How in the world do you reverse such decadence when you are grooming children into it? We’re increasingly doing the same here, teaching sodomitic acts by picture and description (and with tacit or explicit approval) to younger and younger children in so-called sex-ed classes. Sex is an extremely powerful force–capable of creating a new human being–something no scientist in the world can even approach. And we tell children to go ahead and use that power if they feel like it whenever they wish. If they accidentally create a new human being–which they act is designed explicitly to do–we tell them they can kill the human being if they wish. We may as well start giving grade school children guns, and teaching them about safety precautions, and see what happens. This reminds me of a bumper sticker someone told me about yesterday: “If fetuses had guns there would be no abortions.”

Augustine College is pleased to announce the 15th annual Weston Lecture, a free public lecture given this year by Dr. John Patrick on Talking About Wisdom in an Age of Information, Friday, March 15, 2013 at 7:30 p.m. at the Saint Paul University Amphitheatre, Ottawa. The details are here at the website of Augustine College. Dr. Patrick is a most engaging speaker and morally insightful and challenging. His one and only Touchstone article is The Guilty Generation. I hope there will be more.

The brief book of that title by Robert P. George, Ryan T. Anderson, and Sherif Girgis is getting wide and deserved coverage. (Salvo and Touchstone will both review it); Spengler at Asia Times has a fine article about “gay marriage” and institution of real marriage. (HT, J Douglas Johnson) The book is selling pretty well at Amazon. May it have many readers and learners.

A medical doctor presented this testimony last Friday to the Judiciary Committee of the Nebraska legislature. A key point here, made by others elsewhere (e.g., John Patrick, M.D.) is that no society should want medical care professionals to violate their consciences–would you be happy to find out that your primary care physician from time to time violated his own conscience? Would you feel comfortable putting your life or the life of your loved ones in his hands? Moral integrity requires respect for conscience. It’s a shame we have to pass laws to protect consciences. The testimony:

Testimony of Clyde R. Meckel, MD to Judiciary Committee, LB564 – Health Care Freedom of Conscience Act, March 1, 2013

Thank you for the opportunity to testify in support of LB564- the Health Care Freedom of Conscience Act.  The purpose of this bill is to respect and protect the fundamental right of conscience of licensed individuals who provide health care. This is a critical matter of protecting one of our most fundamental liberties.

Our nation has long upheld the protection of individual conscience from governmental coercion. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The right of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit.”

In a letter to the Quakers, George Washington asserted that government was instituted, among other purposes, “to protect the persons and consciences of men from oppression.”  He added, “…it is my wish and desire, that the laws may always be extensively accommodated to [the conscientious scruples of all men], as a due regard to the protection and essential interests of the nation may justify and permit.”

The most common application of the right of conscience is the right to refrain from taking human life. This right has been protected in the arena of compulsory military service, as well as those of abortion, assisted suicide and capital punishment.

Liberals and conservatives alike agree that right of conscience exists, regardless of whether they sympathize with an objector’s particular stance. Right of conscience protects those who dissent from a norm or prevailing standard, and it applies when a cogent argument can be made that a grave wrong is being done.

The primary battlefield in which conscience rights are seriously threatened today is our health care system. More than ever, in this era of big business and big government medicine, health care needs conscience-driven doctors, nurses and other providers. Patients want compassionate, competent and conscientious care from providers, that is, from those who have moral integrity.  That very integrity is vanquished when physicians and other providers are forced to violate their own conscience.

Medicine certainly requires technical competence, but it is fundamentally a moral activity, since an essential part of its practice is helping patients decide what they ought to do in particular situations.  The physician-patient relationship is a covenantal one requiring trust that the physician is acting on the patient’s behalf.  I hope none of us here will end up in a critical situation being cared for by a deconstructed physician or other provider who has learned to check his or her conscience at the door when arriving to work each day.

It is therefore critical that physicians and other health care workers be protected from having their integrity compromised by being compelled into acting against their consciences by patients, health systems or government agencies.

Americans enjoy constitutional protection to make their own decisions about the issues surrounding personhood and the mystery of human life, and this should logically extend to health care professionals in the context of their work.  Our state constitution states that interference with rights of conscience is not to be permitted, and LB564 provides statutory protection of these rights for licensed health care providers.

Motherhood is fine, for some, but children do not NEED mothers. From CNSNews:

The Justice Department’s argument on the superfluity of motherhood is presented in a brief the Obama administration filed in the case of Hollingsworth v. Perry, which challenges the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that amended California’s Constitution to say that marriage involves only one man and one woman.

The Justice Department presented its conclusions about parenthood in rebutting an argument made by proponents of Proposition 8 that the traditional two-parent family, led by both a mother and a father, was the ideal place, determined even by nature itself, to raise a child.

The Obama administration argues this is not true. It argues that children need neither a father nor a mother and that having two fathers or two mothers is just as good as having one of each.

Of course, the point of the federal government is to deny that children having any right to being raised by a mother and to insist that “gay” couples have a right to raise a child. This is government intrusion into the natural order. It also uses the same tactics as it did in Roe v. Wade, falsifying tradition, history, and law. What Roe v. Wade invaded the womb; if the child survives an abortion, Obama doesn’t see the child has any right to medical care; if he gets medical care and survives, he doesn’t care about finding a mother to care for the child. This is the mentality of much of our ruling elite. This cannot long survive. I think even Darwin might agree.

My, the days of Paul Erlich’s deeply-flawed but highly-influential Population Bomb seem so long ago. Are we seeing a heightened awareness of the need to “make babies”?  Even Chicago NPR affiliated, WBEZ is getting in on the act with its Go Make Babies campaign. David Paul Deaval writes at the Star Tribune about how he is a One-Percenter, when it comes to family size. When the history of the United States is written in 2100, what will be the verdict on the sixties sexual revolution? And in case you’re interested, there is a New Sexual Revolution in the making, if M. Catherine Evans and Ann Kane are correct in their article at the American Thinker. But, seriously, this is only the second or third phase of the Sexual Revolution. Kinsey, who help launched the first, was already into pedophilia and normalizing it. We are getting there. Some of the sex-ed materials distributed to grade school children are child porn, and include sodomy. Kinsey would approve.

Lee Habeeb writes at National Review about Johnny Cash (whose birthday is Feb. 26) and how an aspect of his troubled life has been ignored by Hollywood. Walk the Line was a fine movie, but it left something out too important to ignore, Cash’s very serious Christian faith. He was a very troubled man, and was at his best performing for the inmates of Folsom Prison, with whom he easily identified. Cash autobiography makes his faith quite clear. The suicide attempt Habeeb relates is chilling.

Russell Moore wrote about Cash (Real Hard Cash) in Touchstone (Dec. 2005). Cash was no saint, but he knew his sin and sought and embraced its Remedy. He knew the score, and his music often pointed the Way.

This story in Newsweek (of all places) is not asking about the 55 million babies aborted since Roe v. Wade, but it does raise the looming demographic nightmare of shrinking population even in the USA and what it means for our economy. Authors Joel Kotkin and Harry Siegel are destined for a ton of hate mail, if cyber-mail can be measured in weight. And they definitely do not open real mail packages left at their door. You can’t talk about babies because all that was decided and settle in the grand sexual and feminist revolution, when women were liberated from all that stuff. Time to read The Children of Men again.

This story was first reported at MercatorNet, and claims that

The proportion of Christians in the country – which currently stands at about 34 percent — is slowly increasing. By 2030, it will rise to 37 percent and by 2045 to more than 39 percent. And because hundreds of thousands of overseas Lebanese are eligible to vote, the increase in registered voters is even more impressive. By 2030, 40 percent of Lebanese on the electoral roll will be Christian, and by 2045, the figure will be 41 percent.

But taking a census is just not done in Lebanon as it is two politically touchy. Sunni and Shiite Islamic factions share power with the Christian population. An interesting article about a very complex situation.