons from being recently diagnosed with reactive hypoglycemia. Just go read it.

Dawn Eden is on a roll, which is not unusual. She posts something new almost every night, most often of late posting tales of what Planned Parenthood and the pro-abortion lobby are doing with the tax dollars we give them, ostensibly to provide various community services. Right now the Dawn Patrol features:

• a link to Albert Mohler's review of Beyond Choice, a book by the grandson of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. (Apparently grandson is every bit the fan of eugenics that grandma was.)
• her comments on a New York Times Magazine story glamourizing gay parenthood.
• a news story about a Planned Parenthood attorney speaking of an aborted fetus as part of a teenage girl's "medical records".

The item to which I'd most like to direct you is a lengthy post about stem cell research. She relates a conversation with a research scientist, who explains his objections with the way the stem cell debate is portrayed in the mainstream media, and she goes on to deal with the ethical realities of destroying embryos for research. The whole thing is topped off with selected comments from her readers which add more perspective to the picture. Along with the many links to other articles, it's a great resource for understanding the issue and helping you to communicate that understanding to others.

Dawn does a great job of digging out these stories and putting them into perspective. I'm too tired to explain this well, except to say that if you are concerned about our fallen culture's attacks on the dignity and sanctity of human life, of marriage, and of sex, you need to bookmark the Dawn Patrol and visit once a day, mostly so I don't have to turn BatesLine into a fan blog with a daily entry telling you to go read her site. Because you just should and you shouldn't need reminding.

(And just so you don't think there's only one side to the multifaceted Dawn Eden, click here if you've got RealPlayer, and seek about 11 minutes into the program, to hear a catchy tune she recorded a couple of years ago, and which I can't get out of my head since I first heard it a few days ago. Yes, folks, she's hip, and she's voting for President Bush. And you can learn about more of her many facets on the "Gaits of Eden" home page.)

Scott Ott of the satirical website ScrappleFace has posted the definitive obituary for the father of deconstructionism, which begins:

(2004-10-10) -- French President Jacques Chirac announced today that Jacques Derrida, the father of the intellectual movement called deconstructionism, died yesterday of pancreatic cancer, "if indeed 'death' can be said to mean anything beyond the biases of culture, language, religion and philosophy." ...

This is nice:

"Monsieur Derrida bequeathed a magnificent legacy to the global intellectual community," said Mr. Chirac. "He has provided us all with the intellectual infrastructure to prevent us from seeking after truth."

Go read the whole thing.

Dawn Eden has been reporting on what Planned Parenthood is really up to, behind its cloak of respectability. Her latest find -- a Planned Parenthood "activism camp" in Tampa training teens how to do abortion advocacy. The source is a story in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

The Delray Beach, Florida, teens who are the subject of the story attended the are involved with a youth program called "Teen Education for Every Nationality". They attended the Tampa camp and are using the skills they acquired to do door-to-door canvassing back home:

The campers are using the skills they learned to register voters, educate people on women's health issues and discuss abortion in the run-up to the November election. They plan to continue their activities after the election as well.

When they canvass neighborhoods, the teens talk about sensitive issues, but they don't endorse candidates, said Nady Mesamour, 15, and a member of the group.

T.E.E.N. is a program of Planned Parenthood of South Palm Beach and Broward Counties. According to this report (see page CS-35), in 2003 the program received $551,473 in grant money from Broward County's Children's Services Administration. The purpose of the grant is listed as "Behavioral Health - Prevention", i.e. keeping kids out of trouble by involving them in constructive activities. One of the quality measurements established by Broward County is that "10% of Youth clients served will be involved in appropriate and supervised extra-curricular activities such as community service." The report indicates that 90% of youth clients met this requirement. Evidently, abortion indoctrination and door-to-door abortion advocacy is one of the ways participants in the program met the requirement.

What do you want to bet that even though they aren't endorsing candidates, they are "educating" voters about which candidates support Planned Parenthood's positions?

Planned Parenthood is usually more subtle in how they redirect your tax dollars to promote abortion. Planned Parenthood chapters often apply for government grants for innocuous programs, which helps pay operating overhead for the organization, and also enables them to shift donated funds toward controversial activities like abortion referrals and pro-abortion lobbying activities. Several years ago here in Tulsa, the local Planned Parenthood chapter tried to get Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) money to fund improvements to a pediatric clinic. (CDBG money comes from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and is distributed by local government to non-profit agencies.) While such a clinic is a worthwhile cause, because money is fungible, government money for the clinic would free up private contributions for lobbying at the State Capitol. Happily, Tulsa's City Council had enough pro-life members that Planned Parenthood did not get a share of the federal grant money, and in recent years they haven't applied. (There's another reason why you should care about local government, even if your focus is on social issues.)

Funny, poignant -- For the Day of Atonement, Esther Kustanowitz presents a somewhat tongue-in-cheek litany of repentance for the single and dating. The first line of each three-sentence stanza is to be read by the men, the second by the women, and the third by both together. Some sample stanzas:

We have rejected you for being too fat or too plain. We have rejected you for being too short or too bald. We have judged you according to external appearances and drawn assumptions from the superficial.

We have told you that you were �like a sister� to us. We have told you that you were �a really great guy.� We have lacked the fortitude to transition friendship into romance, and consigned you to the torment of �The Friend Zone.�

We have eschewed dating in favor of hot wings and professional sports. We have eschewed dating in favor of Cosmos and �Sex and the City.� We have escaped into comfort zones of food, alcohol and television to avoid potential heartbreak.

We have bantered too freely, creating a perceived depth to dialogue that was meant only at face value. We have flirted without follow-up, using subtle encouragement to convey enigmatic interest. We have left you in confusion, pondering the true intentions of our fearful hearts.

We have proposed second dates we had no intention of confirming. We have accepted second dates we had no intention of attending. We have chosen a slow fadeout over honesty, denying you the dignity of a truthful closure.

I remember some of that (especially "the torment of the Friend Zone"). Nice to have all that far back in the rear-view mirror.

You can find Esther's blog, My Urban Kvetch, here.

Dennis Schenkel draws an interesting parallel to politicians who support abortion rights while proclaiming themselves "personally opposed" to abortion:

I think some politicians have no idea what kind of nonsense they are speaking when they suggest that they are personally opposed to something that is gravely evil, but that they believe it to be a matter of personal conscience. They even believe their Church backs them up on this, and not without cause, since sometimes the same nonsense can be heard spewing from the lips of a priest.

One way to determine whether a difficult moral position is consistent and permissible is to compare it to another, similar moral problem, one in which there is no question about what is right or wrong, and see what we can learn from the comparison.

Consider the case of the hypothetical, fictional German citizen in the 1930's and 1940's...let's call him Johannes Kerrymeister, to make up a name completely at random. Being a faithful Catholic, Herr Kerrymeister is personally opposed to the wholesale slaughter of innocent Jews and others whom society deems to be non-persons.

I'll let you read the rest of it here.

I think this amazing ability to straddle the fence on profound moral issues is rooted in the post-modern rejection of objective truth in the moral realm -- "it may be true for you, but not for me". John Kerry tries to cloak his moral confusion and moral cowardice under the guise of nuance and sophistication.

Increasingly, the key difference between the Republican Party and the Democrat Party seems to be between those who believe that there exist timeless and universal standards of right and wrong and those who do not. This is not to say that voters, candidates, and activists are perfectly sorted between those parties based on that principle, but that seems to be the trend. Some political analysts have noticed a correlation between voting for Democrats and holding loose attitudes regarding sexual morality. As more and more people with strong religious convictions no longer feel at home in the Democrat Party, those who are hostile to religion and who reject moral absolutes have become dominant in that party.

Even among social liberals, you have a contingent of "9/11 Republicans" -- people who hold secularist views on sexual morality, but who are willing to apply the word evil to Islamofascist terrorism, in contrast to other social liberals who seem to fear that measuring anything, even terrorism, by an absolute moral standard will grant a foothold for absolute moral standards to be applied to sexual mores.

That latter group may have a point. In the 1960s, certain liberals were appalled at the weak-kneed, apologetic response of some of the their fellow liberals to oppressive, imperialistic Soviet Communism. Over time this core group of "neo-conservatives," which had broken with the mainstream of liberalism over foreign policy, began to question liberal orthodoxy on domestic policy. Their movement away from liberalism was accelerated by the left's hysterical response to their "apostasy" from the true liberal faith. Time will tell if today's "9/11 Republicans" become tomorrow's "neo-neo-cons".

I am working on some entries to wrap up last week's Republican National Convention, specifically to touch on some important stories that were overshadowed by the nightly speeches and pageantry of the event.

In the meantime, here are some reading assignments:

Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, writes a column almost daily, presented in blog form on the website of radio station WMCA. The conflict between the Christian worldview and other worldviews is at the heart of many of his columns. On his front page today:

• A review of Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey, a book that aims to explain what a worldview is, the distinctives of a Biblical worldview, and how so many Christians are able simultaneously to hold a secular worldview while affirming the tenets of the Christian faith.

• A critique of The Teen Code, an eye-opening book by a teenager on parent-teen communications:

  The underlying message of the book is that parents can indeed parent their teenagers, so long as we parent them as they will allow themselves to be parented. Now, armed with advice from an adolescent expert, parents are told that we must just accept the fact that vast areas of our children's lives are off limits, and that we should treat our teenagers as autonomous individuals who happen to live in our homes and are doing their best to negotiate around our discipline and moralizing. America's parents owe a debt of gratitude to young Rhett Godfrey for his new book. The Teen Code serves as a prophetic warning and an all-too-accurate description of the teenage mind at work.

• A critique of Bill Clinton's sermon at Riverside Church a week ago Sunday, in which he exposes a doctrine of "Biblical ambiguity" at the heart of Clinton's remarks -- the Bible can't be understood, so we don't have to worry about obeying its precepts. Mohler contrasts this with the traditional Christian view of Biblical perspicuity -- God made the Bible so that man could understand what God wants us to know about him and what he requires of us.

• An essay titled "Oprah Winfrey: Agent of Moral Insanity", about a recent Oprah show promoting the notion of teenage transexualism.
  

Mohler's got several more essays showing that the left is actively and consciously engaged in a culture war -- the culture war is not the product of rampant right-wing fears but a real conflict over the control of cultural institutions.

And saving perhaps the best for last, an essay reminding Christians of our duty to be engaged in the political process, grounded in the distinction between Augustine's City of God and City of Man:

Thus, Christians bear important responsibilities in both cities. Even as we know that our ultimate citizenship is in heaven, and even as we set our sights on the glory of the City of God, we must work for good, justice, and righteousness in the City of Man. We do so, not merely because we are commanded to love its citizens, but because we know that they are loved by the very God we serve.

From generation to generation, Christians often swing between two extremes, either ignoring the City of Man or considering it to be our main concern. A biblical balance establishes the fact that the City of Man is indeed passing, and chastens us from believing that the City of Man and its realities can ever be of ultimate importance. Yet, we also know that each of us is, by God's own design, a citizen--though temporarily--of the City of Man. When Jesus instructed that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, He pointed His followers to the City of Man and gave us a clear assignment. The only alternatives that remain are obedience and disobedience to this call.

Love of neighbor for the sake of loving God is a profound political philosophy that strikes a balance between the disobedience of political disengagement and the idolatry of politics as our main priority. As evangelical Christians, we must engage in political action, not because we believe the conceit that politics is ultimate, but because we must obey our Redeemer when He commanded that we must love our neighbor.

Go read it all, and add Al Mohler to your daily reading list.

A lot of bloggers have had Bouguereau on the mind of late:

Eight days ago, Mikki and I were at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, getting a whirlwind tour, in between church, brunch, and a Broadway play, from Dawn Eden. We started in the European painting gallery, and as we entered the first room, Dawn pointed out a couple of works by 19th century French painter William Bouguereau, "The Proposal" and "Young Mother Gazing at Her Child". I mentioned that Tulsa's Philbrook Museum had a prominently displayed work that I thought was a Bouguereau -- "The Shepherdess", which has pride of place in the first gallery. The name of the artist of that work was one of the few questions that stumped our team at the Holland Hall School trivia night back in January (we won decisively).

Late last night I verified that Bouguereau was the artist of the painting at Philbrook. Meanwhile, Dean Esmay was composing an essay on culture and female beauty (another topic I blogged about yesterday), and the heart of the piece was an appreciation of a certain 19th century French painter:

Back in the late 1800s, there was an artist who I believe truly captured the beauty of the female form. In my mind, he should be revered as much as Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and maybe even Da Vinci. He was a truly great artist. Perhaps he is forgotten because his work came just before the explosion of the expressionists, the cubists, the dadaists, the abstractionists, and so on. Perhaps he was just too old-fashioned, for he was completely overshadowed by the modern artists. But he should be remembered.

Who was he? His name was William Bouguereau. ...

I see two things when I see William Bouguereau's work. First, I see a man who drew in the classical style at a time when it was out of fashion, archaic, and underapreciated. This is tragic enough. Yet I also see an artist who, more than any other, appreciated the grace, the beauty, and the poetry of the feminine form, the true feminine form.

Women--real women--aren't they beautiful?

Indeed.

Dean's entry includes a selection of Bouguereau's work and a link to an essay and online gallery of more than 200 paintings.

Hat tip to Charles of Dustbury for the link.

Candace, one of the bloggers I met in NYC, has some thoughts worthy of pondering in an entry titled "Women do a lot of stupid things to feel beautiful". After a long list of said stupid things that includes overconsumption of alcohol, extreme blisters, starvation, vomiting, and credit card debt, she writes:

And why? All these things do is give us tear lines. They cross our faces with sadnesses that don't belong there. They take the beauty we got here with and chew on it until it's unrecognizable, and then they spit us out on the feet of our fathers, who tried so hard to protect us.

I should mention, because it's relevant in this context, that Candace is a lovely young woman. (I hope the Fatha of da Revolution will not send me to Siberia for noticing.)

There were several interesting comments on the entry, including this one from Missie:

it's always been my hypothesis such woman lacked affirmation from their father at a time when their self-identity, and thus self-esteem, was being established.... i'm very well aware that despite the petty things i do to feel EXTRA beautiful, none the less, I still am because long time ago, my father, through endless compliments and gasps of delights each time he saw me for the first time that day, made feel like i was a bombshell. t[o] solve this dilema, it is my belief, woman realize who made them and therefore rest in the assurance of his great craftmanship.

As a father of a little girl -- only four years old now -- I love to watch her dance like a ballerina and to see her delight in wearing a pretty dress. And she delights in the praise of dad, mom, and grandparents. We must continue to affirm her as often as we can, but the day will almost surely come when all our affirmation will be unable to outweigh the doubts cast by her peers. I can only hope we do our best to impart the true nature of beauty:

Do not let your adorning be external -- the braiding of hair, the wearing of gold, or the putting on of clothing -- but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious.

The end of that comment is significant too -- we need to help our little girl realize that she is God's handiwork, and thus can "rest in the assurance of his great craftmanship."

Candace has more good stuff -- including another first hand account of the Communists for Kerry rally and her mom's thoughts on the hostage situation in Russia.

Okiedoke wonders why people would use a service like Clean Flicks to edit the bad stuff out of the movies they rent for home viewing:

A company called CleanFlicks is taking movies and editing out all graphic violence, nudity, profanity, and sexual content.

What I don�t get is why folks who are offended by immorality in certain movies want to rent those movies in the first place.

I think I can offer an example. Last night, my wife and I went to see "The Terminal", which stars Tom Hanks as an eastern European tourist who gets stuck for nine months in the international lounge at Kennedy Airport because of a coup in his home country and an inflexible bureaucrat here. It was the kind of movie my wife and I seem to gravitate toward -- a quiet little movie about a fish out of water, and the comedy inherent in cross-cultural encounters. Afterwards we both agreed it was a great choice.

Thinking back on the movie, it occurred to me that there were only two reasons to rate the film PG-13. The flight attendant, played by Catherine Zeta Jones, talks about her long-term affair with a married man (art imitates life!); you don't see anything untoward on screen, but I guess that would count as an adult theme. She also makes use of some barnyard epithets which aren't integral to the plot -- you could have easily substituted minced oaths without losing anything. It was pretty close to being a film the whole family could enjoy together, but I certainly don't want to expose my kids to bad language anymore than necessary. I don't want them growing up thinking this is the way grownups normally speak to one another.

I sometimes think they throw in a little garbage to prevent a film from being rated G, for fear of losing at the box office. I give David Lynch, of all directors, credit for letting "The Straight Story" (another film we enjoyed) keep its G rating, and not dirtying it up to get the PG.

That's the point of CleanFlicks: There are movies that come pretty close in their original form to being something that the whole family could enjoy together, and with a little editing they are. It would be better if modern filmmakers learned to exercise the kind of creativity that their predecessors of 50 years ago did -- getting the point across without resorting to foul language and gratuitous sex and violence.

Blogging has been lax and infrequent the last two weeks because of travel. First a week with the family in West Texas and San Antonio -- every day started early and ended late. After about 36 hours back in Tulsa, I was in a plane to Montreal, on business -- the days are still long, but oddly not as tiring as the family vacation was.

One of the many pleasures of travel is scanning the radio dial and comparing the selections to what's on back home. The other afternoon, coming back from lunch, I heard what I thought might be singing in Portuguese at first, but later identified as Italian. It was a music program -- American and British pop songs from the '60s, but sung in Italian. The intro to one of the songs was big, brassy, and orchestral, with an oohing and ahhing choir in the background and I expected to hear Dusty Springfield belting out her hit, "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me". Instead it was some man singing the same song in Italian. It was strange but fun to listen to hear familiar tunes and unfamiliar words, but over too soon as I arrived back at the workplace.

(UPDATE: Further Googling reveals the song was originally written in Italian, then translated to English.)

The radio station is CFMB, and they aren't all Italian all the time, but seek to cater to the 30% or so of Montreal's population that are neither native Anglophones or native Francophones. They broadcast each week in 23 different languages, some for as little as 30 minutes, but how wonderful to be able to tune in and hear your native tongue and news from home even for a short while each week. And even if you don't know the language, it's a joy to hear the "music" of different languages -- each one with its unique rhythm and intonation.

"Credo", a teacher in a Catholic school in Australia, recounts a lively discussion about what was the greatest cause of death in the 20th century. His top student identified Stalin's purges, but when Credo asked them to consider a "non-event", the same student suggested abortion was the 20th century's greatest killer. He goes on to describe the discussion in the following class -- what he presented, and the debate that occurred between the students. His goal was to lead a substantive discussion about abortion, focusing on documented science, rather than theological perspectives, and to look at the social and historical factors involved in abortion's prevalence.

He goes on to describe the verbal pummeling he suffered from the mother of a student who defended abortion in that class session:

She spoke firmly but calmly at first, but escalated into fist-shaking and cursing (and I don't mean $%^*!, I mean she actually cursed me). She felt that it was inappropriate for me to have discussed the topic with the students given that it was a history class. I tried to explain my reasoning, and I - genuinely - apologised if she felt that her student had been disadvantaged by my decision to tailor the curriculum to my class's interests....

By this stage I was stunned. The other teachers in the room were all paying attention and one of them was shaking in fright. The mother had now left her seat and was standing in front of me, waving her fist.

I was tempted to ask her why she chose a Catholic school to educate her daughter, but thought better of it. Her voice got higher and she bellowed at me - "You're a man, you don't get a say, what would you know?" At that point, I lowered my voice and attempted to answer by giving my own personal experiences with abortion (sadly).

She cut me off with a statement that I will take to the end of my days:

"The world would be a better place if you had been aborted."

Start there, read that whole entry, then keep reading as he responds to comments from readers. In a more recent entry, Credo has photos and an excerpt from a BBC article -- amazing and precious images of babies in the womb using 4D ultrasound imaging -- kicking, eye-opening, toesucking, smiling, yawning, patting.

Hat tip to Swamphopper at the Rough Woodsman for the link.

David Gelernter writes in Opinion Journal about the fulsome praise being heaped by the leftist media on World War II veterans. He says the vets deserve better than the repetition of a trite phrase: "If we cared about that war, the men who won it and the ideas it suggests, we would teach our children (at least) four topics." The four topics are "the major battles of the war, ... the bestiality of the Japanese, ... the attitude of American intellectuals, ... [and] the veterans' neglected voice." Names like Corregidor and Anzio should mean something to our children. The stories of those who fought should be as readily available as the memoirs of those who reported on the war. Regarding the intellectuals Gelernter writes:

Before Pearl Harbor but long after the character of Hitlerism was clear--after the Nuremberg laws, the Kristallnacht pogrom, the establishment of Dachau and the Gestapo--American intellectuals tended to be dead against the U.S. joining Britain's war on Hitler.

Today's students learn (sometimes) about right-wing isolationists like Charles Lindbergh and the America Firsters. They are less likely to read documents like this, which appeared in Partisan Review (the U.S. intelligentsia's No. 1 favorite mag) in fall 1939, signed by John Dewey, William Carlos Williams, Meyer Schapiro and many more of the era's leading lights. "The last war showed only too clearly that we can have no faith in imperialist crusades to bring freedom to any people. Our entry into the war, under the slogan of 'Stop Hitler!' would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here. . . . The American masses can best help [the German people] by fighting at home to keep their own liberties." The intelligentsia acted on its convictions. "By one means or another," Diana Trilling later wrote of this period, "most of the intellectuals of our acquaintance evaded the draft."

Why rake up these Profiles in Disgrace? Because in the Iraq War era they have a painfully familiar ring.

Dewey, of course, is the father of modern American public education.

UPDATE: Donald Sensing has answered the call by telling the story of the Battle of Midway and the brave men of Torpedo Squadron 8, all but one of whom flew to their deaths that day.

After Abortion links to this visual dictionary of American Sign Language, which uses little QuickTime films to illustrate words. Near the top of the index are the words "abort" and "abortion". The signs are described respectively as "One hand grabs something from the other hand and throws it away," and "The hand takes a hold of something and then throws it off to the side." In both signs the hand goes from flat to balled, as if wadding up something to discard it. One commenter describes it as "a clawed ripping away and tossing."

Fellow Pogophile and blogger Dawn Eden was saluted at the end of Joe Scarborough's MSNBC show last night as one of the former Florida congressmen's favorite blogs (transcript here, scroll to end), alongside blogosphere luminaries like Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan.

SCARBOROUGH: You know, our sex scandal blogger story may have left some of you asking, what's a blogger?

Well, mom and pop, a blogger is one who blogs. Speaking "Electric Company" style, our guests for that segment keep a political diary online. It's called a Weblog. Take the words Web and log and it becomes Weblog. But since kids don't have a sufficient attention span to piece two syllables together, the terms has been mercifully cut down to blog.

SCARBOROUGH COUNTRY's favorite blogs include Wonkette.com and Gawker, of course, InstaPundit, Dawn Patrol, AndrewSullivan, and the ArmedProphet. And the keepers of these blogs mix news stories with political viewpoints and personal stories, which really make blogs most interesting. And most blogs are updated daily using software that allows nimrods with little or no technical background, i.e., me, to update their blogs on a daily basis.

Now, if you haven't checked out blogs or this crazy Internet thing, I highly recommend it. I hear it's real big with the kids.

Congratulations to Dawn, who turns out a thought-provoking essay nearly every day, and has been certified by another Oklahoma blogger as an enigma:

Anyone that can mercilessly (and justly) skewer Hugh Hefner, relate personal stories about her friend, the panhandling music editor/heroin addict, thoughtfully compare clinical and situational depression, discuss Philip K. Dick's influence on G.K. Chesterson (and Orson Welles), tell a story (an application lesson actually) about working the basement of Warner Communications, and pepper the whole page with references from the scripture (KJV no less!) all on the same page is an enigma. Now what would you guess that person does for al living? Theology professor? Maybe Comparative Lit? Or Anthropology? Nope. Music Historian and author of the headline "Hurt in the Line of Doody."

By the way, the beginning of the Scarborough quote refers to a U. S. Senate staffer who was fired for using Senate computers to post to her blog about moonlighting as a prostitute. I guess it's sweeps month, so the only way blogging will make the TV news is if sex is involved. Dawn Eden writes about sex, too, but she shuns pop culture's glamourization of casual sex for insight into the real consequences of treating those made in God's image as mere implements. And she's called attention to Planned Parenthood's website for teenagers, which puts the lie to PP's rhetoric that they seek to help teens make responsible decisions.

Dawn Eden relates a jaw-dropping encounter with Dr. James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule.

I was introduced to the gaunt, aged legend by another scientist, who proceeded to tell Watson about his biomedicals company, which funded work in the genetics field.

Watson interrupted him: "Is your company geared towards research or service?"

The scientist paused for a second, taking in the unusual question. "Research," he answered.

"That's the problem with these companies today!" the Nobel laureate erupted. "Everyone's doing research in genetics and nobody's doing service. Because it's too controversial"�he sneered�"to help mothers so that they can give birth to healthy babies. ...

"They say I'm a killer," Watson went on, his tired eyes taking on fire. "It's those right-to-lifers."

"They say I'm a killer," he repeated, "and everyone's afraid of offending them." He was still looking at the other scientist. The scientist, whom I know didn't share his views, maintained an attentive silence�partly, I believe, out of gentlemanly respect, and partly out of not wanting to put gasoline on a fire.

But I had nothing to lose. So I took a deep breath, adjusted my jaw so it was back in line with my upper lip, and said, in the gentlest voice I could muster, "I'd love to know more about why you feel that way, as I'm a right-to-lifer myself."

Watson looked me in the eye and told me he was qualified to advocate in favor of mothers choosing to abort "unhealthy" children because he wished he could have aborted his own son, who is mentally handicapped.

He went on, unprodded, to say that he was an "unbeliever," so he was sure he would have had no moral qualms about killing his own child.

Just to clarify, by "helping mothers have healthy babies", he means helping them kill babies with the wrong genes.

Charles G. Hill comments:

If there's a Deep Truth here, it's this: doing good things, even great things, doesn't assure you a position on the side of the angels.

Dawn Eden reports from Monday's Defense of Marriage rally in New York City. It didn't fit the media stereotype of these events:

During the one-hour rally�which occurred after hundreds of members of the clergy held a press conference on the City Hally steps�the crowd was addressed by several local pastors from the from the City Covenant Coalition and Kevin McCullough, each of whom led a prayer. It was strange and beautiful to be on the southern border of the park on a bright, sunny day, holding hands with complete strangers, and realizing we all wanted the same thing. We were reclaiming city space as prayer space.

It was clear that one of the main talking points for the pastors (which I later learned was elucidated in the guidelines their coalition had produced for the rally) was that we who uphold traditional marriage should not carry a message of hate. But this was more than just "love the sinner, hate the sin." The speakers stressed that the present marriage crisis stemmed from heterosexual infidelity, and from the church's failure to come down strongly against such transgressions.

One speaker instructed the crowd's members to say, "We have sinned," and then point at themselves and say, "I have sinned." The issue, said another, was not that we should beat ourselves up over our sin, but that we should take responsibility for what we have done, and likewise take responsibility for our actions now.

I don't know what, if any, coverage this rally is going to get from the mainstream media, but I can tell you one thing: If any mainstream reporters were there, chances are they were very disappointed. There was not a single word of hate. There was only the message of God's love and redemption, and of marriage as Jesus described in in Matthew 19:4-6....

There's more and it's all good, plus links to photos and additional coverage of the rally.

National Review Online runs one of Florence King's The Misanthrope's Corner columns each Friday. This week's is from 1996, in which King anticipates with uncanny accuracy the course of the same-sex marriage debate:

The preliminary stage of brainwashing is already underway. "Husband" and "wife" are yielding to "spouse," a vague usage that benefits no one but gays. Gov. Roy Romer recently vetoed Colorado's proposed anti-gay marriage law, calling it "mean-spirited," a word that functions in America like the bell in Pavlov's laboratory. And now Bill Clinton has announced, through his gay-liaison office, that he is "personally opposed" to homosexual marriage. This phraseology, a staple of the abortion debate, is a reminder not to let our premises stand in the way of our conclusions.

The major brainwashing, soon to begin, will proceed as follows.

Magazines will run cover stories that thinking Americans � all 17 of us � recognize as that brand of persuasion called "nibbled to death by a duck." Time does "Debating Same-Sex Marriage" and Newsweek does "Rethinking Gay Marriage." Lofty opinion journals weigh in with "A Symposium on," "In Defense of," and "Voices from," while Parade does "If They Say 'I Do' . . . Will We Say 'You Can't?'" Cover art consists of a pair of wedding rings sporting identical biological signs: two arrow-shooting circles for men, two mirror-handle circles for women. We will start seeing these logos in our sleep.

Read the whole thing, then read a couple of her previously posted columns.

From Stanley Kurtz, in NRO:

There's been a lot of commentary on how San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom's flouting of the law is not nearly so bad as the conduct of former Alabama chief justice Roy Moore. ...

What Mayor Newsom is doing has much deeper social and legal consequences � and is meant to have those consequences. Newsom is intentionally creating legal, political, and cultural facts on the ground designed to overturn current law � both in California and beyond. Newsom is purposely trying to initiate legal challenges to state and federal defense of marriage acts. And he is doing this is two ways � by encouraging copycat civil disobedience in other parts of the country, and by generating "married" couples who can file lawsuits, in California and beyond. Especially because he is creating couples who can file suits, Newsom's actions are far more disruptive and consequential than Judge Moore's. And the judges who have refused to swiftly shut down this obviously lawless action are equally to blame.

Newsom is using extra-legal means to bring a major national debate to resolution on his own terms. By creating "married" couples, Newsom is trying to put the cultural, political, and legal momentum inherent in "possession" behind his side of the argument. If Newsom is allowed to determine a major policy debate by resort to extra-legal means, the damage to social trust and civil comity in our divided nation will be immense....

Since 9/11, conservatives have felt pretty confident about their position. I say we are living on sand. Yes, we have the presidency and, by the narrowest of margins, Congress. The Left controls the other key levers of the culture. If we lose the presidency, we lose the courts, and we lose the culture. It is only our political success that has given us a counterweight to the liberal domination of the culture....

But if we lose the presidency now � and lose it in the face of San Francisco � we lose all. No court will ever pay us any mind again. They will fear and bow to the Left alone.

Read the whole thing.

Nat Hentoff, civil libertarian and columnist for the Village Voice, is weighing in on media coverage of Terri Schindler-Schiavo. He has pronounced the media guilty of "journalistic malpractice", mischaracterizing her condition and uncritically siding with her husband, who wishes her dead. And he says that the support for her cause from disabled-rights groups has gone unreported in the mainstream media:

For 13 years, Terri Schiavo has not been able to speak for herself. But she is not brain-dead, not in a comatose state, not terminal, and not connected to a respirator. If the feeding tube is removed, she will starve to death. Whatever she may or may not have said, did she consider food and water "artificial means?"

Harvard is revisiting its core curriculum, an encouraging sign. Through the last hundred years, Harvard has several times drifted away from a common core for its undergraduates, allowing them more freedom to craft their own education through electives. Several times Harvard has pulled back to redefine the basic elements of a Harvard education. The lead paragraph of the Boston Globe story linked above summarizes President Conant's 1940s reform effort: "There were certain things that any Harvard College graduate should know in order to contribute to society."

The Globe story reports on President Larry Summers efforts to address the core curriculum, and the resistance he's getting from some faculty members:

At one point, several professors say, Summers recalled a top Harvard art historian's reaction to his comment that he wished an old class, "Fine Arts 13,'' was still in the course catalogue to provide an introductory survey for students who probably wouldn't study art history again. Summers apparently liked this anecdote so much that he repeated it in his commencement speech last June. "Reacting with a mixture of consternation and hilarity, she wondered how I could possibly expect any self-respecting scholar to propel our students -- like a cannonball -- from 'Caves to Picasso' in one academic year,'' Summers said in the speech. He clearly hadn't cottoned to her view. Summers also told the English professors that the administration has received some letters from graduates asking why they didn't have the chance to take a Great Books-style course covering, say, Homer to Woolf. ...

All opinions are equal among the new curriculum working groups, but clearly Summers's opinions are more equal than others. At commencement, Summers made it clear he expects the review to lead to real reforms with a certain back-to-basics ring to them.

"All students,'' he argued in front of 5,000 graduating seniors, parents, and alumni, should "know how to compose a literate and persuasive essay,'' "know how to interpret a great humanistic text,'' "know how to connect history to the present,'' and "know -- they should genuinely understand at some basic level -- how unraveling the mysteries of the genome is transforming the nature of science.''

The soft oratory skills of many in Generation Y were no less a concern. "It is not clear to me that we do enough to make sure that our students graduate with the ability to speak cogently, to persuade others, and to reason to an important decision with moral and ethical implications,'' said Summers, himself an intimidating master of rhetorical combat who tends to make up his mind by arguing points and counterpoints with those whose intelligence and oratorical skills he respects.

There are indications that Summers wants the core to be about the student acquiring a fundamental body of knowledge, not just about vague notions like "ways of knowing" and "modes of inquiry". In an interview he said, "I do hope achieving knowledge in key areas would be a crucial element in the general education component.'' I will resist uttering a sarcastic "duh!" That idea may be obvious among us layfolk, but in academic circles it's rather controversial. First there's the question of what are the key areas in which an educated person should attain knowledge. Then there's the challenge posed by the deconstructionists to the very possibility of knowledge.

Harvard costs $37,928 per year for tuition, room, board, and fees, not counting travel, books, and other personal expenses. If my kid's going to pahk his cah in Hahvahd Yahd, "achieving knowledge in key areas" better be included in the price.

There's a wealth of wonderfully curmudgeonly commentary on language, writing, and education here, at a website dedicated to the works and memory of Richard Mitchell, who published the Underground Grammarian newsletter, from which I quoted in the previous entry. All issues of the newsletter are online as are his four books.

If you want to understand the roots of the mess that is public education, this is a good place to start. If you want to read something that will kindle devotion to clarity of thought and expression, drink deeply at this well.

Here are a few selections to make you thirst for more:

From the introduction to Less Than Words Can Say:

Many years earlier I had returned a similar questionnaire, because the man who sent it had promised, in writing, to "analize" my "input." That seemed appropriate, so I put it in. But he didn�t do as he had promised, and I had lost all interest in questionnaires....

Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellow men bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen. There must be some minimum allowable dose of inanity beyond which the mind cannot remain reasonable. Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought.

On public education:

American public education is a remarkable enterprise; it succeeds best where it fails. Imagine an industry that consistently fails to do what it sets out to do, a factory where this year�s product is invariably sleazier than last year�s but, nevertheless, better than next year�s. Imagine a corporation whose executives are always spending vast sums of money on studies designed to discover just what it is they are supposed to do and then vaster sums for further studies on just how to do it. Imagine a plant devoted to the manufacture of factory seconds to be sold at a loss. Imagine a producer of vacuum cleaners that rarely work hiring whole platoons of engineers who will, in time, report that it is, in fact, true that the vacuum cleaners rarely work, and who will, for a larger fee, be glad to find out why, if that�s possible. If you discover some such outfit, don�t invest in it. Unfortunately, we are all required to invest in public education.

Public education is also an enterprise that regularly blames its clients for its failures. Education cannot, after all, be expected to deal with barbarous and sometimes even homicidal students who hate schools and everything in them, except, perhaps, for smaller kids with loose lunch money. If the students are dull and hostile, we mustn�t blame the schools. We must blame the parents for their neglect and their bad examples. If the parents are ignorant and depraved, then we must blame "society." And so forth�but not too far. Those who lament thus seem not inclined to ask how "society" got to be that way, if it is that way, and whether or not public education may have made it so.

In his second book, The Graves of Academe, Mitchell points us to the origins of modern educratic idiocy -- not the '60s, but 1913, and the "Seven Deadly Principles" of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education:

In the cause of "democratic" public education, the Gang of Twenty-seven compounded illogic with ignorance by deciding that the education proposed by the Eliot committee was primarily meant as "preparation for the college or university." True, relatively few high school graduates of 1913 went on to college; but even fewer had done so in 1893. Indeed, it was just because so few would go on to more education that the Eliot committee wanted so many to have so much in high school. But the Gang of Twenty-seven decided that since very few students would go on to the mastery of a discipline and the rigorous training of the mind in college, which colleges were still fancied to provide in those days, there was little need to fuss about such things in high school. They had far more interesting things to fuss about in any case, their kinds of things. They enshrined them all, where they abide as holy relics of the cult of educationism to this day, in their final report, issued in 1918 (and printed at government expense, like all the outpourings of educationism ever since) as Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education....

While its concrete proposals for Civics Education are very much like its proposals for all the other educations, Cardinal Principles, in the name of "attitudes and habits important in a democracy," goes an extra step and prescribes what should actually happen in the classroom. It urges "the assignment of projects and problems to groups of pupils for cooperative solution and the socialized recitation whereby the class as a whole develops a sense of collective responsibility. Both of these devices give training in collective thinking." Here we can see the theoretical foundations of the rap session, the encounter group, the values clarification module, and the typical course in education, but also something far worse....

The children who are to generate "cooperative solutions" and "socialized recitations" are to do so without concern for, or even any knowledge of, "constitutional questions and remote governmental functions" like checks and balances. They will do their "collective thinking" unencumbered by "mere information."

It is another of the educationists� self-serving delusions that if enough of the ignorant pool their resources, knowledge will appear, and that a parliament of fools can deliberate its way to wisdom....

I went to the monthly Tulsa County Republican Men's Club luncheon today. The group's name is a bit of a misnomer, since the crowd is close to half-female and there are regular attendees from other counties. The food is good, the speakers are usually interesting, and it's fun to catch up with the latest political gossip. With term limits going into effect next year, candidates are already lining up for next year's races. At today's lunch I saw Brian Crain, who is running for Senate 39 (incumbent Jerry Smith is term-limited); Pam Peterson, who is running for House 67 (incumbent Hopper Smith is leaving the House this year or next -- he plans to run for Senate 25, but he may be deployed overseas with the 45th Infantry, in which case he'll resign early, and a special election will be held); and Joan Hastings, former County Clerk and State Representative, who may be running for Senate 25 (incumbent Charles Ford is term-limited).

The topic of the day was education and the speakers were Union Schools Superintendent Cathy Burden, State Senator Charles Ford, and State Senator Scott Pruitt. Cathy Burden called for administrative consolidation of our more than 500 school districts and said it was hard to find teachers to meet the needs of that growing district. Sen. Ford gave a brief history of state funding for education, a system that has gone from locally-funded to one that is 75% state-funded, and which creates disincentives for local funding. Sen. Pruitt spoke of giving more control back to local districts, providing state funding and demanding results, but not dictating the methods to achieve results, thus empowering local administrators to make decisions.

Amidst all the talk of empowering administrators and tweaking funding formulae, talk of empowering taxpayers (or, in Educanto, "patrons" ) and parents was conspicuous by its absence, especially conspicuous in a Republican meeting. I got to ask the last question, and so I stood up, and said so.

We need patron empowerment. Our system of electing school boards is designed to discourage accountability to the voters. Board members in large districts like Tulsa serve four year terms, with one or two members elected each February. The filing period is in early December, during the Thanksgiving to Christmas rush; the election is the second Tuesday in February, which in even numbered years is one week after the municipal primary. Because of the staggered terms, there is no way for the electorate to dump the whole bunch at once, no matter how incompetent or unresponsive they are. The terms of office are far too long. Over time, a school board member tends to regard himself or herself as an ambassador representing the school administration to the community, rather than as the representative of taxpayers and parents, holding the administration accountable. An "us vs. them" mentality develops, with "us" being the administration and the board, and "them" being the unruly parents and taxpayers who have unreasonable expectations and are stingy, too.

My remedy is to have every district elect the entire school board every two years, during the normal election cycle. I didn't mention this, but I'd even favor partisan elections -- there are stark differences in educational philosophy and they generally fall along national party lines (something that isn't true with municipal issues). Sen. Ford said that the legislature voted to change the election dates back in the '80s, but the school districts applied pressure to change them back.

We also need parental empowerment, by which I mean genuine school choice -- the opportunity for more parents to choose private education for their children. I favor tuition tax credits and tax credits to donors to scholarship programs as ways to make alternative education affordable for more families without creating an entanglement between private schools and the state. Oklahoma is looking for ways to make itself attractive to energetic entrepreneurs, looking to attract and retain young people. As far as I am aware, no state has a statewide school choice program. Here is an opportunity for us to distinguish Oklahoma, make life better for families with school-aged children, and create a competitive environment that will help all schools improve.

I'm just amazed that none of the Republican legislators brought up the issue of school choice. It makes me worry that even if Republicans take over the legislature, they will content themselves with tinkering with this broken system, and placating the teachers' unions and the administrators' lobby. The point, after all, is not to prop up an existing way of doing things, but to educate children, whether in state-run schools, private schools, or at home.

Russ McGuire is also a favorite columnist, as well as a friend. Based here in the Tulsa area, he knows the information technology industry from the inside. These days, he writes a technology column for Business Reform magazine.

In a recent column, he follows up several topics he covered earlier in the year, juxtaposing his earlier thoughts with recent developments. The topics include Apple's profitability, TiVo, spam, the SCO/Linux dispute, and MCI WorldCom's corporate culture. It's a good introduction to his work, which should be of interest to anyone who works or invests in high-tech businesses. What he says about WorldCom should be of particular interest to Tulsans.

It's graduation time, and our thoughts turn to the commencement ceremony. Three weeks ago I was at my cousin's high school graduation, where we listened to the superintendent urge the graduates to register to vote and elect legislators who would shovel more money into the schools. 17 years ago, at my college graduation, we all sat in heavy rain for an hour while we listened to the World's Most Boring Commencement Speaker (William R. Hewlett) read, in monotone, a speech that he was apparently seeing for the first time as he stood at the podium. It was a litany of his company's engineering achievements, recited in excruciating technical detail. I have a photo of me, looking like a drowned rat, taking my diploma from Paul Gray, MIT's last good president, and not coincidentally, its last alumnus to serve as president. Gray's charge to the class (continued on this page) was actually pretty good, although we were all too wet to notice. Gray delivered the only funny line of the day, which came from a parent:

"After the soaking I've take from this place for the past four years, what's a little rain?"

Here is a much shorter, much funnier, and much more inspirational commencement speech. It's three years old, but I just came across it, thanks to a link today from Jonah Goldberg on The Corner. Conan O'Brien addressed the Harvard class of 2000, on the 15th anniversary of his own graduation from the red brick schoolhouse up Chuck River from MIT. In an inspirational speech, he prepared the students for a lifetime failure and ridicule:

So what can you expect out there in the real world? Let me tell you. As you leave these gates and re-enter society, one thing is certain: Everyone out there is going to hate you. Never tell anyone in a roadside diner that you went to Harvard. In most situations the correct response to where did you go to school is, "School? Why, I never had much in the way of book larnin' and such." Then, get in your BMW and get the hell out of there.

You see, you're in for a lifetime of "And you went to Harvard?" Accidentally give the wrong amount of change in a transaction and it's, "And you went to Harvard?" Ask the guy at the hardware store how these jumper cables work and hear, "And you went to Harvard?" Forget just once that your underwear goes inside your pants and it's "and you went to Harvard." Get your head stuck in your niece's dollhouse because you wanted to see what it was like to be a giant and it's "Uncle Conan, you went to Harvard!?"

He went on to tell the story of his post-Harvard career, marked by low-paying jobs and bad career moves, like leaving SNL to write a sitcom that never made it to air. Even taking the Late Night post looked like a bad move at first, as he suffered a barrage of negative reviews. He winds up by telling the graduates not to fear failure:

Needless to say, I took a lot of criticism, some of it deserved, some of it excessive. And it hurt like you wouldn't believe. But I'm telling you all this for a reason. I've had a lot of success and I've had a lot of failure. I've looked good and I've looked bad. I've been praised and I've been criticized. But my mistakes have been necessary. Except for Wilson's House of Suede and Leather. That was just stupid.

I've dwelled on my failures today because, as graduates of Harvard, your biggest liability is your need to succeed. Your need to always find yourself on the sweet side of the bell curve. Because success is a lot like a bright, white tuxedo. You feel terrific when you get it, but then you're desperately afraid of getting it dirty, of spoiling it in any way.

I left the cocoon of Harvard, I left the cocoon of Saturday Night Live, I left the cocoon of The Simpsons. And each time it was bruising and tumultuous. And yet, every failure was freeing, and today I'm as nostalgic for the bad as I am for the good.

So, that's what I wish for all of you: the bad as well as the good. Fall down, make a mess, break something occasionally. And remember that the story is never over.

That's a gem -- buried in the laugh lines, something these graduates really needed to hear. If you've gone to a school like Harvard or MIT, you either succeed big or you never get over the sense that you could have done more with your opportunities. And a fear of big failure can keep you from taking the risks that could lead to big success, so you settle instead for middling security.

Conan and I started college the same year. I could have been his classmate, as I had an offer from Harvard, but declined it for MIT's offer because I figured an engineering degree would give me a better chance at a job after graduation. (Yes, there is a difference between being smart and being savvy.) Some night, when I'm feeling especially rueful, I'll tell the story of what went into that decision. Don't get me wrong -- I made wonderful friends at MIT, I got a solid education, and I have many happy memories. And MIT is a great choice if you are in love with science or engineering. I chose MIT because it promised a career that would provide a secure future in comfortable surroundings, not necessarily a career that I would love.

Looking at my job history and Conan's circa 1990, my choice of MIT and engineering looked pretty sound -- I had been continuously employed, my salary had gone up every year, and I had received job offers from competing companies. Since 1990, I've stayed on a linear track. Conan took risks, was doing something he loved, and after a slow and bumpy start his rise was exponential. Of course, his career track may just as easily have followed a spectacular downward curve, but at least he'd be failing while doing something he loved.

The Bible reminds us that neither earthly success or earthly failure are permanent:

So my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labor under the sun. For a man may do his work with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then he must leave all he owns to someone who has not worked for it. This too is meaningless and a great misfortune. What does a man get for all the toil and anxious striving with which he labors under the sun? All his days his work is pain and grief; even at night his mind does not rest. This too is meaningless.

In light of this reality:

A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment?

My advice to my graduating cousin? Understand and delight in your God-given abilities and inclinations. Find a job you will love. Use college to help you get there. Don't play it safe.

UPDATE: Steve Young has written a graduation address with a similar theme, which begins, "THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR TO SUCCESS IS FAILURE!" Citing the examples of Elvis Presley, Oprah Winfrey, and Walter Cronkite, Young writes:

All these people share one thing in common. They ignored the "experts." They refused to let hardships stop them on the road to victory. They learned that every triumphant discovery resulted from many unsuccessful experiments; that every home run has been tempered by a multitude of missed swings; that every great script was built on the back of endless rewrites; that every top performer has been humiliated by more than one performance; that failure is part of the process that breeds success.

In case someone just happens to be checking the site at this moment, a talk by Adam Nicholson, author of God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, is being broadcast by C-SPAN 2 -- 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. If this talk ends up on their website, I'll post a link to it later from this entry.

UPDATE: C-SPAN 2 has posted the video of the talk on its BookTV website. It should be there for a couple of weeks.

Nicolson spoke of the predecessors to the KJV: the anti-monarchical Geneva Bible of the Puritans ("king" is always translated "tyrant" in the Old Testament) and the Bishop's Bible, which Nicolson describes as "pompous, obscure, and often laughable." He lays out the spirit of the age as King James takes the throne of England. He describes the committee structure that produced the translation and tells us some personal anecdotes about the translators. These were men of the world, not cloistered monks, and Nicolson believes that made the King James version a better translation than many that followed. Nicolson compares Psalm 8 in the KJV, Milton's metrical translation, written nearly half a century later.

I didn't get to see the whole thing -- I'll try to watch it all tonight. Here's an article written by Nicolson for The Age last year prior to publication of his book.

An interesting fact about Nicolson -- he owns three small islands in the Hebrides, a gift from his father on his 21st birthday.

As the New York Times continues its credibility meltdown, we learn of a remarkable memo written by Los Angeles Times Editor John Carroll to his section editors, criticizing the bias evident in a story by LA Times reporter Scott Gold on the "Women's Right to Know Act" recently passed in Texas. (A similar bill in Oklahoma, requiring information about the development of the fetus and potential health risks to be presented to a woman prior to an abortion, was killed when pro-life Senate Democrats cast party line votes to avoid putting a controversial issue on Gov. Brad Henry's desk.)

Here's the whole thing, for posterity.

I'm concerned about the perception---and the occasional reality---that the Times is a liberal, "politically correct" newspaper. Generally speaking, this is an inaccurate view, but occasionally we prove our critics right. We did so today with the front-page story on the bill in Texas that would require abortion doctors to counsel patients that they may be risking breast cancer.

The apparent bias of the writer and/or the desk reveals itself in the third paragraph, which characterizes such bills in Texas and elsewhere as requiring "so-called counseling of patients." I don't think people on the anti-abortion side would consider it "so-called," a phrase that is loaded with derision.

The story makes a strong case that the link between abortion and breast cancer is widely discounted among researchers, but I wondered as I read it whether somewhere there might exist some credible scientist who believes in it.

Such a person makes no appearance in the story's lengthy passage about the scientific issue. We do quote one of the sponsors of the bill, noting that he "has a professional background in property management." Seldom will you read a cheaper shot than this. Why, if this is germane, wouldn't we point to legislators on the other side who are similarly bereft of scientific credentials?

It is not until the last three paragraphs of the story that we finally surface a professor of biology and endocrinology who believes the abortion/cancer connection is valid. But do we quote him as to why he believes this? No. We quote his political views.

Apparently the scientific argument for the anti-abortion side is so absurd that we don't need to waste our readers' time with it.

The reason I'm sending this note to all section editors is that I want everyone to understand how serious I am about purging all political bias from our coverage. We may happen to live in a political atmosphere that is suffused with liberal values (and is unreflective of the nation as a whole), but we are not going to push a liberal agenda in the news pages of the Times.

I'm no expert on abortion, but I know enough to believe that it presents a profound philosophical, religious and scientific question, and I respect people on both sides of the debate. A newspaper that is intelligent and fair-minded will do the same.

Let me know if you'd like to discuss this.

John

Because it's likely to disappear soon, I've put the original LA Times article on the extended part of this entry. You will notice that the version on the Baltimore Sun website omits both the sneering reference to Corte's profession and any reference at all to Baruch College endocrinology professor Joel Brind, who affirms the link between abortion and breast cancer.

George Neumayr of the American Spectator has more to say about the Carroll memo and media bias, pointing out another trick often used by reporters to express an opinion while pretending to report:

Scott Gold's article contained other tricks of bias that Carroll didn't mention. Take a look at this one: "�critics say the law is a thinly veiled attempt to intimidate, frighten and shame women who are seeking an abortion." Who are these "critics"? Do they include by chance the Times reporters huddled around Gold's desk?

The "critics say" trick is a familiar one in the Times. In a story questioning the Pentagon's embedded reporters policy, they trotted out the phrase to advance their own assertion: "Some critics say these policies raise questions about the balance and sensitivity of wartime media coverage�"

"Some critics say" is the Times's euphemism for "Our opinion is�"

Readers of the Tulsa World will be familiar with this technique. In today's edition, Randy Krehbiel uses a related phrase in an article about welfare reform reauthorization:

Most observers seem to agree that whatever the details of the new rules, the effect will be tougher eligibility and less benefits.

Who qualifies as an observer, and how many are included in this universe? How many observers constitute "most"? This seems to be shorthand for "I think this is true, but I'm on deadline and I don't have a quote that makes this point as directly as I would like."

David Russ, my fraternity brother and fellow MIT alum, and who is, in fact, a rocket scientist, sends me a link to an insightful Weekly Standard column by Joel Engel, which points out the near-worship of intelligence among leftist intellectual circles. Character is not only considered irrelevant, but intelligence becomes a substitute for character:

In fact, the "right" kind of intelligence--call it Upper West Side smarts--is in some ways more tyrannical than the old Upper East Side, world-at-their-feet arrogance bred in "the best" prep schools three generations ago. While the Andover kids were at least taught manners and noblesse oblige, today's aspiring intelligentsia (especially in the bigger cities) too often learn that bright makes right. To wit: A jeweler I know brags that his 9-year-old son, away at overnight camp, mouths off to the counselors--"because he's so much smarter than they are." A friend can't decide whether he'd prefer his brilliant but tortured son to be happy or accomplished. A colleague's sister watches with pride and nods approvingly as her 7-year-old daughter calls me stupid for disagreeing with her memorized contention that the president has more important things to worry about--"like the economy, duh"--than Iraq.

It will not be surprising that the favorite recent presidents of this bunch are Clinton and Carter, and their least favorites, Reagan and Bush. Engel compares supposed intelligence with success in foreign policy and concludes that raw intelligence isn't as useful as common sense:

The best and the brightest, as we learned from JFK's advisers, offer little protection against absolute foolishness--and may, perhaps, be more susceptible to it, given the anecdotal evidence suggesting that brilliance and common sense are inversely correlated. It's no wonder Castro hoped Bush wouldn't be "as stupid as he seems." For 40 years the dictator has been surrounded and visited by brilliant people who swear that he's brilliant and benevolent--and if Bush were indeed a dimwit, he might see right through Castro and conclude that all those people willing to brave sharks, drowning, dehydration, and firing squads to escape from Cuba actually recognize something that the dictator's brilliant admirers do not.

From painful personal experience, I can tell you that intelligence is no guarantee of success, and as much as I admire the signs of brilliance I see in my children, I know that they will only be able to make the most of that brilliance if they have learned godliness and humility, hard work and practical common sense.

Another fraternity brother, Peter Sullivan, once told me this story on himself, which illustrates that an MIT education is no guarantee of common sense: One night he was restless and couldn't sleep. He was feeling nervous (about a test, if I recall correctly), so to mellow out he drank a "Mello Yello", which had the highest caffeine content of all the beverages offered by the Coca-Cola Company. He still couldn't fall asleep, and since he was unable to doze, he reasoned that he should take a "No-Doz", which made him about as calm and cool as Barney Fife confronted with an actual crimefighting situation.

Now let me tell a story on myself. My college social life was frustrating. As a skinny, spotty, charisma-deficient nerd-boy, I was certainly among my own kind at MIT, but I therefore failed to make much of an impression on the girls I went out with. There was one thing I had going for me -- I was smart enough to go to MIT and study computer science -- but that didn't seem to help me at all with these women. Many years later, I realized that they weren't impressed by my academic credentials because they were MIT students, too. I had foolishly restricted my dating universe to the set of women among whom my one competitive advantage was neutralized. There were plenty of attractive female students in the Boston area who would see an MIT engineer with good earning potential as a great catch (lack of charisma notwithstanding), but instead of looking up and seeing alternate routes through the dating maze, I kept my head down and continued bashing into the dead end I had found.

Anyway, I finally tumbled to this conclusion, oh, about three months ago. And I might have remained clueless and single until then, but providentially, toward the end of my college years, when I was not quite as skinny and spotty as before, God brought across my path a lovely young University of Arkansas student, who condescended to be my first girlfriend and, ultimately, to be my wife.

So don't confuse intelligence with common sense, people skills, or the countless other factors that separate success from failure.

A web search for photos of old-time playground equipment (of the sort they have at Riverside Park in Independence, Kansas) turned up this little essay by Bill Van Dyk about a decision to tear down every playground in the Toronto school district despite the fact that the old equipment was safe:

What happened was this. An inspector from Ottawa had created a report that laid out some guidelines for new playground equipment, with the laudable goal of ensuring that they would be as safe as possible. The new guidelines were better than the old guidelines, of course. Some clever people have found ways to build playground equipment that is safer than ever before.

The Toronto School Board, having received their new guidelines, hired an inspector from a private service to check all of their playground equipment to see if they conformed with the new guidelines. They did not, of course. The old playground equipment is, well, old.

As it turns out, the old playground equipment was not very bad at all. Out of the hundreds of thousands of children who had played on them, no one had ever been killed, nor, apparently, were there many serious injuries. In fact, more children are injured on the paved areas of the playground and the yard than on the playground equipment.

Still, no cost is too high when it comes to children's safety. Except for the cost of common sense and rationality. The Toronto School Board ordered 172 sets of old playground equipment removed, on the off chance that someone, some day, might get hurt really bad.

In the midst of all the talk about racial preferences in college admissions, it's not often mentioned that many colleges which receive federal funds have racially-exclusive programs, a clear violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Roger Clegg, in NRO, reports that his organization has notified 26 universities that their racially exclusive programs violate the law and could be the subject of a complaint to the Office of Civil Rights. In 15 cases, the university responded to the notice by dropping the racial requirements without hesitation. When my alma mater was challenged, they hesitated a bit:

MIT's story is a bit more complicated. We first wrote to its senior counsel on February 20, 2001, after receiving a complaint from a parent whose child was ineligible for its summer program, which excluded whites and Asians. MIT said it was confident that its program was consistent with federal law, and so last year we filed a complaint with OCR, which launched an investigation.

That investigation is still ongoing, but MIT has concluded that we were right after all, and that a racially exclusive program is indeed indefensible. "Our best advice was that for racially exclusive programs, our chances of winning were essentially zero," said Robert P. Redwine, MIT's dean of undergraduate education. The university's senior counsel added that its decision was based on "an analysis of what our peers were doing around the country, and what conclusion other institutions have reached. . . ." So MIT has decided to end the racial exclusivity of its summer programs, too.

MIT's program is called Project Interphase. It was designed to help "underrepresented [i.e., not Jewish or Asian] minority students" make the transition to the pace of an MIT education:

Over a quarter of a century old, the goal of the program is to enhance the academic preparation of the participants who are expected to enter MIT as undergraduates in the Fall. The program emphasizes accelerated adjustment to the rigorous MIT environment and has a dual focus: academic excellence, and the development of social and institutional support networks and skills.

The new policy still has a focus on "underrepresented minorities" but acknowledges other circumstances for which such a program might be useful:

To that end, individuals of any race or national origin may apply to these programs. MIT will take many factors into account when selecting students for these programs, such as academic qualifications, and whether the individual is the first generation in his or her family to be headed for college, comes from a high school that does not send a high percentage of students to four-year colleges, comes from a background that presents challenges for success at an elite urban institution such as MIT, or comes from a racial or ethnic minority group that is underrepresented in educational programs and careers in science and engineering.

While I understand the good intentions behind Project Interphase, it was my observation that it may have interfered with the success of minority students. The program unfairly stigmatized minority students as uniformly and uniquely unprepared by their high school education for the intensity of the MIT experience, often described as like "taking a drink from a firehose". Furthermore, by bringing racially-exclusive groups together before freshman orientation, the program encouraged the development of race-based social networks, which preempted the formation of cross-racial friendships. Our fraternity offered several bids every year to African-American freshmen based, like all our bids, on our assessment of a freshman's compatibility with the current membership. Only rarely were those bids accepted, with many of these young men choosing to join their Interphase classmates in certain dorm floors of New House, dubbed "Chocolate City" by the residents.

A Google search on "Chocolate City" turns up this interesting page by a white Ohio State alum who links to a number of similar living arrangements at school around the country. The author says that his college experience would have been diminished had his African-American roommate chosen to live in self-segregated housing.

In NRO's Corner, Stanley Kurtz reveals that members of the National Association of Scholars -- professors who support academic freedom and oppose political correctness -- now have a virtual catecomb, in the form of a weblog, for their mutual encouragement. Meanwhile NAS members receive printed communications in a plain brown wrapper:

When I was a grad student, I was afraid to join the NAS for fear that if my membership were discovered, it would destroy my career. So I subscribed to Academic Questions, the NAS journal, but without formally joining. Eventually, I joined the NAS, but made sure it mailings came to me at home, rather than at school. Turns out the local NAS understood all this, and sent its information in envelopes with no organizational identification on the outside.

With a tip of the cap to Andrew Stuttaford of National Review Online for pointing this out, here is a fascinating review by Christopher Hitchens of a new book on the origins of the King James Version of the Bible by Adam Nicholson. The review includes a link to the book's first chapter.

Although I find translations like the NIV or the more word-for-word literal NASB better suited for study and comprehension, the King James Version is a cornerstone of the modern English language, and its turns of phrase inhabit our everyday speech. That's why I'm happy that the scripture memorization my son does at his school is done in the KJV. That is the only appropriate choice for a school with a classical emphasis.

UPDATE: The Washington Post has posted this review, by Jonathan Yardley.

Separation of church and state notwithstanding, you can't separate your theology (or lack thereof) from your politics. What you believe about the existence and nature of God and the nature of mankind will shape your ideas about government and society. If we build public policy on a solid foundation of ideas that reflect the world as it really is, we will build a peaceful, happy and prosperous society. If we build policy on a complete misunderstanding of human nature, we will produce chaos and despair. That's why I like to ask candidates -- particularly judicial candidates who won't be drawn out on specific issues -- "Are people basically good, or basically evil?" If they get this question wrong, they'll make all sorts of bad decisions, and I'll end up in my house behind seven different kinds of locks, hoping the marauding hordes will leave me alone.

This is what got me thinking about this: In today's "Bleat", James Lileks tells us about a couple of Anthony Burgess's dystopian sci-fi novels (The Wanting Seed, A Clockwork Orange), and how they reflect Burgess's fascination with "the dynamic between the teachings of St. Augustine and the Pelagian heresy." Augustine said that it was not possible for man not to sin -- because of the fall, humans cannot acheive perfection, apart from God's grace. Pelagius said, yes, it was possible for man to be perfect, and Augustinians shouldn't be so lazy about attaining personal holiness. Of course, theology has implications for public policy: "...in this argument, Burgess saw the two poles of political philosophy at work in the West, and beyond. Augustinian philosophy, which saw man as flawed and sinful and basically hosed when it came to perfectibility in this mortal plain, was the conservative view. Pelagius was liberalism: our nature is not only perfectible, we can perfect ourselves here and now."

Which view you hold comes down to a matter of religious conviction but it leads you to very different conclusions about the role of government, how to educate, how to deal with crime. Some theological propositions aren't testable, but with regard to human nature, we have thousands of years of recorded history to draw from. We can see how real humans have responded to various methods of governing and quickly determine which set of presuppositions, which model, is closest to reality.

I am reminded of a Monty Python bit: The Amazing Mystico and Janet, an illusionist (and his assistant) who builds high-rise apartments by hypnosis -- they stay up as long as the tenants believe in them. In real life of course, apartment buildings stay up only if they are constructed in accordance with the immutable laws of physics, exploiting those laws to produce the desired result. In the same way, a society built in accordance with the immutable laws of human nature will stand firm, while no amount of sincere believing will sustain a society built upon an illusion.

Read the whole article. Lileks' Bleat is always worth reading, and the rest of his site is hilarious, thought-provoking, and amazing, too.

Michael Barone of U.S. News and World Report has an original insight into a significant contrast between what he calls "Soft America" and "Hard America" -- Hard America being "the part of American life subject to competition and accountability". Most modern American kids aren't exposed to Hard America until age 18, and that, Barone says, is why America produces incompetent 18 year olds and competent 30 year olds.

My wife and I are doing our part to produce competent 18 year olds. Our children, even at their young ages, deal with accountability and are held responsible for their actions at home. There's a place for softness -- being understanding and forbearing as a child matures -- while remaining firm and insisting that the child take responsibility for the consequences of his behavior. We willingly pay a premium so that our son can have an education grounded in the same philosophy.

It's a brilliant insight by Michael Barone (not an unusual occurrence) and worth a read. (Thanks to Instapundit for the link.)

The Wall Street Journal's Michael Judge offers an appreciation of the life-work of Charlie Douglass, inventor of the "Laff-Box":

"Sometimes called the Laugh Organ, the first Laff Box stood just over two feet tall and was operated something like an organ. Different buttons could be pressed to combine different types of laughter--belly laughs or chuckles, hoots or guffaws--and the operator could even choose the sex and age (man, women or child) of the laughter. Foot pedals were used to control the timing and duration of the laughter."

Judge says the Laff Box serves a useful social purpose and won't be going away anytime soon.

On the way down US 75 to Jenks for my son's T-ball game, I directed his attention up Lookout Mountain to the KTUL Channel 8 studios. "That's a TV station up there." Trying to find a way to explain the significance, I asked my wife, "Does he watch anything on Channel 8?" "We see bits of the news, sometimes."

Thirty-five years ago, the Channel 8 studios on Lookout Mountain meant something to Tulsa's six-year-olds. That's where you went to be on "Mr Zing and Tuffy" or "Uncle Zeb's Cartoon Camp". It's where you wrote to get an autographed Gusty cartoon by weatherman Don Woods. Lookout Mountain meant something to local musicians too, who appeared on John Chick's morning show, and to the many fans of Mazeppa's Uncanny Film Festival. It wasn't just that these programs were entertaining or informative, it was that you or someone you knew might be on the air. Stations like KTUL were woven tightly into local culture.

That connection is gone -- my son watches Animal Planet, PBS, Disney, and HGTV. He's probably seen more TV reporters in person, at the various political events we attend, than he has on TV.

If you want to relive a time when locally-owned TV (and radio) stations reflected and contributed to local popular culture, check out Mike Ransom's wonderful Tulsa TV Memories website.