The Catholic Bishops of Maryland have issued a statement, “The Most Sacred of All Property: Religious Freedom and the People of Maryland.”
Despite its title, the principles it lays out and the examples it uses are applicable to the entire United States. People of all faiths, not just Catholics, will find it a helpful defense when faced with marriage and family issues.
Read it here.
This used to be called prostitution–now it’s just debt reduction:
…There is a plethora of on-line dating sites, calling themselves arrangement sites, where young women looking to pay down college debt are matched to older, wealthy donors. What is not advertised, but is clearly understood by reading young women’s confessionals in a recent Huffington Post piece about “sugar daddies” and the financially beleaguered “sugar baby” girls, is that these arrangements are for paid sex, and the industry is booming. Read more…
November 8, 2011 http://www.thepublicdiscourse.
Four points in defense of human dignity. Adapted from an address delivered last night at the University of Pennsylvania.
Most of my sources in this essay are not Catholic. That shouldn’t be surprising. Catholics have no monopoly on respect for human dignity. Catholics do have a very long tradition of thinking about the nature of the human person and society, but I’d like to begin by setting the proper framework for our discussion. Read more…
SO GROSS! A little cannibalism, anyone?
LARGO, FL, October 25, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The pro-life organization Children of God for Life announced today the filing of a shareholder resolution with the Securities and Exchange Commission and PepsiCo, protesting the use of aborted a fetal cell line for the research and development of flavor enhancers for their beverages. Read more…
Editor’s Note: Last week my daughter, Moriah Mosher, who is 18 years old, traveled to Rhodes, Greece, where she addressed the Rhodes Youth Forum on the subject of “Traditional Family Values.” The Forum is an annual meeting of young people from all over the world who are devoted to the search for the common good. My daughter told the group that the common good is to be found not in the discovery of new principles for living, but in the rediscovery of God-given truths about the importance of faith, life and family. She is right, of course.
Steven W. Mosher Read more…
The fact that there’s a disparity is not the main point. Its existence is the problem, in whatever form it takes.
By now it’s worldwide news that two high profile executions took place in the US this week. The fact that it shocked the world may or may not have shocked American citizens used to this form of ‘justice’. Read more…
by Marcia Segelstein
In the not too distant past, traditionalists theorized that when it came to raising children, the answer was to retreat from the world. Use private or parochial schools. Or even better, homeschool. Raise up a generation of kids who would change the world by trying to raise them outside the world.
To some degree, I concur. Homeschooling and using Christian and other private schools are great options for those who have the time and resources. Read more…
The current battles over the fate of thousands of babies conceived via in vitro fertilization would confound even King Solomon.
Sensational news reports surrounding the $180,000 price tag for Ukrainian black-market babies shocked the determinedly secular segments of society, and few remain unmoved by the story of the FBI’s round-up of “baby-brokers.” Beyond the initial horror of children clinically conceived and sold as a commodity, investigators discovered that these babies have dozens of full and half siblings that were sold elsewhere. This opens the possibility that, in 25 years, a young man might unknowingly marry his sister. Read more…
Recently the UK newspaper, the Independent, has published an article about the Jhunjhunu district of Rajasthan in India, where there is a statewide target to sterilise 1% of the population.
Of course the state officials cannot do so through coercion – that would be too much like eugenics! And last time that India tried forced sterilisation it proved to be “deeply controversial”: Read more…
The PR department of a hospital thought so, but patients are entitled to consider all sides of an issue such as euthanasia.
The ethics of communication – whether over-communication or under-communication – have been in the news over the last few months. WikiLeaks , the Murdoch press affair in Britain, and in Canada the public’s right to be informed of the details of the health status of the leader of the federal opposition, Jack Layton, have all made headlines. A recent incident caused me to look at the ethics that should govern communications in a very everyday context, that of hospital patients’ committees communications to patients. Here’s the story. Read more…
This doesn’t surprise me:
BOSTON (Reuters) – Men who pay for sex are more likely than men who do not pay for sex to commit a variety of offenses including violent crimes against women, according to research conducted in the Boston area. Read more…
A follow-up to Betsy’s post on pre-natal DNA testing:
That knowledge has a flip side. “How much responsibility are we expecting people to take for the genetic makeup of any child they might have?” asks Josephine Johnston, a research scholar at the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank near New York City.
If a child is born with a condition that could have been detected, the presence of the test changes that outcome “from something that happened to you, to something that you participated in,” she says. Read more…
In case you had not noticed, Hungary has a whopper of a new constitution that is giving the European Union and other international organizations something to think (and gripe) about. Critics call the text’s reference to Christian heritage and its emphasis on strong families a dangerous blast from the past. A debate in the civil liberties committee of the European Parliament has been scheduled for next week and it promises to be quite acrimonious. Read more…
I forget who said ‘not everything is political’, but it must have been a while ago because it seems now, everything is. But certainly, every issue is a moral issue, and somebody’s morals are going to prevail. When it comes to making law and setting social policy, it’s good to hear top political and religious leaders talking about what makes a just and virtuous society. Read more…
A new Gallup poll about moral issues in the US shows that Americans are most in agreement about marital infidelity and polygamy, with 91 per cent of people polled considering an extra-marital affair morally wrong and 86 per cent saying polygamy is immoral. Only two other issues come near a national consensus — 84 per cent condemning the cloning of humans and 80 per cent suicide.
The agreement about suicide seems strange in view of the result that shows people are almost evenly divided on the issue of doctor-assisted suicide — 48 per cent think it’s wrong and 45 per cent that it is morally acceptable. Read more…
And still call it health care?
Yes, in many places. Start with Sweden.
The Swedish parliament has overwhelmingly passed an order instructing Swedish politicians at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) to fight against the rights of doctors to refuse to participate in abortions. Read more…
from LifeNews.com:
HB 2416 bans the practice of abortion via webcam, also known as telemedicine. Considering the well-documented dangers of abortion pills, women should be able to meet in person with a doctor before ingesting a dangerous chemical… Abortion-via-webcam is just another example of how Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry are concerned with their bottom line instead of women’s health & safety.
Yesterday there was a segment on NPR titled Taming The Twin Trend From Fertility Treatments. They talked about how various forms of ART have caused an increase in the incidence of twin pregnancies:
Twins, once a rarity to marvel over, are now a common part of American culture, thanks in large part to increased use of reproductive technology. Twins are conceived naturally just 2 percent of the time; for those who get pregnant with fertility treatments the rate is more than 40 percent.
They also discussed some of the health risks associated with twins: Read more…
A pro-life group that monitors the use of cells from babies victimized by abortions is today highlighting a biotech company, Senomyx, which it says produces artificial flavor enhancers using aborted fetal cell lines to test their products.
How could this possibly be happening?!!!
I don’t even know what to say…
LGBTweekly.com:
The Irish edition of tabloid news magazine The Sun recently covered the story of Penny Lawrence, a 28-year-old woman suffering from Genetic Sexual Attraction (GSA) who is now pregnant with her father’s child.
If you seriously don’t think there are folks waiting in the wings for same-sex ‘marriage’ to set the legal precedent they need to make what is described above legal – along with absolutely anything else you could imagine – then check out a website called Full Marriage Equality. (They refer to this father and daughter’s relationship as “consanguinarmory”.)
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