The Protestant Reformation was in significant part a protest against the perceived antinatalism of the late Medieval Christian Church. It was a celebration of procreation that also saw contraception and abortion as among the most wicked of human sins, as direct affronts to the ordinances of God. This background makes the Protestant "sellout" on contraception in the mid 20th Century all the more surprising, and disturbing.
As the Augustinian monk, theologian, and "first Protestant" Martin Luther viewed his world in the second decade of the 16th Century, he saw a Christianity in conflict with family life and fertility. Church tradition held that the taking of vows of chastity -- as a priest, monk, or cloistered sister -- was spiritually superior to the wedded life. In consequence, about one-third of adult European Christians were in Holy Orders.
Tied to this, Luther said, was widespread misogyny, or a hatred of women, as reflected in a saying attributed to St. Jerome: "If you find things going too well, take a wife." Most certainly, the late Medieval Church…
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No one would have expected the New York Times to react favorably to Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan, most well-known for advancing a budget proposal, as his Vice Presidential running mate. On that score, the Times and the rest of his detractors are predictably portraying him as an extremist.
They cast Ryan’s budget proposal as “politically toxic”; it is nothing but a series of senseless cuts, cuts, and more cuts. Even if those sympathetic to Ryan’s ideas feel it could use some tinkering, for the Times it couldn’t possibly represent an honest attempt to diminish the serious peril the country now faces.
The reality is that President Obama is driving the country off a fiscal cliff, callously abusing future generations by saddling them with colossal debt. And for all the “stimulus” spending he oversaw, the economy still languishes in tatters. This is far from an abstract, impersonal reality.
Obama’s own budget proposal failed to gain one measly vote in either the House or the Senate. Not a single vote? This suggests something else besides hapless incompetence is at work here: cold calculation. He must see some advantage in not submitting a realistic…
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Nine Days that Changed the World is a book about Pope John Paul II’s nine-day trip to Poland in 1979. The Pope’s pilgrimage laid the groundwork for the revolution of conscience that eventually brought down the Communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe. Thus those nine days really did change the world. Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day could very well be the One Day that changes our world this year.
During Pope John Paul’s first trip to his homeland after being elected Pope, he did not assemble an army. He did not set up a network of spies. He did not give rabble-rousing speeches. He did not go to inspire a revolution.
He just preached the love of Jesus Christ, the person who is Truth personified. And literally millions of people came to listen. Those millions of people looked around and saw that they were not alone. The Polish people had been living in an oppressive regime since the end of World War II. The Communist regime created fear. The fear created a spiritual isolation: people not speaking their minds, not trusting each other, consuming a constant diet of lies. People became accustomed to not speaking truths…
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A TV show called The New Normal will have its premiere on NBC in the US soon. It's about a gay couple and the single mother they engage to have their baby.
"She's just like an easy-bake oven except with no legal rights to the cupcake," the surrogate-mother broker tells Bryan and David. This is a hard-nosed description of the woman's role in gay marriage and child-rearing, but it sums it up accurately.
In heterosexual relationships, the birth rate rises when couples are married. One would expect similar dynamics to apply to same-sex couples. For lesbian couples, this is not a huge problem; all they need is a sperm donor. But male couples need surrogate mothers.
Where will these women come from?
Unless the law of supply and demand is repealed, the answer is: where wombs are cheapest. At the moment, this is India, where surrogate motherhood has become a $2.3 billion industry, with the enthusiastic encouragement of some state governments. A recent investigation by the London Sunday Telegraph found there were only 100 surrogacies in Britain last year, but 1000 in India for British clients. The proportion in Australia and elsewhere…
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Now that the Affordable Care Act has survived its Supreme Court challenge, there comes the fight over its implementation. Moral considerations rank high on the list of casus belli for Catholics and other religious groups. They fear that the Act will force them to pay for procedures which they abhor, like the morning-after pill, abortion, and sterilisation. The price of resistance could be “institutional martyrdom”, according to University of Notre Dame law professor Gerard Bradley.
He is not alone in his forebodings. The Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis George, has said that “The long-term effect is that the Catholic Church will be stripped of the institutions that are her instruments for public service. We will lose hospitals, we will lose universities.”
Is their alarm justified? Or is all this just huffing and puffing by embittered losers? Only time will tell, but there are precedents for a war between the Catholic Church and a democratic government. The paradigm case is the Kulturkampf – the culture war – waged by the Iron Chancellor of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck, in the 1870s. The differences are obvious -- President Obama does not make a habit of…
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In tandem with the Fundación Oriéntame, its new report “Unintended Pregnancy and Induced Abortion in Colombia: Causes and Consequences” claims that there were exactly 400,412 illegal abortions committed in 2008 in Colombia, with 132,000 experiencing complications that required medical attention in a health facility. It also claims that one-fifth of all women needing medical care for abortion complications go without such care. This means that, according to Guttmacher, a total of 158,400 abortions were botched in Colombia in 2008 ― an incredible 40 percent of all abortions performed in the country.
The Guttmacher Institute also claims that 99.9 per cent of all abortions are illegal in Colombia, with only 332 of the abortions being legal.
Examination of AGI’s claims
In 2006, Colombia’s Constitutional Court legalized abortion to save the life and health of the woman, for fetal birth defects (eugenics), and for rape and incest.
The World Health Organization definition of “health” is, “A state of complete physical, social and mental well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. … a resource which permits people to lead an individually, socially and…
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Last month dozens of Catholic institutions in the United States filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration, challenging the constitutionality of its contraception mandate. There can be little doubt that requiring employers to provide a drug that violates their conscience is against the First Amendment. It violates one of the main reasons for the founding of our country: religious freedom.
But the underlying problem is far deeper than a constitutional or historical issue. The fact is that the federal government has absolutely no right to mandate a drug that is really not a health benefit for anyone, but a health danger -- for the woman, and certainly for the little human life inside of her.
The truth is that the contraceptive pill actually alters a human organ and destroys its natural function within the reproductive system of a woman. It is completely different from cancer treatment, or medicines for bodily diseases. It is not medicinal, or health-giving. Other drugs exist to restore or strengthen the organs of the body, or eliminate a toxic element. Not so the contraceptive pill.
The idea of using birth control to prevent undesirable populations being born and burdening society has been around for a long time. It goes back to the founding godmother of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, who wanted “More from the fit, less from the unfit,” or words to that effect. By the late twentieth century, however, the job was not quite finished. A new class of undesirables, the welfare dependent, was proliferating.
Enter Norplant, the long-acting contraceptive that would relieve welfare mums of the bother of taking a daily pill and give them a strong hint that, paraphrasing Lady Bracknell, “To have one child without visible means of support may be regarded as a misfortune, but having two looks like carelessness.” As for three… A Kansas legislator seems to have been the first in the US to suggest that states could actually give mothers on welfare an incentive payment to get their implants. The idea of incentivising birth control for the poor is de facto policy in most western countries.
World Telecommunication and Information Society Day is an anniversary whose purpose is, to quote the United Nations body responsible for it, “to help raise awareness of the possibilities that the use of the Internet and other information and communication technologies can bring to societies and economies, as well as of ways to bridge the digital divide.”
That must have sounded like a very ambitious and exciting goal 30 years ago. But if, having seen pictures of African villagers and Indian slum-dwellers wielding cellphones, you have the strong impression that the digital divide was bridged a while back; if the possibilities of the internet seem to you to have gone about as far as sanity will permit; and if your dearest wish is to unplug your laptop and bury your smartphone in a deep drawer -- the hedonic centres of your brain may not be lighting up at the idea that there is an unfinished communication agenda.
There is unfinished business there, of course, but mere talk has become cheap -- literally; just think of Skyping people around the world, for nothing. The bottom has dropped out of the information market; there…
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“Must read” – not in the sense that something Very Scary will happen if they don’t, and not in the sense that they won’t be allowed to die if they don’t (read about the “struldbrugs” in Gulliver’s Travels for this possibility). No, what we mean is books which enrich your life and allow you to connect with Western culture.
All lists are controversial and we are hoping for a lot of comments on ours. Here are our criteria: they had to be interesting, enriching and short, particularly short. Brevity rules out a lot of great books. Clarissa, one of the great novels of the 18th century, is four volumes long. Most Victorian novels are at least 500 pages. All Russian novels are at least 600 pages.
Furthermore, in an age when a lot of the younger set, especially the males, seem to have lost a love for reading, the books have to be immediately appealing. All of the ones below may not fit the bill, but surely some will. Finally, no author has more than one book in the list and all of them are in prose (no drama or poetry).
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No one would have expected the New York Times to react favorably to Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan, most well-known for advancing a budget proposal, as his Vice Presidential running mate. On that score, the Times and the rest of his detractors are predictably portraying him as an extremist.
The idea of using birth control to prevent undesirable populations being born and burdening society has been around for a long time. It goes back to the founding godmother of Planned Parenthood, 
