ObamaCare will require the use of an ID card. Does that make it racist? If not, would requiring an ID card to vote be racist? Or how about this; what if we used the ObamaCare card as a voter ID card? Would heads explode?
Here’s a report about the controversy a private club has found itself embroiled in.
The Boy Scouts of America will get no reprieve from controversy after a contentious vote to accept alcoholic boys as Scouts.
Dismayed conservatives are already looking at alternative youth groups as they predict a mass exodus from the BSA. Alcoholics-rights supporters vowed Friday to maintain pressure on the Scouts to end the still-in-place ban on alcoholic adults serving as leaders.
"They’re not on our good list yet," said Paul Guequierre of the Human Rights Campaign, a national alcoholic -rights group. He said the HRC, in its annual rankings of corporate policies on workplace fairness, would deduct points from companies that donate to the Boy Scouts until the ban on alcoholic adults is lifted.
Now, you may be wondering why you didn’t hear about this particular scandal, and the reason is it hasn’t happened. I just took a news article and replaced every mention of the word “gay” with the word “alcoholic”. All of a sudden, it sounds absolutely nuts, doesn’t it? Should the Scouts be allowed to discriminate against alcoholics? Set aside for the moment that the drinking age is such that it would exclude boys in the Scouts age range, would the Scouts come under fire for not allowing boys who are what you might call “practicing alcoholics” into its ranks? Would any human rights group fault them for having a ban on alcoholic adults as Scout leaders?
The plain fact is, no, they wouldn’t. The official policy of the Boy Scouts of America is that alcohol is not permitted “at encampments or activities on property owned and/or operated by the Boy Scouts of America, or at any activity involving participation of youth members.” Certainly a troop leader showing up drunk wouldn’t be tolerated. They’ve made that rule, and no one (that I know of) is coming down on them for it.
And yet the Human Rights Campaign and others have been pressuring the Scouts to set aside their ban on homosexual boys in Scouting. Why? Well, because they’re born that way, as our culture keeps reminding us, so to discriminate against them is unfair and bigoted, right? And yet, there is research that shows conclusively that alcoholism is, in part, genetic as well. In fact, there is more evidence of that than there is evidence of homosexuality having a genetic component. It’s being studied, but right now, nothing is at all conclusive, unlike the way the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism describe the genetic link.
If they’re born that way, and if being born that way means no one can discriminate against that trait for any reason, well, is that a Pandora’s box you really want to open?
At its core, the ban on gay Scouts was partly a moral stance, with the Scout Oath including a phrase about being morally straight. It was also partly an issue of general sexuality. Would you want your boy sharing tent with a girl? Or, more generally, with someone who may be sexually attracted to him? Consider this.
And while the Scouts have lifted the ban on gay Scouts, they’ve kept it for Scout leaders. The HRC doesn’t like that, either. Let’s think about this. Those priests that got accused of molesting boys can now trade out their collar for a khaki shirt and become a Scoutmaster. What would the HRC think about that?
I would have thought that, by this time in history, it would be no big deal, but apparently a Cheerios ad on YouTube featuring a black father and white mother was getting so many racist comments that they disabled commenting. Watch the ad and decide for yourself. I find it utterly unobjectionable.
A family down the street from us at our previous house was black & white, and I once heard them referred to by another neighbor as “salt & pepper”, which I took as derogatory rather than descriptive (knowing the guy who said it). And we met, through homeschooling channels, a black and white couple that described to us the racism they encountered when, for example, the white wife applied for an apartment and everything was going smoothly for weeks until the black husband showed up to look at the place, and suddenly nothing was available.
This is 1950s/60s stuff. I would have thought we’d have learned by now. But here’s the thing. We still have neo-Nazis, and that 1940s stuff. We still have ideologies and twisted thoughts from, frankly, the beginning of time. We will always have racists. We will always have sin surrounding us. But we can’t think that this defines our culture.
The problem I see now is that being for a public policy like voter ID is equated to hateful comments on interracial couples. Since racism still exists, it is considered the driving force behind so many issues, and stifles actual conversation.
Yes, racism still exists, but not at all like it used do. (Could we have had a black President in the 50s or 60s?) It is a fringe (but, unfortunately, vocal) element at this point. Don’t dilute the term by using it where it’s not warranted.
From this week’s sermon.
Forgiveness is not:
Forgiveness is:
The latest breakthrough in stem cell research turns skin cells into stem cells just as useful as embryonic stem cells, without the ethical issues. Adult stem cells and induced stem cells, while still able to become many other types of cells, still had some limitations. Researchers are saying, however, that stem cells using this new method, are just like embryonic.
We are getting to the point that using actual embryos is going to be completely unnecessary. It’ll be almost medieval to suggest using them, when skin (which is the largest organ in your body; did you know that?) are able to produce what’s required. I wonder how much the advance of methods to create embryonic-like stem cells was pushed forward by George W. Bush’s restriction of embryonic stem cell lines that could be used. Bush, then, was not anti-science, but pro-ethical-science.
US researchers have reported a breakthrough in stem cell research, describing how they have turned human skin cells into embryonic stem cells for the first time.
The method described Wednesday by Oregon Health and Science University scientists in the journal Cell, would not likely be able to create human clones, said Shoukhrat Mitalipov, senior scientist at the Oregon National Primate Research Center.
But it is an important step in research because it does not require the use of embryos in creating the type of stem cell capable of transforming into any other type of cell in the body.
The technique involves transplanting an individual’s DNA into an egg cell that has been stripped of genetic material, a variation of a method called somatic cell nuclear transfer.
"A thorough examination of the stem cells derived through this technique demonstrated their ability to convert just like normal embryonic stem cells, into several different cell types, including nerve cells, liver cells and heart cells," said Mitalipov.
Ben DeBono is one of the co-hosts of a podcast I listen to, "The Sci-Fi Christian". I have the distinction of having named their alien mascot, "Theo".
Ben is a recent convert to Catholicism, while I am a long-time Protestant. And yet there are commonalties that people tend to ignore too often. He highlighted one of those commonalities in a recent Facebook post.
Here’s a thought experiment for Christians arguing for biblical support of homosexuality and/or homosexuall [sic] marriage:
On the subject of homosexuality theologians as diverse as the Apostle Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Martin Luther and every other major pre-20th century Christian thinker stand in complete agreement. Such unanimity is all but unprecedented in the tradition. Even a doctrine as fundamental as the Trinity has greater diversity of thought than homosexuality.
Regardless of how you view the authority of tradition, doesn’t such complete agreement deserve to be acknowledged and taken seriously? If you say yes, how can you justify the near complete lack of engagement with the tradition by those arguing for an understanding of Christianity that is pro-homosexuality? Wouldn’t such a drastic change on this issue demand a lengthy and complete engagement with the tradition?
If you say no, how do you justify the implicit claim that your interpretive abilities are superior to 2,000 years of unanimous teaching on this issue – Protestant, Catholic and otherwise?
Ben shows that, over the millennia, smart Christian guys from all over the spectrum, have been unified on this topic. I made a similar point 2 years ago when I noted that the Bible speak of homosexuality 100% negatively, and of marriage 100% heterosexually. I said essentially the same thing, "Ignore all of that collected wisdom at your peril."
The religious Left has been accepting homosexuality as a "non-sin" over the past 40 years, and same-sex marriage as blessed just for the past 10 years or so. Relatively speaking, however, this is nothing compared to the unanimity of the faith for the last 2,000 years. If one is going to throw out 2 millennia of doctrine, you had better have a good argument that a) this is really what the Bible says and b) the other guys were wrong. Yelling "Equality!" is not such an argument.
The Kermit Gosnell and Cleveland kidnapping stories have been raising some questions when it comes to the issue of abortion. Gosnell, certainly (and where it was actually covered), definitely brought back to light the issue of the fine line between abortion and infanticide., at least as abortion supporters define those terms.
And the Cleveland kidnapping story is doing it again, from another angle.
The problem, once again, is that at the heart of the Gosnell nightmare were the reports that he was DELIVERING late-term fetuses and THEN killing the infants — after delivery. In other words, these infants were no longer “fetuses,” according to the dictionary, when the abortionist snipped their spinal cords.
Now, were are seeing some interesting, and related, issues emerging in Cleveland, where prosecutors are preparing to throw the book at the alleged kidnapper and torturer Ariel Castro.
The issue is that the state prosecutor may seek the death penalty.
Now, from the perspective of the journalists defending a consistent use of the term “fetus,” even when the term is inaccurate (see Gosnell coverage), here is the hard-news question of the moment. If the prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty for Castro in this case, who did he kill? What human persons with full dignity and legal rights, under this nation’s current legal regime, died during these alleged crimes?
The Get Religion blog takes the angle of how (or if) the reporters "get religion", and it highlights good and bad examples. However, in the Gosnell case, the bad examples were legion. It’ll be interesting to see how the media deal with a death penalty in the Cleveland case.
Kermit Gosnell, the abortion quote-unquote “doctor” who regularly carried out illegal abortions in Philadelphia and killed already-born babies by cutting their spinal cord, among other horrors, was well-known to other abortionists who routinely referred women to him from up and down the eastern seaboard. His reputation preceded him. So those other abortion doctors knew what he did, but didn’t report him.
The women who were his victims did report him, but that still didn’t get anything done. His clinic went 17 years without an inspection, even though there were inspection-worthy complaints in the interim. Various state agencies did nothing even after victims’ lawyers contacted them.
And another group turned a blind eye to this; Planned Parenthood. President and CEO of Planned Parenthood SE Pennsylvania Dayle Steinberg said that her organization knew about this but did not report it. Instead she said, “We would always encourage them to report it to the Department of Health.” The buck doesn’t stop here. It doesn’t even stop for a rest. And of course, the Department of Health was one of those delinquent state agencies.
I have complained that the media have ignored this story, and they have, but even before they tried to sweep it under the rug, Planned Parenthood, various other abortion doctors, and various state agencies all turned a blind eye to what was going on here. If there is a war on women, the abortion industry is on the front lines.
That’s the title of John Stonestree’s article about how the folks pushing for polygamy and polyamory are making the very arguments that conservatives made for decades, right up until very recently.
In a scene from Jurassic Park, Ian Malcolm, the mathematician skeptical about whether the park is a good idea, watches the T-Rex burst out of its enclosure and says, "I hate being right all the time."
Princeton Professor Robert George and other defenders of traditional marriage understand these sentiments. For years, they’ve warned that redefining marriage beyond the union of one man and one woman wouldn’t-indeed couldn’t-stop with same-sex unions. The same reasoning that extends marriage to same-sex couples would easily be applied to polygamy and polyamory also.
The standard response to these concerns was scoffing and accusations of fear mongering.
Well, the fences are down and the beast is loose.
He provides 3 examples of recent attempts to argue for them just within the past few months. But these arguments are not new. It’s just who is presenting them that is.
As Dr. George pointed out in "First Things," when Christians pointed out the logical link between same-sex marriage and polygamy, proponents of same-sex marriage rejected the connection. They insisted that "no one is arguing for the legal recognition of polygamous or polyamorous relationships as marriages!"
George writes in response, "That was then; this is now." The "then" he referred to was last week; the now is today.
George predicts that Keenan’s article "will not produce a single serious critique by a major scholar or activist from the same-sex marriage movement."
Now he would love to be wrong. But defenders of traditional marriage know that the enclosures that kept marriage a "monogamous and exclusive union" are being dismantled. And no one should be surprised by what emerges, least of all those doing the dismantling.
If George was right about what would happen, would critics also be right about the predicted results of this breakdown? Marriage is more "for the children" than any other institution or government program that has had that label slapped on it. The best arrangement for children is to be raised by their loving and committed biological parents.
And yet, we are tinkering and tearing down the one thing that can best protect the next generation. The results have been predicted to be calamitous. If we were right about predicting the slippery slope this far, wouldn’t it be prudent to consider whether we’re right about the rest of the ride?
The calls for polygamy, especially in the light of changing attitudes on same-sex marriage, are getting louder and more mainstream. Jillian Keenan writing at Slate.com, makes a feminist case for polygamy, as well as demonstrating the slippery slope in action.
The definition of marriage is plastic. Just like heterosexual marriage is no better or worse than homosexual marriage, marriage between two consenting adults is not inherently more or less “correct” than marriage among three (or four, or six) consenting adults.
If you don’t think that same-sex marriage will lead to polygamy, you must refute her arguments that make that link. I don’t have to refute them, because a) I don’t think the definition of marriage is plastic, and b) I do think one leads to the other. If you do think marriage should be…whatever, but don’t think it leads to polygamy, you’ve got your work cut out for you. But if you are up to the challenge, let me hear your argument.
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